The airboats looked like a big hit. The mana guns were an even bigger hit. I wondered how to follow up my success.

I was a little worried about the skeletons attacking. Their presence had impacted my domain in a most unpleasant fashion. I would have to keep an eye on that sector of the forest. I made a note to have Gina increase the patrols in that area.

Speaking of Gina.

“Good Morning.” I called out to Gina.

“What?” She grumpily replied.

“What do you mean, what?” I asked back.

“You only talk to me when you want something.” Gina told me.

Well shit. She might be right. Nevermind.

“Those new mana guns look pretty cool.” I told her. “Do you think you and your warriors would like some?” I asked her.

“A few mana guns would be nice.” She told me. “But a true warrior needs to be able to feel the enemy beneath her claws.”

“Yes. Yes. Crush your enemies, drive them before and to hear the lamentation of their queens.” I said.

“That is exactly it.” Gina told me excitedly. “I wish to hear the lamentations of their queens.” Gina began to excitedly chitter. I didn’t have the heart to tell my ants how cute they were when they were excited.

I started tinkering in my creation room. I had made a room with models of all the different things I wanted to make. I definitely wasn’t playing with action figures here. This room was separate from the workshop I had made with Monte. He had a few cool ideas but I like to create prototypes to see how they worked before I made a full scale item.

The first problem I ran into was how does an ant hold a gun? Probably not very well I decided. Maybe a redesign of the ant would be in order. I toyed around with several different variations. An ant walking on two legs. This would leave two pairs of arms for fighting. I couldn’t find an easy way to make all the modifications to the ant. They all looked weird.

Maybe have the ant walk on four legs and leave the two forelegs as arms. This had possibilities. Some sort of ant centaur. An antauri. Yes. I even had a cool name. I worked on lengthening the torso. We needed more and different muscle attachments. This warrior was going to be shredded.

I needed to make sure this variation had enough mana power to fire the weapons at a decent rate.

Now I needed mana guns for this bad ass ant. The ant was approximately the same height as a human. But she had more mass and weighed more. I thought about the gun we had used before. That was too lightweight. I needed something with more umph.

The revolver rifle idea Monte had was pretty cool. But if I made the mana reservoirs bigger, I wouldn’t be able to cram as many in as before.

I finally decided on three chambers. They were larger than before. I felt since the ants had a higher mana regeneration rate, they would still have a similar rate of fire. The extra mana reserves also meant I could play around with the type of spell I could cast.

This was all so exciting. Maybe a bigger fireball? Fireball was always cool but I wasn’t worried about damaging myself. Trees were notoriously flammable.

Maybe something with less flame but more explosion? Yes. This was the way. I worked on creating a rune of compression. The idea was distantly related to the rune I had discovered on the sky whales. Their flying rune attached to already existing mana flows and pushed against the mana flow. Maybe if I worked the rune inside out and backwards, the force would compress the mana. Now to shape the mana into a cylinder shape.

Kerumph.

Ah. I seemed to have destroyed my workshop. That seemed to happen with depressing regularity. Everytime I tried to make a better rune something would go wrong.

No worries. I could just make a new one. Hopefully no one noticed that boom. Also the explosion verified I was on the right track. All I had to do now was make the explosion happen closer to the enemies.