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.”

almost collapsed as pain

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 will

would fail, causing greater chaos on the plains and costing the ants an enormous haul of cores and Biomass, resources

you need,” she promised, “but

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

them either, but I’ll provide extra security as well to make sure you

froze before she nodded

“That’s appreciated.”

few lines of scent

allowances the Colony had made when planning to

scribbling away using the new ‘scent pen’, she completed her new distribution plan and

the fortress,” she muttered as she rose up from

really need a chair, they were perfectly content to work while standing, but it felt nice to

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

by 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

to race along the

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

All for efficiency.

ants bustled all over the surface of the nest. Within the grand fortress, there were well over a hundred thousand of

up as soon as she

front?” she asked, snapping