Eria's scream split into chittering as her body swelled. Chitin plates bloomed and extra limbs cracked out of her back, the stage groaned under the new weight.

Behind Zora, the twelve Spore Knights and the several dozen guards he'd shoved out of the building with earthen walls started clawing their way back in. He immediately snapped an ear at them. The Spore Knights aside, the guards were loading new bullets into their rifles, the stuttered discipline of bolt-actions racking across the hall—and at once, a storm of barrels was pointed his way.

He had to give them credit, at least. He'd hurled them out with everything he had, and here they were, still on their feet.

But Eria had no intention of letting them fire.

The giant grafting bug she'd become screamed—and vaulted. She cleared the Spore Knights in a single leap, landing behind the riflemen on the left like a dropped bell. The first slash sounded like paper torn off a wet board. A dozen men went down in a single sweep of her razor foreleg, armour screaming, bodies ruined.

The shape of her was wrong. Half-formed, her lower body was all giant black and gold-streaked bug, but where the giant bug's head should be, her normal human upper body retained its shape. She really was an amalgamation, between a Giant-Class bug and a Mutant-Class bug, though her pupils had gone sharp and narrow as well. They didn't look like they could be reasoned with.

"Get them out, Enki!" Zora snapped.

Enki was already moving. Wormholes pried open behind every standing knight and guard, and before Zora even knew it, the boy was darting through his own wormholes, shoving each and every last one of them back into their wormholes. A wounded student whimpered; Enki kicked him into his wormhole as well, evacuating everyone from the building with a seamstress' precision.

Eria struggled to follow the motion. She slashed where the wormholes appeared one by one only to miss every time, so eventually, she lifted her head towards the one man who wasn't moving in the hall:

Zora.

Those sharp, predator-like eyes locked onto him.

She lunged.

He brought his staff up and let the word carry his will: "Barrier!"

The air stiffened in front of him. Eria slammed into his invisible wall with enough force to drive a crack through the spell—and through the stage behind him. The impact threw him back with a violent skid. He blew through the rear wall in a roar of bricks and splinters and out into daylight, shoulders stinging, but he found his balance mid-flight and stabbed his staff into the ground to slow himself down.

"Streets, become shackles!"

He'd studied every pavement, brick, and clay used to shape the streets. He knew the seams between the cobbles, and he knew how to dismantle them. The ground answered. As Eria clawed out of the ceremonial building after him, curb and cobble tore out of the ground and braided into stony bands that shot up around Eria's legs, like hands grabbing onto a thrashing animal.

For an instant, the bindings held. Then Eria's legs surged, and the stone shackles split like stale bread. She ripped herself loose and tore up a length of the broken street with her, flinging the slab toward him like a meteorite.

"Shatter!"

The chunk exploded into a cloud of harmless grit. Pebbles pattered against the street behind him like rain against a drum, and thank the heavens he'd broken the chunk small enough not to gouge the evacuating people behind him—a trickle of students and soldiers still fleeing the hall—but the cost came at once: the air filled with a hiss of dust.

The grit scratched at his hearing, static on the line.

He lost track of her for half a heartbeat too long.

By the time he swiped the dustcloud away, Eria had already clawed her onto the top of the low administration building across the street. Her claws cracked tiles and she slipped more than a few times, but once she was above most of the campus, she threw her human head to the sky and loosed a howl that made every hair on his arms stand up.

The ground answered.

Tremors ran beneath his soles. One after another, the campus ruptured from the ground-up. Statues toppled. Gravel sprayed. From gardens to quads to the margins of walkways, Giant-Class bugs exploded from the ground by the hundreds. Two hundred. He counted at least two hundred popping up across the entire campus before their screeching made it impossible to count.

Zora grimaced.

The Giant-Class bugs Vantari had been experimenting on down in his lab.

And he must've seeded a vial of grafting bug essence inside Eria, which shattered with his whistle, making her go berserk.

As Kita burst through the hole in the wall to join Zora outside, he listened to the snap of rifles on every side of the campus, guards shouting orders between bursts of gunfire, and the smaller, shakier sounds of students chambering rounds and swinging blades with hands that'd never known war. They were fighting the Giant-Class bugs, yes, but not well. Their patterns were sloppy, their stances too narrow; they bled fear into every bullet and swing they sent out.

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While Enki alone was evacuating dozens of people every second with his wormholes, it wasn't enough.

"Kita," Zora said, steady as stone, "help Enki out. Evacuate the students, the wounded, and pull them clear. I'll deal with the bugs."

"Wait—" Her voice broke on the name she couldn't quite finish. He felt her staring up at Eria, worried like he'd never seen her, but he couldn't linger on the heiress now.

He flared his wings once, hard and sharp, and the gust kicked dust and ash away as he lifted himself onto the ceremonial building's sloped roof. Tiles shifted under his boots. He stamped his staff down in front of him, gripped it with both hands to steady himself, and then cleared his throat.

"Earth!" he bellowed. "Speak in spears, and rise where I point, not where I don't!"

