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.

do we have so few mages? When fighting against a huge horde, like the one coming to kill us right

of the horde with deadly fire, torching dozens of monsters with flamethrower like magic before retreating through the tunnels which collapsed behind them, leaving decimated and crispy ranks of

shifted uncomfortably. "We've had most of the hatchlings move into the soldier caste recently" Antionette informed me, "Large numbers of scouts and soldiers have been

I could understand,

raise up the future generations of mage ants" Propellant told me ruefully. "We

I would have loved to have more mages right now. To clear away large amounts of weak enemies they would have been indispensable. There may be a use for the mages we have, of course, but there is a lot that can be said

they say: Quantity, is a quality all of its

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

next evolution, Eldest?" Victoriant asked, sounding

affirmed with a dip of my antennae, "I only need six more levels. If we're going to battle against creatures as strong as those coming our

may have the ability to chip away at the number of weaker monsters but tackling anything stronger is

didn't you? She's technically correct, but

lead up to this crisis?" I

to this point silent Brood

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

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

program continues to run unabated. Each new hatchling deserves

each of them at the same time, something you can only do with extensively

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

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

rest. We've been pretty flat out for the last few days and