It’d taken a whole week and being brought to Death Rope Passing for Sparrow to learn how to control his warping, but M1N-K1 warped than him, getting inside his range to drive a straight kick towards his stomach.
He sidestepped by a foot and dodged the kick, his wormic spine snapping with the jerky motion. At the same time, he grabbed her kicking leg with both arms and twisted down, throwing her into the dome shoulder-first—but the glass couldn’t withstand their weight and shattered, a hundred shards falling with them as he slammed her into the study table.
The landing hurt them both the same, but of them managed to scramble onto their feet, warping back, skidding back to opposite ends of the library.
From the lowest to highest rank in the Hagi’Shar forward army, it was first the Carpenter Ant Battalions, then the Mortar Ant Battalions, then the Silver Ant Battalions, and finally the Bullet Ant Battalions. The Silver Ant Scouts were especially trained in traversal and movement techniques even Bullet Ant Soldiers wouldn’t know, so it didn’t exactly come as a surprise to him that K1 got the hang of the warping step so quickly.
He tested her control, then. He warped ten metres around the edge of the library with a single step, and she warped the exact same distance in the other direction, keeping him at a fixed distance. Her eyes were cold and steady, her muscles coiled and ready—he was about to take another step around the library when she suddenly warped fifteen metres in one go, tackling him with her shoulder while her obsidian-edge knife flew at his throat.
.
The scout moved nimbly despite her larger size. He blocked her knife with his rifle, but her shoulder rammed straight into his chest and they exploded out the front door, tumbling down the snowy slope as a crowd of children shrieked around them. Through the pain, through the rolling, he heard Ninmah faintly shouting at them to stop, but he felt the air twisting around K1. He followed her through her warping wormhole, both of them reappearing atop a distant gabled roof as they landed on their feet.
She was already in his face by the time he regained his balance, trying to hold his rifle in a defensive stance.
He deflected her attack, her knife grazing the side of his cheek. She darted in with her knee as a follow up, trying to smash his stomach, but he clinched his elbow and blocked it with his rigid annuli, snapping his right arm voluntarily as he swung his fist at her temples like a flail. His attack caught her with a loud and sent her reeling with a growl, slipping off the gabled roof, but in another second—he felt it with his vibrational senses. A wormhole opened behind him. He whirled just as she was about to slip off the roof and swung the stock of his rifle, wood striking obsidian in a bone-reverberating clang.
She spat and pulled back, warping five metres, ten metres, fifteen metres back in quick succession. Incredible control, not enough decisiveness. He knew from experience that doing rapid short warps was more draining than doing one single long warp.
he asked, wiping his bayonet clean with the sleeve of his cloak, stepping up to the narrow ridge of the roof.
She stretched her legs, warping back and forth across her roof for a little while as though to test how far she could go in a single warp. Then she warped in without warning, rushing across at sporadic intervals to make her movements harder to predict.
“I am replaceable at the end of the day,” she said, warping to his side the moment he was about to swing his rifle forward, her knife going ground to sky towards his jaw. “Besides, now that the Boreus brood nest’s location has been uncovered, scouts are no longer necessary in the Hagi’Shar Forward Army.”
he said, stomping the roof to make wooden boards fly into the air; he twisted his entire body and kicked in her direction, his shin missing her head completely, but the shrapnel he kicked decimated the roofs in her general direction. He felt her warping behind him and swung his rifle preemptively, wood clashing obsidian once more.
“I refuse.”
“You have yet to prove yourself a superior soldier,” she said plainly, dropping to her knees as she threw her knife at him, the edge cutting across his throat. A shallow cut. He would’ve been cut deeper if he hadn’t broken his neck and jerked his head to the side, but she followed up by warping onto his shoulders, wrapping her legs around his neck. Somehow she caught her knife out of the air before it could fly too far away. “Your toughness level seems to be a bit above average. You must have consumed bug meat. However, the empire’s obsidian blades are designed to crack even Boreus chitin. I highly doubt—”
He lashed out and grabbed her knife-holding wrist, twisting so both of them slammed down into the roof at the exact same time—this time, he didn’t let them fall through. He warped them above another roof so they could slam down a second time, and the impact rattled her brains, making her legs relax just a tiny little bit. That little bit was enough for him to worm his way out, and before she could scramble to her feet, he was already standing over her with his rifle stock swinging down.
