Chrysalis

"With your permission Eldest, I will leave the council and begin to organise a workforce to prepare our initial fortifications" Tungstant said.

I waved an antennae in approval and the small, dextrous ant climbed up the wall and out the roof of the chamber in a moment.

"Alright then. Pitfall traps, tunnels to attack, I like all of these ideas. What else have we got? How is our magic firepower coming along?" I asked.

The two mages in the room, Propellant and Coolant, shifted on their feet as they became the centre of attention for the council. The mage caste hadn't had a lot of time to build up their raw magic handling skills, and were without the benefit of my own extensive spending on brain power when it came to evolutions. Having said that, they were no slouches in the brain game and were able to choose their own elemental gland on evolution. So there had to be some juice there.

"The number of mage ants we have to work with is still limited" Coolant hedged.

There were over a thousand ants in the colony at this time, there were like a hundred new ants being born every day. How few mages could there be?

"How many are we talking about?" I asked.

"Five" Coolant said flatly.

"Five?!" I sputtered.

"Oh, seven including Coolant and I" Propellant offered helpfully.

Holy moly.

When fighting against a huge horde, like the one coming to kill

in to reveal teams of mage ants who blasted the front ranks of the horde with deadly fire, torching dozens

the soldier caste recently" Antionette informed me, "Large numbers of scouts and soldiers have been born. Our more specialised castes

I could understand,

methods to raise up the future generations of mage ants" Propellant told me ruefully. "We didn't anticipate a need for a number of mages at this stage and

have more mages right now. To clear away large amounts of weak enemies they would have been indispensable.

a quality all of its own. That's practically

coming our way, I need to help with that so

evolution, Eldest?"

am" I affirmed with a dip of my antennae, "I only need six more levels. If we're going to battle against

Sloan the General piped up, "we may have the ability to chip away at the number of weaker monsters but tackling anything stronger is going to be beyond us for a time. If the Eldest can evolve then that task will be

all of the hard work onto me, didn't you? She's technically correct,

think we can agree that we don't need to prioritise food gathering or egg laying to a high extent in the lead

food gathering entirely, surely?" protested Florence, the to this point silent Brood Tender,

food gathering operations completely" Sloan assured her, "but rather that we divert a significant portion of the soldiers currently acting to gather food

back, though she and her fellow Brood Tender were clearly not happy. I understand it, less food coming in means

hatchling training program continues to run unabated. Each new hatchling deserves the best possible start we can give them, don't forget

you can only do with extensively upgraded compound eyes, one of the benefits of being an insect

each nodded in agreement, more to appease me than anything else. My insistence on equal treatment for the hatchlings still makes little sense to them I suspect, thankfully by virtue of being old they have to listen to

ready to move out for a few hours will you, Senior?" Sloan

"That's right. Crinis needs to evolve and we all need some rest. We've been pretty flat out for the last few days and I suspect it's