A cloying, fungal dampness clung to the farmhouse air, thick with the tang of unwashed bodies, old timber, and the pervasive, greasy scent of cheap noodles—a perfume of profound unease. Captain Liang moved through the nervous clumps of tenants and his own men like a ghost, his face a new canvas of fresh scratches overlaid on the older map of perpetual worry. He, and every Xie retainer present, had developed a working theory about the young master they'd been condemned to babysit.
The boy possessed a certain feral acuity. Not intelligence, not wisdom—those required depth and study. His was the sharp, sudden cunning of a cornered rodent, flaring to life only when his own skin or coin was threatened. The dossier from X5 had been unequivocal: a spectacularly useless youth, a truant and a brawler whose academic records were a wasteland of single-digit scores. So where, Liang mused, dabbing at a sting on his cheek, had this… this juridicalviciousness sprung from? This casual, cutting knowledge of grain requisition laws, Imperial assessors, and the delicate, bloody ballet of inter-house politics? Perhaps the ugly feud with the Li clan on that mining rock had been an education of its own—a brutal primer in how even mid-level nobility had to grovel before the cold, impersonal machinery of the state. A lesson this particular rat had digested whole. Borrowing the tiger's awe to terrify the wolf,Liang thought with a grimace. Effective. Deeply, profoundly ungrateful, but effective.
Across the churned dirt of the yard, Teng Yunli stood as if sculpted from winter marble, save for the almost imperceptible tremor in the hand clenched white-knuckled at his side. The humiliation was a physical thing, a coppery, ashy taste flooding his mouth. To be dismantled—his elegant, unspoken power play shredded into a squalid argument over entry fees by this… this bastard, this refuse scraped from the galaxy's underside. Rage was a white-hot ingot in his gut, burning with the pure, clean need to see that smug, noodle-slurping face obliterated, that sneering voice silenced for good.
Before the fantasy could crystallize into action, the voice cut through the murmuring tension again, laced with theatrical boredom. "You lot," the 'young master' declared, waving a languid, dismissive hand towards the most vocal agitators, encompassing Teng Yunli's core group. "Plan's changed. You don't get in. At any price. The rest of you, the toll stands." He took a long, obnoxious slurp from his synth-foil cup, grimacing as if the world personally offended him. "Bugs'll be here any minute. I'm not wasting my evening on your tantrums. Gate shuts in thirty. Anyone tries to rush it, their name goes on a docket for grand larceny. Now move. You're ruining my noodles."
The effect was instantaneous, brutal, and masterfully cynical. By creating a caste of the permanently damned, he transformed the original fee into a lifeline. The crowd's unified outrage shattered, replaced by the panic of individuals terrified of being on the wrong side of the line. A frantic, jostling queue formed, copper notes and credit chips thrust towards the bewildered farmhands like offerings to a capricious god.
Teng Yunli watched, his aristocratic composure a thin veneer over seething fury. He was being outmaneuvered by a gutter-born simpleton. The 'grain legality' argument, damn it all to the darkest pit, had real teeth. His own guards, men of practical violence, had subtly shifted stance, becoming barriers rather than blades. The cost-benefit analysis was lethally clear.
From the deep shadows beside a grain silo, Aqi observed the theater with the detached focus of a tactician, while Gronk nibbled on a salvaged nutrient bar. "Huh," the marmot grunted, crumbs dusting his golden chest fur. "Picked a fight with the shiny one. Gotta give 'im points for guts."
"Stupidity," Aqi corrected, her voice barely a whisper. "Or a very specific calculation. He's herding them."
"The shiny guy?"
"All of them."
On the balcony, Yao let the performance hang in the charged air, the steam from her cup wreathing her face in the fading light. Her true attention, however, was elsewhere. Her newly-symphonic senses, still humming with the aftershocks of transformation, were tuned to a different frequency. Beneath the crowd's grumble and the wind's sigh through barren stalks, she heard it—the distant, growing thrum of high-performance repulsor engines. One set close, approaching fast. Another, farther out, holding position. Trouble, arriving in harmonic layers. She took another deliberate, soggy mouthful, playing for seconds.
