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During Sung Jinwoo’s dramatic battle againstthe true Boss of the Jeju Island S-Rank Gate, the black ant commonly referred to as “The Ant King”, inSolo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow-, the monster unleashed a dangerous-looking, last-ditch transformation in order to put an end to the battle. The series itself doesn’t quite explain what the nature of this transformation actually was.
Given the fact that we know how the Ant Queen imparted traits from the organisms she ate to her offspring, it is possibly some kind of collection of the most viable traits in the organisms that make up the Ant King. So, what was that transformation, and how does it work?
The Ant King’s Life Cycle
The Objective of Metamorphosis
With most insects, the life cycle is a story of four acts: the egg, the larva, the pupa and finally, the adult. In the case of insects like butterflies and other flying insects, there’s a huge gap between their larval form and their adult forms, with the change from their pupal forms to adulthood being facilitated by a process known to many people: metamorphosis.
The Ant King rapidly charged through the first three stages of his life cycle,emerging from his egg a fully grown adult; however, most, if not all, arthropods (the invertebrates with segmented bodies, like insects, arachnids and their marine equivalents) undergo a very important process in their adulthood: moulting. As they grow, their exoskeletons become too small to contain their squishy flesh, so animals of this class must shed their exoskeletons and then spend a period of ultimate vulnerability waiting for their new exoskeletons to harden.
We actually saw this happen quite rapidlywhen the Ant King first hatched, with his squishy red flesh tightening around his body as it rapidly hardened into the iconic black exoskeleton that he has for the rest of his appearances. So, despite the fact that he’s a rapidly evolved, mega form of the ant species that dominated Jeju Island for almost half a decade made up of various insect and animal species, most of his “base programming” is ant focused.
Generally, ants are actually all females, except for the reproducing males. Every variation of ant is derived from the same eggs, but the amount of nutrition one gets can facilitate growth into something different. While most worker ants are infertile females, the Queen is the fertile female and the male ants exist solely to reproduce.Solo Levelingis quite accurate in its depiction of theAnt King as a winged malesmaller than the Queen.
How is the Ant King Different?
The Apex of Evolution
By the time the Ant King is laid, the Queen has seen the dire food situation on Jeju Island and has been trying to force her offspring to evolve wings so that they can get off the island. Packing all the energy she can into a single egg, she essentially places her entire species' future on the shoulders of a single ant. This ant would be atthe very apex of existenceas the ultimate being. During the Ant King’s battle against Sung Jinwoo, it makes use of a poison attack derived from the abilities of marine life in the area, like the blue-ringed octopus, one of the most venomous creatures on the planet, and the highly venomous black-banded sea krait first spotted in the area around 2016. To put it in perspective, a single blue-ringed octopus (an animal that is the size of a golf ball) contains enough venom to kill 26 grown adults, while the black-banded sea krait boasts venom that is ten times stronger than that of the cobra.
With the Gluttony Skill, the Ant King’s evolution is not restricted by genetic factors per se, but by just how much he can consume and incorporate into his own make-up. This is how he gained the ability to speak, aseating Min Byung-Gu’s headgave the Ant King access to his memories and faculty for language. Through the combination of factors like this Gluttony Skill, and the abilities he was born with, thanks to the Queen’s phagogenesis, the Ant King is able to force his own evolution, in real time. After trading blows with Sung Jinwoo during the early parts of their fight, the Ant King realized that a battle of might is useless, and poison lacks any potency, so the Ant King unleashes his final trump card.
The Ant King’s Final Form
A Vision of Apex Predation
One major difference seen in the anime compared to the manhwa is the fact that the Ant King’s internal dialogue makes space to explainwhat his last-ditch transformation actually was meant to do. The anime plays it off like a power-up that results in increased speed; however, that speed is actually the objective of the transformation. Realizing he didn’t have Jinwoo beat with power, the Ant King tried to boost his speed, with a transformation that not only streamlined his already sleek limbs, but also saw giant razor-sharp claws emerge from his hands. A basic rule of aerodynamics is that sharper objects can cut through air with less resistance (consider the biomimicry involved in the construction of the Japanese Shinkansen, which used to suffer from terrible sonic booms when entering/exiting tunnels because the nose wasn’t built to effectively cut through the air before the nosewas designed after the Kingfish.
In the manhwa, the Ant King’s internal dialogue explains this as a contraction of his body so that he can focus all his energy on speed. If we were to specifically identify what creatures' genetics are at play in this transformation, it’s probably worth noting that dragonflies are among the fastest flying insects, and that the Ant King’s wing structure, while not changed by the transformation, is quite similar to that of the dragonfly, while the speed of the Ant King’s wingbeat supports the idea that he’s pushed to the fore the genes ofsome of the faster creatures in his composition. The claws don’t seem to be reflective of an insect per se, but could potentially be repurposed from the genes of reptiles, marine life or even birds.
Solo Leveling
Cast
A-1 Pictures' Solo Leveling is an anime based on Chugong’s popular web novel. Set in an unforgiving fantasy world where hunters explore dungeons filled with monsters, the vulnerable Sung Jinwoo gains a significant power boost after he is picked to be a solo player by the System.
