“All ceremonial combat attire is mandatory, non-negotiable, and non-refundable. The activation phrase is assigned by the House Head.” — Syntavelli, Family Investiture Standards (internal)
The light came up out of the floor.
Golden, climbing Alice’s legs in a slow spiral like something being poured upward, and the chitin underfoot threw it back. For a second she was just a girl standing in a spotlight that hadn’t been there a second ago, arm still raised from the flourish, and then the light caught and the rest of her caught with it.
It went fast after that, and it went theatrical, and I understood with a sinking certainty that there was a soundtrack only she could hear.
Fire burned itself onto her piece by piece. Heels first, a crimson set with a gold edge. Then the socks; up past the knee, deep red bleeding to ember-orange at the top, banded in a thin line of gold that matched the heels because of course it did.
A skirt unfurled out of the spiral next, short, all of it moving like it remembered being flame, and underneath it—
I caught a flash of fitted shorts in the same red as the skirt settled, and the small cowardly part of my brain that had been bracing for an awkward problem relaxed, because naturally the modesty was engineered in.
Auntie Syntavelli had designed the outfit.
The top came together over her shoulders in folded layers, structured, pointed at the lines, and the colors gradiented up the same way the socks went down; ember at the hem to deep gold at the collar, with feather shapes worked into the seams.
A circlet settled into her hair, three stylized flames of beaten gold; the center one carrying a single fanned feather that caught the light and held a heat-shimmer of its own.
…and last, a star bloomed high on her cheekbone, just under her left eye; small, five-pointed, the orange of a coal with the wind on it.
It pulsed once.
The light folded itself back down into the floor and was gone, and the green crept back in around the edges, and Alice stood there blazing quietly in the middle of a bug hive looking like the cover of something I would have pretended not to own.
I was aware, distantly, that my face had gone hot.
“Tada!“ Alice threw both arms wide, the heels clicking together. “Okay. Now—” she planted a fist on her hip, deeply pleased with herself, “—I’m twice as strong as I was a second ago.”
“Your modifier is one-fifty,” Cecilia said. “A hundred and fifty percent of the base.”
Alice stuck her tongue out at her. “And my debuff’s twenty-five. Without it on. Seventy-five to one-fifty.” She held up one finger, then a second. “That’s double.”
Cecilia tipped her head with her brows furrowed. “…That’s technically correct.”
Alice spun to me on a heel, glowing, ember star and all. “Well?“ she demanded. “What do you think?”
Every honest answer to that was a bad idea. My mouth, abandoned by the rest of me, reached for the nearest exit.
“Uh.” I cleared my throat. “Is your charisma boosted?”
Alice laughed. “Yep. Everything I do is boosted.”
Then, to prove it, she beamed her grin at full power at me, and it looked exactly the same as every other time she’d pointed it my way. I was still working out where to put my eyes when Cecilia took the floor, or took pity on me, and stepped off the wall into the open stretch of resin.
I braced for the full show.
Cecilia said it halfway through a step, flat and unbothered. “Lunaris Lotus—Bloom.”
One white flash.
Done before I’d finished bracing.
Where Alice had taken the scenic route, Cecilia had skipped to the last frame. Same cut as her sister, near enough; the heels, the socks past the knee, the short skirt, the structured top, but all of it white, a clean unbroken white the hive’s green light slid right off without finding any purchase. A lotus sat high on her cheekbone where Alice wore her star, pale and folded and faintly lit from inside.
She caught me looking. I reached for the first true thing in range that wasn’t you look incredible. “Does white stain?”
“It doesn’t!” Alice was at my shoulder before I’d clocked her crossing the floor, thrilled to have found a convert. “And the heels never slip. On anything. Ice, oil, doesn’t matter. They’re so comfy, Dash, you have no idea.”
Cecilia let her sister run out of road, then put the full weight of her attention on me. “Your attributes. You still haven’t told us.”
It hadn’t actually been a secret, I didn’t know how to explain and they—
Ugh.
This was just embarrassing, and there was no face for that. “Okay. So it pulled something weird.” I scrubbed the back of my neck. “A-tier subsystem, except it was built for a different species. Trine Concord. For something called the Vesh’tri. Bugs. Three-sided bugs. It tried to fit their manual onto me and gave up partway, so I’ve got a stat called Carapace that the System admits I don’t have, and my Strength is officially named Wallop.” I exhaled. “I’m not a bug.”
Cecilia nodded once. “That’s uncommon.” She paused to think. “We’ve had it in the books, though. Cross-species allocation. It happens. It still has to be compatible with humans.” Then she turned to Alice. “What’s the standard attribute multiplier for E tier?”
Alice found something fascinating on the far wall. “I aced that test.”
