Wallace Dalton shrugged.
“Well, of course. They don’t have feet.”
Sounds of distant alarm were suddenly heard as crystal matrices around the office sparked to life. Garbled voices and panicked shouting began to echo throughout. Lord Korbell looked around in shock before pounding feet echoed through the door, followed by a host of finely dressed soldiers bursting into the room.
“My Lord!” one cried. “The city is under assault by monsters!”
Wallace sighed and rolled his shoulders. He flicked a glance at the others in the room, judging their mood before he decided to tactically return to his chair. His knees hurt these days.
“Is this your idea of honour?” the young lord demanded. “A surprise attack while you are still in the city to negotiate?”
Wallace raised one brow.
“What do you mean? I offered you a chance to surrender and you rejected it. Why wouldn’t they attack?”
“They aren’t afraid that I’ll take you hostage and execute you?”
“Honestly, I told them that such things never happened and they shouldn’t worry about it.”
Yasmine clapped a hand to her forehead. This lunatic had no regard for his own life, but at the least he could care a little about hers.
Korbell turned back to his soldiers.
“This is Ironwall! There is no need to panic, we have driven off stronger foes than this. Contact the gates, wake the reserves, and get every man and woman ready to fight. There is no chance they can break through as long as we commit to the defence.”
“Sure about that?” Wallace pointed out the nearby window.
The soldiers and their lord looked out to see streams of ants already climbing along the walls and ceiling of the great chamber in which the city stood. The much-vaunted shell that had defended them for hundreds of years had already been pierced in several places, holes the size of a small house having been punched through. Hundreds of ants had already entered, a number that soon ballooned into thousands.
“The gates are under heavy assault!”
“The garrison is being attacked from underneath!”
“There are reports of tunnelling beneath the castle, my Lord! This area isn’t secure.”
Lord Korbell couldn’t process the repeated shocks that came at him faster than he could comprehend. What in the world was happening?
“Rylleh lasted longer,” Wallace grunted with satisfaction. “I knew that wall was overrated.”
150. Colony vs Colony, Part 21
By repeatedly firing smaller, more manageable Gravity Bombs, I’ve been able to lock down one side of the assault so everyone else could concentrate on the other. Digging Sarah out is becoming a higher and higher priority at this point. Her roar, even buried under termites, is deafening. She must be causing absolute mayhem in there, but she can’t last forever.
Unfortunately, enough time has passed for the enemy to burrow their way to our current position, so once again, we are coming under fire from all directions. When they pop up directly beneath, above, and in front of me, it becomes impossible to keep them away with the bombs. The chances of drawing myself in and getting damaged by my own spell are way too high. Reluctantly, I’m forced to stop casting them.
The exercise has been incredibly valuable as a learning experience, however.
I’ve been blasting out Gravity Bombs at full strength, holding it back to unleash it only in the final moments as an all-or-nothing strike. It’s been my trump card against my strongest foes, and for that reason, I’ve been reluctant to spend my Gravity Mana, wanting to hold it back to pump into the mega-bombs I used against the termite nest or against Grokus.
The potential of multiple smaller bombs has been completely lost for all this time, and now I realise the incredible utility. With my current reservoir of Gravity Mana, I can probably cast as many as twenty bombs the same size as the first one I threw at the centipede nest. If I can master the ability to develop them rapidly and throw them out in controlled ways, it’ll be super useful!
Gravity Mana, roaring back into usefulness even before I get the specific Skill! I knew I wasn’t wrong to place my faith in it.
Even so, we are in trouble here now. With the enemy pouring in, we have no choice but to huddle up and fight in as dense a formation as we can. At the same time, we try to tunnel our way to Sarah, literally drilling into a seething wall of termites.
It’s not easy!
Surrounded on all sides, we fight desperately to hold our ground and prevent the never-ending waves of termites from overwhelming us. We are soon nearly buried under the Biomass left behind by the defeated foes, and we shovel in food when we get a second of time, but there’s no way we can keep up with it all. Crinis manages to pack away a stupid amount of food into her three maws, but even then, there’s just too much.
If only she could rapidly convert that Biomass into more flesh. That might be an idea for her next evolution. Getting whittled down over long battles is one of her key weaknesses, but that could be overcome so long as she has access to food if she can make that conversion quickly. As it is, it’ll take several hours for that food to replenish her store of shadow flesh.
In this sort of battle, Crinis is at her best. She’s unleashed as many limbs as possible in order to annihilate the termites quickly, and it’s working to a degree. Thousands of tentacles are out there, each one wriggling and writhing as it seeks to grip a termite and rend it to pieces, but this strategy isn’t without drawbacks. She can’t accurately control so many at once, despite the mutations and organs that expand her control. With everything that she’s poured into it, Crinis can probably utilise up to a hundred tentacles at once, which is insane when you think about it. I only have six limbs, and I still get them tangled on occasion.
With a thousand tentacles thrashing around, many are operating on complete auto pilot, which is far from useless, but massively inefficient. Although these ‘mindless’ tentacles are still doing damage, they are also being destroyed faster than the limbs she manipulates at will. In short, Crinis’ offensive capacity is rapidly getting thinned.
“GRAAAAA!”
Tiny, on the other hand, just keeps on punching. I know his stamina is flagging and he’ll have to stop being so liberal with his heavy punches, but for now, he is going all out. I’m honestly impressed he’s been able to keep going for this long! The number of termites he’s defeated must be close to my own total, which I didn’t expect. The increase in his Skills has really pushed him up to another echelon.
[Good work, Tiny! Keep hitting right to the end! It shouldn’t be long before we get relieved!]
[HARRRRR!]
I sure hope it isn’t long before we get relieved. The sooner the better! I didn’t expect it would be this hard to hold off the termites, another lapse in judgement. I’m confident the Colony are rolling up the enemy like a Persian rug right now, but if they don’t do it fast enough…
[The moment you get it charged up, you need to unleash your laser again, Invidia. Try to take as many out as you can.]
[I sssssshall havessss them alllll!]
[I mean, if you can, great. Have at it.]
I shift the focus of my mind elsewhere.
[Sarah? Can you hear me? How are you?]
I try to touch her mind, but all I get back is a wall of pain and rage. She’s in full berserk mode. Judging by the sounds I’m hearing, she has become a literal termite thrashing machine in there, but I don’t know how much longer she’s going to last.