Dungeon Life

Chapter Two-Hundred Fifty-Four

Queen

The ant scion wonders if maybe she should step out of her lab more often. Working with the catkin on the way gave her so much information to work with! If only she could have another month to really iterate on the armor designs… but no, the Emperor was right in striking now.

Prepare too much, and opportunity will pass you by. Jumping too quickly is just as dangerous, but she suspects the Emperor was closer to the former than the latter. But oh, how that preparation has borne fruit!

She had been aware for some time that Fluffles was working on a variation of the Voice’s Butterfly Effect, but even she couldn’t have guessed at the complexity of the final product! Helping command the vast energies was, in some ways, like commanding her personal ants, and in other ways it was so much more.

She would love nothing more than to explore the technique and new possibilities, but there is more pressing business to attend to. The Emperor wages war, so she can’t just sit in her mobile lab and tease out the secrets of reality. She needs to contribute, even if he doesn’t demand it. Especially because he doesn’t demand it!

She and Thing work in tandem with the Magmyrm, working to keep alive whoever the volcanic ants bring back from the battle. She still isn’t so sure about healing the enemy, but the Emperor was clear, even without the Voice needing to spell it out: Any who are brought in will be healed. If you can’t commit to that, get out of the medics area. It’s rare for him to be so vehement with something, so she is willing to bow to his unusual wisdom. It’s shown itself invaluable before, so she has no reason to doubt it will show its worth again by the end of all this.

Pheromones fly through the air as treatments are administered, some giving diagnoses, and some giving information of the battle. Honey has her bees everywhere, and while they occasionally get conscripted to help with a particularly-difficult injury, they are mostly here to get information about how the battles are going.

Despite how busy the medical ward is, the fighting is going well. If Queen hadn’t been part of that spell, she would say it’s going impossibly well. The delvers are outnumbered approximately three to one, even with the defecting townsfolk on their side. The counter-ambushes went exceptionally well, with the delvers either handling the attacks on their own, or with the help of the wyrms.

The fighting in the town is the messiest, and she wonders just how bad it would be without Murphy’s Law aimed at their foe. While it is not a perfect protection, the misfortunes of battle are certainly weighing more on the enemies than her allies.

Though that doesn’t mean her allies are immune to it. The magmyrm have brought in over a dozen bodies now, along with tales of their own misfortunes. That Crystal Shield acolyte was distracted and never saw the flying blade that took his life. This adventurer spotted an ambush early enough to warn her allies, but not early enough to save herself. The dwellers, though, hurt Queen the most. This ratkin was too good with the compound bow, and the Maw’s clergy decided to destroy him, even at the cost of their lives. That tarantulakin held a narrow tunnel while civilians could escape, buying time for backup to keep them safe and avenge her.

Her only solace is that the dead were brought in dead. So far, not a single living delver or dweller has entered her ward and been lost. But the fighting is still ongoing, and growing more brutal as the Maw’s forces grow desperate.

She puts her musings aside as more magmyrm rush in, pheromones thick with alarm. Their charge is alive, but they don’t know how much longer that will be the case. She directs them to her personal station, and freezes for a moment when she sees who it is.

Vernew.

The spiderkin is usually so brash and vibrant, it seems so… so wrong to see her so still, even without her having two jagged blades in her chest. Another thick wave of pheromones kicks her out of her thoughts, and she replies with her own. Emperor as her witness, she will not lose her friend this day!

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She embraces her titles, for she is not simply an Alchemist, but also the Wielder of Secret Knowledge. Let Honey horde information, Queen will set each grain of truth as a scalpel for her ants to bear. A bee hordes, an ant uses. She knows spiderkin anatomy. Her compound eyes take in every detail as she orders ants and hands alike.

One lung is certainly punctured, with the other blade being dangerously close to Vernew’s heart. Her ants swarm around the offending weapons, carefully digging away the armor without allowing the blades to move. They’re jagged, serrated. If not removed carefully, they’ll do more damage on the way out. They are also restricting bleeding, so removing them now would be a mistake.

The hands release the latches of the composite clamshell, freeing the two pieces. The holes are wide enough now, allowing the hands to carefully levitate the chestpiece free.

So much ichor. She pushes the thought aside, needing to focus. If Vernew had a true exoskeleton, she’d already be dead. But having actual bones allows for a proper circulatory system, which helps minimize bleeding, no matter how much it might look otherwise.

She orders resin and bandages, as well as potions. This is beyond what a simple healing slime can help with. Her ants carefully enter the wound, her metal-mandibled majors working to blunt the sharp serrations. Her smaller alchemical ants transport potion exactly where it needs to go, carefully bringing vessels back together, knitting lung tissue whole.

The blade near her heart is the easier task, more needing to prevent further damage than actively repair anything. While there are a lot of vessels in and around the beating muscle, her ants are able to navigate far more nimbly than something so large and crude as a scalpel.

The intrusion near her heart is removed first, and even with her ants managing the blood vessels, they could only get to so many of them with the blade still in the wound. She does her best to ignore the splurt of precious fluid, and instead orders the ants back as the hands bring forward the bandage.

She pauses for a brief moment when she sees the bandage, immediately able to tell it’s no ordinary one. She never made special bandages! What is…

Her mandibles twitch in an ant smile as she realizes what it is. She orders it applied to the wound, and resin applied as well, even as the events of the bandage’s existence play through her mind.

She and Thing were not the only ones working on the medical supplies, back in the safety of the Emperor's territory. At the time, she thought Grim was simply helping in a more mundane manner. His size and simply having hands were already an immense help in making bandages. His sanitized scythe made cutting them easier, and he could seal them in wax without worrying about burning his fingers.

But of course the Groundsreaper would help in his own subtle way. Queen wonders if other healers would apply a bandage so suffused with death magic, even with all the fate and life magic in it, too. Other healers don’t truly understand what infections are, and so wouldn’t understand how important a little bit of death is to ensure proper life.

Other healers probably wouldn’t apply resin overtop a bandage, but other healers don’t often work with spiderkin. Even if her chitin isn’t a true exoskeleton like Queen’s, it will still provide an excellent surface to seal with resin, without little things like hairs to make removing it later difficult.

Other healers might not know how a lung is put together, and other healers certainly wouldn’t have the delicate and precise mandibles of her ants to align everything properly. Other healers might be able to just brute force health with raw magic power, but Queen doesn’t have the luxury of having life affinity.

But she has her secret knowledge, and as the Emperor likes to say: knowledge is power. And power is more than just the ability to destroy dangers, but the ability to protect. Her power can save and improve lives, not just end them.

The work is painstaking, but she can’t afford to just slather her friend in healing potions, nor just toss her into a healing slime. The slimes are effective, but they really need all the important pieces to be roughly where they should be, in order to work. The potions are effective, but she only has so much of a supply, even with her ants brewing more as she works. She needs to be efficient.

The blade in Vernew’s lung is finally removed and another bandage applied and resined in place, and a dose of healing potion is administered to help stabilize her friend. Queen would like to do more, but she can’t waste materials. She can already scent more emergency pheromones from magmyrm outside.

Vernew is not going to be the only dire case she deals with today. While she can’t do anything for the ones that arrive too late, she will do her best to not let any slip away that make it to her in time.