With fighting imminent, I wanted to be ready. Physically and mentally. But I took about an hour to thread through Rings Four and Three before I finally found my target.

  I wasn’t allowed to meet the Councillor I wanted to talk to, at first. Apparently, he was too busy formulating defence plans, taking care of logistics, and whatever other crap military leaders got up to on the eve of battle. I was pretty sure a lot of that had been prepared already, but I was from Ring Four, after all.

  Thankfully, I found a second Councillor not long afterwards. My favourite Councillor, actually.

  “Ross.” Wargrog smiled at me. “I’ve been hearing most excellent things about Ring Four’s preparation, thanks to you.”

  “I definitely didn’t do it all myself,” I said. “Just like I couldn’t have figured out a way to stop Brasvay from stealing the temple without your help.”

  Wargrog’s expression turned a little regretful. “I wish it hadn’t come to that. I still don’t know what Councillor Hristo was thinking. But…”

  “We’re working on it, thanks to your recommendation. Anyway, I was hoping I could get help on a different matter, Councillor.”

  Wargrog had been thoughtfully rubbing his finger-sized tusk but then looked down in surprise. “Oh? What is it?”

  “Apparently, it looks like the Councillor who’s in charge of leading the defence of Zairgon, so far as I’ve seen at least, isn’t exactly willing to convene with all of its defenders.”

  That made Wargrog frown once again. “Come with me. Lassikhio is occasionally too one-minded to notice what others might want.”

  I followed the Ogre Councillor gratefully. It was vindictively satisfying to walk through the same little camp I had done so earlier, except with everyone making space for me as I trailed behind one of the most important personages in Zairgon. Both satisfying and annoying. I decided not to dwell on it.

  Just before we entered the building that Councillor Lassikhio had clearly appropriated into a command centre, several people stepped out. I recognized the Guildmaster of the Adventurer’s Guild and the Commander of the Guards. Only the former nodded at me in greeting before leaving. The others looked important too, and familiar, though they weren’t anyone I knew personally.

  “What is thy business?” the draconic Scalekin asked when we entered. He was sitting in front of a table with a map of Zairgon, little pins tacked on all over it.

  Brusque and to the point. I wanted to take it as the actions of someone who was simply too busy at a time like this. I knew how that felt. But considering it had taken me the recommendation of another Councillor to even get this meeting going, I wasn’t feeling very charitable.

  “What’s my business?” I said. “It’s the same business we all have. The gods-damned Blight Swarm.”

  My tone definitely didn’t impress him. His eyes smoldered and his pupils thinned to slits. “Then we are already dealing with it. Get thee gone if thou hast nothing worthy of my attention.”

  “Now, now,” Wargrog said. “Councillor Lassikhio and Cultist Moreland. Let us reserve our flaring tempers for when the Swarm arrives, please.”

  He was right. Wasting time by bickering wasn’t going to help anybody.

  “More specifically,” I said. “I want us to cooperate better about the Blight Swarm.”

  “How so?” Lassikhio asked.

  “You aren’t cooperating at the moment, Councillor. This isn’t me trying to disrespect you. It’s the truth. You stopped that flying charge by the first bug invasion right over Ring Four, which made all the monsters disperse across it. If our defence plans hadn’t been flexible, we’d have been in real trouble.”

  “The Swarm does not leave time—”

  “Please let me finish. For all the battle plans you seem to be drawing up, I haven’t heard a peep about any defensive measure that actively incorporates anyone in Ring Four. So, do you see what I mean when I say we can cooperate better? Especially when you’re happy to coerce us to join your little expeditionary forces only to forget us all when it’s done.”

  “There was no coercion. It was a voluntary excursion.”

  I stood straighter. “Voluntary, huh? Then what’s this pressure I feel all around me?”

  My anger and annoyance had a reason. Legitimate as it was due to Councillor Lassikhio’s actions, I did recognize my antagonistic attitude wasn’t going to help gain any favours with him. That said, it did help me repel the almost natural-seeming influence he was wielding.

  At least he had the wherewithal to lessen the effect of his aura. I wondered if it was something he naturally kept on all the time, so much so that he wasn’t even aware of the severity of the effect it was having on others.

  “What is thy proposal?” Councillor Lassikhio asked.

  I could have grumbled that he was leaving all the work up to me, but there was no time to waste. “Consider us in your battle plans, to begin with.”

  “Thou are being considered. Rabble though thy forces may be, thou are sizable, and that must be accounted for.”

  “Then why weren’t we told about it?” I sighed. “It’s too late to make elaborate plans by adding yet another element for you to actively consider, but just… remember that we’re people trying to live through this too.”

  “Yet again, thou art naught but rabble.” His scrutinizing eyes held mine harshly. “’Tis not meant as disrespect, but truth plain and bare. Thy kind possesseth no training, no true weapons, nor skill, nor experience—no means by which to aid at the measure required to save Zairgon. And yet thou wouldst make harsh demands of me?”

  My face started feeling a little hot, but I got a quick warning glance from Wargrog. I took a deep breath. “You could change that, you know. If your priority is saving Zairgon, then save the people of Ring Four too.”

