The elusive Fox culled the numbers of the swarm like he was wielding the blade of Death himself. With every slash of his sword, an insectoid was split apart before the image displayed within the shield changed and gave him a view of his next victim. As for the victims themselves, there was little they could do to stop it. For them, Death was an absolute certainty.

Perhaps if they had known what they were up against, they might have had a chance. That was, if they were more than just a horde of mindless beasts. But missing this crucial information, and the intelligence to properly put it to use, they were little more than weeds waiting to be pulled.

All they would see is the glistening reflection of themselves in their kin's water coated shells be replaced by the visage of a grey haired man, then the next second a steel blade would lunge from the carapace and claim their lives.

Whilst Fox was slashing rapidly at the floating shield turned instrument of death, the other members of the hunting party were not idle. Taking the initiative back into their own hands, this time they were the ones who charged forth, eager to meet the remnants of the black wave.

There were still countless bodies composing what was left, but they weren't taken by surprise and forced onto the defensive anymore.

As they charged forwards, only one member of the hunting party was left standing beside the elusive Fox and that was the owner of the shield he was currently using.

He was culling their numbers while their companions closed the gap, but it was her job to keep them in place and stop them from regaining their footing. A job that was going to be much easier thanks to Erik giving them an impromptu shower.

Her pet Orthrus stood beside her, continuous streams of pale blue lightning leaping from their mouths. The two streams merged together after leaving their maws, forming a singular bolt that chilled the air as it arced.

This bolt wasn't aimed at the collection of insects, instead it struck directly against Astra's outstretched hand, freezing her palm on contact and spreading frost along her blackened fingers. If someone didn't know that her hands looked like that before, they might think that she had developed a serious case of frost bite, and that her fingers were about to fall off, frozen stiff.

Her eyes glowed with a pale white light as the chilling lightning flowed through her body, pouring into her Abyss and being converted with her. Her other hand, which was extended towards the swarm, was sparking with pure white bolts of electricity. Miniature bolts arcing between her fingers, just begging to be unleashed onto the world. These bolts didn't chill the air, instead boiling and scorching it on contact.

Finally, after absorbing enough of the Orthrus' bone chilling lightning, the tips of Astra's blackened fingers began to glow with pure white light, before a hail of thin lightning bolts leapt from her fingers tips. They raced across the air, crackling with every movement as they scorched the air, before latching on to the water covered ants.

Before she was focused on damage, dealing as much as possible and being focused on a single bolt. But now? This spider web of bolts filled the air, dancing across their water covered shells and eagerly leaping to the nearest ant, over and over.

Every ant acted as a perfect conduit, every one connected her lightning web to the next. While they didn't burn them to charred corpses, they still had the desired effect.

SKKKRRRAAAAAAAA!

A cacophony of shrill screeching filled the air, an orchestra of pain as the lightning bolts pierced through their defences and latched onto their nervous systems. Pain and misery was in abundance within this swarm, their bodies betraying their minds.

It almost seemed as if the lightning bolts were puppet strings of her own, connecting Astra to her living puppets as they danced, writhed and squirmed for her amusement. An entire swarm under her control, just long enough for her companions to close the gap.

Alexandra shattered the road with every booming step as she charged, the broken hunks of tarmac immediately latching onto her foot and crawling up her leg. The more she broke, the more that covered her. Her body grew, her footsteps becoming wider and cracking the road deeper with each calamitous step until she was a towering, 20 foot tall golem that seemed to be made of the road itself. Her face reforged from shattered stone, giving her rows of teeth formed of jagged stalagmites.

It was a truly horrifying sight, turning her into a monster more dread educing that the swarm of ants could ever dream of being. At this size, crushing these insectoids really did look like mere insects to her, insects that were just waiting to be crushed under her boot. Which was exactly what she did.

Every time she brought her foot down, the earth trembled in fear from her titanic wrath while ant bodies were splattered within the fresh craters her feet created.

She was not the only one taking on a colossal form. Cynthia expanded her body outwards and, instead of keeping a humanoid form like Alexandra, her body grew until it formed a tsunami like wave. The wave of slime lunged forward, wrapping itself around a group of ants that had been recently released from Astra's control, and immediately engulfed them.

The poor victims were pulled into her gelatinous body, quickly beginning to claw at their throats as they struggled to breath. Although drowning within her viscous body was the best possible outcome.

Their bodies hissed, bubbles curling off of them as they floated within her gelatinous mass. The acid liquid that composed Cynthia's body rapidly dissolved her ensnared victims, their limbs visibly shrinking until they had no arms to grasp at their throats with. Not that they were able to anymore regardless.

As they had drowned on her acid, it had flooded their lungs and ate them from the inside out. It didn't take long for the acid to eat through their lungs, pouring out and drowning the rest of their internal organs. Even with their protective shells, they were helpless against the cruelty of Cynthia's bottomless stomach.

Crescent blades of water manifested themselves in the air, their edges impossibly sharp as they carved through the immobilised ants. Unlike Seth, who had to rely on a weapon to create these water blades, Erik manifested them out of nothing but his own raw power.

The water appeared out of thin air, starting as a globule of water hanging in the air, before stretching itself outwards and forming the blade it was destined to be. Once it was fully formed, it launched itself and easily carved through the weak points of the ants.

They weren't currently powerful enough to cut through their armour, but with the ants utterly beholden to Astra's strings of lightning, it was easy for Erik to consistently slice through the joints and gaps in their carapace.

Even when he missed, however, and the water splashed uselessly against the chitin after simply carving a furrow into it, the extra water proved itself more than useful at increasing Astra's control over the victim, or giving the elusive Fox another window to cast his blade through.

Geysers of startling orange flames coursed through the air like serpents, swallowing up the helpless ants and doing what the lightning couldn't, turning them into lifeless, charred husks.

No longer limited to simple smells, Alfie was an instrument of destruction. His rat-tailed armour still served him well, since it had come from a transcendent opponent, even if it was one on the weaker side.

After his evolution, his power had truly proved itself useful. Whereas before he could only reliably produce flames by relying on the power of farts, now he could produce pure gas without having to use smells as a crutch.

Propane poured out from the pores of his skin and flowed through the tubing created by his disgusting armour. The tubing exited underneath his arm, where his friend had considerately carved a peculiar symbol onto one of the tails of his armour.

Alfie didn't quite understand how it worked, but with a small amount of mana pushed into the strange symbol, it would burn like a pilot light. Combining that with his new pure gas creation, turned him into a walking, talking flamethrower.

Liquid fuel would definitely have been better, but there was little he could do about that. It seemed like his days of sweating any kind of liquid was far gone, for now all he could produce was gas.

There was no limit to what gases he could create, from pure oxygen, to deadly mustard gas, to the sweet smell of a rose. All he required was the knowledge of its chemical composition, and the ability to clearly picture it in his mind. Something that painfully reminded him of his failings in chemistry class, but at least he was making up for it now.