Otto knew he probably shouldn’t have brought so much gear with him into the exam, but he wasn’t going to abandon his oversized satchel now.

  “... Need some help with that, Pioneer?” his teammate sneered, glancing back and down at him from atop a mushroom branch. “Drop the bag and just shadow us with your rifle. We don’t need you on the same pace as us. You can shoot as long as you’re in range, right?”

  He scrunched his nose and wiped sweat off his brow as he looked up at his teammates, the middle-aged couple in Symbiote Exorcist robes. They’d been looking down on him for being small since the day they met in that waiting room, but he wasn’t small compared to them. It was just the satchel on his back that was twice his size and thrice as bulky that made him small; he was at least tall enough to wield his anti-chitin rifle without any troubles.

  Of course, the two didn’t care too much about him in the first place. They’d told him to stay out of their way and let them handle the bugs with their syringe daggers and toxic claws, but… the truth was, they’d have died a dozen times over in the past three days had he not been shadowing them all the time, calling out ambushing bugs with his dragonfly goggles.

  He sighed, heaving and groaning as he continued climbing the colossal mushroom to get up to his teammates. There was no point arguing with them. They were a team now, so he’d just have to work with them.

  “I’m not shooting people, though,” he muttered, sending them a pointed glare as he finally pulled himself over the edge of the branch, patting spore dust off his trousers. “And you two said you detected a Mutant. Where? My goggles aren’t showing me any heat signal–”

  “That’s because your eyes are slow,” the exorcist said, shrugging and turning as she gave him a dismissive wave. “It’s moving. . We can catch up and intercept it before it burrows deep into the earth again.”

  “And with our luck, we’ll be back in the waiting room by this afternoon,” the other exorcist said, patting him hard on the back. “You don’t have to do much. Just sit up here and follow us as we move down there. You see anything that moves, you tell us and shoot. That clear?”

  Otto twitched an eye. “I’m not shooting people.”

  “Well, you better get used to it,” the man replied, and the two of them hopped forward and off the branch, clicking their tongue at him to follow. “It’s gonna be a bloodbath.”

  Darkness bloomed in the centre of a mushroom clearing, and Wisnu had to plug her nose as she approached the beastly lady, her giant rectangular blade dangling loosely in her hand.

  The lady didn’t fool her and her teammate for a second. The moment the exam started and they walked through the wormhole, their third teammate had taken off—most likely to hunt the Mutant alone—and since then, it’d just been her and Donna against endless hordes of Giant-Class bugs. No matter how many waves they fought off, there’d always be more, there’d always be more, and… well, she was kinda pissed. Her eyes were dark and bleary. She hadn’t gotten any sleep in days. The pretty geometric patterns on her noble’s tunic were torn and stained in blood. She wasn’t , thank the Earth Princess, but she’d be in for a hell of a scolding once she returned to the Attini Empire.

  “If only we had a third teammate,” she said aloud, doing her best to keep her voice even, steady, and calm. Donna, a mercenary bug-slayer from the southwest, froze the moment the beastly lady snapped her head over to glare at them—and her eyes were bright, shining emeralds, her face shrouded in shadows.

  But Wisnu wasn’t scared of her.

  She should’ve been with them this entire time.

  “Stop going off on your own to…” Wisnu trailed off, looking around the clearing for the first time. Bodies hung from mushroom branches, giant bug carcasses were littered everywhere, and the beastly lady in a Plagueplain Doctor’s mask was kneeling hunched over a bloody mound of broken corpses. It was distasteful, if not gorey and downright disrespectful—and the lady was even someone’s heart in her hands, scalpel for nails digging into the skin. “... What, pray tell, are you even doing here?”

  The lady flicked her blood-stained hair back, cackling softly under her mask. “Do you even care? Leave me alone, you fucks. I don’t need your help to pass. I’ll just stay here for a week or two longer and collect more living heart samples. You know, there’s a variety of Insect-Blooded hearts in this exam that I just can’t get enough of them–”

  “I care if you were the one who caused this massacre,” Wisnu said, lifting her obsidian-edged blade and pointing it at the Plagueplain Doctor. “The rules state there are no penalties for killing other participants during the course of the exam, but just because it is not written does not mean it is not wrong.”

  The lady shrugged, pocketing the heart and slipping it under her black robes. “Sure, Baroness of Justice. Whatever you say. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have more hearts to collect–”

  “Did you do this, Blaire?”