  “Is there truly aught for any to save?”

  “There is.” Alright, now I was done here. It made me wonder if Lassikhio was trying to manipulate my anger too. This was the truly insidious part of the kind of aura that this Councillor and the Scarseekers of House Kalnislaw used. Even when I was strong enough to recognize it, I could only doubt myself and my own thoughts. So I just summoned up some confidence and bullishly went on. “In fact, Ring Four is what will save Zairgon.”

  That made both Councillors’ eyes widen.

  “Is that so?” Lassikhio asked. His mouth had curled ever so upwards. “Pray, enlighten us, I beseech thee, how thou wouldst accomplish such a feat?”

  I was about to open my mouth and answer, but a commotion outside stopped me. Moments later, a harried-looking Rakshasa in the navy blue Zairgon military uniform I was starting to recognize burst in.

  “Lord Councillors,” he said, voice strained with urgency. “The Swarm is almost upon us.”

  My heart clenched tightly in my chest, but I found myself smiling as I looked at Councillor Lassikhio. “Well, looks like you’re going to get the answer to your question pretty soon.”

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  The first part of the invasion was the darkness closing in. Hundreds of thousands of bugs all making their way to Zairgon to blanket the entire city, to cover the entire mountain in the endless horde of flying creepy crawlies.

  “Keep the fires lit!” I didn’t want to open my mouth in fear of one of the tiny parasites shooting inside, but I had to shout over their incessant droning to keep up morale. “Make sure all your sides are covered.”

  The smaller insects trying to swarm us were a cross between roaches, flies, and mosquitoes. Honestly, there was absolutely zero time for me to be even sure. I was just reminded of every single buzzing, flying annoyance I had ever dealt with, just with all of them combined and taken to a hellish level.

  We were in strict formation. After gathering around the incense-burning braziers, we made sure to stick with our backs to each other, ensuring not a single side of us was vulnerable to the tiny flying monsters.

  Sure, I had Flare active and working as much as I could to ward off the monsters, but I couldn’t maintain it everywhere to protect everybody all the time.

  “Are these the Seeders or the Feeders?” Guille asked. He was the only one with me I really recognized just then. A couple of others were familiar but not people I knew well personally. I had broken up the cult so that there was someone I knew, someone I could trust to handle things, with as many groups all over our neighbourhood as possible.

  “Feeders,” I said. “Pretty sure I saw their mouths.”

  These ones had lamprey-like suckers to latch onto their targets and burrow into their flesh. I considered them the bug version of piranhas.

  A consideration that was justified some time later when someone nearby succumbed to the monsters. At a different group, one of the members had drawn away from the rest of the little party. No sooner did he have no one protecting his back before the bugs swarmed him.

  It made me bless the fact I had my armour on, and regret that there wasn’t enough for the others. At least we had managed to get some Rituals up.

  I was too horrified to count the number of seconds it took for the tiny but ravenous monsters to eat through his clothes, then flesh, before beginning to devour him from within.

  It was maybe a small blessing that the bugs’ overpowering droning drowned out the man’s screams.

  Not that his dying shrieks had lasted long. Seconds after he fell, struggling and panicking, the insects covered his entire body from head to toe. I didn’t get to see how much of his carcass was left because his fallen torch guttered out moments later.

  With that sobering reminder, we continued doing our best to repel the invading insects. I swung my torch harder than everyone near me. These things hated fire. I was constantly channelling Flare. One of the pockets I had created ruptured after finally losing the energy I had stored. I had created similar packets all over the area, but they weren’t going to last long.

  We were drowning in a sheer avalanche of insects.

  A panicked screech of “Seeders!” put everybody on edge. The man who had screamed out the warning had been stung. Then he shrieked even louder as he stabbed his burning torch right on the spot where he had been hit.

  That was the only immediate way to deal with Seeder stings. Unlike Feeders, which ate the target directly, Seeders deposited eggs via their stingers.

  Hatching led to parasites that could debilitate entire limbs in a day. Most people died on the third.

  “Don’t let them touch you!” Guille shouted.

  I focused, trying to channel even more Flare to create new pockets with Concentration and Capacity. Glowing blobs of heat energy rose to life around us, scorching the bugs and washing them in orange light. I burned the little bastards as best as I could.

  In the distance, the pockets I had prepared beforehand were firing off. Columns of Flare towered into the sky, lighting up the neighbourhood.

  The problem was that they would only stymie the bugs for so long.

  Still, I was just glad that the response to both kinds of tiny bugs was the same. Kill them with fire, drive them back by burning incense, and of course, physical barriers and attacks helped where they could be used effectively.

  The problem was that the Swarm’s attack was multifaceted. It wasn’t just the physical danger of laying parasitic eggs or eating our flesh from within that we had to deal with.

  They were also attacking our senses.

  The droning was the obvious one. We were forced to shout to communicate, which had started chafing my throat. And then there was the stench too. A nasty undercurrent pervaded through everything, making it harder to breathe. I was trying not to gag as the odour hit me over and over again. Like a dead rat left in a days-old sock.

