I know what happens in the second test. The instructors and administrators watching above, having all the demons' profiles on a desk, evaluating if each demon should be revived if they die inside the maze, or be left dead as they are.

  I remember the sounds and scene I imagined in my mind.

  Scrit, scrit, scrit...

  The casual crossing out of lives, of demons that barely had enough time to experience life. It almost makes the institution itself feel predatory, and the monsters in the maze honest by comparison.

  Shhhlup, shhhlup- The Red Sludge monster slithered through the dark hallway.

  Following some distance behind, I felt the heart in my pocket. It had finally stopped beating, and died.

  Haiz, just a week ago I was eating instant noodles on my bed. But the resources I would get in the Demon Academy to train are just too valuable to give up. I still hadn't forgotten the reason I came here in the first place.

  Putting a hand on my stomach, I didn't feel hungry nor too thirsty, but a small, growing feeling of needing to go to the washroom that appeared.

  Looking at the distance between me and the Red Sludge, I judged that it was quite a measurable distance, but likely enough for me to go take a quick break and come back to the deterrence radius.

  It's best to deal with it while I can. While the Red Sludge monster would indeed deter other monsters from approaching it, there was a limit to how far its influence would reach. Though, with how short I'll be gone for, I doubted that it would matter much.

  Looking back to make sure there was nothing waiting behind me, I stopped and went a little farther away to urinate.

  Just a little farther away, in the watchful eyes of the darkness...

  "Kieeek! Keeek! Kiee!", an oversized ant clacked its mandibles at a larger, soldier ant.

  Clack! Clack clack! Clacking their mandibles back in acknowledgement, the soldier ant retreated farther back into the darkness, making its way over to an ant even more ginormous in size. The queen.

  The soldier ant made a report, "Kek! Kiek! Keeek! Kieeee!"

  The queen, an ant the size of an elephant, listened attentively to its child's words.

  Tapping one of its legs on the floor in contemplation, the queen thanked its child for their work, and raised its head to look forward. A few miles ahead, a male demon with half-demon blood was facing the wall.

  It was the first demon they found after an excruciating time searching, and it had finally let down its guard.

  "...", the queen ant became silent, before calling its children.

  "KIEEEEE!"

  I attempted to block out the sound of excreting waste using [Immersion]. It was a sound that I found particularly disgusting. The thought of being dirty always made me feel queasy.

  However, just when I was about to finish, an eerie sound of clacking entered my ears just a few feet away.

  I turned my head, "!"

  Startled to see an ant the size of a large dog approaching me, I instinctively turned my body to face it, inadvertently peeing on its head.

  "...", I felt awkward, zipping up my pants. Why is an ant here??

  The ant, taking a moment of silence, suddenly felt determined. A known signal of disrespect by demons, it certainly had to take revenge!

  Scurrying back to its colony, the ant disappeared into the darkness.

  But, without indulging myself in embarrassment, I knew what seeing an ant meant.

  A colony is nearby! I was about to get ambushed!

  Immediately, I felt hurried, and turned around to run back closer to the Red Sludge. The Red Sludge monster was half the size of a regular queen ant in this world, but its attack to expel poisonous blood would easily be lethal to a large group of enemies.

  However, before I could make it even a few steps forward, I heard countless layers of mandibles clacking behind me.

  I looked behind me. An army of ants was rapidly approaching.

  "!!!", my jaw fell, "Fuck!"

  Grinding my teeth, I thought of what to do, but I knew I couldn't underestimate the ants' speed. Before I knew it, I felt something clamp down on my lower leg.

  Chomp!

  It was like time slowed down just for me to feel the full experience. My thoughts halted, and my good leg faltered.

  ...Crunch! The sound of bone being crushed echoed in my ears.

  "That hurts!"

  Subconsciously, [Killing Intent] activated, and a thick sludge of malice crashed into the advancing colony of ants.

  "Kieeek!"

  Taken by surprise, the ants at the front line stopped momentarily, causing those in the back to slam themselves into them, crushing some fragile parts of their heads.

