***

Calvin’s breath caught in his lungs. He knew what was going to happen next: the creature would rush toward him with unnatural smoothness, and its razor sharp legs would reduce him to quivering chunks of bloody meat. The sheer panicked adrenaline saw him fumbling into his belt, drawing the Jerrytanium knife and flicking it forward faster than he could think.

Shaping.

10/12 Bent Remaining.

“You-“ A man’s gravelly voice oozed out of the metallic beast an instant before a massive trident of Jerrytanium formed from the tip of Calvin’s knife caught the Hunter-Killer and pinned it to the wall.

Calvin scrambled to his feet and dodged around the flailing limbs whizzing through the air as the creature tried to unpin itself from the wall.

He ducked to the side and grabbed his component belt before jumping out the window the monster had just come from.

Calvin burst through the shattered slats, his heart slamming against his chest, too in the moment to feel the wood scrape against his skin as he came out of the third story window.

The entire Inn was at a slant, and Calvin found himself sliding down the painted wooden surface rather than falling straight down to the ground. A second later he pushed off the wood and landed on the ground, casting his gaze around for any sign of what had happened.

The buildings around him were demolished, like a toddler had gotten tired of playing with its blocks and upended his entire construction. The street was choked with civilians, men and women, both wounded and unwounded, were panicking on the street. Cries of desperation and pain filled the air, but the herd mentality seemed to lead them in the appropriate direction: Away from the wall.

The Inn Calvin had been staying in was a block away from the wall. Uncomfortably closed for some, but cheap. To the left, the buildings closer to the wall were nothing but rubble, and…Calvin noticed that a huge chunk of the night sky was dark, something gigantic was blocking out the stars.

From that direction, more Hunter-Killers were crawling over theruined buildings, swarming toward Calvin and the rest of the civilians.

A man threw a torch at one of the creatures, who dodged it easily, but the burning piece of wood and cloth sailed far past it, bathing a small fraction of the towering thing in illumination.

Far above him, Calvin saw metal plates the size of bathtubs that seemed to slowly move, as if whatever was beneath them was breathing.

Then the torch went out.

Calvin decided it was time to get out of here.

Shrieks rose as the metallic creature began to tear through the crowd.

I need to save as many people as possible.

Oh, come on, don’t tell me you’re –

And use them to buy time.

Fair enough.

Calvinian summoning.

Heart of the Swarm.

9/12 Bent remaining.

Calvin split the swarm into two groups, the escape group of some five hundred pounds, roughly triple his body weight, went three different directions: east, southeast, and northeast. If any of them were destroyed, it would shift the location he reappeared farther away from whatever killed them.

The other half, the amount of wasps he’d been able to summon at level eight, spread out among the killing machines, their only purpose to land on the creature’s eyeballs and cloud their vision.

Calvin watched in amazement as his awareness ballooned outward, encompassing the entire block, and rapidly stretching even further outward as approximately two million wasps choked the air around the Ilethan creatures flooding into the city.

Off the top of my head? A lot.

The wasps couldn’t do anything more than cover the creature’s eyes, as their stingers simply clinked against glass and steel, their poison completely ineffective.

It was enough though. People, when faced with death, can find a respectable amount of hustle, and the civilians fled toward the castle while the metal creatures killed Calvin’s swarm by the thousands, crushing them off of their eyes, slicing them out of the air.

Out of curiosity, Calvin pushed his swarm of wasps over toward the giant…thing, that dominated the next street over. He couldn’t see particularly well in the dark, but the sensitive feet and millions of contact points allowed him to make out something big and cylindrical, covered in armored plates that doubled as feet.

Feels like the descriptions I’ve heard of a Berengas wurm, but it’s metal?

That would make plowing through solid steel more viable. I actually don’t know that kind of ‘bot. Maybe they mutated one?

Calvin didn’t know enough to weigh in on that, and his focus was stolen by something off to the side.

