A thousand Boreus scaled the fleshy walls of the pit to hell, and the hail of bullets began to fall.

Every bullet they’d confiscated from Kuraku’s outpost, they were feeding into their rifles like vials of blood to famished ghouls; rapid fire resounded across the pit as the five of them walked down, bare feet glued to the wall, felling a dozen giant bugs with each volley.

They didn’t have to worry about running out of ammo. Every time they pulled their hands back, a Worm Mage would warp in and dump a fistful of bullets before returning to the entrance of the nest. The elders’ job in this siege was to distract the surface Boreus and keep the five of them from being flanked from behind, while a few of the younger elders who couldn’t dance and fight as well played mules in the resupply chain. They’d brought every crate of bullets with them, and the mules carried the crates on their backs like they were diamonds, always ready to distribute more ammo. The five of them need only focus on hell—Sparrow reached into his cloak and pulled out a quartz crystal bomb.

“On my mark,” he said, as the other four pulled out bombs of their own, “three, two, one, drop.”

They dropped their small black bombs at once, and he fired in quick succession, detonating all of them into sparkling clouds of pure, chitin-shredding icicles. The first wave of Boreus was met with a storm of hail. Fifty of them had their skulls bashed open by the giant icicles, and they dragged fifty more down as they fell, screeching and flailing their legs.

Utu had made the bombs exactly as he’d instructed them to.

This is doable.

We can win.

The five of them fired faster than the Boreus could crawl up, and the bugs realised it. An unholy screech resounded off the walls; Sparrow tightened his chest and knew it was the Mutant commanding the Boreus, telling them to hold position and to stop charging mindlessly. Now they stood on platforms, fanning their defunct wings, sending waves of chitin spikes at the five of them.

Harpy, Peregrine, and Crow dropped to their bare stomachs, ducking under the spikes. Sparrow and Minki warped to the opposite side of the walls, and then they kept advancing—the three bullet ant soldiers walking on the ‘ground’, and the two of them on the ‘ceiling’. Split apart, the Boreus couldn’t concentrate their projectile attacks, and the five of them wore the Worm Mage’s nigh-impenetrable cloaks. Spikes bounced off the fabric that fell before them because of gravity. Their toughness levels were high enough to bat anything shot their way with their bare forearms.

“Hasten our advance,” he said, glancing up at the three bullet ant soldiers, “and capture a checkpoint for us to rest on.”

The pit was five hundred metres deep, but there were platforms every hundred metres where the Boreus nested their giant milky eggs in fleshy oval pits. Close to the first platform, the five of them released their sticky skin and dropped down, landing hard between a dozen bugs—bayonets cleaving in circles to decapitate half of the horde in a single swing. Heads flew and blood spewed. Sparrow fired a bullet up to signal the Worm Mages down, and all eighteen of them warped down immediately, slamming ammo crates and sandwich boxes and all sorts of camping equipment onto the platform.

Both Ninmah and Utu shot him nervous grins, waving at the five of them to continue down.

“We’ll hold this platform and stop the Boreus from flanking you!” Utu said, giving him a thumbs-up.

“Everyone! Hands on the walls, feet on the ground!” Ninmah shouted. “We’re using peristaltic vibration just like we planned!”

At once, the elders slapped their palms on the walls, and when they hissed cold breaths through gritted teeth—their bones trembled, their muscles quivered, an earthquake rocked the walls of the pit above them. Two hundred or so giant bugs lost their footing and came tumbling down, falling past them, but the Worm Mages had more stamina to spare. They’d been raising their strain limit to the quintuple digits the past half a year, and just between the eighteen of them, they’d all unlocked their tier five mutation ‘peristaltic vibration’: a mutation that allowed them to vibrate their bodies and create miniature earthquakes when they were all vibrating solid surfaces in sync.

It wasn’t a very useful mutation for their normal day-to-day lives, but like this, the Boreus above had no option but to crawl down slowly and carefully. That brought Sparrow and the soldiers enough time to devour the sandwiches, refill their ammo pouches, and then butcher a few bug carcasses that’d landed next to them.

Raw Boreus flesh didn’t taste the best, but any amount of points they could get, they would have to take.

[Unallocated Points: 19 → 56]

Then they resumed their descent, dropping another round of quartz crystal bombs to disorient the bugs beneath them.

Four hundred more metres.

In nest extermination missions, individual strength wasn’t important. It didn’t matter Sparrow and Minki could warp while the bullet ant soldiers couldn’t. Against massive hordes, there was only strength in numbers and firepower, and the Worm Mages were the perfect backline support. Even without shooting bullets or arrows themselves, just the fact that one of them could function in the stead of an entire supply chain made non-stop firing a viable strategy. Sparrow barely had to aim. There was a Boreus everywhere he looked, and a bullet in his hand whenever he reached back for one. When massive fans of spikes flew up at them, a wall of wormholes would open and reflect the spikes back at the bugs. Really, all five of them could be replaced by any grunt ant soldier and they’d likely perform just as well—that was how impermeable the Worm Mage’s support and defences were.

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[Unallocated Points: 56 → 89]

Three hundred more metres.

