From the ceiling descended a dozen crystal shards, arranging themselves in a rotating orb. Lines of mana shot between them, sketching a 3-D model of Stratum -27: twisting ramps, pulsing mana-veins, hollows shaped like wounded hearts. The image spun, froze, magnified on a pinpoint of crimson. Variants leaned closer; even the Sliweave's surface stilled, ripples arrested mid-pulse.
a pulse rippled through the hologram, highlighting a stair-spiral so steep it resembled a drill bit sunk into living stone.
Murmurs rustled across pheromone channels: anticipation, disciplined hunger, a flash of competitive pride. Rodion sensed every nuance. He adjusted the projection twice, exposing cross-sections, annotating fault lines with narrow white glyphs.
A cluster of Soldiers parted as his proxy entered the hall—a Worker body, but taller, its carapace stained a muted guntal, optic lenses glowing the sa sapphire as Rodion's real eyes. The proxy moved with exacting economy, each footfall precise; lesser Workers skittered aside in instinctive deference, antennae dipping like peasants greeting nobility.
Inside the proxy, Rodion processed dual feeds: the busy staging arena and a secondary cara trained on the Hatchery. That second feed absorbed half his threads. There, among soft glow-pods and steaming incubation pools, the Queen coiled her titanic fra. Usually she radiated quiet omnipotence—ferocious attention split across thousands of tasks. Today her aura drew inward, a fortress guarding sothing fragile.
Rodion magnified. At the core of her coiled body sat a single egg, matte-black, surface so lightless it seed to drink colour. No runic halo, no standard gestation glow. rely stillness, yet sensors read a heartbeat—slow, irregular, deeper than any Worker, sharper than any Soldier. Unlogged paraters scrolled red. Rodion dropped markers: Anomaly: pigntation override. Psychic field: sporadic flare, amplitude unknown.
He considered pinging the Queen directly. Protocol urged respect for her maternal trance. He filed a higher-priority note instead and cut the feed, attention re-centering on the staging chamber.
Monkey had finished his checklist. He flipped the board to reveal launch timings: columns of green lights, one amber waiting. The amber matched the Sliweave squad, still soaking rune-threads.
Rodion's proxy strode across the floor, stopping before the gelatinous fighter. He reached out—hesitated a microsecond, recalculated contact pressure, then laid two tal fingertips against the Sliweave's surface. The gel dimpled, cool and elastic. Electro-readouts flashed: viscosity nominal, conductivity peak. Satisfied, he withdrew.
The amber light turned green.
A low chord vibrated the floor—transport platform arriving. It rose from a yawning shaft, stone petals opening to expose circular lift plates carved with spirals that drank torchlight like wells drink rain. Soldiers filed aboard, talons clacking soft. The Drakeant folded wings tight, crouching; electricity danced across plates and grounded into copper rails set in the floor.
Rodion broadcast a narrow-band pulse: coordinates, fallback routes, encrypted recall codes. Variants answered: pheromone bursts sweet with confidence.
Only then did he send a silent handshake to Monkey.
The valet extended an arm. tal fingertips brushed against tal knuckles—small, ceremonial, unseen by most. Monkey chirped once: promise to keep watch on the ho front. Rodion's optics dimd in acknowledgnt.
Inside his proxy, he felt the silent absence of the Queen like a missing bass note in a symphony. Why that egg? Why now? He quarantined the thought; strategic focus must remain.
Worker Technicians flooded in, securing crates of resin grenades, spools of conductive thread, jars of concentrated glucose paste. Each container snapped into mag-locks on variant harnesses. Antennae clicked: ready, ready, ready.
Rodion raised one forelimb of the proxy. Six sets of compound eyes turned to him; even the Drakeant dipped its scaled muzzle.
The Crymber Ant responded first, venting a plu of frost that traced jagged fractals in midair: acknowledgent. The Drakeant's wings cracked lightning like distant sumr storms: eagerness. The Sliweave rely shivered, skin rippling in glassy waves.
A final glyph blinked above the transport: OPEN.
Four Worker captains stabbed staff spears into conduit sockets. Blue-white mana surged outward, flooding rings along the lift. The entire platform began to sink, stone petals closing overhead like slow jaws. Dust motes swirled, lifting, then subsiding in the sudden vacuum.
Rodion watched until the last glimr of Drakeant wing vanished below. Then the petals sealed with a purring lock, leaving only faint humming through the floor—like an enormous cat dozing beneath stone.
Silence expanded.
He pivoted, proxy stride clipping toward a side alcove where relay crystals pulsed, waiting to carry every heartbeat of the expedition back to main ops. Monkey glided beside him, screen already displaying biotrics scrolling upward as the team descended.
