Chrysalis

Ah, the fifth. Such a lovely place to be. I mean, the acid isn’t all that enjoyable, but what this stratum lacks in good atmosphere, it makes up for with hospitality.

A disgusting, bloated lobster comes running at me, its eyes boiling with rage, and hissing globs of unspeakable goo bubbling up from its carapace so fast the monster leaves a thick trail of ooze behind it.

I mean, what do I even do? I don’t want to bite the thing. If I actually manage to hurt it, my mandibles will probably melt off. Its claws don’t seem any more appealing than the rest of it. It has four, because of course it does, and the pincers look more like mouths than anything else, each of them streaming virulent yellow bile.

Let’s just say, it isn’t the kind of fight I really look forward to.

Gravity Bomb!

A smaller bomb rips into space and howls toward the offending monster. Unthinking, the beast runs straight into the spell and vanishes as the bomb expands to consume whatever it can.

The lobster screams and rattles, and for a moment, I can see it flailing wildly, bits and pieces pushing out of the void, but only for brief instants, until the spell eventually winks out and the lobster, now missing a large chunk of itself, slumps down defeated. Yeesh. I’m having to do this more and more as time passes. That monster was almost the same size as I am, so it can’t have been too low of a tier, which means I would have loved to get my mandibles on the core.

all so toxic. If I let them anywhere near the safe-zone, they start spraying goop all over the place like they’re firefighters trying to hose down a petrol station

more major threats for the time being, which gives me a little time to check myself over, and inspect the work the Colony has

lot. The wuffer zone has now been expanded to include a brand new zone, the two separated by several hundred metres. There’s all sorts of fancy shenanigans going on between the two packs of wuffers, channels dug into the floor of the tunnel to move both toxic and pure mana from one side to the other. I’m not sure how it all works, I certainly wasn’t the one to do the math, but it seems to be working well, and it won’t be long

of tunnel that has no toxic mana in it

all working. The thinkers in the Colony have really outdone themselves on this one. I know the idea is to use these ‘nodes’ of wuffers in strategic positions to support each other and maintain the clean mana zone, so this is the test run to see how the current designs on these connections will perform. Of course, the usual ants are

wuffer count. No way we can maintain a whole pack of five hundred wuffers at every section. I have no idea what cores these little globs are made of, but we can’t have an unlimited supply

out there, Eldest?” Brendant calls out to me, her

a little while,” I respond, “but I’ll need a break in

to cleansing my internal mana, breaking down the infections as fast as possible. It’s a never ending battle, since no matter how much I remove, more will always come in. While I’m at it, I trip my regeneration gland and feel a brief moment of relief as the ice cold fluid rushes throughout my body, concentrating in my carapace and joints as it repairs the

by constantly refreshing my regeneration gland and washing the fatigue from my minds via the Vestibule am I able to