The Unmaker

For a few seconds after Amula drove her heel into Raya’s back, the former strongest student of the Alshifa Bug-Slaying School remained deathly still on the floor.

Silent.

Unmoving.

“... What, did you kill him?” Issam mumbled, sitting up and wincing at the same time. Having been sliced by the hornet spear thirty-one times didn’t seem to affect him more than seeing Raya lay unmoving under Amula’s heel. “Hey. Raya. I know you’re not dead. I don’t care how hard she kicked you through the wall and how hard she dragged you back in—we’ve done way worse than that in sparring over the past five years, so get the hell up.”

Dahlia and the twins reeled away when Raya suddenly surged upwards, his muscles driven by sheer rage and willpower, but Amula simply clicked her tongue before slamming his spine down again. With her free leg, she kicked his spear and sent it flying into the wall right next to Dahlia’s head, while effectively shattering his wrist-mounted crossbow by stepping hard on his arm; even he would be hard-pressed to launch an attack in such an unfavourable position now.

[How cruel.]

That’s just how Amula is–

“Hey,” she said, glaring at Dahlia with her hands stuck in her pockets. “Take his spear and make sure he doesn’t get his hands on it. If ye have to, just dismantle it. Ye can probably make something out of its raw parts–”

“Just kill me,” Raya grumbled, his voice raspy, his arms struggling to push his body off the floor. “I… lost. Losers don’t get to live. Just kill me… and get out of here.”

Dahlia blinked as she slowly turned to look at the spear that’d just narrowly missed piercing her ear.

[He can still talk,] Eria remarked, sounding more impressed than ever. [Is he from a famous household of bug-slayers? It is already an achievement enough to have stayed conscious after that hit to his spine, but to think he is still able to resist–]

“Fuck no,” Amula spat, as she kicked him once more in the stomach before lifting her foot off his spine, stumbling away. “Ye have problems and I don’t like ye one bit, but without yer spear, you’re hardly a threat to anyone. Ye won’t land any surprise attacks with me around, so don’t even try it. I’ll beat ye down again.”

Raya managed to raise his head, his neck straining, his dark eyes twisted into a nasty scowl. “You… sure about that? I killed half of our classmates even without my hornet spear. You don’t think I can–”

“It’s not a hornet spear.”

Just this once, Dahlia didn’t feel as pressured and nervous with all eyes landing on her—her own eyes, after all, were tracing the sharpened edges of the ‘hornet spear’, and her suspicions were all but confirmed when she turned to glance at Raya’s face.

[Eastern Honey Bee Spear (Quality = E)(Str +0/5)(Strain +251)]

[Special Qualities: Pain Venom (Quality = F)]

… It’s just as I thought.

If you look closer, the stinger is actually barbed.

The reason why he said the stinger was constantly ‘dull’ is because it’s not a hornet’s smooth stinger.

[Indeed,] Eria mused. [Depending on the species, a hornet can stab almost as many times as it wants without fear of ripping out its stinger. A honey bee, however, can only stab either once or twice before killing itself in the process—just how has this boy managed to hold onto his spear this long without breaking it in the process?]

He’s ‘Godsent talent’ Raya, after all.

But if it’s a honey bee spear, and not a hornet spear…

“You lied about killing all our classmates with venom, because honey bee venom isn’t particularly potent. It’s just a bit… painful,” she mumbled aloud as the twins stepped past her to pull his spear out of the wall, chattering amongst themselves while studying the gleaming stinger. “Our classmates are strong. They wouldn’t have died from simple honey bee venom. So, if you lied about that, I don’t think… you didn’t kill anyone, did you?”

“...”

Raya didn’t speak. He didn’t look her in the eye. For Amula’s part she looked more than confused, scratching the back of her head in irritation, but Issam belted out a small laugh as she helped him off the floor; evidently, neither of them were particularly worried about the ‘venom’ Raya had injected into them now.

“Well, I figured,” Issam said, thumbing at the small grazes across his body. Amula agreed with a small shrug. “I’d always thought, during sparring, that you just weren’t using the venom part of the spear for some reason, but we had a real fight going on just now, and I was still jumping around even after you grazed me a dozen times with your ‘venom’? Hey, how long have you been lying to us about your Swarmsteel being hornet-made?”

“I think he’s even got Biem fooled,” Ayla said, as she pulled Dahlia onto her feet as well and all of them reconvened in the centre of the room, while Jerie was still struggling to pick out his Swarmsteel from the boxes by the walls. “Seriously, does Biem know? That you’ve been faking it for years with a ‘hornet spear’? What, is that wrist crossbow thing also a honey bee crossbow? Why didn’t you pick a Swarmsteel that actually had paralysing or venomous capabilities?”

