… Darkness blooms down from the top of the fortress like an inkblot spreading on a scroll. The stone starts to crawl, the pillars start to wobble. A shudder of animalistic fear ripples up little Alice’s spine as she watches the Hasharana Academy crumble around her, giant insects overrunning even the diamond-encrusted doors of the grand shelter—in no time at all the swallows will cry, and she will be killed.

She, the last of her class, will be wiped out here.

Even with fear in her throat, she doesn’t falter. Her eyes drift across the first line of giant insects squeezing into the shelter and she bit her nails, twirling her fingers, making exaggerated whips with her four arms as though she were conducting a musical troupe. Most of her classmates would have been able to deflect the threads coming out her nails, but they were already dead. The giant insects are not her classmates. Her threads twirls into a frayed, knotted rope mid-air and cleaves through the first line, ripping into the back. It hurts more to sit there and do nothing. She knows resistance is futile. But she is resolved to take as many giant insects down with her as she can, so when the swallows cry and the rubble is cleared, people will laud her a hero for having not given up until her very end.

She tunes out the rest of her environment and zeroes in on one bug at a time. The shelter fills with unnatural screeching and buzzing as her silk threads whips everywhere all at once, each of her arms taking one cardinal direction, her feet tied to a broken slab on the ground to keep herself from running. Blood was falling from the giant insects’ mandibles, hunger and desire mixed with pure aggression in their eyes. They know it is only a matter of time before they get to her. They charge on, despite the clouds of threads that whip out at them. They charge on, despite rubble falling from the ceiling and crushing dozens of them at once. Their movements grow rougher and rougher until suddenly she cries out—she runs out of threads to produce from her nails.

A great plume of fire pours from a beetle’s mouth, enveloping her whole. She starts screaming; it is a pain unlike any before. More chitinous projectiles launch endlessly against her, chipping her hardened skin, and she whirls in a panic to fend off everything flying at her. Then her left arms are severed and a Mutant mantis flings her into the wall, small bits of silver and stone pelting her head from above. The ceiling crashes down, and as she pries open her eyes she sees a horde of them in quiet advance, thickening by the second.

She rests her back against the wall and bites her lips.

She… doesn’t feel anything about death.

She doesn’t know what that is.

She doesn’t have a heart.

So when she closes her eyes and breathes her last—

She wakes, in a land of silver, where every giant insect is petrified and turned to diamond.

“...”

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She is dead. She is sure of it. But she feels cold on her cheeks, weight on her shoulders; perhaps this is the entrance to the land of the dead?

A worm crosses her eyes. A second worm. A third worm. A fourth worm. They vanish, as quickly as they flitted across the horde of petrified insects, and in their place a man wearing a cloak of living chrome walks up to her. She doesn’t try to pull away even as the man caresses her face, sealing her wounds and regrowing new arms for her.

It doesn’t hurt.

It is just cold.

“... And so you are the last, child of the mandarina,” the man mutters, as little Alice blinks and nods at the same time; that is all she can muster. “I would commend you for being the only one to survive this hellscape, but that would be presumptuous of the man playing the defunct role of a mage envoy. The Seven Swarmsteel Fronts will now be humanity’s domain. No longer will I play the part of your father—tonight, the Hasharana Academy falls, and children like you would no longer be born.

“So how about it, sole graduate of the academy?

“Would you like to be a Hasharana?”

“...”

“You are still far too young to be a wandering bug-slayer, hm?” The man waves the question away, rising to his feet. He nods to nobody in particular, but four shimmers nod back from atop the heads of the petrified insects. Little Alice blinks.

Are there... worms over there?

“Then you are of no use to me, child,” the man says, sighing as she leaves through the ravaged doors of the grand shelter. “I do not care what you do from now on. A child who cannot fight giant insects with glee will not be a useful Hasharana. Stay there and be idle if you please—you will know the pain of starvation soon enough.”

Little Alice doesn't respond as the Worm God leaves the ruins of the academy, likely to build a new one. She's sure a new academy will be erected by the end of the week, but… will she not be a part of it?

Is she no longer needed?

“What do I do, then?”

Should she try to leave?

Should she just sit here and die?

If she dies… would anyone remember her?

“...”

Unbeknownst to her, she still has threads in her blood, because somebody pulls her strings and yanks her to her feet.

Her eyes are blank.

Her body is hollow.

She has no heart.

She lacks the cold steel of the ‘Worm God’, the proud emblem of the Hasharana, and the unbridled malice of the Swarm. She even lacks the strength of her classmates who died before her.

Just one girl, against the world—she walks out of the fortress, out into the desert, and fate picks a direction.

- Scene from Hasharana Academy past