The Unmaker

… The sandstone street reeked of smoke and salt-blood.

Apocia cracked her limbs one by one, the joints of her arms clicking like grinding millstones as she rolled her shoulders. Each crack echoed against the crumbling buildings around her. Her knuckles flexed, claws trailing sparks across her own chitin plates.

Her back hurt.

Not much. Not enough to stop her. But enough to piss her off. She ran her palm over the cracked carapace arching across her back, fingers brushing the jagged fracture. It throbbed beneath her touch.

Tch.

It'd been a while since anything had gotten through there, so begrudgingly, she'd give the firefly girl with the hammer that much. She was a little wounded.

The air rippled as Thracia crash-landed beside her, debris shivered under her feet. "Nice view from the sky, big sister," she greeted, breathless but smiling, brushing soot from her face like it was nothing. "Are those gnats still breathing?"

Apocia flicked a sneer back at her younger sister. "The Sun and the others?"

"Hard to say." Thracia twirled a thread between her claws, a predator's smirk curling her mandibles. "I hit her with a thread spear strong enough to turn a canyon into a crater. She blocked it, sure, but… well. We'll see if I need to dig for a corpse."

"Do it." Apocia nodded toward the burning street's end. "I'm sure I smashed the Hangman to a pulp somewhere through a building, so I'll check up on the firefly."

They bumped fists, the chitinous crack sharp and solid before Thracia leapt away into the smoke.

For her part, Apocia turned her steps toward the lone figure sprawled at the other end of the street.

The firefly girl was trying to crawl away.

Apocia's grin spread slowly. "Oh, look at you," she cooed, voice dripping venom. "Still clinging to life like the bug you are."

The girl gripped her hammer like a lifeline, dragging her battered body through the rubble, smeared in ash and blood. Pathetic. Apocia closed the distance in a single stride, rearing back a leg and driving her foot into the girl's stomach. The impact lifted the girl off the ground and sent her skidding across the street like a ragdoll. Her cry was a thin gasp—barely audible beneath the groan of shifting debris—as she slammed into a wall, and a small cascade of rubble collapsed onto her.

Apocia followed at a lazy pace, talons clacking against the stone.

"What's wrong? Not so strong now, are you?" she mocked, reaching down and swiping the debris aside with a contemptuous flick.

Curled beneath the rubble, the girl lay in a tight ball, breaths shallow, hammer still clutched to her chest.

Apocia's grin widened.

She drove her foot into the girl's ribs again, sending her bouncing into yet another heap of rubble. This time, there was no cry. No gasp.

But she was still alive.

Good.

Die slowly.

Apocia crouched beside her, claws hooking into the girl's hair. She yanked her up onto her knees, forcing the girl's head back. Her face was streaked with dirt, lips split, but her eyes…

Her eyes still burned.

"... You know," Apocia purred, "for decades, you Hasharana have hunted us like animals." Her claws traced a slow line down the girl's cheek, leaving thin crimson cuts. "Like we were at the bottom of the food chain. The Seven Spider Spinners, reduced to nothing but quarry. That wasn't very godly of us, was it?"

She carved another line, savouring the sting.

"How does it feel, little Hasharana?" she sneered, "to be beneath the boot? To be humiliated like the bug you really are?"

Another slash.

No scream.

Not even a whimper.

Apocia's lips curled back. "Say something. Go on. Squeal. Beg. Cry. I'm giving you a chance here, you little…"

The girl's mouth opened. Apocia leaned in, lips parting to mock her again.

"What is it?" she snarled. "What are your final words? What does a bug have to say—"

"Made you look," the girl whispered.

Then a wad of searing sand struck Apocia square in the face.

It was blinding. Hot. So blistering hot that even through her chitin, it scalded. She recoiled, hissing, flinging the girl aside as she clawed the sand from her eyes.

Her vision blurred. Every blink grated like grinding glass.

How?

How did the whelp keep that in her mouth without flinching?

What kind of heat tolerance does she have?

She blinked hard, the sand streaming off her face, and through the haze, she saw the firefly girl scrambling—not away this time, but towards her giant warhammer sitting just a fair bit away from here.

Cute. But still futile. Apocia surged forward, claws poised to cleave the girl in two before she could reach her precious toy—

But the moment her weight shifted, a sharp, sickening pain exploded through her legs.

Her knees buckled.

Staggering, she dropped to one leg, her breaths catching. Something was wrong. Her balance was off, and her body was sluggish. Like her body no longer obeyed her command.

Then she looked down and saw slivers of rusted metal, dozens of them, all lodged perfectly into the miniscule gaps between her leg plates.

Not through the chitin, no. Between the seams. It was precision so fine and so meticulous that she hadn't even felt the impact until now, when every twist of muscle pulled those shards deeper into nerves and tendons.