Raya’s eye twitched, and he whipped his head up to glare at Ayla. “Tch. Listen to yourselves. ‘Paralysing or venomous capabilities’, like actually powerful bug-slayers need to rely on any underhanded tricks like that to slay a giant bug. A sturdy spear and a lacklustre ranged option is all I need to–”

A low rumble outside the windows caught their attention, and the twins were the first to snap their heads around, faces pale as ash.

Dahlia saw it a second later; a massive black wave of giant insects were scaling the hill up to the school, all bunched up and squeezed together as they tried crossing the flimsy wooden bridge where the dead beetle still sat in wait. They were more beetles, more crickets, more diverse in features than she could pick out one by one—but there were just enough of them that even if the bridge were to collapse right now, they’d simply be able to climb over each other in order to reach the school.

She estimated… three minutes.

Three minutes before they’d find their way up to this exact room where her pocket watch had practically flashed a ‘human presence’ signal for all the undertown’s giant bugs to see.

Oh no.

This is bad.

Eria, I… what do I–

“Alright!” Issam clapped his hands, his lips smiling but his jaw clenched with worry; it was hard not to sweat in a situation like this. “We won’t be leaving through the bridge, so we’re going the other way! Out the window, over the railings, down the vertical cliffs! If we move fast enough we might just lose them before they can even pinpoint our exact location!”

“They already know where we are. It’s just about how much damage they’re gonna cause while they try to get up to us,” Amula said, as suddenly she darted over to the chalkboard and kicked in the rest of the wall—a crack, a boom, and sunlight came flooding in through the giant hole she made, facing out towards the rest of the undertown. “I can jump down and land safely with my boots, no problem, but I can only carry one person with me. Let’s say I carry Dahlia since she’s basically immobile. Issam, ye can kinda scale down with yer mantis scythes, ye twins have half-gliding mantles, but Jerie won’t be able to get down safely.”

“And Raya, too.” Issam pointed out. “Don’t forget about him. Since you might’ve just shattered his spine, he’s basically the same as Dahlia in the movement department–”

“–I lost. Leave me here to die–”

“–but even if we can get down the cliffs safely, I don’t think we can get far away enough that the Swarm can’t catch up,” Aylee muttered. “This won’t work. Maybe we could half-glide off into the distance if it were just the two of us with the mantles, but Issam can’t run that fast. Neither can you, Amula. You’re already completely burnt out after that fight, right?”

Amula frowned and tried to hide it by turning away, but even Dahlia could tell her knees were shaking slightly, and the shrapnel in her forearm she’d obviously yet to remove since the fight with the giant beetle was gradually taking its toll on her.

What do we do, then?

How do we run?

Eria.

What do I–

[You are the ‘Make-Whatever’, are you not?]

Eria tapped its legs on her shoulder and beckoned her to take a look around—ignoring the arguing twins, ignoring Amula and Issam bouncing ideas off each other, ignoring Jerie still frantically searching the mounds of scrap for his Swarmsteel—and then the little black bug reappeared on the bridge of her nose, its beady black eyes staring straight into hers.

[In this armoury where all the strongest insect parts in the undertown are stored, can you really say you have no idea what you can make to get everyone out of here?]

[Think, Dahlia.]

[Do you see the ‘path’ out of this situation?]

…

So she took a deep, body-shuddering breath, before reaching to turn the dial on her pocket watch… only to realise, when her hand completely whiffed behind her waistband, that she didn’t have it with her anymore.

She’d destroyed it with that flash of light.

But even still, she’d managed to make a few shoddy chestplates without needing to listen to the rhythmic tick tocks of her watch—so what was to say she couldn’t make more Swarmsteel without it?

Think, Dahlia.

You are… the ‘Make-Whatever’.

She closed her eyes. Searched her memories. She recalled every little piece of scrap Biem had thrown into the mounds, every broken furniture, everything that’d been deemed unusable and thus chucked into the deepest, darkest corners of the room where nobody would ever dream of uncovering it again—had she not spent the past five years of her life secretly wishing she could be allowed one unsupervised night in the homeroom, just so she could pick out everything she could potentially use for her Swarmsteel-making hobby at home?

In the end, it didn’t take her long at all to ‘find’ the insect part she’d coveted most of all.

Now, it was what they needed the most.

She knew what she had to make.

“... I have a plan,” she said. “I need… help, though.”