"I only held half of them," said Leah.
She said it for the third time, in the same careful voice, as though repeating it might make it true. She sat cross-legged on a cushion before the great curved wall of black glass, with her chin in her hand and her tea going cold, watching a long, dim tunnel where a column of ants was marching in neat, patient lines.
"Half of the tunnels," she said. "Not the whole colony. The east junction runs. The upper galleries run. I only parked the side chambers. It's supposed to look like lag."
"It is very subtle," said Ainz.
"Thank you."
"I am not certain it is subtle enough."
He stood behind her, in the dark armor of Momon, with his helmet under one arm. Narberal waited by the door. Beside her, in two long, still, black ranks, the Death Knights stood with their shields grounded and their faces hidden. They were, strictly, not meant to be in the control room at all, but he had not liked leaving them outside.
"I didn't want you to come at all," said Leah. "Not today. Not with the thread the way it is."
"I wished to see for myself."
"See what?"
"What they do when they believe they are not being watched."
"They're always watched."
"They do not know that."
Leah gave a short, unhappy laugh. "I do. I forget it sometimes. Sorry."
On the central pane, the tunnel flickered. A column of small figures in plain brown cloaks had entered the far end, in twos and threes, quietly. They moved with the hushed, careful tread of people trying not to sound like people.
"Tourists," said Narberal.
"Tourists don't wear plate under a cloak," said Ainz.
He looked closer. There was a bulge at every shoulder. A dull gleam under every hem. The man at the back carried something long and wrapped in cloth, which was not a fishing rod.
"How many?"
"Eleven," said Leah. "No. Fourteen. No..."
The tunnel kept filling.
"Thirty," she said, in a thin voice. "Forty. Fifty. There are *sixty* of them."
"Sixty?"
"Sixty-two. That's Grimward and Harrow's hunters and a bunch of ringers. They've all come in the east entrance. They're staging at the first junction." She sat up very straight. "They came early."
"Why?"
"So they could be there when the gap opens."
Ainz felt something cold go down the back of his spine.
"Leah. How long have you known it was a trap?"
"About four minutes."
***
He saw Tally at the very center of the formation.
She had taken a position at the mouth of the junction, a little apart from the rest, with her back against the stone and a silver stopwatch in her left hand. She was not looking at the empty tunnel. She was looking at her own palm. Her lips moved. Her thumb tapped a small, steady rhythm against the rim.
"Eleven point four," she murmured, on the glass. Ainz read it on her lips. "Eleven point four. Eleven point... *there.*"
She lifted her head.
Down the long tunnel, a quarter-mile away, the last pair of ants in the line turned a corner, and the passage went quiet.
"Gap," said Tally.
It took a second for the word to land. It took a second more for the sixty-two to move.
They did not run. They moved like a river that has found the shape of its bed. The scouts went first, low and silent, and the shield-bearers came after in a tight, flat wedge, and behind them came the mages and the archers and the long, grim line of Harrow's black wolves. They flowed down the empty tunnel and into the first chamber and across the bridge and past the glowing fungus, and not one of them made a sound.
"They know the route," said Leah, in horror.
"They have mapped it."
"They have mapped it for *three weeks.* They hit the gap in the junction, then they take the shaft by the second terrace, and that gives them the dais in nine minutes." She was on her feet. She had gone white to the lips. "I can release the colony. The ants are parked in the far galleries. It takes eleven minutes for them to get to the dais."
"Nine against eleven."
"Yes."
"Then they will reach it first."
"They'll reach the dais. They'll kill the handmaid. And there's an archway behind her." Leah turned to him, and her eyes were enormous. "There's a root curtain over it. It looks like a wall. But Tally found the seam on her third run, I'm almost sure, and if she..."
She did not finish.
Ainz stood very still.
He saw it with terrible clarity, the way he had once seen the whole tree of a boss fight a second before it fell apart. A dais broken. A curtain of roots torn aside. A round black room with a table and a pot of tea, and a woman on a cushion in a brown cloak who was not a boss and not a script and not a dungeon.
