Another month passed since Sparrow learned how to speak in his warping voice, and by now he felt the Worm Mages had eradicated half the Boreus living under the surface of the glacier.

  he asked, yanking his bayonet out of the last Boreus’ head as he did.

  Of the hunting group of twenty, six of them were elders, and one by one they shouted their reports along a fifty metre line across the glacier.

  Utu shouted, furthest away from him, five younger children helping him pluck his arrows out of the fallen Boreus in front of him.

  Ammu, Nammu, and Immu shouted, triplet brothers always joined at the hip.

  Enli shouted, the youngest of the elders, just a couple months since she’d turned ten.

  Ninmah grumbled, sounding sorely disappointed as she warped over to him, dragging her D-Rank Giant-Class Boreus by the antenna across the glacier.

  As the sun fell over the horizon and the others warped back in to pile their carcasses together, Ninmah looked at him with wide, pleading eyes. He shrugged and kicked one of his four-metre class Boreus, letting her have it—they’d recently made a rule that designated hunting elders who couldn’t reach their daily quota of killing at least two Boreus per session wouldn’t get as much bug meat for dinner, and while the Worm Mages were proficient enough at hunting Boreus now that he didn’t exactly need to be here with them every single day, sometimes, one or two of them wouldn’t manage to reach their quota. It could be because another elder’s warping voice was too loud and attracted all the Boreus over to them, or it could just be plain misfortune that they couldn’t get any hooks that day.

  In any case, he’d hunted seven in the afternoon by himself, so he could spare one or even two or even three for Ninmah; it wasn’t like hunting than two meant he’d get extra bug meat for dinner, anyways. It just meant elders who hunted less than that would be taken out of the hunting group for more practice with their sharpshooting, and they’d stay out of the hunting group until Sparrow gave them the okay to try hunting again.

  Because while the Boreus hadn’t invaded since that night two months ago, the average strength of the Boreus living under the glacier to be increasing exponentially.

  They had to do more than catch up to the Boreus’ growing strength.

  While he waved at the hunting group to disband and start hauling their carcasses back to the village for butchering, he knelt and placed his palm on the frozen sea, pushing his vibrational senses deep into the ice. The dusking sun cast a cosy, warm orange glow that reflected off the edges of the glacier like a wall of flames, but deep below he could faintly tell there were still hundreds of Boreus, of Boreus running across the glacier—the average fifty or so Boreus they could lure to the surface and bring to heel daily weren’t even a fraction of their forces. The ones they could kill were only the surface forces. In that sense, they making a difference when it came to increasing their own strength, but…

  He closed his eyes and tried to push his senses even further down.

  He’d have liked to stay kneeling and continue trying to probe the ice for more information about their underground passages, but Ninmah tapped him on the shoulder from behind, tipping her head back.

  Reluctantly, he rose to his feet and began warping back to the village with Ninmah beside him, taking a relaxed and meandering pace that didn’t strain him particularly much. He seemed to have hit a soft limit of ten metres per warp, which meant unless he was dashing through his warps, it’d take him at least ten minutes to go between the glacier to the village compared to the five or so minutes for the rest of the Worm Mages—but nobody ever seemed to mind accompanying him on his shorter warps. They were more than happy to match his pace, and even Ninmah, humming with her hands crossed behind her head right now, didn’t seem as though she cared that the rest of the hunting group was most likely already back in the village.

  For him, that was still a sore point.

  [Name: ‘Sparrow’]

  [Grade: B-Rank Giant-Class]

  [Class: Whiteworm]

  [Swarmblood Art: Worm Maw]

  [Aura: 1,464]

  [Points: 165]

  [Strength: 5, Speed: 6, Toughness: 4, Dexterity: 6, Perception: 4]

  [T1 Mutation | Inorganic Heart Lvl. 10

  [T2 Mutations | Vibrational Senses Lvl. 3 Wormic Bones Lvl. 3

  [T3 Mutations | Segmented Setae | Rigid Annuli | Sclerite Jaw] 150P

  As they warped back to the village in silence, crossing boulders and plains of snow and blackrock mountains as they did, he wondered if it was about time he unlocked one of his tier three mutations. He’d learned what each of them would do from Ninmah, and the fact that he’d increased his attributes across the board over the past month meant his stamina wasn’t so terrible now. He could maintain two or three decent-sized wormholes without much issue now, and he could consistently speak in his warping voice throughout the entire day as long as he kept his sentences brief and curt. No extraneous words.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Ninmah finally said, dumping a few snack worms on his shoulder as he stared at his status interface the entire way back. He paused his command to increase his attribute levels with every free point he had and turned to look at her.

