The blizzard raged, freezing rain and hail whipping across the battlefield.
In the distance, mortars fired in relentless blasts, volleys of shrapnel shells exploding on contact with the snow. Inhuman screeches tore into the sky, and the ground rumbled under the weight of a thousand giant black bugs—the stampeding horde was a grotesque sight. They were a wall of giant scorpionflies, swinging their antennae like oversized swords and spears. Blades shattered against their armoured legs. Javelin bolts bounced off their jagged chitin. Wherever they went, massacre followed; the human army's ranks were broken beyond repair.
But Sparrow didn't panic.
He narrowed his eyes down his rifle, visualised a small scope extending past the barrel, and stared down the closest bug a dozen metres in front of him.
Lift.
Aim.
Fire.
His first shot found its mark between the eyes of a bug that was devouring a soldier’s belly with its abdomen sticking up. Shrieks from the right had him whirling, and he pulled back his rifle bolt to chamber a second shot. Without hesitation, he fired a second round past the ear of a retreating soldier, ripping through another bug's leg.
Chamber. Fire again.
He fired twice more in quick succession, finishing off the fallen bug before turning back towards the frontline in the distance. A massive horde of a thousand bugs were still charging past the trenches, ripping through the bramble vine barricades, most unbothered by the falling mortar shells. There were just too many for him to shoot; snapping his aim from one target to the next, he eventually found his rifle clicking empty. His hands flew to his reserve pouches. His fingers failed to curl around even a single bullet.
Someone tugged on his trousers.
He swung his rifle without looking, pressing his bayonet against the throat of a fallen soldier. He recognized her by her code on the back of her neck: designated JA1-NA from the Fifth Frontline Battalion. She'd handpicked anaesthetic floss fungus and treated his wounds with them before. He knew she was about his age, hailed from the far south, and was surprisingly agile for how thin and bony she looked, but now she was missing both her legs and her right eye to boot; it was taking everything she had left in her just to raise her rifle.
Her free, trembling hand drew a bloody insignia in the snow, and she lifted her head to smile at him briefly. It was a strange expression only allowed for a soldier at the brink of death—so he nodded back, gripping the barrel of her rifle.
For the Attini Empire.
And then she caved, her fingers flattening lifelessly. JA1-NA was dead. He immediately blinked and tried to forget her name; he’d learned not to care too much. No one ever lasted long, least of all on the frontlines.
He yanked the rifle out of her hands and raised it, aiming, firing three shots in a single second to shred the brains of the three closest bugs. Yellow pus and black matter spewed behind the five-metre-tall giants. He couldn’t help but flinch a little when the stock of his new rifle nearly kicked back into his face; his own bullets were hollow points, but the frontline soldiers were physically stronger than the soldiers in most other battalions, so they used heavier rifles with chitin-piercing bullets to their advantage. Now he barely had to aim for any weak points to take down a bug.
He couldn’t stop now.
Round after round, one bug after another, his arm muscles tearing with every shot, he kept firing and reloading and standing his ground–
“All frontline battalions! Abandon your posts and retreat to the third trench line!”
His ears perked. A human roar. An order. General Wanuy bellowed for a full-scale retreat, so he immediately slung the rifle over his back and backed off. The minutes that followed came as a snowy blur. He ran low and fast, moving in zig-zags so the mortar shells had a harder time hitting him. At some point, he spotted a line of trenches in the distance. His breaths were running short, his fingers were frozen numb. He threw himself forward and slid down into the trench, regrouping with his battalion of only eight soldiers remaining—all of them kneeling, hunched over, breaths ragged as they stared at his arrival.
They waited ten more seconds, twenty more seconds. When they realised they were the last battalion to retreat, they moved.
Together, they sprinted into an open field within the backline trenches, and there they immediately regrouped with the other battalions: the disposable frontline soldiers, the most numerous and the most gravely wounded. Forty of them groaned and ailed on snowy cots all around, and half of them wouldn’t survive their injuries. The thirty mortar troops in the back were busy uprooting their artillery, preparing to haul them even further back. Twenty scouts were running around providing first-aid, firing coloured flares into the sky to communicate with the battalions in other backline trenches several hundreds of metres away—and all of them were disordered, disgruntled, like the grunt soldiers they were without their commander.
Then, Sparrow heard the sharp clack of a footstep behind him, and all one hundred of them shot to attention. The injured jumped onto their feet, picking up their rifles. The mortar troops dropped their fungus mortars. The scouts fired the black flares into the sky, relaying to the battalions elsewhere that he was here to take command. He was their god: Uniformed, clad in a long fur coat over light black chitin armour, and human. Still, he had four arms with two antennae sprouting off his forehead; he was more biologically modified than any one of them grunt soldiers.