Captain Liang's head snapped up, his professional paranoia ringing like a bell. "Young Master! Incoming shuttle! Bearing the family crest!"
A sleek, gunmetal-grey shuttle descended from the bruised violet sky, the Xie heraldic hawk etched upon its hull in deep, arrogant indigo. It moved with the lethal grace of a raptor claiming its perch. The crowd's noise dipped into a reverent, fearful hush. Realpower had arrived.
Yao's gaze flicked to the silo's shadow. She caught the brief, instinctive flinch as both Aqi and Gronk dissolved further into the gloom. Smart,she thought, a sliver of approval piercing her concentration. Sentiment here was a currency that bought only graves. A bond forged in a few hours of shared violence didn't warrant a suicide pact. Their instinct for self-preservation was a data point, and it spoke well of their potential longevity.
She let the petulant mask slam back into place, scowling at Liang. "So they're here. You'd think the sky was falling. This is mydirt. My walls. Try to remember whose pay you're on."
Teng Yunli, witnessing the arrival, felt a surge of vicious, vindictive hope. The Xie family's internal dramas were poorly-kept secrets whispered in elite parlors. Perhaps the universe had just handed him a blade.
The shuttle hatch hissed open. Three figures emerged, their boots hitting the hard-packed earth with definitive thuds. A squad of guards followed, their armor polished to a muted gleam, their stances broadcasting a quiet, professional lethality that made Liang's men look like festival volunteers.
The leader was a man in his late forties, Xie Yong, from a minor collateral line. His face was all severe angles and pinched discontent, as if he perpetually smelled something faintly rotten. Beside him stood his son, Xie Jun, nineteen and armored in expensive, rune-etched leathers that seemed designed less for protection and more for proclamation. The third youth was younger, perhaps sixteen, with the pale, fine-boned beauty of a porcelain doll and eyes the color of a frozen lake—Xie Guangyu, one of Xie An's legitimate heirs. The resemblance to his father was there, but muted, overshadowed by an unsettling, watchful stillness.
Yao's mind raced, cross-referencing gossip fragments and data snippets. Xie Yong… almost certainly kin to that insubordinate shuttle pilot. The look he leveled at her wasn't mere disdain; it was assessment, sharp and wary. Their shuttle's sensors would have captured the entire preceding farce in high definition. They'd heard her.
"Uncle," she drawled, not deigning to descend. "Come to my rescue? Brought a whole parade. I'm touched."
Xie Jun's lip curled, but a minuscule shake of his father's head froze the sneer. Xie Yong's voice was gravel grinding in cold oil. "We are apprised of the situation. The holding is of strategic import. Keli, you are young and… notably inexperienced. The perimeters are beyond you. Retire inside. We will manage affairs and summon you when the environment is… sanitized." The dismissal was wrapped in the thinnest, most transparent gauze of paternal concern.
Ah, the 'for the greater good of the family' gambit,Yao thought. How tediously predictable.She painted on a look of vapid admiration. "Wow, Uncle, you're so strong and wise! You should go fight the monsters then! I'll stay here and guard the soup." She waved a magnanimous hand towards the darkening fields. "Oh, but you might have to fight the Teng guy first. He wants my farm too. You should kill him! For the family! And to protect me, your favorite nephew! I can be a witness! It's a great plan, right?" She beamed at him, the very picture of bloodthirsty, idiot enthusiasm.
The sheer, audacious wrongnessof it struck Xie Yong like a physical blow. He had come to smoothly assume command, not to be handed a script penned by a lunatic and thrust into the role of common cutthroat.
Xie Jun, his patience a frayed thread, snapped. "The Calamity is the enemy! We are not barbarians brawling in the dirt. We consolidate. We enter the compound." His tone brooked no argument, a pale imitation of his father's intended authority.
