The room was packed with ants. Hundreds of them. Eggs dropped from the queen with horrifying regularity. Dr. Twilight had clearly done something to accelerate their development as well as granting them enormous size; worker ants grabbed hold of the eggs and shoved them into a gluey mass behind the vast abdomen, from which they emerged full grown about fifteen minutes later.
    Xorn walked out of the wall and said, "My God, their pupating cycle has been accelerated madly."
    The queen herself was a good hundred feet long. How had they cleared out this huge chamber so quickly?
    It dawned on Phoenix Talon—they hadn't. There on the floor were the traces of an old pentagram. This had once been one of St.John's ritual spaces.
    The grenade wasn't going to do it. Phoenix Talon grabbed his plastique and set the detonator for five second delay; this would require fine timing. In a masterly display of ninja agility he vaulted up and danced across the carpet of moving ants, toward the queen. The last ant lifted its head at just the wrong moment; his foot slipped, and he found himself on the ground, looking up at the queen's thorax, with a plastique charge about to detonate beside him.
    "Y'know, he almost pulled that one off," Steel remarked. Radiation began flickering over the antennae of two hundred ants. "Oh, they're gonna fry him...."
    Phoenix Talon promptly climbed the queen's leg and got onto her back, putting her bulk between him and the explosive and trying to ignore how fundamentally disgusting this was.
    Thunderbolt scowled in concentration; the radiation beams the ants were discharging at Phoenix Talon swirled in midair and coalesced around him instead, cloaking him in a faint green light as Xorn dove madly out of the way. Cold Steel was, of course, impervious.
    "No! the queen buzzed.
    Cold Steel bent down and put his hands on the ground. Ice sheeted over the stone, up the ants' legs up to the second joint. "I'm focusing this to make sure I don't get it around the plastique. That's not easy."
    The queen rotated her head to look at Phoenix Talon. You little worm! Ant thoughts were invading his mind, making him part of the hive....
    The plastique went off, and cut her in half. The front part of her body was tossed upwards by the force of the explosion. Phoenix Talon was hurled backwards, into the egg sack, buried up to the neck in its grotesque fluids. This is possibly the single most repulsive thing that has ever happened to me.
    Xorn poked his head out from the wall. "Oh my God.... Nothing to do but get it done." A half dozen ants exploded. "God I hate fighting this stuff!"
    Phoenix Talon clambered free of the monstrous egg sack, dripping goo from every limb.
    "How you doing down there?" Steel inquired.
    "Repulsed!" he shouted back.
    "Welcome to the team!" With Doc Twilight as a regular enemy, this sort of thing was always happening to the Warriors.
    The queen buzzed angrily, crawling toward the man who had maimed her so horribly. You will all join the Hive.... no! The radiation blast Thunderbolt had stored up struck her, and she began shuddering madly as her blood boiled.
    "I wonder how she deals with temperature inversion..." Steel mused. "Everybody duck!"
    Ice met the radiating heat. The ant queen exploded, showering the trio with even more disgusting goo. The remaining ants twitched mindlessly and began to die as their queen left them.
    "Where's the fucking gene sequencer?" Talon stalked over to look for it; it had been coated in ice and was quite undamaged, more's the pity. He considered taking a whack at the damn thing himself.
    "Any residual effects from the mind contact with the ant?" Xorn asked.
    "No."

Later that afternoon, two overalled men with a variety of strange equipment on hand looked over the ant wreckage.
    "What I want to know is, how come we always get stuck cleanin' this stuff up?" the first one muttered sulkily.
    "Always? This is the first time we've ever had to clean up giant ant!" the other reminded him, shaking his head at the sight. He straightened his cap, unshipped his mop and prepared for one heck of a cleanup job.
    "You know what I mean. Sewer lines break, we gotta clean that up. Chemical spills, we gotta clean that up."
    "Giant microwaved ants?"
    "Yeah, we gotta clean those up, too." They began moving said giant ants to one corner of the cave; animal control would have to figure out how to dispose of them.
    "We're the guys who get paid to clean stuff up," the other pointed out with a shrug. He'd been animal control back in New York a year ago, moved to Boston where things were calmer. He didn't mind cleaning up messes half so much as being in the middle of them.
    "You have to be so stoic about it... hey, what's this pulsating thing here?" He dropped his half of the ant and went to take a look at something all but unseen in a cranny near one wall.
    "Stand back away from that," his comrade snapped. He'd learned well in the Big Apple; his standard-issue flamethrower played steadily over whatever it was that had moved. "We are not having a sequel, no giant ant queens coming back!"

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