Thousand Tongue Mage

Six days passed since the final match, and still the academy hummed with restless ceremony. Outside the dormitory, silk banners were being strung across the campus' streets. Trumpeters rehearsed. Uniforms were pressed and polished.

Zora awoke to none of that.

He awoke to something else entirely.

It was the middle of the night before the award ceremony tomorrow when Zora snapped awake to a low rumble. A deep rumble. It wasn't quite beneath the floorboards of their dormitory room, but it wasn't quite in the walls either. It drifted through the air in pulses, and the ba-dump, ba-dump notes caught in his ear like a half-heard syllable.

That, in itself, was strange. Rarer still, he couldn't tell exactly where it was coming from.

Zora didn't like that.

He immediately swung his legs over the edge of the top bunk and dropped to the floor quietly, letting his bare soles meet the wood. The floor itself was cool, faintly dusty, and completely still—until the next ba-dump came, trembling faintly through the arches of his feet.

Beside him, Enki sat up completely straight as well. Of course the boy wouldn't miss it. He wasn't sleeping to begin with.

So, for a good moment, neither of them spoke as if they were two instruments struck by the same note. They listened, one with ears, the other with metal-bored perception, until suddenly—as abruptly as it had begun—the rumble ceased.

Gone.

Zora's brows lowered slightly. He turned his head towards the girl's side of the room. Kita's breathing was slow, even, and unbothered as ever. She was still asleep.

But what of the other girl?

Suddenly once more, the front door creaked open, and both of them snapped their heads towards it.

There'd been no footsteps.

None.

So when a whisper and a head poked through the crack in the door, all hesitant and embarrassed, Zora couldn't help but scowl.

"Um… Mister Alvay? Mister Eryn?"

The door opened a little more as Eria looked in their general direction. Only in their general direction. She didn't try to meet either of their eyes.

"Can you… follow me, please?"

And without waiting for a reply, she pulled her head back out.

Zora angled his head at Enki, who did the same unconsciously—and then they both stepped away from the bunk, padding across the floor quietly so as not to alert Kita. Together, they stepped into their shoes and out into the hallway, where dim lanternlight was warm against Zora's cheek. Nobody was out here at this time of night but for the three of them, which meant it smelled all the more apparent: that scent of dirt and blood on Eria's dirty uniform.

"... You've been looking for bugs again?" Zora murmured as Enki closed the door behind them. "I told you. If you're hungry, I'd rather pay for snacks than have you digging through mulch—

"No, I… I wasn't digging again," she stammered. "That's… not it."

She hesitated. Her breathing quickened just slightly. Then, in a softer, steadier whisper, she leaned in close and said:

"I'm here to guide you."

Once again, she didn't wait for a reply. She turned on her heel and quickly slipped away, vaulting over the hallway railings and sprinting across the dark dormitory garden without a sound.

Zora and Enki followed the hush of her feet.

The night air was usually thick—the scent of trimmed hedges and dew-slick grass deepening as they passed under the arbors—but by the time they reached the garden's heart where a pavilion loomed like a crown, Eria had already skipped onto the centre of the pavilion, dropped on her knees.

Her knuckles strike the centre wooden tile once, then again. A pause. Then she struck a rapid four-beat rhythm in succession, as though playing…

A code.

A password?

Then a hatch groaned open beneath her, and the air that rose from the gap was colder than night, stinking faintly of iron and long-sealed dust.

Enki's jaw clicked softly beneath his mask. Zora flinched. Both of them immediately turned towards Eria, but before either of them could reach out to her, she gestured for them to follow before stepping into the bottomless chute.

No hesitation. No fear. She vanished into the dark like a coin into a well, and there was no sound of impact as far as Zora could hear.

That, too, was worrying.

"... It has to be Vantari," Zora said quietly, peering down the chute with Enki. "He's finally making a move after the mess we caused in the tournament. Be careful."

