- Excerpt from ‘Whispers of the Wild Growth’, Scripture One Hundred

  Three days since Madamaron last attacked.

  There’d been no deaths since then.

  While the townsfolk of the Sharaji Oasis Town were still obviously wary of Dahlia—she and Alice were the only ones with four arms, after all—they seemed to have grown somewhat used to her walking around looking for chores to help out with. Rest was one thing, but sitting still or lying flat on her bed for several days straight wasn’t her thing; she’d never done the same even when she was sick or feeling down back in Alshifa. Her hands had to move, her fingers to be holding onto something, else she’d be nothing more than a doll people had to excessively dote over.

  And she was a guest here. All the more reason to make herself useful if she could at least walk.

  In the three days that’d followed since Alice told her about Madamaron, she’d mostly been relegated to take on whatever chore an outsider was allowed to handle: washing clothes and brushing sand off carpets and windowsills after dark, mainly. The water riders didn’t trust her enough to teach her how to ride a camel yet. The potters and the weavers and the embroiderers still evidently found her black arms unsettling to be around. She didn’t mind the simple chores; she rather liked working all alone after everyone had already retreated to their households for the night, because it meant she could explore around town without anyone finding her movements suspicious.

  That was her main takeaway after three nights of working tedious chores. The brooms she’d been given for cleaning were crushed and flattened strips of stick bug chitin rolled into cylinders for textured grips. The bins around the town were coated with sandstone on the outside, but if she were to pull their lids open and peered inside, plugging her nose as she did, she’d find a mesh of foul-smelling termite midguts stuck to the walls of the bin. The midguts periodically secrete bacterial liquid that automatically breaks down whatever is thrown in after a day or two, which was why she’d never had to trouble herself looking for a trash disposal site to empty the bins. Even the brushes she’d been handed to scrub off stains from the townsfolk’s clothes were made from the bristles of giant locusts—not the softest of bristles to use for light-fabric clothes, but they were efficient at getting stains off regardless.

  Everywhere she could turn to look, there’d be something inconspicuously human insect-made. There was no clear distinction between what was Swarmsteel and what wasn’t; she felt, with just a touch of modification, most of the common household items could be turned into F or E-Ranked Swarmsteel anyone could equip to some degree of power.

  Tonight was her third night cleaning and tidying the town up after everyone else had retired for the night. Tonight, as usual, she finished brushing off the eastern section of the circular bazaar street and was allowing herself some free time to look curiously around—because despite everything being half-insect-made, the town was in a rather poor state of disrepair. It didn’t look like this in the sun; the sandstone buildings would shine with reflected golden glows as the emerald oasis shimmered in the sunlight, boisterous bartering and haggling filling the air, men and women filling the streets, people drawing water and crafting their wares out in the alleys and praying on the doorstep of their houses. In the sun, it was a brighter and more brilliant town than Alshifa ever was despite only being a third of its size… but at night, it was the same gloomy sight.

  Moonlight alone wasn’t enough to illuminate the town. Without people walking the streets and candlelights burning in every household, she couldn’t help but think that the Oasis Town was like Alshifa—the heavy, brooding silence in the night was because humanity knew they couldn’t be too loud, lest the Swarm would hear and descend upon them with the might of a million bugs.

  Walking around with her broom in her hands, she studied the faded splashes and sprays of scarlet on the walls, the sandstone houses replaced section by section over the years and decades. The main street may be paved and the edges lined with quivertail butterfly webbings to make it seem pretty, but it was uneven in some places because there were mountains of bones buried beneath the sand; she couldn’t fathom how many times the town must’ve been attacked and how many people the townsfolk had had to bury to make their streets as robust as they were. Near the edges of the town, the damages were more obvious. The storage sheds were worn and chipped away by the winds, while rats and vermin had devoured discarded lumps of fabric that could’ve been remade into something useful. the borders of the town, it was even clearer the town had once been several times its current size: piles of mechanical and sandstone parts were half-sunken and sticking out of the desert, immobile in the sand.

  If there was still a Maker in this town, they’d either already left, died, or given up on returning this town to its glory days—if there’d ever been any in the first place.

  Right as she was about to turn a corner into the southern section of the town, her ears perked and her body unconsciously moved behind a stack of crates for cover as she heard a voice—voices, in fact, chuckling and laughing and singing carefree into the night. It was strange indeed; the hour was past midnight and most people usually retired several hours before that. Who could be out here at this time of night?

  Could they be in danger?

  Eria said plainly, casually.

