The Unmaker

Alice's glowing thread continued pulling tight at Dahlia's waist as the Sun's fiery arrow jerked all of them upward. She clutched the line with both hands, knuckles white, eyes wide against the rush of wind. Her heart thudded so hard it hurt her ribs. Below her, the chasm that had nearly devoured them all was vanishing into darkness and collapse. The narrow walls of the desert chute around them were closing in with terrifying speed, sand and stone crumbling inward in massive slabs, and the roar of the earth swallowing itself swallowed every other sound.

She squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for impact, for pain, for the weight of stone to crush her spine—

Then everything broke open.

Air.

Cold, sweet, dry air.

Her eyes flew open just in time to see the City of Feasts stretching far and wide beneath them. She blinked against the sudden moonlight, sharp and silver and… almost strange after weeks spent underground. She wasn't used to it, and it took her a moment to reorient herself.

They were all flying—no, hovering—some fifty metres above the city, still being hoisted up by the Sun's arrow.

For a moment, the night was quiet save the snapping of wind across her ears.

Then she saw the smoke.

The city was on fire.

Below them, the stacked streets of the City of Feasts cracked and burned. Smoke rolled in thick plumes from crumbling towers. Fire climbed balconies like vines. Sandstone buildings that once stood proud and glowing under the moon now sagged in on themselves, broken and blackened. Entire city blocks had fallen into themselves. Roads cracked like dried clay.

The northern end of the city they were hovering over was the worst of it all. A crescent-shaped wound of destruction carved across the sand, like a trench of rot cutting through a garden—and from the giant crack in the ground came giant shadows. Bugs, skittering out from the underground tunnels and out into the open air.

[Two hundred and fifteen D-Rank to A-Rank Giant-Classes detected.]

At least two hundred of them surging across the city in a directionless rampage. It wasn't easy to tell what they were, because they were as varied as bugs could be: all sorts of beetles, locusts, ants, and spiders. Lots of spiders. Each was as large as a house, and the ground shook beneath their legs. They scuttled, burrowed, and clawed their way through the buildings, a full siege in motion. No order. No need for order.

And leading the rampage, two distant figures gave off killing pressures that burned like stars.

Apocia and Thracia.

They were unmistakable. Once dull and frail—if the hulking tarantula that was Apocia could even be called that to begin with—their chitin plates now glowed with faint streaks of pink and red, making them quite striking to the eye.

"... We're too late," Otto whispered, and Dahlia barely caught his voice over the rushing wind in her ears.

Blaire hissed between her teeth and pulled her mask down tighter. "So they really did it, those bitches. They've fully replenished their strength and sated their hunger now."

No one spoke for a moment.

Then, the Sun shouted over the wind.

"This isn't over yet!"

Dahlia turned, heart still hammering, to see the Sun diving straight down with her bow broken into two fiery daggers.

"This is only the first ember!" the Sun shouted. "If you wish to wear the brand of Hasharana, then show me you can walk through fire without flinching!"

The sandstone city split like honeycombs under Apocia's fists.

She slammed through the third story of a merchant's guildhall, her six arms dragging concrete slabs and cracked frescoes into the air before the entire structure burst outward behind her. Dust and splinters curled into the night, trailing her movements like she was being followed by a tail of ash and rage. The city screamed behind her. Oil fires crackled from overturned barrels and burst pipelines. Glass shattered. Pillars buckled. Giant-Class bugs stormed through the labyrinthine alleyways of the City of Feasts, ripping shutters from balconies and flattening plaza fountains beneath their weight.

It was glorious.

She grinned wide with sharp mandibles and leapt after her younger sister, smashing her legs into the side of a temple column and sending debris into the night. It was good to destroy. It was good to burn. These streets had been too quiet for too long.

This!

This is freedom!

Wind tore at her face, the air hot with oil-smoke and burning threads of her younger sister's silk, but the heat only fed the pulse thrumming in her veins. The blood of their eldest sister churned like liquid fire inside them, thick with power, and with every strike Apocia delivered to the city, she felt closer to the god she once was.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Her claws sank through a watchtower's central pillar as she dropped beside it and yanked. Stone and mortar cracked. The structure collapsed with a scream of iron hinges. Somewhere below, she heard the screech of a dying vehicle—something wheeled and weak—before it was silenced by her swarm.

She breathed deep. The desert air filled her lungs.

There had been a time when Apocia and her six sisters ruled the canopies of this continent. There had been a time when silk-strung cathedrals of webs hung between shattered cities and ruined mountains, and the humans knew better than to speak their names aloud.

She remembered those days fondly, back when the world still trembled at the name of the Seven Spider Spinners.

The humans were softer back then. Dumber. Easier to herd. Their blades were duller, their tactics were scattered, and the Swarm itself was wilder—more animal than army—but even chaos had purpose back then. Under their eldest sister's command, the seven of them had torn through metal capitals and mudbrick palaces, leaving trails of silk-wrapped monuments behind. Apocia had killed her first human sixty years ago by tearing his head in half. Thracia had taken her first town by flooding the square with water they broke out of a dam.

