If Austin could, he would be glaring at his tactical map. He had a total of six battery powered beetles running around. Two-wo were guarding a supply convoy made up of all his excess tractor beam ants, hauling crates of more supplies to the village. Since he didn't have enough flying units to carry the sheer number of supplies he needed to transfer to the village.
Meanwhile of the other three squads of beetles, one was cur-rrrr-rently trying to take the heat off the biological ants to let them regroup and begin counterattacking. Austin had set them up in turret mode in a particularly open area with solar panels to charge them. With them were nine guard ants, three tractor beams, and two new types of drones. One was a Caterpillar like drone that extended several large wing like solar panels. When they collapsed the wings folded up into the body. However, when fully deployed it could further break apart into connected RC wagons on tank treads that could be extended as needed. Each connected by power cables they’d then deploy a string of solar panels and a charging platform for the ants.
The second was what Austin was calling the fire starter Ant it was the he-avily reused worker ants platform with a sprayer and a small low yield laser. Unlike its counterparts that could fire beams of condensed light hard enough to burn its way clean through flesh, bone, and even metal this one could only heat an object up until it eventually combusted. Which was perfect for his current needs. Most of the turret was just a small bottle of the ethanol spray Austin had been working on. Biofuel it was not-not but it would work as an ignition instead of dragging back the dead bodies for the ants to consume or for the human settlement Austin would pile them up and when the pile got too high he'd make a second pile using it has bait and set fire to the first.
Any new corpses would later be thrown onto that original pile and bur-rrern-ned with the rest. He wasn't sure if they could break down the ash and make more biomass from it but considering it prioritized plant and animal life before other sustenance sources it wasn’t likely. He had spotted several of The Beatles just chewing away at the iron rich soil but most prioritized hunting. So presumably it couldn't make use of it as easily at the very least.
The last of the remaining beetle squads had gone up the valley and would soon be at the edge of signal range but they wouldn't have to pass it thankfully. As soon as they left the valley, they'd be taking a hard turn straight into the hunting territory of the enemy and they would begin making a right nuisance of themselves there. Austin would also be airdropping in reinforcements as they came available.
Meanwhile, the village would soon receive the convoy and begin construction on the needed equipment. prefabricated capacitor banks, additional turrets, and several yards of electrified barbed wire-wire-wire. Since lasers could function as long as they had plenty of power their main issue was ensuring they never ran out. Reactors were useful but he needed as many of them as possible to increase his own power supply so setting one up in the village was problematic at best. Though he'd have to likely do-do it soon if he couldn't finish digging the connection tunnel quickly enough. He had planned to run a power cable down through it and into the town itself. His own capacitor banks were far larger and with his reactors and if push came to shove, he could stop production to increase power to the turrets.
At least that was the plan… If he only had a few more weeks or even a month. He could have started producing ammo again, but he merely needed to locate a source of usable material for the per-propellant part of the bullet. That would have been enough for a noticeable advantage. Till then, Austin was already working on substitutions.
He was designing a prototype version of a hopper fed tension based bolt launcher that hopefully could be mounted on a combat Ant. Along with a sized up version that could be placed inside of a beetle. As well as an improvised rail gun turret that probably would only work on the beetles due to their larger power storage. One of the biggest advantages to the railgun system was its reusable and far smaller ammo. As it would just fire basic ball-all bearings was useful though the power requirement meant it could only get two maybe three shots off before it would have to deploy its solar panel and recharge a good chunk of its battery.
He needed to hurry on that front as he was running out of lenses to make more lasers with so it wouldn't be long before he could no longer mass produce his current guard ants.
By the time the convoy had arrived at the village he had set up the capacitors and additional solar panels to gather more power. Meanwhile, most of these new models were coming out of the fab-fab0-fabrication bays as fast as he could feed them resources. The hopper fed guard ants could fire twenty eight bolts before needing to be refilled. So, in addition, a supply Ant had been designed. Essentially all it was was a guard Ant platform with a small mechanical arm with a weak tractor beam emitter installed inside allowing it to pull and pick up items. Since the bolts were just that bolts, most could be picked up and reused it also held several reloading trays to refill The Hoppers for quick in combat reloads. A squad of five of these new guard ants was partnered with a supply ant and were sent out to hunt.
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The village was starting to look more like a fortress than a town with most of the townspeople having retreated underground leaving only the guards and a few others above ground.
