Dahlia had seen the hustle and bustle of the main streets from atop Emparatoria, but actually wading through the crowd was another beast altogether.

Exiting Eighth Mantid Street, she entered some sort of bazaar where a sprawling web of stalls, tents, and open-air shops stretched out under the fierce midday sun. Narrow, winding pathways snaked between the stalls, barely wide enough for five people to walk side-by-side, but there had to be dozens of people squeezing by the dust-choked streets—she’d not felt this suffocated since the last time she visited Alshifa’s Night Bazaar.

And these people… aren’t… all human… either.

She jostled from side to side as she squirmed through the crowd with her shopping basket in hand, twisting past carts pulled by men with heavy beetle shells on their backs, dodging men with long antennae from poking her eyes out. It wasn’t just one or two or three; more than half the people in the city had some sort of insect appendage replacing their normal human limbs, and nobody seemed at all uncomfortable around them. Merchants with complete ant heads gestured at tables filled with shimmering jewels, their many-jointed fingers wrapped in thick cloth, mandibles clicking as they negotiated prices. Streetside singers with segmented chitin rings around their neck bellowed throaty songs, gathering crowds of curious onlookers. More winged couriers—children, most of them—dashed overhead on tarps and turbaned heads, earning the collective ire of the crowd as men and women alike shook their fists angrily.

For her part, she barely knew where she was going or what she had to get for Tavern Emparatoria. She’d taken a gander at the shopping list, but Safi’s handwriting was borderline indecipherable, and before she could even think about going back for clarification, she’d been pushed into the crowd.

Following the ebb and flow of the bazaar the past two hours had her shoving her shopping list in random merchants’ faces, and after lots of incoherent shouting, pointing, and silvers being taken out of her pouch, she now had a basket of fresh leeks, radishes, and a ton of other vegetables she didn’t recognise. She’d counted the number of ingredients in her basket, and it matched the number of handwritten lines on the list, so she assumed she’d bought everything Safi asked her to—but now the challenge was getting back to Tavern Emparatoria, and Kari wasn’t very helpful on that front.

Just because she knew where she had to go didn’t mean she could get there.

So… many… people…

I can’t… breathe–

[Most humans of the surface have at least one or two clearly visible insect traits—after all, it’s not an immediate death sentence if someone without a system eats one small insect,] Kari said, trying to distract her from the stifling heat and the noise of the Bazaar as she tried to squirm her way through the crowd. [Since most people’s jobs and futures are decided the moment they are born, they are fed one specific insect dish when they are children to mutate one singular insect trait. Afterwards, their mouths never so much as come close to insect flesh again, so the ‘Bloodlines’ —the term the Hasharana use to refer to the voices people hear as they are on the verge of mutating into an insect—are never strengthened any further. A human loses their humanity when they succumb to their Bloodline, but if the voices are only mere whispers, even a child with a scorpion claw for an arm wouldn’t lose themselves.]

[Now, the City of Feasts is a bit special in the sense that many high-skilled insect-flesh chefs live here, meaning many people come here from all across the continent just to buy specific insect dishes. This is why the bazaars are so packed, and this is why the people here are so diverse. You can buy just about any mutation here as long as you have the silvers to pay the chefs, so if you’d look to your left, you’d see–]

I don’t want… a tour right now, she grumbled, feeling dizzier and more nauseous by the minute. I just wanna… go back… to the tavern–

[Actually, don't look to your left.]

[There’s a bit of a gruesome scene.]

…

She looked anyways, and it wasn’t like she could really help it. Tons of people were crowded around the entrance to a particularly narrow and shady alleyway, and they were all gasping, looking up at the gloom—Dahlia couldn’t help but grimace herself. They were five bodies wrapped from head to toe in milky silk, swaying gently in the desert breeze, sticking to a massive spider web strung between the scrap buildings.

The corpses were very visibly deformed with their insides sucked out, just like the victims of Madamaron and its brood, but unlike the first time she’d come across a husk in the Oasis Town, she didn’t have to do anything here. Three hooded men with flower-patterned capes were pushing the crowd back from the alleyway, their voices sharp and commanding as their hands rested on the hilts of curved, gleaming Swarmsteel blades. She didn’t need Kari to tell her who they were: she instinctively pulled her scarf up and hurried away, scurrying towards the end of the Bazaar.