General Wanuy nodded curtly at Sparrow and his battalion before surveying the remaining survivors standing all around, lips curled in displeasure.
“... Vice-general Kuraku.” The General angled his head to look at the redhead standing a bit further back by his side, four hands clasped behind his back. “Damage and casualty report.”
The Vice-general saluted, stepping forward crossing her arm over her chest. “The first and second trench lines have been breached. The bugs storming the frontline number four thousand two hundred and ninety-one, and at least a quarter of them are six-metre-classes and upwards. Estimated casualties on our side are eight hundred and counting.”
The General’s stony expression barely shifted as he turned, regarding the survivors with a cold look. “What of the reserve shells from the mortars even further back? How much longer can they suppress the bugs for our retreat to the fifth trench lines?”
“The scouts in the fourth trench lines fired the orange pheromone flares. We have ten minutes to evacuate before the fungus mortars must cease fire reload, and by then, I surmise the bugs will have overrun even the third trench line.”
Then, the Vice-general paused. Both of her antennae shot up straight as another series of mortar shells cracked the sky in the far distance; the General shook his head slightly and shut his eyes as he walked off to an ammo crate, brushing snow off the lid.
“We underestimated them, after all,” he muttered. “This was a trap. They knew we were coming. The bugs will catch up in four minutes with those newly mutated motor joints of theirs, and if all of us fall here, the Swarm will claim this region and prove an eternal thorn in the Empire's side.” Then he turned around, glaring at the survivors. “All of you, activate status screens. Show me your biologs.”
All one hundred or so of them obliged without a word. Sparrow closed his eyes briefly as he imagined tugging on the implant buried deep in his neck, as though reaching into his flesh with metal wires and yanking out a black box from his spine—and his status screen was among the first to appear over his head, allowing the General and the Vice-general to analyse it as they pleased.
[// STATUS]
[Name: ‘Sparrow’, Human]
[Class: Bullet Ant]
[Origin: Attini Empire]
[BloodVolume: 3.9/4.2 (95%), Strain: 230/501 (46%)]
[Unallocated Points: 0]
[Strength: 3, Speed: 3, Dexterity: 8, Toughness: 2, Perceptivity: 2, StrainLimit: 502]
[// MUTATION TREE]
[T1 | Pheromone Sensors]
{T1 Branch Mutations | Death Detection}
[T2 | Nuerofear Dampener | Vicious Paramandibles]
{T2 Branch Mutations | Emotional Regulator | Venom Amplifier}
[T3 | Hyperreflexive Antennae | Nectar Repository | Stinger Bases] 150P
{T3 Branch Mutations | ??? | ??? | ???}
... And when the General’s eyes lingered on his status screen longer than anyone else’s, he wondered, for the briefest of moments, just what the problem might be.
“Designated ‘Sparrow’, marksman of the First Bullet Ant Battalion,” the General said plainly, regarding him with a cold and sunken gaze. “You are the healthiest among your battalion, and I see you have not yet strained yourself to the point of physical debilitation. Wonderful. As the General of the Hagi’Shar Forward Army, I hereby assign you your final duty as a soldier. You are allowed to use anything we will leave behind in the third trench lines, and there is no time limit for your objective.”
Something pounded in his chest. He tilted his head slightly, making eye contact with the General.
What is my duty? he thought, knowing nobody could hear him.
The General heard him nonetheless and answered quite steadily.
“Stay behind, cover our retreat to the south, and exterminate every insect you see.”
…
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The General had handpicked all three thousand of them in the army since they were children left in orphanages. He'd put them in battalions, housed them, fed them, cared for them; were it not for him, Sparrow would likely have been sold off to some noble tucked safely behind the walls of their private fortress. He'd probably have lived a cozy life far from the battlefield, far from any bugs, far from any weapons and systems and bio-engineered soldiers... but the General was like all of their fathers, and Sparrow couldn't envision another sort of life for himself.
The best time to be alive was right now, on this battlefield—and so it was the best time to die as well.
… Understood.
After another second, Sparrow saluted the General and turned away, marching towards the ammo crates with his rifle in hand.
The Vice-general started barking orders for the rest of the survivors to gather the essentials and depart for the south; they couldn't spend a single second idling about. Sparrow couldn’t really hear the sound of the bugs' legs skittering across the snow, but no doubt they’d close in on the third trench lines in a minute, maybe even a bit less. The giant snow scorpionflies were only one of very few insect species in the world that could tolerate and traverse cold terrain like a beetle could race across dry sand—if the General and the Forward Army were to make a full-scale retreat, somebody had to stay behind to distract them.
