Another week passed, and Sparrow was still far from mastering how to warp.

  He might’ve overestimated himself a little bit, thinking his being able to cross Death Rope Passing the first time meant he could do it again faster, but Ninmah and the children had other plans. They detached some of the ropes, loosened others, and made it so the winds shoved the ropes from literal end to end like swings on loose bolts—he’d be hard-pressed to even crawl across them normally, let alone balance himself on two feet while focusing on his warping.

  That didn’t mean he’d the additional challenge, of course. It just meant in the past week, he figured he’d reached a hard limit of about eight metres per warp for now. Additional levels in strength, dexterity, and perceptivity would probably be helpful, but not immediately necessary. Eight metres per warp was more than enough distance for him to manoeuvre around the top of the mountain range, so Ninmah had started bringing him into the rest of Immanu since the blizzard started weakening eight days ago—and the village in the sky was where he practised his warping.

  His daily ‘run’ through the village, too, was but another part of his morning training routine.

  Ninmah asked, popping her shoulders and stretching her legs and glancing at Sparrow as she did.

  Sparrow threw on his cloak and pulled his hood up, bracing himself for the chilly air outside. He’d more than grown used to it—the cloak Ninmah had given him was surprisingly effective at keeping him warm, though he wasn’t sure how much of his cold resistance could be attributed to his half-inorganic body—so he left both his fur coat and army-issued scarf on his bed, hesitating for a short moment before deciding he’d take his rifle with him as usual.

  There was no reason to part with his weapon, he thought, as Ninmah didn’t even finish counting down from three before immediately warping out of his cabin.

  Beginning in his cabin, Sparrow took a single step forward to warp out into the snow, and then warped ten consecutive eight metre distances to start things off—he hadn’t realised this before, but his repurposed storage cabin was actually on the far outskirts of the village, meaning there was no easy way to actually to the village without him being able to control his warps. Ninmah hadn’t been keeping him arbitrarily confined the first week he arrived at Immanu; she must’ve figured he’d want to reach the village with his own strength, of his own accord, and as he chased after Ninmah’s tail, he felt she’d definitely made the right choice keeping the village hidden from him until he was ready to traverse it with his own two feet.

  That was, as its silhouette appeared through the wintry mist and clouds, a ‘true’ village in the sky.

  Nestled in a crater and walled off by four sky-piercing blackrock mountains, Immanu was a small hundred-house village made of glistening crystal wood, densely packed and filled with crooked, winding alleyways. As he warped past the wooden fences and through the giant rectangular gate, the fields of snow on the outskirts gave way to endless gardens of crystal-petal flowers surrounding the village, misty streams running throughout filled with colourful fishes and lotus blossoms bobbing on the waves.

  Scattered groups of children in thick white layers spotted him and Ninmah, and they waved at them their morning greetings as they washed clothes in the streams, picked blossoms from the weaves, and played with strange toys he’d heard them call ‘slinkies’—and while Sparrow like to nod back out of common courtesy, he was going to lose Ninmah if he wasn’t completely focused on her.

  Past the gate, past the loitering children, the bonnet houses of the village were upon him, windmills on gabled roofs spinning about as he warped through the narrow cobbled alleys. The wooden walls shimmered with reflected sunlight, and each overhanging roof of every house were dangling with unique beads, talismans, and countless small treasures: some had feathers bound with bright threads, others had tiny gems carved with symbols of their local tongue, and some others had chains of wooden beads that let sunlight refract through, throwing shimmers of colour across the air. He decided it was all too much for him to take in and warped up to the closest roof, stumbling for half a second before sweeping his eyes across for Ninmah.

  The view of Immanu from up high was still just as bright. Small shrines and communal kitchens and storage sheds and tanning houses stood out like sore thumbs with their colour-marked roofs, yes, but the twenty-metre-high bell tower in the centre of the village was outstanding itself. He spotted Ninmah warping towards it from the left, and he pursued—warping from one roof to another and doing his best not to hold his breaths with each step he took.

