Dahlia wakes with a startled flail, tipping over in her chair. Her head bounces off the floor. The scalpel and chisel she’d strapped around her wrists fly off and nearly stab into her eyes. Outside, in the living room, her father is awake and prowling—she can see his shadow lumbering around through the slit under the bedroom door, and she clamps her hands over her mouth, refusing to breathe.
This is a nightmare again.
This isn’t real.
Her father doesn’t have four arms, two antennae, and a needle for a tongue.
He isn’t a bug.
So she stays on the ground, eyes squeezed shut, clutching her knees to her chest until the sun rises—her father stops walking around and returns to lying down on the living room sofa.
…
… The nightmare is over.
Time for Bug-Slaying School again.
- Scene from Sina Household past
----------------------------------------
… Tonight, Dahlia didn’t have a dream.
She didn’t have a nightmare.
When her eyelids fluttered open and she found her hands still pressing the wad of bandages over her left eye, the only thing she felt was hunger, and her throat screaming out for water.
The night was still dark out, moonlight still bright over the hole in the ceiling. Her blanket and mantle and chestplate and bracers were heavy on her body, but the moment she tried to sit up straight, she discovered it was really just the blanket—her limbs, for the most part, had regained their strength over however many hours she’d spent passed out on the sofa. The gnawing aches in her chest were also gone, or at the very least, they’d changed in nature. While before they’d been unbearable like daggers ripping through her heart, things were much less… cloudy, now. She could think more or less as well as her usual, and when she even managed to formulate a complete thought in her head, trying to remember what’d happened–
[There is bread and water on the table, nine steps in front of you. Be careful not to step on the few pieces of shrapnel Amula failed to clean during your crash landing into the orphanage.]
The last thing she wanted to hear was Eria’s voice, but she couldn’t deny it was just a little comforting hearing a familiar voice rather than an unfamiliar one.
She was still alive.
She was still Dahlia Sina.
She had yet to turn into a giant black bug herself.
… Thank you, Eria.
I’m… I’m sure you have a lot of things you want to ask, but–
[First, fill your stomach and quench your thirst.]
[In truth, now that I have full access to all of your memories, I have very little I want to ask.]
[Please take better care of yourself.]
…
There wasn't anything she could say to that, so she mumbled and practically rolled off the sofa in the same instant; thankfully she didn't land on anything sharp, but her muscles still ached a fair bit and her legs felt like jelly. Hesitantly, she thought about just toughing out her growling stomach until morning, but seeing the hard bread sitting on the dimly lit table just a few steps in front of her made her feel even more hungry—so she drew to her feet, prying the sticky bandage off her left eye so she wouldn’t have to hold onto it forever.
She blinked. Her vision was still intact. Now, the logical part of her wanted to sit back down and tend to the scar properly—surely there were plenty of medicinal equipment in the orphanage to at least deal with a small wound—but the moment she got close to the table, her bristles tingled with the ‘taste’ of bread.
She couldn’t stop herself from sitting on the table, devouring everything the seniors had left out for her. ‘Bland’ was the word she’d used to describe the mixture of bread and water mixing in her mouth, but… she was more hungry than she realised. Not that she would’ve complained either way.
… Where are the two of them, anyways?
As she ate, she stole a few glances about the giant common area and spotted no sleeping Amula, no meditating Jerie. The only firefly lamps that were lit were the ones around her sofa. Eria probably would’ve injected her with something to enhance her vision if she hadn’t preemptively put a stop to that; now wasn’t a good time for her to be feeling extra awake. If she could have it, she’d finish her late-night meal and just roll right back over to sleep, but, at the same time… she wondered if the open balcony doors at the end of the room meant something.
Curiosity and worry in equal parts got the better of her, so once she swallowed her last gulp of bread, she made her way over to the balcony.
