One week passed.

  Sparrow sat on his bed, watching snow pelt against the windows and listening to the winds churning up a nasty storm outside. His rifle lay beside him, and the broken bayonet shards were still left in a bowl on the table a few metres off, reminding him he was lacking both a knife to stab and bullets to shoot with—his rifle was little more than a glorified club until he could find the time to fix it.

  The blizzard had been slowly dying down the past week, but he could tell by the worried looks on the Worm Mages’ faces whenever they passed that it wasn’t normal. Blizzards weren’t supposed to last this long, nor this ferocious and oppressive; he’d no doubt it was the empire’s doing. Their mortars and artillery cannons were designed based on the black sporespike fungi, which were mushrooms that ejected poison spikes far up into the air whenever a flying bug tried to pluck them from the soil—and the empire had weaponised them against the Swarm. The General himself had gained half his notoriety by modifying hundreds of gigantic sporespike fungi that could eject shrapnel shells instead of normal poison spikes, turning them into the backbone of any siege.

  As far as Sparrow knew, though, the modifications weren’t perfect; the giant sporespikes still released a bit of poison into the sky whenever they fired. Most likely, it was this same poison that was polluting the sky around the mountain ranges, resulting in the harsher-than-usual blizzard.

  It was difficult to see out the windows with the blizzard raging as hard as it was, but he had a rough idea where he was: at most a few dozen kilometres away from the first outpost the General had erected at the border of the wintry Hagi’Shar region. How high he was into the mountain ranges was another matter altogether. At least now he knew he hadn’t been whisked away to some strange, strange dream while he’d been unconscious and given a half-inorganic body.

  There were no clocks in his cabin. Nothing to inform him of the time. Still, he’d been trained to wake sharply at six in the morning as a soldier, and he’d woken up only two minutes ago—given Ninmah and the other Worm Mages always visited him at seven at the earliest with baskets of crunchy snowfruits, he had about an hour to do as he pleased around the cabin.

  He swung his legs off his bed, rose to his feet, and took a tiny step forward–

  A wormhole opened automatically and hurtled him headfirst into a wooden pillar holding up the second floor.

  Rubbing his forehead and tightening his jaw as he did, he took a single, cautious step back—and a wormhole opened behind him to warp him even back this time, overshooting his bed and bumping into the nightstand. He scowled and looked down at his feet, pressing his heel so hard into the floorboards it left a small dent in the wood.

  For the next ten minutes, warping around the cabin was all he did. Tables were run into. Potted plants were knocked off their windowsills. The curtain flaps he’d almost torn off their hooks a few days ago finally ripped off as he accidentally overshot and warped into a wormhole, which irritated him to no end—how was it difficult to control his Swarmblood Art?

  What was he missing?

  [Points: 89]

  [Strength: 3, Speed: 3, Toughness: 3, Dexterity: 3, Perception: 2]

  In the end, he ran himself ragged after ten full minutes of continuous warping and plopped himself back down on his bed, sweat pouring down his brow. It wasn’t even about controlling how far his wormholes warped him—if he couldn’t even himself from opening wormholes automatically whenever he took a step, there was no way he’d be able to safely make the journey back to his battalion.

  He'd run himself off a cliff before ever making it out of the village.

  Planting his arms behind him, he glared at his status interface and hesitated to do anything with it. Eighty-nine points was a lot for him to deposit, but he didn’t want to use any of it right now if he didn’t have to. His dexterity and toughness were already thrice that of the average man, and to increase his toughness level up from three to four, he’d have to deposit three times three times three amount of points—that was twenty-seven points into an attribute that may not contribute to him being able to control his warping.

  Raising his perception level to three would be a lot cheaper, so it might be worth a try, but again—he had no idea which attribute was the limiting factor here. Maybe his attributes had nothing to do with controlling his warps.

  [T1 Mutation | Inorganic Heart Lvl. 10

  [T2 Mutations | Vibrational Senses | Wormic Bones] 50P

  … But it was also a hefty fifty points to unlock each of the tier two mutations, and he couldn’t read. He didn’t know how to. Grunt soldiers like him were never taught in training; the best he could do was read numbers and memorise which of them correlated to which attributes in which row. For all he knew, he could be approaching his new class entirely wrong—what if the attribute locations had been switched around and he’d been misreading everything up until now?

