Master of the Sword
Master of the Sword
'Ugh, this is disgusting!'
The mine tunnel swallowed every scrap of light. A girl walked forward, her body crawling with dozens, then hundreds, of insects. With every step they tore at her skin, trying to burrow inside.
Crack!
They couldn't break through. Health 10—troll-like regeneration and a body hardened far beyond human limits. Her dense muscle and hide were as impenetrable as dragon scales.
The bloodworms' jaws gnawed at her flesh, raising stinging welts and angry red streaks, but her accelerated regeneration smoothed the skin back to normal before the marks could settle.
Stinging from head to toe, she swatted the flying insects out of the air, sealed her eyes and mouth shut against the ones crawling toward her face, and clapped her palms against her own body.
Each strike reduced a fistful of bugs to a crushed smear of ichor. She grew slick with the stuff, her padded armor beginning to stink of bug fluids and reeking carapace secretions.
'It's disgusting, but I'm the one who has to do it.'
If a task existed in this place that only she could perform, she would see it through. She had heard Aslan's thoughts countless times, had watched him act, and now she threw herself forward the way he would have done.
Right here, right now, she was the only one who could absorb the bloodworms with her body.
They surged from the walls, the ceiling, the floor, clinging to Angie's flesh and ripping at it with mindless persistence. She answered with her palms, slapping them dead.
When her hands couldn't reach, she rolled across the ground or slammed her body into the tunnel walls. Dead bugs piled thick underfoot.
Still they came, obsessively latching onto her. Whether they couldn't grasp that her hide was impenetrable, or whether they understood and kept trying anyway, she couldn't tell.
The bloodworms that bypassed Angie and surged past her were, in a sense, the stragglers—the ones who couldn't find a grip because her body was already so thickly covered.
Aslan moved to meet those stragglers. He kicked out with a boot of hard leather.
The bugs burst apart with a dry crunch. He drove his leg through the center of the mass, thrust with an elbow wrapped in cloth, lashed out. Bugs caught the blows and shattered against the tunnel walls.
He didn't use his flail. There was a reason. He fought with one arm and one leg.
Ereta and Dmitri backed him up, each wielding a torch and a weapon. A mace crushed flying insects midair. A blade flashed and severed. Torches swung, searing and cutting.
The tunnel floor grew slick with dead bugs—the reek of them, the unpleasant rasp of shattered carapace.
Aslan and the party pressed forward.
The bloodworms swarming Angie showed no sign of thinning. They kept flinging themselves at her, trying to excavate her flesh and reach her heart.
At a glance, it looked futile. But Aslan understood the logic behind it.
Angie was no priest.
She looked like an ordinary human wrapped in tough hide—no divine power, no channeled authority to speak of.
And that part was essentially true, since she had no such power.
So the bloodworms operated on the assumption that this hide-bound "host candidate" could be breached and subdued. They targeted Angie simply because she was at the front.
And since they couldn't breach her, they kept trying. Her skin was tough, yes, but it was still skin. A collective insect-mind couldn't make the distinction.
The thuds and crunches fell silent as Angie stopped at a fork in the tunnel and shook her hands with a flick.
"Ugh, disgusting."
She was drenched from head to toe in bug carapace and ichor.
The stench didn't just sting her nostrils—it was numbing her sense of smell entirely. Every time she moved her arms, she heard the dry rustle of shell fragments in her armpits and along her ribs.
Her face twisted with revulsion. She whined.
"So disgusting..."
She wasn't complaining about the tactic itself. As far as she could tell, there was no better way. That didn't mean she had to enjoy it. The two things were separate problems.
For one, the stench was unbearable. She'd grown up in the slums and thought she was used to foul smells, but this level of concentrated bug-reek was something else entirely.
And the sensation of insects crawling over her skin—
That was a disgust she could never get used to. Scowling, Angie rubbed her cheek with her forefinger.
Thick smears of ichor and shell. She clamped her mouth shut and shook her hands again.
At least this wasn't the kind of thing she'd have to keep doing forever. That was some comfort. She clenched her fist, steadying her resolve—
"Angie."
She turned at the sound of her name. Aslan was approaching from behind, silhouetted against the wavering torchlight, a cloak in his hands.
"Sorry. It's pretty awful, isn't it?"
He brought the cloak toward her face as he spoke.
"If there'd been a better way, I would've taken it. Right now... this was the only thing I could think of. The safest option. Nobody gets hurt."
He wiped her face with the cloak. The thick layer of bug fluid smeared away a little with each pass of the fabric.
Angie looked up at him—at the man who was cleaning her undoubtedly foul-smelling face with his own cloak—and let out a small, stupid noise.
"Ah—"
He wore his usual melancholic expression, with an apology written into the lines of his face.
But even that guilt-ridden look carried a strange loneliness, and she found her reply catching in her throat.
"It's nothing, I'm fine. It's just kind of gross..."
