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.”

as pain

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

Carpentant shrugged.

you tell me no, I’ll go back and make the best of it, but I think we both know what

and costing the ants

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

to do,” Carpentant grumbled. “Feel sorry for them being thrown into a mess like

not what I would have wanted for them either, but I’ll provide extra security as well to make sure you all stay

irritated carver froze before she nodded

“That’s appreciated.”

of scent and replacing

planning to resist

pen’, she completed her new distribution plan and put it down with a

muttered as she rose up from her

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

around her smithy. She claimed it freed up

requesting medical treatment, or supplies, or any number of

to race along 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,

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

as she saw Sloan heading

What brings you to the front?” she asked, snapping a one