I moved my claw delicately as I combed through the bundled layers of Octavia's web, discovering more and more foreign objects. Leaves were the most common, but I also saw clumps of moss, lichen, and other dried plant material that looked like it might have once been part of a tumbleweed.

"You seem bothered by this," said Octavia.

"You're not bothered by it?" I asked.

"Why would I?" she said. "The ants didn't get through the web. They only got as far as the third layer. I still have multiple extra safety layers."

"But they're getting closer," I said.

"Wrong," she said. "The first time, they only got as far as the third layer. This time, same thing. They're not making progress."

"You said that they've been trying new things," I reminded her. "That means that they've been acquiring more information."

"But having more information hasn't done them any good," she said. "Like I said, they haven't made any progress."

I sighed. "Some kinds of progress aren't incremental," I said. "Sometimes, technological and scientific progress moves forward at a gradual pace: you can predict what computer chips will look like in a few years by looking at how they've evolved over the past few years. Cutting-edge technology figures out how to fit more transistors onto a chip, and they keep getting faster. But what about the invention of the microprocessor, or the integrated circuit, or the first transistor itself? Computers as we know them weren't always a thing. Then, suddenly, they were."

"So there's no way for us to predict them," she said. "Yet you seem very confident in your ability to predict how the ants will advance."

"I'm saying that the fact that we can't predict how they advance is reason enough for caution. Sometimes, when 'overnight success' stories happen, it's usually after some amount of unseen tinkering or experimentation. But this time, we can see the experimentation. And while we don't know what kind of timescale they're operating on, they seem to be adapting quickly."

"I could understand if the ants were bringing weapons or tools," she said. "If they showed up with a dull blade and tried cutting through the web, then maybe there would be some risk of them showing up next week with a shaper blade. But that's not what they're doing. None of this looks like 'progress.' They're just throwing a bunch of stuff at the web and seeing what sticks."

"Hold on," I said. "Say that again."

"They're trying a bunch of random ideas," she said.

"I meant the phrasing," I said. "They 'throw a bunch of stuff at the web and see what sticks.' Isn't that literally what they're doing? Doesn't that seem…deliberate on their part?"

"It seems random to me," she said.

"You told me earlier that not every part of the web is sticky."

"Yes," she said. "Otherwise I wouldn't be able to walk on it without getting stuck. It's a network of sticky and non-sticky web strands."

"That's a vulnerability," I said. "Suppose you're an ant. You know that the web consists of sticky and non-sticky parts. How do you test the stickiness of a given part? You touch it. But just like you don't test the depth of a pool with both feet, you don't test the stickiness of a web with your own body. You get a rod to measure the depth, or a leaf to measure the stickiness."

"The ants have a lot more than two feet," said Octavia. "So do I. So do you, for that matter."

"It's a metaphor," I said, pretty sure that she had understood my point just fine. "The point is, the ants seem to be learning."

"That learning doesn't seem to have prevented them from throwing hundreds of lives away," she said.

"Yes," I said. "I had the same thought. The panicked way they all rushed the web doesn't square with the deliberate testing suggested by the large number of leaves."

"So much for your theory," said Octavia.

"I don't need to understand the underlying mechanism here to understand that there's danger!" I was caught off guard by the sound of my own voice echoing off the walls of the passageway – I hadn't intended to raise it. I took a deep breath and continued. "When you hear a noise outside, do you wait until you've identified the source of the noise before locking your door?"

"I lock my door as soon as I get home," said Octavia.

"Exactly!" I said. "You lock your door when you get home, even if you're not being pursued, because even the possibility that someone might try to enter your home is enough to warrant protection."

"That's why I put up multiple layers," she said. "If five walls isn't enough for you, I can put more up."

I sighed. "Thank you. I would appreciate that. But my biggest worry is that more web walls might not save us if they can figure out a reliable method for defeating them. When your enemy invents a cannon that can breach your castle walls, the solution isn't to build an additional wall; it's to build a better wall."

"You're talking as if this is something that you already know a lot about," said Octavia.

"I'm mean, I'm not an expert in medieval siege defenses, but…"

"No, not about that," she said. "I mean, maybe you shouldn't talk like the foremost expert on what my webs can and can't handle until you've seen all of them. You said something about how 'ideas are tested by observation,' or something like that, right? Maybe, before you share any more of your ideas, you should spend more time observing."

"Fair point. How many more of these tunnels are there to clear out?"

"There are three tunnels total where they've been trying to get through," she said. "This is our second. So after this, one more."

"I'm glad it's only three," I said. "And you're right, I clearly know less about things down here than I thought I did. I had no idea that your lair had so many points of intersection with the ant territory."

I refrained from speaking further while Octavia finished things up in the Sparkling Vault tunnel, replacing her web walls and tossing me a steady supply of ant remains (which I began eating with her blessing). She was done before I had gotten even close to devouring the ant remains, and she began skittering back to the central chasm. "Do you mind leaving the vittles for now?" she asked. "We can come back for dinner later."

"Fine by me," I said, following after her. "We're good to just leave these here?"

"Yes, it's fine for a short while," she said.

