Ten more days passed, and by this point, there was only one day remaining in the exam—over seventy percent of the colossal fungi forest had been reduced to ashes by the ever-diligent sun moth patrolling overhead, and all that was really left of the forest was a kilometre stretch of greenery, barely large enough for anyone to get a good warmup run in.

  But Team ‘Dahlia’, as the five of them were, still had to make the best of their tiny little arena.

  Dawn of the eleventh morning. The cicadas singing and birds chirping were louder than ever around their clearing. The critters that’d survived the sun moths and the battles between the participants and the bugs had nowhere else to go but the clearing the five of them had been living in, and though their pretty mushroom hollow had been destroyed, it didn’t take them long at all to rebuild a new one, though it was obviously much less fancy—they spent more time training than beautifying their temporary abode. They’d cleared out the rest of the forest for Giant-Class bugs, ate as much as they could, and now, they were as ready as they could be to take on the Mutant-Class twins.

  [... You’re all plenty strong enough together.]

  [Now, it’ll come down to how well you can execute your plan.]

  All of them were scattered across the clearing. Otto was perched atop a branch, feeding anti-chitin bullets into his ‘rifle’. Muyang and Wisnu, as Dahlia expected, had become fast friends. She wasn’t privy to most of their private conversations, but whenever they were in plain sight, they were always training each other in hand-to-hand combat, and it was always quite amusing to see a giant man like Muyang sparring a seemingly delicate and frail lady like Wisnu. The solid thuds of their clashing fists and shins gave a good background beat to Emilia’s humming, which was all the cicada girl had been doing the past ten days: lying on her back to sleep, waking up to eat, and walking around every once in a while to stretch her limbs. Of the five of them, she was the most casual and relaxed; Dahlia had no idea what she was thinking, but if she didn't feel the need to train or warm up her voice, then maybe it was a good thing. She was confident in herself. She knew they could win.

  They’d prepared themselves about as well as they could, and now, it was time to fight.

  [Name: Dahlia Sina]

  [Grade: S-Rank Giant-Class]

  [Class: Assassin Bug]

  [Swarmblood Art: Recollection]

  [Aura: 1,389 (+320)]

  [Points: 28]

  [Strength: 5 (+4), Speed: 5 (+1), Toughness: 5 (+3), Dexterity: 4 (+1), Perception: 4 (+1)]

  [// MUTATION TREE]

  [T1 Mutation | Swarmguard Deity Lvl: 5]

  [T2 Mutations | Basic Chitin Lvl: 4 | Basic Antennae Lvl: 4]

  [T3 Mutations | Basic Claws | Stridulating Throat | Basic Setae Lvl: 3] 150P

  [// EQUIPPED SWARMSTEEL]

  [Assassin Bug Claw Gauntlets (Grade: C-Rank)(Str: +2/3)(Dex: +1/2)(Aura: +150/300)]

  [Adaptable Desert Locust Greaves (Grade: E-Rank)(Spd +1/1](Tou +2/2)(Aura: +40/60)]

  [Glasswing Butterfly Goggles (Grade: F-Rank)(Per: +1/1)(Aura: +10/10)]

  [Adaptable Firefly Bracers (Grade: C-Rank)(Str: +1/2)(Tou: +0/1)(Aura: +60/250)]

  [Adaptable Antlion Cloak (Grade: E-Rank)(Spd: +1/1)(Tou: +1/2)(Aura +40/120)]

  [Adaptable {Amalgamation} Hammer (Grade: E-Rank)(Str: +1/4)(Aura: + 20/60)]

  They didn’t need to share any more words. They’d shared plenty over the past ten days, throwing and discussing their ideas on how to slay the beetle twins most efficiently—and the answer they arrived at unanimously wasn’t surprising to Dahlia at all. Now, Muyang and Wisnu stood in the centre of the clearing, Emilia stood by the trunk of a colossal mushroom, and Otto knelt perched on the branches overhead. Dahlia herself was sitting and leaning against the trunk of another colossal mushroom close by, but not quite close to the rest of the team. She was a bit off to the side.

  The others had far more combat-heavy jobs to accomplish than her, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a role to play.

  “... Ready?” Wisnu asked, glancing back at all of them as she kicked up her oversized sawtooth blade, gripping it in both hands. In response, Muyang put on his giant beetle helm, Emilia rubbed her throat, Otto yanked in the scope on his rifle, and Dahlia nodded from afar as she tightened her two-handed grip on her hammer.

  They’d spent enough time idling around.

  Now was the time to pass the exam or die trying.

  Emilia sucked in a sharp breath before shouting as loud as she could, her voice reverberating and rippling across the clearing. The rest of them winced, but didn’t falter. They’d prepared themselves for the ear-shattering noise. Cicadas screamed around them, birds scattered in noisy flocks, and Dahlia’s antennae tingled as they swerved straight ahead—two human-shaped shadows were dashing and leaping between the colossal mushrooms, having heard the commotion explicitly made to challenge them to a fight.

