Chapter 34: “How to Prove You Aren’t Just Warming That Seat”
While Kerry scouted out the city, Riley patrolled the great forest. There shouldn’t be any monster in the forest that Rare’s group wasn’t aware of, so while they had their pick of owl monsters, Riley was told that if she saw any other flying monster that seemed strong, she should bring it back unharmed. Whenever it didn’t seem necessary to jack into Kerry’s vision, Rare would instead jack into Riley’s to observe what was going on in the forest.
Rare used the queen’s chambers to do this, where she, naturally, sat on a throne. After having the engineers process a rock into the vague shape of a throne, she spread a bunch of pelts from large monsters they’d hunted over it until it wasn’t uncomfortable to sit on anymore. The seat portion was rounded while the back portion leaned back slightly, which helped distribute body weight since there was more contact with the throne’s surface area. It was modeled after the driver’s seat in a car from yesteryear to be comfortable even when used for long periods of time.
Recently, she had even been simply sleeping on the throne whenever she logged out.
Right next to the throne was Sugaru’s bed, which was basically where she produced ants. As soon as they were born, they were taught how to access their inventories, as well as friend chat if they were commanders, then assigned to squads.
In general, as ant nests grew, they would expand their living areas. That meant they had to obtain more supplies in order to support all the ants in the nest. As far as Rare’s group went, since they didn’t have any larvae or pupae, it was easier to manage than real ants would be, but that also meant that as the scale of their operations increased, they had to turn the entire area of the great forest into their hunting grounds in order to keep up with the number of mouths to feed. That was why they had aggressively taken over the forest.
Since they were managing it like a giant farm, some of the monsters and wild animals were actually more populous than before. Then again, those monsters probably didn’t realize that they were being raised in that manner.
<Boss, I’m back.>
While she was jacked into Riley’s vision and hearing and vicariously enjoying her exploration of the forest, Kerry contacted her via friend chat. After her normal vision and hearing returned, she saw that Kerry was back in the queen’s chamber. She was wearing a full set of Rabbit Leather Armor.
“Haha, what’s with that armor? Nah, it doesn’t look weird. You do look like a proper sellsword, at least.”