Enki nodded once like he didn't need to be told that. In truth, Zora was the one who probably had to be careful, so…

After another second of deliberation, Enki stepped into the chute after Eria, and after another second, Zora followed after.

The chute swallowed him whole.

Cold wind rushed past his cheeks. The walls of the chute were dirt for the first ten or so metres, but afterwards, it was tight—stone or reinforced clay by the way it channelled the air, if he had to guess—so he counted the seconds softly under his breath. Seventeen… eighteen…

When he finally heard the bottom beneath him after twenty seconds, he flared his wings. The air caught, snapping taut in the narrow chute's walls. His body slowed, drifted, then settled, and by the time he landed, it was in a soft crouch with dust billowing beneath his shoes.

Enki had already landed beside him, unbothered.

Zora straightened. The metal was smooth and cold.. The air was stale but active—it was being filtered through vents—-which meant the low hums came from unseen turbines somewhere in the walls, and the gentle ticks came from an array of regulating valves on pipes running across the ceiling.

They were in a underground lab.

No wonder Eria's always dirty whenever I chance upon her in the middle of the night.

If she keeps making her way down and climbing her way back up the chute…

He wasn't exactly surprised that Vantari's hideout was underground. He'd already guessed as much, anyways, considering the ants in the empire seemed to have a tendency for underground passages, but he was surprised by the scale of the laboratory at just a first listen. They'd dropped into the entry chamber, but past the straight and arched metal hallway in front of him, he could detect countless more chambers, tunnels, and twists and turns that seemed to sprawl across the entire undergrowth of the campus.

Before he could lose himself in the scale of the lab, though, Eria—standing a few paces away—started wriggling her hands in silence.

"He's waiting for the two of you," she whispered, equal parts nervous and fearful. "We need to hurry."

Zora heard it again. That trembling behind her voice. She feared she really, really had to go, so as she turned and hurried down the hallway, the two of them followed in step.

The air changed with every new corridor: some were thick with the antiseptic tang of alchemical sterilizers, while others rippled with the distant hiss of steam valves and the low gurgle of circulating fluids. The lab truly was enormous. Rows of bioarcanic machines pulsed to Zora's left, and while he couldn't see the color of the tubes, he heard the pump of blood through vein-like conduits, and he caught the constant clicking rotations of segmented limbs behind glass walls.

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Bug limbs. Ant jaws. Carapaces preserved in humming fields. In every chamber they passed, dozens of masked researchers worked on every sort of bug carcass Zora could imagine, and when Eria passed, Zora furrowed his brows behind his mask.

He knew they knew who he and Enki were. No doubt about that. So why were they watching Eria with more fear than awe?

Eria said nothing as she finally led them down a smaller, narrower hallway, and she immediately stopped in front of the single open doorway on the right.

Her arm lifted. A wordless gesture. She pointed into the small research room beside her, as though saying 'this is as far as I can go', so Zora and Enki stopped right in front of the room as well.

Inside, someone was dissecting a corpse.

The young man with a stitched-up face was peeling through the dead lady's back with a scalpel, cutting through tissue, rending through bone. The lady herself was naked and strapped down to the table—completely cold and likely pale, for all the blood had been drained out of her—but even still, it only took Zora a second to recognize the scent of the burnt insignia on the back of her neck.

The crest of the Salaqa Household.

… She's the missing spy.

Zora's lips thinned as the young man suddenly turned and seemed genuinely shocked that he had visitors. Even Zora was shocked, because the man was none other than the young professor with the stitched-up face who'd taught 'Textual Analysis of Contemporary Empire Militarization' on their very first day in the academy.

The professor immediately took off his gloves, put his scalpel down, and stepped out of the musty old room before closing the door behind him.

"Ah," he said. "You've finally arrived."

But he wasn't addressing Zora or Enki, no.

"What took you so long to bring them here, Eria?"

