It’d taken a whole week and being brought to Death Rope Passing for Sparrow to learn how to control his warping step, but M1N-K1 warped faster than him, getting inside his range to drive a straight kick towards his stomach.
He sidestepped by a foot and dodged the kick, his wormic spine snapping with the jerky motion. At the same time, he grabbed her kicking leg with both arms and twisted down, throwing her into the dome shoulder-first—but the glass couldn’t withstand their weight and shattered, a hundred shards falling with them as he slammed her into the study table.
The landing hurt them both the same, but both of them managed to scramble onto their feet, warping back, skidding back to opposite ends of the library.
… She is a silver ant scout, after all.
From the lowest to highest rank in the Hagi’Shar forward army, it was first the Carpenter Ant Battalions, then the Mortar Ant Battalions, then the Silver Ant Battalions, and finally the Bullet Ant Battalions. The silver ant scouts were especially trained in traversal and movement techniques even bullet ant soldiers wouldn’t know, so it didn’t exactly come as a surprise to him that K1 got the hang of the warping step so quickly.
He tested her control, then. He warped ten metres around the edge of the library with a single step, and she warped the exact same distance in the other direction, keeping him at a fixed distance. Her eyes were cold and steady, her muscles coiled and ready—he was about to take another step around the library when she suddenly warped fifteen metres in one go, tackling him with her shoulder while her obsidian-edge knife flew at his throat.
An Empire-issued obsidian knife... a fair bit sharper than my bayonet.
Tanking this with my bare skin would be difficult.
The scout moved nimbly despite her larger size; he blocked her knife with his rifle, but her shoulder rammed straight into his chest and they exploded out the front door, tumbling down the snowy slope as a crowd of children shrieked around them. Through the pain, through the rolling, he heard Ninmah faintly shouting at them to stop, but he felt the air twisting around K1. He followed her through the warp, both of them reappearing atop a distant gabled roof as they landed on their feet.
She was already in his face by the time he regained his balance, trying to hold his rifle in a defensive stance.
‘M1N-K1’, huh.
He deflected her attack, her knife grazing the side of his cheek. She darted in with her knee as a follow up, trying to smash his stomach, but he clinched his elbow and blocked it with his rigid annuli, snapping his right arm voluntarily as he swung his fist at her temples like a flail. His attack caught her with a loud whack and sent her reeling with a growl, slipping off the gabled roof, but in another second—he felt it with his vibrational senses. Space being carved away behind him. He whirled just as she was about to slip off the roof and swung the stock of his rifle, wood striking obsidian in a bone-reverberating clang.
She spat and pulled back, warping five metres, ten metres, fifteen metres back in quick succession. Incredible control, not enough decisiveness; he knew from experience that doing rapid short warps was more stamina draining than doing one single long warp.
“As ‘M1N-K1’, you were the leader of the First Silver Ant Battalion, were you not?” he asked, wiping his bayonet clean with the sleeve of his cloak, stepping up to the narrow ridge of the roof. “If you were the leader of the First Silver Ant Battalion, then you must have been the best silver ant scout in the Hagi’Shar Forward Army. Why did he not keep you on retainer?"
She stretched her legs, warping back and forth across her roof for a little while as though to test how far she could go in a single warp. Then she warped in without warning, rushing across at sporadic intervals to make her movements harder to predict.
“I am replaceable at the end of the day,” she said, warping to his side the moment he was about to swing his rifle forward, her knife going ground to sky towards his jaw. “Besides, now that the Boreus nest’s location has been uncovered, scouts are no longer necessary in the Hagi’Shar Forward Army.”
“I see,” he said, stomping the roof to make wooden boards fly into the air; he twisted his entire body and kicked in her direction, his shin missing her head completely, but the shrapnel he kicked decimated the roofs in her general direction. He felt her warping behind him and swung his rifle preemptively, wood clashing obsidian once more. “Then you are no longer required to stay with the Forward Army. Remain in Immanu and assist me with the extermination of the Boreus. You will serve both the General and the Attini Empire that way.”
