Chapter 1525 – The Flow

Advant, loyal Soldier of the Colony and member of the Council, stood alongside her sibling, the general Sloan, and watched.

“It’s doesn’t quite hit home until you see it for yourself,” she noted.

“I’ve been here for three days, and I still can’t quite believe it,” Sloan replied. “Getting the reports is overwhelming enough, but this… this is beyond my imagination.”

The two stood, clinging to a wall as they looked down over the connection between the fourth stratum and the fifth. Deep below the mountain that the Colony had turned into their nest, the transformation that had taken place here was nothing short of baffling.

Where once there had been monster-infested tunnels turned into staging grounds for the invasion, now there lay a hub of industry without rival anywhere else in the Colony’s lands. A new portal network had been established, the extravagant cost deemed justified in order to save the time it took to shift materials from the mountain above to below, and from those portals, an unending stream of all that the ants created poured out.

Reinforcements, healers, medicines, new trainees for the militia, metals, wood, precious stone, ores, cores, Biomass, everything.

It had proven to take too much time to carry objects through the portal, so the carvers had laid down tracks and devised carts that could bridge the gap caused by the width of the portal itself, just so they could move things through that little bit faster.

The two Council members watched as the fully laden carts streamed through the magic gateways, being sorted and shifted to different paths that would take them to specific warehouses to be unloaded. Already, the surrounding tunnels were stuffed with storage, the defensive line pushed further and further out to accommodate the necessary space. Peeling the Dungeon veins from this vast chamber alone had been a mighty work; not too long ago, it would have been beyond the Colony’s skill entirely.

And all of this, everything that came through, everything that was processed, all the materials, all the ants, all the humans and golgari and various other races, all vanished down the shaft into the fifth stratum.

“Solant has somehow managed to leverage the production of almost the entire Colony,” Sloan noted. “We are sending down ten thousand ants a day, and still she wants more.”

“Are our casualties that high?” Advant fretted. “We shouldn’t be throwing away the lives of our siblings.”

“You’ve seen the reports, the casualties are far lower than what we might have expected going into this, but the injury rate is staggering, and the time to heal wounds sustained down there is much longer than the norm. Every healer we can spare across the entire Colony is down there already, and it isn’t enough. Look over there.”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

The general used her antennae to direct Advant’s attention, and she saw a new facility being constructed, an enormous, ten-floored building being built into the vast chamber wall.

“New hospital, the first of six.”

“Six?”

“That’s right. They’re running out of space down in the fortress to accommodate the wounded. Attrition during the wave has proven to be absurdly high. Did you see what the average deployment time for a soldier on the platforms is?”