Yao's manic grin vanished. She hopped off the balcony with a clumsy thud, the half-eaten cup of noodles clutched like a scepter. She strode right up to the Xie party, the smell of artificial broth and her own unwashed, adolescent male disguise creating a nauseating aura. "Ticket," she stated, thrusting her free hand forward, palm up.
Xie Guangyu, who had been observing with the detached curiosity of a scientist studying a novel pathogen, actually blinked.
"Excuse me?" Xie Yong's voice dropped to a deadly whisper.
"Ticket. Everyone pays. I made a big announcement. But, see, here's the awkward bit," Yao said, leaning in as if sharing a secret. "You folks haven't actually formallyrecognized me yet. No ID, no family registry. So technically, legally speaking, we're not family. Not yet. So… you gotta pay. But hey!" She brightened. "You can ask me for a refund later! I'm good for it." She winked.
The insult was so petty, so exquisitely aimed at the heart of Xie Yong's own condescending "familial duty" ploy, that it momentarily short-circuited his anger, leaving only stunned, icy fury. With a sound of pure disgust, he ripped a credit chip from his belt and threw it at her feet. Xie Jun and the others followed suit, the chips scattering in the dirt like metallic, contemptuous leaves.
Yao didn't bend. She looked past them at the cluster of gawping, terrified tenant farmers. "Well? That's your back-wages. You think I'm your maid?"
A beat of stunned silence, then a ragged, desperate cheer erupted as the farmers fell upon the chips, their fear momentarily buried under a landslide of hard currency. "The master! Young Master Keli is our master!" one grizzled old man cried, holding a chip aloft as if it were a holy relic. "The deed says so! The law is with him!"
Yao nodded, as if this was the most obvious conclusion in the world, and turned on her heel. Captain Liang scrambled after her like a worried shadow. The moment the heavy farmhouse door thudded shut, she spun and kicked him hard in the shin.
"Agh!My lord?!"
"That's for the doe eyes you were making at my dear cousin out there," she hissed, her voice dropping from its performative whine to something low and venomous. "Your salary comes from mypocket. You watch myback. Not suck up to the relatives who might find a dead bastard convenient. Remember which way your blade points."
Liang, nursing his shin and a profound sense of injustice, could only nod miserably. The message was crystalline: his loyalty, however purchased, was to be absolute and singular. "Fortify the perimeter," she ordered, the petulance gone, replaced by a tone of cold command that brooked no debate. "If this many hired swords can't hold, we're all just meat in a larder."
In the cramped room they'd secured for a small fortune, Gronk was lamenting the lumpy mattress. Aqi stood at the warped window, her gray eyes cataloging the organized chaos below. The farm was being transformed into a fortress with a desperate, focused energy.
"He gave it all away," Gronk mused, unpacking a terrifying array of specialized ammunition from his seemingly bottomless pouch. "The coin. So why bother chargin'? Seems… pointy."
Aqi didn't turn from the window. "What is the difference between a guest and a customer?"
Gronk paused, a high-explosive round in his paw. "Spellin'?"
A faint sigh escaped her. "A guest costs the host. A customer pays. He is establishing the fundamental relationship. Had they entered as 'noble protectors,' they would consume his food, command his space, and he would be in their debt. Now, they are purchasing a service. Hesets the terms."
Gronk's beady eyes widened in revelation. "Ooooh. So it ain't about the copper. It's about… who's holdin' the leash."
"Precisely." Aqi's gaze was drawn to a group of farmers struggling with enormous, rancid bales of cured hides and matted wool from a storage barn. A stockpile of staggering, suspicious size. Her mind, a machine for connecting disparate dots, engaged. She turned and yanked Gronk's tail. "Up. We're making a purchase."
Down in the room that served as the master's study—a space reeking of dust, mildew, and the incongruous smell of roast fowl—Yao was methodically demolishing a platter of food. The tenant head, Lao Zhang, was wringing his cap, delivering a rambling report. When Aqi and Gronk entered, Yao looked up, her eyes—catching the garish, electric green from a hideous pastoral painting on the wall—glinting with an unnerving, acquisitive light.
