Eria didn’t miss a beat.
She didn’t hear Eria wrong. The words weren’t jumbled, her thoughts weren’t scrambled, the giant cave cricket was dead before her eyes, and her heart was still… pounding. Beating hard against her ribs. If she thought she’d been calming down after her near-death encounter, she she wasn’t now.
“What do you mean?” she breathed, eyes twitching as her fingers loosened for a brief moment and blood began trickling down her forearms. She doubled over in pain, teeth gritted, pressing her forehead into the wet ground. “I… I killed it already, didn’t I? Why do I have to eat it? What's the point–”
Eria swiped a leg horizontally, cutting empty air, and there was a small flash of light before something warped into existence—a little black box about the size of her torso, so real and so corporeal-looking she could hardly believe it was just another projection.
[Name: Dahlia Sina]
[Grade: F-Rank Giant-Class]
[Class: ???]
[Swarmblood Art: ???]
[Aura: 500]
[Points: 0]
[Strength: 1, Speed: 1, Toughness: 1, Dexterity: 3, Perception: 1]
[// MUTATION TREE
[// EQUIPPED SWARMSTEEL
She leaned away from the suddenly bright light and forced herself into a squint. The written words were small and difficult to read.
Eria said.
“... Okay? Confusion. So what does eating—”
Eria continued.
Then it paused for a second, giving her a second to digest the information.
She listened closely, dearly, but the explanation still wasn’t making much sense to her.
“But how does that… work?” she asked, as she stared straight at the cricket once again; her gulp was so loud she feared someone from the surface might’ve heard it. “How does eating the cricket flesh increase my strength? My speed? Don’t you need… to specifically train those particular attributes? Issam and Amula and the others, they put months upon years of training on end just to make themselves take one step a little bit faster, and now you’re telling me—”
“Yes—”
Eria said firmly, and the status screen winked out of existence.
She blinked. “I… what? We can?”
Eria skittered off the carcass, and then she was left alone in the sewage room.
Foetid waters rushing to her right, cockroaches scurrying between the heaps of trash on her left. She heard everything and smelled everything and everything, in brutal clarity—the blotchy black ooze spilling from the cricket’s exploded head, the nauseating riot of toxic colours reflecting from its shattered chitin plates, the gut-wrenching spray of strewn organs and entrails dangling from its open thorax—and even just the idea of sticking one of the more appetising strands of meat into her mouth made bile rise up in her throat.
She tried, nevertheless.
Reaching in front of her, she ripped out a single strand of meat from the cricket's exploded head and stuffed it into her mouth, hoping it'd go down smoothly, quickly. She managed to swallow, actually—but then inside her rejected the flesh, and she couldn’t hold the bile back this time.
As Eria tilted its little head, she doubled over and threw up the muddy black meat, clutching her stomach in pain.
Eria said, in an artificially cool and soothing voice, sauntering under her face to wave up at her.
“I… know that,” she wheezed, voice trembling between words, between breaths. “I know… I’m weak. I know. Agreement. If it were Issam, he would’ve… he would’ve already finished eating by now—”
“But I can’t eat it,” she finished, as she squeezed her eyes shut and hurled again; a horrid, retched, unseemly sight. Eria stopped talking to stare as she managed to look at the little bug weakly. “I… I can’t. I’m sorry, but I... I can't—”
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
Eria said calmly.
Dahlia gritted her teeth. She tried again, and she triedstrand after strand, bite-sized chunk after bite-sized chunk, but she could never get the putrid flesh to go down her throat. It was more than just a mental incapability; it was as though she physically couldn't stomach the idea of eating bug meat, and even if she wanted to, she just... couldn't.
After seeing her throw up her fifteenth attempt at devouring the cricket flesh, Eria rubbed its head with a little leg.
Eria muttered.
Eria trailed off.
She stopped forcing cricket flesh down her throat and simply knelt there on all fours, gasping and heaving for breath.
Eria asked, almost impassively.
“There’s… there’s another way I can increase my attributes and grow stronger, isn’t there?”
She asked, though she felt she already knew the answer, and she started crawling towards the cricket with her right hand clamped over her left forearm. She was left-handed, so, if nothing else, she her left hand to be in good condition in order to do what she was really good at.
While she sat up straight and rolled her sleeves up to her shoulders, Eria stood atop the cricket’s antennae, staring down at her.
Eria said hesitantly,
“That’s okay. I can deal with… that,” she mumbled, as she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, rusted chisel, biting the handle between her teeth. “Ah’ll do thish my oan waye.”
Eria stepped back, sensing she had no need for interference at this point, so she raised her head to let out a soft exhale before turning the dial on her pocket watch.
One minute was all she’d give herself before her forearm wounds needed to be sealed.
