“... It was Year Fifty-One, Month Crab, Day Fifteen. I was ten years old, and Kuraku was nine. We were sent running across the southeastern plains as Ant Class Soldiers with nothing but sawtooth blades in our hands and shrapnel bombs on our backs—we were supposed to be bait and fodder for the Spore Knights behind us, who needed all hands on deck to distract the bugs for thirty minutes while they regenerated their missing limbs.”

  With an underhanded throw, Kuraku sent her entire gauntlet of exploding ants flying. The ants flashed, scattered into a hundred sizable shrapnel, and exploded; the pyrotechnics transformed the mouth of the Barrows into a display of blinding light and deafening sound.

  The undead soldiers fired through the smoke, their first volley taking down ten children who were standing too close to the entrance. Screams echoed off the walls. The Worm Mages who could still move warped deeper into the cave while Sparrow and Minki warped , driving their bayonet at Kuraku’s neck and intent on dragging her out into the sun.

  Kuraku them impale her neck, and when they tried to warp her out with them, she resisted. Ground her heels into the crystallised stone, pure rage and force of will anchoring her—Minki threw both of them back as Kuraku swiped with her other gauntlet, detonating the air in front of her with yet another flash of fire.

  She waded through the flames and the smoke, a hundred Zombie Ant Soldiers trailing behind her with their rifles raised.

  “They sent our battalion out as bait, all fifty-one of us in the Second Carpenter Ant Battalion,” the General said, speaking through the zombie ants in Kuraku’s hanging jaw, and the soldiers behind her fired all at once. Minki grabbed him and warped back again, retreating to the first flight of stairs leading down to the chasm. “It wasn’t just our battalion that was sent out as bait. Our General ordered all fifteen Carpenter Ant Battalions present to buy thirty minutes for our three Spore Knights, and within ten, half of us were already torn to shreds by the giant cicadas. By the thirty minute mark, only Kuraku and I were still standing. The bombs that were supposed to explode on our backs didn’t go off, but still we bought enough time. The Spore Knights regenerated and we won our first battle.”

  It was a retreating firefight once more. Sparrow and Minki backed down the stairs and felled as many undead soldiers as they could, and these ones weren’t nearly as resilient as the Bullet Ant Soldiers. Their heads popped and their bodies crumbled every time they were shot with bullets and arrows, but, after ten or so seconds, a horde of zombie ants would fill in the wounds and drag them back onto their feet.

  They weren’t rushing down the stairs. They didn’t need to. With Kuraku leading the advancing force and intercepting as many projectiles as she could with her exploding ants, they were gaining more ground than they were losing bodies to puppet.

  The Worm Mages flanked the sides of the first cavern, second cavern, and third cavern, vibrating the walls and bringing down the ceiling whenever the Forward Army breached another chokepoint. The rubble never lasted long. Kuraku blew through any obstacle standing in her way with stride.

  “Year Fifty-Two, near the northeastern border of the Empire. For our second battle, our battalion was told to relay messages between the western and eastern trenches. When we arrived at the western Vice-General’s dugout, however, we found the soldiers there had all but given up on the war. They sat with their heads low, their jaws slack, their rifles cleared of any bullets. The western Vice-General told us to tell the eastern General that they were going to surrender, so we ran all the way back, through rain and mortar fire, fifty kilometres across the warring border. Everyone but Kuraku and I perished during the round trip.”

  Deeper into the barrows, the weight and pressure of the mountain pushed down upon the Worm Mages’ shoulders, slowing their retreat. Sparrow was sure it wasn’t any ‘real’ weight. It was exhaustion, scrapes and bruises, and the fact that they were slowly nearing the chasm where all the children were gathered—was there really no way they could isolate Kuraku and focus only on tearing her apart?

  … There was.

  They just hadn’t tried hard enough.

  Ninmah tried to snatch his collar and pull him even further back into the Barrows, but he warped forward with Minki without a word, going for round two of trying to warp Kuraku away. The Vice-General was prepared for them this time. With a swipe, she detonated the air in front of her with a cloud of explosions, and Minki cried out in pain. The two of them gnashed their teeth and pushed through the blast anyways, slipping under Kuraku’s jaw and jamming their bayonets straight into her chest.