And nobody looked back at him as he climbed over the trench, dragging two crates of anti-chitin bullets behind him.
New mission received.
Duration: Not stated.
Location: Not stated.
Objective: Survive.
Through the blizzard, through the rain, he aimed his rifle where moonlight gleamed off black chitin plates and fired—four consecutive shots landing perfectly between four bugs, throwing them to the ground. The recoil of the heavy rifle was powerful against his arms, but his skin tingled, helping him catch a square, raw cut of insect flesh flying at his face just in time.
He didn’t need to look behind him to know it was the General who’d tossed it at him, but he did stare at the insignia of the Empire carved into the brick red meat for a little while.
This was his reward for staying behind.
…
So he immediately popped the cube into his mouth, razor teeth gnashing through the tough, sinewy meat.
Decree Two: Be grateful for what you are given.
Decree Three: Always return what you have been given.
For the Attini Empire.
[Unallocated Points: 0 → 30]
Deposit nine points into strength, thirteen points into toughness, and the rest into strain limit.
[Strength: 3 → 4, Toughness: 2 → 4, StrainLimit: 502 → 510]
[Unallocated Points: 30 → 0]
His muscles tightened. His skin hardened. The system’s augmentations were instant; given the strength and toughness equivalent of four fully-grown men, he fired three consecutive anti-chitin rounds, feeling only a small kick into his biceps. The front line of bugs roared in the distance, and that was his signal to trudge forward to meet them in battle. If he stayed cowering on the edge of the trench any longer, the rest of them would wrap around him and intercept the retreating army.
He would fail humanity, and that wouldn’t do.
Come.
I am here.
The air filled with a cacophony of screeches as the horde rushed him, quickly coming into his scope.
Eight bullets in the magazine. Begin.
He fired left, right, forward, felling two bugs and clipping another’s leg. Four, six, eight more bugs came at him from all directions. Four more dropped within seconds as he jumped, emptying his rifle into half of their heads. The rest flailed and their legs carved through the air, ripping burning streaks across his right thigh as he backflipped to put some distance between them.
Keep going, he thought.
For the Attini Empire.
[Strain: 46% → 63%]
Fire. Chamber. Fire. Vicious onslaught. Reckless abandon. Fighting with reckless abandon—no different from the mindless creatures charging at him. Soon, his anti-chitin rifle clicked empty and he instinctively reached for the ammo crate, only to realise he’d jumped away from it.
He clicked his tongue irritably.
Damnit.
Unwilling to back down, he met the swarming bugs with nothing but a bayonet, slicing through the ranks like a frenzied ant until a bug's antenna stabbed through his waist. He hit the snow, crashing hard as another bug charged at him.
He watched it charge with a livid eye, twisting his lips, gritting his teeth.
Get up.
He pushed to his feet and stabbed straight through the bug's eye, vaulting onto its head before grabbing one of its antennae, holding it like the reins of a bull. He jerked left—the small three-metre-class bug bucked and reeled, crashing into the other bugs violently, moving on until he finally slit its neck.
[Strain: 63% → 76%]
Pain flashed across Sparrow’s eyes, his lungs grasping for scraps of thin, cold-flavoured air as he stumbled off the bug. The slight increase in his strain limit had bought him some extra time and stamina, but it wouldn’t last forever; his muscles were giving out. Eventually his bones would shatter. Eventually his body would fall asleep.
But not now.
Reaching a hundred percent of his strain was the point of no return, but it wasn’t as though there’d be any returning for him anyways.
Decree One: Accomplish your mission no matter the cost.
[Strain: 76% → 88%]
Four more bugs charged at him, and he grabbed his rifle, facing them head-on. A strange, strange emotion tried to tug on the corner of his lips; maybe it was 'fear', maybe it was 'anger', maybe it was 'sadness'. Whatever it was, he didn't let it surface. Clenching his throat, he twirled in place and swung his bayonet in a wide berth, ducking and decapitating two as they soared right over his head. The others screeched to a halt to spit fans of chitin spikes from either side of him, and he only had one free arm to block one—a column of pain seared his back from the hip to the shoulders.
Sparrow hit the ground—but no sound escaped his lips.
Pain was nothing to him.
Get up, Sparrow.
GET. UP.
He did, stabbing the left attacker between the eyes. Without missing a beat, he turned and shouldered his rifle before lifting the bug on his bayonet, swinging it at the other like a massive hammer.
Blood sprayed in an arc from the impact, dropping the bug.
That was number twenty-eight and twenty-nine.
