Death Rope Passing was as hostile and uninviting as ever—the hundred-metre-long chasm by the side of the blackrock mountains could, theoretically, be crossed by making a simple wormhole, or even by walking sideways on the rough walls using segmented setae. The children of Immanu, however, preferred balancing across the dozens of frayed ropes that could barely be called ‘bridges’, and in doing so could frighten any outsider looking to challenge the chasm.
They made it look so easy, too. A dozen children who’d finished their early lunches were already prancing across the ropes; two boys were warping all over the ropes while play-fighting each other with their slinkies; Enli, the youngest of the elders, was lecturing half a dozen girls by the other end of the chasm, teaching them how to warp faster by simply shifting their weight around; the others were embroiled in all sorts of skipping and clapping and dancing, not a single bit worried they’d twirl off the ropes thinner than the soles of their feet.
Seeing the even-more-frayed ropes made Sparrow do a little double-take at first. He’d stopped training his warping step here about a month and a half ago—running through the village itself was much more practical training for him—but it almost seemed as though the ropes were even more worn down than the last he’d seen them.
Maybe it was a bad idea bringing Minki here, but… well.
She was a silver ant scout.
“We will race across,” he said plainly, whistling and waving the two play-fighting boys over. Their eyes lit up when they saw him, and they warped over to receive their payment of four snack worms each, mock-saluting him as he glanced back at Minki. “The goal is to reach the other side without dying. If you can warp a hundred metres across in one step, then feel free to do so. Otherwise, stick to the ropes and find your own way.”
Ever the stony face, Minki bit her lips and looked a bit hesitant. “What is the purpose of doing so? The ropes are not pulled taut in the slightest. One misstep and–”
“We will race across,” he repeated.
“... Understood.”
He didn't have to stretch his limbs, but Minki had to do it a second time, a third time, and a fourth time. The two boys he'd paid to be the referees counted down from ten in Immanu tongue, and while he wasn't sure if Minki had picked up the tongue yet, they were shouting the numbers with enough exuberance that ‘zero’ should be obvious—so when the boys clapped, kicking a wave of snow at their faces, both of them took off for the ropes.
Ten metres. Ten metres. Ten metres. His feet tip-tapped across the ropes, and it was but a leisurely walk in the park for him. He reached the other end of the chasm and nodded as the children being lectured by Enli threw their hands up, begging for snack worms. The younger elder scowled as he handed each of them a single worm, but that scowl quickly turned into a beam of pure delight when he gave her three snack worms instead, patting her head in consolation.
In return, all seven of them dropped what they'd been doing to cheer for Minki instead, who was—unsurprisingly—stuck at the fifteen metre mark with her arms spread out, desperately trying to balance herself on the rope she'd chosen.
“... You can do it,” he said, unexcited, and Enli hit him in the shoulder. He frowned, prompting her to throw her entire body forward and shriek her cheer as though to say ‘this is how you egg someone on’.
He tried again.
“You can do it,” he said, with a bit more volume, but with less enthusiasm; Enli groaned and started coordinating the girls around her to clap in sync, doing everything in their power to snap Minki out of her frozen state.
But though it may be a waste of limited resources, Sparrow knew a better way to get a fellow soldier to move.
He dragged his right foot back, pulled his rifle out, and aimed at Minki’s head. The glint of silver off his bayonet made the scout's vibrational senses tingle, and when he pulled the trigger, the resulting bang making the kids around him jump—Minki warped another fifteen metres forward, panting and gasping as she flailed her arms around, failing to find the core of her balance.
Before she could fall, he pulled the bolt back, chambered a second round, and fired again. She warped forward again on instinct, her head shooting up to glare at him. If she could make such an expression, she had strength left to spare, so he emptied four more bullets at her before she was a mere ten metres from him, standing completely upright; he didn't attempt to dodge as she leaped the rest of the distance across, pouncing at his throat. with her obsidian knife drawn.
While Enli warped between them and smacked Minki into the snow with a chop to the head, grumbling something about ‘no fighting in the village’, he slung his rifle back over his shoulder and stepped towards the chasm.
“We race again,” he said.
“... Understood.”
