- Scene from Alshifa Bug-Slaying School past

  Through the metal gate and past the withered, barren fields, the Alshifa Bug-Slaying School welcomed their arrival with a giant metal sign hanging over the dark entrance.

  The infamous ‘leave your humanity aside’ sign had been scribbled on by graduates from a few decades ago to scare the first-years into dropping out—or transferring to the far more ordinary General School on the other end of town. After all, the more students there were across the five years of aspiring bug-slayers, the more competition there’d be for jobs after graduation; graduates either worked as Instructors or as garrison bug-slayer in others undertowns connected to Alshifa through a web of subterranean tunnels, and since there was only ever a need for five Instructors in the school at any given time… it was understandable why bug-slaying was a tight-knit profession where most graduates were either close friends, or were shunned and kicked out of class.

  It was standard for the Bug-Slaying School to have only five classes, one for each grade, and one Instructor assigned to each class. The Instructors would teach the same class every year until all their students either graduated or dropped out, which meant for the past five years, the only instructor Dahlia really knew was Instructor Biem—and she couldn’t deny she felt a little shiver run down her spine as she stepped into the dark halls of the school, almost expecting a harsh and grating scolding for having arrived so late today.

  But today, the school was quiet.

  The sun was bright outside, the air suffocating inside the foyer. Not a single firefly lamp was lit. Once, the foyer might’ve been the most grandiose hall in the entire town—tapestries dotted every inch of every wall depicting courageous bug-slayers of old, defunct weapons dangled from chains on the three-storey high ceiling, and the single spiralling staircase at the back of the hall were connected to bridges that led into every single possible hallway of the fortress-like school—but now she could barely see ten steps ahead of her, and the rolls of fuzzy carpet beneath her feet were the only things indicating this the same school she’d been attending the past five years.

  It just wasn’t the same without the students running around, sparring wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted.

  “... Jerie. Amula,” Issam said quietly, glancing back at the seniors with a little nod. “Light.”

  The two needed no telling twice. Jerie took the lead with his firefly cage held out in front of him, while Amula walked at the very back with her cage hanging on her waistband. Issam was right behind Jerie, the twins right behind him, and then Dahlia right before Amula—a small, compact formation just in case one of the fireflies were to go out. There were no windows in the foyers, in the hallways, so until they reached their homeroom, they to stay close to the seniors.

  All of them sucked in a sharp breath and began trudging forward, leaving sunlight behind as they searched for the stairs.

  Eria asked, and it was like a ghost had just spoken in her ear. She shrieked and jumped and made the twins in front of her shriek as well, which most certainly didn’t do them any favours when it came to being quiet.

  Issam turned just in time to see Amula kicking her in the back of her knees, hissing at her to shut up. She apologised profusely with a dozen short bows as they started trudging up the stairs, hands feeling and gripping tight on the railings.

  Eria bobbed her head up and down.

  As they travelled steadily up the stairs, making their way to the third floor where the fifth-year homeroom and armoury was, she felt as though there were shadows skittering just beyond the edge of the light; maybe it was just her bracers’ bristle acting up, though, because none of the others spoke up. Sure, there that ominous presence Issam had mentioned that they should probably worry about, but the fact of the matter was, they to get to the armoury to get Amula and Jerie’s Swarmsteel back, so they lose their nerve now. She kept her tongue and forged on, placing her hands over her bracers to keep them from shivering.

  The stairs levelled out after a whole minute of silent trudging, and now they were faced with a pitch-black hallway that seemed to stretch forever and ever into the abyss. Jerie and Issam paused for a moment—as though forgetting whether their homeroom was left or right—before the twins jabbed their thumbs left, making Issam chuckled softly.

  Somehow, seeing the usually composed boys lose themselves a little made Dahlia feel a bit more comfortable. She wasn’t the only one unnerved by their environment.

  “... This reminds me of Biem turning off all the fireflies lanterns in the middle of class for sudden sensory training sessions,” Ayla said, her voice low as a whisper as they walked down the dark hallway. “He group exercises, so he’d split the entire school up into five classes and make us play tag—the whole school’s the arena, no using Swarmsteel, and if you get tagged, you can’t revive. So, if you suck at moving around in the dark, you’d just sit the next two hours out on the floor. It’s not fun compared to the tag the kids at the General School play.”