“I refuse.”
“Why?”
“You have yet to prove yourself a superior soldier,” she said plainly, dropping to her knees as she threw her knife at him, the edge cutting across his throat. A shallow cut. He would’ve been cut deeper if he hadn’t broken his neck and jerked his head to the side, but she followed up by warping onto his shoulders, wrapping her legs around his neck. Somehow she caught her knife out of the air before it could fly too far away. “Your toughness level seems to be a bit above average. You must have consumed insect flesh. However, the Empire’s obsidian blades are designed to crack even Boreus chitin. I highly doubt–”
“You are only the strongest of the Silver Ant Battalions.”
He lashed out and grabbed her knife-holding wrist, twisting so both of them slammed down into the roof at the exact same time—this time, he didn’t let them fall through. He warped them above another roof so they could slam down a second time, and the impact rattled her brains, making her legs relax just a tiny little bit. That little bit was enough for him to worm his way out, and before she could scramble to her feet, he was already standing over her with his rifle stock swinging down.
[Strength: 6 → 7]
[Unallocated Points: 177 → 141]
His rifle smashed into her chest with the strength of seven men, like splitting logs with an axe, and again he sent her crashing through the roof. Underneath, Ammu, Nammu, and Immu shrieked, the three brothers in the middle of changing into their thicker hunting cloaks, so he hopped down with an apologetic nod before grabbing the groaning K1 by the collar, warping off to a nearby communal kitchen.
While she tried to swipe at his neck with her knife, he tossed her into a nearby mound of snow and looked around the front of the kitchen. There were already a dozen children digging holes outside, still trying to fill them with excess Boreus flesh—including the extra forty or so Boreus they’d killed saving the Silver Ant Battalion—so he trudged over to Hijo, a nine-year-old little girl who was about to turn ten in a few months, kneeling to face her eye-to-eye.
Precocious little Hijo crossed her arms, cheeks puffing. “How much?”
He raised nine fingers. “Nine points’ worth. Take it out from my share.”
“How do you want it?”
“Between two pieces of flatbread.”
“Okay!” She whirled, shouted at the younger children under her command today, and while two of them warped into the kitchen to get his order done, she turned back around with her palms cupped together. “That’ll be… um, five for the processing fee, and two more for the chefs!”
Grumbling, he reached into his cloak, rummaging around his inside pockets before dumping five snack worms into her hands. She squealed with glee and warped around the back of the kitchen to enjoy her light-morning snack, and not a few seconds later, the two children who’d warped into the kitchen came back out with his sandwich. They bounced up and down, laughing as he paid each of them a snack worm for their trouble—and then he gave each of them one more snack worm as he shoved their heads down, making them duck under K1’s swinging knife from behind.
“Your warps are too fast,” he said, snapping his shoulder so he could grab her collar once again without looking. “Even if you want to rush into the warp, you have to relax like a worm… or so the Worm Mages say.”
Ten metres. Ten metres. Ten metres. With her collar in his hands, he warped them both to the western edges of the village before chucking her into a freezing river stream. As usual, Utu was already sitting by a crackling campfire next to the river, holding his crystal quartz arrowheads over the fire so he could sharpen them easier, so he sighed the moment he locked eyes with Sparrow—Sparrow, likewise, didn’t waste any time with niceties, tossing his sandwich onto one of Utu’s arrowheads.
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“She’s a fast learner,” Utu remarked, raising his brows as Sparrow sat next to him on a little stool, watching K1 crawl out of the freezing river, gasping. Utu blushed a little, “and unlike you, she’s pretty. And she’s got pretty good stamina, too. She’ll make for a good Worm Mage, eh?”
Sparrow nodded slowly, taking the sandwich arrowhead from Utu and holding his breakfast over the fire himself. “She has more talent than me.”
“... You’re not gonna deny it?”
