“That’s something, at least,” Burke mutters and turns her eyes toward Wills, who nods and rushes out of the chamber.
I twitch an antennae, curious at the exchange. Burke fills me in. “Wills has gone to organise our scouting regiment. We’ll need trails laid farther to the north and eyes on the horde if we can get them.”
“Be careful,” I warn. “That magic lizard is no joke.”
“We’ll be careful,” she assures me.
Hmm. I suppose having as constant a flow of information as possible will be a great first step.
“We are going to have to fight this,” I declare to the council. “We can’t afford to wait until they get to us before we begin to inflict damage. We need to start chipping away at them as they advance. Does anyone have thoughts on how we can do this?”
The generals and soldiers flap their antennae for a moment as they consider their options before Leeroy speaks up.
“I suggest I lead an advanced unit to—”
“Rejected,” I say.
“You didn’t let me finish!” the offended soldier replies.
“Alright then, go ahead,” I sigh.
“As I was saying. I lead an advance unit to engage the enemy and die in glorious battle, sacrificing ourselves to buy more time for the colony to prepare. My very guts will rise up to entangle the foe!”
THWACK!
I slap down on the ant’s head in retribution for the nonsense she’d spewed.
Dammit Leeroy… Get some sense in your head!
“Any serious suggestions?”
Tungstant uses one leg to rub her mandibles. “We should limit ourselves to the ‘hit and run’ tactics the eldest taught us during training. It should be feasible to attack using tunnels, pitfalls and prebuilt defence networks that we can abandon and flee. Cobalt and I have cooked up a few ideas in that direction already.”
“Do we have any ants that can do damage from long-range?” I ask. All of the workers were born with acid glands, just as I was, but the range isn’t exactly stellar.
“The scouts have a dedicated group with range and damage mutations on their acid glands,” Burke says. “We’re experimenting with ways that scouts can contribute to pitched battle, and using them as an artillery battery in open areas is one of the concepts we’re developing. We’re soldiers, after all.”
It is true and easy to forget. The scouts are one of three offshoots of the baseline soldier variant and are therefore beefier than all of the other castes. It would be a mistake to think of them as anything other than a battle asset alongside being a scouting force.
“Fantastic. What else can we get done?”
76. War Council, Part 2
“With your permission, eldest, I will leave the council and begin to organise a workforce to prepare our initial fortifications,” Tungstant says.
I wave an antenna in approval, and the small, dextrous ant climbs up the wall and out the roof of the chamber.
“Alright then. Pitfall traps, tunnels to attack, I like all of these ideas. What else have we got? How is our magic firepower coming along?” I ask.
The two mages in the room, Propellant and Coolant, shift on their feet as they become the centre of attention for the council. The mage caste hasn’t had a lot of time to build up their raw magic-handling Skills, and are without the benefit of my own extensive spending on brain power when it came to evolutions. Having said that, they’re no slouches in the brain game and were able to choose their own elemental gland on evolution. So there has to be some juice there.
“The number of mage ants we have to work with is still limited,” Coolant hedges.
There are over a thousand ants in the colony at this time, there are like a hundred new ants being born every day. How few mages could there be?
“How many are we talking about?” I ask.
“Five,” Coolant said flatly.
“Five!” I sputter.
“Oh, seven including Coolant and I,” Propellant offers helpfully.
Holy moly.
“Why do we have so few mages? When fighting against a huge horde, like the one coming to kill us right now, more mage ants would be indispensable!”
I can see it in my mind’s eye already. Tunnel entrances falling in to reveal teams of mage ants who blast the front ranks of the horde with deadly fire, torching dozens of monsters with flamethrower-like magic before retreating through the tunnels which collapse behind them, leaving decimated and crispy ranks of enemies in their wake.
A few members of the council shift uncomfortably. “We’ve had most of the hatchlings move into the soldier caste recently,” Antionette informs me. “Large numbers of scouts and soldiers have been born. Our more specialised castes have had slower recruitment rates.”
Slower I could understand, but five?
“Coolant and I have been doing our best to map out the Skill paths from scratch and explore methods to raise up the future generations of mage ants,” Propellant tells me ruefully. “We didn’t anticipate a need for a large number of mages at this stage and wanted to take more time with our preparation.”
Makes sense. Still, I would have loved to have more mages to clear away large amounts of weak enemies. There may be a use for the mages we have, of course, but there is a lot that can be said for quantity.
As they say: Quantity is a quality all of its own. That’s practically the ant’s motto.
“Ok then. We have two main objectives, we need to whittle down the horde that’s coming our way, I need to help with that so I can reach my second objective, which is to Level up so I can evolve.”
“You’re close to your next evolution, eldest?” Victoriant asks, sounding oddly excited.
“I am,” I affirm with a dip of my antennae. “I only need six more Levels. If we’re going to battle against creatures as strong as those coming our way, we’re going to need every little advantage we can get.”
“I agree,” Sloan the general pipes up. “We may have the ability to chip away at the number of weaker monsters, but tackling anything stronger is going to be beyond us for a time. If the eldest can evolve, then that task will be in capable hands.”
You just wanted to dump all of the hard work onto me, didn’t you? She’s technically correct, but that doesn’t serve to soothe my irritation.
“I think we can agree that we don’t need to prioritise food gathering or egg laying to a high extent in leading up to this crisis?” I ask the gathered council. “If we don’t survive the upcoming battle, then the colony will cease to exist.”
“We shouldn’t shut down food gathering entirely, surely?” protests Florence, the up-to-this-point-silent Brood Tender. “Without food the larvae will starve.”
“I don’t think anyone is suggesting we cease food gathering operations completely,” Sloan assures her. “But rather that we divert a significant portion of the soldiers currently acting to gather food to prepare for the defence.”
Somewhat mollified, Florence settles back, though she and her fellow Brood Tender are clearly not happy. I understand it, less food coming in means less brood. What else is a Brood Tender going to do?
“We also need to keep enough senior workers here to ensure that the hatchling training program continues to run unabated. Each new hatchling deserves the best possible start we can give them, don’t forget that!”
I eyeball each of them at the same time, something you can only do with extensively upgraded compound eyes, one of the benefits of being an insect monster.
They nod in agreement, more to appease me than anything else. My insistence on equal treatment for the hatchlings still makes little sense to them, I suspect. Thankfully, by virtue of being old, they have to listen to me. Hooray for strict respect for the elders!