Chapter 286 Scouting repor (1/2)
The idea of peaceful cooperation between nations or even species is quite the foreign concept to these ants and I shouldn't be surprised. They are Dungeon monsters after all. I may have made them smarter but their fundamental nature as ants is to serve the colony to the exclusion of all else. Convincing them not to throw their lives away in pointless sacrifice was hard enough of a ch.o.r.e, diplomacy and trade may be a bridge too far!
It seems that Vibrant at least has begun to grasp the greater picture here.
”Nope!” she chirped brightly, ”I just think we shouldn't eat things that are willing to help us! There are toooons of things that want to kill us that we can go eat.”
Well… Good enough.
”Vibrant does raise I valid point” I declared to the others, ”during the wave we have a near infinite supply of food sp.a.w.ning in the Dungeon below us, most of the Bioma.s.s is going to waste as the monsters battle and feed on each other, only to die and be fed on in return. How long until we are ready to start sending hunting parties into the Dungeon in numbers?”
It's Antionette the Juvenile Queen who stepped forward to answer this time.
”The third hatching since the change of species occurred several hours ago and are for now awaiting the commencement of their training, which means we have more than four hundred of the new workers as well as the numbers we sustained during the wave. The colony has a total workforce of just over one thousand now, but a large proportion of those are not battle ready.”
Over a thousand?! That's great news! We lost a lot of workers over the journey and to finally reach this tipping point is a wonderful moment!
”It shouldn't take too long to get them up to speed surely? How did you go with the first two hundred?” I asked eagerly.
The twenty s.h.i.+fted slightly in their places.
”It was, challenging” admitted Advant the soldier, ”drilling into them the basic concepts of self-preservation was extremely difficult and due to the sheer number of them it took some time to accrue the recquired Bioma.s.s and experience to allow all two hundred to evolve.”
”Wait” I gasped, ”does this mean all two hundred have undergone a maxed out first evolution?”
That would be insane!
The second Juvenile Queen, Victoriant, coughed. ”As you are aware Senior, we don't have the resources to allow each individual to absorb a special core. We did as best we could, each ant evolved with a core, maxed out mutations and having absorbed all of the cores we could supply. To do any better we would have had to delay their evolution for too long.”
I nodded. That made perfect sense, they did the best they could with the resources that we had available. I can't complain too much since I was only too happy to hand the task over to them.
”So what sort of evolutions did they choose? Did we get another even spread like with you guys?”
Theresant smoothly broke in before anyone else could speak. ”As it turned out almost half of them chose to be soldiers, the remainder were mostly workers, with a few artisans mixed in. They are all still in the juvenile stage and it will be some time before they are ready for their next evolution. Our hands are very busy since we already have another two hundred hatchlings to tend to, and another two hundred coming in three days.”
In three days?!
”Just how quickly is the Queen able to lay eggs right now?” I demanded.
”Oh, we get spikes in Bioma.s.s every now and again, the creatures sp.a.w.ning in her chamber supply a steady flow but things have slowed down now that so much is being funnelled into the hatchlings. We project that the Queen will be able to lay one clutch of two hundred eggs every four days at the moment. Mostly thanks to Vibrant and her team bringing up so much from the tunnels.”
Hearing herself praised like this, Vibrant suddenly turned bashful.
”Aww, it's nothing! Just doing what an ant can do!” she giggled.
Two hundred every four days?! With most of the food going into the hatchlings!
”So if we were to start sending hunting parties into the Dungeon in, let's say a week, what sort of speed would we expect to see?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.