"I… I didn't know how to ask them at first." Her breath hitched. "I… I was scared—"

"It's fine." The professor cut her off gently. "Just be quicker next time. Now, go to the pit and get yourself ready for the demonstration."

The word 'demonstration' landed like a knife-edge, and Eria's breath hitched

Zora heard it. Her small frame twitched ever so slightly, and there was a silence—just long enough to thicken—before she looked between Zora and Enki.

Her voice was a whisper wrapped in shame.

"…Okay."

Then she turned. No protest. No plea. Her footfalls retreated further down the corridor, slow and reluctant, and while Zora listened to every beat of it until the sound slipped out of range, he wanted to destroy the lab immediately.

It would be so simple to lash out, but…

No.

Stay calm.

The mission is to investigate Vantari, figure out what he knows, and bring back evidence of this lab's existence to the Salaqa Lord.

Until the…

"Ah, apologies," the professor said with a slow, gracious breath, as if trying to fill the space Eria had left behind. "I can see this meeting is long overdue. I am Vantari, Head Researcher of the Ayapacha Frontline Research Laboratory, but I assume you know who I am already."

Vantari offered no bow, but only a smooth incline of his neck. The threadwork scars across his face pulled tight as he smiled.

"I presume," he continued, turning first to Enki, "you must be the Worm Mage. Which means you," he faced Zora, "are the Thousand Tongue."

Zora said nothing. Neither did Enki.

"Ah, yes," Vantari chuckled, unoffended. "I imagine you're both full of questions. Would the two of you care for a formal showing before the demonstration?

Of course, Zora heard the soft fabric shifts. The muffled, masked breathing. The faintest sounds of blades slightly screeching in their sheathes didn't elude him, so he guessed that there were at least a dozen, maybe two dozen hidden eyes watching the two of them from ducts and crawl spaces around them.

Not that he didn't think the two of them couldn't take all of them, but…

"Alright," Zora said curtly. "Give us a showing."

"Wonderful!" Vantari said, already turning with graceful ease. "Right this way!"

Vantari led the way. Instead of going down the hallway Eria went down, they did a turn and went back the way they came, but this time, the young professor made sure to point out everything of interest: humming generators, pulsing vents, and glass chutes hissing with nutrient fluid.

Chambers split off on either side, brimming with bioarcanic engines that breathed like lungs. Thick chitinous pipes threaded the ceilings. In one chamber, the air vibrated with the faint click of mandibles submerged in vats, and in another, half-assembled insectoids twitched in shallow tanks.

"I knew who you both were the moment you arrived at the academy," Vantari said casually while the two of them were still looking slowly around. "I didn't act because I had no reason to until now, but I've kept my eye on you. You made quite a mess in the northwest, reclaiming it from the Swarm and disrupting the funneling of resources into my department. You've made the Empress and Her Four Families really, really angry."

But he didn't sound bitter. If anything, he sounded amused.

"I'm not angry, though," he said cheerily, glancing over his shoulder to grin at the two of them. "Do you remember the topic of my first lecture, Thousand Tongue?"

Zora remained silent.

"'Walking Legends', was it?" Vantari answered his own question with a shake of his head. "Well, it is true that the Divine Capital says all of them are too unstable, too dangerous to command, and too wild to be incorporated in any proper military hierarchy, but that's just what they say. Truth is, I love my empire. I want us to win our eternal war against the Swarm, and to that end, even the Divine Capital agrees to a certain extent—in secret, of course—that 'walking legends' are the only way we can defeat them in the long run."

Another hallway opened before them as they made a turn. This one was lined with brass canisters and sealed doors, each as thick as a full-blown fortress wall.

"Our armies cannot keep pace," Vantari said. "Our siege weapons can grow heavier and our soldiers can grow more numerous, but the Swarm grows faster year after year, breed after breed. We can churn out a hundred child soldiers only to have them lose their heads against the very first Mutant-Class they face, so recklessness may lose us this war, but fear will. We cannot win by being afraid to innovate, so walking legends like the two of you are exactly what we need."