  “It’s only not fun if you suck at it,” Issam said, cackling under his breath as he smirked back at Ayla. “I love Instructor Biem’s games. They’re always quite thrilling, aren’t they?”

  “Easy for ye to say. You know what we seniors called this hallway?” Amula mumbled, her head swivelling left and right as though searching for observers. When she didn’t spot anything out of the ordinary, she leaned in to toss a pebble at Issam’s neck. “This is the ‘Hallway of Lost Heads’. See, because the fifth-year and fourth-year homerooms are both on this level, whenever the fireflies go out and Biem roars for tag to begin, the strongest students in the school would rush out and start bustin’ everyone’s heads. Nobody else gets to play on this level. It’s so damned unfun, honestly–”

  “You say that like you weren’t one of those ‘strongest students’, girl,” Ayla muttered, turning round to scowl at Amula. “When we played this game last year, it was you and Jerie in the fifth-years and Raya and Issam in the fourth-years. Did the rest of us get to move even a single inch before we got tagged? Hell no. We just sat there for three hours in the dark like a bunch of losers.”

  Amula scowled back. “Hey, I gave ye all a chance. I told our classmates to wait ten seconds before going for yer heads, but Raya–”

  “Raya ruined it for us,” Aylee groaned, and Ayla nodded with overexaggerated forlorn, making Issam laugh again at the front. “That… guy. We him to wait a bit just as the fireflies went out so we could form a strategy to deal with you fifth-years, but he just went ahead and tagged your entire class immediately. Except for you and Jerie, of course. Then the two of you got pissed and tagged in return, so it was just another sit-in-the-dark exercise for the rest of us while Raya and Issam had all the fun.”

  “I hate that guy,” Aylee agreed.

  “Same,” Issam said.

  “He’s not called the most talented bug-slayer in Alshifa’s history for nothin’. The Instructors actually let him pick his Swarmsteel when he was a third-year, while the rest of us only got ours this year,” Amula muttered, and as they rounded a corner, Dahlia stepped on a broken glass shard. The older girl had to kick her a few steps forward just so she wouldn’t make a noise. “We’re gettin’ off-topic, though. That’s… our homeroom at the end, right? The door’s open. Think someone’s already inside ransackin’ the place?”

  True to the Amula’s word, the straight beam of sunlight falling through the open door at the end of the hallway made breath hitch—since their homeroom also doubled as their class armoury, Instructor Biem was always a stickler for making sure the student on door-locking duty that day did their job. It’d be a disaster if people could just walk in and come out with a dozen combat-tested Swarmsteel.

  So, to see that the door was open now, remembering what Issam had said about the ominous presence…

  … Dahlia coughed into her fist and bowed again, catching everyone’s attention.

  “I think it was supposed to be… me,” she mumbled, unable to meet any of their gazes. “But I left early yesterday, so I… didn’t lock the door properly. There’s probably nobody inside.”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  Issam sighed a breath of relief. The twins whacked her on her back and said it was no problem, while Amula muttered something unintelligible before taking the lead into the homeroom alongside Jerie—and the moment all of them stepped into the sunlit room was also the same moment the twins shut the door behind them, twisting the double locks to make sure nothing could sneak up on them.

  Looking around the familiar homeroom helped Dahlia calm down a little. It wasn’t like the small twenty desks classrooms in the General School—the bug-slaying homeroom was almost as wide as an entire ball-playing field, twice as tall as any normal room, and instead of desks and chairs they had a field of five-metre-tall wooden poles sticking out of the floor like sugarcanes.

  The idea was only Instructor Biem would get to sit at the ‘normal’ desk at the front of the room, while the rest of the fifth-years would have to balance on top of the poles the entire day without sitting down even once. That, and the poles could also be used as an obstacle course whenever Instructor Biem felt like throwing chalk at someone, and a single lever pull by his desk was all it’d take for the entire room to ‘transform’; shutters would fall over the line of windows, spikes and swinging traps would emerge from the walls, and they could host a full-on movement training session without having to walk out the doorway.