  They accepted the challenge.

  [Two C-Rank Mutant-Class ambrosia beetles detected.]

  [Prepare for combat.]

  They had no intention to deceive. No intention to ride and hide. Their combined auras—their killing pressures—washed over the clearing even from afar, and though Dahlia was sitting leisurely off to the side, she still found herself gritting her teeth and shaking slightly. The firefly had been F-Rank, and Madamaron had been D-Rank. To face off against two C-Ranks at the same time was nothing short of a big leap for her—so thankfully, she wasn’t alone in this fight.

  She had powerful allies.

  Calm down.

  Slow your heartbeat.

  Wait for your moment.

  As the beetle twins pounced at Muyang and Wisnu from the shadows, both vanguards sidestepped their claw swipes. An unexpected move. The beetles must’ve thought they were going to parry or block, given their straightforward natures and fighting styles, but instead their dodges opened the beetles up to a quick counterattack—Dahlia’s heart soared for a single beat when both vanguards managed to lunge in and slam small circular magnets onto their chitins, which immediately thrummed and make their killing pressures waver for a short moment.

  Muyang and Wisnu backed up as the beetle twins stumbled forward, compound eyes wide and clearly surprised at their opening move.

  “It is not two C-Rank Mutant-Classes we are facing,” Muyang said, on the third night since they started working as a team of five. He sprang the topic out of nowhere while they were all feasting on bug meat around a campfire, and everyone stopped chewing for a moment just to stare at him. “Individually, they may be C-Rank, but I reckon their actual threat level together is around B-Rank, or even low A-Rank. Wisnu and I can each match one as a vanguard, but I doubt, even with Wisnu’s speed and my durability, that we can do much more than defend ourselves as punching bags.”

  “So?” Emilia said, lying on her side as she continued munching on her mantis leg. “We still need you two to be our vanguards, right? It’s not like me or Dahlia or Otto can play that round, and you know they’re going to want to fight close-quarters. We need someone to play the shields.”

  “And we will be the immovable shields, but there is a saying in the Hellfire Caldera Front that I cannot translate to the Sharaji Tongue completely,” Muyang replied, raising a finger, “‘If the mountain cannot rise, lower the river that climbs it. When the shield cannot harden, let the blade find no edge to cut’. It is one of the core tenets of the Firegourd Wu Clan, the family of Beetle Dancers.”

  “I’ve literally never heard that saying before.”

  “Me neither,” Otto said.

  “Where’s the Hellfire Caldera Front again?” Dahlia asked.

  “It means if we cannot strengthen ourselves enough to overwhelm the bugs with sheer power, then we should seek not to chase an unattainable strength,” Wisnu said, looking at Muyang with a coy smile, “and instead weaken our enemies.”

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Muyang smiled back. “Precisely. To that end, the sons of the Firegourd Wu Clan always train with metal rings on our limbs, torso, and neck—they constrict us, bind us, but through the pain and weight we suffer, our muscles grow tighter and our bodies become stronger. If we could somehow attach something to the two Mutant-Classes, we could weaken their physicality and lower their threat level down to D-Rank.”

  “Because what doesn’t kill you leaves you permanently in pain, crippled, and disfigured,” Otto murmured, sapphire eyes glowing softly as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a little metal stick. “Actually, we Pioneers in the Rampaging Hinterland Front regularly use magnets made of insect parts to create Swarmsteel. If we can make a few high-density magnets that stick onto the Mutants’ chitin like glue, then we can make it so they can’t fight too close together or they’ll risk being glued together—they’ll be forced to fight apart.”

  “Aren’t those magnets hard to make?” Emilia mumbled, gesturing to the pile of raw insect chitin and uneaten parts behind them. “We have lots of random bug components right there, but we’d be here for weeks and months before we find even a single one with trace amounts of magnetic minerals, and that’s if any of us even knows which insect parts have magnetic minerals or not–”

  “Honeybee abdomens, termite antennae, butterfly thoraxes, and dung beetle eyes,” Dahlia said, crawling over to the pile of insect parts as she began flinging irrelevant parts aside, eyes wide and focused as she searched for the necessary components. “All of those parts… um, are known to have something called ‘magnetite’ in them, which supposedly helps them navigate across vast or underground spaces with their sixth sense. If we find those parts and then squish them all into super high density… what did you call them? ‘Magnets’? Do you think they’ll stick to the Mutant-Classes’ chitin?”

  The rest of them stared at her blankly, and she paused to glance back at them as she finally felt a bit self-conscious—she was scraping and scavenging the pile of insect parts like a beggar, and that made her face all the more red and hot.