  The only way he could get tons more points was if he consumed bug meat—specifically, the bioarcanic essence within the meat—and he highly doubted he’d be getting any more points anytime soon. he could count on Ninmah being able to give him one or two points a day via the little snack worms she gave him last week, but that wouldn’t be nearly consistent enough to make any meaningful progress.

  If there were no bugs up in this mountain range for him to hunt and kill, he wouldn’t be able to get any points, simple as that.

  He kept on sitting and staring, but only for a little while longer. ‘Idling on the battlefield is like a cicada unaware of the mantis behind it’ was the phrase the General liked to tell all of them grunt soldiers, and it’d been beaten into them during training, during battle, during war, over and over and over again. He could afford to warp a few more times for more practice. Just a few more times. Surely, if he kept on practising, something would just in his head about which attribute he really had to raise. The insurmountable wall would be no longer—

  And then he warped into Ninmah the exact same moment she warped in by the front door, both of their heads knocking together as they stumbled back, groaning.

  she grumbled, rubbing her rosy nose as he took an involuntary second step backwards, warping right back onto his bed where he fell against the bedding. He couldn’t help a quiet wince this time; her head was a lot sturdier than any wall he’d ever run into.

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  Several more wormholes opened across the cabin as Worm Mages warped in and out, bearing baskets and flowers and fresh towels for him to wipe himself down with, and Ninmah coordinated all of them to leave their gifts on the table so fast he barely even caught a glimpse of their faces. They’d been more curious about him the first few days of the week, constantly arguing with Ninmah so they could stare and poke and prod at his black hair, but the young girl had been adamant about him getting his rest—at least, that was what he she’d been saying. Whenever she switched back to her native tongue with her warping, space-bending voice, his ears would start ringing and he’d cover them with his blanket.

  Whatever she’d said to them, though, had made them all come to a reluctant agreement: until he was well enough to step foot outside the cabin, only Ninmah would be allowed to meet and talk with him. No arguing about it.

  He didn’t really mind the silence from his end. Getting ignored and ignoring his captors meant he had more time to practise on his own.

  While he remained seated on his bed and stared at the mages as they came and went, observing how their wormholes open for just the briefest of moments before closing to complete the warp, Ninmah noticed the shattered potted plant under the windowsill. He twitched an eye. He had half a mind to get up and clean the mess himself, but before he could even stand up again, she’d already drawn a circle, made the shards fall through a wormhole, and warped over to his bed with a basket of snow melons in her hands.

  she mumbled, pouting as she pushed the basket into his arms.

  He narrowed his eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to speak, but it was more so that all Bullet Ant Soldiers were all vastly incapable of coherent speech. Back when he still had his ant mutations, he had ‘Vicious Paramandibles’ as his class’ unique biomagic, which allowed him to harness bioarcanic essence and sharpen his teeth into tiny black saws that could let him chew through all sorts of materials. It was a useful biomagic in battle when he had to eat and digest whatever organic material he could get his hands on to recover his stamina, but as a tradeoff, he’d used it so many times that he’d inevitably shredded most of his tongue, effectively removing his ability to talk half a year ago.

  Even though his class had been switched out and his body renewed with ‘half-inorganic’ parts, Ninmah hadn’t been lying when she said it’d take a while for his body to adapt to them and heal. He still had his tongue—no doubt about that—but he could tell it’d been replaced with a biometal one, and even just the act of opening his mouth to draw a breath of fresh air hurt. The Boreus had done a number on him. It’d be a while before he could be speaking actual words again.

  … Not that he thought he’d have much to say, anyways.

  At the very least, he didn’t trust the Worm Mages. Not completely.

  So he took a look at the snow melons, hesitated for a second, and then raised one into his mouth. The crunch was crystal, the sweetness a bit too overbearing on his tongue, but he wasn’t about to complain; the food grunt soldiers were given at the outpost was much, much worse. He wasn’t too picky with his food. Anything that could give him the energy needed to fight the Swarm was good enough, though with his half-inorganic body, it wasn’t like he to eat in the first place.