[Strength: 5 → 6]
[Aura: 1,614 → 1,739]
[Points: 267 → 142]
His rifle smashed into her chest with the strength of six men, like splitting logs with an axe, and he sent her crashing through the roof. Underneath, Ammu, Nammu, and Immu shrieked, the three brothers in the middle of changing into their thicker hunting cloaks, so he hopped down with an apologetic nod before grabbing the groaning K1 by the collar, warping off to a nearby communal kitchen.
While she tried to swipe at his neck with her knife, he tossed her into a nearby mound of snow and looked around the front of the kitchen. There were already a dozen children digging holes outside, still trying to fill them with excess Boreus meat—including the extra forty or so Boreus they’d killed saving the Silver Ant Battalion—so he trudged over to a little girl, kneeling to face her eye-to-eye.
Precocious little Hijo crossed her arms, cheeks puffing.
He raised eight fingers.
She whirled, shouted at the younger children under her command today, and while two of them warped into the kitchen to get his order done, she turned back around with her palms cupped together.
Grumbling, he reached into his cloak, rummaging around his inside pockets before dumping five snack worms into her hands. She squealed with glee and warped around the back of the kitchen to enjoy her light-morning snack, and not a few seconds later, the two children who’d warped into the kitchen came back out with his sandwich. They bounced up and down, laughing as he paid each of them a snack worm for their trouble—and he gave each of them one more snack worm as he shoved their heads down, making them duck under K1’s swinging knife from behind.
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he said, snapping his shoulder so he could grab her collar once again without looking.
Ten metres. Ten metres. Ten metres. With her collar in his hands, he warped them both to the western edges of the village before chucking her into a freezing river stream. As usual, Utu was already sitting by a crackling campfire next to the river, holding his crystal quartz arrowheads over the fire so he could sharpen them easier, so he sighed the moment he locked eyes with Sparrow—Sparrow, likewise, didn’t waste any time with niceties, tossing his sandwich onto one of Utu’s arrowheads.
Utu remarked, raising his brows as Sparrow sat next to him on a little stool, watching K1 crawl out of the freezing river, gasping. Utu blushed a little,
Sparrow nodded slowly, taking the sandwich arrowhead from Utu and holding his breakfast over the fire himself.
he said, rolling the sandwich over so the other side could heat up.
Utu’s ears perked up as though he just remembered something.
he replied curtly, plucking the sandwich off the arrowhead and stuffing the feathers back in Utu’s fist.
K1 lunged to stab his feet, so he kicked a thin wave of snow into her face and shot off his stool, grabbing her by her dangling hood.
Ten metres. Ten metres. Ten metres. Back to the library it was. He was briefly aware he was draining his bioarcanic essence a bit too much for what was only the early hours of the day—he still had plenty of chores that required him to maintain at least a wormhole or two for a significant amount of time—but today, he thought, could be a rest day. The wounds he’d sustained from the Boreus three days ago still hadn’t fully healed, and his right arm still stung a bit whenever he swung a little too hard. Maybe Ninmah would let him get away with only harvesting crops from the Barrows, or maybe he could just lay on his bed until well into the afternoon.
Daydreams aside, he warped through the broken front door of the library, tread snow onto the wooden floorboards, and tossed K1 into the table they’d broken just a few minutes ago. While she struggled to claw onto her feet, strain most definitely catching up to her rapid warps, he pecked at his sandwich for a first taste to see if the children put anything funny in them—sometimes they’d put watered root vegetables in his sandwiches, and it’d make the whole thing taste mushy and terrible. Thankfully, it was Hijo the ever-diligent leading the digging team today, so the children didn’t bother pulling pranks on him. It was just flatbread, snow lettuce, and a small cut of Boreus meat he’d personally heated over Utu’s campfire, and that was to say—
[Points: 142 → 150]
The children had gotten good enough at partitioning that they could control the number of points a single bite of Boreus meat would give.
he said, swallowing the last piece of his sandwich,
K1 rose onto two wobbly feet, panting for breath, and then she warped left. Then right. Up onto the third floor railings, down onto the second floor railings. She was a swirl of speed and motion, difficult to pin down with his eyesight alone, and even his vibrational senses weren’t helping him keep up with her much. He could whirl around in a panic and try to lock onto the flutter of her cloak, but… simply ‘blocking’ her attack wasn’t how he was going to defeat her in this battle.