The next tunnel she took me to — which was below the Sparkling Vault — was far more nondescript. "What do you call this tunnel?" I asked.

"Pebbleway," she said. There wasn't any mystery as to where the name came from: the tunnel didn't have any features more notable than the pebbles that seemed more numerous closer to the "contested zone" where Octavia's webs on one side blocked ant passage, and a wall of rocks blocked non-ant passage from the other direction. In contrast to the Sparkling Vault, where the rocks had been tightly packed, some of the rocks here looked looser. That gave me an idea.

"Hey Octavia," I said. "Mind letting me test the strength of that rock wall that the ants have?"

"For what purpose?" she asked.

"Well, if I can move those rocks, we could claw back some territory from them. You could advance your front line."

Octavia thought about the idea for a second. "Fine," she said. "Just…try not to mess up the webs."

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I did my best not to ruin her handiwork as I walked up to the rock wall, though 'my best' wasn't enough to keep me from making a mess of the webs that covered the floor immediately in front of the rocks. I mumbled an apology as I tested the rocks, tapping them with my claw. I tried to pry one of the rocks out, but it was surprisingly solidly lodged in place. "It seems like there's some kind of binding agent here," I said.

Octavia nodded. "Clay, I think."

"Seems that way," I agreed. "Now that I know what it is, it makes sense why there's less of it down here than in the Sparkling Vault tunnel."

Octavia looked at me in a way that I couldn't identify as either curious or indifferent, so I decided to err on the side of overexplaining myself. "There's water up there," I said. "That's why there's more plant life, I assume. That's probably also why the ants had leaves that they could use when approaching from their side. And the wetness probably makes the clay more abundant there."

"They could have carried the clay," she said.

"True," I said. "That would explain why they were able to cement the rocks here, even though it's relatively dry. But…"

I scratched at it near the corner, and little bits of the clay seemed to flake off. "I think I might be able to scratch through this. Do you mind if I give it a try?"

"How long is this going to take?" asked Octavia.

"Won't know until I try," I said.

She hesitated, then nodded. "Go for it."

I worked for several minutes, making slow, incremental progress – bigger emphasis on 'slow.'' There was material flaking away — I was making some progress — but it was so gradual that it might very well be more than an hour before I managed to dislodge a rock. I could tell that Octavia was beginning to grow antsy. At first, she had decided to mimic me and tried her own claw as a scraper, but she had seemingly grown frustrated with the lack of progress and had given up. After maybe half an hour, she said, "Do you think you'll be good down here if I leave for a bit? I'll stop by periodically to check on you."

I considered my current position: I was right up against the rocks that served as the edge of the ants' territory, with no webs between me and them. But a good chunk of the tunnel behind me was covered in web that would serve as some protection if I escaped past them, and if she was only gone a few minutes…

Octavia seemed to sense my hesitation, and she took a layer of web and draped it over the parts of the rock wall that I wasn't currently working on, covering the crevices that seemed like they would be likely access points for ants.

"Okay, that's probably good enough," I said.

The next half hour passed in silence: I slowly scraped away at the wall, and Octavia spent most of her time in a different tunnel while still making frequent trips back to check on me. By the time Octavia made her sixth check on me, I decided that this project, if it was going to work at all, might take upwards of an entire day: progress was getting incrementally slower the longer I went on, and it wasn't as if it had been speedy going from the start. It occurred to me that this was one of the occasions when perhaps stronger claws might have been useful. I wasn't sure if the claw skill tree had options like 'jackhammer claw' or other things that might have been conducive to boulder-busting, but picking away with my level 1 claws hardly seemed like an efficient way to go about things.

Octavia seemed to sense my feeling of defeat, and asked, "Ready to take a break for dinner?"

"Yeah," I said. I followed her back to the Sparkling Vault, where the remains of dozens of ants had been laid out by Octavia in my absence.

"These are mine," she said, gesturing to a batch she kept in the corner. "I'm going to eat them here. Would you like to take yours to the Vault floor and eat them there?"

"Why shouldn't I eat them up here on the ledge with you?" I asked.

"Because I'm eating up here," she said.

"Exactly," I said. "Shared meal time. Social eating."

"You haven't seen me eat, have you?" she said.

I thought back over the past several days. "No, I haven't."

"Do you know how spiders digest their prey?"

"Uh…" Suddenly, I had a pretty good idea of why Octavia had pre-designated several as 'hers,' and what she might have been doing when I was digging in the pebbleway tunnel. "When you came back up here awhile ago, were you…pre-digesting them? Like, they've been soaking in your…bile for awhile now?"

"I don't puke on my food," she said, sounding offended. "It's not bile. It's a digestive enzyme that I secrete in my mouth and deliberately inject."

Technically not vomiting, but 'expelling a fluid with digestive enzymes through your feeding hole' seemed to have a lot in common with barf. Understandable, then, why Octavia might not consider meal time a social activity. "At the risk of my own appetite," I said, "I think I'd like to watch you eat, if you'll permit it. For science."