“Strength must recognise strength,” he said, rolling the sandwich over so the other side could heat up. “With her speed and stamina, she can probably carry all of the hunting group’s haul back to the village herself. You can have more time to practise your archery.”
“Oh!” Utu’s ears perked up as though he just remembered something. “Speaking of, I’ve been meaning to ask: what, exactly, does this ‘dexterity’ attribute do? I noticed yours was strangely high, so… what’s up with that?”
“It gives you a better capability to handle technical weapons,” he replied curtly, plucking the sandwich off the arrowhead and stuffing the feathers back in Utu’s fist. “You should level yours up by one or two levels. For ranged weapons like my rifle and your bow, high dexterity is useful.”
“Sweet! I’ll get it up to seven, then–”
K1 lunged to stab his feet, so he kicked a thin wave of snow into her face and shot off his stool, grabbing her by her dangling hood.
Ten metres. Ten metres. Ten metres. Back to the library it was. He was briefly aware his strain limit was increasing a bit too much for what was only the early hours of the day—he still had plenty of chores that required him to make at least a wormhole or two—but today, he thought, could maybe be a rest day. The wounds he’d sustained from the Boreus three days ago still hadn’t fully healed, and his right arm still stung a bit whenever he swung a little too hard. Maybe Ninmah would let him get away with only harvesting crops from the Barrows; maybe he could just lay on his bed until well into the afternoon.
Daydreams aside, he warped through the broken front door of the library, tread snow onto the wooden floorboards, and tossed K1 into the table they’d broken just a few minutes ago. While she struggled to claw onto her feet, strain most definitely catching up to her rapid warps, he pecked at his sandwich for a first taste to see if the children put anything funny in them—sometimes they’d put watered root vegetables in his sandwiches, and it’d make the whole thing taste mushy and terrible. Thankfully, it was Hijo the ever-diligent leading the digging team today, so the children didn’t bother pulling pranks on him. It was just flatbread, snow lettuce, and a small cut of Boreus leg meat he’d personally heated over Utu’s campfire, and that was to say–
[Unallocated Points: 141 → 150]
–the children had gotten good enough at partitioning that they could control the exact number of points a single bite of Boreus meat would give.
“... Decree Three,” he said, swallowing the last piece of his sandwich, “when in doubt, know that the Attini Empire is right.”
K1 rose onto two wobbly feet, panting for breath, and then she warped left. Then right. Up onto the third floor railings, down onto the second floor railings. She was a swirl of speed and motion, difficult to pin down with his eyesight alone, and even his vibrational senses weren’t helping him keep up with her much. He could whirl around in a panic and try to lock onto the flutter of her cloak, but… simply ‘blocking’ her attack wasn’t how he was going to defeat her in this battle.
So he dropped his rifle and cracked his neck again.
He simply needed to show he was the superior soldier.
Unlock the tier three mutation on the right.
[T3 Mutation Unlocked: Sclerite Jaw]
[Unallocated Points: 150 → 0]
Her warps quickened somehow. She started jumping from chair to railing to shelf to windowsill in rapid succession, making her movements that much more erratic, that much more unpredictable. He rubbed his jaw in an attempt to get rid of the growing tension, but then again it was a necessary tension when it came to mutating a new trait; he certainly hadn’t felt ‘right’ in his own skin when he’d mutated his worm-like bones, and he’d certainly had his run of pain when he’d mutated his vibrational senses. Now, he’d barely felt anything when he mutated his rigid annuli, but he’d chalked that up to it being a mostly surface-level mutation that was just like evolving a thin layer of armour over his skin—this mutation was not like his rigid annuli.
It strengthened the bones in his jaw.
It sharpened his already viciously sharp teeth.
It lined the insides of his mouth with what felt like diamond as he flicked his tongue around.
And when K1 darted in from the back, tripping his vibrational senses at just the very, very last moment–
He whirled and snapped at her obsidian knife, shattering it with a single chomp and headbutting her into the floor as he did.