  The key to controlling his warping was to rush, after all. He was still jogging, but not throwing his entire body into the wormholes that popped up like he would dash towards an enemy—and his half-urgent, half-lazy, ‘in-between’ jog allowed him to catch up to Ninmah, both of them reaching the base of the bell tower at the exact same time.

  Without casting a glance at her, he began scaling the protruding alabaster bricks with his bare hands, his rifle slung on a strap behind his back. He could’ve sworn he heard Ninmah shouting something about not even acknowledging her, but ten metres up into the climb, he heard footsteps eerily close to him.

  He looked over reluctantly and saw her running the wall barefoot, blitzing past him while jeering at him with her tongue stuck out.

  He wasn’t worried, though. She may have beaten him to the top the same way the past eight days, but he’d spent all night practising in his cabin by climbing the pillars to the second floor railings.

  That was, he flung himself up with two hands while letting go of the protruding bricks and warped the last eight metres to the top of the tower, slapping the bundle of chimes before he began to fall. Taking a step was just one way to warp, after all. He’d figured out last night that any sort of movement involving the shifting of weight could be used to trigger a warp, so he ignored Ninmah’s dumbfounded look as he fell past her, landing hard on the fluffy mound of snow at the base of the tower.

  The impact was nullified, but his spine still felt some of it—he was only three times as tough as the average man—so he had to hold in a groan as he lay flat on his back, letting sunlight hit his face like a cold shower in the morning.

  As he forced himself to sit upright, rubbing his neck and rolling his shoulders, a bunch of children started gathering around the village square with curious looks. Most were dressed so thickly in fluffy white cloaks he could’ve easily mistaken them for snowmen in the distance, but this was his third day in the village and there was no mistaking anything anymore—there wasn’t a single adult in this village. There were no elders with grey beards weaving baskets on the streets, no childbearing mothers tending to the stoves and disgruntled hunter fathers looking for a bed to crash on. The oldest person he’d seen in Immanu was Ninmah, and she didn’t look a day past his own age.

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  He was… fourteen.

  He thought.

  He could be wrong.

  But the dozen or so children gathering around him, laughing and chatting and filling the air with their warped voices, couldn’t have an average age of over ten.

  Ninmah said, shooing the children away as she landed on her feet next to him. The children stared at her blankly for another second before she started kicking snow into their faces, making them squeal and laugh and warp away in droves; soon it was just the two of them, and she turned to offer him a helping hand with a small smile.

  He scowled as he accepted her helping hand, letting her pull him onto his feet. While she helped pat snow off his hood and he straightened the flaps of his cloak, he turned to look up at the top of the bell tower—wincing for a moment as he looked straight into the sun. It might not be an achievement to Ninmah and the Worm Mages, but within his own battalion, he’d never lost in a foot race to any one of his comrades.

  That he beat Ninmah after eight days of continuous failures was nothing short of cathartic, though, of course, he didn’t let his emotions show.

  Ninmah frowned as she started leading him through the village on ground level, scrunching her brows hard as she tried to discern from his face.

  she grumbled as she sidestepped, narrowly avoiding a group of children who warped in front of them and warped away immediately after.

  “...”

  She grabbed his hand, gave him four small worms, and he chewed on them as another group of children warped past them with a fit of laughs and chatters.

  [Points: 64 → 66]

  The bright and gleeful smile she gave him made him feel like talking a little, but even if he’d completely adapted to the feeling of his biometal tongue, speech was a right reserved only for officers and generals of the Attini Empire, not for lowly grunts like him. He’d hold himself to that standard even if nobody from the empire was going to know if he spoke in Immanu; discipline of any kind would keep his mind sharp and his body stalwart for when he eventually returned to his battalion.

  He didn’t exactly need to talk or tell the Worm Mages anything.

  When she realised he wasn't going to change his mind, though, Ninmah crossed her arms and pouted, puffing her cheeks as they trudged silently through the cluttered alleys. The village was like this every hour of the day. Nobody really strolled on two feet normally; warped with every step, which meant the streets weren’t really streets, but more like narrow two-child-wide gaps between buildings that nobody really walked. Sparrow and Ninmah could walk side by side now, but a light sway would have their shoulders bumping either into each other or into the walls.

