Nightfall. Sunlight waning, moonlight rising. Dahlia, Raya, Amula, and Jerie departed from the Northern Bridge Street where they’d sent Instructor Biem’s children off, and another half hour later, they arrived at the final stretch of land before they could reach the house at the northernmost end of town.

  Her bracers squeezed tightly down on her forearms and she winced, quietly—she didn’t really even need her bristles to know something was immediately wrong with Northern Old District.

  The Old District may be nicknamed the ‘ghost district’ for how few people lived here now—owing to the opening of the Southern New District right below the Bug-Slaying School a decade ago—but it was particularly motionless.

  Vagrants would make their camp here, and their constant hubbub as they chatted over crackling bonfires would fill the air with hearty chuckles and columns of wispy smoke trails. In the dilapidated buildings overgrown with wild flora and walls of impenetrable vines, swallows and sparrows would buzz all day long, all night long. Tiny Critter-Class bugs would rustle the withered leaves with their piercing legs, and occasionally she'd hear a stray hound crunching down on the hard shell of an unfortunate beetle. Sometimes she’d even hear Instructors training younger students here and making them root out critter insect dens, which was ninety percent of an Alshifa bug-slayers’ daily work. It wasn’t always training to fight Giant-Class insects. It’d never been soundless here, and it’d never been lifeless here.

  Now, it was different.

  Pushing slowly through the maze-like greenery sprouting from gaps between the broken cobblestone tiles, Dahlia scratched her bracers and chewed her lips as she passed the signature landmarks. There was the barrel of burning coals in the small alley to her left where the vagrants always gathered at the end of the week; there was the two-storey building to her right that'd collapsed over three decades ago because Critter-Class termites ate through the supporting wooden beams; there were haphazard sewer grates on the ground everywhere, because the children of the Old District loved jumping into the underground and never listened to anyone telling them to put the grates back where they belonged.

  She'd fallen into muddy waters more than a few times on her way home from school because she wasn't paying attention to where she stepped—but it'd be quite impossible for her to accidentally fall into hole right now.

  The Old District was a disaster area. Giant beetle carcasses were strewn everywhere on her left, elytras half-opened, massive horns crushing multiple metal shacks at once. Webs of black, viscous slime were stuck on the building on her right, alongside a dozen hornet carcasses torn to shreds and decorating the windowsills with their severed heads. Where Dahlia placed her feet, there were two dozen– no, more like fifty medium-sized ladybugs crushed into balls and dumped into the sewers, their bodies so horribly disfigured some of their legs stuck out from the sewer grates like wads of ingrown hair jutting out from human skin.

  There were more insect parts scattered everywhere, but it was impossible to tell just how many bugs had perished here… and while she’d managed to keep her cool for most of the journey, she couldn’t help but accelerate faster, faster, —forcing Raya, Amula, and Jerie to practically run after her as she pushed through the maze-like shrubs.

  Eria said, appearing and tapping on her bracers as she kept on scratching them. The itches just wouldn’t go away.

  “You know I can't do that."

  “It's fine. I'll just... I'll just get stronger by making and equipping Swarmsteel

  “Yer going insane talking to yer worm friend out loud.”

  Amula kicked her knees from behind her, not too hard, but enough to get her to slow down and stumble forward into a tree. Her bracers slammed against the bark and suddenly it was like medicine had been injected into her veins. Her forearms stopped itching immediately.

  While Raya thrust his spear five times to stop any pinecones from falling onto her head, Amula clapped both hands onto her cheeks and stared straight into her eyes. The older girl’s eyes weren’t spinning. She was sure hers were. It was a little embarrassing being forced to make eye contact with someone else at such a close distance, so she tried to squirm out of it, muttering and mumbling ‘she was fine’ or something of the sort—but Amula’s hands didn’t give, and eventually the only thing she do was let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.

  Surprisingly, that… made her shoulders feel a bit less heavy, too.

  Her beetle chestplate stopped squeezing down on her chest so much, her fly mantle stopped pricking the skin around her neck so much.

  Amula let go of her once she started breathing properly, and this time the seniors took the lead, Raya flicking his spear left and right to clear the foliage in front of them. No more following Dahlia through the maze-like flora of the Old District; they were going to cut their way straight through, and she was going to be the one to follow.