  Then, they turned, the Vice-General off the ground using their rifles as a lever and slamming her into the ground behind them—warping her all the way down to the bottom of the stairs, where all three of them immediately lost their balance and rolled before the chasm where all the children were gathered.

  “... Year Fifty-Six. Our final battle after having been reassigned away from the far northeastern front,” the General spat, making Kuraku crawl to her feet with her right elbow bent the wrong way. Sparrow struggled to crawl to his feet as well, but for another reason entirely: his stamina was simply lacking after so many consecutive warps. “Kuraku and I killed the traitorous western Vice-General and his defective soldiers, after all. We were considered strong enough for the far southern front, and we were sent out to halt the Greater Insect God of the South, ‘Regalia’, from reaching the Capital. There, we—”

  Minki was the first to recover with her superior stamina as a former scout, warping forward to grab Kuraku’s arms from behind before she could grab more exploding ants from her hair. Kuraku let out an inhuman, chittering screech as her shoulders were popped, her arms were snapped—it was the type of sound a horde of a hundred giant ants burning alive would make—and while the elders collapsed the ceiling to stop the rest of the Forward Army from marching down the stairs, Ninmah and Utu started hurrying the children across to the other side of the chasm.

  Sparrow didn’t have eyes on the back of his head, but even as he pushed himself up onto one knee, he could tell the dozen giant worms on the other side were curling around the children who couldn’t fight. It was just Minki, him, and Kuraku left on this side.

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  If Kuraku died here, they’d be able to create a chokehold at this chasm and defend it forever.

  he hissed, picking up his rifle, wobbling to his feet.

  “There, all but I was crushed underfoot by Regalia, and in the heat of battle, I drank Regalia's blood. I obtained enough points from her to immediately reach my First Class Mutation Selection, and then I returned to base with the Zombie Ant Class!” the General bellowed, and Kuraku snapped a head in a full circle, whipping her hair of exploding ants right into Minki’s face. The blasts created a shockwave so strong it made the cavern tremble, and the wind knocked the anti-chitin rounds out of his hands before he could jam them into his rifle. “The sacrifices of tens of hundreds of thousands of lives mark the triumphant roar of humanity’s victory! None of our comrades’ deaths are meaningless! We fight and die as weapons of the Attini Empire, and one day, we reclaim our world! What is thirty children and a little village in the middle of nowhere in the face of ultimate sacrifice?”

  Without his anti-chitin rounds, he wouldn’t have enough firepower to tear Kuraku’s limbs apart. He knew this. Kuraku knew this, with her hollow eye sockets and rotten lips twisted into a sickening smile, but when the smoke cleared and it was evident Kuraku had used up every last exploding ant in her hair to send the very mountain a message… there was still among them who hadn’t admitted defeat.

  Minki, with half her face burnt and blown off, still stood behind Kuraku and held the Vice-General’s arms back—whispering a voiceless word, as though begging Sparrow to do it quickly.

  And there was that knotting, painful sensation in his chest again.

  That ‘anger’.

  That ‘hate’.

  A vile, spiteful emotion took hold of his body, and he scrounged up a handful of crystallised stone from the ground to jam them into his rifle. Kuraku growled and tried to kick to her feet, but Minki was standing on her knees and growling , every bit as feral. He yanked on the bolt, chambering his crystal bullets; he lifted his rifle, clenched the shaking muscles in his arms; he fired, ten times in one second, opening ten bullet-sized wormholes before his barrel just to give his bullets a more speed, a more destructive power.

  That little bit of effort with his wormholes was enough to compensate for the anti-chitin rounds, and the ten crystal bullets shattered Kuraku’s wrists, elbows, knees, chest, and head.

  Complete demolition.

  Zombie ants spilled out of her wounds as Minki let go, both girls dropping onto their sides at the exact same time.