  “I… uh, memorised the Amadeus Academy Almanac of Bugs,” she explained hurriedly. “The book said those bugs have parts that demonstrate ‘magnetic properties’, but it never explained what that meant, so I… well, I still memorised which parts have magnetic properties. I just thought it’d come in useful one day.”

  And it was useful, because they did end up making magnets by finding loads of relevant insect parts, crushing them into fine powder, using Otto’s magnet stick to separate the magnetic minerals, mixed the minerals with fungi resin and clay, and then baked the circular magnet to harden the material. It was mainly Otto and Dahlia who’d worked together. Since the amount of magnetic minerals they could extract from a single insect part was dreadfully little, they’d used well over a hundred Giant-Class bug parts to make two powerful magnets that would stick to bug chitin and pull towards each other all the time—and all they had to do was stick them onto the beetle twins’ chests.

  As the beetle twins took simultaneous steps back, scratching and growling at the silver plates glued to their chests with incredibly potent adhesives, Muyang and Wisnu leapt forward. They went on the offensive. To prevent the beetles from potentially ripping the magnets off their chests, the vanguards had to distract them, and distract them the two nobles did. Wisnu slashes wild and furious with her sawtooth greatsword, swiping one beetle to the far right, and Muyang headbutted the ground with his giant beetle helm, forcing the other beetle to dash far left.

  Separated.

  Broken apart.

  In an attempt to regroup and fight as one, the beetles tried dashing back and towards each other, but their antennae stood up straight as they neared each other. Dahlia couldn’t suppress a small smile. They could sense the pull from the magnets—if they regrouped, their magnets would slam the two of them together and immobilise them. They couldn’t regroup as long as the magnets were still on them. Muyang and Wisnu pressed forth, using their hesitation as springboards to continue the onslaught, headslams and kicks and slashes and thrusts breaking the fungi forest around them.

  Now that the beetles had to fight each of the vanguards separately, they were much less powerful. The vanguards weren’t winning—their attacks weren’t landing because the beetles were still too quick, burrowing in and out of the ground to dodge every strike—but the vanguards weren’t losing, either.

  A sharp anti-chitin round whizzed over the vanguards’ heads and pierced into Wisnu’s beetle’s shoulder, while it was still probably thinking about how to regroup with its twin. The beetle screeched. Wisnu tightened her stance and slashed upwards, her greatsword uppercutting its jaw and sending it into the air.

  [Clean shot.]

  [The boy's not half-bad.]

  While the Noble-Blood continued distracting her beetle with flurries of slashes , Muyang’s beetle snapped its head up to glare at Otto. The Pioneer gulped so loud even Dahlia heard it all the way below his branch, but he didn’t falter. He fired a second shot—this one missed—and then the beetle elected to ignore Muyang, dashing past the big man to pounce up at the rifleman instead.

  But Emilia had already jumped up there, standing right behind Otto, and she shouted a sharp, heavy note. A physical sound wave shot forward, smashing into the beetle. Otto had winter earmuffs on. The beetle didn’t. Otto fired two, three, four more times in quick succession, nailing each of the beetle’s arms mid-air as it fell backwards screeching, and Muyang jumped to headbutt it into the ground.

  Dahlia squinted, her Swarmguard Arms bracing her face slowly as Muyang slammed the beetle into the ground, a gust of dirt and wind exploding outwards.

  The beetles weren’t dead yet—none of Wisnu’s slashes could reach the impossibly agile beetle, and the one Muyang slammed into the ground had already scrambled onto its feet, both beetles resuming their melee clashes with the vanguards—but they couldn’t afford to just go for the long-range supports in the back. Not with Otto constantly pelting them with bullets from afar, and Emilia switching between different sounds to constantly support them from the back. She'd hum and match the 'frequency' of her allies for a second to strengthen and toughen them with her voice, then continue to click her tongue and send out sharp sound waves at the beetles, peppering them incessantly.

  As long as Emilia had the stamina to continue using her voice, there was nothing stopping her from doing it all on repeat. And she was a self-sufficient support, given she could also protect herself, though her voice dealt considerably less damage whenever she went on the offensive. Only Otto's anti-chitin bullets could pierce the beetle's chitin.

  “... So Muyang and Wisnu will be the vanguards taking the brunt of the hits, while Otto will hammer their chitin with his anti-chitin rounds,” Emilia said, on the fifth night since they started working together. The rest of them stopped mid-chew to watch her draw diagrams in the dirt with her toes. “Since Otto’s the only one here capable of damaging them, they’ll definitely try to go after him—so I’ll be on standby to protect him and you vanguards with my voice. I'll also contribute to hitting them every once in a while with my sharper sounds, I guess, but basically, I'll be taking the support role here.”

