“Issued strength is a loan against the next emergency. Earned strength is the only kind the System lets you keep.” — Dao of Strength, Kallum Family Combat Doctrine
“Plus eighteen, you said?”
I turned the panel a half-degree in the air, as if a better angle would talk it down to a number that made sense. It held where it was. “I’ve got twenty.”
[Multiplier (all): +20%]
“Twenty,” Cecilia repeated. The hive’s green light slid off her whites and found nothing to hold. “The chart stops at A-tier. A-tier comes in at eighteen, so your attributes are S-tier in Sol.”
“As was my mana previously.”
Her gaze came off the middle distance and landed on me. “Twenty alone would be a lot, but twenty only tells me half of it.” She tipped her head. “What type is twenty? So tell me which. Mind or body or mana or something else? Because if it’s narrow, like only body, twenty is a brag. If it’s—”
“All,” I said.
The word came out smaller than I meant it to, and I felt the heat climb up my neck the instant it left, because there is no humble way to announce that I pulled an S-tier. Bug S-tier, but S-tier nonetheless.
Cecilia didn’t answer right away because Alice answered for her.
She hit me from behind like a dropped ratchet, both arms locking around my neck, the heels of her Lunaris outfit leaving the floor entirely so that for one bad second I was holding her up by the throat-grip alone, coilgun walking off my shoulder. “DASH’S OP,” she shouted, straight into my ear, joyfully, ruinously. “Ceci. Ceci, he’s OP. Twenty AND all? That’s not even—he’s broken—”
“He’ll be strong,” Cecilia agreed, and there was a crack in the flat of it, as if it was too good to scold into shape. “Don’t tell people the number. Tell them all. Let them assume it runs low.”
“Noted.” I peeled Alice’s forearm down out of strangling range. “Can I have my windpipe back?”
Alice dropped off me, landed lightly, and rounded on her sister with her whole face already made up. “Okay. New rule.” She pointed down the gallery, where the green thickened toward something almost ripe and the floor kept tilting away into the dark. “The next ones are Dash’s. All of them. You don’t get to touch them.”
“I let you have the soldiers,” Cecilia said. “You burned the last three before he cleared his holster.”
“Those were soldiers. Soldiers you can see coming from the next district.” Alice planted a fist on her hip, magnanimous and aggrieved at once. “You took the elites. Four elites, the interesting ones, the only fun ones down here, and you did the pretty flowy thing and stole every single—”
“It was one time.”
“It was four times,” Alice said. “In a row. So now they’re his.”
Cecilia looked at me, considered the proposal on its merits, and conceded it the way she conceded most things to Alice: by acting like it had been her idea. “The next ones are yours,” she told me. “We hold the edges.”
“Fantastic,” I said, not trusting them to leave me anything at all, and we went down.
The gallery bottomed out into something the orientation lecture had not prepared me to feel guilty about.
The nursery ran wide; the ceiling dropping until I could have set a palm on it, every meter of the floor and walls packed with sealed cells, soft-sided, faintly luminous, the green inside them gone warm and gold and slow, like the light had a pulse and the pulse was content.
Things moved between them.
Pale, soft-bodied, low to the ground, six limbs apiece folded into delicate combs and ladles instead of blade-claws, and not one of them so much as turned a head when the three of us crested the last rise into their gold.
[Brood Tender]Level 10
They were feeding the cells. Tending them. Smoothing a comb-limb over a sealed clutch and dribbling something into the seam, patient, careful, doing the one job they’d been grown to do, and the System had labeled all of it Level 10 and dropped it into a scenario titled with a verb I was supposed to perform on them.
“They’re not even looking at us,” I said.
“They will when you start.” Cecilia had stopped at the lip, arms folding, settling in to watch. “Tenders turn the instant a clutch takes damage. Until then they don’t register a threat. The shard built them; they’re not real. But we can spare them, if you want.”
“I’m not a bug,” I said, to nobody, to keep the position on the record.
“We know.” Alice patted my shoulder on her way past, ember star bright on her cheek.
I put a slug into the base of the nearest column of cells, and the whole nursery turned to look at me at once.
“Apparently I’m pest control now,” I said, the twins unimpressed with my remark, and got to work.
The [Tenders] came fast and from low, those gentle comb-limbs unfolding into something with edges after all once a clutch was bleeding, and there were a lot of them.
The twins took the edges as promised, Alice walking the far wall in a sheet of fire, cells flashing gold-to-ash where she passed, Cecilia clipping the strays that tried to flank wide of me, both of them carving the room down to a size I could actually hold. The middle was mine. Coilgun for the ones with a floor between us, the marker from Mark the Drift painting each miss so the next one didn’t miss, sword for the ones that closed, the seam under the foreleg coming up the same on every one of them once I quit hunting for it and started believing it would be where it always was.