  Still, the alleys weren’t untrodden. There were crates here and there they had to step over, broken pots and vases nobody had bothered cleaning up, and as they passed a beautiful branch canopy growing out a window with dangling translucent pears—almost as an afterthought—Ninmah rapped the wall with her knuckles before twirling her finger in a circle.

  A moment later, a ripe pear fell through the wormhole she’d drawn in the air and shot up through another wormhole on her palm, allowing her to catch it with her other hand.

  Then she sent him a wide, teasing grin before munching down on it loudly with both hands, the wormholes blinking out of existence without so much as a fading thrum.

  Naturally, his eyes widened.

  He didn’t speak, still, but he tried to will a wormhole into existence as they passed a second branch canopy. She’d done it so smoothly while walking, but he wasn’t about to take any chances—he grabbed her by the wrist and held her still, trying to relax every muscle in his body as he pointed up at the lowest-hanging pear just half a metre above his head.

  And he wasn’t sure how to do it.

  If opening wormholes away from his body was something he could just ‘do’, it hadn’t manifested the same way his warping had—with warping, he physically couldn’t automatically opening wormholes until he learned the sensation of walking ‘in-between’, but opening wormholes and keeping them open was another matter altogether. If there was a sensation he was supposed to get, he didn’t get it. If there was a trick to making two glowing circles appear on his palms, he didn’t know what it was.

  The only thing he got was a snicker out of Ninmah as he twirled a circle in the air and made a complete fool of himself.

  He hadn’t so much as managed to make his fingertip sparkle, let alone leave behind glowing circles of light that could connect two spaces together.

  Ninmah chided, still laughing softly as he looked at her with a finger raised. She raised a finger of her own and winked at him.

  A glowing wormhole hovered where she twirled her finger, and a second wormhole immediately appeared a few metres in front of her.

  He blinked.

  He rubbed his eyes.

  He didn’t learn anything from her whatsoever.

  she chirped, grabbing his hand and guiding his finger as she did. the ‘In-Between’. Don’t think. Don’t worry. If you can already open brief wormholes to step through whenever you warp, you can open extended wormholes anywhere else. Just try.”

  And he tried, of course—it just didn’t work. Over and over again he merely watched as Ninmah pulled his finger around in circles, and over and over again he focused everything into his fingertips as though he were trying to bleed light from under his nails; he had nothing of the sort to emit.

  Regardless, the two of them continued to make fools of themselves as they spent the next ten minutes playing puppet and puppeteer; Ninmah held his finger and dragged it every which way, and he focused so hard on emitting a thread of light from his fingertips that he felt his eyes beginning to dry from how long he was forcing himself to blink. It was the exact opposite of stress-free, and Ninmah seemed to realise it herself after her hundredth failed attempt to get him to open a wormhole outside of warping himself.

  With a dejected sigh, she let go of him so they could both put their hands on their knees and pant for breaths they didn’t exactly have to take.

  Somehow, they’d burned more energy trying to do something that never worked than warping through the entire village for a race up the bell tower.

  she muttered, wiping spread from her forehead as she glanced up at him, smiling weakly.

  He grabbed her shoulder before she could warp away immediately, and she yelped as she evidently to step into a warp—both of them stumbled ten metres forward through her wormhole, tumbling into another alley where they crashed into a mound of unshoveled snow.

  Sparrow got up quickly enough to pat off his cloak, but Ninmah grumbled as she shooed a passing group of children off from laughing at them, unable to get up in the cramped alley.

  she asked, looking up and sending him a suspicious glare.

  He nodded plainly.

  He nodded again.

  And he didn’t blink, he didn’t hesitate—now that he already knew the ‘trick’ to it, he could master warping gradually, but he wasn’t going to figure out how to make a wormhole outside of warping by sitting still in his cabin.

  If he wanted to get stronger before returning to his battalion, he needed to see more of the Worm Mage’s abilities in action.

  So he nodded one last time, offering her a helping hand.

  she replied with a laugh, taking his hand.