  Silence.

  And Blaire returned only a small, small smile with her eyes, her crow’s feet not carrying the meaning behind it.

  “What if I did?” she said. “What are you and Donna gonna do? Apprehend me? Bring me in to see the Lord of the land– Ah, right, there’s no Lord here.” Then she whipped out a glowing syringe from under her sleeve, attached it to the scalpel on her Swarmsteel glove, and flipped Wisnu off with it. “This ain’t the Attini Empire, bitch. Get off your… fucking ant carriage or something. This is the Entrance Exam, and I know for a fact they ain’t looking for softies like you–”

  “C-Can we just calm down, girls?” Donna said frantically, skipping between the two of them with her arms flailing around. “It’s not in the rules, yes, but it’s also not right, yes! You’re both right! Now can we get back together and actually work as a team–”

  “Any Noble-Blood of the Attini Empire who willingly allies with a murderer is no noble at all,” Wisnu said, clenching the muscles in her forearms. “I will ask you one last time, Blaire. Did you kill everyone here, or did you not?”

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  Blaire shrugged nonchalantly again. “Who knows? But, you know, the same goes for us Plagueplain Doctors. The high and clean life just ain’t for us. Your beauty as ‘excellence’ ain’t ubiquitous, and a new word you’ve probably never heard of in your life, you coddled, silver-napkin child–”

  Wisnu drew upon her strength and dashed in for a slash.

  Dahlia, Emilia, and Muyang chased the Mutant ambrosia beetle across the fungi forest, and, surprisingly, they were gaining steady ground. It wasn’t just because she’d been doing stamina training or because Emilia and Muyang were slowing down just for her—the ambrosia beetle just wasn’t particularly fast compared to Madamaron, and all three of them were more than fast enough to keep up with it.

  “The beetle that drags its shell is easy to follow,” Emilia said, her glassy cicada wings fluttering behind her as Dahlia and Muyang ran abreast, all of them keeping their eyes on the grey spore trail the jumping beetle was leaving behind. “Well, in its case, it's more like clouds of spores that it’s not even trying to hide from us. How’d you think it got the jump on so many participants back there if it’s this loud?”

  “It’s… a Mutant,” Dahlia mumbled back, nearly tripping on a giant bug carcass as she vaulted over it. “Maybe they just weren’t… prepared for it?”

  “Nonsense,” Muyang said, shaking his head in dismay. "True, we may not have known every twist of the exam, but its nature remains unchanged year after year. In the first stage, we hunt the Mutant-Classes as teams; in the second, we face them alone; and in the third, fate deals us an unknown hand. Those who enter this trial must surely know they will face Mutant-Classes. How, then, could they come unprepared?"

  Dahlia chewed her lips. “So… either they were too weak, or–”

  “The Mutant beetle’s too strong,” Emilia finished, narrowing her eyes. “Watch your backs, then. It’s probably got a few tricks up its metaphorical sleeves. Wanna bet on whether or not it’s running us into a trap?”

  “I will bet five silvers,” Muyang said.

  “You for or against?”

  “For. Of course.”

  “But I’m also for. What’s the point of a bet if we’re not on opposing sides? Dahlia, how much do you have in your purse?”

  “Uh… but I think we’re running into a trap, too.”

  “You guys are boring.”

  Be that as it may, the three of them eventually burst into a relatively wide clearing, surrounded on all sides by colossal red and blue-capped mushrooms. They screeched to a halt, Muyang’s beetle head screeching louder than all of them combined. Morning sunlight was blaring brightly down on them, but there was a spore filter in the air, warping the light into a sickly, pallid yellowish-green. not a place suited for humans to take shelter in.

  While Emilia summoned an amber chime and Muyang squinted at the dark shadows at the edges of the clearing, Dahlia let her antennae wander around in circles, trying to figure out where the beetle had jumped to. Last they saw it, it’d been leaping off the mushroom barks with its tail tucked between its legs—metaphorically—but with this spore haze in the air? They’d be lucky to still be breathing ten minutes down the line, let alone five, or three. She felt sick just breathing the spores in.

  “Oh, I see,” Emilia murmured, casually rubbing her throat as she cracked her neck left and right, clicking her tongue once, twice, thrice—and the clicks reverberated across the clearing, echoing back to Emilia's ears in seemingly perfect clarity. “That’s how they got the other participants to lower their guard.”

