Very, reluctantly, Sparrow ate the little worm. He wasn’t a picky eater—he’d eaten worse than worms for nourishment on the battlefield—and he especially didn’t need to anger his saviour now. She gave him the little worm as a gesture of goodwill; it’d be rude and disrespectful not to take it.

  The worm, admittedly, tasted like nothing on his tongue. It wasn’t half as disgusting as he thought it’d be, and that was a good thing.

  But after a short while, as Ninmah carried him back to the cabin on foot, humming and satisfied, his status interface popped up next to his head.

  [Points: 88 → 89]

  Three minutes later, he was brought back to the cabin in the blizzard and laid down on his bed. He couldn’t really see anything clearly with his body being so weakened, still, but he could just tell there were dozens of pale-skinned, silver-veined, white-haired children already waiting for him in the cabin.

  The pale biometal children stood behind the second floor railings, hid between the wooden pillars, sat on the edge of the stairs, staring incredulously at him like he was a specimen to be dissected. They jabbed fingers at him as they whispered to one another. Laughed and giggled as Ninmah carried him back to his bed. The harsh, wintry howls of the blizzard outside were replaced by their chorus of voices each talking over one another, none in sync; their voices weren’t comforting nor welcoming in the slightest. Their words twisted through the air and arrived at their destination with actual, blows—he didn’t know how it was possible, but they didn’t need to open their mouths to speak. It was like they could just will sound into existence, and their sounds were able to distort, able to hurt.

  Thankfully, his bed was relatively far away from the tumult, but even bunching his shoulders and trying to cover his ears with his blanket didn’t help.

  He sat, curled up on his bed, gripping his rifle in both hands, shoving his face into his knees.

  Ninmah shouted, shaking her fists angrily at the pale children as she stood next to his bed, back facing him.

  The chattering stopped at once. Sparrow was relieved Ninmah seemed to have stood up for him, but she also didn’t seem to realise she was the one standing the closest to him; her warping voice was the loudest amongst all of them, and it was like someone driving nails into his eardrums with an autohammer. He’d probably start bleeding from his ears soon, and that was if he didn’t fall over from his pounding headache first.

  Thankfully, nobody else spoke in their warping voices anymore. The little that came from the children making wormholes to warp in and out of the cabin still hurt, but they were far more bearable than actual words being spoken. Slowly, steadily, he felt he could unclench his throat and look up from his knees, tightening his fingers around the dark wood of his rifle–

  And Ninmah plopped down on his bed, kicking her legs back and forth as she stared at him with wide, starry blue eyes.

  Her own face was unreadable, the soft planes and angles of her features highlighted in the soft glow of the fireplace. It was more emotion than he’d ever seen from anyone in his battalion, and… he couldn’t quite place a word on what that emotion might be.

  ‘Unease’, perhaps.

  Or maybe ‘curiosity’.

  Once again, his eyes were drawn to the silver veins under her skin. His were exactly the same now.

  Ninmah remarked, lips still sealed, her soft white brows drawing together as she leaned forward to poke his hair. He stared back, eyeing the diamond flower ornament keeping her hair pinned in a bun.

  He tilted his head in a query. He wasn’t even all that tan compared to some of the soldiers stationed east of the Capital, but she just admitted they didn’t know anybody from the Attini Empire. Did that mean they didn’t know which faction he belonged to as well?

  she continued, staring him straight in the eye.

  “...”

  she finished, shrugging nonchalantly.

  … They just told him something incredibly outrageous, but he was right. If they were a sheltered bunch who knew nothing of the outside world, then he had an advantage here. He could pretend to be someone he wasn’t. Maybe he could even convince them to help him if he knew which faction they’d pledged allegiance to.

  But there was something else he wanted to confirm first.

  So, before Ninmah could tilt her head herself, wondering why he wasn’t saying a thing, he kicked his legs out and raised his rifle—pointing the barrel straight at her forehead.

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  She didn’t blink. She didn’t react. None of the pale children warping in and out of the cabin to leave extra blankets and pillows and baskets of fruits behind even so much as at the sight of one of their own staring down a rifle. He couldn’t decipher the blank expression on Ninmah’s face, but it was almost like… ‘confusion’. Maybe ‘incomprehension’. Her eyes were still soft and relieved that he was alive and well; she had no worries apart from him falling over because of hypothermia.

  He narrowed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and pulled the trigger. There was no roar of a bullet—he’d used up everything he had against the bugs, after all—but still, the mighty sound of the striking pin would’ve sent any normal person reeling away in fear.

  There was none of that in Ninmah.

  And when she frowned, pinching the tip of his bayonet with her fingers, he found himself struggling to retake control over his weapon.

