When Sparrow woke, he had no idea where he was. It didn’t help that his head was still ringing with all the pain of getting hit by a giant insect, but darkness was the thing that really inhibited his ability to tell where he was.

  Wherever he’d been picked up and brought to, it was pitch black. Unable to orient himself by sight, he sat up and tried to find his bearings by touch—feeling a blanket over his lower half, a soft bedding beneath him, and some sort of salty incense hovering in the air. Moving around just served to highlight how everything ached, but, more importantly, how could he by simply swishing his arms about?

  Light tried to appear next to his head, but it fizzled out with a little blue spark before the status interface could open. He frowned and searched around his bed for his rifle as he tried again, willing his status interface into existence; it was of no use.

  Something wasn’t right. Unlike rifles that could jam and blades that could dull, the Symbiotic Systems designed by humanity’s brightest the Attini Empire were supposed to be infallible equipment that never required maintenance. A soldier could fight their entire life without having to remove their system even once, so how was it—

  [Error;;Error;;Error]

  [Unauthorised Modifications Detected]

  [Re-linking Symbiotic System with Cervical Spine]

  [Automatic Repair Complete. Reallocating points. Symbiotic System reactivating in three, two, one—]

  [T1 Core Mutation Unlocked: Inorganic Heart Lvl. 10]

  [Brief Description: Your body has become half-inorganic. You will no longer need to eat, drink, or sleep unless you are regenerating your wounds, and you will no longer age]

  [Swarmblood Art Unlocked: Worm Maw]

  [Brief Description: You can now create wormholes]

  Now light into his eyes, filling his vision with blurry, disorienting images of a bonfire-lit two-storey log cabin. A small flame crackled in the fireplace at the back of the room. The ceiling was slanted and arched with wooden beams, the earth-tone walls hung with what seemed like jars of crystals and glowing minerals. Baskets of translucent fruits and melons sat on the round table in the centre of the room, refracting firelight in tiny, blinding star-shaped sparkles. Planters lined the tall, wide windows, and the air smelled stronger with salty incense than ever.

  Confusion.

  The sensory overload made him whip his head away to the other side of his bed, away from the fireplace, but then he was immediately met with someone sleeping—kneeling on the floor with their head resting on the bedding next to his legs.

  He froze, tensing his muscles.

  Staring at the sleeping child cloaked from head to toe in thick white layers, he retreated into the corners of his mind and recalled as much as he could: receiving his final orders from the General, killing twenty-nine Giant-Class bugs, falling face-first into the snow after running himself out of stamina, and… that was it. He didn’t remember suffering any neck injuries that’d impaired the functions of his system. If there were any, they were certainly not to the extent that his status interface would fail to open the first time around.

  He looked around, turning his head painfully slow, and eventually found his heavy rifle standing upright on the nightstand to his right.

  His captors didn’t take his weapon.

  Why?

  This time, there was no error. No delay. It popped out next to his head, and he studied it as quietly as he could. He didn’t want to wake his captor up by accident.

  [Name: ‘Sparrow’]

  [Grade: D-Rank Giant-Class]

  [Class: Whiteworm]

  [Swarmblood Art: Worm Maw]

  [Aura: 793]

  [Points: 88]

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

  [// MUTATION TREE]

  [T1 Mutation | Inorganic Heart Lvl. 10

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

  And he was just as confused looking at his status interface now as he was before.

  Furrowing his brows, he picked up his rifle slowly and gently. The points he’d allocated into raising his strength and toughness were still in effect, but he didn’t remember having seventy extra points. Neither was his class spelled with four letters, nor his tier one mutation spelled out in that particular order of shapes—upgrading into a more specialised class within the same insect type was one thing, but he’d never heard of anyone being able to completely switch out their class type for another one.

  He didn’t have the Bullet Ant Class anymore.

  What was he?

  The cabin layout was simple, and the ornately carved front door was but a measly ten metres away. He tested the creakiness of the floorboards by pressing the stock of his rifle against them, finding relief in knowing they were firm as rocks, unlikely to make a sound even if he were to skip across.

  Swinging his legs to the right and avoiding the sleeping child at all costs, he planted both feet on the floor and straightened his back. He hadn’t noticed it before, but he hadn't been changed out of his army-issued trousers, tunic, scarf, and fur coat either. His short and messy hair was still braided at the back, his hands still wrapped in bloody bandages; strangely, he had no visible wounds where he remembered being cut and impaled by the bugs. There weren’t scars on his garments or even the slightest hints of wear and tear on his battle-worn coat—evidently his captors had gone to the effort of tending to his wounds and mending his clothes, but what sort of medicine could they possibly practise to raise him from the dead?

  He decided he didn’t need to know right now.

  So, pushing through the thudding aches across his body, he rose to his feet and took a step forward—

  He ran his head into the front door, making the entire thing rattle on its hinges and earning himself a very, painful throb in his skull.

