Chrysalis

“How are the demon traps holding?”

“Barely!”

“Then reinforce them, dammit!”

“I can’t just poke them with an antenna and then they become stronger. I need time to design, materials to build with, ants to do the building. Those are huge construction projects, we can’t just ‘reinforce’ them!”

“Right, sorry.”

Sloan rubbed her antennae against her carapace, trying to calm herself down. The carver, Carpentant, also soothed herself as they took the temperature out of the argument.

Which wasn’t easy inside the third right now. With the mana thickening by the hour, the air only grew hotter and hotter, to the point it had grown oppressive. Ants didn’t mind a bit of heat, not at all, but they weren’t amazing at regulating their temperatures. If things got much worse, they’d need to distribute enchanted equipment to every member of the Colony in the stratum.

“Are the farms at least producing cores and Biomass? They’re working?”

“Oh, they’re working. Too well! There’s so many demons crammed inside that we’re getting double the amount of cores we expected. The workers in charge of maintaining and operating the farms are overwhelmed, but there aren’t enough of us to help them. We need more ants!”

“If you get the numbers you need, will that stop the farms from breaking?”

Carpentant thought for a long moment. It wasn’t a simple question, but the wrong answer could have grave implications. It was already a difficult proposition to contain the mess that the plains had become. If the monsters within the farms broke out….

“If you give me what I’m asking for, plus another ten percent, we’ll have enough to properly run the farms and look to reinforce the structure.”

almost collapsed as pain shot through her

to squeeze out. “Everyone is desperately short staffed right

Carpentant shrugged.

distribute resources, not me. If you tell me no,

farms would fail, causing greater chaos on the plains and costing the ants an enormous haul of cores and Biomass,

you the ants you need,” she promised, “but they’re likely to be fresh graduates. Is that

Carpentant grumbled. “Feel sorry for them being thrown into a mess like

them either, but I’ll

froze before she nodded with

“That’s appreciated.”

Sloan sighed and went back to her planning documents, scratching out a few lines of scent and replacing them. The next wave of reinforcements from above had been allocated already, but

Colony had made when planning to resist the wave in the third stratum, the

pen’, she completed her new distribution plan

muttered

for varying sizes. They didn’t really need a chair, they

could rise up and down and wheel around her smithy. She claimed it freed up more legs to

the flood of messengers. A constant stream ran in both directions, toward the wall and deeper into the nest, requesting medical treatment, or

race along the paths, keeping pace

into ‘lanes’, each with its own designated speed. This particular passage was six lanes wide, three in either direction, with another six on the roof, split the same way, and she was barely able to keep up in the middle one. To her right, scouts flashed past her

All for efficiency.

a kilometre from the outer wall. The area at this exit was a staging ground and ants bustled all over the surface of the nest.

rushed up as soon as she saw Sloan heading to the

you to the front?” she