[Trine Concord progress: 61%]
[Trine Concord progress: 70%]
The bar climbed off my kills and only my kills; Alice’s wall of fire could have hollowed the place twice over and the number wouldn’t have twitched for it. They weren’t leveling me. They were clearing me a lane and letting me do the leveling myself, which was a more annoying kind of generous than I had the spare attention to resent mid-swing.
Then the gold light at the back of the nursery folded, two cells the size of doors splitting along their seams, and the things that climbed out of them were not Tenders.
[Brood Guardian]Level 10
They came up heavy. Where the elite soldiers upstairs had been beefed-up soldiers, these were a different silhouette; broad through the shoulder, low-slung, two pairs of forelimbs instead of one, the outer pair folded into shields of grown chitin and the inner pair into hooks, plating doubled over every angle a sword might want.
The green down their flanks ran deep; and they put themselves between me and the cells and waited, and the waiting was worse than a charge.
“Two,” I said. “Both at once.”
Cecilia sheathed both of her swords and stepped back instead of in. “Both yours. It needs to be hard somewhere, Dash, or you'll walk out of here without attributes. Alice keeps the small ones off you. The Guardians are yours.”
Alice had already gone to the far edge, herding the last of the Tenders into a corner to burn at her leisure. Which left the back of the nursery, two armored things the size of couches, and me.
The first one came in low, both shields up, and I made the mistake of meeting it the way I’d met everything else down here; stepped off the line, turned the curve of my shield to skate the hook past.
The hook skated. The shield held.
And then the second Guardian, which I had stopped watching, walked into the space my shoulder had turned away from and clubbed me off my feet with a shield of its own.
I hit the cell-wall, slid, kept the sword. The shield ate most of it.
Most.
“Stop watching the one you’re fighting,” Cecilia said. “It’s already losing. The one with its hands free is the one that hits you. Watch that one.”
I got up. They reset side by side.
“Don’t stand between them. Ever. Put one behind the other so the back one has to come around the front to reach you, and make it pay for the trip.”
I circled.
The trailing Guardian started its arc around its partner’s flank, and I cut the circle tighter to keep them stacked, and for two full seconds I was fighting one Guardian with the other one stuck behind it, exactly the way she’d said, and it felt like cheating and I wanted more of it.
The window opened, the front one overcommitted a hook, its flank hanging open, the soft seam under the foreleg turned to me, and I planted my entire weight and drove the sword for the seam with everything I had.
It went in. Green came up hot over my wrist.
And the back Guardian, freed the instant I rooted, came over its partner’s shoulder and caught me across the shield hard enough to fold my planted leg, and I went down on one knee with the sword still buried and the second set of hooks coming down at the back of my neck. The shield flickered up over me a half-beat before it landed.
“I said half-weight.” Cecilia hadn’t moved. “You planted. You gave one of them your whole body and left the other one all of it. Don’t commit to a fight you can’t walk out of mid-swing. Half-weight on the cut. Keep enough of yourself to leave.”
I tore the sword free, took the second hook on the shield’s curve instead of my spine, and rolled out from under both of them with my dignity somewhere back by the cell-wall.
“Use the column.” She nodded at the fused mass of cells rising floor-to-ceiling near the back, two of me wide. “Back into it. Only one of them reaches you at a time, and you choose which. Make the architecture do the work you keep trying to do with your feet.”
I gave ground to the column and put my shoulders against it. Two Guardians, one approach, the back one reduced to lean around its partner and snapping with the inner hooks, live for half a second at a time and never both at once.
“Now break their timing,” she said. “They swing together. Unlike you, they were grown to. Move on the off-beat. Never let both of them be live in the same instant; make them take turns, and take the one that’s mid-recovery.”
So I stopped fighting their rhythm and started fighting the gap in it.
Front one swung; I gave it the shield and didn’t answer. Front one recovered; the back one leaned in to fill the silence; I let it.
And in the half-beat after the back one’s hook bit chitin and before the front one had reset, there was exactly one Guardian live, mid-recovery, its inner foreleg lifted and the soft line under it turned to me, and nothing else in the room able to reach me for the length of a breath.
“There,” Cecilia said.
Half-weight. Enough of myself to leave.
I put the edge into the seam under the lifted foreleg and drew it the way she’d taught me upstairs, one specific thing meant all the way down. The blade came out the other side of the joint. The whole front quarter of the thing dropped, hooks first, and I was already off the column and outside before it finished folding, half-weight, leaving the second Guardian closing on the space where I’d been.
[Trine Concord progress: 88%]
“Eighty-eight,” I read aloud between breaths. The bar sat there, fat and close.
“Good,” Cecilia said. “That’s your kill.”
