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.

we have so few mages? When fighting against a 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

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 born. Our more specialised castes have had slower recruitment rates

could

been doing our best to map out the skill paths from scratch and explore methods to raise up the future generations of mage ants"

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,

all of its own. That's practically the

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 is to level up so that

close to your next evolution,

going to battle against creatures

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 in capable

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

to prioritise food gathering or egg laying to a high extent in the lead up to this crisis?" I asked the gathered council, "If we don't survive the upcoming battle then the colony will cease

surely?" protested Florence, the to this

that we cease food gathering operations completely" Sloan assured her, "but rather that we divert a significant portion of

Tender were clearly not happy. I understand it,

keep enough senior workers here to ensure that the hatchling training program continues to

do with extensively upgraded compound eyes, one of the benefits of being

still makes little sense to them I

be ready to move out for a few hours

and we all need some rest. We've been pretty flat out for the last few days