Chrysalis

“What are the lizards playing at?” Morrelia growled.

Commander Chyron chuckled humourlessly as she watched the activity in the port city with unblinking eyes.

“Trying to slither back into our good graces, I don’t doubt. Leadership is still furious with them, to put it mildly. It’ll be decades before relations get back to anything like what they were.”

“Decades. That’s not much to them.”

“True. Hardly even a blip. They may even view it as a worthy tradeoff for the ‘experimental’ action they took.”

“Are we really withholding support during the waves?”

“Completely. Thanks to that, we’ve got more resources freed up for trivial, ‘save the world’ type actions like this one.”

From the top of the old Legion fort they currently occupied, the Colony could clearly be seen. The ants were as industrious as ever, putting up their nest in a staggeringly short amount of time. Morrelia felt she could barely blink before the construction was done and hordes of ants ran in and out through the main entrance, carrying in goods from the ships down on the docks. Blink again, and the fortifications had improved, soldiers were patrolling, lookouts were positioned high up the nest and mages had begun controlling the flow of mana in the vicinity.

the

a terrible enemy,” she nodded toward the still-growing mound of dirt and rock. “They’ve spun that entire thing out of thin air.

It was still difficult for her to think of Anthony and his family as an

of them now,” she said softly. “They have territory, resources, expertise. At what point does it become too costly for us to

her Tribune, then nodded

The waves have people spooked, mana levels just surge higher and higher each time. Commander Titus believed another Rending was coming, right from

report any instances of

the original members of the Legionem Abyssi, those founding

leaned against the waist-high stone wall, eyes glittering coldly in the

of the path, the golden city, everyone has grown complacent, confident. They were able to fend off the waves well enough. The worst they had to deal with were Krath raids, which were unpleasant but

are buckling under the pressure. The Legion has diplomats in every court, council chamber and market square screaming

“Are we ready?”

out a

everyone else's mess for hundreds of years. Not enough recruits, not enough funds. We can’t possibly be in all the places we’re going to be needed. Which means some parts

but this bad? There were places in the Dungeon that leaned on the Legion for