Vital points.

All of them.

Her claws scraped against the ground as she tried to rise, but the pain was immediate. Blinding. Her legs betrayed her, sending her sprawling onto her back.

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Impossible.

To be able to bypass my toughness and figure out exactly where you need to stab to destabilise me for a moment…

It didn't matter, though. Not truly. The little firefly girl may have gotten the better of her for a moment, but there was no way she could lift that absurdly large warhammer and swing it with any amount of force with how injured she was now. Apocia grinned, almost wanting to let the girl try and get a good hit on her again—

But then the girl's fingers curled around the haft, and the world seemed to disappear around the two of them.

The flames died. All of them were extinguished in an instant. The roaring blaze devouring the sandstone city vanished as if smothered by an invisible hand, and the smoke cleared. The rubble faded. The burning City of Feasts bled away as the night sky, too, turned into nothing but a deep, empty vacuum devoid of stars and gentle light.

Apocia's breath caught in her throat.

She knew this place.

The floating islands drifted lazily beneath her. The air was thick with thunder, charged with the weight of a breaking storm. Winds howled against nothing. Here was the battlefield of an old war: the place where she and her Spider Sisters first met him.

A memory?

It was a memory, but it was now—and the little firefly girl in front of her was no longer a girl.

Mantis arms folded like blades across a thorax of hornet chitin. Six shimmering moth wings spread wide from a beetle's armoured back. Antlion mandibles jutted from a throat coiled in centipede segments, while firefly veins pulsed beneath a translucent membrane of webbed flesh. She had four arms, eight eyes, and even her two legs bore the gnarled heft of a stag beetle, every joint of hers a mismatched graft of insect and vile, wretched thing.

She was humanoid in the loosest sense. A mockery of form built to offend the gods, if there were any, but it was her face—or the absence of it—that stilled Apocia's breath.

Shadows swallowed her features, leaving only the twin slits of her eight golden, lurid eyes.

Vertical irises that seemed to pulse with every rumble of thunder.

… Apocia's lungs refused her. Her throat convulsed uselessly.

She couldn't speak. Her body betrayed her.

Those golden eyes pinned her to the ground and dissected her. She was flayed open beneath that gaze, every secret, every fear exposed. Her legs refused to brace. Her claws hung limp at her sides. Her mandibles twitched, useless.

Move.

Strike.

Rip… her… apart.

But nothing.

And when the girl lifted her hammer, the weapon responded like a living beast. The head of the hammer cracked, splitting apart down its iron length, and inside, a mouth revealed itself: wide, gaping, packed with jagged teeth in rows upon rows, gnashing at the air with a hunger so palpable it throbbed in her skull.

Apocia's mind raced, a loop of denials.

She's just a human.

A child.

Not even a Hasharana.

This… this isn't real.

This is a trick.

This is…

But she knew.

In that frozen moment, beneath the weight of that burning golden gaze, she knew.

Who are you?

Why won't you give up?

Haven't I hurt you enough already?

And as the girl gripped her hammer with all four hands, bringing it down on Apocia's chest—

Why are you here, Kin of the King?

The storm vanished around her. The dream ended, and the sandstone city returned. Desert winds howled as sand twisted into a vortex around the girl, coiling around the hammer's jaws, and at the same time, lightning surged. Crackling, golden lightning lashed out from the girl's four hands and zipped down the hammer, strengthening the impact as it struck her square in the chest.

Chitin cracked.

Apocia felt it. The protective plates of her breast—her proud armor forged by generations of war—split beneath that devouring maw. The lightning-infused hammer chewed its way inward, lightning gnawing through muscle, sand grinding through sinew. It was a detonation of pure force and pain.

She screamed.

Her mind reeled, flaying open as understanding poured in with the pain. She saw it now with brutal clarity: the girl's breath carried the antlion's vortex, twisting the sands to her will, but that was undeniably the firefly's Art as well.

Two Arts. One human.

"... Assasssin bug!" she screamed. "Why are you here?"

The raw, wretched scream that cracked across the city hit Thracia's ears first.

She flinched mid-leap, legs skittering against the fractured sandstone tiles as she landed on a high roof, her breaths hitching.

That was Apocia.

She whirled immediately, scanning the burning streets behind her. All eight pupils narrowed into slits as she desperately looked for the epicentre of that terrible sound, and—there.

Her older sister, monstrous and proud, was being crushed in the chest by a warhammer. That human firefly girl—not even a Hasharana—was the one standing over her with that gnashing, snapping warhammer.

For a heartbeat, Thracia's legs refused her.

What… is that thing?

From here, she wasn't swallowed whole by that suffocating bloodlust, but even at this distance, the weight of the firefly girl's presence was suffocating.