“Then you’ll know it. And the standard deviation between tiers?”
“Ughhh,” Alice’s whole body folded with the groan. “We did this last semester.”
“Dash didn’t. He got his attributes this morning. He needs to know what he’s—”
Alice rounded on me and gripped both my arms, dead serious. “Dash. Do you like math?”
I started sweating. “I don’t know—what are you talking about?”
“He doesn’t like math!” Alice announced to the room, vindicated.
Cecilia’s mouth went small and unhappy at having her lesson hijacked, and I found a very interesting patch of resin down by my boots, because my blushing face was not equipped to take that expression on that face in that outfit.
Come on me, you like Erika!
“Uh.” I steered us off my eyeline. “Guys—how bad is it, actually? Having bug attributes.”
Alice flapped a hand. “Fiiiine.”
Cecilia cut her a look, then: “Mostly fine. It can be a little tricky when you hit the level for perks; they will be bug-themed and your choice will be limited. Level for perk is…?” The teacher tone snapped back, aimed at her sister.
Alice crossed her arms. “Between twenty and forty. I’m not dumb; I’ve got three points in Intelligence. That makes me smort! Wisdom more wise and I got them both maxed.”
My intelligence claimed it was Snap.
I kept that to myself.
“Three. Yes.” Cecilia inclined her head, serene. “Attributes give a multiplier to natural talent. So the boost scales with whatever’s already there—which, in Alice’s case—”
“Ceciii.” Alice’s arms dropped, and she pouted almost the same way Cecilia’s had just done, and I lost the wall-staring battle a second time. “Stop bullying me and let’s go burn this hive down. It was your idea to power-level Dash in the first place!”
“Alice!” It came out sharp, and then it caught up with her. Cecilia’s composure cracked clean down the middle, and color climbed her neck.
I blinked. Looked at her.
She met my eyes and gave a small nod, as if she’d decided to own it instead of duck it. “Y-you unlocked a-attributes,” she said, and the stammer was new; I’d never once heard her trip on a word. “And you ne-needed a way to increase them. That’s all.” She pulled in a breath and reached for the lesson. “Alice. Explain how it works for basic E-tier.”
“I wanna burn things.” Alice had recovered. “And I don’t like what I’m hearing. He can learn as we go!”
The hive settled the argument for us.
A seam high on the chitin split with a wet, tearing pop, like a knuckle cracking inside a melon, and the glow behind it spilled out brighter.
Then the wall beside it went, and the one at my back, all five faces of the chamber coming unstitched along their glowing lines at once, and out of the gaps came legs. Too many legs. Pale segmented things hauling themselves into the green light, the colour of something left too long in a jar, light-organs pulsing down their flanks in a slow rhythm that not one of them shared.
[Brood Drone]Level 10
So that was the brood.
“Finally,” Alice breathed, and then I lost track of her, because she was already across the room.
Fire came off her in a sheet rather than a throw, and she wore it like a coat as she shouldered into the first cluster. Three of the pale things came apart against her and kept burning where they fell, and the burning ones flared along the open cells in the wall and took the unhatched brood with them.
Hollowing it.
Literally.
She was laughing the whole time.
Cecilia worked the other way, white and economical. I only caught her in pieces; here, then a drone folding around a cut I never saw land, then six meters on with the blade already sheathing. Burst speed read less like motion than like the room editing out the parts where she crossed it.
Nothing touched the white.
I picked the one wall still closed, put the coilgun to my shoulder, and went to work on whatever the twins weren’t.
The first slug took a drone center-mass and left a faint hanging ghost in the air where the shot went, a little marker the new skill painted for me alone.
Huh.
Weird.
It worked different that I imagined, not where it landed, but where it went, but at least I didn’t need to create tracing rounds.
The drone dropped. The mark told me I’d pulled left. I corrected, and the second one didn’t drift. The grumpiest skill pick of my life, earning its keep one body at a time.
It didn’t last.
Three of us against a chamber of drones, and two of the three were the twins. The buzz thinned to nothing, the last light-organ guttered out on the floor, and then the chamber kept opening; the closed wall I’d been bracing against peeled back on itself, except there was no brood behind this one.
A gallery ran off into green darkness farther than the glow reached, ribbed and vaulted, and somewhere down the length of it: claws, heavier than the drones.
[Trine Concord progress: 17%]
[Step 1 completed][Step 2: Clear the Brood Hall]
We went in.
[Soldier Drone]Level 10
The soldiers were bigger, the pale gone to a deep green, forelimbs folded up into blade-claws they walked on the knuckles of. We cleared the hall the same way we’d cleared the chamber until Cecilia stopped.
