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 shot through

of ants,” she managed to squeeze

Carpentant shrugged.

tell me no, I’ll go back and make the

on the plains and costing the ants

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

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

have wanted for them either, but I’ll provide

carver froze 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

planning to resist the

away using the new ‘scent pen’, she completed her new distribution plan and put it down with a

she muttered as she rose

the various nests, despite the need for varying sizes. They didn’t really need

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

flood 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 course, but having a description was never quite the same as seeing

slipped into 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

All for efficiency.

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

as she saw Sloan heading to

the front?” she asked, snapping