  He managed a coherent thought for only half a second before his entire world shifted, chrome and silver lines swirling in his vision. The veins and arteries under his skin glowed bright silver. A wave of nausea washed over him as he stumbled back, to the left, to the right, knocking into the table with the baskets of translucent fruits and spilling them all across the floor; they clinked and shattered and sounded like miniature mortar shells in his ears, and the child sleeping by the bed most heard him now.

  Their head shot up from the bed, beady blue eyes blinking behind their deep hood—he blinked back at them for a moment as he clutched his head, struggling to tighten his grip on his rifle.

  So he turned, tried to take a step towards the front door—

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  And ran into a window, crashing through the glass shoulder-first, before tumbling outside unceremoniously alongside a few potted plants.

  He exhaled coolly, letting the air fill his lungs.

  He recalled the sensations from his childhood, training in the harsh military winter camps north of the empire. ‘Cold’ was the word. The air hadn’t been dry or fresh, and when he breathed in his lungs would be scraped with crystal ash and sharp snowflakes. Winter was a swaddling, sleepy thing that lured trainee soldiers to permanent slumber, and they Ant Class Soldiers with ant-type mutations at the end of the day—they weren’t naturally suited to survive in wintry conditions. Humid fungus forests were more their favoured terrain.

  But as he lay on his back staring up at the swirling, spinning moon in the night sky, he found… he didn’t mind the cold that much. Snowflakes were falling gently onto his nose, the winds were blowing softly, reinvigorating his spirit; it wasn’t anything like the nail-biting cold he’d endured before.

  Something had changed inside him, and as he looked up at his own outstretched arms, eyeing the silvery veins that ran beneath his skin, he felt an inexplicable ‘coldness’ in his bones. His nails were metal. Strips and parts of his skin on his forearms were reflective like steel. If he stripped himself down and looked in a mirror, no doubt he’d find more patches of silver across his entire body…but that metal was only ‘cold’. Not ‘dead.’

  When he touched the silver strips on his forearm, he his own touch. The metal was hard, but not tough. It bent and stretched just like normal skin.

  If he had to wager a guess, about fifty percent of his skin and body was metallic now.

  The sound of the front door being kicked open next to him made him jolt upright, brushing snow off his fur coat. He hadn’t escaped yet. He scrambled to his feet while the child standing in the doorway shouted in a strange, unintelligible voice that almost seemed to physically the space around their body—and if that wasn’t an indication he wasn’t allowed to leave, he didn’t know what was.

  Whirling away from the cabin, he dropped a metal pin from his belt before taking another step—

  And then he lurched forward, feeling an intense wave of nausea. Before doubling over, though, he managed to look back at the now distant cabin. The metal pin gleamed under moonlight; it was a good seven or eight metres away from where he was standing now.

  He confirmed his hypothesis as he took another step forward, felt the world blur around him, and turned around to see the cabin as little more than a glowing orange spot in the mighty blizzard. He to be well over fifteen metres away from it now, even though he’d only taken two steps away from it.

  Whenever he took a step forward, he’d ‘open’ a blue circular gate in front of him for just half a second, and going through it would displace him completely. He didn’t have to will it to happen. The gates simply opened whenever he tried to take a step.

  There was no time for more speculation. Still turned to face the cabin he’d escaped from, his eyes narrowed as he spotted a dozen, two dozen, a more orange spots glowing in the far distance—evidently, he’d been brought to some hidden village off the maps of the empire, given he’d never heard anything about anyone living in the high altitudes of the wintry north—but now wasn’t the time to ponder just how deep he was in foreign territory.

  Getting as far as he could from his captors was his primary concern.

  He took another step forward, becoming a swirl of motion and sensation as he opened circular gate after gate, hurtling himself through distorted space. Snow and wind whirled around him, smashing into his face and cutting into his skin. At times, he’d hear and feel pursuers on his back, moving through the knee-high snow with that same thrumming noise that telegraphed the opening of circular gates. Whenever he felt they were about to catch up, he’d quicken his pace and go even faster, even harder—and it was a real strain on his body.

  Combined with the crunch beneath his boots in the snow and the rough rustles of his clothing, he felt as though opening each circular gate was him open space itself. Going through the gates was easy enough, but each use of his Swarmblood Art drained his bioarcanic essence massively, and he had little control over the distance he travelled. He couldn’t even be sure if he moving only eight or so metres with each step through a gate.

  But…it was fascinating. And . As he crossed frozen streams, blocks of slick ice, scaling steep inclines, and gradually throwing off the ‘scent’ of his pursuers behind him, he felt his heart thumping in his chest. It wasn’t a fleshy, organic thump. It was cold, sharp, like a metal heart pumping pure ice into his veins, and he felt all the more alive for it.

  He’d never moved so fast before.

  He’d never moved so before.

