Vantari ran—limped, really—through the veinwork of his laboratory, a lantern bucking against his hip. The stump of his right arm burned, and each footfall jarred the wound. So irritating. All of it, irritating. A decade of infrastructure collapsed into a column of dust by a single diamond round and a blind linguist's parlor tricks—and now the tunnels themselves shuddered with the aftershocks, dust drifting like spores.

Note it: his lab was most likely destroyed. Note it again: within hours, the ruins of his lab would be mapped, catalogued, and moralized. The word 'traitor' would be placed next to his name and lichen across every wall of the Divine Capital, and then it'd crawl east, west, and south until the Outer Regions sang the chorus as well.

He shouldn't have misread the Thousand Tongue. The Worm Mage was predictable in unpredictability, but the Thousand Tongue had seemed, to his discredit, a negotiable variable—both of them were instructors too clean of blood to risk the optics of massacre, so he hadn't thought the Thousand Tongue would decide to simply clean house.

It appeared he'd over-fitted all of his models for success, and now his research was over.

… But is it really?

This was all so irritating, but not terminal. He'd designed against terminal failure. Before he ran away from the Thousand Tongue and the ceremonial hall, he'd tucked a folder under his left arm. Fifty-two pages of clean data, survival curves, and graft resonance ladders; all the rest could burn for all he cared.

As long as he had this one folder, he could restart his research again.

Outside the Capital, he could hire a carriage from any border hamlet too hungry to ask questions. The Mori Masif Front would swallow him in a few weeks—its logistics corps understood the value of heresy if heresy killed bugs—and the Rampaging Hinterland Front would demand brutal field proofs before they took him in; but he could deliver those by month's end.

The Plagueplain Front? Better still. Bharncair wore curiosity like an epaulette, and the Plagueplain Doctors would take his research and welcome him into their fold. Let the Divine Empress keep her theater, and let Decima play puppeteer in the shadows. So what if the Attini Empire that'd scorned him now was destroyed? He'd simply restart his research in a place where results outranked optics.

I will survive.

Humanity will survive.

He cut left, then right, following tunnels whose geometry he could draw blindfolded—and then, slowly but surely, he collided with geometry he didn't recognize at all.

The floor sloped where it should've remained level. The air cooled and dampened. A slight lateral draft tugged at the lantern flame, and he slowed, lifted the light, as he stepped into a cavern that didn't belong to his lab or to any plan he'd ever sketched.

… What is this place?

Bioluminescent mushrooms rippled across the walls like the underside of a jellyfish. The fungal caps—probably basidiomycete derivatives, though thicker with a salt-glass lustre—tiled the ceiling and walls, each cap haloed with green-fire gills.

The light lit up the cavern of earth and—he blinked—piles of soil that were not soil.

They were bodies.

He advanced three steps, lantern rising. At least two hundred human corpses were heaped into mounds that tried and failed to become mountains. Their armour were shattered, their textiles were rotted to lace, and most of them were in states of such decay that he could only conclude they'd been dead for a while. The air was thick with death, too. Adipocere and stale iron. He even tasted putrescine under the sweet fungal breath; the nearest corpse mountain had sloughed into a slip, and what oozed at the bottom was human oil.

This isn't one of mine.

The body disposal caverns for his lab lay further south. He was running north. If his internal map was correct now—and it always was—he was directly under the Divine Temple right now.

Curiosity outran prudence in him.

He went to the nearest corpse pile and knelt. His hand did what they'd done since boyhood: sort, part, probe, and record. He peeled a slab of collapsed armour plate aside. Under it was a man's torso, ribs sprung like a cracked barrel. The breastplate still held a carved crest he could recognise in his sleep: a stylized crown made of interlocking ants.

Spore Knight.

"Now, why would you be here?" he murmured. Forget his bleeding, missing arm. He was too piqued by the corpses.

He lifted his lantern, washed light across the mound, then searched through the second and third corpses. Every mostly-intact corpse he inspected belonged to a Spore Knight, but that didn't make a lick of sense. The Divine Capital didn't scrimp on funerals for its peacocks. The Empress would build domes and float white flowers and parade banners and call their deaths 'sacrifices'.

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What was this, then? A crypt that refused ritual? A midden?

As he continued rummaging through the corpses, a thought slid along his nerves. He'd never really thought about it, but since all Spore Knights had the Advanced Bullet Ant Class as a baseline, and were then augmented with an additional ant ability given by the Divine Empress… what sort of class did the Empress have that has been giving the Spore Knights their impossible regeneration ability for the past decade since she took the throne?