She leapt off the crumbling minaret and landed with a bone-splitting crack on the spine of a warehouse, rolling as her weight tore a trench down the middle of the roof. Thunder cracked somewhere in the distance. Not sky-thunder—an explosion from her horde of Giant-Class bugs.

Good!

Let it burn!

Let them all burn!

Because those easy days back then hadn't lasted.

The Hasharana had come.

Apocia's claws flexed as she drove her fist into the side of a market hall, glass exploding outward like pollen from a flower. A second punch followed, and a cascade of stone slammed into the square around her.

Those blasted wandering bug-slayers hadn't come out of nowhere. There had been signs of their formation even before the Swarm God descended in Year Seventy, but they might as well have come out of nowhere, trickling out from every city and every front on the continent.

And they'd come out with incredible ferocity.

There weren't many of them in the beginning. Just one or two every month. Observing. Recording. Gathering whispers in alleyways and old records. Eventually, though, they learned the seven of them by name, by movement, by preferences, and for each Hasharana she killed, two more took their place. The more she fought, the stronger they came. They spoke in cold tongues, coordinated like the Swarm never could, and hunted without rest.

She hated them.

She abhorred them like every other bug in the world.

These past thirty years had been humiliation stacked on humiliation. The seven of them had gone from queens to vermin. From gods to whispers in the dirt. She had watched her sisters fall one by one, swallowed by fire, crushed by blades, frozen, burned, decapitated—again and again and again.

But now—

She vaulted back onto the roofs, twisting through a spinning leap as Thracia caught up beside her, webbing slung around her arms like a harness. Her younger sister snarled, kicking through a glass dome and sending debris flying into the alleys.

Now they had the blood again. Now they were gods again.

Apocia landed beside a cratered clocktower and drove her legs into the street below, cleaving a sinkhole in its centre. Flames licked around her feet, oil igniting in little bursts as her swarm crashed through the next district in waves of blackened chitin. Thunderous roars echoed down the alleys.

She stood atop her ruined bazaar, her body lit by the fires around her, and threw back her head in laughter.

Just like the old days.

Just like before the Hasharana came.

…

But something was wrong.

Apocia narrowed her many eyes.

There were no screams.

She tilted her head and sniffed again, mandibles clenching with unease. There were signs of life all around—faint traces of breathing, movement, and the hard crack of insect chitin crushing sandstone buildings—but there wasn't a single human. Not a single body. There were no blood on the walls and no crushed corpses beneath the rubble.

Her claws flexed at her sides. She bared her fangs and turned in a full circle, letting her lower eyes track the ruined paths behind her. There should be entrails. Screams. The scent of torn flesh. But there was nothing.

They hadn't killed anyone yet.

And then the roof of the sandstone temple in front of her exploded in a hail of sand and light.

Apocia snarled, throwing an arm in front of her face as the wind buffeted her back. Shattered sandstone slapped against her plating. Beside her, Thracia crouched low, eight clawed limbs tense, legs ready to leap—but neither of them moved from the centre of the bazaar.

She recognised the scent.

The two figures that landed on the roof before her were framed by the collapsing dust. One was cloaked in a storm of firelight, and the other was silent, hanging upside down on a gleaming red thread.

The Sun and the Hangman.

Of course.

The Sun sneered down at her, bow already drawn and glinting like a crescent blade beneath the moon.

"We predicted this, you know?"

Apocia narrowed her gaze. The Sun continued, her tone infuriatingly calm.

"This is the Hasharana Entrance Exam," she drawled. "We knew you'd come crawling out eventually. That's why we emptied the city out to the outskirts beforehand."

Apocia's mandibles flared. "You lie."

The Sun's smirk widened. "Thousands of bug-slayers from organizations all across the continent gather to take our entrance exam every year. Just how many people do you think are surrounding this city right now?"

She was about to snarl something back when the roofs around them exploded again, and ten new figures landed one by one on the buildings surrounding them. Tall, cloaked in flower-patched mantles, each wielding a weapon big enough to split open a Giant-Class bug in half. Their skin was laced with chitin plates. Segmented carapaces. Wings. Claws. Iron mandibles growing from cheeks. Chitin-spined legs curling beneath heavy armour.

Ten more flower-caped Hasharana, every one of them radiating killing pressure.

The Hangman, dangling upside down under the Sun's slanted roof, couldn't resist a laugh. "You two doomed yourselves the moment you stepped into the City of Feasts!" she chirped. "Now you're not leaving!"

…

They'd been lured.

Herded.

Surrounded.

And yet.

A sharp grin spread across Apocia's fanged mouth.

She laughed once, low and cruel.

"... Well then." She lifted her chin and met the Sun's eyes. "I suppose we'll have to celebrate the return of the Spider Sisters with the death of two Arcana Hasharana."

One more fight.

Glory to the Swarm.