The Unmaker

While Safi shovelled all the sand outside the tavern, Emparatoria continued quickly towards the City of Feasts in the distance.

Now that Dahlia was sitting cross-legged up on the giant cicada’s back and not looking out a dinghy window, she realised two things: the city wasn’t built under a giant ribcage, and it was also much, much larger than she’d thought.

The City of Feasts was a chaotic sprawl of ramshackle buildings and makeshift towers built from scrap, stone, and golden wood. What she thought were ribs earlier were, instead, eight colossal spider legs curling upwards and looming over the giant city like a ribcage, rust-coloured and weathered by the desert sands. She could already taste the dryness and the grit, like old metal on her tongue. The heat, too—there was no escaping it. The sun burned down without any clouds in the azure sky, and more flares of light reflected from the scrap and glass scattered across the city, blinding her eyes.

She couldn’t even look at the city properly, so she looked at the spider legs instead, towering a menacing hundred metres over the desert city like they’d always been a permanent fixture… except that couldn’t possibly be the case–

“Ow!”

Alice yelped, clapping her hands over her ears and making Dahlia jump in fright; the two of them had been kicked out of the tavern to sit above Emparatoria instead, but Dahlia had spent the past few hours trying not to hurl, so they hadn’t really talked. More accurately, they hadn’t really had a conversation—Alice rambling about how much she hated the sand for three hours straight didn’t count as conversation—but so close to the City of Feasts now, Dahlia supposed she had lots she wanted to say about the spider legs.

Dahlia had lots she wanted to ask, too, but right now…

“What’s… up?” she asked, worry creasing her brows as Alice rubbed her own ears, grimacing quietly.

“Nothing,” Alice mumbled, head lolling left and right. “It’s just… it’s been a while since I’ve been near a worm effigy, so I’m just now receiving a bunch of notifications I should’ve received three months ago.”

“Notifications?”

Alice tapped her own nape. “The Altered Swarmsteel System. Just because I have a registered system doesn’t mean I get constantly updating information everywhere on the continent. For the most part, we Hasharana have established ‘worm effigies’ in most corners of the continent—they’re like signal beacons where information can be deposited and sent to every other Hasharana in the vicinity—but there are still a few places where effigies are pretty much nonexistent. The entire Sharaji Desert has… like, one effigy. And it’s right inside the City of Feasts.”

Dahlia blinked. “What… uh, what does a registered Altered Swarmsteel System do again? Why do I have to take the exam to get it registered?”

“... Well, for starters, you get access to a ton of annoying features you won’t really use,” Alice said, sighing as she kicked back on the cicada carapace and folded her arms under her head, closing her eyes. “The main difference between a normal Swarmsteel System and an Altered Swarmsteel System is the presence of the ‘Archive’, which is… you know. The artificial intelligence that talks to you. Haven’t you noticed, though, that your Archive is pretty much useless when it comes to anything outside of hunting bugs?”

“Uh… no?” Dahlia said, tilting her head quizzically. “Kari’s really helpful. I like Kari.”

[Aw. Thank you–]

“That’s because you haven’t been to a big city where there’s lots to do other than wake up, pick reeds, work in a forge, and then go to sleep,” Alice mumbled, raising a single finger to shush her. “Listen: the Archive does exactly what it’s named after. It’s just a glorified librarian that retrieves information from a database, and that database needs to be updated manually all the time. Who manages the database, hm? Who do you think updates all the information every single hour of the day?”

“The Worm God?”

Alice flicked a silk band at her forehead, making her wince. “Stupid. We do. The Altered Swarmsteel System is constantly collecting environmental information from our surroundings—the temperature, the wind speed, the lay of the land—and whenever we approach a worm effigy, all of that information is instantly deposited into the effigy, then sent out as a signal to every other Altered Swarmsteel System in the area. Since there are registered Hasharana and worm effigies in most parts of the continent, we basically have constant access to all sorts of live information all across the continent.”

Dahlia glanced at the little golden bug on her shoulder, blinking pointedly.

She’s not lying, right?

[No.]

So you… you really are a really, really, really advanced Swarmsteel.

[Well, yes. I told you as much back when we first met in Alshifa–]

“This ‘live information’ we can access near worm effigies are manifold, including, but not limited to: weather forecasts, navigation data, bug bounties, distress signals, restaurant suggestions, pathfinding suggestions, private messages left by another Hasharana, private complaints left by another Hasharana who you stole a bounty kill from, and death threats left by another Hasharana who you stole a bounty kill from even though they were the one who answered the distress signal first,” Alice rambled, raising eight more fingers and shushing Dahlia with all of them, “and I’m an Arcana Hasharana, so I just got about a hundred notifications the moment I entered the range of the worm effigy. I keep telling my Archive to not slam my head with every message all at once, but oh well. I’ll read them later.”

Kari dipped its head as though to sigh, and Dahlia looked at Alice worriedly. “Shouldn’t you… uh, read them now? Some of them are probably important messages, right? What if people need you to kill something?”