[Trine Concord progress: 26%]
She put a flat hand against my chest, the universal sign for do not, and with the other leveled her sheathed blade at the last soldier still picking its way toward us over the bodies of the rest.
“That one’s yours.” She stepped back. “Sword.”
I looked at it. As much as a thing with no eyes could find looked at anything, it looked at me. “It’s level ten.”
“And you have a blade that cuts through anything and a shield that won’t let it kill you. So the only variable left is you.” Her arms were already folded. “Draw.”
I let the coilgun down on its sling, drew great-grandfather’s sword, and the soldier covered the last of the gallery and came in.
It led with both blade-claws, a flat overlapping sweep that would’ve opened me hip to shoulder, and it landed on my shield. The shield held. Then I was in the air, the gallery and the ceiling swapping places, and I hit the chitin wall a body-length back and slid down it with the sword still in my hand, more by luck than grip.
“There it is,” Cecilia said, unbothered. “You fight with full weight, Dash, and the soldier is heavier, so stop standing where it can put its whole body behind one line.”
I got up. The soldier was already turning.
“Don’t catch it flat. Let the claw skate past you and take the cost out of its side.”
I came off the wall as it came in, and I tried it, stepped off the line instead of into it, turned the shield so the claw skidded across the curve.
It half-worked.
The shove that should’ve launched me only staggered me. The claw went wide. For half a breath its flank hung open and turned toward me.
“Now—”
I swung. Hit the plate. The blade rang and skipped, great-grandfather’s impossible edge sliding off green chitin because I’d put it there at the wrong angle and the wrong depth, all force and no intent. Maybe if I fed mana to the blade, it could slice through, but I was sure it wasn’t what my teacher was looking for.
“Not the plate, the plate’s armour. Lower, where the limb sockets into the body, the soft line under it. And stop hitting it like you’re angry. Cut like you mean one specific thing. Focus on one thing.”
So I stopped being angry. It was a strange instruction to take mid-fight and a stranger one to manage, but the gallery shrank down to the soldier and the line of its next move and the soft seam under its foreleg, and the noise behind my eyes went quiet, and the next time it swept I wasn’t bracing for the wall.
I was watching the limb.
I slid the claw cleaner, the push barely there, and put the edge into the seam with the angle she’d handed me, and the sword remembered what it was for. It went in. Green ichor came up hot over my wrist, and the soldier’s whole front quarter dropped a degree.
It came slower the next time, favouring the ruined limb.
I slid it and cut the same seam deeper.
Slower again.
I stopped waiting for the wall entirely and started getting there first, off the line, into the seam, out, and its sweeps went wide and tired and easy to read, the light-organs down its flank stuttering out of their rhythm one by one, until the last sweep was slow enough that I just stepped inside it and put the sword through the soft line at the base of its skull and held it there until the legs stopped.
I stood over it with my chest heaving, green smoke rising off the blade, and waited to feel like I’d done something stupid.
[Trine Concord progress: 52%]
“Twenty-six?!” The number hung there, and I read it twice. “Twenty-six percent. Off one bug?”
“Nice!” Alice threw both fists up.
Cecilia turned to her sister, the lesson-light back in her eye. “Why that much?”
Alice’s face fell. “Aw, come on—”
“You aced the test. So. Why that much?”
Alice groaned from the floor of her soul, and then rattled it off anyway, glaring at me the entire time like it was my fault. “Because he’s level two, and he soloed a level ten, so the battle-rating coefficient’s fine, and there’s a skill-disparity term for closing that much of a gap between one fight, and the standard deviation between tiers stacks on top because—” She stopped. Heard what she’d just recited.
“...I hate both of you.”
The smallest amount of satisfaction reached Cecilia’s face. “Good enough.” She was already looking down the gallery, where it fell away into deeper green and something further down was waking up. “Now. Phase three.”
We went deeper.
The gallery tipped downward past the bodies, and the lower we went the warmer it got, the green in the seams thickening from sickly toward something almost ripe, the hive’s hum increased. Whatever the hum was for, more of the place was awake to us now.
[Step 2 completed][Step 3: Cull the Underbrood]
Three soldiers came up out of a side-vent ahead, blade-claws leading.
[Soldier Drone]Level 10
I got as far as reaching for the sword. Then the hall went white-orange and all three of them folded into ash mid-stride, and Alice strolled out through the cinders rolling her shoulders. “Needed that after the test.”
I checked the progress bar. It held at fifty-two percent and ignored me.
Cecilia stopped walking. “Alice.”
“They were coming right at us!”
“They were his.” She used her flat voice. “The brief says hollow the hall. It doesn’t say Alice burns it down before the boy with no levels can draw.“ Alice deflated. “So you’ll explain key levels to him.” Cecilia folded her arms. “As an apology.”