He gestured as they passed a chamber filled with chrysalis tanks, each glowing faintly warm as they nurtured…

Bugs.

All sorts of them.

Critter-Classes. Giant-Classes. Mutant-Classes. Ants and bees, beetles and spiders, scorpions and flies, and even one that Zora didn't recognise—a worm-like bug with more than fifty pairs of legs—hovered in those tanks, being checked on and tended to by researchers on grated platforms and overhead bridges.

"To that end, the Empress' Divine Attendant has been so graciously providing funding to me and my team to create a new type of weapon," Vantari said, face full of pride as he gestured to the chrysalis tanks. "Come. We have a demonstration ready for the two of you. After you see her in action, I'm sure we'll be able to talk more in length about—"

"Do you know what the Divine Attendant is?" Zora cut in sharply.

Vantari didn't miss a beat. "Of course. She's the second Magicicada Witch… Decima, right? It doesn't take a genius to find her sudden appearance ten years ago too good to be true."

"Then, do you not question why a bug is sponsoring you to create a weapon to use against bugs?"

"I'm aware she's most likely going to twist our weapons for her own use when she inevitably shows her true face, yes." Vantari waved that concern away dismissively, though. "However, what she isn't aware of is the fact that our weapons' research is progressing much, much faster than we've been reporting to her, and at this rate, we'll complete our project before she realises what's really going on. By the time she realises we've known who she is since the beginning, we'll have killed her with our weapons already."

The candor caught Zora off guard.

For someone running a top-secret laboratory buried beneath an academy, Vantari spoke with unnerving ease. Zora felt no veils and no half-lies—just the facts, clean and exposed.

He couldn't help but tilt his head slightly.

"... So"?" he asked quietly. "What does Eria have to do with all this?"

Vantari didn't miss a step. "She's a prototype. One of our most promising ones." His voice remained light, unbothered. "We bought her years ago from some desert town on the edge of the Sharaji dunes. A forgettable place with a dwindling population. Her parents were willing to sell, and she responded unusually well to our bioarcanic restructuring, so… well, see for yourselves."

They turned one final corner. With a knock on the door, the set of reinforced steel doors in front of Vantari yawned open.

Cold air rushed past them as Zora stepped into the vast chamber and paused.

This was the largest chamber yet with a high ceiling, humming generators, and pipes thick as logs weaving along the circular walls. Valves exhaled quiet steam. Rows of containment vats lined the flanks, but all of it paled in comparison to the pit in the centre.

It was a deep crater carved into the floor, made in the fashion of the fighting pit in the middle of the campus, and there—standing in the clearing of the artificial fungi forest below—was Eria.

She was chained at the collar to a steel anchor embedded in the ground beneath her. She'd also changed out of her uniform for what looked like an experimental, feathery gown instead.

Vantari strolled to the railings surrounding the edge of the pit before raising a hand, waving at one of the one-way glass panes across the chamber. "Send them through."

And the chamber immediately rumbled as ten gates around the walls of the pit pulled open slowly, steel screaming against steel, where from each gate emerged a single figure: a Mutant-Class walking on two feet.

Zora immediately scowled.

This is the demonstration?

Ten D-Rank Mutant-Classes: a scorpion with a coiling tail wrapped in iron, a spider whose fangs clicked like blades, and a beetle that dragged spiked forearms across the stone. Ants, hornets, and mantises. All of them were heavily armored, and all of them were restrained by heavy collars chained to rail-slots in the floor, ensuring none could rise too high

But none of them had eyes for escape.

Eria flinched as the first Mutant-Class—a mantis with four blades for arms—spotted her. Then another spotted her. Then another. One by one, the ten Mutants began to encircle her slowly, stepping into the artificial fungi forest.

Vantari beamed.

"Please bear witness," he said cheerily. "This is the culmination of five years' worth of the empire's resources funnelled into a single purpose: the 'Grafting Bug Project'."