More Bodies Than Bullets (1/6)
After finally making it out of those deadly tunnels, the Queen quickly finds a place to hide herself, so that she doesn't have to waste her own mana defending against the barrage of mana cannons. She doesn't know how much mana the humans have stored away in their defenses, but either way, she'd much rather have her swarm take the hits. She doesn't lose any mana when they die, after all.
Once the Queen finds a safe place to hide, she looks through her Ants' eyes and directs the battle from there.
One of the first things she does is roll her eyes at herself, as her plans have once again proven to be unfruitful. You see, she had initially planned on running her swarm through the Threshold walls to scout the place out… but it's immediately apparent that this isn't going to work. THE ENTIRE FREAKING FORTRESS IS HOVING A THOUSAND FEET OFF THE GROUND! How is she supposed to get her forces up there to eat the humans?
Remembering that the humans are able to take a few hours to seal the World Gate, she suddenly gets a sense of urgency.
Frantically, she looks around and sees that the walls of the cavern is not only glowing blue-green with spirt stones, but it's also been carved so smoothly that none of her ants are able to climb it at all without losing their grip and falling down.
Looking up at the thousands of mana cannons glowing hotter and hotter with energy, the Queen hisses, "Ugh. This is going to be hard."
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The first thing the Queen does is have her Ants pile themselves on top of each other to make large, artificial ramps made out of writing legs and chitin. This is because the bottom of the Time locked fortress is hovering about 1000 feet off the ground.
However, her plan seems to be failing miserably right now.
With relentless brutality, the arsenal of mana cannons set up on the bottom of the fortress blasts the mounds of ants apart; even when a mound lasts long enough to get some ants up top, too few of them make it up to the bottom of the fortress to make any difference; they get mercilessly slaughtered by the humans inside.
She also tries personally blasting the bottom of the fortress, but to her surprise and frustration, the stone bricks making up the fortress aren't even scratched by her attacks. The Queen had certainly learned from her interrogated prisoners that the Threshold stone was supposed to be indestructible, but she didn't believe it until now.
She discovers that there are tiny gaps in the fortress stone where the mana cannons shoot from; after a little bit of practice, she figures out how to aim her attacks precisely enough to hit the mana cannons through their little gaps.
However, before she can celebrate her new skill, she's flabbergasted to find out that the mana cannons she's destroyed seem to be automatically repairing themselves.
What she doesn't know is that all the cannons and traps (even the ammo reserves) are enchanted to have a fixed point in time they always gravitate towards. Basically, the defenses don't "repair themselves"; the material literally goes back in time to a state where they were whole and new.
After about half an hour, the Queen finally realizes how fruitless it is to pick apart the fortress defenses from down below.
Then, she suddenly smiles and hisses, "I have another idea."
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Given that the Queen has a couple million Ants available to constantly reivive, she figures she has enough children to carry out her plan.
For a moment, the swarm seems to lull, as they all stop fighting for just a moment. Before they can all lie still on the ground, they all abruptly form a few dozen giant piles at once; if all her forces go at the same time to reach the top, then the mana cannons won't be able to blast them all away in time.
What the humans don't know is that the Queen herself is riding on one of the mounds; in her Ant form, she looks identical to her children, so it's not like the humans will know to specifically aim at her. Plus, even if they do hit her by accident with their cannons, her mana shields are more than enough to take the damage.
"Ugh," the Queen grimaces as she shrugs off hit after hit as she ascends, "I hate using mana. The point of eating so much is to stock up mana, not spend it."
The only thing that keeps the Queen motivated to keep pushing forward is the thought of a fortress full of juicy humans to eat, as well as a world on the other side of the gate – a world without dragons!
It only takes a couple of shots bouncing off her shield to realize that something is wrong with her specific mound of ants. So, the Queen grimaces as all the cannons on the Fortress's underside aim at her.
Despite losing about 3% of her mana reserve in the barrage (which makes her heart bleed with sorrow), her barrier is enough to protect the mound, and she succesesfuly makes it up to one of the mana cannons.
Grinning in triumph, she blasts the cannon to tiny bits, then tries to squeeze her body through the gap… only to find that her head is barely too large to fit through. "GAAAH! OPEN UP!!!" she hisses angrily as she bangs her head on the gap.
She was hoping to enter the fortress this way… but what to do now?
"Hmm. No choice then," she thinks as she sticks her hand in the gap and starts releasing the hundreds of thousands of eggs from her palm.
The human defenders just inside barely have time to be surprised before several dozen Ants pop into existence all around them. All the humans here ARE mages, so they at least put up a fight and kill about a hundred ants before they're overwhelmed and torn apart.
As soon as the Ants move out of the way, the rest of the unhatched eggs on the floor start to sprout the rest of their sisters.
And with this, a long, endless stream of Ants swarm out of one of the rooms and starts spreading through the rest of the fortress.
… or at least, they TRY to spread out.
Because the Queen has to dump all of her eggs into that tiny room she's sticking her arm into, only a few Ants are able to spawn at a time. Because so few are trickling out, the human defenders in the hallways have them bottlenecked.
Realizing that her swarm is trapped, she has to think of something very quick…
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Commander Fisco is watching from his surveillance mirrors as his fortress pummels the ants on the cavern floor out of existence. What puzzles him is that before, the Ants were endlessly reviving on the ground…
…Yet now, the Ant population on the ground is slowly dwindling. Where are they all going? There's no way the Queen ran out of mana for revivals already, right? That wouldn't make any sense, since he heard from Haalfrin that the Queen battled with a 4 horned dragon for over a week without much concern.
Thus, he's startled when he suddenly receives an alarm coming from the lower sections of the fortress. It appears that hundreds of Ants are attacking from the inside. "How did they get in?" Fisco wonders...
All he knows is that the Ants can revive, but he doesn't know what conditions they revive under.
If he had known that the Queen revives the Ants by materializing their eggs from her own body, he'd have been able to infer that she's either inside the fortress, or she's clinging to a small hole and sticking her hands through to the inside.
"There's no use wondering how the Queen is moving her Ants into my fortress. I just need to find out how to deal with it." And so, he quickly considers his options.
"Hmm…," he thinks, "the lower levels are full of supply caches and living quarters. Luckily, all the hallways were designed like a maze, so this should make it easier to deal with the horde."
With the narrow hallways, Fisco's men will have an advantage, since enclosed spaces always mitigates the advantage of superior numbers.
There's also the long arrays of traps laid out at every turn; since the Commander knows that the ants are mostly endless, he decides to only activate the traps when his men are about to be overwhelmed – to thin out their numbers.
Other than the traps, the mazelike design of the halls will force the Ants to spread out on their quest to find a way to the surface. Then, when a few Ants DO make it through the entrance to the fortress proper, they'll come out in small enough trickles that they'll at least be more manageable for the defenders on the walls to take care of.
Fisco smiles thinking about all of this, since he knows very well that the underside maze only has exits to the outermost layers of the fortress defenses; this way, the Ants won't be able to bypass the fortress walls; they'll HAVE to slog through the most heavy defenses they have once they get out of the basement maze.
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After seeing her children be slaughtered over and over again in the halls, it doesn't take very long for the Queen to come up with a new idea.
"Since I have to actively Will my eggs to hatch… I COULD just have my newly spawned children carry my eggs with them out of this tiny room," she thinks. "That way, once my children spread out into other hallways and find more room, instead them having to spread out to search for an exit, they can drop the eggs I'm giving them."
If all of her children themselves act as spawn points, then they'll be able to spread out and search every nook and cranny in these stone halls; then, her children can devour all the living things here, and she can recover some of that mana she's had to spend getting here!