It was a tense and poignant final five days for the village of worms, but the Worm Mages made sure to give everyone their due rites of passage—and to that end, right after they’d finished their meeting in the library, they’d brought the five of them living weapons to the flower garden at the top of the world.
There, it’d been Sparrow and Minki’s turn to watch from the sidelines: Harpy, Peregrine, and Crow each took the stairs to the top of the world, and one by one they received the blessings of the Worm Mages. Quartz crystals were fed to the flowers, songs were hummed to the sky, and each of them received a diamond flower ornament Ninmah personally pinned into their hair.
They’d been so resistant to wearing the ornaments unlike anything else they’d been forced to do the past two weeks—probably because they felt having something like that in their hair meant their identities as bullet ant soldiers would be chipped away steadily—but the elders had been swift about it. Peregrine’s original hairpin that kept her hair parted to one side was replaced with the ornament instead. Crow’s messy bangs that fell over his eyes were clipped up over his forehead. Harpy’s were stabbed at the back of her long and flowy hair, much like how Ninmah wore hers, and then they were children of Immanu: neither bullet ant soldiers of the Attini Empire, nor Worm Mages in possession of reality-warping mutations.
Just somewhere ‘in-between’.
Sparrow had nothing to say about the elders’ decision to give them their ornaments. It didn’t matter they’d only been here for a little over two weeks; they were going to risk their lives for the village’s sake, and so they were children of Immanu.
The rest of the next five days had passed by in a blur: the bullet ant soldiers diligently trained the elders’ accuracy with their confiscated rifles, Minki slinked off by herself to get a better approximate location of the nest’s entrance, and Sparrow ate the final, final chunks of Boreus flesh the village had in their reserves. Just like that, he’d unlocked his final tier four mutation ‘Proliferating Septa’, which nobody in the village could tell him what it did. Not even the Worm Mages who had it unlocked for years knew what a ‘septa’ was, so he assumed it was a reactive mutation that’d only activate when something incredibly specific happened. Maybe it wasn’t worth the final four hundred and fifty points he had, but… now he’d unlocked all his tier four mutations.
[// STATUS]
[Class: Worm]
[BloodVolume: 5.4/5.4 (100%), Strain: 432/4344 (10%)]
[Unallocated Points: 19]
[Strength: 9, Speed: 7, Dexterity: 12, Toughness: 7, Perceptivity: 9, StrainLimit: 4344]
[// MUTATION TREE]
[T1 | Wormhole Core]
{T1 Branch Mutations | Warping Step | Wormhole Carving | Warping Voice}
[T2 | Vibrational Senses | Wormic Bones]
{T2 Branch Mutations | Frost Immunity | ???}
[T3 | Segmented Setae | Rigid Annuli | Sclerite Jaw]
{T3 Branch Mutations | ??? | ??? | ???}
[T4 | Proliferating Septa | Salt Epidermis | Filtering Gills | Omnidirectional Ocelli]
{T4 Branch Mutations | ??? | ??? | ??? | ???}
[T5 | Peristaltic Vibration | Rapid Reconstruction | Cryogenic Release | Inorganic Digestion | Distending Limbs] 1350P
{T5 Branch Mutations | ??? | ??? | ??? | ??? | ???}
There was no way he’d gather a thousand three hundred and fifty points in time for a tier five mutation, so from here on out, he’d dump every point he’d get during the siege into levelling his basic attributes—and he was going to eat during the siege. All five of them soldiers would. Ideally, they’d be killing so many Boreus per minute that they could afford quick raw bites here and there to continuously boost their physiology.
… And when all was said and done, it was time for them to head out.
Five months, two weeks, and five days since Sparrow arrived at Immanu. Crack of dawn. The northern village fences were where the children who’d be staying behind gathered to send them off on their journey. Each of the elders took their time hugging their favourite younger brothers and sisters, and the children spared no effort handing everyone handmade talismans, additional flower ornaments to stick in their hair, as well as offering singsong prayers to everyone who so much as even crossed their eyes. To the Worm Mages, this was their greatest and riskiest undertaking yet—from mere children who’d been paralyzed at just the sight of a Boreus to volunteering for a full-on siege, they’d all come a very, very long way.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
So Sparrow, Minki, and the bullet ant soldiers let all of them take their time, standing far away from the village gate with their backs turned to the children, staring out at the distant glacier.
For the five of them, today was just another usual day. Maybe they’d come back alive, maybe they wouldn’t. There was no point trying to predict or control the future, so–
“What are you guys doing over here, hah?” Ninmah grumbled, and ten elders warped behind the five of them, immediately dragging them back towards the children. “Get in here. You’re all part of us, too, and the kids wanna stick lots of flowers onto you!”
“...”