The second Guardian came around the column after me, alone now, its partner cooling on the resin, and I felt the fight change shape in my chest; one armored thing, one set of shields and hooks, a column to put my back to and a tempo I knew how to break.
After two, one felt almost rude.
I gave ground, found the rhythm, watched the free hooks, kept half my weight, and started taking it apart the way she’d shown me, and for a moment there it was clean.
Which was exactly the problem.
“Too easy.” Cecilia’s voice had gone thoughtful, and I’d been at this long enough now to know thoughtful was the dangerous one. “One at a time, you'll win eventually. Eventually isn’t a skill. You only learn a lesson if it can still go wrong.” Her eyes went across the nursery, to her sister, to the corner where the last of the Tenders were finishing their burn. “Alice.”
Alice’s head came up, ember star catching, already grinning because she knew that tone and she loved that tone.
“Push me five soldiers,” Cecilia said. “Don’t kill them. Herd them. Put them on Dash.”
“Oh, FINALLY—” Alice was moving before the sentence landed, fire trailing off her heels, banking off the wall toward a side-vent where the deep green still pulsed with something that hadn’t hatched into the fight yet.
She drove a wash of flame across its mouth, and out of it came soldiers, green, blade-clawed, the kind I could see coming from the next district, one, two, then three more boiling out behind them, all of them turning from the heat at their backs toward the only cool thing in the room.
Me.
“Five and the Guardian,” I said, getting my shoulders back to the column, sword up. “At once. You herded them onto me on purpose.”
“Half-weight,” Cecilia said, folding her arms, settling in to watch me work. “Watch the free hands. Make them take turns.”
The Guardian closed from the left.
The five soldiers fanned wide to my right, blade-claws leading, cutting off the column on the open side. I gave the Guardian the column and took the soldiers apart.
That was the plan, and it held because soldiers now felt easier.
The lead two came in their flat overlapping sweeps; I took the first claw on the shield’s curve, skated it, put the sword through the seam, and was off the line before it dropped. The Guardian rounded the column, reaching for me and closed its hooks on chitin where I’d been. I fed it the column again.
[Trine Concord progress: 91%]
The bar barely moved for them. Not that long ago a single soldier had been a fight; now the System paid me in spare change per kill, three percent of nothing.
Three and four rushed the gap while the Guardian leaned around the column for the back of my neck, and for one ugly second it was all of it at once. I ducked under the hook, let it bite the cell-wall where my head had been, and spent the half-breath it bought putting a bullet through the third soldier and the sword through the fourth, back to back, the marker and the seam.
The fifth came alone and died alone.
Then it was the column and me and one armored couch that had spent the entire fight swinging at architecture. It came around slowly, committed, flank open.
One thing. All the way through.
I drew the edge under its foreleg the length of the joint, and the Guardian came apart there and quit.
[100% reached, Trine Concord LP gained!][Trine Concord LP progress: 13%]
“Got the LP,” I said, breathless, leaning on the sword like an old man on a fence.
“Clean,” Cecilia said. “Six on one, and you took a room you weren’t strong enough to take.That’s the lesson. You used your revolver, but still. Well done, Dash.”
The nursery had gone quiet enough to hear the loot drop. I was still hauling air back when Alice came skipping through her own cinders, ember star blazing, both arms flung wide.
“NOVAAA.” She landed in front of me, vibrating. “Six on one, that’s a streak, that’s going straight on the counter—you’re so preem when you stop apologizing mid-swing! Ceci, did you see the duck under the hook? Tell him.”
“It was adequate,” Cecilia said.
I looked at the LP sitting in my status, one whole earned point waiting to go somewhere, the first stat. I pulled up the bug-manual menu, ready to dump it into Wallop (Strength) out of spite and feel the strength in the next swing—
Then I looked down at the drops at my feet.
And past them, up the slope, at the dark mouth of the gallery, and past that the brood hall, and past that the first chamber, every room we’d cut through on the way down.
“Before I put the point in,” I drawled. “Did we collect the loot from any of the previous kills?”
The twins looked at each other.
“Not it,” Cecilia said first.
“Damnit, Ceci!”
Author's note:
As planned, Book 1 will be moving to Kindle Unlimited: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3KYGTJH
I have a big favor to ask, Amazon's algorithm doesn't recommend a book to new readers until it crosses a review threshold. Until we get past that wall, the books are basically invisible to people who'd love them. An honest review on Amazon, even one or two sentences, is the single biggest thing that helps.
Bigger than ads, or anything else.
If you didn't download Book 1 files and would like them, shoot me DM either here or on discord, we might figure something out.
Out is ebook and a paperback. Sadly, I'm still working on a premium hardcover, it needs to split into two and I want pretty illustrations, so it'll likely take some time >_<