The Unmaker

“Issam! Ayla, Aylee! Bring me the… um, that giant, tough-looking piece of fabric over there!” she said, pointing left of the room before pointing straight ahead at the end of the room. “And Amula! I need the chitin tubules over there! Can you bring me ten… no, fifteen… no, twenty! Twenty of the long ones! Please! And preferably the straight ones without any dents!”

Amula narrowed her eyes. “What about the tubules? The hell do ye want to do with them–”

“Here, Dahlia!” Issam shouted, tossing the giant roll of fabric at her with the twins’ assistance, and she just barely avoided getting crushed by it with a little yelp. “You need it to make something, right? We’ll get you all the parts we need! Amula, stop screwing around and help with the tubules! Kick it at her as hard as you can!”

She felt like complaining. Maybe Amula shouldn’t kick the tubules as hard as possible, but the sentiment reached her. The three of them didn’t waste any time as they rushed to the end of the homeroom, scraping the irrelevant junk off to the side as they searched for the tubules she needed, and… even though Amula looked a bit hesitant to just drop everything they’d been discussing in favour of Dahlia’s unknown plan, she seemed to understand there wasn’t nearly enough time to waste just standing around.

Dahlia’s expression was grim, but with her lips curled into a tiny smile, she fell forward on her knees and began unravelling the giant roll of fabric.

Lucky for her, Biem had never touched or altered its shape, so cutting out the excess fabric shouldn’t take too long with her chisel.

[... The wings of a giant robber fly,] Eria commented idly as she got to work cutting the wings evenly, wanting to leave about ten metres of wingspan so they could properly ride on top of it. [Due to their rather aggressive hunting method of intercepting and grabbing prey out of the air, their wings have evolved to be stronger and tougher than most other insect wings. Why was something like this just sitting in the corner of your homeroom?]

She grimaced when her chisel refused to cut cleanly through the wings. Though they were half-transparent, the membranes were tougher than they looked, and she wasn’t so sure if she could just cut randomly across its veins. Maybe she’d weaken the integrity of the wings if she wasn’t careful.

So, she let go of her chisel and hovered her bracers just a few inches off the wings, letting her bristles ‘feel’ out where she needed to cut.

Instructor Biem made a joke once, saying he wanted to take the entire class out for a massive round-town glide on top of the wings.

[Oh?]

You can probably guess how the council responded when he brought up the idea to them.

It wasn’t guaranteed, and she wasn’t completely, one hundred percent sure if it’d work, but she had to do it now. Two minutes remaining. While Issam and the twins and Amula rushed back with their arms full of tough beetle chitin tubules, she ripped along the veins her bristles told her they’d be ‘fine’ to rip—and, surprisingly, using her bare hands to tear the wings was much easier than trying to cut them perfectly with her chisel.

The steel threads don’t lie when it comes to telling me how to dismantle something, after all.

“Issam! Place two tubules on both ends and shape them like an arrow!” she said, sweat beading down her brow as the sounds of the encroaching Swarm grew louder and louder. More snapping and clicking sounds. She tried to drown them out by keeping her back towards the windows. “Ayla, Aylee! Make a little… make two more arrows right next to each of Issam’s arrows! Use four tubules each! Yours don’t have to be as firm and perfectly aligned as Issam’s, but try to make them as flat as possible! Attempt!”

The twins flew off to work, and so did Issam. Amula tapped her foot impatiently and crossed her arms. “What do I do, then? Just sit on Raya while I wait?”

“No! Sorry! Um, you have to… um, your bombardier beetle boots!”

“What about them?”

“Once Issam and the twins have aligned their tubules, I want you to kick them down and burn them onto the wings!” she said, casting a brief glance at the senior’s winged boots. “You can make a bit of fire with your kicks, right? That’s how you’re so fast? That means, if you have enough control, you can–”

“I get it, I get it. I just have to do it like this, right?”

Issam blinked. Then he dodged backwards with his teeth gritted as Amula blurred forward with a downwards heel kick, a tiny spark of a flame searing the beetle chitin onto the tip of the wing.

Dahlia’s eyes widened.

“That’s it! Just keep doing that! And I’ll keep on making sure the wings are properly trimmed down so we can–”

But they’d run out of time. Her three minutes were up. A dozen black legs stabbed through the windows as the Swarm blotted out sunlight, clouds of shrapnel flying inwards. Dahlia just managed to brace her head and neck with her bracers while everyone else dragged the wings deeper into the room, moving them away from the windows. The stone walls groaned. The ceiling creaked. The black legs were slashing wildly, trying to claw out anything they could reach, and by the sounds of legs skittering outside in the hallway she knew they really didn’t have much time left.

Damnit!

I can’t… I can’t…

Her hands stopped moving. She felt an intense nausea rising in her as she struggled to remember what she was doing, which parts of the wings she still needed to tear. With the black legs mere inches away from cleaving off her head, she couldn’t focus, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Without looking, she reached into her pocket and popped a piece of candy into her mouth, missing her mark as the little red ball clattered against the ground–

“It’s alright, Dahlia,” Issam said, his voice piercing through the haze in her ears, and she stopped shaking as much. Her hands stopped searching the ground for the candy she’d lost. “Calm down. Deep breaths, four seconds. Heavy exhale, four seconds. You still have about three minutes before any bug can break into this room, so don’t worry about them and focus on what you have to do.”

