People called him the Warlord of the Northwest. The Boy in the Mist. The One-Boy Army. The 'Quylla Mikhur', meaning 'World Eater' in the northwestern tongues. The empire had a penchant for giving their great warriors deeply poignant names for no good reason, Zora had to admit, but when it came to the child he knew as the Worm Mage, he also had to admit the boy felt like something completely out of this world.

Above the barrelling carriage, the air stretched thin. Zora could barely hear what was going on outside already, but he caught the shift in weight—that even, measured markman's stance, not a drop of wasted motion.

There was the subtle clink of crystal and diamond as a hand adjusted its grip. A bolt sliding into place.

The boy spoke, training his aim on one of the pursuing mosquito-masked assassins.

"The passive mutation for the Whiteworm Class is 'Immortal Heart'," Enki said, quiet as the wind before the storm. No emotion. No weight to the words, as if merely describing the colour of the sky. "I do not have to eat. I do not have to drink. I do not have to sleep. I do not age. I still need to recover if I am injured or overworked, but beyond that, I can keep going."

There was no more discussion.

Three shots rang out in rapid succession, crisp, clean, and unshakable. The air crackled with movement as three bodies twisted mid-flight, their trajectories violently interrupted. Then the sound of impact: dull, heavy thuds against stone. No wetness. No lingering death rattle.

Not bullets that were fired.

Diamond clicked as Enki snapped his rifle's bolt back, reloading pebbles into the chamber with a smooth, methodical rhythm. The boy worked like a machine.

"This rifle is a Swarmsteel. A bioarcanic weapon crafted from the parts of a great whiteworm," he reported stiffly. "I do not know how it is made, and I do not understand its method of construction, but it is a empire-issue bolt-action rifle, custom build. Overall length: one metre. Weight: four and a half kilograms, balanced for precision shooting. Chamber accommodates variable ammunition. No reliance on gunpowder or casings. Effective range: one hundred metres under standard conditions, though accuracy degrades past eighty. It is capable of cycling and firing ten rounds in under a second with optimal bolt manipulation, and the frame is reinforced with whiteworm chitin. It is highly resistant to corrosion, impact, and extreme temperatures. It functions as a melee weapon without any structural compromise."

Without hesitation, Enki fired again. Two more bodies crashed from the sky, their masked forms spiraling into the tunnel's depths.

"In summary: the rifle does not require gunpowder or proper bullets to function. Any material loaded into the chamber will become a projectile."

The carriage rattled violently as the tunnel's narrow walls gave way to a vast, open cavern. The roof stretched high above, jagged formations hanging like the fangs of some ancient beast, and rock bridges crisscrossed in the darkness, spanning a chasm so deep it seemed to swallow the world whole. The air was thinner here, sounds scattering across the void instead of pressing close, which made Zora frown in distaste.

He could still hear well enough, but the clarity dulled even further. The assassins flew fast. Freed from the tunnel's confines, their wings beat in erratic patterns as they fanned out in the open space, no longer bound to predictable angles.

Then, like a chorus of sharpened whispers, gunfire and crossbow bolts screamed toward the carriage from multiple directions.

Enki twirled his rifle in a circle, and in the next breath, the air split open around the carriage.

A dozen perfect circles ate their way into existence, cold edges thrumming like the growls of a starved beast. 'Wormholes', the boy had called them. Every bullet, knife, and stray projectile vanished into the void of the wormholes before they could strike, and then—not a fraction of a second later—the wormholes spat them back out at the assassins from completely different angles.

Two assassins barely had time to register the mistake before their own projectiles punched through them. A startled cry, a snap of motion, and their bodies plunged into the abyss below.

Zora snorted, fingers idly tapping against the windowsill.

"Now that's a sight," he mused, tilting his head upward. "What, exactly, is that Art of yours?"

Enki didn't hesitate. "Worm Maw."

"And what does it do?"

A click. Another round chambered. "It allows me to create wormholes. A single wormhole to link two spaces together."

Zora made a show of opening his eyes and blinking to make sure Enki knew he didn't understand.

