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

managed to squeeze

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

the plains and costing the ants an enormous haul of cores

you need,” she promised, “but they’re likely

have to do,” Carpentant grumbled. “Feel sorry for them

I would have wanted for them either, but I’ll provide extra security as well to make

irritated carver froze before she nodded

“That’s appreciated.”

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

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

new ‘scent pen’, she completed her new distribution

muttered as

among the various nests, despite the need for varying sizes. They didn’t really need a chair, they were perfectly content to work while standing, but it felt nice to rest the legs every now

that could rise up and down and wheel around her smithy. She claimed it freed up more legs to work with, which was

directions, toward the wall and deeper into the nest, requesting medical

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

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

All for efficiency.

found herself only 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. 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

soon as she saw

to the front?” she asked, snapping a one antenna