Two hundred and twenty-five participants stepped foot into their respective wormholes, and Jiayin immediately lay down on her sofa to stare at the honeycomb walls and ceiling.
Exactly seventy-five panes of honeycomb glass were shimmering above and around her, each following a team of three and showing her just what the participants were all up to—the most promising candidates, of course, were on the ceiling where she could look directly up at. The rest of the rabble who’d eventually die or drop out because of the time limit were put on the far walls, and she had no intention of paying any attention to them unless someone had something nice to say about them.
For that matter, William—ever the roach-like, smarmy man—wasn’t helping her keep an eye on the participants. The bespectacled man was off in his own corner of the surveillance room, curled up in a ball and poring through the second volume of his book. He was always like this. Hell would freeze over before she could ever pry him away from his mystery novels, and… it was like he didn’t even care that one of the honeycomb glasses on the left wall had already gone dark, indicating a bug or two had already gotten to that team.
She sighed aloud, pulling out a steel arrow from the quiver she’d laid next to the armrest.
“Is that ‘Web of a Thousand Eyes’, roach?” she asked, licking the barbed tip and coating it with saliva. “Who’s the murderer? The lighthouse guard? The principal? Maybe it’s actually the detective all along, and he just doesn’t remember committing all of those murders himself?”
“The commandments of what makes a good mystery novel dictate the detective cannot be the culprit.” The man’s eyes were still glued to his book, but he pushed his glasses up, letting out a sigh of disappointment as he did. “It can’t be the lighthouse guard, and it can’t be the principal. They’re red herrings. It’s always the one the detective least suspects, but it also has to be someone that’ll kick him in the gut the hardest when they’re finally revealed. I’m tired of this book by now, to be honest. I’m ninety-nine percent sure the culprit’s the–”
With an underhanded throw, she chucked her arrow at his head and watched it detonate right in his face. The room trembled slightly, and a few panes of honeycomb glass threatened to fall off the walls, but by the time the smoke cleared, William had already taken out a new mystery novel to read; she clicked her tongue and snapped her head to look elsewhere, unable to tolerate even one more second of the man’s stupid round glasses that made him look more like a wimpy scholar than the Arcana Hasharana he really was.
And this guy’s supposed to be the second strongest human in the world after the Worm God.
“... Where the hell is the Worm God, anyways?” she muttered, scowling as she caught two more panes of glass going dark to her right. “It’s the thirtieth Hasharana Entrance Exam, the last one in this century, and he can’t even be bothered to send a clone over?”
William shrugged. “He was here. The tenth clone. At least, he was close enough to open seventy-five wormholes at once, but I think… he’s leaving now. Not like there’s any point in him staying when we’re the ones proctoring the exam.”
“And? Where’s the tenth clone going?”
“Traces of the Beast of Ka’lan have reappeared in the Attini Empire. He’s going to investigate.” Then he looked up from his book for a brief second, looking pointedly straight at her. “Focus on surveillance, idiot. Just ask your Archive about Enki’s movements if you’re so interested in him.”
She laughed sardonically, fingers twitching to throw another explosive arrow at him. “How about you help me out, then? There’s hundreds of them. I can’t keep track of them all.”
“Sure you can. Like you didn’t shoot down a thousand arrows last year at the Rolling Logs Festival–”
Footsteps resounded outside the front door, and Jiayin flicked an arrow behind her preemptively. A net of silk threads caught the arrow as the Hangman kicked the door open, holding two bottles of morning ale over her head and wearing an over-exuberant grin on her face.
“You’re here,” Jiayin mumbled.
“I’m here!” Alice chirped.
“Why are you here?”
“Drink!” The girl laughed, hooking the door close behind her as she walked to the sofa right between Jiayin and William. The two bottles of morning ale were flicked at each of them, and while Jiayin caught hers out of the air, William fumbled, the glass shattering against his forehead. “Uncle told me to give you these in his stead, since he’s busy preparing the tavern for morning service and stuff! You guys like ale, right? He said he added extra ‘spice’ to the Sun’s bottle, but I kinda forgot which one was which on the way!”
Jiayin shook the bottle next to her ear, listening for any solid particles inside the glass. “It’s this one. Safi dumped a whole chunk of hellfire chilli inside, didn’t he?”
“I dunno! Anyways, scoot over a little! I've got a bit of time before I have to go back and help uncle out, so… uh, how’s it going?”
This girl. Jiayin clicked her tongue in irritation again, her legs being thrown off the sofa as Alice shoved them aside to make room; the two of them had to sit upright now, but Alice went a step further, throwing her legs onto Jiayin’s lap as she leaned against the armrest.
“Your lap’s the best footrest there is, Jiayin!” Alice laughed, letting out a satisfied groan as she leaned back against the armrest to stare up at the honeycomb glasses. “Ah, I don’t wanna go back to the tavern. Can’t I just stay here for the rest of the month? You’ve got all kinds of food stockpiled in here, right? Lemme–”
“You disappear for months, don’t respond to any of our messages, and then you show up a month ago to register someone for the exam?” Jiayin snapped, throwing the girl a burning, red-eyed glare. “The hell have you been doing? Fishing for pearls in a sea of sand? Do you even know the amount of trouble I had to go through to take over designing the first stage instead of the second?”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Well, maybe don’t ask a fourteen-year-old to take part in designing an exam where ninety percent of participants die in the first round!” Alice said, returning a teasing, infuriating grin. “Seriously! I thought we were already low on numbers, and now we’re killing off potential candidates who can become Hasharana in the future? What’s up with that? Why not–”
“It certainly used to be that we’d let twenty to thirty candidates pass the exam every year,” William said, licking drops of ale off a particularly large shard of glass as he kept his eyes glued to his book. “That was between Year Seventy and Year Eighty, the first decade of the Hasharana operating across the continent. Between Year Eighty and Year Ninety, though, we’ve cut down the average yearly recruits to about fifteen, and in the past five years, we’ve only added fourteen new recruits to our ranks. Do you know why that is?”