A few furtive glances left and right, peeking her head out through the doorway, and she spotted the seniors sitting side-by-side on the tiled roofs with their legs dangling off the edge. Their backs were turned towards her, they weren’t talking or doing anything. Both of them held a single bottle of what seemed like alcohol in their hands. She peered past them and bit her lips, noting they were actually three storeys above the streets—paltry heights compared to the fifty metre cliffs she’d leaped off twice by now, but seeing the ground so far below still sent chills down her spine.
Maybe she shouldn’t be out here.
Maybe the seniors just wanted some time to themselves.
Maybe she’d be better off just pretending she hadn’t seen anything–
“If yer not going to sleep, then just come out here and sit already.”
Jerie turned and waved his bottle at her, beckoning her to sit with them. She was hesitant at first, wondering if she might just slide off the tiles and down to her death, but another irritated click of a tongue from Amula made her move—no more than ten seconds later she was already hugging her knees between the two of them, shivering slightly as a gust of cool wind rolled across the undertown.
‘Wind’.
It was something new to her as well.
A simple hole in the ceiling had really changed everything. Now there was sunlight during the day and moonlight during the night. They didn’t really need a firefly cage to clearly see every nook and cranny of the undertown sprawled out in front of them. Her eyes weren’t used to the bluish-white tints of moonlight, when all everyone ever knew in Alshifa was the harsh orange glow they could get from fireflies or fiercely lit braziers.
Suddenly, there was a screech in the far distance. She reeled on instinct, but Amula and Jerie didn’t react. Evidently they’d been listening to the lightning hornet scream its lungs out the entire night and got used to it already—so she clenched her throat and tried her best to ignore it, too.
“... Sorry I’m being so… troublesome,” she mumbled, burying her face in her knees as she pulled her mantle in, hugging herself. “I’ll… I’ll be fine tomorrow morning. Confident. We can also stop here and there on our way back, and I can… scrounge for insect parts. To bring back to shelter. I want to make–”
“Family is family,” Amula said, taking a swig from her bottle as she did. “It’s not wrong or troublesome to feel bad when a family member passes away. If anyone tells ye it is, then beat them to an inch of their life and show them how troublesome it is to live without bein’ able to walk.”
Jerie snorted at that, and the seniors clinked their bottles over her shoulder before taking another synchronised swig. She peeked between the two and fidgeted a little. They were supposed to be just a year older than her, weren’t they?
Curiosity got the better of her again.
“Um… are the two of you–”
“Fifteen? Yes.”
“And–”
“Been livin’ here with Jerie, Issam, Raya, the twins, and most of our classmates since we were five,” Amula said, plucking the exact question out of her mind and answering them before she could even ask. “It was that small-scale Swarm infestation a decade ago. I’m sure you know about it. A bunch of giant black bugs crawled into Alshifa through the Northern Bawu Tunnel, and it took just about every last bug-slayer workin’ together to suppress them. Lots of people still died back then, though—plenty of parents with kids now left with nowhere to go.”
She lowered her gaze at the mention of the Bawu Tunnel Infestation; she’d learned all about it in General School, and about how most of her dad’s friends had died on the frontlines back then. Classmates. Colleagues. He was already a doctor during the incident, but because she’d just been born and needed tending to, he’d been nowhere close to the Old District while doing his work treating the wounded. Even still, she distinctly remembered seeing the total death count—as recorded in his doctor’s journal she’d stolen a few peeks at over the past few years—numbering up to five hundred at the end of the three-day siege.
Granted, it wasn’t nearly as cataclysmic an infestation as the one they were currently living through, but it’d resulted in the northern tunnel being completely caved in to prevent further infestations from that direction, leaving only the Southern Luwu Tunnels open for trade and communication with the neighbouring undertowns.
And it’d also resulted in her being able to meet Issam down here, in the ravaged Old District where the orphanage was.
“... Oh, cheer up. We hardly knew our parents,” Amula grumbled, whacking her on the back of her head and making her jolt. “As far as we care, all of us orphans are siblins’, and the misters and madams of the orphanage are our real parents… as well as the nice adults who come by every so often to give us all a few hundred coins in donations. Blood ain’t everything. The candy sticks Doctor Sanyon always brought us at the end of every week were much sweeter than any blood could manage, even though he started gettin’ really stingy with them once we all enrolled into the Bug-Slayin’ School. Didn’t want us to get fat, I suppose. Like that could’ve happened with how hard Biem was hittin’ us daily.”