“We have worm systems now,” he mumbled, making a big show of chewing the obsidian shards, alabaster teeth crunching into the volcanic glass without ripping a single tear in his mouth. “Up here, in the village of worms, the Empire’s obsidian blades will do nothing. The Boreus in the glacier are stronger than the Boreus on the surface. We will both need more than what we had in the Forward Army if we want to exterminate them from Hagi’Shar, so…”
He paused, grinding the rest of the shards in his mouth to dust—making special care not to swallow any of it—and then spat them all out.
“... Join me, M1N-K1,” he said, kneeling where she was groaning and rubbing her own head, covering her eyes with her hand. “Exterminate the Boreus with me. Afterwards, we will both return to the General for our next mission.”
“...”
What looked like the beginnings of a cry seemed to twist the scout’s lips, but, after a moment, she managed to suck in a sharp breath and calm herself.
With her eyes still covered, her body still shaking slightly, she nodded where she lay in the wreckage of the study table.
“... You are a bullet ant soldier, after all,” she said. “Understood.”
“Good.” He stood up and patted his hands, scratching his alabaster teeth as he did. “I will brief you on Immanu’s current situation over the course of the coming week. For now, you will rest. Do not leave this library in the meantime.”
“Understood.”
“Here. Have a snack worm–”
Ninmah warped behind him and whacked him on the head, clicking her tongue irritably as his knees buckled. His eyes widened as he fell face-first into the wreckage next to K1. Evidently, he’d strained himself more than he even realised if Ninmah could knock him down with a simple blow.
“... No fighting in Immanu,” Ninmah snapped, scowling as she planted both fists on her hips. “You’re staying in the library as well, Sparrow. No chores for you until you fix the dome and the door and everything else in between. Don’t forget Ammu and Nammu and Immu’s roof.”
He coughed out a mouthful of snow, rolling over. “Understood.”
“I’m glad you do,” she said, sighing angrily, and Sparrow did feel a bit of guilt; he could’ve at least avoided destroying the three brothers’ roof if he’d really tried, but it was a bit too late for that now. Ninmah knelt down to K1’s level, slapping her own cheeks to soften her face up with a charming smile. “Now, about… you. M1N-K1, right? Is that… your name?”
K1 peeled her hand off her eyes and glanced at Sparrow. He nodded back, giving her permission to speak.
“Yes,” she said. “I am designated M1N-K1 of the First Silver Ant Battalion. Pleased to make your acquaintance, chief of Immanu. You may order me around as you wish–”
“We can’t call you M1N-K1, you know?” Ninmah said, flicking K1 on the nose and making the scout flinch; a flick from a Worm Mage must really hurt. “The kids can’t say all that every time they want to call out to you, at least. Do you want a nickname? I can pick one out for you if you want.”
“That is unnecessary. K1 would suffice–”
“When I write your name down how it’s pronounced,” Ninmah said, ignoring K1 as she started drawing in the snow next to them, “it looks like the word ‘Minki’. Can we call you Minki? That’s a cute Immanu name, so the kids will definitely remember it!”
“... Understood.”
While Ninmah beamed and leaned into Minki for a hug, Sparrow rolled onto his side and looked the other way.
He couldn’t quite explain it himself, but he couldn’t form a conclusion as to what the emotion stirring in his chest was. It wasn’t ‘satisfaction’ from having successfully recruited a competent ally, or ‘relief’ that he’d been let off easy by Ninmah for destroying half the library in the process of doing so—he felt this emotion was something much, much more annoying than either one of them.
A cute Immanu name, huh.
…
While Minki struggled to ask Ninmah to let go of her hug, he shook his trivial thoughts away and focused on the important matters at hand.
First, I should gather enough points to unlock the last of the tier three mutations so I can see what the tier four mutations are.
Then, about the Boreus nest that Minki said her battalion located…
…
… No.
First, I fix the front door.