  She didn’t wait for Eria to finish her sentence. She spun out from around the corner, teeth chattering, assassin bug claws sharpened and still just as shaky—if anybody was in danger, she to fight to protect them—but all she was met with instead were six children gathered round in a back alley, playing ball with a dozen more children seated on the edge of the roofs around them.

  Alice was there, too, laughing and sending all the kids half her height twisted smirks as she bullied them in the game of ball.

  Dahlia frowned, crossing her arms as she stayed back and watched the game unfold. The kids had strewn a straw-woven net across the alley at double their height to separate the two teams of three; Alice led the team on the other side facing her, and as far as she could tell, the rules seemed pretty simple. Each player could only hit the ball once with each wrist before the team had to knock the ball over the net, at which point the other team would have to return the ball or let it touch the ground. The ball touching the ground meant defeat—and Dahlia could very easily see the game as something Instructor Biem would’ve made the students of the Bug-Hunting School play to train their hand-eye coordination.

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  “... I win!” Alice laughed, slapping the top of her tiny teammates’ heads as her team won for the umpteenth time; frankly, there was no real competition to be had when she was twice as tall as everyone else. None of the children here were more than ten years old.

  In response, the children flew into an uproar over what was fair and what wasn’t. The losing girls cried and begged for a rematch, but the two boys on Alice’s team clung to her cloak and shook their heads vehemently, sticking their tongues out to jeer at the losers. The dozen or so children sitting on the roofs clamoured for a rematch, two girls jumping down to switch places with the losers—and that was when Alice spotted Dahlia hiding in the back, her eyes lighting up in excitement.

  “Oh! My friend over there will play against me and the boys, okay?” Alice shouted, making hand gestures to communicate with the two new challengers as she yanked Dahlia back with invisible threads; Dahlia barely had time to slink away before she was suddenly surrounded by half a dozen girls, all staring strangely up at her. “She’s like me, you know? Four arms means four wrists, which means she can hit the ball four times! ”

  Alice punctuated the last two words with one finger raised on each of her hands, and the girls, while reluctant at first, seemed to understand Dahlia’s value now—they pushed and shuffled Dahlia around on their side of the court while Alice beamed at her with her hands on her hips, all of them trying to decide who’d be the new arrival’s teammates.

  Dahlia, on the other hand, didn’t bother hiding the displeasure on her face as she scowled back at Alice.

  she thought, curling her lips.

  Alice shot her a smirk that, to her, meant something like ‘I working’.

  One of the girls poked her waist to grab her attention, and her entire body jolted like lightning ran up her spine—she’d not been expecting such a hard poke. The girls giggled at her reaction as she rubbed her back, painfully sore after several hours of tedious chores, but then all but two of the girls climbed back onto the roofs to clear the court; the two who were left were the tallest and strongest-looking of the bunch.

  Still not as tall as she was, but they at least looked to be twelve, thirteen of age; her breaths hitched as she felt she saw a hint of her Alshifa bug-hunting juniors in their eyes, for victory.

  Issam muttered behind her ear.

  … So when the girls fidgeted with their hands nervously, obviously not knowing where to put them around hers, she patted both their heads and smiled as confidently as she could.

  She felt she already understood the rules of the game, so she dropped her broom and took centre position while Alice raised eleven fingers on the other side of the court. They were playing to eleven points, she supposed. Not too long. With her enhanced strength and speed, she could probably put up a good enough fight–

  Alice served the reed-woven ball and it past her head, slamming into the ground before bouncing off with a puff of sand.

  One point for the boys.

  Knitting her brows, she pried her eyelids wide open and lowered her body, getting into a game-ready stance. The spectators on the roofs were cheering and shouting as quietly as they could, most likely afraid of waking their parents, and when Alice caught a new ball that a spectator threw at her, Dahlia tried tensing the muscles in her arms–

  Second serve. A gust of wind. A puff of sand. The two girls next to her coughed and hacked as she failed to even catch the trail of the ball whizzing past her head. The boys on the roof laughed and heckled them while the girls shouted back, mouthing off a hundred words a second in their drawling desert tongue; Alice laughed and cracked her shoulders, a mischievous glint shining in her eyes as she regarded Dahlia with a look that seemed to say ‘is that all you have’?

  It wasn’t.

  [Speed: 1 → 3]

  [Aura: 509 (+50) → 518 (+50)]

  [Points: 10 → 1]

  Alice caught the third ball from the spectators and served immediately with a downwards wrist smash, but having the reaction speed equivalent to three men meant Dahlia moved nimbly despite her aches and injuries. Her cloak fluttered after her as she jerked to the left, catching the ball with her left wrist and making it soar backwards. The girl behind her right slapped it left with a shout, the girl behind her left slapped it right with a laugh, and now the ball was falling back on her.

