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.

huge horde, like the one coming to kill us right now, more mage ants

it in my mind's eye already. Tunnel entrances falling in to reveal teams of mage ants who blasted the front ranks of the horde with deadly fire, torching dozens of monsters with flamethrower like

Antionette informed me, "Large numbers of scouts and

could understand, but

to map out the skill paths from scratch and explore 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

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

they say: Quantity, is a quality all of

We have two main objectives, we need to whittle down the horde that's coming our way, I need to help with that so I can reach my second objective, which

close to your next evolution,

"I only need six more levels. If we're going to battle

the number of weaker monsters but tackling anything stronger is going to be beyond us for a time. If the Eldest can

wanted to dump all of the hard work onto me, didn't you? She's technically correct, but that doesn't serve

to a high extent in the lead up to this crisis?" I asked the gathered council, "If we don't survive

protested Florence, the to

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

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

the hatchling training program continues to run unabated. Each new hatchling deserves the best possible start we

the same time, something you can only do with extensively upgraded compound eyes, one of the

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 me. Hooray for strict respect

for a few hours will you, Senior?" Sloan asked

pretty flat out for the last few days and I