Ant Queen

The Ant Queen was a massive ant plated in chitinous white armor, her eyes a pale shade of lavender.

Devotion to her brood defined her. She mourned the cannibalism her children were driven to in order to survive. Strategy ran alongside that maternal feeling, for she deliberately bred the Ant King to be a soldier capable of bringing down S-Rank Hunters as mighty as Goto Ryuji.

Roughly four years before the main events, the Ant Queen claimed Jeju Island as her domain after Korea's S-Rank Hunters failed to put her down. The island was evacuated, and across the next three years the government tried three times to retake it, each effort repelled by the queen and her offspring. When food finally grew scarce, she birthed the Ant King and charged him with leading the colony and destroying anyone in their path.

During the fourth raid, the Japanese hunters baited the ants into the open, letting the Korean S-Ranks slip into the queen's chamber unseen. She fought back but was steadily overpowered and brought to death's edge when Choi Jong-In wrapped her in a firestorm. Crying out for aid, she summoned her children home, yet Cha Hae-In severed her head with a single sword stroke before they could arrive. The Korean team could not clear the chamber in time, and the returning Ant King, finding his mother's body, flew into a rage that left the squad gravely wounded and their healer Min Byung-Gyu dead. After Jinwoo slew the Ant King and extracted his shadow as Beru, he attempted the same with the queen, but her shadow came out far weaker than expected. Beru explained that she had little combat ability, her true strength being reproduction, which a bodiless shadow could not perform, so Jinwoo abandoned the extraction.