His spell darted from his mouth to his staff, and as he swept his staff across the campus—jabbing at each Giant-Class bug for only half a second before moving onto the next—giant stone spikes shot up from the ground, skewering the first wave of bugs where they barreled towards the guards and students.

He had to shape each syllable with care. Point with care. Too careless and a spike might spear through multiple guards, Too much weight behind a vowel and an entire building might be impaled as collateral damage, killing the students taking shelter inside.

Of course, it didn't help that Eria was jumping all around as well. She pounced onto the giant bugs, tearing open beetles, rending thoraxes, and stitching their limbs onto her own body. Wings grafted onto her teardrop-shaped abdomen with a wet crack. Giant mantis scythes slid behind her shoulder blades. Plates stacked across the back of her giant body until her breaths started rasping through shells, and still she continued eating and ripping into the giant bugs across the campus, an insatiable beast of violence incarnate.

Zora's jaw tightened as he continued raising giant earth spikes across the campus. This was bad, but… Eria wasn't actively hunting down humans. She prioritized bugs first, and she turned her wrath only on those few guards and soldiers who struck at her.

As long as nobody attacked her, she wouldn't attack them back.

Is that her human side still in control or something else entirely?

By the time Zora finished casting, a hundred stone spikes had risen where he pointed and nowhere else. The loud Giant-Class bugs were all impaled in the air and dead; the clever, smaller, and weaker ones were limping; the rest were scattered, disoriented, and howling. The guards could deal with them. From the campus' south gate, he also heard a company of soldiers pouring in. The twelve Spore Knights were still alive and kicking as well, each of them single-handedly taking on multiple giant bugs at once.

Whatever ants the Empress had given them, he supposed they really were the empire's strongest warriors.

Now, he could focus on Eria.

"Enki!" he snapped. "Where the hell are—"

Air folded behind him, and the Worm Mage dashed out of the wormhole, sliding beside him in a hound-like crouch. The diamond rifle rested heavily in the boy's hands, while his cape woven with a hundred diamond flowers swayed against gravity as though it were underwater, the edge of it almost scraping Zora's face.

As Enki fired a few more rounds at a distant Giant-Class bug, Zora angled his head at Eria three roofs away, where she was scything through a horned beetle.

"We have to isolate her," he said. "Can you warp her somewhere else?"

Enki made the smallest sound, a scowl given voice. "The girl's aura is strong. I cannot open a wormhole within thirty paces of her."

"We'll do it the old-fashioned way, then. What's the strongest attack you've got?"

"I can destroy the ceremonial building with a single railgun shot."

Zora frowned. "What's a railgun?"

"It is… a firing technique I learned from an elder worm where I came from."

There were a hundred follow-up questions Zora wanted to ask, but he put them away for now. "Can this 'railgun' punch all the way down to Vantari's lab?"

Enki nodded once. He emptied the chamber in his rifle, leaving it open for one special projectile.

"Then that's where we'll go. Get ready."

Zora lifted his staff and cleared his throat, letting the spell carry on the wind:

"Fireworks! Light up the sky!"

The word carried, and the heavens obeyed. Bursts of heat detonated overhead, their echoes chasing each other across the roofs. Eria's head snapped toward the light, and then her claws gouged stone as she dashed across the buildings in a straight line for him, her body a bloody mess of scythes and shells. She barely even resembled her original grafting bug form anymore.

Zora let her come. He planted his staff into the ground once again, cleared his throat, and said:

"Raise earth."

The ground beneath them buckled and surged upward. Cobble and soil groaned as the entire roof beneath him and Enki lifted in a sudden column of wind and stone, and the world tilted. Dust billowed. Eria leapt into the same updraft, her grafted wings flaring as the three of them rose together into the sky.

Still, she was able to twist mid-flight because of her grafted wings, diving for his throat.

"Barrier!"

The invisible wall before his face caught her in a crash that rang through his bones. The barrier wavered but held, buying him one breath—long enough to whip his head at Enki.

"Do it."

Enki didn't need telling twice. He plucked a small diamond flower from his cape, slid it into the chamber of his bolt-action rifle, and leveled the barrel straight down. A dozen wormholes irised open in a chain before the muzzle—one, then five, then a dozen—and then he pulled the trigger.

The shot came like a boom. The diamond flower round vanished into the wormholes, accelerating until space itself seemed to warp around all three of them for a short second.

Then the flower ruptured the ground below with a vertical scream, a massive hole blasted through stone and foundation alike to head straight into Vantari's laboratory.

Zora tightened his grip on his staff, his lips curving nervously despite himself.

So he had that attack up his sleeve all this time?

What else can this kid do?

But the aftermath of the railgun shot created a funnel of wind, dragging all three of them down as though gravity finally remembered they existed.

While Eria plummeted through the smoking hole in the ground, Zora and Enki fell in with her, air roaring past them.

"No killing!" Zora shouted at Enki. "We're going to subdue her down there!"

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