He waited for her to crawl onto her feet, waited for the two boys across the chasm to count down from ten, and then—ten metres, ten metres, ten metres. He curled his lips as he stepped onto the precipice on the other side, kicking his feet back and forth while wondering what sort of block was preventing him from warping more than ten metres at once. Was it an unconscious fear of going too fast? Were his strides not long enough? How was it that Minki, who was once again stuck on the thirty metre mark on the other side, could warp fifteen metres in a single step despite having less training than him?
Scratching the back of his head in irritation, he waited until she finally crossed over by herself before stepping towards the ropes once more.
“We race again,” he said.
“... Understood.”
And so warping back and forth across Death Rope Passing was all they did for the next two hours; ignoring Ninmah and the hunting group’s advice to take the afternoon easy, he racked up ‘victory’ after ‘victory’ while Minki suffered ‘loss’ after ‘loss’, though by the end of the second hour he still couldn’t manage to break the invisible ten metre wall. The children weren’t cheering for him. Songs weren’t sung in his favour. With every crossing completed, Enli and the girls patted Minki’s head in consolation as she fell to her knees, heaving for breath. Her shins were shaking, her knees were quaking, her thighs were trembling—even a blind man could tell she was terrified of the sheer height, so he stopped cheering her on after he won his thirtieth race, still waiting for her to catch up to him.
But by the time he turned around to look after winning his thirtieth race, Minki was already a step behind him, just barely touching the tails of his fluttering cloak.
“... Okay,” he said, taking one more step forward so she fell on her face as she tried to swipe at him with her knife, the two boys kneeling next to her and poking her neck with sticks. “Follow me.”
She mumbled, voice muffled through the snow.
“Where are we going?”
“Worm.”
----------------------------------------
The two of them passed dozens of children running up and down the tunnel leading into the Barrows, and every time someone paused in front of Sparrow with an ear-to-ear grin, he stopped and put a snack worm in their basket of snow vegetables.
Even with more children being allocated to hunting Boreus every day—meaning, fewer children to work the usual chores—the Worm Mages hadn’t gotten so desperate for vegetables as to break their age-old tradition of not warping inside the Barrows. Those on harvesting duty for the day simply sprinted harder and faster, hauling baskets up and down in fifteen minute round trips instead of the usual thirty minute round trips; it was good exercise for their growing bodies as well.
The feeling of pushing through physical exertion and burning exhaustion in their muscles couldn’t be replaced by simply increasing their attribute levels. There’d be times where they’d have to push forward even if their bodies were screaming in pain—just because they’d lived peaceful lives thus far didn’t mean it’d last forever.
To that end, by the time the two of them reached the chasm at the end of the Barrows separating the human world from the ‘worm world’, about twenty or so children were already waiting for them with baskets full of tiny crystal quartz.
In a strange meeting of fate, it was Hijo, the precocious nine-year-old, who was leading the harvesting group today. He gestured for Minki to stay at the precipice of the chasm while he traded a basket of quartz for a handful of worms… and then traded a few more baskets for even more worms from the children behind Hijo, just in case they needed extra. He’d never actually been to the Barrows without Ninmah, after all; there was a very real chance he’d mess a few things up.
“Pick a worm,” he said, glancing back at Minki as he waved the children away, motioning for them to start working again.
“Pick a… what?” she asked, completely befuddled.
“Pick worm.”
“What worm?”
“Over there,” he muttered, thumbing at the dozen or so Brightworms slithering about the field of crystal reeds on the other side of the chasm; one of them was already staring straight at him with its teeth pried open. It was probably the one he’d been feeding the past two months. “Nevermind. We feed that one.”
It was only just now that Minki tensed up, seemingly realising they weren’t actually alone in the cavern, but before she could ask him anything he couldn’t answer, he walked over to the edge of the chasm and opened as big of a wormhole as he could open by twirling his right eye in a circle—that was, not a very big wormhole at all. He immediately felt the weight on his shoulders as a torso-sized wormhole opened before his legs, and Minki scooted back as the Brightworm on the other side peered through, teeth clattering for the basket of crystal quartz next to his feet.
“... I cannot keep it open for long.” He clenched his jaw, his eyelids quivering as his very eye strained to maintain the wormhole. “Feed the worm.”
Minki didn’t move. She looked left and right, saw the other children opening wormholes and feeding the Brightworms across the chasm in pairs, and then he kicked a small wave of snow into her face to catch her attention.