“That’s not an apology, that’s homework—”
“Key levels,” Cecilia was unbothered.
Alice despaired with her whole body, and then despaired a little more for effect, and then gave it up. “Fine. Okay. So.” She rallied into it. “Every fifth level is a key level.”
I glanced around the ash around, gulped, and asked, “why is it key?”
“Because that’s what it’s called.” She’d clearly never once wondered why. “Five, ten, fifteen, on up. Every key level you get to push up the cap on some of your attributes. Once, not all to one. Also, yeah, not the number number, the ceiling. I got an F because I got that wrong on the test. That stupid teacher! I’ll torch—” Ceci shot her a glare, and Alice moved on as if she hadn’t decided to torch another Aurelia building. “—So, I mean, the most they’re ever allowed to be.”
That fit the little fractions stacked in my status, the Strength nought-of-two. Ceilings. “How many?”
“Depends whose system.” She held up four fingers. “Bog-standard E-tier, you bump four of them.” Then, with relish, the fifth, sixth, seventh fingers climbing up one at a time. “Aurelia? Seven.”
“Seven. Out of—”
“Out of however many you’ve got.” She wiggled all seven at me. “You can get as many attributes as you want. We’ve got the same key level, nearly double the headroom, and it compounds every five levels for the rest of your life. That’s why I asked you to get better. That’s why people sell organs for that!”
“How does that even—”
The hall ahead of us moved.
[Elite Soldier Drone]Level 10
A clutch of beefy-looking soldiers this time, four, boiling up out of the dark where the gallery dropped another level… and Cecilia was already gone.
This one I caught whole.
She went in low and unhurried, and there was nothing in any of it that didn’t need to be there.
A step. A turn off the lead claw without looking at it.
The blade leaving the sheath and passing through the first soldier’s neck-seam and coming back to rest before the body had finished deciding it was dead, and she never stopped moving, flowed out of the first and into the second like the same sentence carrying on, ducked a sweep, opened the third along the exact soft line she’d spent ten minutes teaching me to find.
And then she was standing still with the sword sheathed and not one fleck of green on the white anywhere, while the last of them was still folding down onto the resin.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever watched kill anything.
“NOW YOU DID IT!“ Alice’s voice cracked off the vault. She rounded on her sister’s back, scandalized and overjoyed all at once. “Those were DASH’S! He was supposed to kill those!”
We came up the hall toward her.
Cecilia hadn’t moved from where she’d finished, and as we got close, I saw the composure had gone off somewhere again. She was pink to the collar. “I—” She cleared her throat. “I let my emotions get the better of me. I wanted to test my blade against the elite.”
Alice tsked, long and theatrical, savouring it. “And you call me the irresponsible one.”
“It was one time.“
“It was one time,“ Alice mimicked, already skipping backward up the hall, grinning. “So, you explain the multiplier!”
Cecilia let out a breath with an entire argument folded into it, and turned to me. “Sorry. For the kills.”
She was pink and rumpled and apologising in a magical-girl outfit in the middle of a monster nest, and I resisted the urge to close the distance and hug her. “It’s fine,” I said, which was true, mostly. “What’s a multiplier?”
She found her feet the moment she had something to explain. “Attributes multiply your body, mind, mana, whatever. Some systems do it very detailed. Like an attribute strengthens this one muscle, very precisely. That ones boost more like body, and less mind. Like fifteen percent body, five percent mind. You want the System say ‘all’, and it can boost even luck.”
“The System then got me a random, but from compatible ones,” I said with my eureka moment.
“Yes, compatible’s a hard rule. So I’d guess yours boosts everything at once, across the board. Which is the better kind, for what it’s worth. Less hassle and an equal boost.”
“I wouldn’t put it past the System to hand me the good kind and then name it something stupid.”
She laughed, and the blush finally started to let go. “You can rename the attributes; don’t worry. It scales in tiers. E-tier starts at plus ten percent, and every tier up adds two. So D is twelve, C is fourteen, B is sixteen. And A-tier,” she tipped her head, "comes in at eighteen. Ask the System what is yours."
“Well,” I whispered, mostly to myself. “If it works.”
And because the thing had been in a mood all day, I tried being nice to it. Please, I thought, as sincerely as I could fake, dear System, benevolent god of bug manuals, would you tell me the details?
It answered.
[Key levels (every 5): +10 max points][Milestone levels (every 50): +2 extra max points][Multiplier (all): +20%]
I read the last line twice.
“Huh.” I looked up at Cecilia. “Plus eighteen, you said?”
Author's note: Sorry for the later chappy, I had recently birthday and I was forced today to attend a b-day party today. >_<
On another note, we have a new art sketch by Shine! You picked Eddy, what do you think?
Should we ask to change anything?