There are so many damn ants. She knows there was obviously going to be a lot. It’s an ant hill being stalked by five very large and hungry spiders. Of course there are a lot of ants. But there are so many. It doesn’t take long for them to swarm out of the ant hill. The spiders flee into the trees, and truthfully, she can’t blame them. She really, really wishes she could flee into the trees too. Not that she didn’t expect to get a few bites, but not this.

Most seem to swarm after only a handful of the horses. She notes that somehow Dragomir seems to be left entirely alone, and she’s rather displeased to find that she is not entirely left alone. The battalion of ants that comes her way divides though, many going after the already dead ants. She stomps a handful more in different places, hoping that the army will continue to divide itself among its’ fallen comrades.

There’s more than she can crush though, and they start crawling up her legs and biting. She is endlessly thankful for the scales that run up the lower part of her legs, making it harder for the ants to do much damage. Still, they pinch and prick and there’s enough of them that she can’t just stand there. No, she needs to get the dead ant smell of herself, because certainly she must have some of the dead ant smell clinging to her.

So she runs. Sort of. Syrena doesn’t run well, particularly not in a forest, but she beelines as best she can to the closest stream she can find. She stomps ants on the way, moving in a zigzag to keep luring the ant army into various locations that were not her. Soon, she plunges into the little stream, wishing desperately she were near the ocean or even a river. Any salt water, truthfully, because the smell of the salt would likely be the best thing to keep the ants away.

But she’ll take what she can get. She sinks into the water as best she can, splashing around in an attempt to wash the ants from her legs and get rid of any lingering smell. For good measure, she splashes as much water onto the shore as she can, trying to obscure any scent trail and kill any lingering ants in a sudden mud slide. Hopefully she’d left enough dead ants in the spiderwebs and the trail behind her that the spiders would get dinner. Because otherwise she’s got herself some bitten to hell legs for no good reason.

[Summary: Kills some more ants to try and split the army even more, and then runs into a stream to try and wash the ants away.]