“Feed it, then while it is distracted, harvest the crops growing beneath its body.”
“... Understood.”
Hesitantly, Minki knelt on all fours and tossed chunks of crystal quartz into the Brightworm’s mouth, flinching every time its whole body warbled and crushed the quartz with its hundred inside teeth. He felt a little bad making her do both the feeding and the harvesting—when it was him and Ninmah, the one opening the wormhole also did the feeding—but his strain limit was still very lacking for him to concentrate on doing two things at a time while keeping a wormhole open. If this wasn’t an eye-opening experience for him to maybe focus a bit more on increasing his strain limit, he didn’t know what was.
Eventually, Minki managed to pluck enough vegetables from right under the happily chewing Brightworm to fill up the basket, and he blinked to close the wormhole before the otherworldly beast could look to them for more snacks. Minki was already on her knees while feeding the Brightworm, so it was only him that collapsed backwards, his bones still reverberating from head to toe.
The children snickering and giggling at the two of them all exhausted on the ground didn’t help him get up any quicker.
“A… gain,” he mumbled, tapping the remaining half a dozen baskets of crystal quartz behind him, “until they all become vegetables.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Minki lowered her head to the ground, panting on all fours.
“... Understood.”
And so it was that they spent the next three hours mustering up their strength and their courage, opening tinier and tinier wormholes and feeding the Brightworms more and more awkwardly—in turn, the Brightworms on the other side of the chasm stared at them weirdly the entire time, their crowns of teeth pointed as though to say ‘what are you guys even doing’. At some point, even Sparrow lost all strength in his arms and had to lay on his back, only turning his head so he could keep a wormhole open with his right eye while Minki struggled to multitask feeding and pulling at the same time; it wasn’t until they filled up their final basket that Minki finally groaned in exhaustion, her face slamming into the ground as he closed his eyelids slammed shut by themselves.
He wasn’t hopeful that there was some sort of eye-moisturising mutation down the mutation tree, but he could still hope.
“... Okay,” he muttered, his breaths tearing out of his lungs ragged, his chest still heaving up and down as he stared up at the ceiling. “Still have… time. Follow… me.”
Minki mumbled back from the side, an incoherent blabber of noise and pain.
He didn’t bother replying himself as Hijo picked up all their baskets in both hands, hauling them up to the village by herself.
----------------------------------------
They rested for only ten minutes before he dragged himself onto his feet, and, thankfully, so did Minki without him needing to carry her on his back.
The sun was already well on its way to setting by the time they clawed themselves out of the Barrows, re-entering the village once more—in the distance, he heard the hunting group returning with their carcass haul for the afternoon, and he smelled the familiar tangy, meaty scents of Boreus flesh being cooked in the communal kitchens. The first plates would be served in around another hour, which meant if they wanted to get to and back from their final destination in time for Ninmah’s dinner roll call, they had to move fast.
‘Speed’ may be the antithesis of the worm the Worm Mages had always been trying to emulate with their abilities, but not him.
And not Minki as well.
Taking her to the side of the Barrows, he started the long trek up the spiralling path around the blackrock mountain, and faintly he was aware he probably shouldn’t be trying to ascend with his legs on the verge of collapse. Quickly, the two of them realised this was the most dangerous thing they’d attempted all day long when they had to brave the howling winds, the roaring snow, and the wobbly stone beneath their feet. Like Ninmah had done before, he did his best to keep close to the side of the mountain—and while they could most certainly expedite the process by warping intermittently up the ledges, or even just by using their segmented setae to walk vertically up the mountain itself, that wasn’t going to serve his purpose whatsoever.
He wanted Minki to look at the ridge marks imprinted into the mountain. He wanted her to feel the road turning from snow to stone to sunlight-refracting crystals. He wanted her to grab onto the mossy walls during certain sections when they had to shimmy across ledges with half their feet dangling over the edge, and he wanted her to notice the four-petal crystal blossoms growing near the top of the jagged mountain shrouded by a swirl of clouds.