  The full depth of the architecture eluded her still, but there was no doubt the bug-slaying school’s homerooms were the most advanced rooms in the entire town.

  Eria muttered.

  she thought.

  she offered.

  Of course, there was still the usual homeroom furniture scattered all about: lockers for them to dump their satchels in, medical amenities in case a student fell off a wooden pole mid-class, and most importantly, there were the boxes of random scrap and equipment lining the walls. There wasn’t any real reason why the boxes were so disorganised. They’d just been accumulating mass year after year, decade after decade—most of them were failed Swarmsteel prototypes or broken weapons that’d never end up seeing the light of day, but there’d occasionally be a gem or two in them.

  Amula and Jerie immediately flew over to begin clawing through the boxes of Swarmsteel.

  “... We’ll give them some time to find their Swarmsteel,” Issam said, sighing and trudging over to join them, though he was obviously less enthusiastic given he already had his mantis scythes. “I need a new sword, too. A broken blade is… workable, but not ideal. How about you girls just sit around and rest while we find our stuff?” Then he glanced around at the three of them, smiling softly. “Dahlia can work on making something useful out of the beetle parts, and the two of you can keep her company.”

  The twins gave him a mocking salute. “Sure thing, boss!”

  Without asking, they dragged her over to Instructor Biem’s desk—one sister pulling each arm—before throwing her onto the chair and dumping out half of the beetle chitin plates they’d been carrying in their satchels.

  Dahlia wasn’t immediately sure what to make with them, so she looked up anxiously at the twins as she took out her chisel, biting her lips.

  “Do you guys… have any special requests?” she asked. “Beetle chitin is very flexible. Multi-purpose. If you want some sort of armour, I can try to–”

  “Something lightweight!” Ayla said, twirling in place and lifting her mantle to show off her severe lack of armour underneath. “Chest plates for all of us would be nice so we don’t get instantly skewered by any antennae, but they’ll have to be light! At least for the two of us! We’ll be dodging and jumping around quite often, so… yeah!”

  “... Alright,” Dahlia muttered. “I’ll… try.”

  Popping her shoulders, cracking her wrists, she leaned forward in her chair and tried to ignore the squeezing pains in her forearms.

  So, after staring at the chitin in front of her for a second longer, she turned the dial on her pocket watch–

  “I notice you start that timer whenever you’re about to concentrate on something,” Aylee said, breaking her flow the moment the first sounded. She blinked, hands freezing up just as she got ahold of the first chitin plate. “What’s up with that? Is it a ritual of some sort? I wish I had something like that to help me focus.”

  “Mm… hm,” she hummed, only half-paying attention to Aylee as she blinked and tried entering her flow state again. She didn’t have to measure the twins’ torso width with a cord or anything of the sort. She could tell from a glance how many chitin plates she’d need for a single chestplate, so the first thing she did was pick out the largest, most malleable plates; ones she could bend and curl and shape into smooth curves with her bare hands–

  “You made this pocket watch by yourself, right?” Ayla said, swerving behind her chair to scrutinise her trinket. She blinked and whirled around, covering her watch almost instinctively. Ayla grinned back at her. “It’s cool! I like it! Can you make one for all of us as well?”

  “I’ll… um. Attempt,” she mumbled, whipping back around to start folding the beetle chitin again. “Sorry, but, um, could you… not… talk to me? While I’m working?”

  Ayla didn’t take the hint. “Do you have to focus really hard?”

  Aylee didn’t take it either. “You’re just folding plates and bending them together, right?”

  “Yes. Kinda. But it’s… a bit more complicated than that,” she said, having trouble picking the words out of her mind as her hands and tongue moved at the same time. “If I don’t… focus on the sound of the watch, I can’t make Swarmsteel. That’s just… how it is–”

  “But why?” they asked.