"There are five hard rules and limitations to my Art," Enki said plainly. "One: Free space only. Wormholes cannot be opened inside solids or liquids. That means I cannot open one inside a wall, inside the ground, or inside a person's body. I also cannot open a wormhole around someone's neck and kill them instantly."

"That'd be quite funny if you could," Zora said.

"Two: Immobility." No response to his quip. "Wormholes must be stationary. Once they open in space, they cannot move. The only exception is when I open one on the surface of my own body. Those wormholes move with me."

Zora tilted his head even further back. That tracked with what'd happened back on the train. Enki had struggled to warp because the train was moving at well over sixty metres per second. A wormhole might open in one spot, but the train would tear past it in an instant, making it difficult for him to time how he wanted to hurtle through his own wormholes.

There was a delay before Enki continued. Just another shot, another assassin knocked out of the air.

"Three: Fragility. Wormholes can be broken," he said curtly. "If the glowing edges take enough force, the wormhole collapses violently. Anything passing through at that moment is pushed toward whatever side has more mass. If I reach my arm through one and it is destroyed, my arm would be shoved back towards me."

Zora hummed. "So you can't use them to cut through anything you want."

"No." Another crack of the rifle. "Four: Shape. Wormholes are always circular and strictly two-dimensional. No spheres, no cubes, and no irregular shapes."

Stolen novel; please report.

"And the fifth?"

A brief pause to fire three more shots.

"Five: Range. I can only open wormholes within the range of my aura, and I cannot open them to places I cannot properly perceive," he finished. "If I can hear, see, or sense a closed room well enough, I can create a wormhole inside the closed room even from the outside. But even if someone describes a place to me in perfect detail, I cannot open a wormhole to it unless I personally perceive it and it is in range of my aura. My current maximum range is fifty metres."

And then something broke the monotonous pattern of firing and reloading. A knife sliced and curved through the air at an angle that should've been impossible. An instant later, steel met flesh. Enki toppled over and crashed onto the roof, and then—just like that—the ceiling gave way.

The boy smashed through the wooden panels, landing heavily onto the cushioned seat in front of Zora.

Zora tilted his head slowly. "Are you alright?"

Enki sat up slowly, stiff as a doll. "Okay."

His voice betrayed no pain. No hesitation. Blood should be spilling onto the floorboards between, but there was hardly more than a trickle of cold-feeling blood from the knife still lodged in his shoulder.

Without a flicker of doubt, he reached for the handle, but the wooden panel behind him slid open. Ifas glanced over his shoulder through the slit, shaking his head. "Maybe don't do that, kid. That's a Plagueplain Front knife. Only the Great Makers know what sort of poison they've laced with it. You pull that out too quickly, air gets in, and chances are your flesh'll go stiff as stone."

Enki didn't hesitate. He yanked the knife free.

Zora listened for the wet sound of blood spilling, but there was none.

"I have a mutation that prevents me from bleeding out," Enki replied pre-emptively. "Most poisons should not work on me either. I am half-organic, half-inorganic."

"What else can you do?" Zora asked, leaning back slightly.

"All of my tier five mutations are already unlocked," Enki replied, cracking his own arm as he did, and Zora listened as his wound sealed in real time like snow falling over a crevice. "To sum, I can generate vibrations, regenerate rapidly, emit cryogenic mist, and selectively harden parts of my body to near-indestructibility. However, only my last tier five mutation requires further explanation."

"The cloning mutation, right?"

From the driver's seat, Ifas let out a low whistle. "Ain't that a wild one?"

Enki nodded promptly before jumping back onto the roof, resuming his firefight against the assassins.

"When I cut off a finger, it can grow into an identical clone of myself that I must control manually," he explained between shots, and Zora had to tune out the screams and shouts of the assassins around the carriage to listen carefully. "My clone can use my Art and all of my mutations except for the cloning mutation. Its attribute levels depend on how much I give it when I sever my finger. A default clone with one level in all attributes takes a whole day to develop, but if I give a clone with five levels in all attributes, it would take two weeks for it to develop. This scales exponentially. I have yet to make a clone with more than five levels in all attributes across the board."

Zora hummed in thought. "So how many can you make and control at once?"