  She tightened the muscles in her arms, head craned up as she focused hard on the ball.

  Easier said than done, she quickly learned. She bounced the ball up once with her right wrist, but when she tried to move her left extra arm to bounce the ball again, she accidentally used her normal left arm instead—an instant foul from the spectator boys who were watching her every move like vultures preying on a dying beast. The smug goading from Alice’s team as she high-fived her boys made the girls behind Dahlia grind their teeth in irritation; the girls had surely put all their hopes into Dahlia since she had four arms as well, and right now, she was living up to expectations.

  Fourth ball. She solidified her stance, each muscle coiled and ready. Alice served the ball over to the girls gently, and when both of them bounced it to Dahlia for the attacking return, she jumped. . The ball was four metres off the ground, but she had the strength equivalent of two men to match; she focused all of it into her normal left arm, slamming her wrist so hard into the ball she might as well have been throwing a javelin at a giant bug.

  But the ball, woven from simple reed as it was, exploded mid-air and rained down upon Alice’s side of the court as a scattering of fluffy leaves. She landed on her heels, eyes twitching as the boys called foul again. , destroying the ball they were using to play the game with would lead to a straight defeat.

  Eria mused, perched atop her shoulder as Alice thanked a boy for tossing them a new ball.

  She gritted her teeth, waving at her girls to back off a little, putting some distance between them and Alice standing right in front of the net.

  Fifth ball. Sixth ball. Seventh ball. At this point even the children knew better than to stay on the court; their game had been hijacked by the two outsiders with four arms and strange insect traits. The boys dashed off Alice’s side of the court while the girls ducked off Dahlia’s side, not wanting to get caught between a barrage of powerful inhuman smashes—most of them coming from Dahlia, really. She had four arms, which meant she could bounce the ball at least three times to get a ‘rhythm’ going before returning it to Alice, but again it was easier said than done. It was already difficult enough picking up a water gourd three nights ago with her Swarmguard Arms. Having to essentially juggle a small ball in rapid succession meant she couldn’t even keep the ball bouncing half the time, the next three points lost to her simply letting the ball hit the ground because of her inability to juggle.

  Whether it was because she found Dahlia pitiful or she found the whole situation laughable, Alice paused and shouted over the net before serving the eighth ball.

  “Curl your normal arms behind your back, and focus on your second pair of arms,” Alice said, winking at her. “If you can’t control all four at the same time, there’s no shame in controlling only what you’re already used to.”

  … Dahlia decided to take her advice.

  Eighth ball, ninth ball, tenth ball. The difference was immediately obvious. If she curled her normal arms behind her back and imagined her extra arms as her normal arms instead, she found she could basically move them around as substitutes—an eye-opening revelation she’d never have figured out on her own.

  Eria hummed in satisfaction as she managed to catch the subsequent balls with her extra arms, moving them as swiftly and naturally as she would her normal arms, but the points were still lost the moment she tried smashing the balls back over. No matter how much she tried to restrain herself, her additional level in strength were annihilating the balls the moment her wrists came in contact with them.

  The eleventh ball was the humiliating final blow. In her attempt to move and swing her second left arm in slow motion, she lost total control of her left extra arm and smacked herself in the face. She stumbled a few steps, wiping blood from her nose, but before she knew it she’d fallen backwards onto cold midnight sand. The ball thudded at the same time her head bounced off the ground; then the game was over, and the whooping and celebrating from the boy’s side of the court had her covering her own face in shame.

  Eria said, patting her nose in a consolitary manner.

  Her four arms were rubbing her forehead, so she could still see the girls on her side of the court crying with laughter, kneeling over her, shaking her body left and right as though they were mourning someone who’d passed away—even the two girls she’d been partnered with and later forced off the court were giggling, poking her broken nose lightly.

  Eria didn’t miss a beat.

  Issam added, whispering in her left ear.

  Raya muttered in her right ear, a fading, ghostly voice.

  Amula snapped, and her voice was even farther back, dragging the other two away with her.

  Dahlia let her face relax a little as the girls dragged her off the court and Alice shouted for the next challengers to stand up straight.

  She still couldn’t see how playing ball with the kids of the Sharaji Oasis Town in the middle of the night was helping with the investigation into Madamaron, but, at the very least, it fun. good for training her control over her new arms.

  Maybe she’d come by every once in a while and join in for her own sake.