  His stern look evaporated, and now all he could do was stare in shock as she studied his rifle section by section, part by part—it was obvious she didn’t know what she was looking at, but the moment he noticed her little pinches and presses were physically his weapon, he jerked it away and scrambled onto his feet, standing atop his bed.

  He swung his bayonet down at her neck, and his eyes twitched just as promptly as the blade shattered against her bare skin, the shards spilling across the floorboards. He was sure she wasn't going to die from such a paltry attack—and he was sure they wouldn't kill him now given they'd gone to such lengths to save him—but his knife just breaking on impact was completely unexpected. Their casual reaction to the failed attack was unexpected, too. Some children turned to check out the commotion, but not for long. They were more preoccupied with furnishing the rest of the cabin than warping over to disarm him.

  Ninmah clapped her hands and smiled from ear to ear, dipping her head slightly.

  He shook his head and made her perish the thought before it could develop any further. They weren’t him. Just from her strength and toughness alone, he could tell their attribute levels were probably multitudes higher than his, and that wasn’t considering how frequently they were making wormholes to warp in and out, left and right; he’d barely warped thirty times before he drained his bioarcanic essence, but they seemed to be able to do it continuously just fine.

  It was risky, and he be playing the part of an obedient prisoner… but given he was quite certain they had no intention of actually harming him, he felt he just to figure out the extent of their mutations and magic right now.

  He had to push them a bit further to show off their abilities more.

  Dropping his rifle and lunging for the broken bayonet shard beneath the bed, he was mere inches away from getting his fingers around it before he heard a small —felt a tingle down his spine—and a blue wormhole winked into existence beneath the shard, making it fall through onto Ninmah’s hand behind him. He whirled, confirming it’d just made a movement he previously thought to be impossible; Ninmah was just staring worriedly at him as she twirled her finger and made another wormhole, pushing her arm through to place the shard on the table several metres away from them.

  His brain was working overtime to try to remember every small detail.

  Now that he was a bit warmer and a bit more conscious, he realised how incomprehensible the wormholes really were. They were illogical; he could physically see the wormholes connected to another space, and that was a different kind of magic than anything he’d seen in the empire.

  He felt this was what it meant to be ‘stunned’.

  But for her part, Ninmah wasn’t quite done yet.

  she said, humming a soft song to herself as she twirled and opened five tiny wormholes on each of her finger tips, the rest of the smaller bayonet shards flying to her hand with an invisible pull. Just as quickly, she twirled her fingers the other way round and made the circles repel, the shards over to the table as well.

  Now the floor was all cleaned up and she placed her hands on her hips, smiling triumphantly.

  He looked at her for a long time, his lips pressed into a thin line, and when he tried taking a step back towards his bed—

  He overshot, a wormhole opening briefly in front of him and making him warp past the bedding, running the side of his head into a wall. That was the last straw; he’d been stabbed and gouged and tackled and run headfirst into several hard objects consecutively, and if there was some other measurement of stamina apart from toughness and aura, he was feeling it now—he stumbled around with his head in his hands while Ninmah shot to her feet, shouting worriedly at the others to help him back to his bed.

  Ninmah seemed to catch the exhaustion in his eyes and laid him down on his pillow, her expression slightly ‘troubled’. Worry had replaced incomprehension. He tried squinting through the blurriness to see everyone else’s faces properly, but they were a blurry, swirling fog in his vision; all he could pick out where their glowing blue eyes and their pallid skin that seemed to reflect every ray of light, no matter how faint or far away they were.

  They were children, if he had to describe them in a word—and he wished the dozen or so of them weren’t crowding around his bed from every conceivable direction, staring down at him as though he were prey to be slaughtered on a butcher’s table.

  As Ninmah noticed once again the unease in his eyes and ushered everyone to move back a little, he made his decision once and for all.

  He had to learn how to do everything they just did more. His new abilities would be invaluable to the empire. The pale children could probably exterminate the Boreus nest in this region by themselves if they really wanted to, so he to be able to bring a piece of that strength back to the General by keeping himself alive.

  So, just before he could drift asleep for the second time tonight with his rifle in his arms, Ninmah grabbed his hand and squeezed down.

  she breathed in her deafening, warping voice, her cheeks flushing red as she leaned in close.

  And he blinked slowly, managing a small scowl before he felt his eyelids getting too heavy.

  Ninmah’s eyes lit up, as though plucking his question right out his mind, for a brief second he worried— they read his mind?

  But it wasn’t something he could afford to worry about.

  In the next second, Ninmah rose from his bed and warped a single step back, rejoining the rest of the pale children as they all bowed in unison; the insignia of a giant worm eating its own tail flashing white on the back of their cloaks.

  Ninmah said, raising her head to smile at him.