Chapter 114 The bleary days preceding the panic (1/2)

After several hours of weary defence Tiny awakes, his wounds mostly healed and the fire in his eyes rekindled. So exhausted I can barely form the thoughts I tell him to defend the entrance until I wake up and retreat further into the tunnel where I collapse flat on my face.

Torpor comes over me like a warm embrace. Like a thick blanket.

Without closing my eyes, my thoughts grow slower until they s.h.i.+ft and sink like mola.s.ses until they barely move at all. This is the rest of ant-kind!

When I awake several hours later I feel much refreshed. The heavy exhaustion that had smothered me before has mostly been lifted and the rest, combined with my feeding has closed over almost all of wounds, almost restoring my hp to full.

I get another pleasant surprise when I awaken in the form of a dark coloured gem, the core of the Jellymaw I defeated. The colony must have fished it out of the remaining Bioma.s.s and left it here for me to deal with as I was one who defeated it.

How thoughtful! Truly the workers are the best of siblings!

I'm tempted to absorb the core immediately but in the end I hesitate and decide to deal with it later. Instead I bury it in the wall alongside the other cores I had brought to the escape tunnel.

As quickly as I can I hustle back to the front lines.

Tiny is cheerfully standing as part of the wall of defenders, workers crawling over him. The poor ape is covered in wounds once again, clearly demonstrating that the wave has not let up at all whilst I was sleeping.

Indeed, the room before us is still filled with monsters battling furiously!

[Got enough energy for one more offensive?] I ask my ape companion?

Tiny turns quickly to eyeball me and nods, a big smile breaking out on his face.

Of course he does, he likes fighting almost as much as he likes food!

With Tiny helping I once more activate the Gravity Domain and we work together to clean the room once more. When that task is done I lead the workers out to collect as much of the Bioma.s.s as we can, once again securing the food supply for the colony. Under my instructions, Tiny drags a chunk of food inside the tunnel and stuffs his face before falling asleep, resting whilst I take my turn to defend.

Just like this we begin our long watch. Every few hours we would swap and rest whilst the other took their turn standing against the endless sp.a.w.ns of monsters. On my second watch I took the initiative to push out as much excess dirt as possible whenever there was a break in the fighting, mustering the workforce to move back up the tunnel whilst I protected the entrance, collect the dirt that had been s.h.i.+fted by the Queen and her dig team at the other end before transporting it out to the Queens chamber and piling it up, partially covering the entrance.

In this way we were able to close over at least part of the tunnel entrance and at the same time make a little more room in the escape tunnel.

I didn't want to close the entrance over completely, the monsters in sp.a.w.ning from the Dungeon were a threat to us but at the same time our only source of food. Whenever I awoke from my rest my Gravitational Energy gland would be charged enough that I could maintain the Gravity Domain until almost every monster in the chamber was killed, providing the colony, Tiny and myself the sustenance we needed in order to keep heal and fight.

There was a cost though. Despite my best efforts, despite Tiny exhausting his strength to the limit every time he woke up, we weren't able to protect every worker on the front lines. Sometimes a strong monster would sp.a.w.n in the chamber, las.h.i.+ng out with mana or claws before I could react, or monsters fighting would lose their sense of direction and battle their way directly into the midst of the ants. Those monsters would always be quickly subdued but sometimes an unlucky worker or two would get sliced before we could save them.