Alice craned her head to grin at William. “Nope! Also there’s a shard of glass in your eye. You might wanna get that–”
“In Year Eighty-One, thirty-one Hasharana took off and deserted the organisation with their Altered Swarmsteel Systems, having entered the exam as a group of bandits intending on strengthening their drug-running routes,” William said, blinking and shaking the shard of glass out of his eye. The wound healed in an instant, and he pulled out a second pair of glasses out of his shirt pocket. “We took them down within three years, but half of their Altered Swarmsteel Systems are still circulating out there, and who knows what kind of lowlife activities those Archives are doing now; since then, we’ve upped our recruitment standards. No mere bandits can just pass the exam, and we don’t let our Archives fall into any wrong hands.”
Jiayin flicked the cork of her bottle open and took a light swig. The ale burned all the way down her throat, but either Safi had gone soft over the years or her heat tolerance was getting stronger and stronger; the ale tasted like nothing. Her own saliva was more spicy than this watered-down gunk.
“You sure you brought the right bottle, girl?” she slurred, waving the bottle around– shit. She was getting dizzy already. “Whoa… wait… this is… new–”
“But only fourteen new recruits in the past five years?” Alice said, tilting her head quizzically as she ignored Jiayin promptly. “You sure you guys aren’t making the exam too tough? Gosh, is it because of me? I mean, I know I kinda aced the exam three years ago, but you don’t have to raise the bar that high–”
“The Swarm evolves every single day. A C-Rank Mutant-Class from Year Sixty can’t even compare to a C-Rank Mutant-Class today.” William sighed, shaking his head in dismay. “Truth is, a third of the Hasharana we passed ten years ago probably wouldn’t pass today. That’s just how it is. As the years go by, the bugs get stronger and stronger, and so we need more and more overwhelmingly powerful recruits like you—though you’re the anomaly of all anomalies, so we’re not using you as the standard.”
Alice rested her legs across Jiayin’s shoulder, and for her part, Jiayin was feeling too tipsy and light-headed to protest.
“Okay. But, like, people are still dying in these exams, you know? Shouldn’t we at least interfere when they’re about–”
“One thousand three hundred and fourteen people registered for the exam this year,” William said plainly. “Nineteen people didn’t show up to the temple this morning. Three hundred and thirty-five people didn’t enter their rooms in time. Of the nine hundred and sixty people who had the choice to drop out after listening to the rules of the first stage, seven hundred and thirty-five people chose to depart—and those who dropped out will continue to fight for humanity for the years to come. We did preserve those lives.”
“... And the ones who are already dying in the forest? Aren’t they the most promising candidates if they chose to participate even after hearing the rules?”
“They’re the ones who will either become Hasharana or die trying,” William replied. “Contrary to what you may believe, this exam is not for the elites of the elites. If someone just wants to slay bugs and fight for humanity, they can go to any of the major Swarmsteel Fronts and enlist there, and I’ll be the very first to tell them to serve humanity that way instead. They can be noble warriors who get recognised for their deeds, have a steady income, and start a family with a proper house and all… but ‘steady’ is not the type of people who register and take part in the exam, is it?”
Alice raised a curious brow, and William shrugged.
“People become Hasharana for a very, very personal reason, and people who survive to fail one year always come back the next year,” he said, putting his book down for a second to muse up at the honeycomb glasses. “If their fate is to either become a Hasharana or die trying, then those who die during the exam simply have no place amongst the Hasharana to begin with. They’ll die anyways once they become a Hasharana and start getting Mutant-Class extermination missions. It’s not like the Altered Swarmsteel System will give them a ‘stronger’ insect class or anything, anyways. The only thing that changes is the addition of the Archive.”
“...”
With that, Alice laughed and spun around on the sofa, laying her head down on Jiayin’s lap.
“Wanna bet on the teams that’ll pass the first stage?” she asked, immediately jabbing her finger up at two of the teams on the ceiling. “I’m going with… uhh… wait, I can’t find her–”
“The team with the Plagueplain Doctor and the team with the Symbiote Exorcists,” Jiayin slurred, slapping Alice left and right in an attempt to get the girl off her lap. “Can you, like… stop… using me as a pillow–”
“Oh, the Plagueplain Doctor’s with a noble from the Attini Empire!” Alice chirped, ignoring her and pointing at the team dead centre in the middle of the ceiling. “Okay, I’m going with that team! But the Pioneer team is looking strong as well! William, William, William, who do you think–”
“Team Dahlia,” he said quite evenly, a bored smile tugging on the corner of his lips as he resumed his reading. “They’re the ones on the wall behind you two, by the way. They’re not on the ceiling.”
Alice sat up straight, whirled, and gasped in the same motion. “You’re right! Why aren’t they on the ceiling? That's my face right there–”
“Because they’re nothing special,” Jiayin grumbled, kicking Alice in the back of the head and sending her toppling over the armrest. “They’re… two random girls and a Head of a Dancing Beetle. If the man was paired with a Body and a Tail, maybe they’d be a top team contender, but those two girls are just gonna… drag him down.”
But William hummed like he knew something Jiayin didn't, and Alice clawed over the edge of the sofa, tearing at Jiayin’s scalp.
“William… knows what's up!” Alice growled, and Jiayin licked her palm to prime it with explosive saliva, ready to blast the girl away. “She’s the one… who's going to be… the real show-off for the team, isn't she?”
“Get off me, you fucking brat–”
“Who knows?” William chuckled. “I do wonder how many people will pass this year, though.”