“Eh. There’s always people who need someone else to kill something for them. I only have four arms and two legs—can’t help everyone, can I?” she replied, shrugging nonchalantly as she glanced to the side, reading an invisible status screen. “Besides, I’m an Arcana Hasharana. I don’t get a lot of low-rank missions telling me to hunt down anything less than an A-rank Mutant. Madamaron was a bit different, since it was an unknown-rank Mutant all the way out in an area without a worm effigy, so the risk was too high for any normal Hasharana to accept the mission… but…”

“...”

Alice trailed off, and the ice in her crimson eyes could’ve frozen boiling water.

Dahlia fidgeted with her claws in her laps, tilting her head again. “What’s up? What are you reading?”

“... Nothing,” Alice replied in the most suspicious ‘something’ voice, “it’s nothing you have to worry about, anyways, as an exam taker. Just focus on eating your ten points a day for the next month and get as strong as you can. There’s only one Hasharana Entrance Exam every year, and the venue is different every time, so if next year’s exam is all the way in the north, I can’t be bothered to drag you there.”

Pursing her lips, Dahlia dropped the topic of the suspicious message and looked back out at the city, squinting slightly. The flare was still blinding, but she was slowly getting used to the light.

“That’s an entire city built over a giant spider, huh?” she muttered. “Is it… safe? Aren’t loads of bugs attracted to other bug carcasses? Why build the city over something that massive?”

“Huh? No, it’s alright,” Alice said plainly. “Thirty or so years ago, the Magician and the Star took down the Lesser Great Mutant known as ‘Raposa’, eldest sister of the Seven Spider Spinners, right at the edge of the Sharaji Desert. Since Raposa was too hard to remove—and its carcass being here meant lots of oases and vegetation were allowed to flourish—people just started living over the buried carcass while using its curled-up legs as shade. There are tons of cities and towns out there built around giant bug carcasses. The City of Feasts is just a particularly scrappy one.”

“But wouldn’t lots of bugs be attracted to the giant spider? Like how the bugs we killed in Alshifa strengthened Madamaron and its brood?”

“Well, the Hasharana have preventive measures to protect the city.”

Both of Alice’s antennae split apart, pointing towards opposite ends of the city, and Dahlia’s gaze followed.

There certainly were a lot of scrap metal watchtowers erected here and there to watch for any invading bugs, but more interestingly, there were also a bunch of tiny people marching in long lines around the city, weaving and winding across the golden dunes. Some of them were actually quite close as Emparatoria drew closer and closer to the city, so Dahlia sat up a little to peer out at them—they were all garbed from head to toe in thick bronze layers, glassy wings jutting out their backs, and playing all sorts of strange-looking instruments she’d never seen before. Some were flutes, others were trumpets, and others were fusions between drums and lutes and triangles… there had to be thousands of them just scattered across the desert surrounding the desert, and all of them were playing their own sharp, harsh melody, none in sync with each other.

As Emparatoria passed by one such line, Dahlia couldn’t help but stare at one of the flute-wielding musicians in the lead; the musician glanced back, their pair of glowing red eyes piercing her soul and making her shiver.

“... The Hasharana isn’t the only wandering bug-slaying organisation in the world, you know?” Alice sighed, still laying on her back with her arms folded under her head. “We’re the most famous and the most powerful, but the Cicada Musicians of the Long March are pretty powerful, too. We have a partnership with them: the Hasharana handles most bug-slaying missions, while the Long March takes up defence for most human settlements. They all have the same cicada system class, I hear. When there’s so many of them gathered in one place, playing those shrill songs all day long, even a horde of Mutants would think twice before trying to attack.”

Dahlia was at the edge of her seat, still peering out at the Cicada Musicians. “Are there usually so many of them?” she asked. “And if there are so many of them… why weren’t there any in the Sharaji Oasis Town? They could’ve used–”

“Well, this is a special occasion. All things considered, the Long March is spread pretty thin across the continent. There’s only so many here because the Worm God asked them to be on standby for the exam, so now that I’ve reported the Oasis Town needs protection, I imagine they’ll send a few to be permanently stationed around the Oasis Town once the exam is over,” Alice said, raising a few more fingers. “By the way, the Long March isn’t the only organisation invited to the city. Remember what I said a long time ago about this exam?”

“Uh… no?”

“People from all across the continent are always raring to register in the annual exam,” she said, opening a single eye as she grinned at Dahlia. “Being a Hasharana is a huge honour, after all! There’s no doubt about it! You’ll bump into tons of people from the Attini Empire Front, the Rampaging Hinterland Front, the Hellfire Caldere Front, the Deepwater Legion Front, and even people who just want to give the exam a try with their own self-modified insect system classes—considering an average of a thousand people register every year, it’s gonna be fun watching you guys beat each other up from the spectator stands!”

Dahlia blanked out.

It’d sounded like someone else’s problem three months ago, back when Alice first told her about the exam that people had to pass to obtain a legitimate Altered Swarmsteel System, but now…

“... Actually,” she asked, raising a meek, hesitant hand. “What am I… um, what are participants supposed to do in the exam?”

“So, there are always three stages in the exam,” Alice said cheerily, “and the first stage is almost guaranteed to be a team-based hunting exam, where ninety percent of participants die within the first week!”