Chrysalis

After several hours of weary defence Tiny awakes, his wounds mostly healed and the fire in his eyes rekindled. So exhausted I can barely form the thoughts I tell him to defend the entrance until I wake up and retreat further into the tunnel where I collapse flat on my face.

Torpor comes over me like a warm embrace. Like a thick blanket.

Without closing my eyes, my thoughts grow slower until they shift and sink like molasses until they barely move at all. This is the rest of ant-kind!

When I awake several hours later I feel much refreshed. The heavy exhaustion that had smothered me before has mostly been lifted and the rest, combined with my feeding has closed over almost all of wounds, almost restoring my hp to full.

I get another pleasant surprise when I awaken in the form of a dark coloured gem, the core of the Jellymaw I defeated. The colony must have fished it out of the remaining Biomass and left it here for me to deal with as I was one who defeated it.

How thoughtful! Truly the workers are the best of siblings!

I'm tempted to absorb the core immediately but in the end I hesitate and decide to deal with it later. Instead I bury it in the wall alongside the other cores I had brought to the escape tunnel.

As quickly as I can I hustle back to the front lines.

Tiny is cheerfully standing as part of the wall of defenders, workers crawling over him. The poor ape is covered in wounds once again, clearly demonstrating that the wave has not let up at all whilst I was sleeping.

before us is still filled with

energy for one more offensive?]

turns quickly to eyeball me and nods, a big smile breaking out

fighting almost as much

as much of the Biomass as we can, once again securing the food supply for the colony. Under my instructions, Tiny drags a chunk of food inside the tunnel and

hours we would swap and rest whilst the other took their turn standing against the endless spawns of monsters. On my second watch I took the initiative to push out as much excess dirt as possible whenever there was a break in the fighting, mustering the workforce to move back up the tunnel whilst I protected the entrance, collect the dirt that had been shifted by the Queen and her dig team at the other end before transporting it out to the Queens chamber and piling it

way we were able to close over at least part of the tunnel entrance and at the

Gravitational Energy gland would be charged enough that I could maintain the Gravity Domain until almost every monster in the chamber was killed, providing the colony, Tiny and myself the

a strong monster would spawn in the chamber, lashing out with mana or claws before I could react, or monsters fighting would lose their sense of direction and battle their way directly into the midst of the ants. Those monsters would always be quickly subdued but sometimes an unlucky worker or two would get sliced before

I could. We had grown quite tough at the frontline, a number of my brethren had successfully evolved from hatchlings to

some members of the colony even as it

four cycles of resting and fighting the first major

is was me on duty when it happened. Towards the end of my watch, tired and battered from the constant fighting I had almost not noticed the signs. I was so used to staring at the fighting directly in front of me, sensing for heat sources coming from the walls or from the tunnel above us that I had almost forgotten about what

The tunnel below.

nervous about what I might run into down there. I had

first it was just a faint scraping sound mixed in with all the rest of the noise, I'd hardly registered it at first. My mind, weary from