She was going to say something else, but his touch stole the words.
His hands were hard—scarred from training, tempered by struggle. Those hands moved across her cheek, cleaning her face.
They should have felt rough. Instead, his touch was impossibly gentle.
When the careful brush of the cloak reached her eyes, Angie closed them without thinking.
She felt the fabric trace the curve of her eyelids with an attentive, delicate motion. The touch lifted away, and she opened her eyes again.
In the dim flicker of the torchlight, Aslan flinched.
Every time Angie blinked or shifted her face, he flinched and adjusted, still wiping.
It was only after she'd stood there a long while that she realized his hands were treating her like something fragile. His large palms—big enough to cover her whole face—moved with impossible care.
Her eyes tracked his hands. The area around her eyes was already clean now. He had moved on to her jaw and the nape of her neck.
She let her gaze drift upward, following his hands to his face.
Even in the shadow-cut torchlight, his eyes gleamed—a deep teal that held something somber and something infinitely gentle as they rested on her.
Looking up into those half-lidded eyes, Angie swallowed.
"You're doing great. We got this far because of you."
She had no room to feel proud at the praise. She was staring at his face, dazed, when she jerked back to her senses.
"Ah—uh—you're getting it on you too. The smell, I mean. If you get too close..."
Only then did she remember she was practically marinated in bug guts. Aslan didn't seem to care. He used a clean section of the cloak to wipe down her hair.
"Don't worry about it. I don't mind."
A gentle touch, a gentle gesture. These weren't things Angie had experienced much in her life. Heat rose to her face despite herself, and she pressed her lips together, but she didn't pull away.
It was too sweet to refuse.
Feeling awkward inside that tenderness, she fumbled for a change of subject.
"So—so how far have we come? How much farther?"
Aslan gave her hair one last pass and withdrew the cloak. She felt a faint, irrational pang of disappointment.
"Hard to say. I don't know this mine system well. No map, either."
He glanced at Dmitri as he answered. Dmitri shook his head.
"I don't know either. I'm no miner."
Then his gaze shifted to Ereta behind him. Ereta had been watching Angie with a gaze that was somehow cold, and she only answered after noticing Aslan was looking at her.
"I don't know, either. But maybe we should head opposite the direction of the wind. The draft will lead outside, so we go the other way."
She thought that might lead to the deepest part. Aslan nodded at her suggestion. Angie's eyes flickered as she watched him shake out the cloak—the same one he'd used to clean her face and hair—and settle it back over his shoulders.
"That makes sense. Even if it's not exactly opposite, anywhere the wind isn't coming from will lead deeper. Good thinking, Ereta."
Ereta accepted the praise with a light, pleasant smile. The party picked the right-hand tunnel, the one with no moving air, and headed in.
As they moved through the passage leading deeper, not a single bloodworm appeared. Only a dense silence and a stale, oppressive reek.
Angie looked relieved that the bugs had stopped but wore an odd expression. Aslan kept his hand on the flail at his belt and stared ahead in silence.
The air grew thin. No wind stirred. The darkness itself seemed to thicken.
By the time one torch guttered out and they had to light a fresh one, they had reached the deepest point.
It was a collapsed section of the mine.
More precisely, the collapsed tunnel had subsided and merged with a natural cavern beneath it.
At the center of that cavern lay what they had come for.
It looked like a grotesque cross between a heart and a brain.
The long, massive thing pulsed like a heart, yet the gray-matter-like structures hanging from it evoked a brain.
Surrounding that unknown organ were thousands upon thousands of bugs. Through the gaps in the writhing mass, something metallic glinted between pulses.
Thousands of bloodworms scattered across the floor at the command of the hive mind—the swarm mother that resembled a brain and a heart.
Aslan took in the sheer volume and understood.
It was no coincidence they hadn't seen a single bug while traveling through that last tunnel.
It was a strategy only a hive mind could execute.
Gather them all in one place, then surround and eliminate the intruders in an open cavern instead of a narrow tunnel where pincer attacks were difficult.
Simple. Rational. Effective.
Aslan let out a low sound.
Even a monster with only rudimentary intelligence would eventually pick up a few tricks if it survived long enough. A creature like a swarm mother—born with genuine intelligence from the start—was bound to develop real cunning given time.
Setting this kind of trap, gambling that it could overwhelm them all at once, wasn't beyond reason. Aslan wondered how many hidden objectives lay behind this tactic as he drew his flail. The chain rattled.
"That's the swarm mother. Stay defensive. When I shift to the offensive, that's your cue to attack."
The instructions were simple. They might have been hard to parse for some, but this group included a former master and a current master. And the ones who weren't masters weren't so soft that a wrong step would break them.
Angie raised her fists. Ereta readied axe and mace. Dmitri drew his longsword with a thin, grinning laugh.
The bloodworms scattered across the floor surged forward.