As my conscience begins to skip back into gear, I start to feel the familiar but still immense headache that comes with being stabilized or whatever happens while I am out. After an indeterminate amount of time of painful headache, I ask one of the nearby drones how long I had been out for. Once they pull over a tablet, they respond that I had been online for around six hours.

Nodding to myself and sending the drone off back to their work, I move to order up a new vessel before remembering that I should make a new design for it. After a few moments of fiddling around with the modification station, I eventually opt for a vessel with considerably more armor which apparently were also less conductive to combat scorpion shots and the likes. I also decided to throw in magnetic boots too, seeing not much reason not to.

Ordering the new vessel along with a couple back ups for when this happens again, I remembered that I had lost my blast shield during the fight so I ordered one as well. With all of those in the works, I began floating over to the mole colony before I spotted my leas hound and Paisleigh wandering around the factory.

Floating over to the hounds, my lead hound spots me and begins to stand straight while Paisleigh looks at my lead hound with a confused expression. "Why are you standing like that? He's not here is he?"

Huh, I guess Paisleigh can not see my floating form. I suppose that makes sense, seeing that she is not directly connected to me. I wait until my lead hound finishes explaining to Paisleigh before asking my lead hound for a SITREP on the mole colony.

Using a tablet brought by one of the meandering drones, my lead hound explains that they had managed to take down the worm after I had gone offline. Unfortunately, due to the worm's tunneling and general presence, the caverns had become even more unstable and had actually hit a couple spiders while they worked on the support beams.

The resident moles had also decided to stop drilling entirely in the fear that it may cause a total collapse of the cavern. With all that in mind I excuse myself for a moment before floating back to the drone works and ordering up another group of spiders and sending in the ones still left in the factory.

After one of my new vessel drones finished fabricating, I met back up with my lead hound, Paisleigh, and her two guards, I decide to go back down to the mole colony so I can have a look at the damages in person. Once down there, I see that many piles of loose debris were scattered around the cavern. Walking over to the support beam which was still being worked on by my spiders I saw that it still had over five hours left until completion.

Looking around, I decided to try and help a bit by stocking up the piles of metal plates and other such construction materials and passing them to waiting spiders. This seemed to speed up the process by a small margin but every little bit counts.

As the work went on, I began turning out everything and let my mind wander around for a while. Eventually my mind runs into the string of thoughts revolving around MAI and how they had not attacked in a little while. I thought that they had been mustering a larger force but I ruled that scenario out as there would have been plenty of time for that.

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Another answer is that they were looking for a suitable target but if they wanted to, they could topple over the garrison at the warehouse outpost with minimal effort. However it does not have any particular strategic advantage aside from the few metals stored there and maybe denying me the ability to fabricate forces in that region but it is far away from the battlefield and thus not efficient to move them to the front when I could just produce some at the water treatment plant.

As those things amble about in my head, I do not immediately notice the light rumbling around me until a small rock clicks off my head. Preparing for what could be a big crumble, I scoop up a few spiders nearby me before bolting it over to the cover of a nearby building. Placing them down in the relative safety which the building's roof provides, I instead ran back out towards the few spiders who had not managed to get down the beam before the rocks began to fall.

Dozens of small rocks clicked off my metal shell like raindrops which became more and more numerous as I ran. When I eventually reached the support beam, the torrent of rocks was becoming more and more of a problem as the rocks seemed to increase in size until they began causing small indents in some of my less armored joints. Picking the last of the spiders, I shielded them with the bulk of my body and dashed back to cover.

I managed to make it back to the buildings without sustaining anything more debilitating than the earlier mentioned dents, although there were a multitude of close calls and near misses which likely would have caused at least small gashes in my armor. Not daring to go back while the rocks were still falling, I let myself rest as some of my spiders started the process of fixing the dents on me and a few of the spiders who got caught by a stray rock.

As the rockfall began to slow, I got a notification from one of my scout rats that they were spotting MAI drones gathering a good distance away from the water treatment facility. Calling over my lead hound and Paisleigh, I bid the elder mole farewell along with my spiders before making it back to the subway train station. Hopping on the train and onto a seat, I swap my vision for the scout rat who had sighted the MAI activity.

Soon enough, my eyes adjusted to its new surroundings before my host began focusing its vision towards the large group of drones who were assembling. From the looks of it, the drones were grouping up inside a large building, perhaps an office building or a hospital. Well whatever it was, its walls were blocking my line of sight on how many drones were rallied there. From the guard count, I could see around a baker's dozen drones all looking around for any sign of trouble.

Checking the territorial map, I see that this was around a half hour away from my water treatment outpost. I order my scout rat squad to keep tabs on the enemy formation and to alert me when they begin to move. Slipping back out of the rat scouts' vision, I float over to my water treatment outpost.

Once there, I began counting up their garrison which came out to be a sizable force. Accounting for the attack force, the total drone count came out to around two dozen hornets with another wing of five EMP variants, about three dozen various ground drones, a wing of vultures, a half dozen scorpions, and a whole host of repair spiders.

Ordering all of my drones into high alert, I begin having the spiders begin to rig all of the nearby buildings with all manner of traps in preparation of the imminent battle. Ranging from spikey pitfalls supplied by some of the hornets' extra ammo to large concrete chunks rigged to drop onto unsuspecting drones.

Ordering some firebettles since they did well against the termites last time I was interrupted by a message pinging me. Opening it up, the message warned me that the enemy formation has begun to advance towards my outpost.

Well then, let's hope this preparation is enough.