Of his twenty comrades in the First Bullet Ant Battalion, Sparrow had been ranked number eight in terms of the total number of training fights won. Like all bullet ant soldiers, he’d been trained extensively in close-quarter combat, but his specialty was long-range sharpshooting; such was his designation of ‘Sparrow’, the battalion’s marksman. There was always use for a marksman in small extermination squads, so he’d never really been ‘excluded’ from missions where backline support was needed… but he was only ranked eight because the specialties of the first seven ranks were indispensable for every mission they were sent out on, and whenever he had to sit a mission out, they would go in his stead.

Ranked three, designated strategist ‘Crow’. Ranked two, designated scout ‘Peregrine’. Ranked one, battalion leader, designated vanguard ‘Harpy’—the three of them together could probably kill the Vice-general if they wanted to.

The battle began when he chambered fistfuls of snow into his rifle and the three of them loaded theirs with quartz crystal bullets; there was no need for a bell. Sparrow snapping his rifle up and firing was the signal, and Harpy jerked her arms up, blocking his bullets with sharp twangs against her black bullet ant chitin.

Even real metal bullets wouldn’t have been able to pierce her armour there, so she didn’t fall over ‘dead’. In the time he took to fire once, Crow and Peregrine had dashed off to the sides, rolling behind chunks of Boreus meat as cover. They raised their rifles, firing twice. His vibrational senses tingled and he warped behind them–

Harpy stomped and kicked a wave of snow back, blocking his field of vision. He cracked his wormic bones and dodged and spun and launched himself further back, down the street towards the bell tower, but a volley of bullets flew out the fog with near-pinpoint accuracy, piercing through the pallet of wood he was standing before. Narrowing his eyes at Crow already standing atop a nearby roof, he had the faintest idea how they’d managed to shoot back at him—Crow, who could see him directly, was communicating his locations to Harpy and Peregrine with his pheromones.

Any normal soldier would simply fire back at Crow, but he knew better. The moment he turned his rifle on Crow was the moment the other two would get the signal to shoot, knowing he wouldn’t be able to fire back with his rifle trained on another target.

The sacrificial ant tactic.

Not that Crow’s chitin could be pierced at this distance, anyways.

As bullets staggered through the fog to suppress him behind his cover, he kept his vibrational senses open. Crow could see him, but the strategist wasn’t firing back. It was to create a false sense of security; there was a bouncy rhythm to the rate of fire, the time between bullets flying out the barrel and hitting the wall behind him, and there was a pattern. He was being given time to think, and if there was time to think–

He warped three metres to the left instinctively, dodging Peregrine as she attempted a sneak bayonet attack from the side. She whirled immediately for a counter swipe, but he fired one, two, three times into her chitin forearms; he made a bullet-sized wormhole for the fourth shot and fired through, making the bullet fly into her neck from the side. Somehow she reacted just in time to kick up another wave of snow, creating another thin fog between them as Harpy emerged from the end of the street, firing rifles in both hands at the same time.

Crow gave Harpy his rifle so she could fire at twice the speed, creating the illusion that both her and Peregrine were still shooting at me from all the way over there.

But Peregrine is now here, which means–

Crow dashed through the fog Peregrine retreated through, bullet ant claws sharpened, swiping at his throat. The strategist’s face was as blank as ever as he blocked with his rifle and warped onto a nearby roof, kneeling, not firing back immediately. Crow was still down there, and Harpy was still looking for where he’d warped off to; a bayonet burst from the snow-filled gutters right next to him and stabbed into his thigh, chipping and denting his rigid annuli. By itself, the bayonet wouldn’t have done much damage, but then she fired and a jolt of pain ran through his leg—he stumbled into a warp and put ten metres between him and all of them, frowning.

Cold blood trickled out the bullet hole in his left thigh, but if he clenched his muscles really tight, he could slow the blood loss a little bit.

… They have been observing how the Worm Mages move the past week.

Peregrine continued her pursuit. She burst out of the snow-filled gutters herself and took big leaps across the roofs, one after the other, and all the while Harpy fired at him from the thick fog down below, a constant nuisance. The bullets didn’t need to actually hit him; just distracting his vibrational senses at key moments was enough. Warping down and behind the fog, he swung the stock of his rifle to knock Harpy out, and he did manage to hit someone. Someone fell off their feet as they blocked last minute with their forearm, rifles falling out of their hands, but that weight and that sensation of impact was off. It was too easy. It was too light.

He fired through the fog at the downed soldier, clearing just enough of it to see Crow deflecting all four shots with his forearms. Harpy emerged behind him with a chair—the two soldiers had switched places while he’d been focused on Peregrine—and she swung it at his head, recklessly fast. He whirled and ducked. Crow jumped up behind him and tanked the hit, shattering the chair, sending wooden shrapnel flying everywhere. It may have just been a coincidence that some of it stabbed into the bleeding hole in his thigh, but with the bullet ant soldiers, there was no coincidence. Crow thought it was worth getting slammed in the head with a chair just to wound his mobility even further.