Field reports had called it 'near-immortality', a term he despised for its theological laziness. Nothing was immortal. Some things simply repaired faster than you could break them, and sure, the knights regenerated like cordgrass after fire, but the biological mechanism couldn't actually be—

Something clicked behind him.

He flinched at the first sound: a faint, dry twitch that didn't belong to pipes or stone. He spun, lantern sweeping a nervous arc across the cavern.

Nothing. Only fungus-glow and the still mountains of corpses.

Then there was another twitch, sharper, behind him. He wheeled back, and this time he saw it: a finger, eviscerated to the tendon, giving a feeble spasm.

Hm?

His breaths caught, lungs seared to silence. He stepped back slowly, lantern rattling against his hip. One finger became three. A wrist twitched. A jaw cracked open, then shut. The carcass-mounds began to stir in dissonant rhythms as though some hidden conductor had lifted a baton and called ruined flesh to attention. They weren't alive. Not properly. No, they couldn't be. These bodies were butchered, hollowed, and past the reach of any pulse.

And yet they moved.

… Oh.

I see.

His instincts overtook his curiosity. As the corpse mountains groaned and twitched in tandem, he turned and bolted into the tunnel on the far side of the cavern, continuing north.

He didn't dare look back. The noise swelling behind him was enough to make him run harder than before, deeper into the dark.

The Spore Knights are blessed by the Empress, so if they have that ability, then the Empress…

He didn't complete his hypothesis. It frightened him. If that conjecture stood, then there was an explanation for the knights' regenerative coefficient, and it was worse than the Magicicada Witch's presence in the Divine Temple. He needed a new lab. He needed more months of uninterrupted failure. He needed to finish his research before—

Footsteps ahead.

He slid to a halt so abruptly his lantern's flame crawled sideways and licked the glass. There was pitch black darkness at the edge of his light, but he heard the cadence and knew the sound of heel, ball, and toe. It wasn't a bug. These tunnels under the Divine Capital were made to defend against burrowing bugs to begin with, so there was no way a bug had managed to make its way down here.

A man, then.

A man he could defeat.

"Who's there?" he shouted. "Identify yourself!"

No answer.

But the shadow kept walking forward.

His hand quickly found the puncture ampoule he'd hidden inside his coat. Without hesitation, he thumbed the cap free and drove the needle into his jugular vein—and the grafting bug essence slid into his bloodstream like a warm comet.

His heart seized once, then doubled tempo.

The essence dose was dilute—zero point seven percent of what he gave to his Grafting Bug Afflicted—which meant it was safe enough to keep his speech from frothing into nonsense, but strong enough to make his aura bloom from his pores like a sizable threat. After all, analysis of the grafting bug essence showed five hundred and nineteen signatures braided into one: ants, mantids, dragonflies, termites, hornets, stick bugs, cicadas, and stag beetles. His scent should be like no other bug in the world right now.

There was nothing that shouldn't fear the essence of a grafting bug.

"Careful," he warned the shadow, and his voice went dry with contempt. "Do you really wish to face one such as I?"

The shadow paused for a moment.

Then it resumed walking, unhurried.

… He felt the first pinch of doubt. His aura should be making any sane man blanch. Even Spore Knights had taken a half-step back when he uncorked a vial of the essence near them.

Whatever was in front of him did not.

There's no way.

His heart threw a hiccup against bone. He fought the instinct to backpedal. He had the distillate essence. He had the edge. He was the edge.

"I said," he repeated, louder, "do you really want to test—"

"That smell is quite unique," the man in the shadows said. "That is… five hundred and a few dozen bug essences swirled into one? It's a rather interesting taste, but I've eaten well over five hundred different types of bugs as well. You're nothing particularly new to me."

Vantari took a step back. His heel found grit; his knee barked a flare of pain.

"That's—"

And in the syllable between an idea and his throat, something touched his neck.

He blinked.

The world brightened, then dimmed. Warmth ran down his clavicle with the unmistakable viscosity of blood.

He looked down to see his throat had been slit.

… Ah.

This man… is…

He crumpled to his knees, lanternlight splashing across stone as his throat filled with a wet gurgle.

The man walked past him with intolerable ease, not even sparing him a glance. A kitchen knife spun idly in one shadowed hand, with another flick of the wrist—casual as a coin toss—the man sliced up Vantari's precious data folder. Curves, diagrams, and annotations all shredded into ribbons, falling as confetti over his blood.

Then the man continued down the tunnel, humming all the way.

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