The Last Guardian

Part 8 escalation

It had been three days since the start of the war if-if you could even call it that. The biological ants had proven to be the superior combatants. The armor of even their copper worker units seemed to be relatively decent enough to block glancing blows and their pincers were sharp enough to function as makeshift blades. They also had the bonus of numbers on their side. The only reason they struggled against Austin was he had superior fififi-repower that rendered their natural advantages mute. Add in some decent intelligence and the enemies fell in droves. Only to drag as many of their dead back as possible and return again and again and again, they-hey even succeeded at dragging back a few of the Ant corpses. As the number of dead rose on each side it was clear that whatever they were fighting against had some way to rapidly replace lost troops. It didn't make sense that it was able to do this and not be able to overwhelm the ants with numbers. Austin had stepped in with a new larger dragonfly like drone equipped with a harpoon that he used to drag back corpses for the ants. While the ants consume the corpses slowly and probably fed a good chunk of it to-to their queen to make more ants or whatever they did? He'd still hadn't found them or where they were coming from to confirm that. But the refresh rate wasn't nearly as high as whatever was controlling these blasted creatures.

It wasn't long before larger ant variants took to the field only to be met with of all thing's spiky versions of the copper ants. And while at first, they did join in battles instead they had taken to tearing down the trees and eating them. Whatever this was it had an apparent need to harvest more biomass. And Austin had accidentally just given them something that could finally handle the larger flora by siccing the ants on them.

It-it was not unnoticed by Austin that the war was not going well for the ants. So, Austin started stepping in where he could his Flyers would take on the enemy's collection units using their harpoons to drag corpses back into the ant's territory. He was just fire support at this point but the enemy of my enemy and all. B-but it didn't help the ants through another invasion attempt at him and he had to gun them down. In the end, it was just fewer bodies to throw at the enemy and all. He chucked their corpses down to the cavern below hoping they'd make use of them. It's not like he needed them at the moment for more metal.

While he was still working on increasing his own industrial complex. He had devoted every spare scrap of resource he could to building new beetles, more of his own mechanical ants with multiple new combat variants including a mobile shield platform. And more combat oriented dragonfly drones mos-mostly focusing on the dragonfly drones. While The Beatles were most likely the most effective combat unit in his current arsenal. He needed to continue to provide air support if he didn't want the biological ants to be overrun. It didn't help that the enemy's combat Flyers had figured him out and were starting to pick on his drones. It had been close to a full week now and Austin was having to send out escort drones to fight off air to air incursions on his resource runs. Not that the ants were really making use of the stuff he brought back. At this point, it was more about denying his enemies the resources than helping his reluctant allies. As the sheer number of corpses, he piled up for the ant started to rot and while they were steadily working on the pile they just couldn't keep up.

The larger iron Ant guards hadn't had any casualties yet. Though they had a few close calls. More than one of which Austin had to provide fire support to try and keep whatever this was from getting its hands on their corpses. He wasn't quite sure how or what this thing was, but it had figured out how to make its own version of the copper ants after getting its hands on just a few of their bodies. And Austin didn't even want to think about what would happen if they managed to get ahold of any of the more powerful variants. Like the iron and zzzzinc ones he had seen so far. He honestly wouldn't be surprised if the ants still had a few cards hidden but those two were bad enough as it was.