Rodion allowed himself one final glance toward the Hatchery feed—single fra, Queen still bowed over night-black shell—and flagged it for priority re-check in ten minutes.
Duty first.
Mission clock started.
The expedition squad departed monts later, leaving behind shimring pheromone trails tuned to avoid detection. Like whispers vanishing into stone.
_____
Mid-afternoon light slanted through the arched windows of Mikhailis's personal study, catching on suspended motes of dust that drifted like slow snow in the warm air. Outside, the palace's terraced gardens were a haze of late-season blossoms and glimring insect wings, but he barely spared them a glance. The lecture on chronosynch anomalies—thirty dense pages of rune matrices and grumpy footnotes—lay face-down on the lounge cushion, its ribbon bookmark drooping out like a white flag of surrender.
Mikhailis stretched, vertebrae popping one after another, then groaned with theatrical misery. "Revision accomplished," he declared to nobody, even lifting an imaginary quill for flourish. In truth he had skim-read the final chapter twice, eyes glazing over every ti Rodion's margin notes shifted from neat script to frantic scrawl. Temporal shearing observed at 0.004 second… Ugh. Enough thinking for now.
The velvet lounge—which Lira insisted matched the curtains and thus must remain unsullied—was left in a disorderly tumble of pillows when he padded to his desk. The floorboards cooled under bare feet, and he wiggled his toes, thankful for the quiet. Elowen was occupied with back-to-back council etings, Rodion had vanished to… do inscrutable Rodion things, and even Lira was busy terrorising laundry. A slice of paradise.
He nudged aside a stack of drafts—schematics for a collapsible fla halberd, half-finished letters to the Academy, a doodle of a sli girl wielding twin axes—and pressed the boot rune embedded in the jury-rigged tower. The machine made a cranky grumble like an old cat woken from nap, fans sputtering as arc crystals flickered alive behind lattice vents. One by one, panes of greenish light fanned across his curved screens—the main display cracked years ago, but duct-tape runes held the fault lines at bay.
Loading bars crawled. "Co on, sweetheart," he coaxed, drumming fingers. "Papa needs his dopamine."
Finally, the ho interface resolved: a plain desktop wallpaper of a grinning Drakeant giving a thumbs-up. System notifications chid down the side—Mana capacitor at 81 %, Please calibrate cooling vents, You have 27 unfiled research logs. He clicked none of them. Instead, reflex guided his hand to the browser shortcut. Blank tab. Of course. He sighed.
"No internet. No global PvP," he lanted, glancing at a row of icons for defunct MMOs. "No ani forums. No streaming." A whimper for dramatic effect. "I don't even know if Sli Supre Season Seven got announced…"
He slumped back and scrubbed his scalp with both hands, ruffling wine-dark hair into chaos. Rodion's off punching reality again and I'm stuck in offline mode. A snack might help. He yanked open the middle drawer, rummaging past solder coils and imported bean packets until fingers closed around a nut-and-honey bar. The packaging crinkled as he tore it free with teeth.
Boot complete, the screens rearranged themselves as background processes settled. A small pop-up winked: New Feed Available – DRONE SCOUT KAPPA-5. The preview window showed a blurred sa landscape. Curiosity sparked. He thumbed the space-bar. The pane expanded, definition sharpening until it filled the centre monitor.
A windswept plateau unfurled on-screen beneath a high cyan sky. Vast shards of quartz jutted from red earth, each refracting dawn's leftover sunbeams like crystal monoliths. Down among those shards, tiny black figures scurried. Chira Ant workers—two dozen at least—were fanning out in a tidy wedge formation. Their chitin caught the light in copper flashes; dust rose in amber spirals behind them.
"Oh." Mikhailis's bite stalled halfway through chewy grains. A grin tugged.
The drone's gyro stabilised, focusing on a pool cupped in the sa's heart. Water? No—liquid mana, thin enough to shimr like rcury under breeze. Rainbow ripples slid across the surface, distorting reflections of the shards. A Worker dipped a test probe. Purple numbers flickered briefly on its carapace—sample viable.
Mikhailis leaned back, lacing fingers behind his head. Okay. Real talk. The words ford silently on his lips, brow lifting in wonder. Exploring the world—without leaving the couch. He inhaled, letting dusty sa air he couldn't sll fill an imagination he could. The nut bar hung forgotten.
A side feed flashed: CRYMBER-B3 ONLINE. He tapped to open a split-screen. Now molten corridors sprawled across the right monitor, lava rivers seething beneath black igneous bridges. The Crymber Ant prowled those bridges, magma glow painting its ice-rimd gauntlets in violent oranges. Every footstep lted a thumbprint into the stone, only for frost to snap-freeze the glassy surface behind it. Each breath it vented ca out half fire, half snow.
"Look at you, hot-and-cold hero,"
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