Cold mist smothered the world, swallowing sound, swallowing breath. The train rattled beneath Zora’s feet, steel groaning against steel, but even that familiar noise felt distant—muffled—like the mist was drinking it all in.

  Then, footsteps.

  A deliberate, metallic clink rang out on the roof behind him, steady as a metronome. Zora didn’t turn. Didn’t flinch. He listened. The weight distribution, the metal joints clicking with each step—whoever was approaching, they weren’t entirely human.

  The Mutant-Class gliding ants realised it before he did.

  Seven of them—five of them in front, two of them behind—shrieked all at once. It was a primal, high-pitched wail. Not just fear. Something deeper, more primordial. They scrabbled back on the roofs, wings fluttering uselessly, desperate to put distance between themselves and whatever had emerged from the mist behind him.

  A half-flesh, half-inorganic boy stepped out of the mist quietly, a crystallised bolt-action rifle raised in his hands.

  … No.

  Not a boy.

  Three of them.

  Zora hadn’t even raised his staff before two more sets of identical footsteps followed the first. The mist parted just enough to show them, silhouettes stepping forward in perfect sync. Three rifles lifted as one, aiming down the sights at Zora.

  Something’s wrong about them.

  He couldn’t get a good read on them. Not because of the mist. Not because he was standing on a roaring, chugging train. Even with his enhanced hearing, the boys’ presence warped the air, their outlines blurred and unstable, like… trying to listen to an echo in shifting water. Zora had never encountered anything like it. He could hear their movements, their footfalls, but no distinct breath. No distinct facial features. No steady pulse. Their hearts were beating, but they weren’t the flesh, organic type of sound.

  And the boys were young. No older than Kita as their rifles clicked into position, immediately snapping away from Zora.

  In an instant, gunfire split the night. Thirty rounds across three rifles in under a second. The bullets tore into one of the gliding ants behind Zora before it could react, ripping through chitin, flesh, and muscle. It crumpled mid-screech, its body collapsing in on itself as its heart was torn to shreds.

  The second ant barely survived, launching into the air with a burst of frantic wingbeats, throwing itself onto a train carriage further back alongside the rest of its family.

  Six ants remained. They hissed low, unsettled but holding formation

  Then the train shot out of the mist.

  Cold moonlight fell on Zora’s skin once more, spreading across the vast colossal fungi forests, and just like that, Zora’s hearing snapped back into place. The sound of the train roared into full clarity. Wind whistled past. Distant bugs sang in the trees. The world felt sharp again.

  But the ‘Worm Mages’ were still and unbothered.

  Out of the mist, the gliding ants immediately took to the sky, unfurling their wings fully. They weren’t being stopped by the mist anymore. Now fully airborne, they circled low, gliding around the carriage where Zora and the Worm Mages were. They didn’t dive in immediately. They were watching. Calculating.

  But when they struck, they struck together.

  All six dived, claws bared, cutting through the air like living scythes.

  “Barrier!” Zora snapped, flicking his staff at his feet. His spell snapped outwards in an instant, an unseen wall locking into place around him and the Worm Mages. The ants didn’t have time to correct their trajectory.

  They slammed into the barrier. A jarring collision. Wings crumpled, limbs tangled, and bodies thudded hard against the invisible wall. The air filled with pained screeches as the creatures flailed against the force that’d stopped them dead in the air.

  And the Worm Mages lifted their rifles again to unleash another storm of bullets.

  One of the ants couldn't back away in time. The bullets shredded its body mid-air, wings snapping off as it tumbled off the train.

  Five left.

  The others flew away, keeping their distance. They were more cautious now—predatory creatures recalibrating their attack.

  Then they spoke all at once, and Decima’s voice spilled from five separate mouths in a snarling, overlapping chorus:

  “The World Eater.”

  Zora barely reacted. He didn’t flinch, didn’t acknowledge her theatrics. Whatever Decima thought she knew—whatever old terror she claimed to recognise in those boys—it didn’t change the immediate problem. There were still five Mutant-Class ants hunting him, and he had three uncanny, unreadable riflemen who had yet to acknowledge him beyond a single glance. Practicality demanded action.

  “We could cooperate, you know,” Zora said, slightly out of breath as he threw a glance back at the Worm Mages. “I’ll keep them at bay. I need time to catch my breath, but I can still throw distractions at them, so you shoot them down while they’re forced to stay back. Simple, effective, no unnecessary dramatics. What do you say?”

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  For a fraction of a second, the three Worm Mages seemed to consider him. Not with interest, not even curiosity—just the barest pause, another flicker of acknowledgment before something colder took its place.

  Annoyance. Vague, muted expressions, like someone brushing off a gnat.

  Then the ground disappeared beneath him.

  There was no warning, no shift in bioarcanic essence, no whisper of intent. Just a sudden, silent absence where the train roof had been. Gravity seized him before his mind fully registered the fall. One breath he was standing in the night air, and in the next he was dropping. His shoes struck wood a second later, landing him inside the warm interior of the train carriage below. A cleaner drop than it had any right to be.

  He blinked.

  Looked up.

  The roof was still there.

  Tch.

  That’s the… ‘wormhole’ thing I’ve heard about, huh?

  Up above, the battle carried on without him. Ants shrieked, bullets cracked through the air, and somewhere in that chaos, Zora found irritation coiling in his gut.

  The irritation turned into a slow, wry smile aimed at no one in particular.

