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.

place like they’re firefighters trying to hose down a petrol station before

wuffers, they’ve been doing good work. I cast my eyes about, but I don’t see any more major threats for the time being, which gives me a little time to check myself over, and inspect the

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,

have a long stretch of tunnel that has no toxic mana

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 there, closely monitoring the situation, taking down numbers on their pheromone slates and checking that things are

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

Brendant calls out to me, her pheromones somewhat fuzzy. “Can

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

always come in. While I’m at it, I trip my regeneration gland

I able to remain out here for as long as I do. Endless stamina and regeneration really do