Jerie snickered, exhaling through his nose, and even Dahlia managed to smile a little; it sounded just like her dad to worry about their health even though he himself was a glutton for sweets.
“Did my dad… tell you all to go to the Bug-Slaying School?” she asked, with a small tilt of her head. “I don’t see why you’d all… enrol in the same year, otherwise. And I thought Issam and Raya were transfers from the General School. Why’d you all suddenly decide to be together?”
Amula sent her a puzzled frown in return. “Because we are children of the Alshifa Orphanage, and ninety percent of all graduated bug-slayers in the past four decades have come from this place. Who better than children whose parents were slain by the Swarm to pick up arms and avenge their deaths?”
“... Oh.”
“And Issam and Raya were transfers from the General School, yeah,” Amula continued, nodding pensively. “While all of us were trainin’ in the foundation year—the year before the first year, which was when you joined—Issam had wanted to be a chef, and Raya had wanted to be a doctor. They weren’t doin’ any good in General School, though, and since their principal saw they had a knack for fighting, he had them transferred back over to the Bug-Slayin’ School with the rest of us.”
Her head shot up to blink at Amula immediately. “A chef? A doctor? Are you talking about the same Issam and Raya here? They still can’t–”
“Pick up a book and just read, yes, but they wanted to give it a try regardless.” Amula responded with a curt laugh before shaking her head, looking tiredly down herself. “You know, the two of them were the only ones who had something they wanted to do. Great Makers know I never had anything in particular I wanted to do other than bug-slayin’. Jerie, too—we’re about as indecisive as we could be.”
“Thweep!” was the only soft note that Jerie blew into his flute, as though saying ‘we are good at what we do, though’.
“Hah. Yer right about that, I guess. We are good at bug-slayin’, if we do say so ourselves–”
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“But, then… why did the two of you stay behind an entire year?” Dahlia asked, and Amula’s expression turned cold and distant. “You guys are strong. Like, really really strong. Incredible. Was it a written test you couldn’t pass? Or a super difficult challenge Instructor Biem gave to only the two of you that you couldn’t–”
“My older brother, who was sent to the orphanage with me back when I was five and he was nine, used to wear bombardier beetle boots as well.”
“...”
Amula paused. Jerie closed his eyes. The seniors’ expressions were troubled, and Dahlia knew she’d strayed into a topic an outsider should very well not stray into—but it was only another moment later that Amula shifted where she sat, going cross-legged so she could give Dahlia a proper look at her beetle boots.
“My brother enrolled and graduated from the Bug-Slayin’ School four years earlier than me, so he always had his pair of Swarmsteel with him, and because he was also a top graduate of his class, the instructors turned a blind eye to him holdin’ onto a few extra Swarmsteel outside of usual training hours,” she said, as she ruffled the elytra on the side of her boots and flicked them with her finger. “Since I was goin’ to be a bug-slayer just like him, he gave me an identical pair of his boots while Jerie—I’d been friends with him for a long time, since both our parents apparently knew each other before their deaths—got a hold of the cicada flute. We were allowed to train with our Swarmsteel on our off-days so we could graduate top of the class as well, just like my brother had.
“Remember these roofs, Jerie?
“Brother used to make me chase him across the Old District while you also tried to intercept him with yer music, and the misters and madams of the orphanage would just complain and complain about us being too noisy—we never did manage to stop brother once, did we?”
A faint ‘thweep’ was Jerie’s note of response as he shook his head, a warm and wistful smile tugging on the corner of his lips. Amula looked crestfallen for another second before looking up at Dahlia.
“Good brother. Good man. I’m sure ye have seen him once or twice. He said he frequented Doctor Sanyon quite often because of leg cramps, but I guess ye wouldn’t remember every patient that walked into yer house, huh?”