"The little sparrow and the… tawny butter-ball," she said, waving a greasy drumstick. "To what do I owe the immensepleasure? I'm conducting business."
Gronk swelled up, his fur puffing out. Tawny!His realcaptain would never.
Aqi placed a firm, calming hand on his head. "We wish to buy the pelts. The ones in the yard. At a fifty percent premium. We can draft the contract immediately."
Lao Zhang's eyes nearly popped from his head. Yao chewed slowly, studying them as a jeweler might assess flawed gems. "Why? Planning a fashionable post-apocalypse wardrobe?"
"We have a need."
"You've devised a method to use them against the swarm," Yao stated, leaning forward, her gaze turning sharp, predatory. "Tell me. I'll pay you for the concept."
Gronk made a sound of pure disgust. This guy was worse than a blood-fly.
Aqi was silent for three long heartbeats. "I do not believe you could meet my price for that knowledge," she said, her voice flat. "But consider: if I conceived of it, others may. That is suboptimal for me. It is potentially existential for you, the landowner."
Yao feigned a tumult of greed and caution. "Fine. Then we partner. Take me into your cadre. I'm an Arcanist, you know. I won't disgrace you."
Gronk couldn't help it. He snorted. "What level?"
Yao drew herself up, puffing out her chest with ludicrous pride. "Third Tier!"
Lao Zhang, swept up in the need to validate his new, generous, and terrifying master, burst into sudden, fervent applause. "A prodigy! A genius is among us, blessing our humble farm!"
Aqi and Gronk stared, the momentum of the negotiation utterly annihilated. Aqi closed her eyes for a brief second, then opened them. "A party is… impractical. We will be in the lethal forefront. We could not in good conscience endanger you, young master." She seamlessly shifted tactics. "A profit-sharing agreement. We provide the method and labor, utilizing your materials. The dungeon will recognize the cooperative kill. You receive experience and a proportional share of the spoils. No direct risk to your person."
Yao pretended to weigh this, then shrugged, as if doing them a favor. "Eh, why not. Draft it."
The contract was scribbled on spare ledger paper with swift efficiency. As Aqi signed, her eyes performed a swift inventory of the room. It was less a study and more a bunker. Reinforced steel plating behind the shutters, heavy cross-bars on the inside of the door. The only evident weakness was the wide, cold chimney flue. This was a person who lived in anticipation of siege.
"If anyone comes whining for me," Yao was telling Lao Zhang, "I'm sleeping. A deep, healing sleep. Unreachable. You have my express permission to be profoundly rude."
Aqi filed the order away. As she turned to follow Lao Zhang and a grumbling Gronk out, a new sound insinuated itself into the stuffy room.
Not engines. Not voices.
A low, rising drone, vibrating up through the floorboards, swelling from a whisper to a palpable hum, to a roar that pressed against the eardrums. It came from outside, from everywhere and nowhere, the sound of the horizon itself dissolving into a million hungering mouths.
They all froze, then surged to the window, shoving the shutter wider.
The northern horizon was gone. Erased. In its place, a living, seething black tide, a tsunami of chitin and frantic wings, blotting out the last faint embers of twilight. Fifty thousand. A hundred thousand. Numbers that defied the scale of a Tier 5 event, a rolling cataclysm of ravenous purpose.
Gronk squeaked, a high, pure note of terror, his half-eaten pastry falling to the floor. "No, no, no… the Captain said… they're gestating, they hunt in waves, not all at once… this is allof them!"
Yao's mind, cold and crystalline even as the apocalyptic roar filled the world, locked onto the anomaly. Aberrant behavior. A directed, unified swarm.But the time for analysis, for clever contracts and performative greed, was over. It had evaporated in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
The calculation was now brutally simple. The siege was not impending.
It was here.