  Crossing a crystal river stream and balancing across a fallen pine, he debated, for a moment, whether to tell her about his thoughts on the Boreus.

  But this was her home, and she had a right to know.

  he said sternly, avoiding her eyes and looking straight forward at the distant village as he did. Columns of smoke were billowing out of small stone chimneys; dinner would be served in about half an hour.

  Ninmah furrowed her brows.

  He was about to say that wasn’t how the Swarm worked with their pheromones, but recently, he’d been wondering if that might actually be the case.

  She blinked pointedly.

  he explained.

  he continued, trying to get to his point; Ninmah was evidently not following.

  She blinked again, but with even more confusion.

  he said, raising three fingers, plucking her snack worms off his shoulder and dangling it between them.

  She nodded.

  She nodded again, but with more enthusiasm this time.

  he said plainly.

  Surprise and incredulous passed over her face.

  He shook his head.

  He pursed his lips.

  It was a difficult question.

  There was still much he wasn’t telling her about the Mutant-Classes, and he couldn’t really bring himself to tell her that there were still two classes of bugs above them: the Insect Gods, who could speak in human tongue, and then the Greater Insect Gods, of which none of the six known and named across the continent had even come close to being slain in the past six decades. Both classes of bugs had powerful mutations and biomagics, rivalling that of entire armies. Owing to Ninmah taking time out of every night teaching him how to read, he felt he’d about figured out the extent of her knowledge—and, by extension, the rest of the Worm Mages—regarding the Swarm and the outside world.

  That was to say, not a whole lot outside of the very basics. They’d been mostly secluded from the outside world for the better part of the past four decades, after all.

  Maybe telling her that there was a chance, no matter how slight, that the Boreus Mutant-Class might actually be an Insect God would do nothing but dash her hopes. It wasn’t like they could control who their enemies were, anyways.

  The Worm Mages wouldn’t leave Immanu, and that was that.

  he replied curtly.

  Ninmahs’ eyes lit up at his answer, and she reached into her cloak for more snack worms, humming in delight.

  He caught a blur of motion from the village they were quickly nearing.

  A child warped up and was hanging off the top of the bell tower, ringing the chimes to get everyone’s attention.

  Scowling, he grabbed Ninmah’s hand and warped forward with her, speeding up until they were right beneath the belltower. A small crowd had already gathered alongside half of the elders, all of them standing horizontally on the walls of the bell tower, shouting at the child to get down and stop playing with the chimes.

  In response, the child only pointed south, shouting something incoherent—and then the rest of them heard it as well, all but Sparrow flinching at the sound of a bullet being fired.

  His face turned from a neutral expression to dark, cold grimace.

  While there was silence from the crowd, and Ninmah snapped her head over to stare at his rifle—likely recognising the sound of a bullet firing herself—he warped in the direction of the disturbance and landed himself on a particularly high roof, looking out the borders of the village to see if he could spot anything.

  Nothing.

  The disturbance came from much further away.

  Ninmah and Utu and all of the elders tried to follow, shouting at him to wait for them, but he was in full sprinting mode; he dashed, jumped, and leaped through his warps, passing the kitchens and newly built storage houses and river streams and gardens and fences, even passing by his old cabin that he’d moved out of a month ago on his way to the very edge of the mountain range.

  The last time he’d been there, it was when he’d first woken up after realising he wasn’t dead and tried to escape. Back then, the only reason why he’d hesitated at any point to go any further was because of the sheer intimidating factor of the slope’s steepness—but now that he wasn’t half-dead and was several times stronger, he found himself not particularly afraid as he skidded to a halt near the edge, looking down at the sea of fluffy clouds that stopped him from even finding the surface.

  Now, if he wanted to, he felt he could easily warp down the terribly steep slope of snow and eventually reach the surface—and the moment he descended past the sea of clouds, he’d probably figure out which direction the Capital was in—but that wasn’t what he was trying to do.

  His eyes were firmly locked onto the dozen or so tiny figures three hundred metres below him, trying to climb the slope as they fired their rifles behind them.

  A small group of forty or so Boreus were chasing after them, struggling just as hard to claw up the slope.

  But even from a distance, he could clearly see the glint of silver on the sleeves of their uniforms, and he recognised the whizzing, low-calibre sounds of their bullets.

  Ninmah, Utu, and the elders warped in next to him, kneeling and peering over the precipice as they looked to him for an answer.

  he said, narrowing his eyes.