Hasharana.

If they find me with an unregistered Altered Swarmsteel System, they’re going to capture me, right?

[Yep.]

[And I told you not to look, didn’t I?]

She pursed her lips, trying to quell the pounding in her chest; she couldn’t quite get the image of those bodies strung up on a web out of her head.

There are bugs preying on people in this giant city, too?

But with so many people here… and the Hasharana hosting the exam as well… I thought it’d be safe–

[It happens every once in a while—a giant bug pops out of the ground and wreaks some havoc around a district before the Mantid Syndicate deals with them—but it is, indeed, quite strange for five bodies to just show up near a bazaar like that,] Kari murmured, rubbing its head and looking behind her as it stood atop her shoulder. [Since you’re not a registered Hasharana, I can’t access the local bug bounties to see how many giant bug sightings have been reported in the area, nor can I tap into any public announcements made by any Hasharana warning each other about any giant spiders lurking in the shadows. However, you are largely correct: with the Hasharana Entrance Exam soon to be underway, giant bug activity should decrease dramatically across the entire city as more and more participants arrive.]

…

[Let the Hasharana deal with that situation. If it is anything particularly peculiar, I imagine that Arcana Hasharana is also already in the know–]

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Her antennae tingled and she snapped her head down, seeing an amber-chitined hand plucking a single radish out of her basket.

A thief.

Dahlia whirled just in time to see a little girl with glassy wings hopping over the sea of heads, four arms flailing for balance as she skipped onto a nearby iron balcony. The man sitting on a chair and overlooking the bazaar with a cigar in his hand shouted at her to bugger off, so she jumped and clawed up more and more balconies, vaulting over the edge of the roof before Dahlia could even blink.

[... After her!]

If Dahlia were to be honest, she wasn’t that disappointed about a single radish, but she sighed nevertheless and stretched her legs—she wasn’t in a hurry to get back to the tavern, and maybe a bit of exercise would help her clear her head.

Inhaling sharply, she leaped. Wind whirled around her, blowing sand and dust into nearby faces and scattering goods off adjacent stalls. Her locust greaves carried her above the ground as she slammed her claws into the side of the building five metres up; she clawed five more metres up and then threw herself over the edge, eyes immediately snapping onto the pairs of glassy and sunlight-refracting wings fluttering across the roofs.

They’re really giving her away, huh?

[They’re cicada wings,] Kari commented, [mostly membranous with lots of veins, hence the glass-like texture.]

I know. I’ve made lots of trinkets with them back in Alshifa.

The ‘chase’ across the city roofs was surprisingly calm and slow. Away from the bazaar and the main streets, scrap buildings were built high and close together, and if Dahlia just didn’t look down, she could easily imagine she was skipping over thin river streams instead of what she was actually doing. The cicada girl… wasn’t very fast. For how agile and dexterous she was vaulting over crates and swinging off clotheslines, her actual speed was far below Dahlia’s—cutting her off by jumping to a roof in her projected trajectory was easy enough.

As Dahlia landed right in front of her, she yelped and whirled and tried to kick off the edge of the roof, so Dahlia caught her ankle mid-air. That was the end of that.

“Wait! Miss! Don’t drop me!” the girl cried. “You can have it back! I’m sorry! I won’t do it again!”

“...”

Dahlia held her upside-down while she flailed two of her arms around, her other two arms stopping her long skirt from falling over her face. Surprisingly, the radish she stole was nailed to the inside of her skirt alongside a dozen other vegetables—stolen from other unaware shoppers, no doubt—so Dahlia frowned slightly, plucking out the radish before flipping her over to put her down on the roof.

“... You speak the Alshifa tongue?” Dahlia asked, putting her hands on her knees as she bent down to meet the chestnut-haired girl eye-to-eye. “I was told only old people remember how to speak the tongue of the Sharaji Desert undertowns… are you actually much older than you look? How old are you?”

The girl blinked, still patting dust and sand off her amber mantle as she returned a blank look. “I’m… huh? I’m fourteen?”

“You’re fourteen?”

“Uh-huh. And you?”

“I’m also fourteen.”