  “And that is our strategy?” Wisnu mused, adding lines to the diagram of their formation with her toes, not bothering to toss aside the skewer in her hands. “Muyang and I will distract the beetles, while Otto will shoot and Emilia will provide general support for all of us… but our victory condition is making sure Otto and either Muyang, Emilia, or Dahlia gets the final kill on both Mutant-Classes. Otto can probably aim and get a clean heart shot on one of the Mutant-Classes, but since he will be immediately warped away by wormholes once he kills a Mutant-Class, that will leave only the four of us against one incredibly agile Mutant-Class.”

  “It’ll try to run away,” Otto pointed out.

  “And if we don’t finish the fight fast afterwards, the death of even a single Mutant-Class is a massive reduction in the forest’s killing pressure, and the sun moth is definitely going to notice,” Emilia said, grumbling under her breath as she lay on her back, arms crossed behind her head. “Since Mutant-Classes not of the same type don’t typically like each other, the beetle twins have probably been keeping the sun moth in check these past few weeks, and vice versa, so the sun moth will probably swoop in and kill the last beetle if it realises the other beetle is dead. If that happens, I’ve got no clue if that counts as us ‘killing a Mutant-Class’. We can’t kill the two Mutant-Classes with staggered timing, then. We have to kill them close together.

  “So we have Otto kill one quickly, and then the rest of us just gang up on the other one?” Dahlia asked, a bit anxious. “We… still have to contest with their Swarmblood Art, you know. Their unique magic. They can… burrow through organic material, leave their spores behind, and when they get injured, they can retreat into their burrows to eat the mushrooms they propagated the growth of to rapidly regenerate their wounds. In short, their magic seems to be ‘growing healing mushrooms on any organic material’. How do we contest with that?”

  “And if they burrow out of sight to heal, how do we stop them from removing the magnets that prevent them from fighting together?” Otto muttered, scratching the back of his head as he scowled. “It doesn’t matter how much damage we do to them if they can just run away and come back fully healed in thirty or so seconds. We don’t have that overwhelming firepower to kill them from a hundred to zero, which means–”

  “If we want to prevent them from healing and kill them at the same time, we must trap them,” Muyang finished, raising a finger. “There is a saying in the Hellfire Caldera Front: ‘The gate of refuge becomes the cage when the latch is unseen’.”

  Emilia groaned. “You sound like my dad with those stupid, completely unheard of sayings.”

  “But it is a true saying in the Hellfire Caldera Front. It means–”

  “The beetle twins are powerful, and they will definitely sense a trap coming if they are of sound mind and body,” Wisnu said, shaking her head slowly. “But if they are in pain, panicking, and think they have an opportunity to retreat to safety, they will dive headfirst into the trap by themselves.”

  “... So, we hurt them, injure them, then give them an opportunity to run, and only try to trap them once they’re trying to run away?” Otto asked.

  “And then we finish them off while their guard is lowered.” Muyang nodded. “The question is, how do we predict in which direction they would choose to flee, and how do we prepare a trap that will intercept them on the path of their retreat? We cannot very well trap the entire forest within one week, can we?”

  “If the Plagueplain Doctor were with us, I’m sure she’d have plenty of venom and poison vials she could strap to the trees,” Emilia mused, “then she can detonate those vials whenever the beetles try burrowing inside to heal. Great Makers, she’d be mighty useful for trapping if she were here–”

  “But she is not here, and we will not be enlisting her help,” Wisnu said firmly, putting a stop to the idea. “Any thoughts, Otto? Do you know of any construct in the Rampaging Hinterland Front that can cage in Mutant-Classes?”

  “None that I can make with what shoddy insect parts I have access to here,” Otto mumbled, looking back at their gradually decreasing pile of insect parts. “A physical cage with bars and electrified wires is impossible. Things like that take weeks and months to make, not days. Besides, whatever our trap is, it needs to incapacitate both beetles in one fell swoop. We can’t just incapacitate one and let the other run free.”

  Everyone dipped their heads and lost themselves in their own thoughts, trying to think of any ideas—so Dahlia raised her hand, her throat still clenched nervously.

  In real time, all Dahlia was doing was sitting cross-legged off to the side by herself, both hands clutching onto her hammer planted in her lap. She wasn’t doing anything to help her teammates fight the beetles. Muyang and Wisnu each traded heavy blows with their respective beetles, Emilia was constantly altering her voice, and Otto dealt the hard damage with his rifle. If the beetles weren’t together, they couldn’t gang up on any one of the vanguards, and if they couldn’t use their teamwork advantage…

  It was a matter of time before they had to retreat and use their Swarmblood Art on a random tree.

  And all Dahlia had to do was keep her eyes wide open and pay attention.

  “... I’ll be the trap,” Dahlia said, chewing on her nails. “I’ll predict which tree they’ll escape to and intercept them when they run.”