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.

us is still filled with

one more offensive?] I ask

quickly to eyeball me and nods, a big smile

he does, he likes fighting almost as much

of the Biomass as we

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

least part of the tunnel entrance

my Gravitational Energy gland would be charged enough that I could maintain the Gravity Domain until almost every 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

I didn't look at these workers as tools or monsters that were different from myself. They had their own childlike intelligence and I accepted them as members of my family, I wanted to save them all if I could. We had grown quite tough at the frontline, a number of my brethren had

seemingly endless grind was giving benefits to some members of

of resting and fighting

at the fighting directly in front of me, sensing for heat sources

The tunnel below.

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

rest of the noise, I'd hardly registered it at first. My mind, weary from the hours of vigilance