"Ten. My severed finger will not regenerate until the clone is destroyed. If I have two clones active, I will only have eight fingers. Furthermore, for every clone I make and give attribute levels to, it will take away the same amount of attribute levels from me. Combining the time it takes to develop a clone, the cost of attribute levels, the cost of missing a finger for every clone, and the mental burden of having to control multiple bodies at once, I prefer not to use this mutation if I do not have to."

And that last part—Zora caught something in the boy's tone. A flicker of something that wasn't quite irritation, but close.

"So," Zora mused, "losing those two clones on the train set you back by how much?"

Enki didn't reply, but the silence was an answer on its own. Ifas gave a low chuckle.

"That's a funny mutation, I'll tell ya, but damn if it ain't powerful!" Ifas shouted over the wind. "You get good at controlling your clones, kid, and you'd be a whole army on your own!"

Before Enki could respond, the air shifted. Zora heard the assassins land before he felt the impact. Six of them hit the stone bridge ahead of the carriage, and when they punched down as one, the bridge beneath them collapsed.

Most people would've panicked. Most people would've wasted those precious moments flailing or shouting.

Enki snapped a finger instead, and a larger wormhole tore open in front of them, swallowing the carriage whole before the giant silver ant could run off the edge. A second later, the wheels hit solid ground again as they reappeared on a separate bridge, avoiding the drop entirely.

What a useful Art indeed.

The tunnel narrowed around them, forcing the battle into tighter quarters as Enki resumed his firefight with the rest of the assassins. A cold draft rolled into the carriage. That cryogenic mist leaking from Enki's skin curled through the air like fog slithering over a frozen lake, and it brushed against Zora's face, sharp and biting, chilling his skin.

He sighed through his nose, considering whether to counter it with a warming spell, but then a hand stuck through the slit behind the driver's seat.

It held a cup of steaming chocolate.

"Empire's specialty, Mister Fabre," Ifas said cheerily. "It ain't like the tea you're used to drinking from the southeast, but I promise the empire's kakaw beans ain't half bad."

Zora took the cup without hesitation, smiling courteously. "Freshly brewed?"

"Made it just now. I hope you like it hot."

Admittedly, Zora had never tried empire chocolate before. Which was quite a strange realisation to make now. Two years, and he'd never had the empire's specialty drink before? He raised the small cup to his lips, taking a slow, thoughtful sip.

Rich. Bitter. Dark.

Pleasant.

"Not bad," he mused. "What is this called?"

"Kawiquri chocalate. It means—"

"Bitter silver."

Above, the firefight reached its peak.

Only one assassin remained fluttering after their carriage.

The mosquito-masked man must know by now that he was hopelessly outmatched in range, and desperation made fools of even the deadliest warriors. His wing beats accelerated as he lunged at Enki, aiming for a final, suicidal strike with a curved dagger gripped in both hands.

Zora took another small sip of his coffee as Enki punched out—his arm stretching two metres forward like a striking worm—and the final assassin was flung backwards, tumbling soundlessly into the dark behind them.

Silence followed.

Enki dropped back into the carriage, rifle across his lap, back as straight as ever.

"... I wonder," Zora exhaled slowly, rolling the cup between his palms, "why tell me everything about your abilities, Enki?"

A brief pause.

Then Enki tilted his head, sincerely befuddled.

"It is illogical for allies to withhold ability information from one another," he said. "You will tell me your abilities, too, so I know what to expect of you."

Zora chuckled under his breath, shaking his head.

What a strange child.

But then another thought struck him. "Speaking of which," he started, "you said you don't age. Is that correct?"

"Correct."

"How old are you?"

"I was fourteen when I died in Immanu," Enki said curtly. "I am fourteen now."

…

It was Zora's turn to pause, silent for a beat, before chuckling again.

"Sure," he said. "Fourteen."

At that moment, Ifas slid open the horizontal slit again, extending a cup of chocolate toward Enki. The boy eyed the steaming, bitter-sweet drink with open distaste before shaking his head. "No hot drinks."

Zora reached for the cup instead. "I'll take another."

As he did, Ifas grinned. "We're still on track to reach the Salaqa Region, by the way, so just hold on tight. We'll be back in no time at all.

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