“The System rewards the gap between what you face and what you are. Do not be in a hurry to close it.” — Dao of Strength, Kallum Family Combat Doctrine
Cecilia had called ‘not it’ a clean half-second before either of us understood there was a thing to be not-it about, which was how Alice and I ended up walking back up our own kill-count while she went ahead to the first chamber to sit cross-legged in the gold-green quiet and be unbothered by any of it.
Alice took the loss about as well as she took everything else, which was loudly and on the move.
She’d wanted to go down, toward the deeper green and whatever the scenario was still keeping behind a wall, and instead she was climbing back through rooms we’d already hollowed, kicking a stray piece of the hive out of her path and narrating the indignity of it to the only audience available.
“This is portering,” she informed me, crouching to collect cubes. I didn’t have my Palistra spy plugin, so I didn’t know what the cubes were made of, and I didn’t care. “We’re porters now. Auntie would faint. Ooh—” something only she could see lit up behind her eyes, “—that one dropped an item! Wait, what? Oh! I got another blue crystal!”
It took me a second to remember she was talking about the gacha plugin, which I didn’t have, and I kept that to myself. “Let’s just pick it.”
We worked our way up the nursery and along the gallery and through the brood hall, scooping cubes. By the time we crested the last rise into the first chamber, it was fuller, but thanks to the space fuckery, it weighed the same.
Cecilia sat at the center of the resin floor with her swords laid across her knees, white outfit catching none of the sickly green light, breathing in the slow, measured way I’d learned the one time Omar made me try meditating. She opened her eyes at our footsteps and didn’t bother getting up.
“Everything?”
“Everything,” I said. “Speaking of which,” I pulled up the bug-manual menu, the lone earned LP glowing at the top of it, and let my thumb hover over Wallop. One point. Strength I’d actually feel the next time the sword met a seam. “I’ve got the point. I was thinking strength, just to—”
“Wait.” Cecilia’s eyes opened the rest of the way, and there was a grin underneath the calm that I trusted even less than Alice’s stillness.
“Wait? Why?”
“In Apocalypse Fighters.“ She bent her head. “When do you get more experience? Fighting an enemy at level fifty when you’re fifty, or when you’re forty?”
I groaned because I could see the trap and walked into it anyway. “Forty. So if I spend the point, I’m stronger, and the System decides I’ve got it too easy, and it pays me less.” I scrubbed a hand down my face. “It’s been clipping my reward for being good at this all day, hasn’t it?”
“It has.” She looked unfairly pleased about it.
Alice, halfway through sorting through the drops, laughed. “And then you spend it all at once later and get properly measured at a gym! So you know how much you actually went up.” She mimed reading a slip off a machine. “Before number, after number. Number go up.”
“Number go up,” I agreed, and closed the menu with the point still sitting in it, unspent and faintly accusing.
Cecilia rose out of the meditation pose in one unhurried motion, swords sliding home. “Then let’s get Dash more experience.” She started toward the lip of the gallery, and the lesson-light was back in her eyes. “We hold the edges. You take the middle. Same as down—”
“This is too easy, though,” Alice said, planting both fists on her hips, ember star bright. “Even at the bottom, they weren’t trying. I want them to try.”
A panel bloomed in the corner of my eye before either of us could tell her she was being greedy.
[Do you want to increase the difficulty of the scenario to 15?]
Both twins stopped where they stood.
“Wait,” Alice’s head whipped around to her sister, the complaint forgotten between one word and the next. “This is possible? Ceci. Have I missed this on the test?”
Cecilia’s brows had drawn down, composure turning into thoughtful. “I don’t think it’s in the standard curriculum.” She frowned at the panel hanging in the air; she couldn’t see. “Why was it offered?”
“Because Alice complained,” I said.
Two faces turned to me, equally lost. “The system pays attention to me,” I said with a long sigh. “Snarky alien.”
Alice’s mouth opened.
“Wait—” Cecilia got out.