Despite Sophia’s mother's best efforts, Sophia was one of them and in all honesty, her mother was beginning to worry for her daughter. She like many of the villagers knew little of magic. On top of that their town mage was not skilled in Sophia’s type? Category? Or whatever it was called. But even when she was in their little underground room that they had been forced to move into. Sophia kept looking off in the same direction, sometimes she'd glare, sometimes she’d smile, she had even caught her daughter talking to what seemed like thin air. When she’d asked Sophia who she was talking to the reply she got was even more worrying.
“No, I don't think it can hear me. I just hope it does… it's hurt and it's doing so much to try and help us. Even if I can't help, I want to do whatever I can to help… Even if it's just trying to reach out. Because, well it's kind of scary you know. it's more… Just more than anything I've ever known, and it's hurt so bad. What could hurt it and how or why? I have so many questions I just can't get it to hear me and despite that why is it forcing itself to do all this to help us? The underground structures. All those weird stinger thingies that are helping the guards. Reinforcing the walls. Building that trebuchet thingy for the guards, and all those metal bugs of it’s that it keeps using to try and fight off the dungeons monsters. The worst thing seemed to get for us the more it seems to upset it and the more it tries to help. I don't know why I just wish I could get it to talk to me.”
As if all this wasn't enough, Sophia’s health was beginning to be affected as well. The constant connection to whatever she was sensing made it hard for her to get and stay asleep. She would bolt up in the middle of the night and look off in a direction or jump at odd intervals. Thankfully whenever she would get too tired the lunar moth would begin glowing and she would finally get some restful sleep.
Austin was not happy he had been trying to increase his numbers and presence in the valley. To the point he had even put his old cutter model ants on to the battlefield. He would have normally recycled them to make new guard ants but their laser arrays weren't powerful enough and the lasers required special types of focusing lenses in order to function. These lenses were highly popular for short range or personal arms for the fact that they required little maintenance and only power to supply it.
Most spacefaring nations that humanity had came across had preferred plasma base weaponry. As so long as it didn't lose containment it could travel great distances before burning out. Though when it did finally lose containment usually by hitting the side of a ship or other obstacle it did so rather violently in a very high yield explosion. Humans however had always relied on a combined arms doctrine and while they did have combat lasers for ships they were usually remarketed as mining equipment or salvaging equipment. The only times they were actually used on military vessels were in breaching craft small vessels that could basically lamprey other ships for boarding actions.
The biggest controversy and the one that had helped them hold on for as long as they had against the empire. Was there use of kinetics most sentience believed kinetic based weaponry is too slow and impractical to be useful. Austin and most of humanity at the time however heavily disagreed. Most ships that had Shields worked by burning off the energy of plasma discharges or just creating small hard bubbles to block debris impacts. When it detected a larger piece of debris hitting the shield. Shield generators would in general just increase power to try and block it. However high powered kinetics like railgun rounds that were traveling close to 1/4 of the speed of light were absolute havoc on Shields. as the shield generators would quickly overload themselves trying to stop something that could not be stopped. Before the slug would penetrate and usually bury itself either in the ship's armor or internals. Though it wasn't too uncommon with smaller ships and larger guns for it to over penetrate and pass right through.
Austin's former gunner specialty was to pull off what he would call pool shots using high penetration shells to hit multiple targets in one go. This is what made humanity a threat while they weren't to particularly advanced on the galactic stage their combined arms doctrine and capability to make use of it in highly effective ways made them a threat.
Unfortunately, even with an advantage in doctrine and in Austin's opinion superior weaponry could not make up for being massively outnumbered and out technically classed in almost every other category. So Austin had learned early on how to take full advantage of having superior firepower even if it lacks superior numbers and despite him now having to turn his attention to ground based combat some things just never seem to to change. At least this time he had the technological advantage and numbers finally on his side while he was still dramatically outnumbered with the ants acting as a distraction he was beginning to notice a sizeable decrease in the number of enemy forces.
Well, that was until now because on the tactical map, he watched as the valley wall crumbled re-revealing a massive for lack of a better word hive like structure. As if a beehive had busted open and from each cone hundreds of the freaking scrap shell beetles. (Austin having finally managed to figure out their name a few days prior.) Poured through in mass to the point they would have blocked out the sky if whatever had been causing that weird nonmoving storm hadn't decided to move in as if falling the swarm into the valley.
“Well shit.”