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

ants,” she managed to squeeze out.

Carpentant shrugged.

how many it’s going to take. You’re 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

costing the ants an enormous haul of

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

grumbled. “Feel sorry for them being thrown into a

I’ll provide extra security as

before she nodded with

“That’s appreciated.”

the chamber, 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 now had to be changed.

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

she completed her new distribution plan and put it down

she muttered as

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

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

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 course, but having a description was

into line and began to race along the paths, keeping

same way, and she was barely able to keep up in the middle one. To her right, scouts

All for efficiency.

wall. The area at this exit was a staging ground and ants bustled all over the surface

as she saw Sloan heading to the

the front?” she asked,