It was Dahlia’s turn to blink. The girl was supposedly the same age as her, but also half a head shorter with thin plates of amber-hued chitin scattered across her skin—looking at the rest of her outfit, though, Dahlia could see she was probably not a young child. She wore a fashionable white blouse with puffy sleeves under her amber mantle, her dark skirt was ankle-length, and her chestnut hair was tied in a long braid with a dozen pins woven between the loops; a girl younger than twelve wouldn’t dress herself up like that.

A girl this fashionable shouldn’t be stealing radishes from the bazaar, either.

“Don’t steal,” Dahlia mumbled, chopping the girl’s head with her hand as she stuffed her radish back into her basket. “You… You look like you have silvers to spare, you know? Just buy your own vegetables. And return everything you stole to the people you took them from. And make sure to… apologise, as well. Some people can’t afford even a single radish–”

“I can’t afford one either.”

“... Huh?”

The girl turned all four of her skirt pockets inside-out, sticking her tongue out at Dahlia. “I got no silvers. I have nothing. I haven’t eaten in five days, and I’m going to die.”

Dahlia blinked again. “But what about… your parents? Your house? Surely you’ve got somewhere to–”

“I don’t live here! I’m just here for the Hasharana Entrance Exam!” she said, snatching the radish right out of her basket before leaping off the edge of the roof, clapping two of her hands together in an insincere apology. “Sorry, but I really, really want a hotpot, and you’re the only one I could find with a radish around the bazaar! I promise I’ll find you after I pass! The Hasharana will pay me all the silvers in the world, so I’ll return you ten radishes and–”

The girl slammed into a street lamp back-first, tumbled ten metres down, before landing on a tarp and crashing painfully into boxes of fresh fruit below.

… Ow.

People started shouting angrily, and more people pulled out their blades, but the girl just gave everyone apologetic nods before sprinting away—so for Dahlia’s part, she just watched the thief disappear into the crowd with her radish. It really, really wasn’t that important, and she felt she’d gotten her fill of exercise.

If the girl really wasn’t lying, then she was fine giving up a vegetable or two.

But a girl like that’s taking part in the exam too, huh? she mumbled, cracking her neck and stretching her arms as she reoriented herself, looking in the direction of Tavern Emparatoria. Are they all so… you know. Weird?

[Ninety percent of participants die in the first stage of the exam,] Kari reiterated. [If you only want a system, then you can simply buy one from a system merchant or obtain one by joining the local guards in any borough or major settlement. If you only want to fight the Swarm, then you can enlist in your closest Swarmsteel Front and fight on the frontlines. The only people who take the Hasharana Entrance Exam are those who have nowhere to call home, and those who have nobody to go back to—anyone who participates in the Hasharana Entrance Exam most likely already has a system, and has already served at least a few years on the frontlines against the Swarm.]

[I suppose the girl’s a bit on the young side to be participating, but you’re also fourteen, and Alice became an Arcana Hasharana when she was eleven.]

[The exam attracts all sorts of people from across the continent, but those who enter the first stage are always ready to die at any given moment.]

[The feeling of ‘death’ isn’t particularly new to you, is it?]

…

Dahlia sighed as she spotted Tavern Emparatoria in the distance with its loud and gaudy signage.

But Alice won’t train me before the exam.

[You already have me.]

Just to make it fair for the other participants, she’d probably tell me to ignore you for the entirety of the exam as well.

[But you already have me.]

That cicada girl… am I going to have to clash with more weird people like her during the exam? How strong are the other participants? Can I really–

[You already have me,] Kari grumbled, stomping on her shoulder. [And believe in yourself a little more, won’t you? You still have an entire month to prepare. If you eat ten points a day consistently, make new Swarmsteel out of Madamaron’s parts, and exercise on top of it all, you’d be in no way ‘lacking’ compared to the other participants—I can assure you this much as a former Archive of the Altered Swarmsteel Systems.]

… You’re not lying?

Kari huffed with dissatisfaction, crossing her forelegs. [I don’t lie, Dahlia. And you’ve beaten odds worse than ninety percent, haven’t you?]

[Ignore the City of Feasts for the rest of the month and go hole yourself up in Tavern Emparatoria.]

[Before the exam begins, you should figure out what Swarmsteel you want to make with Madamaron’s parts.]