  “Is that what you smell too?” I asked when I relayed what my nose was telling me to Guille.

  He was busy clamping his free hand over his nostrils, so now his voice sounded weird. If there hadn’t been any bugs, I’d have laughed. “Yes, Cultist Ross. I can’t stand this assault on our senses. It’s driving me insane. This smell, this constant buzzing—I can’t even see what’s going on because there are too many of them. They’re attacking us and our senses.”

  The bugs seemed endless. I was lucky I didn’t get hit, especially since two more people had to deal with getting stung and seeded. Thankfully, neither ended up like the guy who had been devoured by the Feeders.

  Or maybe it was less luck and more the fact that I had Flare to help keep me safe.

  We finally got some actual relief when more columns of fire burned through a huge section of the little monsters. A heavy wash of heat blasted us as the fiery pillar moved through the insects.

  “Sorry I’m late,” the Fire Cult member said. “There’s a lot more than we were expecting.”

  “Just glad you managed to get here,” I said.

  Cooperation would be the key to our success. We had planned things so that the Fire Cult would provide assistance all over Ring Four, provided they were able to take care of their own bug invasion first.

  Now, the Fire Cultist’s blasts of flame were burning huge swathes of space through the swarm of bugs all over.

  “How have you only lost two people so far?” the Fire Cultist asked when we got some breathing room. “We’ve had to pull everyone closer to our temple where the ever-flames burn bright when we started losing droves.”

  I winced at hearing their losses. Were the other neighbourhoods suffering similarly? “I’ve got the Aspect of Flare. Helped a lot, apparently.”

  “Flare?”

  I nodded, then channelled my Aspect. The air was sweltering and the bugs around us were still burning. It was terribly easy to draw in the surrounding heat with Concentration and weave it into a pocket shaped like the front half of a breastplate around the Fire Cultist’s chest. Not that it stuck near his chest when he moved. I’d need another Affix for that.

  Still. His eyes had gone wide at his new, glowing orange armour. It felt nice to minorly wow the person who had finally driven off the bug-sized piranhas.

  Our reprieve didn’t last long though.

  A different kind of droning went up high above us. A loud, thunderous drone that made the air shiver.

  “What’s going on?” someone asked with rising panic.

  “What is that?” asked another.

  We all turned to stare upwards at an angle. For a second, I couldn’t even believe what I was seeing.

  A gigantic monster was threading through the skies like a damn B-17. It wasn’t just the bug’s size that caught me off guard. The thing’s whole build was out of this world. Its gleaming chitinous body was mostly sleek, with its head conically shaped like the front of an airplane. Its tapering wings didn’t flap or buzz, just stuck straight out from its thorax.

  The weirdest bit was its abdomen, which was cut in half. But instead of a stump bleeding out into the air, a stream of energy fired out of its back like the largest jet engine I had ever seen. That was what caused the new, engine-like droning noise.

  “Take cover,” I said as soon as I saw the lumpy bits all along its thorax and the front of its abdomen. “Take cover now!”

  We all started running, the Fire Cultist coming along with us to prevent any more of the demonic little monsters from pulverizing us. But we had only taken about a couple steps before two bursts of light lit up on the walls separating Rings Three and Four.

  One was a faintly flaming aura I was starting to grow very familiar with by now. Councillor Lassikhio shot into the sky like had hitched a ride on a mortar shell. I wasn’t sure who the other light belonged to, though I had my suspicions, which I couldn’t entertain just then because my sight was arrested by how Lassikhio rammed into the huge flying monster.

  “It stopped!” Guille shouted in disbelief. “They actually stopped it. They—”

  “Fuck.”

  The Councillor might have successfully stopped the monster advancing further, and he had even listened to me and stopped it before it got into Ring Four airspace.

  But all the bulbous white growths around the monster’s body started firing. They shot into the air like they were launched from trebuchets, arcing over and heading straight for Zairgon. I was about to yell at everyone to take cover again, but then the second glow shone bright. Shrieking shots of magical energy beamed upwards to strike the white meteors.

  We stood witness to a rather spectacular lightshow—and sound-show—with the explosions ricocheting through the air above us.

  But the Councillor had missed one.

  My heart stuttered at the same time as the monster’s arcing, ivory-coloured blast landed not that distant from us. The ground shook and I almost lost my footing. I could only hope that no one had been present at the site of impact.

  A piercing, clicking cry drilled through the air. I came to a sudden halt. Those shots from the huge monster… those weren’t just any old projectile attack at all.

  It was firing monsters at us.

  “Stay safe and stay together,” I said.

  “Wait, are you going after that thing?” Guille asked.

  “There’s no one else in that direction to deal with it. Let everyone know what’s going on. Go.”

  We parted, all of us hurrying towards our destinations. The screeching going on wasn’t exactly an encouraging sound, but it was fine. None of the info I had gone through had ever mentioned giant, bombing bug monsters. But that was fine. We were wielding flexibility to deal with unpredictability.

  No matter what monster awaited me, I was going to end it.