Chrysalis

They'd done it. After so much time and effort had been expended, they’d finally done it. The mage caste had put themselves through the ringer during the siege, they had battered their minds against the invaders until they bordered on shattering. It had been a painful regime of brutal mental warfare seemingly without end. What had made things even more difficult for the brainy caste of spell-slingers were the critical research tasks draining their numbers. The Colony had decided that the gates and Dungeon vein removal projects were so critical, so vital to the future success of their kind, that even the threat of imminent destruction was not enough to curtail the development of these techniques.

Progress on the gates remained painfully slow. It was clear that without higher levelled specialists in both enchantment and the as yet unseen space magic would be required to make significant headway there. On the other hand, the teams assigned to reverse-engineering the methods witnessed in the city of Rylleh had achieved a breakthrough.

As jubilant as she was, Propellant couldn't help but look askance at the team of mages and carvers who had worked together to make this possible. She studied the complex, almost wavy, interlocking series of walls in front of her once more.

"And you're sure this is going to work?" she asked them.

One of the mages stepped forward, her antennae waving furiously.

"Of course it's going to work you old bat! What the heck do you think we've been doing down here while y- HRCK!"

With extreme speed, a team of previously stealthed ants leapt from the ceiling of the chamber and tackled the mage to the ground mid-rant. Before anyone could think to intervene, the new arrivals had swarmed over the downed ant, expertly knocking her out with a precision bite to cut off circulation to her brain before the shadows enfolded them once more. In less than a second they were gone once more, taking the furious mage with them. The only sign of their presence was an ominously lingering pheromone message that hung in the air long after they were gone.

"Sleep well…" was all it said.

They were clearly starting to manage their evolutions and skills in a direction to better allow them to perform their role, making them terrifyingly capable. The sudden disappearance of their colleague had an even greater effect on the rest of the

since your

days," stammered

how long have you been

Propellant was worried her exo-skeleton was about to

two days and twenty-two hours,"

Propellant clacked her mandibles.

this time, preferably someone not driven near delirious from lack of rest.

moment before

success," the mage spoke with crisp words, "although we were unable to derive the exact method used in Rylleh, we believe that this is as close as we can get

member tried to be too repulsed by the sudden mention of 'calculations'. That stuff was far more up Coolant's alley. She herself was firmly in the 'blow stuff up and think about it later' school of magic. Whichever cursed fool on the surface had introduced the concept

you

one of the strange claws on her foreleg across

we haven't been able to try it on as large a surface area as the nest, so we can't be certain

wandered over to the mock-up the team had erected in the centre of the room and tried to ignore the battles going on elsewhere in the chamber. Damn waves made it so hard to concentrate. It really was precise work. The team had erected no fewer than ten separate walls in a space less than a foot wide, each one folding back