  Sparrow warped in, caught Minki before she could hit the ground, and then the elders warped back to carry them over to the other side of the chasm. The dozen giant worms curled around them as though to form a protective barrier. He made them reel away with a light kick, shaking his head furiously.

  he breathed, narrowing his eyes at the giant, coiled-up Elder Worm at the end of the cavern.

  Then a single, explosive footstep behind him caught his attention, and he whirled with Minki in his arms to see Kuraku standing; zombie ants pouring and oozing from every wound, her quivering legs barely able to keep her standing with her broken joints. Her neck was crooked, her hair was completely dishevelled, and her uniform was torn in more places than a dozen.

  Sparrow’s rifle was still slung over his back.

  He couldn’t drop Minki and pull it out fast enough.

  So he watched, breaths bated, as Kuraku exploded into a charge and leapt off the edge of the chasm in an attempt to jump fifty metres across—

  Only for the dozen giant worms to launch off the cliff themselves, intercepting Kuraku mid-air as Utu shot her in the left eye with his bow and arrow.

  The combined force of a furious arrow and a dozen giant worms and an arrow halted her momentum completely, and all of them plummeted into the abyssal chasm, not a screech or a scream to be heard of.

  Utu growled, waving Sparrow and the rest of them back.

  With the rest of the elders’ help, Sparrow managed to carry Minki across the field of crystal weeds, and all of the able-bodied Worm Mages slapped the ground with their palms. They’d taken too long dealing with Kuraku, so they’d have to move their chokehold even further back to right before the Elder Worm, but that was okay. It to be okay. They could easily hold out here for the rest of eternity.

  Right now, they just needed the Elder Worm to treat Minki.

  While the rest of the Worm Mages vibrated and brought down mountains of debris from the ceiling, blocking off access to and away from the end of the Barrows, Sparrow warped up to the reawakened Elder Worm and glared at it. The colossal worm didn’t bother speaking—he immediately knew what he had to do for one of his children, so he sucked in a sharp breath and swallowed Minki whole, moving her slowly through his glowing silver blood.

  he asked, Ninmah supporting him with an arm over his shoulder as he was just about to stumble and fall. He needed to sit, but he didn’t want to.

  

  Utu snapped.

  

  While the Elder Worm worked in silence, Sparrow couldn’t help but flinch a little looking at the bloody, gaping hole in the side of Minki’s face. Her left cheek and eye had been blown out in much the same way Kuraku took out Utu’s left eye before, but this wound was much, more severe. Even more severe than the one the Elder Worm had to heal back when she was a Silver Ant Scout. Her breaths looked so shallow and her face looked so pale that Sparrow immediately braced himself or the worst… but what the worst thing that could happen?

  That the Elder Worm couldn’t fix her?

  Or was it…

  … And just as he realised what the worst case scenario was, the Elder Worm suddenly exploded from the inside-out, the sound of a crystal quartz bomb going off making his ears ring.

  There was no warning once again—silver plates and shrapnel flew everywhere as everyone braced their faces, their salt epidermis preventing any serious injuries, but the aftermath of the Elder Worm’s sudden and violent destruction was yet another thick smokescreen.

  Thankfully, Utu was fast enough to warp in and catch Minki before she could hit the ground hard, but… Ninmah was squeezing Sparrow in a protective hug with her back riddled with bloody shrapnel, and he didn’t have the strength left to yell out in his warping voice.

  He wanted to tell Utu to let go.

  He wanted to tell everyone to plug their ears and fortify their hearts, but—

  Gunshot.

  Just one.

  ‘Minki’ managed to rip Utu’s unused rifle off his shoulder and fire point-blank through his forehead, killing the one-eyed boy instantly while she warped onto her feet.

  The gaping hole in the side of her face was bursting with a swarm of zombie ants.

  “... You are all still children, so you are unable to see,” the voice rasped, as Minki snapped her neck to look at all of them with one blank, milky white eye—the zombie ants inside her head twisting into the shape of the General’s face. “There is no sacrifice too great for the good of humanity.”