The Unmaker

An unholy belch erupted from the oasis as the little girl was dragged under, disappearing beneath the waves without so much as a scream of panic.

Dahlia didn’t think. She didn’t wait. She jolted to her feet and dashed forward, diving into the deep end of the oasis where she’d always been told no human should ever try swimming over. There was a less than mystical reason, and Alice had told her as much—the reason why the oasis was capable of sustaining itself with endlessly growing reeds and shallow water crops was likely because there were hundreds and thousands of insect carcasses at the very bottom of the oasis, their bodies still in rapid decomposition from however long ago they’d died. Their carcasses provided the nutrients, and the townsfolk plucked the crops diligently to prevent overgrowth; a relationship that’d worked perfectly for the decades the town had been standing.

A dead bug was the only good bug.

Blinking through the water, the first thing she did was reach out and grab onto a clump of reeds both her right hands, still unripe for harvesting. With her left hands, she grabbed onto what felt like the little girl’s outstretched wrists—but she was losing the girl fast, and the shadow trying to pull her under wasn’t going to relent.

Eria! What am I looking at down there?

[I cannot see clearly. You will have to move closer.]

No chance in hell she was going to do that. The unripe reeds in her right hands were still holding onto the shallow end of the oasis, but she could just tell they were going to rip in twenty seconds, maybe even less; if the reeds were pulled, both of them would be dragged into the deep pit and never resurface.

She could barely see past the struggling and screaming little girl, but one look at the humanoid shadow beneath them and she realised she couldn’t see the steel thread. Without knowing what she was facing, without studying its looks and anatomy and understanding its patterns of attack, she wouldn’t be able to dismantle it cleanly. Was she to attempt pulling the little girl up and try to slash at it anyways, knowing she’d be leaving both their lives to fate as to whether or not she could inflict any real damage?

There was… a more certain solution.

A more painful one.

But she’d deal with the consequences later.

Put all my points into strength!

[Increasing your strain limit would allow you to breathe underwater for longer–]

Just do it!

[Strength: 6 → 7]

[Unallocated Points: 38 → 2]

She had one shot. One chance to make this work. She felt pain flaring up her arm as she jerked the little girl with a sudden burst strength, and when the giant insect beneath them failed to immediately pull harder in response, she found a small, small opening where she could release the reeds and swing her right hands down at either one of two targets: one of them being the giant insect’s black raptorial claws stabbed into the little girl’s shin.

Gritting her teeth, she aimed for the other target, severing the little girl’s leg beneath the knee and kicking off for the surface in the same motion.

The moment their heads burst through the surface of the oasis, the girl began crying, gasping, choking all at once; the entire town heard the commotion. Torches were lit, saifs were drawn, people were flooding around the oasis in droves. Dahlia did her best to fling the little girl towards the closest shallow end, but not before nabbing the night vision goggles and holding it far overhead, frantically trying to wipe all the water off the inside lenses.

She barely managed to fit it over her head and eyes before something sharp stabbed into her own ankle, pulling her back under.

Eria! Please–

[Injecting emergency adrenaline!]

The claw dragged her past the reeds, past the shallow ends of the oasis, and down into the abyssal pit she went. There was no strategy or elegance about it—whatever resided at the bottom of the oasis simply wanted someone to fall into a watery grave, and the fastest way to do it was a claw through the leg, unable to be untangled by any normal human means.

But she clenched her throat, tightened her chest, and turned the red and yellow dials on the side of the goggles; light immediately flared out her eyes like a directed firefly lantern, shining down on the giant insect in two wide cones.

… Water bug.

It was a seven-metre class, its carapace a dark, mottled brown, pocked with scars and encrusted with the detritus of a hundred carcasses. Its eyes were black pearls, unblinking and fathomless. While four of its barbed legs were stabbed into the walls of the pit to keep it from moving, one of its forelegs were currently tearing through her ankle; the other was swerving around from the side, aiming to decapitate her in one swift blow.

Raising both her right arms to block, it was only her hardened black chitin that saved her bones from being snapped in two. At the same time, she bent down to carve its other foreleg into pieces, following the faint glow of the steel thread that appeared in her eyes. She couldn’t see the path to dismantling the entire water bug, but so close to its foreleg, she figured its composition was about the same as any other bug with raptorial appendages: getting inside its curved apical claws and cutting between the seams of its chitin was the way to go.