“I accept the challenge!” Alice blurted, beaming, before her sister could finish the syllable.
The panel folded. A new one took its place, and I watched the title rewrite itself out from under the job I thought I’d been doing.
[Scenario unlocked: Kill the King]
So much for becoming queen. The System had looked at the three of us, decided the throne was off the table, and pointed us at the man on it instead.
“Wohoooo!“ Alice jumped in place, both fists in the air, heels clicking.
Cecilia let out a breath with a whole risk assessment folded into it. “What if we can’t handle it?”
Alice shrugged, mid-bounce, as if the answer were stamped on the inside of the question. “We bail!”
That, at least, got a slow nod out of her sister. Then Cecilia’s gaze cut sideways to me, and to the menu I’d just closed. “And can Dash level now?”
Alice’s face went blank for a second, genuinely blank, the gears visibly catching, and then cleared all at once into delight. “Of course!” She flung an arm down the gallery, toward the deeper green. “Stronger enemies!”
And she went ahead.
The gallery opened wide. The ceiling climbed back out of reach, the gold in the seams ran thicker and warmer the deeper we went, and at the far end something heaved itself up off the resin.
[Royal Soldier Drone]Level 15
It stood where the elites had crouched. Broad through the shoulder like a Guardian, but it carried the weight forward instead of low, plated in chitin so dark a green it read black until the seam-light caught the gold threaded through the seams of it, and it walked on two forelimbs grown past claws into blades, ground to a point.
Level fifteen. I was at level two.
“That’s not a soldier,” I said.
Cecilia had stopped at the mouth of the hall, both swords sheathed, reading it. “It’s yours. We’ll keep the rest off you.”
Behind the first, the green at the back of the hall was already peeling open along a dozen seams at once, dark shapes hauling themselves up into the gold, and Alice was already gone toward them with fire trailing off her heels, and Cecilia drew at last and went the other way, and the hall narrowed down in front of me to one black-and-gold thing the size of a couch with swords for arms.
I put my shoulders square and waited for it the way she’d taught me, half my weight, the rest kept for leaving.
It crossed the floor faster than anything that big had a right to and led with the left blade, a flat downward stroke that would have opened me from collar to hip, and I turned the shield to skate it the way I’d skated a hundred claws on the way down here.
The blade bit the curve, caught, and the whole mass behind it walked me off my feet and into the cell-wall, and I came down the chitin in a heap with the air gone out of me and the sword somehow still in my hand.
Right.
Level fifteen didn’t skate.
“Watch the right,” Cecilia said from somewhere off to my left, amidst a flash of white and steel I didn’t have the attention to look at. “It leads left to make you turn into the right. The right is the one that hits you.”
I got up.
It reset, both blades up, and I stopped trying to make its weight go past me and started trying to make it miss.
When the left came down, I wasn’t there for it. I gave ground, gave ground again, let it spend both blades on the floor where I’d been, and in the half-beat after the second one bit resin its flank hung open and the soft seam under the foreleg turned toward me, the same seam every one of them wore in the same place.
Half-weight. One specific thing, all the way down.
I put the edge into the seam and drew it the way she’d handed me upstairs. I lacked strength behind the swing; the attribute differential was too great.
But I had one ace up my sleeve.
The great-grandfather’s sword claimed mana to enhance the cut, and the Royal Soldier’s whole front quarter came off the joint. It stood a second longer than seemed fair. Then it folded, the gold guttering out along its flanks, and where it had been, there was a dull metal cube sitting on the resin, faintly warm, and nothing else.
[Trine Concord progress: 81%]
“Sixty-eight,” I calculated, breathing as if I’d run up every flight we’d come down. “Off one.”
“Off one you shouldn’t have been able to take.” Cecilia hadn’t stopped moving the whole time. “You need to show me the sword sometime. Again. There’s another for you.”