She gave me an odd look, but didn't object. "Let me know if you change your mind," she said, and she began sucking the innards out of one of the ants. There were probably more delicate ways to put it, but no euphemism could escape the fact that she was sucking the liquified guts out of the ants she had killed, ants whose innards had apparently been marinating in her digestive juices during my futile and extended digging session.

Surprisingly, none of it made me lose my appetite. Maybe disgust sensitivity was one of those things you lost when you were a 'carrion feeder' who was used to spewing breath that was literally 'noxious.' I watched her in fascination at first, but it seemed impolite to stare at her as she ate, so I set about eating the ants that she had set aside for me.

Even with Octavia taking her share of the spoils, there was enough for me to raise my satiety all the way to 100% and still had food to spare. I pointed to three remaining ants and asked, "Does this stuff keep?"

"You should eat it now if you're going to eat it at all," she said. "There's not really a place to keep it where it won't go bad."

I was a carrion feeder, so it didn't make as much difference to me, but 'don't leave food out to spoil' was a fair rule for a host to have for her guests. I sat, digesting the ants I had already eaten, looking at the uneaten ants in front of me. 'Leftovers.' And, as I had so many times during my life as a human, having a full stomach was somehow not enough to prevent me from going for one more bite.

[Satiety: 101%. You are bloated! Currently suffering 5% penalty to all stats.]

I laughed. Octavia looked at me with obvious concern — as far as she could tell, I was laughing at nothing — so I explained. "I ate past the point of comfort."

"Ah," she said. "It's not good to do too much of that. Less efficient. Less comfortable, too. But sometimes you need to store up food for future days. I do it often enough."

"It's good to know my stomach capacity goes to eleven," I said. "Or, above 100%. I assume I'll be back down to below 100% before too long."

"You will," she said.

Octavia finished eating, and with her mouth no longer occupied, she now seemed more inclined to make conversation. "Earlier, I said that you should wait until seeing all of the tunnels to make a judgment on my webs. Now that you've seen all of the contested areas, I'm open to hearing what you have to say. Especially what you said about making 'better walls.'"

"Did I say something about making better walls?" I asked.

"You were making an analogy," she said. "When the enemy rolls up to your castle with a cannon, you don't build more walls, you build better walls. What does that even look like?"

"To extend the analogy," I said, "you replace your castle with a bastion. Or you come up with different tactics."

"What's a bastion?" said Octavia. "Aside from, well, a strong defensive fortress."

"Fortress is exactly the right word," I said. "For one thing, there are ways you can angle a wall to make it less vulnerable to cannon fire: a glancing blow will always be less damaging than hitting a flat surface directly. But fort design also includes things like earthwork. You dig ditches. Or do the opposite, and build ramparts out of earth."

"Like the ants build tunnel blockades out of rock."

"Good comparison," I said. "Their fortifications seem a lot sturdier than yours. No offense."

"None taken," she said with a tone indicating that maybe some offense had, in fact, been taken.

"You've got a much harder job than they do," I said, trying to reassure her. "Ants are tiny compared to you, so they can fit into smaller cracks. It's much easier for them to block you out than it is for you to block them out. And that's even before accounting for the fact that they outnumber you, thousands to one. They've got more —" I struggled for a species-neutral alternative to 'human resources.' "Collectively, they have a lot more biomass."

"Biomass," she repeated.

"Yeah," I said. "It means — "

"I think I understand the meaning based on context," she said. "It's just an odd word to use. 'Biomass.' Why not say something like 'muscle?' That means the same thing, right?"

"Sort of," I said. "At least, in this context. But biomass includes things that aren't muscle. All living organisms have biomass. Those leaves, for example. That counts as biomass."

Then, an idea occurred to me. Those ants collectively have a lot of biomass. "Hey, Octavia. Those ants. There's so many of them. We've dealt with hundreds, and I assume there's thousands more. Where do you think they come from?"

"Do you want me to explain reproduction to you?" she said. "Because I'm pretty sure you're the one who gave me a lesson on the specifics of ant reproduction a few days ago."

I shook my head. "What I mean is, there's a lot of ants, which means a lot of ant biomass. How do they sustain that? Where do they get all their food? I didn't see them much on the surface. They did make short work of a tortoise one time, but apart from that, they seemed remarkably absent on the surface. I'm tempted to assume they must have an underground food source."

"They do," she said.

"So, what is it?" I asked.

"I think they gather food from the Shimmergrove. I see them there sometimes."

I waited for Octavia to elaborate and explain what, exactly, the Shimmergrove was. Her silence reminded me that it was not in her nature to volunteer information that I hadn't requested. I said, "Tell me more."

"Maybe it's better if I show you," she said. "In fact, I'm overdue for a visit. You can help me gather some food there. If I preserve it, it will keep better than the ant remains. It makes for a good emergency food source. But I think that should wait until tomorrow."

"Why?" I asked.

"We just had a fight with the hyenas several hours ago," she said. "I'm guessing you used a lot of energy. You should get some rest and recharge before we go there. So should I."

"Sounds like you're expecting a fight," I said.

"I prefer to avoid fighting if possible," she said. "But the Shimmergrove is not a friendly place."