Her body trembled, a pained hiss bubbled out her lips as she wrenched the remnants of its claw out of her ankle—she’d heal such a small wound soon enough—but now the water bug was furious, and it was getting desperate. The water around her churned and swirled as it started climbing up the pit, raising the rest of its gargantuan body out of the abyss; its jagged mandibles clicked together in anticipation as it surely knew she’d never fought underwater, nor against something of its size by herself.

It was right on both accounts.

But, just as well, she’d recently come to a realisation that maybe the steel threads she could see were no mere trick of the eye, or any manifestation of her skill when it came to dismantling things.

[... It can be both,] Eria said. [At the end of the day, it is still a manifestation of the years you have spent making and unmaking Swarmsteel. Do not undersell yourself and the effort you have put in.]

Maybe.

But the steel thread my dad described may not be the steel thread I can see—and it may not be the steel thread my mom could see, either.

I’m an assassin bug, aren’t I?

[...]

Eria wouldn’t tell her, but she’d heard from her dad that the nightmares she used to share with her mom were those of ‘assassin bugs’—terrestrial ambush predators shaped like teardrops with a unique defensive behaviour, where they’d carry a variety of debris and materials, including the dead bodies of their prey, and wear all of it over their backs like armour. They were corpse-carrying bugs who sucked out the insides of their prey with their proboscis and looked nothing like any other bug when they donned the carcasses of their enemies, and, as part of their peculiar traits, their eyes and claws were specifically evolved to not simply rip and tear their prey to shreds.

A prey completely torn apart with cruel violence and sheer brute force couldn’t be used as armour; an assassin bug needed to watch, study its prey, and then decide to dismantle it as efficiently as possible.

Maybe it wasn’t even an ability she could unlocked on her mutation tree, of which she’d yet to even take a glance at, but she felt maybe the ‘steel threads’ she could see were what the eyes of an assassin bug could see—the lines of death, often not swift, but always clean and efficient.

And now she had four hands and twenty claws.

Thank you, goggles.

I can see now.

She was ready for the water bug this time; she caught its other foreleg as it shot up for her neck, her claws digging into the chitin as she strained to hold it back. The water bug tried to headbutt her, mandibles pried apart, but she pushed herself to the left and slammed into the side of the pit, letting it rise past her. Unable to control its momentum or even turn efficiently, the water bug attempted pulling its other legs back to catch her in motion, but by then she’d pushed herself off onto its back, two hands stabbing into its carapace as anchors while her remaining two traced the small black seams between its chitin.

Biting her tongue, she lashed out in zigzags, sending a flurry of cuts, tears, and swipes down at the back of the water bug. Its thorax was her target, but more importantly she just had to get through it to its dorsal vessel—the vessel that functioned like a human heart, responsible for moving blood throughout its body—and she knew from experience that the insides of a water bugs weren’t much different from a normal terrestrial bug. She’d seen water bug critters in the sewers of Alshifa before, and she’d seen her mom take them apart before. Through the metathorax, past its first muscular layer, she’d find what she was looking for hidden behind relatively soft and flexible chitin; its armour certainly wasn’t as tough as the pine sawyer beetle she’d dismantled before.

[You gotta be quick with it, though,] Amula whispered, her garbled voice bubbling through the water. [You can’t breathe underwater for long.]

The water bug flailed around, throwing itself from side to side, wall to wall, trying to crush her against the sandstone. On a few occasions her spine was smashed into the walls of the pit, but Eria simply upped the dose of adrenaline and forced her to push through it, using the crushing force as extra momentum to cut deeper into its body—and once she carved out a metre-diameter hole dead in the centre of its back, she released her anchoring hands to plunge all four into its thorax, ripping through its dorsal vessel and scrambling its insides.

It wasn’t a Mutant, and it wasn’t smart enough to feign its death. The water bug convulsed and twitched and managed only a weak, pathetic bubble of a cry before it began sinking with her hands still stuck in it.

And… she couldn’t pull her hands out.