  She bit her tongue and started walking behind them, her forearms starting to itch again.

  “... There’s gotta be at least sixty or seventy dead Giant-Class bugs here,” Amula muttered, kicking a squashed ladybug out of the way as Jerie kept both hands on his flute, ready to lift and play at a moment’s notice. “Ye came through here before, Raya? Ye did this?”

  Raya didn’t turn around to address her. “No. I was in the south killing lower rank bugs when that lightning hornet fell. Never left the south.”

  “Then who could’ve done this? The guards? The graduate bug-slayers?”

  “They all died on the first day to that lightning hornet. I was there.”

  The four of them stopped next to a giant spider carcass; it might’ve been ten times their size, but its legs were broken, its froths of black pus were leaking out its abdomen, and its own talons were ripped out and stabbed into each of its eight eyes. Jerie stiffened a little as Amula glanced at Dahlia, so she obliged and tentatively strode forward, tracing her finger along the giant slash wounds across the top of its carapace—they were all clean cut, done by a sharp and precise blade. Maybe five blades. Maybe five all at once, judging by the cleave marks that extended past the spider and ripped into the ground below them.

  Was there any bug-slayer in Alshifa who used Swarmsteel claws?

  “Ask yer little worm friend,” Amula said, standing next to Dahlia as she grimaced down at the claw marks herself. “For yer reference, nobody in Alshifa could’ve done this. These death marks are… feral. Its legs look like they’ve been tossed down from somewhere really high up, and the other corpses are about the same. They don’t look like they died here. Someone killed them with claws in another place, then tossed them down here where their guts splattered across the district.”

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  Eria scratched its head with one of its little legs.

  Dahlia repeated Eria’s answer word for word, and the scowl on Amula’s face was magnified even further.

  “So whoever or whatever killed these bugs are still here in Alshifa,” Amula said.

  “Do bugs fight and kill each other, then?”

  Dahlia frowned at the last part. “Mutant-Class behaviour?”

  Eria said firmly, and Dahlia stopped talking to start repeating its comments for everyone to hear again.

  “Yes,” Raya said, thumbing at the lightning scar on his back.

  “We’ve been shot at twice already,” Amula said pointedly.

  Jerie blew.

  Amula narrowed her eyes. “And why not? If these Mutant-Classes are the Swarm’s strongest bugs, then why wouldn’t they just send multiple down to instantly annihilate us?”

  Eria explained.

  Raya shrugged. “Makes sense. I think I can feel it, too.”

  “That sharp, stinging sensation in the air, right?” he said, tilting his head up and closing his eyes briefly. “If its killing pressure is so strong that even I can feel it halfway across the town, then it makes sense why it’s just sitting there not doing anything. It’s the leader, and the rest of the Swarm are its lackeys. The weak obey the strong. It it’s the strongest in Alshifa, so it won’t bother moving until it really has to.”

  “I don’t.”

  Eria said, shaking its head.

  She didn’t repeat that last part out loud.

  Some time ago, somewhere along the way, Eria must’ve gained access to the deeper ‘pools’ of her memories, but the fact that she still hadn’t been assigned her class meant Eria didn’t have access to of her memories—and that was a distance she wanted to maintain no matter what.

  So she didn’t speak.

  She didn’t finish Eria’s sentence.

  Head lowered, arms itching, she turned away from the giant spider and continued on to the base of the northernmost hill in Alshifa. Neither Raya, Amula, nor Jerie questioned why she was being so quiet. The rusty metal stairs built straight up the vertical cliffs were right there in front of them, and they were fearless as they climbed to the very top of the hill. Nobody stopped her from taking the lead. walked in front of her, so they couldn’t see her fidgeting fingers and trembling lips and hollowing cheeks—perhaps it was all for the better they thought she’d grown stronger and more confident since the first time they met five years ago.

  But she was also sure they could tell by the time they reached the top of the hill, and moonlight was already shining brightly down upon Alshifa.

  The front door to her dinghy one-field, one well cabin was swung wide open, and her stomach clenched painfully as she spotted the dried trails of blood leading into the house.

  “... I want to go in alone,” she whispered, nails digging into her arms, blood drawn from her chewed lips and tasting bitter on the tip of her tongue. “I won’t be long. Promise. Just give me… a bit of time, okay?”

