The Unmaker

Little Dahlia rides on the shoulders of her mother, who is riding on the shoulders of her father. Her father is weak, but her mother is even more frail—they ascend the Southern Alshifa Hill without issue, and there little Dahlia starts unfolding the butterfly blanket to set up the picnic.

‘Help Dahlia out, papa,” her mother says, scolding her father as he simply sits and stares out at the undertown. Little Dahlia shakes her fists angrily and complains the same. Her father laughs and leans back further.

“She’ll be fine. She can do all the work alone because she’s a strong girl,” her father says, as he winks at little Dahlia and pulls her mother in by the shoulders. “Aren’t you strong, Dahlia? You can do all the hard work while papa and mama rest on our backs, can’t you?”

Little Dahlia is foolish, so she says ‘yeah!’ with a cheerful smile and starts laying out all the food. Her mother chastises her father again, but he does not move to help little Dahlia out.

“It’s times like these that we let the kids do the hard work. It’d be sad if we just end up not catching the Alshifa night bazaar lighting up, wouldn’t it?” he says.

“We can see the bazaar light up every night we want, but if Dahlia gets too tired to go to school tomorrow, that’s one day of school she’d forever miss out on,” her mother says. “Besides, what’s so special about the sight of the bazaar from up here? Why here? You know you’re not that strong, so climbing those stairs with both of us on your back-”

“Is something I’d have forever missed out on as well, if I hadn’t decided to come here for our tenth anniversary.”

Her mother is silent. Her father smiles. Little Dahlia is oblivious to the happenings around her, and she does not recall much of that evening. However, she remembers one thing her mother said—hand in hand with her father—when the Night Bazaar lit up on the first day of a new year.

“... I’ve seen this sight ten anniversaries in a row,” her mother grumbled. “It’s not pretty at all.”

Little Dahlia also remembers one thing her father said.

“You’re much prettier right now than any Bazaar.”

“...”

Little Dahlia remembers feeling deeply embarrassed for her father.

- Scene from Southern Alshifa Hill past

The ladder from the sewage room to Alshifa’s lower street was well over a hundred metres tall, and halfway up, Dahlia couldn’t stop her palms from sweating anymore. There weren’t any safety rungs around her. If her hands were to slip or her feet were to lose their balance, she’d plummet straight down to where the giant, formless shadows were writhing about.

If that were to happen, she hoped she’d just die from the fall, but… thankfully, she managed to reach the top of the ladder without slipping. Her nails flew over the edge to rake into a bed of hard cobblestone, and then the undertown came into view before she even pulled the rest of her body up.

That was, an undertown undoubtedly dead and silent in the wake of the Swarm.

… It’s quiet.

Where is everyone?

As she rose dead centre in the middle of the street, she could immediately tell nobody was going to tell her to make way for carriages.

Nobody was alive to tell her off.

Between the shafts of cold moonlight that fell from the giant hole in the ceiling, she caught glances of broken bodies and mangled corpses littering the sides of the street, rivers of blood trickling down the slope and into the town square below her. The blood didn’t stop at the square. It branched out, enveloping every road, every alley, a large shadow of a web littered with lumps of flesh and crumpled remains. The smell of it all was infused into the earth, the uprooted cobblestones, the rotten planks by the slums and clay tiles near the Night Bazaar—it felt wrong like nothing else, like a scene of calamity from the Old Alshifa Records brought to life.

If she hadn’t already puked her guts out down in the sewers, she doubted she’d be able to hold her stomach now.

“... Where are all the bugs?” she whispered, hunching her back and wading off to the side of the street as she did. Her sandals splashed across pools of blood, staining her toenails red and black. “There were hundreds of them pouring out of the cocoon. Observed. Alshifa isn’t that big an undertown compared to some others in the area, so where are they?”

[In hiding, I would suppose. Giant insects still possess certain behaviours like your everyday critters. Most do not prefer standing out in the open.]

Her eyes flitted nervously left and right, scanning the broken and ruined houses surrounding her. “So they could just be hiding anywhere? Even though they’re that much stronger than us and can overrun us all at any time?”

[I would not say you, people of the Alshifa undertown, are completely defenceless when it comes to the Swarm. Take a look around you.]

At Eria’s request, she followed the little bug’s pointing leg and spotted something incredulous—a few incredulous things, actually. A giant beetle was speared from head to abdomen by a firefly lamps, impaled into the side of a two-story building. There were other giant insects similarly impaled by other firefly lamps: a few red-striped hornets, a few quivertail butterflies, a scorpion with its head and stinger skewered into the ground. The bloody handiwork was unmistakable; the bug trader hadn’t gone this way while protecting her and Issam and the others in the carriage, so she knew only one other person in Alshifa who could’ve defeated as many bugs as there were human corpses here.

[... While we may have taken a one-hour detour down in the sewers and the majority of the townsfolk have fallen, it is still more than likely there are several surviving students of your Bug-Slaying School wandering about,] Eria said, before poking her shoulder to direct her gaze down the sloped street; in the direction of the southern shelter she was heading towards before her little detour. [Based on your most recent memories before you accepted the Altered Swarmsteel System, you were headed towards the town’s emergency shelter in case of a Swarm invasion, were you not? It would be wise to go there first and regroup with the other students–]

“I need to get to my dad,” she breathed, backpedalling and heading north in the direction of her house. “It’s… it’s not far away from here. Even if I walk at a snail’s pace to avoid detection, it’ll only be two hours, or three, and then I can… and then I–”

[Prioritising your own safety should be your primary concern right now,] Eria said, shaking her head. [Your father lives in a house atop a hill at the northern edge of the undertown, does he not? The Swarm should not have gotten to him. The bugs will not spread very far away from the Night Bazaar for a particular reason, so I would advise going to the shelter first. You require rest and sustenance.]

