In a voice that didn’t belong to the ten Mutant-Class gliding ants around Zora, they spoke in unison.

  “I’m always watching, after all,” Decima said, and it was a lady’s reverberating, echoing voice, coming out from all ten of their mouths at the same time. “Eyes and ears across the empire.”

  Zora let out a slow breath and smiled. “How nice of you to come out and greet me. You know, for a good two years, I wondered if I was chasing a phantom. Some distant whisper slipping through the cracks of the empire. But, with this…”

  He raised Nona’s wand and pointed it at the ants.

  The spiral-patterned stick trembled in his grip. A shiver of recognition. Like a hound catching scent.

  “... Like a bone recognising its dog,” he said, smirking.

  The ants grinned back, baring jagged teeth.

  Then they lunged.

  Zora breathed in. His voice cut through the wind like the edge of a knife.

  “Up and rend!”

  Steel screamed as the metal plates beneath his feet tore themselves apart. Metal plates twisted and shrieked, ripping upwards in jagged slabs. He kicked off a rising panel, putting some more distance between him and the charging ants as he shouted “forward”. The flying debris hovered for a heartbeat—then they flung themselves forward.

  The steel sheets spun like a storm of razor metal, cutting into the nearest ant with a crunch, sending it tumbling off the train. It wasn’t dead, though. More shadows fell from above. Wings buzzed, mandibles clacked. Six ants dove at him, and he barely managed to get his next word out.

  “Shatter!”

  Every window on the train exploded at once. A thousand glass shards burst from their frames, along twenty carriages of the mechanical beast, catching the moonlight in a glittering storm. Zora swept his hand through the air, and the shards obeyed—twisting, swarming, a deadly spiral of jagged edges.

  He flung them skyward.

  The flying ants shrieked as glass lanced through their wings, shredding the thin membranes. Two of them spiraled out of control, slammed against the train, and tumbled into the darkness. The others continued pressing forward.

  One pounced from behind. Another from the front. A third from the side, claws gleaming as they carved through the air. The train beneath them rattled, still hurtling toward the horizon, but Zora didn’t falter.

  “Deflect!”

  The air warped. A shimmering barrier formed at his back, crackling with unseen force. The ant behind him slammed into it, its momentum reversing like it’d struck an invisible wall. Then he ducked, sidestepped a claw strike next to his face, and twisted with his wand whipping “shrapnel strike”. The smaller torn steel plates he’d ripped from the train earlier jolted to life. They lifted, hovered, then shot forward like bullets.

  The ant that’d run into his barrier had no time to react. The steel spikes impaled it through the chest, catching its heart on the way, and more spikes shredded through the ants behind it. Those ones weren’t dead. He delayed them further with a “collapse and crumble”, caving in the roof beneath the four grounded ants. Metal caved inward as if struck by an invisible hammer, and the creatures dropped with a startled screech, vanishing as the walls of the carriage crumbled and collapsed inwards to crush them in an iron grip.

  Thank the Great Makers the engineers listened to me when I asked if they could replace the walls with a softer, more malleable metal.

  If the walls were tempered steel alloys instead, I wouldn’t be able to imagine myself manipulating the metal like this.

  Still, Decima’s voice threaded between his attacks, unshaken. Her tone was almost amused.

  “I don’t particularly care about Nona, for your information,” she said, her voice rippling through the ants’ many mouths. “She’s always been the child between the two of us, so what if a child or two meets an untimely demise? I could just make more. Imagine a dozen Nonas in front of you right now—wouldn’t that be a sight for sore eyes?”

  Zora gritted his teeth, breathing hard. His spells were efficient, but they weren’t free. The strain was beginning to build, a creeping exhaustion in the pit of his stomach. He ignored it. “Could you make more Nonas?”

  “Of course not. Always three witches, never more,” she scoffed. “But you see, the death of a relative makes for a convenient excuse. The northwestern humans have a phrase for it, don’t they? Casa… Cusi… Ca—”

  “Casus belli,” he finished. “A reason to start a war.”

  Decima’s voice curled with mirth. “I’ll gladly use her death to justify killing you. But don’t take it personally. We’ve been repeating this song and dance dance for sixty-three years. History doesn’t change.”

  Zora moved as another ant lunged. He feinted left, then darted right, avoiding the sweeping strike. His wand flicked outward.

  “Slice!”

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  A curved arc of force slashed through the air, invisible but deadly. It struck an ant across its torso, carving a deep gouge into its carapace. It reeled, screeching, but another took its place immediately, mandibles gnashing.

  “We slaughter you,” Decima continued. “You resist. We let you think you have the upper hand. Then we grind you down, take your land, take your hope, take everything else in-between. It’s always the same.”

  His jaw tightened. “That’s an awfully pessimistic take on life.”

  “Is it?” Decima’s tone was light, but the words curled with quiet malice. “Your family might disagree.”

  And Zora froze. Just for an instant. Less than a second. A crack in his focus, a hesitation that shouldn’t have existed.

  But the ants were waiting for it.

  A claw lashed out from behind, too fast. He turned, but not fast enough. The blow struck across his brow, cutting deep. A sharp, burning line of pain split his skin, and his ‘vision’ blurred—not from sight, but from sensation, a hot trickle carving a path down his cheek.

  The wind roared. The train hurtled forward. His breath came quicker now, his pulse drumming in his ears.

  He was running out of bioarcanic essence, and the ants were still smiling around him.

  "... Seven against one,” Decima taunted. “That should be too much, even for you."