So he dropped his rifle and cracked his neck again.
He simply needed to show he was the superior soldier.
[T3 Core Mutation Unlocked: Sclerite Jaw Lvl. 1]
[Brief Description: Your jaw has hardened into diamond with the toughness of double your toughness level. Subsequent levels in this mutation will increase its toughness. At max level, it will be thrice as tough as your toughness level]
[Swarmblood Aura: 1,739 → 1,889]
[Points: 150 → 0]
[Grade: B-Rank Giant-Class → A-Rank Giant-Class]
Her warps quickened somehow. She started jumping from chair to railing to shelf to windowsill in rapid succession, making her movements that much more erratic, that much more unpredictable. He rubbed his jaw in an attempt to get rid of the growing tension, but then again it was a necessary tension when it came to mutating a new trait; he certainly hadn’t felt ‘right’ in his own skin when he’d mutated his wormic bones, and he’d certainly had his run of pain when he’d mutated his vibrational senses. Now, he’d barely felt anything when he mutated his rigid annuli, but he’d chalked that up to it being a mostly surface-level mutation that was just like evolving a thin layer of armour over his inorganic skin—this mutation was like his rigid annuli.
It strengthened the bones in his jaw.
It sharpened his already viciously sharp teeth.
It lined the insides of his mouth with what felt like diamond as he flicked his tongue around.
And when K1 darted in from the back, tripping his vibrational senses at just the very, very last moment—
He whirled and snapped at her obsidian knife, shattering it with a single chomp and headbutting her into the floor as he did.
he mumbled, making a big show of chewing the obsidian shards, alabaster teeth crunching into the volcanic glass without ripping a single tear in his mouth.
He paused, grinding the rest of the knife shards in his mouth to dust—making care not to swallow any of it—and then spat them all out.
he said, kneeling where she was groaning and rubbing her own head, covering her eyes with her hand.
“...”
What looked like the beginnings of a cry seemed to twist the scout’s lips, but, after a moment, she managed to suck in a sharp breath and calm herself.
With her eyes still covered, her body still shaking slightly, she nodded where she lay in the wreckage of the study table.
“You are the superior soldier, after all,” she said. “Understood.”
He stood up and patted his hands, scratching his alabaster teeth as he did.
“Understood.”
Ninmah warped behind him and whacked him on the head, clicking her tongue irritably as his knees buckled. His eyes widened as he fell face-first into the wreckage next to K1. Evidently, he’d strained himself more than he even realised if Ninmah could knock him down with a simple blow.
Ninmah snapped, scowling as she planted both fists on her hips.
He coughed out a mouthful of snow, rolling over.
she said, sighing angrily, and Sparrow feel a bit of guilt. He could’ve at least avoided destroying the three brothers’ roof if he’d really tried, but it was a bit too late for that now. Ninmah knelt down to K1’s level, slapping her own cheeks to soften her face up with a charming smile.
K1 peeled her hand off her eyes and glanced at Sparrow. He nodded back, giving her permission to speak.
she said.
Ninmah said, flicking K1 on the nose and making the scout flinch. A flick from a Worm Mage must hurt.
Ninmah said, ignoring K1 as she started drawing in the snow next to them,
While Ninmah beamed and leaned into Minki for a hug, Sparrow rolled onto his side and looked the other way.
He couldn’t quite explain it himself, but he couldn’t form a conclusion as to what the emotion stirring in his chest was. It wasn’t ‘satisfaction’ from having successfully recruited a competent ally, or ‘relief’ that he’d been let off easy by Ninmah for destroying half the library in the process of doing so—he felt this emotion was something much, more annoying than either one of them.
While Minki struggled to ask Ninmah to let go of her hug, he shook his trivial thoughts away and focused on the important matters at hand.
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