Faintly, she felt as though she heard Eria yelling inside her head, telling her to kick off for the surface, but there was only pain in her lungs. Her breath was gone. She was on fire from the inside, and the adrenaline and whatever else Eria had injected into her to numb the pain was now backfiring—she’d have moved with more urgency if she’d felt herself running out of air earlier, but now it was a bit too late.

The last thing she saw before her eyes fluttered close was a lasso of red silk, sinking faster than both her and the water bug, and when the silk wrapped around them–

Someone thumped her chest once, making her jolt upright while sputtering a mouthful of water.

Alice was kneeling next to her, grinning.

“Not bad at all,” the Hasharana said. “Now uncle has enough ingredients to work with for the rest of the month.”

…

She was sitting on sand. Her goggles had been yanked off. Incoherents shouts and ramblings around her stabbed through her ears like icicles. Her lungs began to expand and fill up with air, but just inhaling made her gasp painfully, hacking and coughing and doubling over to the side with her elbows supporting her weight. She barely had time to mentally register that, while she’d been pulled up and saved by Alice, she was still very much in shock from having nearly suffocated in a pit of bug carcasses.

… Where is she?

Pushing against the ground, her arms felt like jelly, but she managed to swivel her head around. The gargantuan water bug was lying on its back a fair ten metres away, still half-submerged in the oasis, but surrounded by about forty men and women staring incredulously at it. Uncle Safi was already standing on its abdomen, cutting off its legs methodically to use for his own tavern. The abnormal sight wasn’t what she was looking for, though, and she sighed a breath of relief when she saw the little girl lying on the sand a mere few paces away, a dozen grown men carefully hoisting her onto a butterfly wing stretcher.

The girl’s left knee was tightly bandaged with what looked like glowing red silk, nigh-indistinguishable from solidified blood—she may still be hissing and groaning and trying to squeeze tears back into her eyes, but Dahlia just knew she’d be fine.

She’d live.

The little girl’s mother, however, was still distraught and sobbing as she tried to accompany her daughter’s stretcher to the healing house, so Dahlia looked over and tried to reach out—Alice, of course, being the one to flick five invisible threads over, wrapping around the mother’s waist and making her whirl around.

Ten metres apart, face to face, Dahlia’s eyes softened at the sight of the middle-aged town chief who’d snapped at her for stepping into the oasis with her shoes on two weeks ago.

“...”

And while she might have the breath to speak now, she settled, instead, for an apologetic nod.

The chief’s lips quivered, looking almost ready to cry, but then she sent a ghost of a smile back and dipped her head in return—whirling immediately with two guards supporting her arms to follow her daughter to the healing house.

“... That’s not Madamaron, is it?” Dahlia muttered, closing her eyes as she fell back on the sand, resting her aching spine. “It’s just… a random water bug that chose to attack right at the end of the week, just like Madamaron would, but… it tried to get a fourth victim. Madamaron doesn’t do that. It only kills three people a year, and only three people a year, so why–”

“Something’s changed this year.” Alice flicked her head in response, interrupting her. “And you’re right that that’s not Madamaron, but it is a juicy water bug uncle can turn into a delicacy, so good job. Just leave it to uncle to turn it into something delicious.”

She’d like to ask more—mainly, if the water bug had been trying to impersonate Madamaron by framing it for the death of the little girl—but right now she just wanted to sleep.

The crowd around her didn’t help with that, but Alice did.

“Don’t worry. We’ll investigate this ourselves tomorrow,” she whispered. “That water bug couldn’t have come from nowhere, so there’s probably a webwork of tunnels underneath the oasis. We’ll dive back down and see what’s going on.”

Good.

After all, if there’s a fourth attack–

[There is no telling if there will be a fifth, a sixth, and a seventh,] Eria finished. [We can no longer work under the assumption that we will face no attacks for an entire year before Madamaron reawakens. We must be wary of future attacks as we continue investigating.]

[... So, frankly speaking,] Issam said, his gold-lined scarf rustling as though he were shaking his head behind her, [this little investigation Alice is doing is turning out to be more troublesome than we thought.]

Arc 6, “Madamaron, The Elusive”, End