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 her

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

Carpentant shrugged.

me. If you tell me no, I’ll go back

would fail, causing greater chaos on the plains and costing the ants an

you the ants you need,” she promised, “but

for them being thrown into a mess

either, but I’ll provide extra security as well to

carver froze before she nodded

“That’s appreciated.”

Sloan sighed and went back to her planning documents, scratching out a few lines of scent and

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

her new distribution plan and put

fortress,” she muttered as she rose

didn’t really need a chair, they were perfectly content to work while standing, but it felt nice to rest the legs every now and

wheel around her smithy. She claimed it freed up more legs to work with, which was another

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

line and began to race along the paths,

wider passages within the Colony 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 as if she were standing still,

All for efficiency.

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 of the

as soon as she saw Sloan heading

to the front?” she asked, snapping