“You’re the one I’m worried about!”
“Ha-ha!” Vibrant laughed. “I’m sorry, I just find it a little hard to focus on these sorts of warnings sometimes.”
“Why’s that?”
“I kind of figure the Eldest would have ruined everything and gotten in trouble by now, so I don’t have to worry about it.”
“Just what do you think about th—Huh… you might have a point, actually.”
The scout leader was forced to reflect on all the times the Eldest had thrown the Colony headfirst into conflict without affording them the time to properly prepare. In a way, the accelerated timeframe for invading the third stratum had come about because the Eldest pushed downward, and though it wasn’t their fault, the Colony always wanted to follow where their oldest member went.
“Right? But don’t worry, I’ll do better!” Vibrant thumped herself on the front of her thorax with a leg. “What do you need scouted in this area? We can get it done in a flash-flash!”
“I’ll bet you can’t,” Burke muttered.
The scouts were certainly fast, amongst the fastest ants in all the castes, but speed wasn’t their only concern. They also needed to be stealthy, with keen senses and heightened detection abilities to find what others wanted to keep hidden and locate enemies before they were close enough to harm them. All of those things took a significant chunk of evolutionary energy, more than were dedicated to sheer physical prowess. Whereas Vibrant, and by extension her entire group, poured the bulk of their potential into covering ground as fast as they could. Her mages weren’t as strong as regular mages in the Colony in terms of spell-slinging, but they were a hell of a lot more mobile. If all Burke needed them to do was put some eyeballs on the terrain, then Vibrant and her team would get the job done by far the fastest out of anyone in the Colony.
“Alright,” she sighed, “you can do it, but make sure you’re more careful this time. Until we know the Eldest has stuffed up the peace in some way, you don’t want to be the one the Council has to blame.”
“Roger!”
“Look here,” she leaned forward to sketch a few rough shapes in the gritty stone between them, “we’ve located three cities in these locations, but so far, we haven’t mapped the ground between them and we don’t know who has interests here, so we’ve been reluctant to get too close. If you can rush through there at top speed and keep an eye out for tunnel entrances and traffic between them, that would be great. So long as that goes fine and there isn’t a reaction, then you can push further out in this direction and meet up with my scouts who should be operating in the area.” She indicated a section to the right of the cities with a front leg. “Check in with them, and then, if you have the energy to spare, you can swing out to the west. Once you’ve gone five hundred kilometres out, you should come back; we aren’t intending to go further out than that at this time.”
Vibrant looked at the map carefully before her head snapped up, her eyes ablaze with energy that seemed to sear Burke’s eyes.
“OKAY-BYE-BYE! SEE-YOU-AGAIN-SOON!” A wave of pheromones smacked Burke in the face once more, and then a cloud of dust kicked up, as well as a heap of demon larvae who didn’t move out of the way fast enough, blocking her vision.
When the dust and demons cleared, Vibrant and her entire group were gone.
Burke settled back with a sigh.
“Peace and quiet,” she huffed to herself.
59. Darkness Eternal
Leeroy was tired. Not just in a physical sense, because she was definitely drained from long days without rest and filled with hard labour, but more than that, she felt a weariness that echoed deep within her very soul. Not even the harsh words of the Eldest had been enough to shake this lethargy and sense of aimlessness from her and her fellow tier six sisters.
If only she’d been more careful and read the evolution description more carefully!
If only any of them had done that!
The fact she and her sisters were similarly bound to the same fate made it so much worse than if she were the only one, for she felt responsible, that she herself had led them down this path which inevitably led to this end. What’s more, the Eldest specifically banned her from informing her younger sisters, who even now were battling and struggling to evolve to reach this tier, to their disastrous fate.
All these issues combined to infect the aptly named ‘Immortals’ with a dreary malaise that many of their number despaired of being able to cure. Complying with the orders of the Eldest, the highly evolved shock troops managed to rouse themselves enough to throw themselves into work, hauling stone, tearing down existing structures, and doing all the heavy lifting the build crews could throw at them for days on end, working without rest.
Leeroy finished dragging a huge chunk of stone to the base of the pillar on which Roklu stood and looked up at the mighty work the Colony was engaged in.
She wasn’t sure when, but the carvers had discovered a new type of stone, one immensely resistant to heat that also appeared to have a sort of regenerative property. With further exposure to the conditions in the third stratum, the builders had learned much, including how the scorching, ash-infused atmosphere degraded almost every material that it touched. The existing demon structures, however, appeared to be immune to this weathering damage.
This led to the discovery of the new mineral, followed by a frenzied mission to find and process the stone. In typical ant fashion, this was achieved quickly by applying thousands of highly motivated individuals to the task until not only was a significant deposit located, but mining and refining had taken place over just a few days. Now thousands of tons of material were in the process of being hauled across the plains to construct a massive ant hill, a construction the likes of which the third stratum may have never seen before.
Reaching from the ground all the way to the plate a kilometre above, this hill would become the base of operations for the Colony in this layer of the Dungeon, a massive fortress that would occupy many millions of cubic metres, rivalling the size of the main nest itself. At the moment, the carvers were busy preparing the foundation, and although progress was slow since the number of build teams on this level of the Dungeon had greatly diminished over the previous two weeks, already the scale of the project was coming into sight. The footprint of the hill to come was staggering, almost a kilometre square. It likely wouldn’t be finished for months, perhaps longer, even if the Colony decided to commit tens of thousands of workers to the project.
Despite the ambition and effort on display, Leeroy struggled to find the joy and pride that she knew should be there inside her carapace. Instead, there was a hollow sensation that had only grown since she lost her direction, her purpose in life. All of the Immortals around her felt the same.
“Leader,” one of her faithful lieutenants approached her from the side, “do you plan to rest soon?”
“You shouldn’t call me that anymore,” Leeroy said bitterly, “after what I’ve led you to. This eternal… life.”
“We each chose our species on our own, and we each made the same mistake. You can’t be blamed for that, leader.”
“We will still follow you anywhere,” another said, moving alongside the first speaker. “Where else would we even go?”
The emptiness of that last statement found an echo in all of them.
“No, I will continue to work until I collapse,” Leeroy told the others. “I have been told to make myself useful, and so I shall. The Eldest demanded I work, not that I rest, so I will.”