“...”
“It was last year when the three of us were training on the cliffs behind this orphanage,” Amula said, thumbing back at the hill they’d leaped down from without looking, her eyes closing. “Me and Jerie were in our fifth and final year of Bug-Slayin’ School, and were slated to graduate at the top of our class. The two of us wanted to get some extra trainin’ done before our final test, so we asked my brother to let us chase him just one more time, just across the cliffs in the middle of the night so we don’t disturb anyone… it was just so we’d be warmed up the next mornin’ just in case we actually had to fight a giant insect the Instructors brought in from another undertown, you know?
“But I guess I should’ve known we’d been pushin’ my brother a little too hard, and that ‘little bit’ is all it takes for someone to slip and fall.”
Dahlia’s breath caught as Amula’s thumb remained frozen, pointing at the back of the orphanage, and Jerie was just as quiet.
Both of them remained silent for a long time, their mouths grim.
“It was… quick, really,” Amula mumbled. I don’t think he suffered. It was a thirty metre fall off the rocks, onto the edge of the roof, and then straight down to the ground. With how exhausted he’d been even before we nagged him to train us in the middle of the night, I hardly doubt he noticed he was losin’ his balance while running and jumping across the cliffs.
“But still, I…
“...
“... We took a year off, is what I want to say,” Amula finished with a small shake of her head, her brows slowly unknitting, her eyes slowly opening. “I killed my brother, and he died an ugly death, so I know how it feels. That's why Jerie and I take our Swarmsteel off and leave it in the armoury after every day. People tell me it was an accident and I shouldn’t hold onto it for too long, but I killed him with my Swarmsteel, and I can’t run away from that.
“If I want to live, I have to be better than he ever was.
“I have to run faster, jump higher, kick harder, endure tougher and tougher falls, and get used to the pain of taking off my Swarmsteel every single day—so when ye told Issam back at the shelter that ye wanted to check on Doctor Sanyon even though the entire undertown’s been overrun, and when ye still wanted to keep going even after that horrific crash-landin’ in the garden, I thought… maybe yer not so different from me after all.
“Ye have seen death, so ye won’t run away. Ye have felt pain, so ye won't clench your fists. Yer not spineless. And ye will strive to make every death a good one.
“That’s why ye dressed Instructor Biem up on his deathbed, right?
“I would’ve done the same.”
“The only difference between me and ye was… well, ye still had a chance to save your dad.
“So I had to help.”
Jerie finished with a little nod, humming in agreement, and then the seniors were silent once again. They took their swig of alcohol, averted their gaze from hers—so she drew a deep breath and kicked her legs out, letting her feet dangle off the edge.
Just like the two of them.
“... My mom, Eria, didn’t really die of a ‘virulent disease’.”
The seniors kept drinking.
The lightning hornet kept screeching in the far distance.
She didn’t stop talking.
“I’m sure, one way or the other, you’ve… heard the story,” she continued, eyes slanted, staring at the bloody street far below. “My mom caught something dangerously infectious and died in the middle of the night, all of a sudden, and my dad had to bury her to prevent the disease from spreading. Then he stopped working for two years because he couldn’t pick himself up again.
“That’s… not right.
“My mom was sick, but it wasn’t… a disease.
“She had a compulsion where she had to eat bugs every so often, and if she didn’t she’d get all itchy and irritated.”
Amula’s ears perked, and she caught Jerie peeking at her from the corner of his eyes.
“I didn’t think– I didn’t know it was such a big deal at the time, since my dad always managed to buy her a few crickets or beetles to chew on. I thought it was just a… habit. A tick she couldn’t get rid of,” she mumbled, grinding her teeth as she did. “But I knew she’d been eating more and more bugs as the years went on. She’d sneak out of bed in the middle of the night to dig through the trash, crawl through the fields; all for a single bug to nibble on. She couldn’t stop herself. It was... a type of compulsion. Addiction. She couldn’t control it. My dad was a doctor, so he drank her blood and gave himself the same compulsion in an attempt to run more tests, hoping he could find a cure by using himself as a test subject, but...