*And then they would know.*
And behind that: a lord who dies, and a retinue that dies with her. A queen who dies, and a colony that dies with her. A single point, and a whole structure resting on it.
*If I fall,* he had thought, in a quiet cavern, *they have nothing.*
He had thought it of himself, and of Nazarick. He had not thought, until this moment, that it could also be said of a small, tired woman in a cloak, who had once offered him a cup of tea.
"How long?" he said.
"Nine minutes."
"I will be there in six."
"You can't *fly.* It's a mile of tunnel."
"I have a wide range of abilities," said Ainz. "Do not worry about the distance."
He put on his helmet.
"Narberal. With me. Death Knights, with me." He turned to the door. "Leah. Stay here. Do not leave this room. Do not go near the glass. If the curtain falls before I arrive, you will *go.* Do you understand?"
"Where?"
"Anywhere." His voice was very flat. "I will find you."
Leah stared at him. Her mouth opened, then closed.
"Okay," she whispered.
He opened the door.
***
The dais was already a battlefield.
He heard it before he saw it: a ringing of steel, a ragged shout, the thin high scream of something small and hurt. He came around the last bend at a dead run, with Narberal at his shoulder and the Death Knights thundering behind, and the whole third chamber opened before him like a stage.
The handmaid was down.
She lay at the foot of the dais, on her side, in her neat grey coat, with an arrow in her shoulder and a spear point resting lightly against her chest. She was breathing. She was looking up with calm, patient, faintly embarrassed eyes at a tall woman with grey in her hair and a black wolf's head on her breastplate, who was standing over her with a long dark spear.
"Please," said the handmaid, politely. "I would prefer you did not."
"I'm sorry," said Harrow.
"It is only a few minutes of..."
"I know."
"Stop," said Ainz.
His voice rang off the stone.
Every head in the chamber turned.
There were sixty of them, ranked in a broad, shallow crescent around the dais. They stood with weapons ready and faces pale and grim in the glow of the fungus. And there, at the very back, small and plain in her grey coat, with her stopwatch cupped in both hands, stood Tally.
Ainz walked forward.
He did not hurry. He had gone, in the last hundred yards, from a run to a walk, and from a walk to a slow, steady, measured stride. He passed the fallen handmaid. He passed the dais. He came to a halt at the very foot of the low stone steps, and the two black knights took their places on either side of him, shields locked, in the posture of a guard of honor at a gate.
Behind them, a curtain of old brown roots hung against the cavern wall, perfectly still.
"Momon," said Harrow.
"Harrow."
"I wondered whether you'd come."
"I am a guest in this lair."
A faint rustle ran through the ranks.
*Guest.* He had said it without thinking. He saw it land. He saw a young woman in the front rank draw in her breath and whisper something to the man beside her. He saw Tally, very still, at the back, look up from her palm and watch him over the heads of the crowd.
*Quillon,* he thought. *Quillon's word.*
It was too late to take it back.
"And a guest," said Ainz, as steadily as he could, "is owed protection by his host. You have no business in this chamber. Disperse."
"We're not leaving," said Harrow.
"I know."
"We've got sixty-two people and an eight-minute window. We're going through that curtain."
"You will not."
"Or what?"
He did not answer at once.
He had been asking himself the same question for the last three hundred yards. He had spent the whole run turning it over. *I can kill them,* he had thought. *I can kill every one of them in under a minute. They will respawn, and learn, and return in an hour with an exact map of my swing.* He had done it once. He had done it fifty-nine times. It had made things worse.
*A defeat can be answered. A reading cannot be taken back.*
He lifted the great sword and set the tip against the stone.
"I will not kill you," said Ainz.
***
It took them a moment to understand.
It took Harrow longer than the rest. She stood with the spear half raised, and her face did a strange, slow thing, as though she had put her foot on a stair that was not there.
"You'll... what?"
"I will not kill you. Not one of you. Not tonight."