  There was no hiding the flinch that went through Dahlia at that, though the fact that Emilia warned all of them helped lessen the surprise.

  When her antennae flared and tingled, she instinctively whirled with her firefly bracers crossed in front of her head, and the first Mutant that leapt through a colossal mushroom to slash down at her received an explosion of lightning as a gift.

  Blue and golden sparks coursed through its chitin as it clicked its tongue and jumped back, skidding along the clearing before it decided to retreat into the shadows. Muyang tried to swing his giant beetle helm at it on the way out, and Emilia most certainly tried to summon her flute again, but both of them were too late—the Mutant lunged at their backs from the other side of the clearing, and they coordinated their defences at the same time, Muyang blocking with his beetle helm and Emilia shouting a physical sound wave to help with the defence.

  Now, there were four-armed ambrosia beetles prowling around the clearing, and taking into account the fact that their chitin armours were eerily smooth and hairy—they could easily pass for humans clad in full-body Swarmsteel if they lost the beetle heads—it was quite obvious they weren’t going to be at each other’s throats.

  “... I thought Mutants aren’t big on teamwork?” Dahlia whispered, pressing her back to Emilia and Muyang’s as they faced both beetles together. “Unless… they’re of the same species, in which case, they’re more than happy to be buddies. Twins. Mutant twins?”

  “Seems like it,” Emilia grumbled, grinning back at her. “But it doesn’t matter. Just stay behind me. Now we know whenever there’s one, there’ll be another, so we can prepare accordingly. They won’t take us off-guard next time.”

  “And about this time?” Muyang mumbled, his neck muscles tensing as he rolled his shoulders. “They still Mutant-Classes, and even with our numbers, it is we who are pressed against the edge of the blade. Tell me, can the two of you join forces to slay one? As for me… alone, I may stand a chance, or perhaps not. Their rank eludes my sight.”

  “Cool. I see you can still talk like that when you’re staring death in the face. You’re less nervous than I thought you’d be.”

  “The same goes for you, Miss Emilia. We strike at the count of three?”

  Emilia nodded. “Two.”

  Dahlia blinked. “Wait. I don’t think this is a fight we wanna take–”

  And a loud from right beyond the edges of the clearing startled both Mutant beetles, their heads snapping over to see the source of the commotion—and then they immediately leapt away. For good reason, too; Muyang picked the two of them up by their collars and tossed them back without any effort as a horde of about a hundred Giant-Class bugs smashed through the forest, pouring into the clearing with ear-shattering screeches filling the air.

  If it were just the bugs, the Mutants probably wouldn’t have run, but it was who was already fighting the bugs that rattled them.

  There were two, four, six of them. Two other full teams. A middle-aged couple in silver-plated robes wielded giant bone saws and jagged daggers, hacking and slashing through the dense mass of giant bugs pouring around them. Above them, a younger boy in a thick fur coat wobbled on a thick mushroom branch, aiming a crude pipe-like weapon down at the bugs. Judging by how they were all working together to clear out the bugs, they were probably on the same team.

  Dahlia couldn’t say the same for the other team.

  On the side of the clearing, a fierce duel unfolded atop the wave of giant bugs. A pretty lady in regal, feathery, and geometric-patterned attire clashed against another masked lady, and her toxic black and green cloak billowing like raven wings stood out in stark contrast. It was a giant rectangular blade against glowing syringes attached to claws. Noble and elegant bladework against wild, feral slashes. They leapt nimbly from bug to bug, desperately trying to kill each other, and the bugs they decimated in the process were mere side-effects. They only had eyes for each other, and… there was also a third lady running after them on foot, shouting and waving at them to direct their fighting spirit on the bugs instead.

  Of course, directing fighting spirit on the approaching bugs was something Dahlia, Emilia, and Muyang should be doing as well. Half the clearing was already flooded with crawling, bleeding, screeching giants—they couldn’t really run from this, and frankly, Dahlia didn’t think her teammates to run from this.

  The link to the Discord server is with nearly five hundred members, where you can get notifications for chapter updates, check out my writing progress, and read daily facts about this insect-based world. My is here with up to eight advanced chapters for this story and Storm Strider and Thousand Tongue Mage, so it's twenty-four advanced chapters in total.

  See you next Friday!