  Krrrk!

  I continued running without looking back. But the ant queen followed closely behind, ordering the ants at the front to continue moving.

  What should I do? My mind raced twice as fast as my heart, before thinking of an idea.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Leaping up to the wall, an ant intending to chomp down on my other leg missed. I felt my lower right leg bleeding out, but I couldn't care less at the moment.

  Leaping from the wall, I turned around 360 and jumped right into the colony.

  "Kieek!", the ants excitedly cried.

  I used my bad leg to find footing, stepping on one of the ants' heads.

  "Ugh!", my leg felt like it was going to be crushed under my body's weight, my blood splashed all over the ant I stepped on and hitting some around it.

  But when I jumped again, the ants were all looking up, mandibles open for me to land on one of them and get crushed brutally.

  Reaching into my inner pocket, I took out the heart of the monster I killed earlier, sliding it between an ant's mandibles. I lett it get crushed, allowing me to stay in the air for a few more seconds.

  Hearing their brother snap their mandibles on something, the ants swarmed below me, killing the ant in the middle as a result.

  I was able to find footing again and stepped on the body of one of the ants with my bad leg again. This time, I felt like I could no longer put anymore pressure on it. Regardless, I temporarily forced through the weakness.

  I looked forward, and saw the Red Sludge I followed earlier...turn back, and begin slithering this way.

  My eyes lit up in joy. It worked.

  Now, I just had to buy time for it to get here. A colony in the maze would be artificially limited by the instructors to not get too big, so the Red Sludge's poison attack would wipe it out in mere moments.

  But when I turned my head back, the queen ant was right there, face to face, ready to clamp its mandibles on my torso.

  My eyes widened, but without hesitation, I put my hand between its mandibles, pushing me backwards.

  Clamp!

  My hand was crushed completely. An inexplicable pain overtook my consciousness, making the focus in my eyes blur, before the pain vanished in [Immersion].

  Refilled with adrenaline and clenching my fist, I pulled myself back, separating my crushed hand from my wrist and using my good leg jump sideways, dodging a speedy ant attempting to take my other hand.

  Landing on the floor, I ran deeper into the colony, running closer to the large queen ant. In the narrow hallway, the ants struggled to manuever past the queen without getting stepped on or blocking her way.

  The queen ant seemed to prioritize herself as well, and turned around to attack me again.

  No matter what, in this world, an ant would be devastated if they hurt their queen. Easily able to dodge the slow queen's mandibles, the few ants that made it through her struggled to get a clear chomp without adding in the queen's legs. As for the few ants that accidentally bit her, it only made the queen panic and block the maneuverability of the lesser ants even more.

  However, after a while of merely watching the queen fail to get me and being unable to join the fight, the ants clacked their mandibles to communicate with each other in a strange language.

  Eventually, they thought of a solution.

  Rapidly, they climbed on top of each other, making a tower akin to zombies in movies climbing a wall, and the ants at the top fell to the top of the queen's body and ran over it to get to me. They ran with such vigor that most miscalculated how long the queen was and directly fell to the ground once they reached the end of it, resulting in some falling on their backs.

  I looked at the tower in disbelief. I made these folks too smart.

  Exhaustion slowly built up in me, my body growing increasingly tired faster than normal due to needing to run and dodge while limping.

  I glanced behind me. I couldn't just try running away trying to outrun them either.

  Watching from a distance, several bat monsters dug their claws in the wall so that they could steal the ants' kill if I tried to run away.

  More and more ants beginning to make their way to me, I had to dodge more and more attacks, finding myself in the air a couple times and stepping on ants' heads.

  As the seconds passed by, the only reason I wasn't dead was because of the ants' fear of hurting the queen.

  But, the ants knew this too and began slowly pushing me back, forcing me to dodge in ways that would put distance from me and the queen, little by little.

  Come on, come on! Is that slime here yet? Impatience grew steadily.

  But just when a sense of dread rose in my heart, the sound of something sizzling and burning delightfully entered my ears.

  Ssss...

