Where the low-quarter of Karzurkul was dead, bleached bones, stripped of marrow, the mid-quarter was very much alive. Alive in the way a still-rotting corpse is alive. Festering with maggots and corpse flies that picked at the putrefying remains. Bulbous urvai drone workers skittered past with bloated bellies, some teaming up to drag the corpses of their fallen brethren and other larger prey. Unlike when it was in a larval stage and purely herbivorous, the warrior stage of the swarm did not discriminate when it came to food. From the lowliest patch of mushrooms to the flesh of unlucky chellicoi larvae and the carapaces of their own warriors, anything was fair game.
Walking through the feeding frenzy of a hive on a war footing was like walking through a living nightmare. The air buzzed with spitters, lanky insects the size of a grown man, with translucent wings the size of their whole body and sloshing sacks of acid for a thorax. Slayer warriors, standing even taller, with stony, armoured carapaces and eight vicious, downward scything limbs attached to a chest as thick as two dwarves. Sentry warriors scuttled low to the ground, ubiquitous, mandibles twitching with clicks only the hive understood.
Talia felt a spike of worry nag at her focus as the density of their unwitting foes increased. The drain on her mana didn’t exactly increase exponentially, it was less drastic than that, but she could only handle so many, that she knew for sure. Around her, the delvers pressed close, crowding up to her in a tight diamond formation with her in the centre. Stretching out her mindsense, Talia kept a close eye on her Core, justifying the expenditure with the fact that if they ran into a large enough group of urvai, her Core would be drained dry.
And then we’re all dead. Of course, right on cue...
Talia focused, picking apart the twisting mass of minds ahead of them. They swarmed over each other, thoughts flickering as some unseen communication prompted them to act.
BOOM—Crack
Further into the city, metal and stone shrieked as a building collapsed. The ground shook. Delvers sank low, bracing themselves. A slayer staggered midstride, myriad spiked legs scrambling for balance under its rocky carapace, stumbling closer to the group of humans traipsing through the periphery of the hive. Even after a half-dozen such instances, Talia’s comrades still tensed. They half-drew weapons from their sheathes and nocked arrows, prepared for a sudden fight. But the slayer simply swept its compound eyes across them confusedly before skittering deeper into the mid-quarter. Powerful legs cut notches into the stone road as it walked. The nest ahead of them continued its diligent work unimpeded. Urvai were too stupid for things like fear or dread. The buzz of activity so clustered could only mean one thing.
The delvers did not grumble or complain. The psionic link remained silent as they backtracked, but Talia could sense the general undercurrent of fear in the group. A terrible understanding that their lives were not in their own hands, and instead relied on a power they did not understand, which seemed both miraculous and likely to fail at any time.
The group weaved its way through cramped alleyways, shifting around calcified mounds of milky-white rock. The blockages cut off entire streets, drone workers swarming around them and adding their own loads of liquified stone. Urvai treated cities like they would any other cave system, blocking off tunnels in seemingly random patterns that only the hive understood. It made the already maze-like city even more labyrinthine. Claustrophobia was an uncommon trait among most sapients, but the primal feeling of being trapped was omnipresent here. They’d already had to backtrack multiple times, cutting through buildings and courtyards to find new paths forward. Large, open boulevards were useless. Already sparse on the edges of the quarter, and clogged with more urvai than Talia could hope to influence.
As they finally got to the intersection, one of the humans —Cassidy, Talia thought her name was, the one who’d called her soulless in the shelter— moaned across the telepathic link.
Cassidy shot Talia a look that could contain nothing but bile and venom, even if she couldn't see it. As if it was the psion’s fault that they were in this predicament. Talia supposed that, in a roundabout way, Cassidy was right.
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Which did nothing to change that predicament of course.
The intersection was blocked.
A mound of white stone bulged organically in the centre of the road as drones dropped off their payloads, cutting off their retreat. The group was trapped.
Both suggestions were risky. Buildings, especially in the mid-quarter onward, presented their own dangers. The denizens of Karzurkul had left traps behind in their flight. Both arcanic and mundane. So long as the mana lasted in the enchantments, and the mechanisms hadn’t decayed, the delvers would be at risk of gouts of flame and friction fields, or the ever-typical crushing trap and many more besides. It was one of the main reasons arcanists and engineers were brought along when delving. They’d been lucky thus far, but all it took was one wrong step, one missed inscription, and they were in for a world of hurt.
Maker’s Plaza, on the other hand, was near the centre of the quarter, the endpoint for three large boulevards and half a dozen smaller streets. They’d have to move slowly, taking to backstreets and tiny alleyways. One errant patrol, or stumbling on the centre of the hive, and Talia’s shroud would suck her dry of mana like a squeezed waterskin.
Calisto reacted to none of the suggestions, her cowl scanned across the street, back straight, hand on her mace. Talia let the delvemaster take the reins, favouring neither approach, focusing on cycling as well as she could while maintaining her focus on the shroud spell.
Privately to Talia, she posed a question.
Talia considered the proposition, running the variables in her head. The bottom floors of most of the buildings had cores of hard granite at their center, with that dark alloy covering it, three centimetres thick.
Calisto hummed telepathically, her mind awash with frustration.
As the group moved toward the selected building Talia thought it over. Every tactic she considered came down to the same thing: there were too many urvai for her to hide them from. Wracking her brain, Talia remembered a story from the Three-Month War. One her father often told when he got into his cups, mourning the friends he’d lost to the bugs.
It would work. But they’re already on the brink of breaking. It might also just be shooting ourselves in the foot.
In Talia’s crystal-clear mind, the calculus was obvious. What was one life in the face of a dozen, no, hundreds of thousands? The issue was that she got the distinct sense no one else would see it that way.
Puzzling over how to frame her suggestion, Talia bit the arrowhead and just told her. The pair paced about, keeping Talia’s shroud over the rest of the group as they searched what seemed to be a large workshop for an exit into the next street over. When her story was done, Calisto’s hand was clenched tight around her mace head, and she stared off at a wall where a set of shelves held tools that had long since crumbled to dust and bits of rust.
They reached the final dead end in the cavernous, four-story building. There were mutters of trying across the street, but the race against the hourglass pressed on them all. They’d all been told of the constraints of Talia’s shroud. They all knew time was limited.
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In the end, they checked one more building, freezing when a patrol of a dozen slayers and their sentry escorts lumbered down the street, before calling it quits. Talia’s Core was down to a quarter of its capacity, and her mind was beginning to fray under the strain of both cycling and maintaining the shroud. They had another hour, an hour and a half, max, and the trek back to the secondary nest would take at least half to a third of that time.
They were running out of time.
Calisto called across the link.
Silence was in short supply in the middle of a swarm of urvai, but somehow the delvers managed it. The link made it a palpable thing, one that intruded on all of their thoughts like an infestation.
The delvers glanced at each other, unsettled. Waiting. Watching. Wondering who amongst them would be the martyr. Colum began to raise his hand, only for it to get slapped down by a furious Yasida.
This certainly isn’t how Orvall made it sound in his stories.
In that tale, her father’s brother-in-arms had rushed forward at once, saving the entire squad without a second thought. Once more, Talia was reminded that delvers were not soldiers. They were scavengers first and foremost. Desperate men and women risking their lives to better their lot. That guiding principle did not exactly lend itself to selfless sacrifice, even for the greater good.
In the end, Calisto was right. One of Lored’s kin stepped forward, reaching up and snapping half of his delver tag off before handing it to his clansman.
Talia stepped forward, painfully aware of the drain on her mana, and that their next steps would be no less costly.