And so, for their part, the five of them didn’t resist as the children jumped over the fences to wrap them in tight hugs. A dozen flowers were stabbed all over their cloaks and scarves, into their hoods and sleeves. Peregrine, the youngest and shortest of them, raised her hand as she tried to get out of her group hug, but neither Harpy nor Crow could offer any assistance; they were just as surrounded as the children chanted their prayers and blessings, filling the morning sky with a cacophony of harmonious, joyous warping voices.
Utu grabbed Minki’s hand and warped the two of them a little bit off to the side, and while Sparrow glanced at him, his face completely beet-red in stark contrast to Minki’s dusty pink, someone tapped on his shoulder from behind.
He turned, and saw a strange grin on Ninmah’s face as she stared up at him.
Her face was beet-red, too, and for the life of him he just couldn’t figure out what it meant.
… But he supposed this was more like a typical morning for Immanu.
And, by the end of the day, they will either have stabilised all of Hagi’Shar or died trying.
----------------------------------------
Eighteen elders and five soldiers. They settled for trudging across the glacier on foot instead of warping to avoid making excessive noise, and that meant they saw the slow, slow infestation of the Swarm as they progressed towards the northern point.
The flat glacier was five hundred metres long, and three hundred metres up north was when ice had all but disappeared under their feet, replaced by fields of pinkish-purplish flesh that was the ‘crawl’. The ground squished under their bare feet. The air was thin with a subtle scent of poisonous spores, but their filtering gills blocked out most of them. It wasn’t just the glacier that’d been infested; the surrounding blackrock mountains were being turned into mountains of flesh, and if they left the Boreus alone for another month or two, the entire Hagi’Shar would probably be crawled all over.
Now that they were stepping on crawl, they started hurrying their way north. No doubt the Mutant at the bottom of the nest could feel something stepping on its territory, and would be sending Boreus to investigate soon.
“Can you detect the nest entrance, Minki?” Sparrow whispered, glancing back at the scout as they hurried over a small mound of crawl, their eyes all peeled for any suspicious-looking cracks and crevices. “We cannot wander around like this for much longer. Within fifteen minutes, we must be standing at the edge of the entrance.”
Minki’s shoulders tensed. “It has to be close by. I am detecting intense Boreus movement within a hundred metres, so we are likely already looking at the entrance,” she replied curtly, raising a fist so everyone stopped moving at the same time. They were holding this position. “Look for the telltale signs of a nest entrance: denser crawl presence, higher heat signatures, and unnatural bone and organic material effigies to ward from invaders. Notice any one of the above and tell me. I will–”
Suddenly, the three bullet ant soldiers stepped forward and raised their rifles to the sky, glancing back at Sparrow for permission to fire.
While Minki widened her eyes, Sparrow pursed his lips and thought about their proposal. Sure, making a ruckus now and seeing where the majority of Boreus burst out of would likely help them pinpoint the nest entrance, but he was worried about the Worm Mages. They were quite deep into the crawl. He didn’t think any of the elders could be caught by the Boreus even if the bugs had a speed advantage on crawl, but–
Utu shot a blunt arrow at the back of his head and made him wince, turning around with a small glare.
“... We’ll be fine,” the one-eyed boy said, shooting him a confident grin and a thumbs-up; as did the rest of the elders. “Do what you have to do. We’ll do our parts as planned, and if everything goes right, we’ll all be back in time for lunch.”
“...”
Sparrow turned away to look at Harpy, nodding firmly.
The Worm Mages had come a really, really long way since their first encounter with the Boreus, after all.
Immediately, the bullet ant soldiers each fired a single shot in the air, the sound rippling across the fleshy crawl, making tiny organic bulbs wobble and living tendrils sway in the winds. Ice cracked in the far distance. The silence that followed was deafening to their ears. All of them sucked in sharp breaths, tightened their grips around their weapons, and just as Sparrow thought about firing a fourth shot himself–
A pillar of black mass exploded from a small hole in the crawl fifty metres to their left, and then a dozen smaller geysers erupted around them, each spewing hordes of giant black bugs into the air. They were hundreds. Thousands. The Swarm of Boreus swirled the skies before landing hard on the crawl, their screeches tearing into the sky and the glacier rumbling under their weight.
But the twenty-three of them had already warped all the way to the mouth of the nest, and the five of them soldiers of the Attini Empire were standing at the edge of the giant pit to hell, glowering down at the horde of Boreus that’d slaughtered a third of the Hagi’Shar Forward Army half a year ago.
It was a straight five-hundred-metre drop to the very bottom—the walls were fleshy crawl, there were ice platforms jutting out here and there, and about a thousand Boreus climbing straight up to meet their invaders head-on—but where sunlight couldn’t reach, humanity’s unwavering spirit could.
Sparrow took a step down, standing vertically on the walls of the pit with his segmented setae, and the other four followed; rifles lifted, eyes narrowed, the tails of their cloaks falling and curling in front of them.
“... Vanguards at the ready,” he said, chambering his first chitin-piercing round. “Commencing Swarm nest extermination.”