  The queen ant didn't seem to notice anything.

  The sizzling grew louder.

  SsssSSSS-

  Suddenly feeling a terrible burning pain at the back, the queen ant cried in shock, "KIEE!"

  All of the ants startled, they looked back and wanted to see what was harming the queen, which only a few could glimpse.

  A red sludge of a monster, consistently spewing large blobs of dark red liquid at the queen, burning and cooking it alive.

  Filled with excruciating pain, the queen ant struggled and tried turning around to face the Red Sludge, but was unable to do so as her children attempted the same, clogging the space she needed to turn. At the same time, the children at the back desperately tried to shield her and sacrifice themselves, forming a wall to block the acid. Only, their numbers were too small, and over half of the ant colony had already crossed over to my side.

  In a short amount of time, the acid blood melted nearly half of the queen ant's back side into its torso, before it had taken too much damage and collapsed on its side.

  Boom!

  Quickly hiding near the queen ant's half-melted corpse, I waited for the Red Sludge monster to take out some of the other ants before switching hiding spots and climbing under a soldier ants' corpse.

  Sss!

  I watched silently as the Red Sludge resisted the mandible attacks of the ants, and melted them all with a few gushes of acid.

  Climbing and making its way to a specific ant, the suction sound started as it began sucking up some blood that had gotten on its mandibles.

  It was my blood. I had planned to remove my camouflage and attract the Red Sludge here by spreading my blood, and it had worked.

  Hiding under a soldier ant, the Red Sludge feasted on the blood that came from my severed limbs, moving onto another ant, to another, to the queen's mandibles that had crushed my hand, until it had eaten all of the blood it could sense and began silthering away to its original destination.

  I glanced back, the bat monsters that were waiting to 'steal a kill' had already been scared off.

  When the Red Sludge monster went a bit of a distance away, I climbed out from the soilder ant's corpse, and removed one of its mandibles to take as a weapon.

  Behind me, I heard the queen ant weakly cry in desperation.

  "Kie...k-...ke.."

  I made my way to the queen ant's head. Despite half of its body being melted, it was still alive.

  I looked down into the queen ant's eye in silence, a conflicted feeling forming in my heart.

  "...", the queen ant saw me stand above it, its cries morphing into a silence of sorrowful acceptance. Its children, the colony it had built with years of effort.

  All of it was now gone.

  In the blink of an eye.

  ...I looked at the mandible in my hand, and looked back at the queen ant. Heavily, I raised the mandible, then began stabbing its eye ferverously.

  I didn't make a sound as the feeling of flesh being pierced and crushed sent a small shiver down my spine.

  I let out a shaky breath. I need to kill it quickly, and take what's useful. I need to finish up quickly before those bats come back.

  Flesh splattered and the equivalent of 'ant blood' dripped down from its eye, until the queen ant finally succumbed and its body lost strength, dipping into lifelessness.

  Dropping the ant mandible in my hand, I limped to the queen ant's melted body and ripped out the esophagus and some flesh from its abdomen, stuffing it into my pocket.

  I continued limping and cauterized my right wrist using some leftover acid on the ground, then made my way closer to the Red Sludge, once again following it in its tracks.

  I looked down at myself, my right arm that was missing a hand, and my right leg with the lower part crushed to a stick's width.

  The escalation of these past events were almost comical, but I felt like I couldn't laugh at all. Even now, the ant queen's corpse would be desecrated, eaten by other creatures, with no time to pay any respects.

  I forcefully ripped a part of my blazer, using it to put pressure and bandage up my wrist.

  ...After a few minutes of following the Red Sludge, the adrenaline slowly faded, my strength to walk and use [Immersion] weakening from exhaustion, pain gradually coming into the picture.

  The Red Sludge monster was also moving toward another lighted area as well.

  Unsure if this would be my end in this maze, I continued following the Red Sludge monster, until I heard a squelching sound in its direction.

  Shlrsh, shhh...

  Stopping in my tracks, I focused [Immersion] on the Red Sludge monster and saw a demon up ahead...who stabbed it.