  He continued stumbling through the thick snow, looking over his shoulder with every few panting breaths, but those who’d been trying to pursue him seemed to have long since given up on following him through the blizzard. It made sense to him. He was a Bullet Ant Soldier trained to be equal parts fearless and reckless; he to be close to breaking through the blizzard. He could just… feel it. If he reached his hands out and clawed at the air, he felt he’d be able to grab the fog and physically twist it out of the way. That was how close he was to being able to see again, and—

  Someone tackled him from behind, having moved forward faster than any other pursuer, and the two of them fell forward with his rifle disappearing into the snow. He cursed internally. Letting his weapon go was a grave mistake, but an even bigger mistake was his tackler not immediately grappling him into a chokehold—he managed to twirl, snarl, and kick outwards all in one swift motion, the hardened sole of his boot smashing into the tackler’s nose to get them off him.

  The voice that cried out in pain was shrill and young, undoubtedly female, but he didn’t feel pity for his captor. He saw the flicker of bright moonlight at the edge of the fog, at the end of the blizzard, and he opened a gate to open in front of him one last time—

  Before being dragged to a halt by the girl he’d kicked in the face just seconds ago, his entire body tugged back by the collar of his coat.

  Just in time.

  If she hadn’t pulled him back, he would’ve walked through the gate and threw himself right off the edge of the thousand-metre slope, tumbling to his death in the snowy, sky-piercing mountain range.

  As he fell on his rear and panted for breath, his stamina giving in, his eyes fluttered across the world and he immediately zoned out. The sea of fluffy, sparkling clouds a thousand metres beneath him stretched from mountain to mountain, horizon to horizon—he didn’t know where he was. There were no traces of smoke from bonfires anywhere, no sounds of faint mortar shelling in the distance; there were no landmarks with which to estimate his current location.

  He couldn't even tell which direction the Attini Empire was in, and the empire was the largest realm on the continent. Even if he couldn't see the Divine Capital itself, could he not at least see the Crawling Seas themselves?

  He gripped his fist in the snow and found his rifle after a second of blind searching, resolving himself to descend the incredibly steep slope. It wasn’t completely vertical, so he find solid footholds here and there if he just really, really focused.

  Between ‘fearlessness and recklessness in equal parts’, he liked to believe he had more of the former.

  The girl behind him had other plans. Yanking him back again, she pulled him onto his rear before falling through a gate herself, reappearing over him, straddling him with her hands gripping onto his scarf. He tried to raise his rifle and jam his bayonet into her neck, but failed to draw any strength from his arms. Was he really that tired and weak after all?

  Irrelevant.

  He had to—

  the young girl breathed, pulling her hood back and her scarf down to stare him in the eyes—and hers were the brightest, most striking sapphires he’d ever seen in his life.

  They were ‘pretty’ eyes.

  He stared up at her in silence, unable to comprehend just how the rest of her face was in the moonlight, and—ever so slightly—her lips shifted into a faint smile seeing him completely pinned under her gaze.

  she said, her smile morphing into a wide, triumphant grin as her cheeks flushed red in the cold. He couldn’t resist a frown; her lips weren’t even parted, but he could hear her voice ringing in his eardrums. How could she speak without opening her mouth?

  “…”

  The girl frowned. He continued staring at her through narrowed eyes. The silence persisted for a moment longer before she quickly realised she might be sitting on him a bit hard, so she scrambled off him before offering him a helping hand.

  He couldn’t help but notice the glowing silver veins under her biometallic skin as well.

  Unlike him, her entire body seemed to be made out of biometals.

  she said, her silver lips gradually turning a soft, pinkish shade of blue as she smiled again.

  “...”

  She didn’t ask for permission. A small ‘wormhole’ connected to a black void appeared in her palm, and it him onto her back with an invisible force. His muscles ached and he couldn’t resist a flinch as she wrapped his arms around her shoulders. It was like he was a puppet being pulled around on cold metal wires, and there was quite literally nothing he could do to counter it.

  He was too tired.

  But, compared to when he first woke up in an unfamiliar cabin, he wasn’t so agitated about immediately returning to the battlefield now.

  he thought.

  He didn’t need to feel the bone protrusion on her nape to know: the very fact that she and of the attempted pursuers could warp was proof of their having the same biomagic as him.

  So his mind spurred into action.

  If he could stay alive in their presence and observe them, study them… maybe he’d be able to bring more important information back to the General than if he were to attempt escaping now.

  Letting his fatigue drag him down into dark slumber for the second time in what, to him, felt like mere minutes apart, he rested his head on Ninmah’s shoulder and closed his eyes. , they weren’t going to kill him. They wouldn’t have patched him up, put him on a warm bed, and gave him a new class otherwise. It made more sense if they were his 'saviours' rather than his 'captors'.

  Still, he'd be wary.

  If they made a move on him, he'd–

  Ninmah whispered, and he pried an eye open to see her reaching into her cloak, holding something out at him.

  He stared at her, his gaze blank, but she was completely, serious about the small white worm wriggling in her palm.

  She wanted him to take it.

  she urged.

  'Mesenchytraeus' are the only worms in the world that are known to spend their entire lives in glacial ice. Most of them spend their entire lives under 0°C, and when they're exposed to temperatures as high as 5°C, their enzymes and membrane structures start falling apart, causing the worm to liquefy!

  very difficult to get rid of!