Every inch of her told her to run.

… But Apocia was down there.

No.

Thracia's mandibles ground together, sparks scraping between serrated edges. She was the youngest. The smallest. But she wasn't weak, and she wasn't going to abandon a sister of hers anymore.

With a hiss, she reared back, threading a spear between her jaws. Her silk flowed fast and precise, coiling into a dense, venom-laced spiral. One good shot from this distance was all it'd take. Her six arms spread, anchoring herself as her spinnerets thrummed. She'd snipe that wretched little human's head clean off.

No more games.

Her aim locked, perfect, the city's glow sharpening her focus. The wind curled just right. A breath, shallow and thin, filled her chest.

She fired—or tried to, as something sharp and sleek pierced through her cheek.

Pain exploded .

A fiery streak, red-hot, punched into the left side of her face and burst out the right, shattering the half-formed spear in her mouth.

She immediately staggered back with a wet, guttural hiss of pain, legs fumbling on the slanted roof as she flicked splatters of molten silk and blood from her fangs.

She twisted her head, spitting pure rage until she spotted the archer perched like a broken-winged bird on a distant roof. Her bow was gone. Her tattered beetle armour clung to her body in loose, charred straps. Her long, silky black hair was matted to her face with sweat and blood, but the Sun still stood, holding a single arrow like it was a javelin.

"Persistent fuck!" Thracia snarled, yanking the arrow from her cheek with a wet crackle. Her mandibles clicked in disgust. Another thread spear began to form in her mouth, her spinnerets vomiting venom-soaked silk into a new spiral—but the Sun wasn't going to just stand there and wait this time.

The Arcana Hasharana leapt.

No bow. No finesse. With a burning thrust of muscle and sheer willpower, the Sun leapt straight at her, and the arrow in the human's hand ignited, flames roaring to life as if furious with the world itself.

Thracia's eyes went wide as the arrow propelled itself at her chest with the force of a meteorite, while the Sun rode the arrow by holding onto the fletching.

Too fast!

Thracia whipped all six of her arms up, thread-laced claws slicing to intercept, but the arrow didn't slow. The flames ate her threads and reduced them to cinders before they even touched.

A heartbeat too late, she tried to dodge.

Impact.

Fire consumed her vision as the Sun's arrow stabbed into her chest, and both of them rocketed backwards across the sky of the City of Feasts.

The world was screaming.

No, Apocia was screaming.

Apocia bellowed as she seized the head of the hammer with all six arms, feeling its electrified jaws gnashing at her palms. Sparks bit into her chitin, arcing across her fingers, but she didn't let go.

Not again.

Not after everything.

"Don't—" Her mandibles ground, her voice shredded by rage. "Don't you dare underestimate me!"

The girl gritted her teeth and hissed back, pushing down her warhammer, her face twisted in a mix of terror and stubbornness. Lightning danced across her arms, sand curled around her feet, and for a moment, it almost seemed like she could force Apocia back down.

Almost.

But almost was not enough.

"I… am… a Spider God!" Apocia roared, and with a heave of every muscle in her gargantuan body, she shoved the hammer skyward. "You are nothing to me!"

The girl stumbled, sandals scraping against cracked stone, and Apocia surged upward, forcing herself to her feet. Her back ached, her chestplate still sizzling with lingering energy, but she was upright again.

Alive.

Furious.

The girl backed away, step by step, retreating down the ruined street with her hammer held like a fragile shield, but it'd take more than a shield for her to survive what Apocia was going to do to her.

Apocia lunged.

The city blurred as she charged, every footfall shattering stone beneath her. Her claws slashed through the smoke, fists hammering forward with the force of a falling mountain. She didn't think. Didn't strategise. The sounds tearing out of her throat were nothing but raw noise now: howls of fury, screeches born of some deeper fear. This fight had slipped from tactics to pure, animalistic violence.

But the moment came. A crack in the girl's footing. An exposed angle.

Now.

Apocia's arm swung down, claws gleaming, ready to cleave the girl's head from her shoulders.

But her strike never landed.

Two figures crashed-landed between them—one in a tattered noble's feathery mantle, the other in stained Plagueplain garb—and they moved as one, hands clasped.

The Noble-Blood swung her sawtooth greatsword gripped in a single, defiant hand, and with a sharp, brutal parry, she met Apocia's slash head-on. The jolt of the impact shuddered up Apocia's arm. At the same time, the Plagueplain Doctor's syringe claws were stabbed into the Noble-Blood's other hand, pumping something bitter and sour and sweet-smelling into the girl's body— not to wound, but to amplify human strength.

For the first time tonight, a mere human was able to meet her strength head on.

"...This is it, Dahlia," the Noble-Blood whispered. "Tonight, we shall slay a god."