Upping The Ante

1. The Bleary Days

After several hours of weary defence at the escape tunnel entrance, I’m relieved when Tiny awakes. His wounds are mostly healed and the fire in his eyes rekindled. So exhausted I can barely form the thoughts, I tell him to defend the entrance until I wake up and retreat farther into the tunnel where I collapse flat on my face.

Torpor comes over me like a warm embrace and a thick blanket.

Without closing my eyes, my thoughts grow slower until they shift and sink, becoming molasses, until they barely move at all. This is the rest of ant-kind!

When I awake several hours later, I feel much refreshed. The heavy exhaustion that smothered me before has mostly been lifted. The rest, combined with a hearty feed, has closed over almost all of my wounds.

There’s another pleasant surprise awaiting me in the form of a dark coloured gem. The core of the Jellymaw I defeated. The colony must have fished it out of the remaining Biomass and left it here for me to deal with since I was one who defeated it.

How thoughtful! Truly the workers are the best of siblings.

I’m tempted to absorb the core immediately, but I decide to deal with it later. Instead, I bury it in the wall alongside the other cores I brought to the escape tunnel.

As quickly as I can, I hustle back to the front lines.

Tiny is cheerfully standing as part of the wall of defenders, workers crawling all over him. The poor ape is covered in wounds once again, demonstrating that the wave has not let up at all while I slept.

Indeed, the room before us is still filled with monsters furiously battling!

[Got enough energy for one more offensive?] I ask my ape companion.

Tiny eyeballs me and nods, a big smile breaking out on his face.

Of course he does. He likes fighting almost as much as he likes food.

With Tiny helping, I activate the Gravity Domain and we work together to clear the room once more. When that task is done, I lead the workers out to collect as much of the Biomass as we can, securing the food supply for the colony. Under my instructions, Tiny drags a chunk of food inside the tunnel and stuffs his face before falling asleep, resting while I take my turn to defend.

Just like this we begin our long watch. Every few hours we would swap and rest, with the other taking the mantle to stand against the endless spawns of monsters. On my second watch, I took the initiative to push out as much excess dirt as possible whenever there was a break in the fighting. That done, I’d muster the workforce to move back up the tunnel and leave me to protect the entrance. Then it was back to collecting the dirt shifted by the queen and her dig team at the other end, transporting it out to the queen’s chamber and piling it up, partially covering the entrance.

In this way we’ve been able to close over at least part of the tunnel entrance, and at the same time, make a little more room in the escape tunnel.

I didn’t want to close the entrance over completely. The monsters spawning from the Dungeon are a threat to us, but at the same time were our only source of food. Whenever I awoke from my rest, my Gravity Magic Gland would be charged enough to maintain the Gravity Domain until almost every monster in the chamber was killed. Providing the colony, Tiny and myself the sustenance we needed in order to keep healing and fighting.

There was a cost though. Despite my best efforts, despite Tiny exhausting his strength to the limit every time he woke up, we weren’t able to protect every worker on the front lines. Sometimes a strong monster would spawn in the chamber, lashing out with Mana or claws before I could react. Monsters fighting would lose their sense of direction and battle their way directly into the midst of the ants. Those monsters would always be quickly subdued, but sometimes an unlucky worker or two would get sliced before we could save them.

Those losses hurt. I didn’t look at these workers as tools or monsters different from myself. They had their own childlike intelligence. I accepted them as members of my family and wanted to save them all if I could.

We had grown quite tough at the front line. A number of my brethren had successfully evolved from hatchlings to workers as time passed. Once when attempting to scout with my Mana Sensing, I was able to discover that some of the mature workers had in fact condensed a core! A milestone well worthy of celebration!

The seemingly endless grind was giving benefits to some members of the colony, even as it wore away at our nerves.

After four cycles of resting and fighting the first major shift occurred.

Luckily it was me on duty when it happened. Toward the end of my watch, tired and battered from the constant brawl, I’d almost not noticed the signs. I was so used to staring at the battles directly in front of me, sensing for heat sources coming from the walls or from the tunnel above us, I’d almost forgotten about what had worried me the most at first.

The tunnel below.

Mostly blocked off in the first hours of digging the escape tunnel, I haven’t explored the passage leading down into the Dungeon; too nervous about what I might run into. I had grown accustomed to not really worrying about what was happening down there. So much so, that when the sound of fighting from beneath me shifted, I didn’t know what to make of it.

At first it was just a faint scraping sound mixed in with all the rest of the noise. I’d hardly registered it at first. My mind, weary from the hours of vigilance, only made a mental note of it before focusing on more immediate threats.

It only grew louder with time.

Eventually, the scraping was becoming more and more clear, a consistent backdrop to the more insistent sounds ringing out in front of me. Then the sounds echoing from the chambers below changed, the ringing of combat replaced by the harsh shrieking of crazed monsters and a rather ominous chewing.

It took a little while for my tired brain to click as to what exactly that meant.

The monsters from below are rising up!

The second shock struck me at exactly the same time. From my peripheral vision, a twinkling light beams at just the wrong angle, catching my attention, just as I’m worried about the noise from below.

What I see makes my blood run cold.

The veins of Mana that are the energy source of this Dungeon were starting to grow into the escape tunnel! As I stare at these new veins, my worry only grows larger.

Not only have the veins started growing, they’re extending fast enough I can actually see them move. It’s slow for sure, but visible!

This cannot be good…