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It didn’t matter they were three thousand metres above ground level and completely out of their element.

Their rhythm completely changed. If they were carefully poking and prodding his mobility before, they were on an all-out reckless assault now—he warped ten metres back onto the edge of a roof to smear freezing snow across his wound, but Crow suppressed him with bullets from countless angles, constantly putting him on the move. He warped down into alleyways, hid under roofs, but Peregrine punched through the walls, tracking him by seeing how the air twisted in the wake of his warps. On the very, very rare occasion that he was only facing one of them, he’d immediately dart in and try to shoot them down with wormhole bullets from every conceivable direction, but Harpy never let them be alone for more than a few seconds; even with the strength equivalent of nine men, his bayonet stabs never even managed to dent Harpy’s chitin.

It was difficult trying to keep up with all three of them when he only had one pair of eyes.

So the next time he warped onto a roof, panting and gasping for breath as he just barely managed to evade Harpy’s claw–

Deposit four hundred and fifty points into unlocking the tier four mutation on the far right.

[T4 Mutation Unlocked: Omnidirectional Ocelli]

[Unallocated Points: 491 → 41]

His skin felt like it was bubbling. It felt like tiny eyes were growing all across his body, making him more sensitive to light, to cold, to heat—it was an extension mutation to his vibrational senses, but more visual—and while he wasn’t exactly facing the direction of attack, he almost felt as though he could see the small flicker of silver light behind him.

He whirled on instinct, locking eyes with Crow trying to snipe him from behind a distant chimney.

There you are.

As Harpy and Peregrine jumped up and jabbed their bayonets forward, he warped directly across and grabbed Crow by the neck. The others fired at his back, so he simply warped away with Crow in his hands—dragging the strategist through grates and walls and mounds of snow before tossing him into the side of the bell tower, tossing his own bayonet forward and pinning his collar against the wall.

More gunshots resounded through the air, distracting his vibrational senses, but the flashes of bullets leaving their barrels do not lie. He ‘saw’ the flash coming from his left with his omnidirectional eyes. He felt the bullet whizzing past his ear before it even left the barrel, so he snapped his head forward, dodging it, and then returned a shot straight between Peregrine’s eyes. The soldier who’d tried to sneak a shot on him while Harpy distracted him with her loud shots toppled over, playing fair and playing dead.

With Crow hanging limp on the wall and Peregrine knocked out, only one remained. Harpy charged around a corner, furrowed her brows just slightly at the sight of her defeated subordinates, and immediately pointed her rifle at him. He didn’t move out of the way. She pulled the trigger; she’d no bullets left, and he’d been counting.

It’d come down to a duel.

Harpy started circling him like a murder of crows, unhurried but wary. He could try to shoot at her from a dozen different directions, but the truth was, he’d always wanted to know just how strong the Bullet Ant Battalion’s leader was; he’d seen her flip giant insects over and smash them into groups of soldiers from the Plagueplain Front, so her strength level had to be decently high. Maybe even higher than his.

Rolling his shoulders, cracking his neck, he gripped his rifle tight in his hands and prepared for a clash. Harpy mimicked him, drawing one leg back. Since he was the one who wanted to test her, he wasn’t going to move… and the moment she charged at full strength with her bayonet reared behind her, her expression blank and distant, was the moment he arrived at a conclusion.

The fight was over.

From atop a distant roof, three blunt arrows smashed into the side of Harpy’s head and knocked her to the ground, soundless and unceremonious. Sparrow glanced over and saw Utu scowling at all of them, but not a second later, Ninmah warped behind him and whacked his head with a spatula, a plain white apron tied around her waist—he’d prepared himself for a big scolding beforehand for fighting and shooting around the village without permission, but getting hit on the head by a Worm Mage still hurt, after all.

“... Dinner,” Ninmah said, grumbling under her breath as she dragged him off to the communal kitchens. It was evident she wanted to scold him even more by the pout on her face, but… everyone was hungry. A few other elders warped in to start hauling the fallen bullet ant soldiers away as well, and Minki warped next to him, hanging him a bandage for his thigh as he let Ninmah pull him by the wrist.

Minki gave him a quizzical tilt of her head as though asking if they were good enough, so, in response, he glanced at Harpy wobbling to her feet behind him.

All three bullet ant soldiers were already back on their feet, politely declining the elders’ offers to warp them to the communal kitchen; not one of the three looked like they bore a grudge against him as they ran and caught up to him, trailing a fair distance behind him.

…

If Utu hadn’t interrupted with an arrow to her face, he would’ve had to warp away from Harpy’s bayonet charge.

He would’ve died in an instant otherwise.

“... In two weeks, we will set off for the Boreus nest and exterminate the Mutant,” he said, nodding firmly at Minki, “and they are more than strong enough.”