Chapter 1500 – Home Is Where The Heart Is

Home can also, as it turns out, be a giant platform outside a family mega-fortress.

“Eldest, are you smelling me?”

“Yes! I can smell you perfectly well. Finish what you’re saying, sheesh!”

“Fine,” Tungstant says, watching me suspiciously. She turns and gestures to the platform still under construction. “This will be one of the intake points of the nest. When we’re done with it, anyway. We need you to stand guard here as much as possible. Other than building the site itself, we don’t have time to complete the defensive installations, so we’re relying on you and regular battalions to cover these points. Without them, we won’t be able to feed the wuffers, and then everything falls apart.”

“I know that! I’ve been out in the tunnels fighting for weeks now. You think I don’t know how this fortress is supposed to operate just because I wasn’t building it? I just have to hang around and defend the platform, right? Easy. You get back to doing what you do and leave this to me.”

I feel like we need to start brewing higher caffeine content in our tea. Tungstant and the other builders look like they’re in desperate need of it, a little extra oomph before they start a shift could be just the thing they need. I wave her off and turn to look at my new deployment zone.

It feels a little disingenuous to just call it a ‘platform’. This thing is enormous. It’s roughly a square kilometre in size and is built in several layers. The bottom layer is the same as the outer shell, with all the enchanted steel, living stone, and layer after layer of compressed stone. Above that lies the mana channels. This is an entire layer of highly-engineered connectors that effectively act like giant mana pipes. And I do mean giant.

There are only eight of these platforms in the final design of the fortress, and they are intended to funnel a truly absurd amount of mana inside. These pipes be CHUNKY. The intake sections are enormous vacuums, sucking in mana on an industrial scale. All of that energy gets pumped inside the fortress and fed to the delightfully wobbly wuffers who are much more safely housed in their own dedicated chambers closer to the centre of the fortress.

The final layer is something new, for the Colony anyway. It seems my fellow ants have finally embraced what is truly beautiful in life: diamonds. Sweet, shiny diamonds.

That’s right. The surface of the platform is an entire layer of hardened diamond. How did they get so much of it? I feel like I don’t want to know, but they did, and it’s all here. The diamond is laid down in one metre by one metre by one foot squares, which the carvers can conveniently lift up to work on the channels beneath if something goes wrong.

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And yes, that is an entire foot of depth. They wanted these things to be sturdy. As a result, I think these platforms are the single most complex and expensive thing the Colony has ever built anywhere.

There are EIGHT of them.

Tiny, Crinis, Invidia, myself and Sarah (with Odin) have been assigned our own platforms to guard, while Vibrant and her followers are going to take care of the other three. Naturally, it isn’t just us. Each one will also hold no fewer than four battalions of ants, which is forty thousand, with the Immortals held in reserve and at the ready if there’s a need.

Once the entire fortress is sealed up like an egg, these are going to be the only places where the Colony will be interacting with the fifth stratum in any way during the wave, but the fighting here is going to be… well… I think it’s going to be pretty messy. Which is an understatement.