  She twiddled her fingers. Her hands stopped moving again. Nervous beads of sweat rolled down her forehead as her skin started itching, anxiety gripping around her heart. She simply… she simply couldn’t concentrate on making Swarmsteel when she was being stared at so intently. She wasn’t used to it. This was always a job she did when she was alone inside her stuffy little bedroom, as far away as possible from any distractions—and the twins finally seemed to take the hint, sighing as they walked out of sight.

  Her mind unfroze the moment they left her field of vision, and suddenly her hands were moving on their own again.

  She still had a bit of time to spare.

  If she couldn’t finish shaping an entire chestplate in a single minute, she could just turn the dial again.

  The question lingered at the back of her mind, gnawing away at her focus, but for her part she was able to consciously endure the itching sensation. The answer didn’t matter. Having a little ritual she could perform before doing something mentally taxing was a thing. It kept her focused, it awakened the latent muscle memories in her body, and, most important of all, the steady and of her pocket watch made her feel at home.

  Her dad always carried a pocket watch with him, after all–

  “You used to spend a lot of time making Swarmsteel on your own, sitting at that bedroom desk of yours facing out the window, right?”

  A pair of hands started massaging her shoulders from behind, but even when she froze up again, she couldn’t tell which one of the twins was talking to her.

  When Ayla wasn’t trying to sound too upbeat and Aylee wasn’t trying to sound too melodramatic, their voices were nigh-indistinguishable—and the massaging hands moved in sync, kneading and working her muscles to relieve a burst of pent-up stress she didn’t even realise she had.

  It was like… poison, being sucked out of her veins, and now she could breathe properly again.

  “Don’t stop moving your hands,” the voice whispered into her ear. “Keep going. Don’t stop. Just listen to my voice, okay?”

  She didn’t really have the option to say no, so when her pocket watch rang, she immediately slapped the dial to silence it—and then her hands returned to work.

  The girl behind her giggled, and now she was sure of it; there was only one sister massaging her from behind.

  But which one?

  “... You’ve always been super quiet and reserved, you know? Even when you were a first-year, you didn’t talk much to anyone. It kinda made me think you… couldn’t? But then I saw you talking to Issam after school one day and thought, ‘ah, you really talk after all’,” the sister said, making her gulp as she tried her best to focus on the chitin plates in front of her. “You probably don’t know this, but the only reason why all twenty-two of us managed to get expelled on our first day of school was because of you. Do you remember that day? I know I do. Biem was going to expel everyone who didn’t make it to homeroom that morning, and the way Issam and Raya were going at each other’s throats while everyone was completely distracted with egging them on, would’ve made it had you not done what you did.”

  “You don’t remember?” the sister chuckled, moving onto thumping her shoulders with closed fists. “You fight. I dunno if you just weren’t paying attention to the fight or what, but you just ignored Issam and Raya and walked up to the homeroom yourself. When everyone saw Biem just taking you in, we realised fighting wasn’t part of any initiation test—so the rest of us followed, and none of us got expelled that first day.”

  “And since that day, I’ve kinda thought to myself, ‘ah, this girl’s pretty tricky and devious’, just like me,” the sister said, “and I kinda… you know. I kinda wanted to be your friend.”

  “I mean, I most definitely felt like I to be your friend,” the sister said, with a small lilt in her voice that suggested she shrugged nonchalantly. “You were a really tough nut to crack, though. I tried getting paired up with you during morning stretches countless times, but you always stretched with Issam and never even looked our way. I tried eating my lunches with you, but I guess your talent for hiding and sneaking around extends outside of that hide and seek game Biem makes us play. I still don’t know where you eat your lunches, by the way.”

  “I even made friends with Issam to try to get closer to you, but every time he tried bringing me over to your house you’d just be sitting by your desk making your Swarmsteel, and you always look so… focused. And happy.” The sister paused for a moment. “I was never able to bring myself to disturb you then, so I never did. In hindsight, I wish it didn’t take a literal Swarm infestation for us to talk, but… I’m happy that we’re talking now.”