…
Ten minutes of rest wasn’t enough. Heat built up in his throbbing legs, making his skin tingle down to his toes. The temperature up here was near-freezing, but not quite. Even if the two of them weren’t already out of breath, the air was thin where they pressed forth into the swirl of clouds, and looking through the blurriness in his vision was a terrible struggle—if they were anybody but soldiers of the Attini Empire, they would’ve fallen from oxygen deprivation long, long ago.
So, after fifty cruel minutes, they reached the summit. Their heads poked out the dense swirl of clouds and their eyes were met with the garden of a thousand diamond flowers. The sky above was an abyssal blue, and, so close to breaching the barrier that separated the realm of ‘land’ from ‘sky’, there was an even higher spot they could reach: the white-painted rectangular shrine gate above a small slope at the end of the garden.
By all human logic, they should’ve collapsed out of exhaustion somewhere along the way, but somehow they managed to drag their way through the garden, past the diamond flowers, and up the small flight of stairs until they were right under the gate, right on the precipice of what might be a four thousand metre plummet to the earth—and then he sat down first, legs dangling over the edge as he surveyed the endless sea of clouds beneath him.
Minki did as he did, if not only because there was nothing else to do.
“...”
Then, at the same time, both of them decided on their first tier four mutation.
[T4 Mutation Unlocked: Filtering Gills]
[Unallocated Points: 29]
What felt like a thousand tiny scalpels plunged into his skin all over, and there was only brief pain. Brief muscle aching. Then his breath returned, redoubled, filling his lungs with air fresher than he’d ever breathed—of the four tier four mutations, ‘filtering gills’ was the only one he’d been confident did exactly as it meant, and that was allowing him to breathe through his skin like he knew most insects did through their thoraxes and abdomens. There must almost be a ‘filtering’ effect that made it so the air he breathed felt cleaner and cooler. The last time he’d been here, he’d been plagued with a subtle headache that made him almost woozy and sleepy; now, he essentially had his stamina multiplied by being able to respirate almost across his entire body.
For four hundred and fifty points and no apparent visual or physiological side effects at all, it wasn’t a terrible mutation at all. Granted, none of his mutations so far had seriously altered his physical appearance—save for his alabaster teeth and the crystal rings around his limbs—but for something disgusting called the ‘worm’ system, it really was more beneficial than it wasn’t.
“...”
Then, the two of them didn’t do anything else but stare out at the sea of clouds.
It wasn’t snowing here.
They were above snowfall.
It wasn’t raining here.
They were above rainfall.
And here, they could see the entire world—without the columns of mortar smoke rising into the sky, without the giant hundred-metre-class insects dominating the horizon, without the mountains of corpses built on the honourable deaths of their own comrades.
Here, above the world, they were… at peace.
“... The children here can balance across swaying tightropes on one foot and not fear the impending beats of death,” Minki said, her eyes blank, drowsy, and looking far away as she stared at the dusking sun. “They can laugh when a soldier fires a rifle next to their ears, they can afford to look away while they feed abnormal beasts twenty times their own size, and the only thing they really have to worry about is how late they can be for dinner before their elders come pelting their armoured skin with arrows.”
He felt his expression barely shifted, but he wasn’t entirely sure if it really didn’t change. In the four months he’d been in Immanu, he felt he’d become a little… strange.
Things he didn’t used to do, he was more than willing to do now.
Words he didn’t used to even gesture, he was more than capable of speaking now.
Was it merely because his ant system had been removed, or was it because of something else?
Of someone else?
…
He was still clueless in that regard.
But the one thing he did know for certain, he was going to do.
Minki knew it, too.
“... And so you wish to protect this little ‘peace’ of Immanu,” Minki said, shaking her head softly. “Do you, a bullet ant soldier, truly believe that this… that this ‘haven’ can be preserved in these chaotic times?”
His eyes pierced through the swirl of clouds directly below him, trying to spot the lighting braziers of the village.
“I am a weapon,” he said, stalling in a moment of silence before answering. “My ‘beliefs’ have nothing to do with anything I do. Either I can do it or I cannot, and I still remember Decree One: Accomplish your mission no matter what.”
“And defending Immanu’s ‘peace’ is not your mission. It is exterminating the Boreus–”
“It is my mission.”
“On whose orders?”
“The Empire,” he said. “Decree Two: Be grateful for what you are given. Decree Three: Always repay what you have been given.”
“...”