Then he glanced around, smirking softly as he did.

“It looks like he’s finally found his Swarmsteel, after all,” he said.

She didn’t look.

She didn’t tear her eyes away from the wings below her.

But she felt, in the corner of her eyes, rising to his feet at the back of the room—the boy who’d not spoken a single word this entire time raised something long and sharp to his mouth, and when he blew through his Swarmsteel, it was a roar of a whistle that that rattled the bugs outside in unison.

The giant bugs screeched, their legs pulled out of the windows, and their skittering outside in the hallway started running away from the origin of the sound; Jerie continued to play his flute, his voice heavy, fast-spoken, almost physical in the way the vibrations rang through her bones and drove deep into the floor. Even Issam and Amula had to clamp their hands over their ears as they continued working, the twins’ grimacing smiles showing they were trying their absolute hardest not to accidentally nudge their tubules out of their positions.

[... A pygmy cicada flute that produces sound loud enough to frighten even giant insects,] Eria explained, while she resumed tearing up the wings with her jaw clenched, teeth gritted. [There is a good reason why, even on the surface, it is almost mandatory for any travelling caravan to have at least one cicada flute user in the mix. They can end a battle before it even begins. And while it is not amongst the rarest of Swarmsteel or the hardest to make, most competent users of the cicada flute are typically aligned with some of the greater and stronger factions of the continent—that is, the cicada flute is only effective when the user in question is properly trained to use it.]

[And what do you, children of Alshifa, call Jerie by?]

Dahlia didn’t have to think.

‘Glass Breaker’ Jerie.

[A fitting name.]

[And all of you continue to surprise me.]

[A mantis swordsman who does not appear to feel pain, moth mantles twins who can perfectly manoeuvre within a dome of withered leaves of their own making, a bombardier beetle kicker who does not hurt herself with her own boots, a honey bee spearman who can equip multiple Swarmsteel at once without being overloaded with strain, and a musician who can properly play a cicada flute.]

[To think, just beneath the Sharaji Desert, that there were trainee bug-slayers of your calibre–]

The extra minute Jerie bought was all she needed. She finished the ‘frame’ of the giant glider—a ten-by-four metre pair of veined wings, held together by twenty beetle chitin tubules and likely more than capable of carrying the weight of seven people. All they’d need to get it to glide long distances was for someone to give it a fast running start, and Amula could easily do that.

In truth, she wasn’t really sure if it’d hold under speed. Or under flight. If the tubules weren’t arranged to be as sturdy as possible and the wings weren’t as thick as she’d thought, there was just as much of a chance that it’d crumble the moment they tried to sit on it.

… Maybe this was a risky plan after all. Maybe they’d stand a better chance if they just tried scaling down the vertical cliffs with their bare hands–

“I don’t think we’ll need a running start to get this thing gliding! Ayla, Aylee! Help me get it out of the hole!” Issam shouted, jumping to his feet and lifting the back of the glider with two hands. “We’re gonna hang it there, sit on it, and then we’re gonna drop it! Sounds simple enough, right?”

“Got it, boss!” the twins shouted.

But before Dahlia could plunge into a spiral of self-doubting again, the twins picked up both ends of the glider and rushed to the hole alongside Issam. Amula kicked a pebble at the back of Jerie’s head to get him to come with them, while simultaneously scooping the groaning Raya up in her arms; nobody and nothing important was left behind.

Dahlia still knelt there, though. Next to the windows. The dozen black legs smashed back through the walls the moment Jerie stopped playing his flute, and part of her wondered why all the legs looked so familiar in her eyes.

Was it because they reminded her of something?

Was it because there were just so many of them clumped outside that they were but a single black mass, resembling Eria—the bug she hated the most in the world?

“... Dahlia!” Issam shouted, as the twins stepped tentatively out onto the massive glider, followed by Jerie, then Amula, and then Raya. The mantis swordsman was the one who’d cut the glider off the metal bars they were hanging it off on.

She simply stared at them.

And for a good few seconds, she wondered if she should really go with them.

Eria had said as much; they each had their specialties, and all of them were impressive beyond belief.

If Issam wasn’t right in front of her, offering his hand for her to take, could she really say she’d want to go with them of her own volition?

…

… She could.

She made the glider.

And if she could ride it all the way to the northernmost end of the town, where her dad was, she’d even take the front seat and keep her eyes wide open the entire flight.

[Run, Dahlia.]

[That is your creation.]

She didn’t think, and she didn’t hesitate any longer. Issam and the twins roared at her to hurry as the first of the giant bugs flew in through the windows, the walls, the broken doorway, but she was running faster than she’d ever run before.

So what if she was afraid of heights?

When she jumped, and when she leaped to take the twins’ outstretched hands–

Issam severed the metal bars the glider was hanging on, and then there was the sensation of weightlessness, a terrifying downwards lurch.

They were plummeting atop the glider.

… I'm coming, dad.

I promise.

Arc Two, “The Fifth-years of the Bug-Slaying School”, End