  “Alright. You don’t wanna work together,” he murmured, rolling his shoulders before lifting his staff to the roof. “Rip and tear, then.”

  The ceiling screamed. Metal ripped apart, peeling away like torn skin, jagged edges curling outward as his spell pried the structure open. The carriage itself shuddered beneath the spell, wood and steel groaning in protest as the ceiling split.

  Zora bent his knees and jumped, wind rushing past as he launched himself back into the fray.

  His shoes struck steel.

  The moment Zora landed, the world properly unfolded through sound. Gunfire snapped in rhythmic bursts, chitinous wings sliced through the air, and the hollow whumps of displaced wind screamed as bullets ripped past the gliding ants swirling around the night sky. The three Worm Mages stood in tight formation, rifles exploding with heat as they pivoted in unison, their movements controlled and honed. They were trained shooters, no doubt about it. Not mere spellcasters who picked up a gun—they knew how to move, how to control a battlefield, how to shoot in formation.

  One of the ants tucked its wings from above, dropping toward one of the mages, claws stretched to carve his skull from his shoulders. But the boy it targeted didn’t flinch. He simply stepped back—and vanished. No crack of displaced air, no distortion, no sound at all. One moment he was there. The next, gone.

  The ant slashed at nothing.

  Before it could recover, space twisted behind it, and the vanished Worm Mage emerged from his wormhole, bayonet already plunging forward. The knife speared clean through the ant’s chest, pinning it in place just long enough for the other two mages to whirl and unload a merciless volley straight into its center mass. The bug’s chest exploded into pulp under concentrated fire. A second later, the first mage flicked his bayonet, and the ruined husk of the ant tumbled off the train, vanishing into the darkness below.

  Without even looking, the mage then turned and fired behind himself. A clean, precise shot that clipped another ant’s chest mid-ambush.

  Zora didn’t move.

  Didn’t need to.

  He simply watched and listened.

  … Those aren’t normal bullets.

  Something was off. Two of the Worm Mages wielded normal rifles, but the third one fired bullets that weren’t the empire’s standard anti-chitin rounds. At first, they sounded just like any other metal slug, but on closer attention, the weight and impact were… wrong. That mage with the diamond rifle wasn’t firing conventional ammunition. No, he was shooting whatever was available to load into the chamber—flying metal fragments, jagged rocks, even compressed air.

  Most of his projectiles were weaker than specialised anti-chitin rounds Zora had to ‘block’ almost on a weekly basis, but the trade-off was infinite adaptability. There was no need for that Worm Mage to carry loads of heavy ammunition crates when anything he picked up could be shoved into the chamber and fired as a bullet.

  A Swarmsteel weapon.

  But what bug is it made out of?

  A… worm?

  Zora exhaled quietly, focusing on the other two mages. Their rifles were normal. That meant by now, their pockets were out of bullets. They should be easy, defenceless prey without any ammunition—but they weren’t.

  As the remaining four ants slashed through the air, circling for another attack, neither of the two mages hesitated. In one smooth motion, they tossed their spent rifles aside, opened wormholes in front of them, and reached through.

  Two of the ants vanished mid-flight, yanked from the air as hands dragged them through the wormholes that’d appeared next to them. The Worm Mages slammed both into the roof of the carriage. Chitin cracked under their struggle, wings beating wildly as they slashed in blind desperation. Their claws tore into the flesh of mages holding them. One of the boys lost half his ribs. The other had his throat ripped clean open.

  Neither reacted. They simply tightened their grips, and then they ripped the ants apart. No weapons. No spells. Their hands vibrated with raw power, metallic fingers digging deep into muscle and exoskeleton as they pulled the bugs apart limb from limb. One of the boys even bit into his ant’s throat, gnawing through sinew like a starving animal.

  While Zora raised a brow, feeling slightly perturbed, the third Worm Mage behind him lifted his diamond rifle. Three more sharp cracks rang out. Three shots hit their mark. The last three gliding ants, still darting overhead, had their wings obliterated mid-flight. They spiraled downward, landing hard on a train carriage ahead.

  The Worm Mage lowered his rifle, staring after them.

  A moment passed.

  The last gliding ant hesitated.

  Zora could practically hear the falter in its movement—the hitched breaths, the shuddering stance, the instinctive recoil of prey recognising its place in the food chain—and then, without a word from Decima, it turned tail and ran.

  Not toward the Worm Mages. Not toward Zora.

  Toward the front of the train.

  Shit.

  It wasn’t fleeing. It’d realised it couldn’t win this fight head-up against the Worm Mages, so it was shifting its strategy: if it could reach the front, it could derail the entire train, sending the carriages hurtling into Nohoch Ik’Balam like a metal storm. Zora didn’t have to be an architect to know buildings would be levelled. People would die.

  He moved. He lunged forward, feet barely touching the roof, already closing the gap. The ant was fast, but—

  A shift in air pressure. A distortion in space. Suddenly, the Worm Mage with the diamond rifle stepped out of a wormhole in front of him, and there was no time for either of them to realise they’d gotten in each other’s way.

  Zora slammed into the boy, momentum knocking them both off balance, limbs tangling as they hit the roof in a graceless collision. Metal rattled under their combined weight. They rolled once, twice, before shoving each other off and scrambling upright.

  Irritation crackled between them like static as the Worm Mage whirled, seemingly on instinct, turning his rifle on Zora again.

  … Damnit, kid.

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