Her ears flared with heat. “My dad needs rest and sustenance. I was supposed to get staples for our dinner tonight and he hasn’t eaten anything the entire day. If I don’t get back to him with something, he’s going to–”

[You have nothing to offer him even if you go right now.]

Eria’s voice of reason slapped her in the face, loud and clear, and she forced her feet to stop moving without her commanding them to.

[From here to your house, it would be a ten hour journey if you consider moving extremely discreetly. It is not likely you will find easy-to-swallow food on the way there. You will not be able to draw clean water from a well without making a fuss. Finding a roof to sleep safely under will be a nigh-impossible challenge with your body already being as exhausted as it is. If you go to your father right now, the chances of you surviving the next ten hours will be lower than one percent.]

[I will respect your decision if you still wish to go to your father.]

[But the quietest wings carry the weightiest wisdoms because they are the only wings that know not to fly in a storm.]

…

She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, exhaled heavily.

Her heart was telling her to go to her father right this instant, but her body was saying no.

Her body said ‘you wouldn’t make it if you went in this state’.

“... Alright,” she whispered, as she pried her eyelids slowly open and nodded at Eria. “I’ll… I’ll go to the shelter. Reprieve. I’ll sleep for a bit, then try to grab some food and water on the way before heading to my dad.”

[That is a sound plan. Now–]

Like a calm river’s surface disturbed by a ripple, there was a tingling feeling on her bracers’ bristles that alerted her to something behind her. Something moderately big. Something extremely fast, something incredibly sharp—she whirled and ducked at the same time, barely avoiding getting her head lopped off by the giant spider’s talons.

Her blood froze, and so did the rest of her body.

Even in her utterly exhausted state, she recognised it as a grey wolf spider; a species with stout bodies and long legs and were agile runners, especially during the night. Eight beady black eyes arranged across three rows on its face stared blankly down at her, and for a few seconds both of them were unmoving.

Unflinching.

Silently appraising the other’s fighting strength, as though a head-on battle between the ant and the titan was even going to be a close battle at all.

…

Eria didn’t need to shout in her ear twice. She didn’t need to turn the dial on her pocket watch more than once. A split second before the wolf spider lunged in with two talons hissing with venom, she jumped back and began sprinting down the street as fast as her legs could carry her.

[Drawing upon shallow memories, processing, creating mental map of the Alshifa undertown… turn left at the next intersection, then right, right, left, left, right–]

“I know how to get to the shelter! Familiarity! I’ve been running on these streets my entire life!” she hissed in response, much harsher than she thought she’d sounded in her own head, but the wolf spider was very close behind; she wasn’t in the mood to hear Eria regurgitating simple directions. “Do you know… a method to shake it off? Distraction? I’m kinda… focusing! On running!”

[Bringing it to the shelter would be the best option–]

“No! Don’t! I won’t bring it to everyone else! I have to deal with it here!”

[That would be impossible. You are in no state to fight right now. This wolf spider is several times more powerful than the cave cricket you deceived back in the sewers. Its running speed is nigh-unmatched, and it will not fall for any sort of trickery. You must call for aid.]

She bit her lips and slipped through a broken fence, ducking into a dark alleyway. The wolf spider crashed through the whole fence and slammed into the walls of a building, using its legs as brakes and anchors to slingshot itself into the alley. It wanted her badly, and it wouldn’t stop until either one of them were twitching half-dead on the ground.

Maybe I have to fight it, after all?

But I… I–

She rounded a corner, ran around a firefly lamp, and then ran promptly into another firefly lamp. Her eyes went for a torrential swim. Her momentum halted completely as she stumbled a few steps back, closing the distance between her and the wolf spider, and no amount of shouting by Eria could get her feet to start moving again.

No.

My head… my legs… my eyes…

[Shout something! Make a ruckus! You have no other option but to hope for someone to hear you now!]

Time seemed to move in slow motion as the exhaustion from the past few hours finally caught up to her. Vaguely she felt herself falling, pivoting on one foot to face the wolf spider in her final moments, but when her pocket watch rang with a little ding and the firefly bulb she’d attached to it as a prototype glowed with the might of a tiny, tiny sun–

“Dahlia!”

Two moth girls darted in from an adjacent roof in the blink of an eye, kicking the wolf spider into the side of a building, and then a mantis swordsman dashed past her falling body with his sword reared far behind his back.

She’d seen the silhouette of this swordsman many times before, training his unsheathing, his instant sharpening, and downwards cleaving all in one single motion.

The wolf spider was only as big as the cave cricket was, so it didn’t stand a chance as Issam’s gleaming sword split its head apart with a cracking squelch.

…

[He’s strong,] Eria commented idly as she fell onto her back, sheer fatigue claiming her body at long last. [Will he take you safely to the shelter, or should I inject a burst of adrenaline so you can run away?]

She managed to shake her head before her mind started drifting off to sleep.

That’s Issam, she thought, though she knew Eria couldn’t hear her inner voice. He’s the second strongest student in Alshifa.

[...]

[... I see.]

[I hear you.]

[Then, I will patiently await your awakening.]

[Once you reawaken and regroup with your friends at the shelter, you must figure out how to deal with this Swarm invasion together.]

Arc One, “Night of the Black Stars”, End