"That's..." She shook her head. "That doesn't make sense. You've killed fifty-nine of us already."
"Yes."
"You didn't hesitate."
"No."
"Then why..."
"Because it did not work," said Ainz. He heard how his own voice sounded, quiet and tired and a long way from Momon's. "Because every time I killed one of you, you came back with a better question. I have no wish to teach you any more."
There was a long silence.
Somewhere in the ranks, a young man made a small, startled sound that might have been a laugh. Somewhere behind him, someone said, very softly, *he's not bluffing.*
"Then what are you going to do?" said Harrow.
"Stand here."
"That's it?"
"That is all."
She stared at him. Then she looked at the two black knights, and at the shields locked in a perfect wall, and at the mage in black robes who stood at his shoulder with her hands folded and her face composed.
"Let's find out," said Harrow.
She raised her spear.
"Go!"
***
It was the strangest battle he had ever fought.
He had spent half his life learning how to kill things quickly. He had no practice at the other thing. He found, within the first thirty seconds, that holding sixty people without hurting them was less like swordplay than like trying to keep a tide out of a doorway with a broom.
They came in waves. The first was the shield-bearers, a line of grim young men with their heads down, and the Death Knights met them at the foot of the stairs and simply did not give way. They held. They absorbed. They shoved, with slow, terrible patience, and the first rank staggered, and the second piled into the back of it, and for a moment there was a tangle of mail and cursing in the narrow space between the dais and the wall.
"*Stun!*" said Narberal, quietly, and a flat sheet of white lightning swept across the front rank, low and wide. Eight men dropped where they stood, twitching, breathing, wide-eyed and alive.
"Thank you," said Ainz.
"It is nothing, Lord Ainz."
"Do not do it more than you must."
"I am being very nice."
"I know."
The archers loosed. He took the arrows on the shoulder and the helm, and let them ring off. A mage in the second rank flung a bolt of cold fire at the Death Knights, and he stepped in front of it, and took it on the breastplate, and the plate went white with frost. He swung once, with the flat of the great sword, and a man who had slipped past the shield wall went spinning into the rock, groaning, in one piece.
They were not trying to avoid dying. That was the strange part. They were, he realized with a slow, creeping unease, trying to *die.* The shield-bearers lowered their guard. The archers leaned into the sword. A boy of nineteen with a ragged cloak came at the knights with a dagger in each hand and no shield at all, and when Ainz caught his wrist and turned him gently aside, the boy looked up at him in honest, bewildered disappointment.
"You're supposed to hit me," he said.
"I am not going to."
"But I have to see what happens!"
"I know."
"That's *cheating.*"
"It is simply," said Ainz, "the end of the lesson."
He pinned the boy against the wall with one gauntleted hand. He did not squeeze. He held him there, firmly, politely, and the boy hung in his grip like a puppy in a bag, blinking, and said nothing at all.
Behind him, a very small, very dry voice said: "Eight minutes."
It was Tally.
***
She had come forward through the crush.
He did not know when. He had not seen her cross the floor. But she was standing now at the foot of the dais steps, ten feet from the Death Knights' shields, with her stopwatch open in one hand and a small, stubby pencil in the other, and she was looking at him with calm, steady, exhausted eyes.
"Seven minutes forty," she said. "The colony's due back on the dais in eleven minutes from the moment the first of us crossed the bridge. We've lost about two."
"Have you."
"We could get through you by then. If we were willing to die."
"You are willing."
"Yes."
"And I am unwilling to let you."
"Yes. I see that." She tilted her head. "You've stopped us. Not by killing. By *not* killing. That's... a very clever thing to do. I want you to know I noticed."
"It was not clever."
"It was the only thing that works." Tally flicked the watch shut and looked up at the high, dim ceiling, with its glowing veins and its hanging roots. "I'd like to ask a question."
"Ask."
"Are you a player?"
Ainz did not move.
"I am a merchant."
"That's not an answer."
"It is the one I have."
"Merchants don't hold a lair's stairs against sixty raiders." She considered him with a faint, wry look. "Merchants don't know the word *guest.* Merchants don't ask us not to die."
