Drip-Fed

The slime had gotten itself in a precarious situation. It was currently surrounded by ants, lots and lots of ants, enough to rip it apart in no time flat if they wanted to. It was a good thing for the amorphous that they didn’t, because they didn’t see the slime as an enemy. They saw it as part of their nest.

Yes, the slime was now part of an ant lair. To be exact, it was the reinforced ceiling of something like a central road that connected several breeding chambers with a dumping site. Judging by the fact that it was hit by drops of water from above every now and again, it had been put there for rain protection.

How had it gotten there? Through its own fault. After having waited for a short span of time to make sure the ants weren’t still on the look-out for it, the slime had returned to land. Rather than a predator, it had loaded its proverbial stomach before coming, this time it came as an observer.

What it did was hide itself inside its shell and just watch the ants, while running experiments with the pheromone duct it had gotten from the first few ants it devoured. As ants were quite small, that was the only part of their body that the slime could actually use for something.

At first everything went fine, it just went through the different kinds of smells the duct could produce. Very carefully, it tried one thing, then another, then another. It was interesting to see that the ants reacted in odd ways. They were obviously disinterested in attacking what must have looked like a rock to them. Instead they came in bigger and bigger numbers.

So, the slime reached out of its shell and attacked, convinced that the duct must have pacified the ants somehow. When attacked, the insects reacted exactly as before and swarmed him. One bath, one filled stomach and one climb back on land later, the slime repeated the game.

Maybe it just hadn’t used enough of the pheromones? Time to kick the production into overdrive and see what would happen. At first the game just repeated itself, one ant came to check out what it was smelling, then two, then thirty-five. Then more than it had ever seen skitter around at one place. Then it happened. The slime, thinking about whether it should strike now or later, was suddenly lifted up.

It really hadn’t expected the tiny insects to muster that much power, but they worked in instinctual unison. Together they managed to carry the camouflaged slime, who had a bit of a panic attack at that point.

Quickly, it disabled its pheromone duct, but the smell was already sticking to it and the other ants were marking it themselves. This was already a process it couldn’t stop. There were so many ants around that it didn’t feel like it could fight its way out either and the chances only became slimmer the further it was carried away from the water.

Thus, it just let it happen and became part of the nest. Truthfully speaking, its position wasn’t the worst. It rested on the edges of three separate bundles of moss, underneath which the ants had buried their main chambers. It was both a rain shield and a bridge for the ants to cross, but that was a sacrifice it could take in return for its supreme observing position.

The problem was it had to eat eventually. Soon, actually, since it already felt famished and would soon become weaker.

Luckily, it had hatched a plan. Through experimentation and observation, it had puzzled together a strategy that should allow it to survive this mess. Should, theoretically, this could all horribly backfire, ending the slimes ascension up the food chain at a mere ant colony.

The reason why the slime was willing to even throw its life on the line in this fight was that it thought it was facing the final boss. What could be stronger than a hivemind organized colony consisting of insects that could carry several times their weight and inject acid into bite wounds? In its tiny mind, barely understanding that there had to be something outside this cave, it felt like a hero challenging the army of the dark lord on its own, about to smash them into the next cycle. So the risk was worth taking.

Its plan hinged on two things. One was the fact that the ants would only react aggressively towards it if they were convinced it was attacking them. As long as it kept the pheromones on and moved in a non-threatening way, they would disregard what it did. Which was what allowed it to, very slowly, extend a part of its liquid body out of the shell and into an opportune position above one of the breeding chambers’ exits.

The reason for that was that the slime had observed there to be different kinds of ants. It had managed to distinguish three by their tremors, smell and looks. The latter two the slime identified through an insect-eyes tentacle and the ant’s own noses, or whatever one wanted to call their smelling organ.

One was the workers, the smallest and most numerous of the swarm. Next were the elites, bigger versions that did more of the heavy lifting and fighting but were less numerous and nimble. Last, and the slime had only managed to see a few of these, were the queens. They were tucked away in the breeding chambers most of the day and when they came out they had a number of worker and elites steadily buzzing around them.

They were attracted to the queens by such a powerful pheromone that it triumphed over everything the slime could produce at the current time. The glands producing them had to be slightly different and that was the second thing the slime was banking on.

Its opportunity came eventually. A queen, taking a small stroll out of her underground confinement in order to get some fresh food rather than being steadily feed through her workers social stomach, revealed herself. Eating the regurgitations of her underlings all the time must have been tiring even for a being with next to no capability to think.

Humanizations aside, she didn’t think about it and wasn’t tired of regurgitations. Her body just craved some fresh sugar, so she would go the place where the colony was currently breeding a kind of greenfly that ate moss and secreted a sweet liquid. Then she would head right back underground. That was the plan her instincts had scraped together.

Until she was suddenly scooped up by a viscous liquid, sucked under the outer layer and into the acidic main fluid of the ambushing roof. The slime quickly retreated its tentacle, as the ants went into a frenzy. Many of them jumped onto the tentacle, hitching a ride and greatly annoying the slime with their bites.

The drop of evolutionary soup had already taken this into account and it wasn’t a hindrance that was important. All that mattered was that it transported the queen inside it. Once it managed to do that, it tightly closed its shell and digested the queen alongside with the workers and guarding elites that had either been scooped up with or jumped onto the slime to follow her.

This part of the plan was relatively safe. Ants, while strong relative to their size, did not possess the tools to puncture the shell of the slime. They gnawed at and skittered all over it, desperately trying to find an opening. A myriad of tiny steps like drum beats stressed the slime, even knowing it was safe didn’t help when it was continuously assaulted by the hammering and scraping sounds.

If the slime was wrong and the queen’s pheromones did not allow it to become an object of veneration to the ants, then this would be its end. Either it would sit there inside its shell and starve to death, or it would open and be ripped apart. Personally, it had already decided that it would rather starve in that situation.

An eternity spent digesting to the sound of the raging swarm later, the slime grew its new duct and began producing pheromones like mad, opening its shell just a bit to let it flow out unobstructed.

Nothing happened for a long time. The slime was already resigning itself to its fate. Then, the attacks became less intense, confused even, as the ants were tricked into thinking they were attacking what they were trying to save. It took more time for the slime’s new queen pheromones to overpower the attack-markings that were covering its shell, but eventually the ants went docile.

They still skittered all over the slime, but when it moved probingly, they didn’t see it as an enemy. Instead, they were now swarming in protection of their newly anointed boss. That greatly pleased the slime, as it picked them up one by one and ate them with a side-serving of moss.

It was really hungry after all that.