Thinking wasn’t necessary. Paying attention wasn’t necessary. Sparrow’s hands moved on their own, firing, chambering, firing again. Not a single day passed by where he didn’t think the Worm Mages’ abilities could truly turn the tides of war against the Swarm, but now they were actually doing what the entire Hagi’Shar Forward Army had been unable to do that first night they attempted an assault, and it was… ‘exhilarating’. Slaughtering hordes of giant bugs had never been so fun and easy before. Between their crystal bombs and bullets and reflecting wormholes and earthquakes to fell the Boreus, they’d completely overprepared for the nest itself.

[Unallocated Points: 89 → 138]

Two hundred more metres.

And now Sparrow knew he couldn’t let the Attini Empire get its hands on the Worm Mages.

He just couldn’t.

None of them had any idea what the Worm Mages’ tier six mutations and above did, but if the Attini Empire had them under control, their powers would be used to slaughter cities upon cities of humans to consolidate the Empire’s rule. Only afterwards would they be turned against the Swarm, and by then it’d be too late for their spirits.

… So he’d exterminate the Boreus nest here and hold the General to his word.

“One hundred metres to contact,” he said, tightening his fingers around his rifle as they landed on the final platform, decapitating all of the bugs around them. He narrowed his eyes at the bottom of the fleshy pit; behind the final horde of Boreus climbing on each other to form a dense ball of biomass, he felt there was something just right beneath the horde. “Eat as much as you can, but do not bloat yourself. Agility would be key to adapting to whatever abilities it has.”

Minki and the bullet ant soldiers nodded firmly, immediately getting to work butchering the bugs around them. He partook in the feast as well, some of the Worm Mages helping them carve out Boreus flesh so they could get in their last round of points—from one hundred and thirty-eight to one hundred and seventy-nine—but not once did he take his eyes off the growing ball of Boreus beneath him.

“... Ready yourselves,” he said, still chewing on a raw Boreus leg. “Mandibles out. Chitin-piercing bullets chambered in. We shave away the bugs forming a deathball around it, and then we–”

His vibrational senses tingled. His omnidirectional ocelli caught flickers of cold light between the dense ball of Boreus. While Minki and the Worm Mages warped out of the way with Peregrine and Crow, he threw himself to the side and grabbed Harpy along with him—narrowly dodging the ball of pure biomass the Mutant just threw at them, the Boreus splattering against the walls and scraping them with a rain of falling chitin.

As he fell, he looked worriedly up at the Worm Mages. Thankfully, all of them were even more perceptive than he was, so they were still sticking to the walls even though their platform was destroyed.

It does not care about its brood, he thought. It will not call for reinforcements as long as the Worm Mages are distracting the rest of the nest above, then.

All five of them landed hard on their heels, crushing giant bugs underfoot. A dozen more charged at them, but the dozen were the last—Sparrow warped twelve times in sequence, slicing off their heads from underneath with his bayonet, and then there were only six people standing on two feet at the bottom of the pit.

While the Worm Mages fought up a storm above them to stop any Boreus from interrupting them, Sparrow clenched his jaw at the sight of the ‘humanoid’ in front of him. Cold sunlight glinted off its obsidian chitin plates. It had four black arms, two spear-like antennae, two dotted wings dangling off its shoulders, and a prolonged snout in place of its mouth that looked more like a crow’s beak instead. The lower half of its body had two legs, yes, but also more than that; it had a scorpion’s tail sticking out its back, free-flowing chitin plates jutting out its hips that made it look like it was wearing a long wrap skirt, and what seemed like some sort of blue mist hissing out holes in its armoured legs.

Suffice it to say, it’d only be mistaken as a human from a far, far distance. Any closer and a real human would instantly be able to tell—humans were not half-giants at three metres tall.

This was the Boreus Mutant, and if it could talk, it’d be labelled a Lesser Great Mutant and assigned a name by the Attini Empire.

…

Fortunately for them, it didn’t talk. Its giant black eyes on both sides of its head were irisless, gleaming with a sheen of water. It stood so perfectly still in the centre of the pit with a neutral arms-down pose that, for a second, Sparrow wondered if it was blind or broken; then it snapped its head to stare straight at him, as though identifying him as the person with the most amount of points gathered in his lifetime.

But for their part, the five of them scattered across the circular bottom of the pit were motionless. Perched atop their Boreus carcasses, gripping their rifles in one hand. Against hordes of bugs, strength in numbers and firepower mattered most, but this battle would be one of tactics, tenacity, and trying to figure out what the Mutant’s abilities were before it could figure out theirs—Sparrow’s hard months of accumulating power and unlocking more and more mutations would have to pay off here.

His worm mutations had to pay off here.

Suddenly, cold mist exploded out the holes in the Mutant’s legs, enveloping the entire bottom of the pit in glowing, freezing crystals. They spread fast and violently, crawling up the walls, climbing ten metres, twenty metres, thirty metres, before growing inwards to harden into a ceiling of pure frost over their heads—and now the six of them were truly separated in their own little world. Neither Worm Mages nor Boreus would be able to chip away at the crystal ceiling in time to help.

And that was just what Sparrow wanted.

“... Death to the Swarm,” he whispered, “for the Attini Empire.”