"I have been asking for some time."
"I noticed that too." She glanced at the root curtain, hanging against the wall behind him, utterly still. "I think you've been asking us to leave something alone."
"I have been asking," said Ainz, very quietly, "for a great many things. Most of them I will not be able to explain."
For a long, silent moment, the two of them stood in the glow of the fungus, a small plain woman in a grey coat and a tall black warrior in a dented helm, and nobody in the whole chamber seemed to breathe.
Then, from far away down the long tunnel, came a faint, rhythmic, many-legged clicking.
Tally closed her eyes.
"Oh," she said, gently. "There they are."
***
The colony arrived like a tide.
They came down the long ramps from every side at once, in neat black columns, with their shells gleaming and their antennae high. They came in ones and tens and hundreds, with great, patient, well-drilled precision, and at the head of the first column, bobbing very slightly, strode an ant the size of a donkey in a very small, very neat hat.
It paused at the edge of the chamber. It looked at the sixty-two. It looked at the fallen handmaid, and at Momon, and at the two black knights.
It waved.
Somebody, somewhere in the ranks, began to laugh.
It was a high, helpless, hysterical sound, and it spread. In a moment half the crescent was laughing, and the other half was staring, and Harrow stood with her spear half lowered and her mouth working, and the boy pinned against the wall by Momon's hand put his head back and howled.
"It *waved,*" he gasped.
"They always wave," said Tally, wearily.
"It's got a *hat!*"
"I know."
"We were going to take down the whole..."
"I know," said Tally. "Put your weapons down, everyone. It's over."
It was, Ainz saw, true. The gap had closed. The tide had come in. A raid timed to the second on an empty chamber had become, in an instant, an ordinary run, on the ordinary cycle, against an ordinary colony, which was something that every player in the cave knew how to survive.
They began to retreat.
It took a long while. They went by ones and twos, dragging their stunned and shaken, and the ants parted for them with great, grave courtesy. Harrow was the last to go. She stopped at the edge of the chamber, and looked back at him, and in the pale light her face was not that of a hunter at all.
"Thank you," she said, "for not killing us."
"There is no need."
"No. There is." She turned. "I'll keep that in mind."
She went.
And behind her, a small, plain woman in a grey coat stayed where she was, at the foot of the stairs, with the stopwatch open in her hand and her pencil moving rapidly over a small white card.
***
It was a long time before anyone spoke.
They stood in the round black room, the four of them. Leah sat on her cushion, with her hands wrapped around a cup she had not drunk from, and her face was the color of paper. Sugaru stood by the glass with her antennae drooping. Narberal had gone to fetch the handmaid, who was being tended in a side chamber by three anxious ants in aprons.
On the great curved pane, the dais had gone quiet. The ants had resumed their work, hauling stone and fungus and bundles of dried leaves, in neat, tireless lines. In the far corner, at the very edge of the glass, a small grey-coated figure sat on a rock with a notebook open on her knee.
"She's still there," said Leah, faintly.
"Yes."
"She's *still counting.*"
"Yes."
"What's she writing?"
Ainz looked at the glass for a long moment.
He could not read it from here. But he thought, perhaps, that he knew. He thought that, somewhere in that small white card, in a neat, careful hand, there was a line that said:
*Momon did not kill anyone. Why?*
And beneath it, perhaps, another one, a good deal worse.
*Whom was he protecting?*
"Ainz," said Leah.
"Yes."
"You said, back in the thread. You said we'd need something better than a distraction."
"Yes."
"Do you have one?"
He turned from the glass.
He took off his helmet, with slow, careful hands, and set it down on the low table beside the teapot, and for the first time in a long while he did not hide his face. It was a plain white skull with two dim red lights in the sockets. It was not a comforting sight. It was, he thought, rather a tired one.
"I think," said Ainz, "that I have the beginning of one."
He sat down on a cushion.
"It begins," he said, "with Nazarick's POPs."