  Raya and the seniors knew well enough not to respond, so, with her heart pounding in her ears, she stepped into her house on her tiptoes.

  She avoided walking on the trail on blood, but the stench was immediately apparent when she entered the living room; repugnant flesh and chitin were strewn about the mounds of unwashed fabric, the window frames clung to by severed legs and punctured eyeballs; two giant ants were smashed together by their skulls and buried halfway through the broken floorboards, through the eroded ground; if there was any question as to who might’ve killed the giant bugs and tossed them into the Old District down below, she didn’t have to look any further.

  While she might’ve preferred sleeping on her chair in the bedroom, her dad was…

  Sitting upright on the old sofa.

  His head was low, his body was shrouded in shadows. She couldn’t see his face, couldn’t hear his breathing. His messy grey hair fell over his eyes, he’d not changed out of his black mourning clothes since the day he buried her mother. His hands were no longer human, replaced instead by monstrous Swarmsteel gauntlets that came right out of a nightmare—five black insect claws sprouting from each finger, clicking softly against one another like surgical claws, each sharp as a scalpel.

  For the briefest of seconds, she froze at the doorway; she remembered how Instructor Biem had died with dignity, his body sitting upright even after his death by sheer force of will.

  A part of her couldn’t accept the fact her dad may already have perished, but then there was sound. Movement. A single amber eye opened and glared at her, shining bright like the sun, and… there was this unsettling calmness emanating from him that sent chills down her spine. Killing pressure. A sinking feeling when her gaze met his. For whatever reason, her mind initially refused to accept the man as her own flesh and blood, but beyond the Swarmsteel claws and the bloody chunks that lay before his feet, that haggard and bony shape of his face was undeniably hers as well.

  A single, cold breath escaped his lips as he exhaled, and Eria must’ve said something in her head—a warning, a call for caution—but whatever it was, she didn’t hear it.

  She tuned it out.

  She pushed through the killing pressure.

  Her feet moved before her head could think more clearly about the situation, and she immediately tripped over a torn-off insect leg on the floor, stumbling a half-step.

  “You… you’re hungry, right?” she stammered, recovering from the stumble as she slung her satchel off her back, hands trembling, rummaging through it for the bread she’d prepared for him. “The sallet I made two days ago… it’s still just sitting there, huh? Understandable. It’s not… my best… so I bought some bread for you. They’re still kinda fresh from the shelter, so once we eat we should–”

  “Leave this place,” he rasped, his second amber eye opening, and it was only now that she noticed his irises were vertical slits. “Leave… this place.”

  “... No,” she said, gritting her teeth as she held a bread in one hand and a waterskin in the other, pushing slowly but steadily forward. “Everyone’s at the shelter. We to go there. Necessary. If we don’t, we’ll eventually run out of food and water, and then–”

  She got close enough.

  Three steps before him.

  Then, he struck. It was a blur, and maybe she should’ve expected it coming, but she —five black insect claws flew up at her face, and it was only now that she realised they weren’t his Swarmsteel gauntlets at all. They were the surgical claws he’d made just years prior, but not quite.

  She was completely blindsided when his insect claws tore up her left cheek and ripped into her face, half her vision going red instantly.

  She fell with a scream, flailing as her dad rose from his sofa, bones creaking, claws clinking. The beginnings of adrenaline flooding into her veins numbed her pain, but even as she shuffled backwards with her heart beating faster than ever before, she , with painful clarity, the parts of his body where moonlight fell onto—hard black shells scabbed over patches of his body, creeping across half his face and his entire right arm. His knees were bent at odd angles, muscles rippling and warbling awkwardly under his skin. Two black wings with bright golden stripes hung behind his shoulder blades. A single elongated needle was his tongue, hanging out his mouth and dripping with venom that sizzled as the droplets hit the floor. His proportions were even more wildly deformed; she didn’t remember him being two metres tall, or his shoulders being so broad, or his neck being so stretched and his hair being so shiny with oil.

  If anything, she remembered someone who had his exact same appearance right now.

  The humanoid form of the black teardrop-shaped bug in her nightmares.

  The humanoid form of the little black bug Eria was controlling.

  The vilest, most deplorable true bug of them all.

  “... Leave… this… place,” her dad rasped. “Leave… .”