  He kept his stance firm, feeling the steel vibrate beneath his feet. Wind lashed against his cloak, but he remained steady, listening.

  "It’s hard to recite an entire spell passage when you have to breathe and dodge at the same time, isn’t it? Magicians like you and me prefer to lob spells from afar. I won’t let you create that distance.”

  Decima’s voice slithered through the ants' throats, and it was an unnatural, reverberating hum that made the air itself feel tainted. She wasn’t controlling the ants. He could hear the clicks, the thrums, the vibrations. There were tiny cicadas buried in all of their heads, and that was how she was speaking through them, but their speed, their coordination—that was all them. Their teamwork was innate, sharpened through years of growing battle instinct.

  And below him, a few carriages back, he could still hear Kita struggling. Her breaths were sharp, strained. She was still locked in combat with the very first gliding ant, and that was no good at all. They were nearing Nohoch Ik’Balam. If these ants were to reach the capital, too many people would get hurt.

  He had to end this now.

  "... Back."

  His one-syllable word pulsed through the air. The ants staggered, their bodies momentarily resisting their own momentum, and in that brief pause, he flicked his cloak backwards.

  "Firestorm."

  Flames unfurled from his back, roaring into existence and igniting his wings and cloak. Heat rippled outward in waves, the sheer intensity forcing the ants to recoil even further. One wasn’t fast enough. He surged forward, flicked his wand into a sword, and sliced through its torso in a clean arc. The carcass split in two, sizzling as it tumbled off the train.

  Six left, but he wasn’t done. He needed to ground them.

  "Ignite."

  The air thickened with heat. Again—"Ignite"—and again—"Ignite"—until the oxygen itself felt ready to combust. The gliding ants that tried to take flight faltered midair, their wings crinkling under the rising temperature. They dropped onto the train’s roof, grounded on two feet.

  Can’t fly or use your wings when it’s too hot, huh? He half-grinned, half-grimaced as he flapped his wings as fast as he could, fanning the heat and the flames out even further, even harder. They shrivel. They wrinkle. If I can’t fly, then neither can you—

  "I’ll admit you’re strong," Decima mused through the nearest ant, its mandibles twisting into a grotesque approximation of a grin. "Versatile, too. But you’re alone. You have to protect that girl down there, don’t you? That means you can’t go all-out and just light the entire train on fire."

  Zora bit his tongue. She was right. He could easily engulf the entire train in his flames and overheat the grounded ants—and he’d survive his own flames, no problem—but he’d take Kita along with them.

  Well.

  This is troublesome.

  How do I make all of them back off just enough so I get more space to cast spells from afar, and how do I do that without hurting Kita in the process?

  His pulse pounded against his skull as he continued flapping his fiery wings. Heat coiled in his throat. It was all a bit too much even for him. The speed, the wind, the sheer sensory overload—his own fire was blinding him. He could barely hear past the deafening rush of air, and as he turned sharply, trying to track the ants’ movement, but their sounds had vanished into the haze of crackling embers.

  He’d miscalculated.

  Twelve Mutant-Classes were a bit too many.

  Then—a sound.

  A distant howl louder than his flames.

  Not wind. Not the train. Something else. Something deep. Resonant. Like the wail of something impossibly large, carried from the depths of the colossal fungi forest.

  Zora stopped breathing.

  The ants seemed to freeze, too.

  For the first time, the clicking of their mandibles ceased. Their chittering, mocking, taunting voices disappeared. The wind died. The sky itself seemed to tighten, thick with an invisible weight pressing down.

  Then, once more, the world shifted as the train veered into a thick cloud of fog.

  This is…

  Not an ordinary fog. Cold. It rolled over the steel like living tendrils, swallowing everything in an instant. One moment, there was heat—flames licking at the sky, the air blistering with his power—then there was nothing.

  Zora’s fiery wings vanished. Extinguished as if they’d never existed, and the temperature plummeted. His skin prickled with icy needles. The sweat on his body turned clammy in an instant. His breath hitched, and when he exhaled, he felt he could practically see it—a faint, glowing blue mist curling from his lips.

  The sound of the train’s wheels screeching over the tracks—gone.

  The wind—silent.

  The sounds of battle—erased.

  Only the cold remained.

  His hands twitched at his sides. His muscles screamed at him to move, to do something, but he was locked in place as if the very air had thickened around him. It was only his new spiracle mutation that allowed him to breathe at all. Otherwise, he’d have suffocated in the mist already.

  The ants weren’t exempt from the freezing mist, either. Ice crystals crept along their delicate wing membranes, a thin, unnatural frost crackling over their bodies. One by one, they took nervous steps away from him, backing onto the adjacent carriages.

  Five in front of him. Two behind him. None flying anymore.

  And just as he was about to swallow—

  A new sound behind him.

  Soft. Sharp. Metallic.

  Footsteps.

  Zora turned slowly, and the vibrations of the new arrival’s footsteps painted, in his head, the wavy silhouette of…

  … A boy?

  A boy emerged from the fog behind him. His feet were bare. His skin was half-flesh, half-metal. A cloak woven with diamond moonflowers swayed behind him, the crystalline petals swaying and clinking together with each step forward, and those sounds were the only ones he could hear in the mist—delicate, cold, and ringing like wind chimes in a mist where no wind could exist.

  The boy held a rifle as well. Bolt-action. Sleek. Lethal.

  And it was pointed directly at Zora.

  …

  Zora narrowed his eyes.

  After all, he’d been following the boy’s story even before he left Amadeus Academy.

  The other enemy of the empire.

  The Warlord of the Northwest.

  The Worm Mage.

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