  He’d only been eating, drinking, and sleeping the past week out of pure force of habit, but as the days went by, he felt himself slowly losing the compulsion to do so.

  In another week or two, maybe he wouldn’t even to eat or sleep anymore.

  Ninmah continued grumbling, though there was a smile tugging on the corner of her lips as she dabbed his forehead with a small towel, wiping sweat off his brows.

  He scowled, resisting the urge to slap her towel away.

  he thought.

  Ninmah watched him eat in silence, munching on his melon with two hands, and before long she sighed and pulled him up by his ear—as easy as a child could pluck a bean sprout from the earth.

  This time, he didn’t resist the motion and finished his melon, swallowing quickly as she started patting him down from head to toe.

  she said plainly, her head shooting up while she was kneeling to frown at him.

  She reached into her cloak, rummaged around, and dumped in his hands two small white worms before warping away.

  He couldn’t trust her, but he could trust points when he saw them. He tossed the snack worms and chewed as quickly as he could, looking at his status interface expectedly.

  [Points: 89 → 90]

  He waited three seconds. Five seconds. Ten seconds was all it took for her to blur up and down and across the cabin, rummaging through the closets and cabinets before warping back in front of him with a bunch of identical white cloaks clasped in her hands. Then she became an afterimage again, warping behind him over and over as she measured which cloak would fit him best from the shoulder down; it was almost impossible to catch her between warps, and for a moment he just tried to stay as still as possible, trying not to make himself dizzy staring at her wormholes opening and winking shut.

  Too many attributes he had to raise, too little points to work with. Ninmah was done sizing him up by the time he finished his thought and flung the plain white cloak around his shoulders, clasping the blue tassels in front of his collarbones together to keep it from falling off.

  she said, patting her hands as though to wipe off any residual dust.

  He looked over to the army-issued fur coat he’d taken off, scrunching his face.

  Ninmah interrupted his thoughts by grabbing his left hand with her own, raising them before their faces.

  she warned.

  He didn’t get to finish his thought. Ninmah took one casual step forward and dragged him through her wormhole, pulling both of them right outside the front door, and the movement was… ‘slow’.

  That didn’t feel right.

  He pursed his lips and looked back at the front door, wondering why his jerky, uncontrollable warp felt much ‘faster’ than hers—she supposed to be far stronger than him, after all—but Ninmah didn’t give him a chance to contemplate. As the first wave of gently falling snowflakes blew into his face, she took a second, third, fourth step through her wormholes, pulling him away from the cabin and through into the misty blizzard, filling his vision with nothing but muddy nausea and bright, spinning stars.

  Tightening his fingers around her hand, he tried matching his steps with hers, hoping the simultaneous steps would make the ‘slow’ warps more manageable. It was of no use. He could barely see five feet ahead of him while getting dragged around, let alone catch a glimpse of her leg movements or the blurry village they were passing by in continuous flashes of light—the best he could do was bite his teeth, try to keep up with his own set of panic steps, and hope they’d reach wherever they were going soon enough.

  ‘Soon’ arrived quickly.

  Ninmah stopped all of a sudden, stepping through the final wormhole, and Sparrow couldn’t stay on his feet as he collapsed onto one knee. His vision was pure white, his eardrums were ringing with the lingering of the warps; he hadn’t used any bioarcanic essence at all going through her wormholes, but still, it like he’d been the one warping.

  As he panted for breath and Ninmah stood over him, patting his back and humming a soft song to calm him down, he stole a glance at her bare feet.

  There was no snow on top of them, as though she hadn’t even so much as walking in a hurried manner.

  He tilted his head in quiet befuddlement.

  More hands started patting him on the back and he tensed up, opening his eyes and ears for the first time in a week.

  He looked up, and about a dozen thickly layered children stood around him, laughing and giggling as Ninmah instructed them to comfort him with their pats.

  And he looked further past the children, past the snow, past the blizzard—his eyes immediately drawn to the gargantuan hundred-metre chasm in front of him, bridged across by a web of frayed ropes that looked as though they hadn’t been maintained or replaced in several decades.

  Ninmah crossed her arms and puffed out her chest, smiling proudly out at the chasm.

  she said, her eyes twinkling with excitement as she grinned back down at him.