She put a hand into the herd at the edge of my vision and peeled one off it, turning it with the flat of a blade and walking it onto me, and then she was gone back to the rest, and it was me and the second King’s soldier and the lesson I’d just spent my whole body learning.
This one I met cleaner. Gave ground, made the left miss, took the right on the shield’s curve and let it pay for the trip, found the seam on the second opening instead of the fourth, and my sword claimed its prize.
[Trine Concord LP gained!][Trine Concord progress: 44%]
Two. I let it sit in the corner of my eye and didn’t touch it.
The third Cecilia fed me before the second had finished going to its cube, and I had the rhythm of it now, the false lead, the real hand, the seam waiting where it always waited, sword doing its sword thing, and the hall shrank down to that and stayed there.
I stopped looking at the twins. They went to weather at the edges of me: Alice a wash of orange on my left that flared every time a cluster of the King’s soldiers tried to swing wide and found her instead, Cecilia a white blur on my right that turned dark shapes into cubes between one breath and the next, two swords and never once both of them where I could see them.
The middle was mine.
The middle was always going to be mine.
[Trine Concord LP gained!][Trine Concord progress: 6%]
Three.
The fourth came slower in my hands because I came faster, off the line before it committed, into the seam before it reset.
[Trine Concord progress: 55%]
Every soldier I dropped made me a little less of a gap, and the System docked the gap the instant I closed any of it, and it would keep docking it for as long as I kept getting better at this, which it had been counting on me to do since breakfast.
The grumpy little god of bug manuals, paying me less the more I earned it.
[Trine Concord LP gained!][Trine Concord progress: 3%]
I stopped reading individual numbers after that and let them blur into the work; the cubes piling up on the resin where Alice swept them out of the lane with a boot between her own kills.
The King’s soldiers came and came, and each one was a little easier than it had any business being, and each one paid a little less for it, my sword being the decider between us, the bar filling slower; the rewards thinning.
[Trine Concord LP gained!][Trine Concord LP gained!]
By the time the green at the back of the hall finally ran short of dark shapes to hand me, the last soldier dropped under a cut I barely had enough mana for.
[Trine Concord LP gained!][Trine Concord LP progress: 17%]
Seven points, sitting in my status, every one of them unspent and going to a gym later if I had any discipline at all.
I lowered the sword.
The hall had gone quiet enough to hear my own breathing and the small settling tick of the cubes cooling. “That’s the well dry,” Cecilia said, sheathing both swords. She wasn’t even winded. “Fodder’s done paying. Whatever’s left in here that’s worth your time is further down.”
Further down, the gallery quit pretending to be a tunnel and opened into something built to be knelt in.
The chamber ran back farther than the seam-light could carry; the vault lifting away into a dark I couldn’t find the top of, and every wall was cells. And at the back of it, where the gold ran thickest and a shelf of fused chitin rose up out of the floor was the King.
[Brood King]Level 15
It was sitting, folded down on itself, and even folded it was bigger than the two Guardians I’d nearly died to twice.
Plated in the same black-green as the Royal Soldiers but gone darker, almost wet, the gold pooled thick in the seams and running. Two more shapes unfolded off the floor at the foot of the dais, planting themselves between the throne and us.
[Elite Royal Guardian]Level 15
Same doubled shields and hooks as the Guardians downstairs, scaled up and gilded, a matched pair standing at the King’s doorway. And behind them, scattered back through the gold along the cell-walls, the smaller things were waking, soldiers, drones.
Cecilia’s arm came across my chest before I’d even thought of going in.
“You’re not in this one.” She said, both swords already loose in her hands. “Stay back.” Her eyes flicked to the coilgun on my shoulder. “And try to put rounds into something.” She was already turning toward the Guardians. “Alice. The small ones. All of them, keep them off both of us.”
“FINALLY.” Alice was gone on the word, fire sheeting off her.
The King spotted us, lifted one bladed forelimb and pulled its arm back to throw as he started gathering strange light at the tip.
“DOWN—” Cecilia shouted.
The King hurled a spell at us.