Only four thousand or so more to go–
[Strain: 88% → 95%]
[Warning: Total Organ Failure Imminent]
He fell into the snow, feeling the stinging chills of snowflakes and the pitter-patter of rain against his hot skin. His body was dull and throbbing where he’d been stabbed and cleaved and cut by the bugs, but now the pain was fading, and his mind much more cloudy and murky—he felt he could still think more or less as usual, but this fall was going to be permanent.
His internal organs were going to shut down, and that would be that.
Was this enough?
Briefly, he wondered if he’d served humanity well and killed enough bugs to earn the retreating army enough time. It’d be shameful if he couldn’t at least cover their retreat even after being given special treatment by the General, and if he could just lift his head and and look to see if they were gone, that would be enough... but he couldn't move. If he were a Spore Knight with the ability to regenerate endlessly, or a Plagueplain Doctor who could petrify anything he touched with his venom, or just someone with a bit of 'magic' in his blood, then maybe he'd be strong enough to lift his head. As it stood, though, he was just a grunt ant class soldier. He couldn’t even remember his own name, and the Attini Empire made sure of that. To improve their efficiency and coordination in battle, their systems suppressed intense emotions for all soldiers but the officers and generals who needed to make tactical and strategic decisions on the fly; there was no use for emotions in a soldier whose only duty was to shed blood against the Swarm.
So, in the end, he supposed he didn’t feel like smiling like JA1-NA after all.
Decree Four: Death in battle is an honour for a warrior against the Swarm.
For the Attini Empire.
----------------------------------------
… One hour after the battlefield stilled.
A low hum filled the air, the sound resonating through the snow. The bugs had all but forgotten about the grunt soldier that’d taken out a small, small part of their endless horde, which meant, in the blizzard, a human-sized wormhole was allowed to open undetected above the boy’s head.
The wormhole pulsed with soft, otherworldly light as four children cloaked in ethereal white stepped through—playing with their slinkies, chewing on their snack worms—twiddling their fingers nervously as they looked left and right for any potential threats.
Determining there were none, they quickly turned their heads down to stare at the boy.
"... Whoa. Sharp teeth. Strange hair," one of the children whispered, kneeling and poking at his head. The colour of his hair was unlike anything they’d seen before—black as oil, but messy and sharp like icicles. Another child slapped the back of the first’s head for touching him recklessly. If the boy was dead, they were disrespecting him by treating his body too lightly.
"Lots of people dead here, too," the second child said, looking around the snowy battlefield, arms crossed. "Maybe... maybe we shouldn't be here. We're not gonna find who we're looking for."
But a third child knelt and hovered a gloved hand over his nape, beady eyes widening behind her thick, fluffy hood.
"... Still alive," she mumbled, almost in disbelief at first; then she whirled and faced the others excitedly, pumping her fists. "Still alive! This one's still alive!"
The others gasped, and the four of them immediately warped around each of his limbs, pressing their fingers to his throat. The third child hadn't been lying—despite his body having been run through by countless spikes, shrapnel, and insect chitin, there was still a pulse. There was still breathing.
The fourth child knelt over his face, pressing her hands over his cheeks.
"What do you want?" she asked, voice soft as a whisper. "Do you want to live?"
"..."
And the boy, eyes closed and only half-conscious as he was, couldn't mumble anything even close to a coherent answer. The fourth child grimaced, because the truth was, even she wasn't sure if she'd want to live if she were surrounded by the corpses of her friends and family, knowing she was the only one who'd survived. She wouldn't be surprised at all if the boy shook his head and mouthed a weak, trembling 'no' to her... but he wasn't like her, after all.
Somehow, he pried his eyelids open.
His lips trembled, and tears wrung out of his eyes.
The blizzard was so cold they froze right as they started flowing down his cheeks, but behind the watery shimmer, there was fire in his bloodshot eyes—and the four of them, clad from head to toe in the thickest snow-faring cloak any human could ever wear, shivered as they looked him in the eye.
That rage, that ferocity, that desperation to live; he was no blank-faced, expressionless, emotionless warrior after all.
They heard his silent scream, and he spoke,
"I want to live."
"I want strength."
'I want power."
... And that was because he was human.
Quickly, without another word, the four of them hoisted him over their heads with inhuman strength. There was no hesitation. There couldn’t be hesitation. The boy was still bleeding out, his breaths unbearably cold and shallow—his life could be counted down in the minutes, and if he died, it’d be entirely their fault for not moving fast enough.
"Take him to meet our god!" the second child said.
"Save strange hair boy!" the first child said, nodding in agreement.
"And we'll give him our last system?" the third child asked, looking to the fourth child for permission, for acknowledgement.
And the fourth child didn’t hesitate, either.
"We'll switch out his system for ours!" she said, pumping her fists. "If he wants to live and fight so much, we'll turn him into a Worm Mage!"