  “You might not get it, but… I thought you were really, cool,” the sister breathed, as the shoulder thumping stopped and the massaging returned; a bit faster, a bit rougher this time. “The way you can just zone out and put your all into something you really like… you know, I was never really good at that sort of thing. All I’m good at is wearing my mantle and making big, flashy distractions while the bug-slayers do all the heavy lifting. In a way, I guess I’m just jealous of you and Issam. You can make and repair all of our weapons, and Issam uses them. Compared to the two of you, I’m just kind of in the middle of the road, huh?”

  “If it weren’t for you, both of us would’ve died to that beetle back then,” the sister whispered. “So thank you. I mean it. And I also mean it when I say I still want to be friends with you, so… let’s hang out after we deal with this invasion?”

  The massaging hands were slightly heated, slightly sweaty—their warmth didn’t escape Dahlia’s attention. She was more than familiar with the unsaid sentiment herself; the feeling of being indebted to someone; the feeling of being inferior to someone; they were all sentiments very, close to her heart, and she’d imagined, more than a few dozens times in her head, what she’d like to hear from Issam were she ever to lay her thoughts bare.

  So, as her hands eventually stopped moving and her breathing slowed to a crawl, she lowered her head and stared quietly at the nails massaging her shoulders.

  They were plain, but smooth and pretty nails; quite unlike her bruised and dirtied ones.

  Her nails could never be like the sister’s, and maybe that… was okay.

  She gulped. She chewed her lips and tried to gather her courage. Her lips parted for a brief second, then closed in the next—and she managed to re-gather her courage and speak.

  Just a whisper.

  “... I’ve made three chest plates for now,” she mumbled, making a point not to turn and look as she lowered her head, looking down at her lap. “If you’d like, maybe I can… help put one on for you?”

  It was a silly offer. A pointless offer. Of course the mantle-wearing student would be able to don any shoddy chestplate themselves, without anyone to help them, but–

  “Sure!” Ayla said, bouncing forward from her left with a wide grin.

  “Do me first,” Aylee said, skipping forward from her right with a gentle smile.

  And she blinked at the two of them, losing her breath for a second as she wondered if she’d just been plain wrong about there being only one sister massaging her shoulders.

  With great delight, the twins lined up as she stood and helped them wear their chest plates.

  It wasn’t until she was halfway through that she realised something, with a momentary pause: she’d made Swarmsteel even while she was being stared at the entire time.

  [Pine Sawyer Beetle Chest Plate (Grade: F-Rank)(Tou: +0/2)(Aura: +0/30)]

  When had she slipped into her flow state?

  When the twins first started talking?

  Or when she’d been asked to be friends with them?

  She didn’t really know. The tightness in her chest that hadn’t gone away since she started travelling with everyone settled just a little bit, but… she felt just a bit more at ease around the twins.

  And when she looked at them marvelling and flicking the lightweight piece of equipment she’d made explicitly them, she felt an indescribable sense of pride and accomplishment—so when Ayla turned to hug her with a thankful laugh while Aylee held up a hand for her to slap, she felt a bit of something mixed in, swirling along with the pride she found she didn’t really care too much about.

  She found herself smiling a bit, too.

  The twins’ energy was infectious.

  And if she could have it…

  … she could have it, she wanted to make Swarmsteel for Issam, Amula, and Jerie as well.

  But not right now.

  The bristles on her bracers were shivering, and snapped their heads up to stare at the front door.

  Eria warned.

  The door was still sealed and doubled-locked, but the silence outside didn’t fool her for a second. The hard stone floor of the Bug-Slaying School knew the sound of human footsteps, and whatever was standing right beyond the door human. She was about ninety percent sure of it. If it was human, it’d probably be carrying a firefly cage, but there wasn’t a shadow trickling in through the slit at the bottom of the door—so the thing to be able to see in the dark, move well in it.

  Her mind raced to narrow down the type of giant insect they might have to face on their way out, but that was just as unnecessary as well.

  Something knocked on the door.

  Once.

  Twice.

  And right as her hands whipped forward to grab one of the chest plates, desperately pulling it over her own torso

  The front door was kicked in with a loud crash, and a boy darted in with his hornet spear reared behind him.