Chrysalis

It turned out, monsters from the fifth didn't much like it when you took their slime away. An hour after first deploying the ‘Wuffers’, as the ants had begun to call them, much to the annoyance of the core shapers, they saw for the first time how the slugs would react when they saw someone messing with their precious goop.

How could Solant describe it? They went absolutely, one-hundred percent, without exception, gonzo crazy.

A fat toad monster hopped around the corner and saw the wuffers happily huffing and puffing, soaking up the slime and purifying it, and grew still. Naturally, the ants had sprung into action, recovering the slow-moving pets and taking up a defensive formation.

What they didn’t expect was for the frog to unleash a mighty croak, the explosive exhalation filled with mindless rage, before it hurled itself headlong toward the massed ant position. Such was its anger, the monster fought completely heedless of its own survival, throwing itself recklessly into the jaws of the soldiers, trying to crush them with its mass whilst it lashed out with powerful legs, lashing tongue and toxic bile.

Many were wounded, despite the fight being thousands against one, and Solant was not pleased.

In the midst of reprimanding her soldiers for their slow reaction, and blaming herself for not foreseeing the situation, she sensed something might be a little off, and stared hard into the haze-filled depths before them.

“Let’s pull back and fortify,” she ordered crisply. “I want tunnel fort three dash two constructed in five minutes.”

“That build is allotted seven minutes,” her lead carver and fellow broodmate, Subutant, stated.

“We don’t have seven,” Solant replied shortly and the carver dashed away, issuing a flurry of instructions to her fellow builders.

“What do you see?” Sumant asked, bracing in the frontline along with the other soldiers as they began an ordered, step by step retreat toward the mountain fortifications.

“That frog would have been heard for kilometres through these tunnels,” Solant replied, watching the haze intently.

“You think it was calling for reinforcements? It didn’t seem that intelligent.”

for

minutes, the basic outline of the tunnel fort was complete: sturdy walls, narrow opening, firing lines for spells and acid, along with channels for pulling back the wounded, had

Just in time.

at first, then in

the core shapers grudgingly responded, the pets raising

didn’t break through the haze that filled the

tensed as they heard the first roar, then the second, the third, and more, and more. Squelching, wet gurgles of rage bounced off the slime-coated tunnel walls

the tunnel, one minute.

pelting every surface with a barrage of frozen water. Thirty seconds later, they pulled back and the fire mages stepped forward, igniting the air itself in a furious blast. Rock groaned and cracked at the rapid temperature shift and

even louder, and

blaze at the last second

forward. Prepared for the injuries, the soldiers lunged and chomped, their mandibles sizzling as they bit into the toxic flesh. Heedless of the wounds, the slug pushed forward, discharging a burst

out much of the goop, but it was stubborn and more than

came alongside them. Opening their mouths wide, the wuffers shot forth blasts of pure gel that clung to

burbling in fury, and the soldiers hastily pulled the Biomass into the temporary fort. The wuffers descended

wuff!” they

then a toxin elemental, then a toad, then more, and

it finally finished, Solant’s force had been battered, bruised and almost broken a dozen times. The list of injured ants was far too long, and more than a hundred had fallen in the furious fighting. The price they had paid for the pitiful progress that had been achieved

stratum Biomass, dozens of cores and the lessons learned were a rich reward indeed, not to mention what

willingly thrown their lives away to try and coat the ants with slime and acid, to fill the position with corrupting miasma. Without the wuffers counteracting the poisonous mana, the ants would have been fighting abdomen deep in sludge, a

the transparent jelly-caterpillars were only tier three. The next time

escort in the next two minutes. Everyone who is

turned to the