Tungstant woke from her torpor feeling just as tired as when she went into it. After her last… incident, she didn’t want to lose the time by being captured by they who would not be named, and made sure she got regular rest, but there was so much to do.

An infinite amount of work and a very finite amount of time to do it in.

She exited the rest chamber set aside for the carvers and began to make her way to the build headquarters. Traffic was heavy and it took her a while to make it through the streams of bustling ants before she arrived to find dozens of the highest level carvers huddled around the design tables.

There were a dozen of them, each hosting an intricately detailed model of different aspects of the build.

“Finally awake are you?” Cobalt huffed.

Her sibling looked exhausted, antennae drooping with fatigue.

“Yes. Not that I think the rest helped much.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Any word on the Eldest?”

“No movement. They’re still asleep and it looks like they will be for a while. The tier seven evolution seems to be taking significantly longer than the tier six.”

“Well, I suppose that’s not too surprising. It does mean that things are going to remain tense around here for a while longer.”

With the oldest, strongest and most respected ant in the Colony sleeping, totally defenceless in the fourth stratum, where the family didn’t have a strong foundation, the situation was risky. Everyone felt on edge. The scouts were working double shifts, trying to be an early warning system for the rest of the family. The carvers were doing everything they could to rebuild and fortify this mountain to make it into an impregnable fortress.

But even they could only work so fast, and whatever the Eldest had done had blown the inside of what had once been the termite mound to absolute pieces.

“The inner shell is seventy percent complete,” Cobalt brought her sibling up to speed, “though we need to keep the pressure up until it’s done. The estimated time to completion is another twelve hours.”

“Can we speed that up?”

“Not if we want it done right…”

“Damn. We definitely do.”

“Exactly. The quad-layering technique is extremely strong, but time consuming and not everyone has the skills to pull it off. Once it’s finished, though, it’d take a drill team a full day to get through.”

“Who even invented that technique again?”

“I did….”

“Funny, you’ve never mentioned it.”

“Very funny. Once that’s done, we can work on the gates.”

Tungstant pondered for a moment. She’d been working on the frame to install the gates in before she’d gone to sleep. They still weren’t done?

“What the heck is holding up the gate teams? That should’ve been done two hours ago!”

“It’s Smithant.”

It was always Smithant.

“What does she want this time?”

“She’s come up with some fancy new enchantment method and got the whole team re-working the enchantments from scratch. It set the completion time back by ten hours.”

“TEN!?”

The irritable carver slapped an antennae to her forehead in dismay. If one component of the build was delayed, then that would cause a knock-on effect, inflicting chaos in the schedule all down the line. Like a row of small rectangular bricks standing precariously on their edge. Once the first fell, the rest were doomed to follow.

“She’s convinced it will be twice as effective as the previous setup,” Cobalt said.

“Even so, it may not be worth the delay! Completing the shell won’t mean much if there’s a massive hole where the door is meant to go!”

“You want to tell her to compromise? She’ll listen to us if we demand it, but I wasn’t confident enough to make the call myself.”

The inner-shell was the first layer of defence they planned to build around the sanctum in which the Eldest currently rested. Later, it would likely house the Queen, or other queens, but for now, it was intended to be a bulwark to protect their Senior during evolution.

They’d done their best to fortify the mountain before the evolution had started, but proper defences took a great deal of time and effort to implement. With all the tools that could be brought to bear to break down metal and stone using mana, reinforcing it became ten times as difficult.

Which meant the Colony wanted the highest quality methods and materials, but also had to be leery of the time required. Carvers, as a rule, hated to compromise on their craftsmanship. The corners they’d had to cut were like wedges driven under Cobalt’s and Tungstant’s carapace, constantly irritating and chafing as they continued the build.

“Let her finish it,” Tungstant said, resigned. “The scouts haven’t turned anything up, so the delay shouldn’t matter. If it’s as good as she thinks, it’ll be worth the time.”

This mountain would eventually become the seat of power for the Colony in this stratum, so they wanted the best for it just as much as Smithant did.

She’d been up for ten minutes and already, Tungstant could feel a headache coming on.

“What about our other problem?” she asked. “Have there been any developments on that front?”

Cobalt pointed with an antenna, and the two skittered over to one of the models. This particular carving was a nightmare tangle of knotted tendrils and jagged lines that snarled around each other endlessly. What was worse was that it wasn’t finished. For now, the mass of root-like lines terminated in a solid block of stone.

“The mapping of the lower tunnels is taking much, much longer than anticipated.”

“It looks like almost no progress was made since I last looked at it,” Tungstant noted as she circled the model.

“There hasn’t been,” Cobalt noted grimly. “The last report came through an hour ago. The monster spawns down there are proving to be a nightmare. Fourth stratum monsters are difficult for us to deal with. The scouts aren’t battling weak little termites anymore, these are the real deal.”

“We have to have control down there,” Tungstant fretted, “if we can’t secure the tunnels beneath us….”

Needless to say, for the Colony to not have control of the terrain beneath them was… unnatural. The area beneath the mountain was a horrific mess of narrow tunnels that formed a nightmare maze of never ending terror. In other words, ant home ground. They should reign supreme under those conditions!

“The fighting has been intense, from all reports. The former fungus farms are still on fire and the smoke is everywhere. Pockets of lava are still melting through the walls and the monsters down there aren’t happy about it.”

“Well, darn,” Tungstant muttered. “So what’s the plan?”

“Plan? There’s no plan right now. That’s for you to work out, I’m going to sleep.”

Cobalt gave her sister a hearty pat on the back with an antenna and dashed away, leaving Tungstant staring at the model. That headache was definitely back.