They must be an ant colony passing by, which happened to be attracted by the meat we hunted.

Ants are social animals that communicate using pheromones and their antennae. If one ant finds food, it can summon hundreds or thousands of other ants within minutes.

I don't think these ants are the same type of ant as red imported fire ants.

If the ants are red imported fire ants or similar species, their nests are fixed, and these natives should have been able to find and deal with them much earlier.

Judging from the way these ants behave, they are more like army ants that are all black and have no fixed abode.

Army ants are social insects with large colonies, sometimes numbering in the millions.

They do not have fixed nests and are always moving around. Wherever they go, insects and small invertebrates are preyed upon in large numbers.

Some large animals may also die from being immobilized after being attacked, so army ants are important harvesters in the ecosystem.

These ants are incredibly powerful fighters; they leave nothing but desolation in their wake, and no animal can stop them.

They either escape beforehand or become their food.

The red ants in front of us are larger than the new army ants, and they secrete more formic acid toxins.

It will take some time for the people in the tribe to evacuate, and they also need to take some essential food with them.

The natives knew very well that these ants would try to scavenge as much food as possible wherever they went.

Therefore, they all had to be prepared to deal with these ants for several days.

What we need to do now is use the torches in our hands to slow down the ants' movement and buy some precious time for everyone to evacuate.

Because of the rush, the women didn't have time to take many things, so they started to evacuate with their children.

At this time, those ants were just like the black giant ants I had faced back in my hometown; they were not afraid of fire at all, and we used our torches to burn them on the ground.

Instead, they bared their teeth and claws and launched an attack on the torch. The torch crackled and popped, and soon a thick layer of charred ant corpses piled up.

Later, it was from these local people that I learned the names of this ant and the ants from my hometown.

The ants in my hometown are called giant ants by the locals, and they are even more terrifying than these. The locals in front of me call these red tiger ants, meaning they are as brave and fearless as tigers.

These red tiger ants were like madmen, completely disregarding their own energy expenditure, and kept crawling towards us.

Fortunately, we outnumbered them and used more than twenty torches to form a temporary wall of fire. Although the red tiger ants were ferocious, they couldn't break through our fire defense for a while.

However, this wall of fire clearly could not hold for long. The red tiger ants that kept swarming towards the torch were either due to formic acid or because there were too many dead ones, and they had begun to seriously affect the burning of the torch.

"&%%&%*&*!"

At this moment, the tribal chief shouted anxiously at the women, and I could roughly guess what he meant without explanation. He probably wanted them to abandon some food and retreat to escape for their lives.

Seeing that we were about to collapse, the women quickly grabbed the last of the supplies they could and ran toward the gate.

Then I noticed that the giant hyena from before hadn't left with everyone. Instead, it was standing behind the tribal chief, waiting for this man. It seemed that the chief had brought the giant hyena back to raise.

Seeing that everyone had left, I heard the indigenous chieftain utter a single "ro" to the giant hyena beside him.

Later I learned that Luo was the name of this giant hyena.

With just a simple exchange of glances, Luo and the natives knew what to do next. Luo dashed off like a gust of wind, heading in the direction the women had left in.

Luo hadn't left before because he wanted to stay and cover the retreat with everyone. Later, the tribal chief signaled Luo to leave so that he could protect the women and children of the tribes.

Because the rainforest outside might not be much safer than this place, and any kind of wild beast could threaten the safety of their people.

Luo's duty has always been to protect the safety of the tribe, and he is simply doing his job.

At this moment, the flames of the torches in our hands are only about one-third the size they were before, and the temperature has also dropped significantly.

Seeing the situation, the indigenous chief shouted to everyone, and then all the indigenous people threw their torches on the ground to form the last wall of fire.

Then they pulled out the glow sticks stuck in the thatched roof of the house and fled for their lives in the direction the women had left.

Just as we reached the entrance to the tribe, the torches behind us were almost instantly extinguished by the swarm of ants that surged up.

Darkness once again enveloped every corner of the tribe, and within minutes, every corner of the tribe had been taken over by the ant swarm.

Fortunately, there was still a lot of food left inside, which should be enough to hold them off for a while and buy us more time to escape.

With no worries about our retreat, we ran very fast. It didn't take long for us to catch up with the women and children from the tribe ahead.

The leader first asked everyone one by one, and only after confirming that everyone was there and no one had fallen behind did the man, who was nearly forty years old, finally breathe a long sigh of relief and a smile appeared on his face.

In their view, as long as everyone is safe and sound, that is the greatest good thing. As for the food, although it is precious, it can be found again later.

It's still a long time before dawn, and we can't possibly rest in this open-air environment.

If some wild beasts come along, our situation will become very passive in this dark.

The indigenous chieftain was also frowning with worry. It was dark and gloomy, and it was not an easy task to build a temporary shelter for so many people.

I frowned as well. If it were just one or two people, it would be easy to handle, but with so many people together, it was really troublesome.

I gestured to the chief, asking if there were any caves or similar terrain nearby that we could go inside to spend the night.

The chieftain shook his head in disappointment at my suggestion. The high priest of the cave did know of an ancient ruin, but it was quite far from here, requiring most of a day to travel there.

By the time we get there, it will probably be dawn.

In the end, it was the high priest who stepped forward. He had explored the entire area in his early years and knew every nook and cranny by heart.

The high priest told us that there was a place full of huge, jagged rocks on a mountain ridge not far from here.

We can go there, pile up the smaller stones to form a stone wall, and then spend the night in the structure of the giant boulders.

We have no better option at the moment, so we have no choice but to risk spending the night at the place the high priest mentioned.