- Scene from Southern Alshifa Hill past

  The ladder from the sewage room to Alshifa’s lower street was well over a hundred metres tall, and halfway up, Dahlia couldn’t stop her palms from sweating anymore. There weren’t any safety rungs around her. If her hands were to slip or her feet were to lose their balance, she’d plummet straight down to where the giant, formless shadows were writhing about.

  If that were to happen, she hoped she’d just die from the fall, but… thankfully, she managed to reach the top of the ladder without slipping. Her nails flew over the edge to rake into a bed of hard cobblestone, and then the undertown came into view before she even pulled the rest of her body up.

  That was, an undertown undoubtedly dead and silent in the wake of the Swarm.

  As she rose dead centre in the middle of the street, she could immediately tell nobody was going to tell her to make way for carriages.

  Nobody was alive to tell her off.

  Between the shafts of cold moonlight that fell from the giant hole in the ceiling, she caught glances of broken bodies and mangled corpses littering the sides of the street, rivers of blood trickling down the slope and into the town square below her. The blood didn’t stop at the square. It branched out, enveloping every road, every alley, a large shadow of a web littered with lumps of flesh and crumpled remains. The smell of it all was infused into the earth, the uprooted cobblestones, the rotten planks by the slums and clay tiles near the Night Bazaar—it felt like nothing else, like a scene of calamity from the Old Alshifa Records brought to life.

  If she hadn’t already puked her guts out down in the sewers, she doubted she’d be able to hold her stomach now.

  “... Where are all the bugs?” she whispered, hunching her back and wading off to the side of the street as she did. Her sandals splashed across pools of blood, staining her toenails red and black. “There were hundreds of them pouring out of the cocoon. Observed. Alshifa isn’t that big an undertown compared to some others in the area, so where are they?”

  Her eyes flitted nervously left and right, scanning the broken and ruined houses surrounding her. “So they could just be hiding anywhere? Even though they’re that much stronger than us and can overrun us all at any time?”

  At Eria’s request, she followed the little bug’s pointing leg and spotted something incredulous—a incredulous things, actually. A giant beetle was speared from head to abdomen by a firefly lamp, impaled into the side of a two-story building. There were other giant insects similarly impaled by other firefly lamps: a few red-striped hornets, a few quivertail butterflies, a scorpion with its head and stinger skewered into the ground. The bloody handiwork was unmistakable; the bug trader hadn’t gone this way while protecting her and Issam and the others in the carriage, so she knew only one other person in Alshifa who could’ve defeated as many bugs as there were human corpses here.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Eria said, before poking her shoulder to direct her gaze down the sloped street; in the direction of the southern shelter she was heading towards before her little detour.

  “I need to get to my dad,” she breathed, backpedalling and heading north in the direction of her house. “It’s… it’s not far away from here. Even if I walk at a snail’s pace to avoid detection, it’ll only be two hours, or three, and then I can… and then I—”

  Eria said, shaking her head.

  Her ears flared with heat. “My needs rest and sustenance. I was supposed to get staples for our dinner tonight and he hasn’t eaten anything the entire day. If I don’t get back to him with something, he’s going to—”

  Eria’s voice of reason slapped her in the face, loud and clear, and she forced her feet to stop moving without her commanding them to.

  She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, exhaled heavily.

  Her heart was telling her to go to her father right this instant, but her body was saying no.

  Her body said ‘you wouldn’t make it if you went in this state’.

  “... Alright,” she whispered, as she pried her eyelids slowly open and nodded at Eria. “I’ll… I’ll go to the shelter. Reprieve. I’ll sleep for a bit, then try to grab some food and water on the way before heading to my dad.”

  Like a calm river’s surface disturbed by a ripple, there was a tingling feeling on her bracers’ bristles that alerted her to something behind her. Something moderately big. Something extremely fast, something incredibly —she whirled and ducked at the same time, barely avoiding getting her head lopped off by the giant spider’s talons.

  Her blood froze, and so did the rest of her body.

  Even in her utterly exhausted state, she recognised it as a grey wolf spider: a species with stout bodies and long legs and were agile runners, especially during the night. Eight beady black eyes arranged across three rows on its face stared blankly down at her, and for a few seconds both of them were unmoving.

  Unflinching.

  Silently appraising the other’s fighting strength, as though a head-on battle between the ant and the titan was even going to be a close battle at all.

  Eria didn’t need to shout in her ear twice. She didn’t need to turn the dial on her pocket watch more than once. A split second before the wolf spider lunged in with two talons hissing with venom, she jumped back and began sprinting down the street as fast as her legs could carry her.

  “I know how to get to the shelter! Familiarity! I’ve been running on these streets my entire life!” she hissed in response, much harsher than she thought she’d sounded in her own head, but the wolf spider was close behind; she wasn’t in the mood to hear Eria regurgitating simple directions. “Do you know… a method to shake it off? Distraction? I’m kinda… focusing! On running!”

  “No! Don’t! I won’t bring it to everyone else! I have to deal with it here!”

  She bit her lips and slipped through a broken fence, ducking into a dark alleyway. The wolf spider crashed through the whole fence and slammed into the walls of a building, using its legs as brakes and anchors to slingshot itself into the alley. It wanted her , and it wouldn’t stop until either one of them were twitching half-dead on the ground.

  She rounded a corner, ran around a firefly lamp, and then ran promptly another firefly lamp. Her eyes went for a torrential swim. Her momentum halted completely as she stumbled a few steps back, closing the distance between her and the wolf spider, and no amount of shouting by Eria could get her feet to start moving again.

  Time seemed to move in slow motion as the exhaustion from the past few hours finally caught up to her. Vaguely she felt herself falling, pivoting on one foot to face the wolf spider in her final moments, but when her pocket watch rang with a little and the firefly bulb she’d attached to it as a prototype glowed with the might of a tiny, tiny sun–

  “Dahlia!”

  Two moth girls darted in from an adjacent roof in the blink of an eye, kicking the wolf spider into the side of a building, and then a mantis swordsman dashed past her falling body with his sword reared far behind his back.

  She’d seen the silhouette of this swordsman many times before, training his unsheathing, his instant sharpening, and downwards cleaving all in one single motion.

  The wolf spider was only as big as the cave cricket was, so it didn’t stand a chance as Issam’s gleaming sword split its head apart with a cracking .

  Eria commented idly as she fell onto her back, sheer fatigue claiming her body at long last.

  She managed to shake her head before her mind started drifting off to sleep.

  she thought, though she knew Eria couldn’t hear her inner voice.