Her eyes snapped wide awake as she focused, glaring down at its forelegs with a burning intensity.
She grabbed the cricket’s left foreleg without hesitation. In general, an insect’s legs were six-segmented, going from the ‘pretarsus’ at the tip of the leg to the ‘coxa’ connecting the leg to the body. The pretarsus ‘claw’ parts were usually most valuable, considering their application in blades and weapons, while the ‘femur’ parts were usually second most valuable, considering their high muscle density for armour and padding. Under normal circumstances she’d be aiming to dismantle those parts for herself first, but a cave cricket was a little different.
The cylindrical ‘tibia’ parts, located directly beneath the femur, were what she really wanted from the cricket.
she recalled from an old textbook, biting her lips as she did. ‘
Tick, tock. If the cave cricket were any bigger, she’d probably have a tough time dismantling its legs, but it didn’t take her long at all to locate the joints she needed to cut with her chisel, or the muscles that needed to go if she wanted to remove its chitin. Her blade struggled a bit for a completely clean cuts, but after twenty seconds of heaving and groaning, she managed to separate the entire leg, blood oozing from the stumps.
Somehow, she was able to ignore the putrid scents and went straight to carving the tibia’s lower joint, isolating the cylindrical chitin before shaking it up and down to make the flesh inside slide out.
That was the first part done.
With the heavy tibia in hand, she fell to her right and dipped it in the sewage water, letting the violent flow clean it thoroughly on the inside. ‘Clean’ was an incredible overstatement, of course—it still sewage water at the end of the day—but at least the blood and flanges wouldn't stick. She let it soak for about twenty seconds before pulling it out, slamming the whole thing down on the ground in front of it.
She drove her chisel down and hit it right down the middle, thumb on the back of her blade. It wasn't meant to ‘cut’. Her blade was too small for something like that, so instead she recalled her father's teachings and ‘splintered’ it with impact force. The cylindrical chitin split into two uneven halves with a resounding crack, and she didn’t waste anymore time.
The sixty second mark came to a pass with a sharp as she slipped her forearms into the hollow cylindrical chitin, equipping them like bracers, and they immediately tightened around her forearms to stop her wounds from bleeding.
Her eyes softened for a moment when she felt a strange sense of tranquillity washing over her no longer throbbing arms.
Then, she started itching and scratching at the spiky bristles on her bracers as the air seemed to chafe at them.
Eria muttered as she hissed and breathed heavily, trying to get used to the constant itching on her bracers.
“Show me… my status screen again.”
Eria obliged without another word.
[Strength: 1, Speed: 1, Toughness: 1, Dexterity: 3, Perception: 1 (+1)]
[// EQUIPPED Swarmsteel]
[Cave Cricket Bracers (Grade: F-Rank)(Per: +1/2)(Tou: +0/1)(Aura: +5/20)]
Her lips curled into a small smile. There was an additional 'plus one' next to her perception level, meaning she slightly stronger just by equipping the Swarmsteel bracers… but then her eyes wandered a little further up the screen and she noticed something peculiar.
She pointed at the Swarmsteel description with a shaky finger. “It says… up here, though, that I’m only getting one out of three levels for perception, and five out of twenty for aura,” she said. “Why?”
Eria answered quickly.
“Ah. So… if I just keep wearing the bracers and get used to them—”
Dahlia looked down glumly. “Oh. I see. I’m just… not that compatible with my own Swarmsteel, then.”
Eria countered.
She glanced up at the status screen. "No?"
Eria murmured.
Eria trailed off, and Dahlia knew exactly why.
Her bracers’ hypersensitive bristles were quivering slightly.
“It’s faint, but I think… there are more giant bugs behind me,” she finished with a whisper, standing onto two wobbly feet before stumbling right into a wall. She’d stayed kneeling for too long again. “I have to go, right? I can’t beat all of them… right?”
“The bug trader.”
She cast a long, hard look at the man lying still behind her, half his body still submerged in the rushing sewage waters. Further behind him, in the dark sewage tunnel, shadows moved and screeched and lumbered forward with ground-shaking tremors—and though she wanted nothing more than to take the good man with her, she didn’t have nearly enough strength to carry him up the ladder right now.
Guilt flared up inside her, alongside a fierce protectiveness to not leave the man who’d saved her life behind… but she supposed, at the end of the day, that she was still a coward after all.
She slapped her shaky hands on the first rung of the ladder and tore her eyes away from the bug trader.
“... Eria.”
The little black bug appeared on her shoulder, and this time she managed to keep her disgust to a simple flinch.
“Thank you for putting up with me,” she whispered. “But I’ll be coming back for him once I get a little bit braver.”
There was a brief pause before Eria responded with a small nod of its head.