Chrysalis

The giant gorilla shifted uncomfortably as Smithant crawled over him, taking measurements with her antennae and trying to work out the best way she could cobble the armour she had onto his massive frame.

Tiny, for his part, suffered through it as best he could. Naturally, his preference would be to smash the stupid sword people's faces in, but he'd been ordered to come all the way up to the nest by his Master and so he had no choice but to do so. In his own opinion, the previous fight had been a magnificent success. Much face was smashed, many blows landed upon the enemy. Tiny had punched until his fists bled and wrists cracked, the rage within him all but spent. Yet the Master was more concerned with 'near fatal wounds' and 'catastrophic loss of blood', things that Tiny didn't deem nearly as important. Still, the master had heard that there might be a powerful set of armour on offer and so now here he was.

Antennae tippy-tap on his arm and he dutifully raises it to allow the ant to measure his arms and shoulders.

It's a good thing the Colony managed to haul so many suits back from the battlefield, Smithant reflected, since there were only so many pieces that would be useable in this reconstruction and she had a heck of a lot of surface area to cover. The rest of the ants in attendance watched from the sidelines, slightly anxious for the outcome. The pets raised by the Eldest had achieved a strange sort of status amongst the Colony. They weren't ants, obviously, but they were still accepted as part of the family. In a sense they were an extension of the Eldest, and therefore deserving of some measure of the respect reserved for that august individual.

In truth, it took hours to complete since Smithant

make began to take shape in the mind of the carver. It wasn't going to be pretty, and it certainly wasn't going to be something like a full suit of armour, but it was going to provide a lot more protection than fur and skin. With the rough outline complete, she

of making the cuts necessary to separate the armour into the pieces she would need. Hours of painful, slow and careful work followed. She had to cut the armour without weakening it as much as possible, easier said than done. She also had to keep in mind the chunks of enchanted runes inscribed in the armour

to assist on the project. Eventually they were forced to take a wall down to accommodate them all as they worked in a frenzy. Sections were cut, compared, recut, straps added, bindings tied and pieces layered over each other in a thousand different combinations. After a few hours, a trio of high

rewriting and editing the runes was a mammoth one and the ants set to it with gusto, forming a separate team working alongside the first. It was hectic work, but the

finally made. It was crude, a hodgepodge of bits and pieces taken from far finer work, but it functioned. The enchantment matrix might spark a little bit (metaphorically) but

Tiny put it on, Smithant couldn't help but