“Eventually, my mom went too far with it.
“Two years ago she must’ve eaten one too many bugs in a small period of time, and she turned into… what my dad turned into just up there.
“My dad killed her to protect me, and he made me promise not to tell anyone about it. Nobody would question him if I didn’t say anything. Secrecy. He was the genius doctor, my mom was an outsider, someone getting addicted to eating bugs is completely unheard of—it’d be dangerous if people knew eating insects would eventually turn them into half-insects themselves. There’d be people who want to try and mutate themselves to get stronger, and… that’s not something dad wanted.
“A few days after he killed my mom, he started showing signs of mutating, too. He couldn't develop a cure for the compulsion fast enough, but he never truly gave up, so I kept his mutations a secret while he’s been slowly losing his mind while continuing his research the past two years. To talk to him, I had to… dumb down my speech. A little. Speak in short fragments. Short words. Otherwise he won’t even understand me, and if we can’t talk, if we can’t share information, then I can’t… I can’t find a cure for him in case he failed, too.”
Her voice was more heavy with emotion than she liked, but once her final words rolled off her tongue, her body also felt a lot lighter than before she’d started.
She’d said everything important she had to say.
There was nothing left for her to hide.
Her past, her fears, her inability to put even a bite of insect flesh into her mouth—not only did the seniors know all about her now, she’d also said everything out loud for Eria to hear.
Now, there were no more secrets between her and her little assistant.
“... Well, ye had it tough too, huh?”
A ‘thweep’ of solidarity was Jerie note of his choice, and Amula started patting her on the head with a wide smile on her face.
Of course, there were still many questions they asked that she didn’t have the answers to—questions like who her mom was, where her compulsion came from, why it took her so long to lose her humanity, and how the exact transformation happened—but they probably weren’t expecting much from her in that regard from the very beginning, and it showed with how quickly they gave up on interrogating her. After all, the only things she did understand about her mom’s compulsion was what little her dad had written about it in his doctor’s journal, which she’d discovered about a year back while cleaning out the bedroom. There wasn’t a lot of useful information in it; the only important detail she remembered was the fact that her mom was likely an outsider from the surface, and her dad only succumbed to the same compulsion because he’d forced himself to eat insects just to carry out dangerous experimental treatments on his own body.
So long as nobody else in Alshifa was hungry or desperate or insane enough to consume insects, nobody would mutate uncontrollably again.
“... Yer goin’ to tell Issam about this once we get back, right?” Amula asked, once Dahlia’s eyes started spinning and her head started lolling about from all the questioning. “Don't tell me yer goin’ to keep it from him and the twins. Ye can trust them. They won’t tell anyone else if ye just tell them to keep it quiet… unless ye have already told Issam and he was just pretendin’ not to know. That’s probably the case, yeah?”
She paused.
Tilted her head, pursed her lips.
“Why… would I have told Issam about this?” she asked.
“Because he likes ye?”
“Huh?”
A soft, keening ‘thweep’ dribbled out from Jerie’s flute, and Amula shook her head in dismay as she held her bottle of alcohol out at Dahlia.
“Issam’s strong, but I think even his knees will crumble if ye tell him ye want to walk around with him for ten minutes doin’ utterly nothin’ of note,” the senior grumbled, forcing her to take the bottle before patting her head once again. “Ye know, yer the same age as him, ten times as smart, but I guess yer still clueless after all. At times like these, Doctor Sanyon always said ye should just drink yer pride away—ye will wake up havin’ made a decision ye can’t take back that way, and that means ye can start changin’ as a person once again.”
Dahlia blinked.
“I… uh, I don’t think dad ever said that,” she said, hesitatingly, as she raised the bottle to her lips and frowned at the smell of it. “This isn’t alcohol, by the way. It’s just… juice? It’s grape juice. Fruit. It even has the purple–”
“It’s alcohol,” Amula said, nodding confidently. “Don’t be scared of it. All adults have to drink eventually, so Doctor Sanyon always said it’s better to start gettin’ used to it early than not. I don’t know what’s so hard about gettin’ used to it, though. Alcohol tastes pretty good. Right, Jerie?”