“The Worm Mages saved my life, Minki.” He turned his eyes on her, slow and steady. She didn’t look away from the sparkling sea of clouds beneath her. “I would have let you die, but they saved you, too. Thus, you are in the same boat as I am—fail to defend Immanu’s peace, and you will fail in your mission as a weapon of the Empire.”
Then she glanced at him, an uncomfortable and unfeeling frown on her face.
“Do you not think the worm systems here can be used to defeat the Swarm?”
“I do.”
“Then why not have the children give worm systems to more soldiers in the Empire?”
“They cannot. The two systems they gave us were their last, and considering that the only way to get a worm system is by taking one from another, there can only be as many Worm Mages as there are right now. That is, a hundred and thirteen Worm Mages.”
“Then why not have the children work with the Empire? They would not have to give their systems to anyone. They–”
“Will be subjected to cruelty and warfare beyond their wildest imaginations,” he said curtly. “The Worm Mages are fun-loving pacifists. They will kill to survive, but no more than that. If they join the war against the Swarm, they will lose their peace. If they refuse to join and the Empire or any other faction catches wind of their existence, a war will be fought over who will be able to torture and turn them into soldiers first. There is no ‘happy’ end where the Worm Mages can coexist with the rest of humanity below the mountains—and that is all fine and well.” He shook his head, blinking slowly. “I think… they do not mind living in the mountains, secluded from the rest of the world. They enjoy their peace. What is so wrong with not wanting to become the saviour ‘gods’ of humanity?”
“...”
Minki mulled on it.
And then she closed her eyes, thinking even deeper.
“... What is your plan, then?” she asked. “You said you would return to the Empire to rejoin the fight after exterminating the Boreus. How do you plan on explaining your new system?”
“I would tell the General I do not remember.”
“He would press the issue. He would investigate these mountains by himself.”
“I would become strong enough to persuade him not to. The reward for my extermination of the Boreus will be his reason to acknowledge my system as an anomaly, and the General is a rational man.”
“Even if the General does not investigate further, the Capital will be interested. The Empress and Her Four Families will come. Her Spore Knights will ravage the lands.”
“With the General on my side, we can put up a decent resistance. The Empress and Her Spore Knights have more pressing matters to worry about than how one lowly grunt managed to mutate a system in the middle of a chaotic campaign.”
“In time–”
“In time, I will have helped play a small, small role in humanity being able to defeat the Swarm,” he said, shaking his head, “and by then, nobody will remember the story of the grunt with the mutations of a worm. Humanity will have won. The Swarm will have been exterminated. Nobody will care to look for Immanu anymore.”
“...”
Silence once more.
It was times like these when he wished he’d spent more time reading the easy-to-read expressions of the Worm Mages, because when it came to Minki—a fellow soldier like him—he couldn’t really tell at all.
But, if he had to guess… that little swirl of blue light in her eyes was ‘hope’.
‘Belief’.
Or simple ‘duty’.
Whatever it was, it had her nodding fiercely and fixing him with a glittering, determined gaze.
“... Understood,” she said. “When we return to the Empire, I will assist you and corroborate your claims that our systems merely ‘mutated’. The General will understand even if he does not. We will serve him as his aides as he continues waging war against the Swarm, and Immanu will not be discovered by anyone.”
He dipped his head in return, acknowledging her pledge. “Good. Although I was already expecting that much from you.”
“I apologise if I am not a reassuring weapon. However, our current objective remains unchanged: we must first exterminate the Boreus and destroy their nest before the General can even have a chance to march his army up here.”
“Correct. To that end, we must continue growing stronger. Without enough power to negotiate with the General, we–”
The two of them shivered when they heard a bellow of a warping voice, twisting even the dense swirl of clouds beneath them.
It was the bellow of an angry village chief and the combined impatience of a hundred and eleven children—after all, it was an Immanu rule that everybody must be present at roll call before dinner could be served.
“... Our current objective has changed,” he said, sliding off the edge so his feet were stuck to the side of the cliff. “First, we eat. Then, we race again in Death Rope Passing.”
“Can we… not?”
“Are you not hungry?”
“No. Not that. Can we not rest at night?”
He tilted his head. “No.”
“... Understood.”
Minki followed him off the edge, and the two of them started running vertically down the mountain.