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.”

collapsed as pain shot through

thousands of ants,” she managed to squeeze out. “Everyone is desperately

Carpentant shrugged.

the one who has to distribute resources, not me. If you tell me no, I’ll go back and make the best of it, but I think we both know what will

costing the ants an enormous haul of cores

you the ants you need,” she promised, “but they’re likely to be

for them being thrown into a mess like

not what I would have wanted for them either, but I’ll provide extra

irritated carver froze before she nodded with

“That’s appreciated.”

her planning documents, scratching out a few lines of scent and replacing

but despite the over the top allowances the Colony had made when planning to resist the wave in the third stratum, the Dungeon had

‘scent pen’, she completed her new distribution plan and put it down

go check on the fortress,” she muttered

various nests, despite the need for varying sizes. They didn’t really need a chair, they were

custom built, swivelling chair that could rise up and down and wheel around her smithy. She claimed it freed up more legs to work with, which was another aspect to the rate of chair

of messengers. A constant stream ran in both directions, toward the wall and deeper into the nest, requesting medical treatment, or supplies, or any number of things. She was kept updated, of

and began to race along the paths, keeping pace with the

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

All for efficiency.

this exit was a staging ground and ants bustled all over the surface of the nest. Within the grand fortress, there were well over a hundred thousand of her siblings at present, every one of them dedicated to the preservation

general rushed up as soon as

front?” she asked,