Jerie smacked his lips and chortled, taking another large swig of his bottle. Amula reached far behind her into an open satchel to pop open another bottle—and now that Dahlia could see the orphanage’s label glued around the bottle, she figured there wouldn’t really be any harm in drinking ‘alcohol’ with the seniors right now.
She liked sweet things.
The lightning hornet’s faint screeches in the far distance were a little jarring, sure, but for however long she spent trying to hold in her laughs while drinking with the seniors, under cold moonlight… she almost felt as though tonight was just a normal night out with her friends.
… This is all I know, Eria.
This is everything I have.
Now, do you know, exactly, what insect class I am best suited for?
It took Eria a while to respond.
[... I do.]
[To be upfront with you, I already had my suspicions since you dismantled the pine sawyer beetle, and seeing the bug your father half-transformed into—the same bug your mother had transformed into, owing to his consuming her blood and you being descended from her—has all but confirmed my suspicions. There is only one insect class I can assign to you based on your mother's bloodline.]
[According to my database, however, the insect your class is based on should have been made extinct forty years ago, before the first Altered Swarmsteel System was even developed.]
[Should I assign you your insect class, you will be the only human in the entire world in possession of it.]
…
[However, considering your history and your allergy to consuming insect flesh, perhaps… there is no reason for me to assign you your insect class.]
She didn’t blink.
Why not?
[Because the mutations you can unlock by having an insect class can only be unlocked via points,] Eria explained. [The attribute levels provided by Swarmsteel will be taken away once the Swarmsteel is removed, but power gained from allocating your points will never leave you. Therefore, if you spend the rest of your life never consuming a single insect—by extension, never gaining a single point—nothing will come out of having your insect class assigned. I will still be able to provide you with knowledge you may not have access to, but the other half of my capabilities will become obsolete. Without being able to consume insect flesh and gaining points, you will not be able to interact with your mutation tree, which allows you to pick and choose your mutations as you gain more and more points.]
[If that is the case, then…]
[...]
[... I will support you, Dahlia Sina, in growing stronger only using Swarmsteel.]
[It will not be an easy path. Your strain is already nearing half of your limit purely by your equipped Swarmsteel alone, but I… I can see your will, too.]
[You do not wish to keep me around for the rest of your life, do you?]
She didn’t hesitate.
I don’t.
That’s why this strain… these attributes… these insect classes... they don’t really mean anything to me.
I’ll get as strong as I need to beat the lightning hornet, and then I’m going to try to make a seal over the hole in the ceiling.
If the Swarm can’t come down here again, I won’t have any need for more power, right?
[... That is correct.]
[If you can seal the hole and reinforce the rest of the ceiling as well, then the likelihood of another Swarm cocoon smashing into Alshifa will be nearly zero. The surviving townsfolk will not have to worry about an infestation of this scale ever again.]
[Now, unless your strain reaches one hundred percent, you will not be debilitated to the brink of death—so I shall support you until you defeat the lightning hornet, and you will do that without consuming insect flesh, relying only on your Swarmsteel.]
[Afterwards, you can discard me alongside the rest of your Swarmsteel, and free yourself from the burden of your Swarmsteel strain.]
[How does this proposal sound?]
While Amula and Jerie patted her head once more, chuckling about some old story involving Issam and Raya and the twins while they were still children in the orphanage, their cheeks flushed red from the ‘alcohol’—she dipped her head slowly and let a small smile take her face.
… Thank you, Eria.
For being so patient with me.
Mom and dad would’ve loved to dismantle you just to see how, exactly, you function.
The little black bug on her shoulder shuddered.
[I would rather not be dismantled, but I understand the sentiment.]
[Now, please enjoy the rest of your night with your friends.]
[I will have you make and equip enough Swarmsteel tomorrow to push your body to the brink of death.]