Grant and Nadia were walking down the street, just one block over from where Calvin had been, protected by a barrier of whirling knives. It looked like the massive sword weilder had adapted to Calvin’s swarms, and replaced his steak knives with actual daggers. He looked grim as he walked beside Nadia, the two of them flanked by six of the Hunter-killers.

Nadia, on the other hand, looked terrible. Her face was sunken and grey, wearing the same clothes as…Dear Elani, eight days ago? Calvin, like a typical boy, was unopposed to wearing the same shirt for a few weeks at a time if it was still clean, but Nadia’s armor was torn and crusted with her own blood, in such a state that even he thought it was out of the ordinary. The black eye she’d gotten from Kala hadn’t healed either, instead it was an ugly purple with greenish tinge at the edges, fresh as the day she’d gotten it.

Something is very wrong here. Why? Calvin’s Intuition struggled to put the facts together and form a conclusion out of what he had available, but in the end, failed to come up with anything useful, other than a strange foreboding.

Calvin sent a probe in, a few thousand wasps as a hello, but they didn’t make it past the large man’s whizzing barrier of knives.

Need to Get Atom ant sooner or later to let my wasps compete with things like that.

At level fifteen, he would be able to sacrifice fifteen times the wasps mass to make it fifteen times stronger. For a little wasp that might not mean much, but scale it up to the size of a small dog, and then you had something dangerous.

Assuming I ever get there, Calvin thought as he guided his escape groups away from the fighting.

At the rate you’re getting into life or death situations…yeah, I think you’ll get there.

At Elliot’s words Nadia’s head whipped up and she studied the wasp swarm hovering around their dome of safety. She inhaled deeply through her nosem and let out a shuddering sigh, as if tasting the air on the way back out, too.

Well, that’s creepy, but at least she’d not using her damn mind magic…Why isn’t she using her mind magic?

An entire week had gone by, so there was no reason for the Ilethan sorceress not to have restored most if not all of her Bent.

Is she saving it for me or something? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. She demonstrated more than enough Bent to overwhelm me casually, she didn’t seem the type to skimp on it, and yet she’s just walking beside Grant…sniffing for things.

Calvin watched with a thousand eyes in the growing light of the city-wide fire as Nadia took a sharp left turn angling toward Calvin’s inn. She stopped right where he’d been standing when he’d used Heart of the Swarm, and began testing the air with her nose and tongue in a way that seemd to genuinely make Grant uncomfortable, the big man shifting away from the grey princess. The front line had long since moved forward, so there was no one else there to witness the strange sight of a pallid princess climbing the side of an inn, pausing at the broken shutters to sniff the wood, her strangely dark tongue flicking out like a snake’s to test the splintered wooden frame.

Hey I think she just-

“Divination…”

She frowned, seemingly unhappy with the result of the spell, just as Calvin felt an itch on the back of his imaginary neck, like some fuzzy something was watching each of his wasp bodies, and he could make out its malignant gaze boring into their backs.

She reached out with a finger and slid it across the sharp edges of the shattered wood slats, the very tip coming back with a bit of red.

Is that my-

“Spell Purge.”

****

Calvin’s eyes flew open, six feet above the cobbled stone streets, arms and legs flailing as he slammed into the ground halfway between his three escape swarms and his delaying swarm.

When the time was right, he’d planned on having the delaying swarm cease to exist by biting off each other’s heads, canceling out their mass and allowing him to reappear much further away, but he hadn’t had time to do that.

He landed right on the front lines, not nearly as close to the castle as he’d wanted to be, among the mass of panicked gadveran civilians running for the safety of the palace. Calvin forced himself to his feet and joined them before he was trampled to death.

Not a hundred percent sure the castle is a safe place to be at this point, buddy.

What, would you prefer I go to the docks and board a ship, with that fleet out there?

Then at least your opponents would be human, am I right?

Calvin weighed the situation. From what he’d seen in the air, Fires were engulfing the entire city. The infrastructure, and therefore the city’s ability to sustain a war, was going up in smoke as he stood there thinking about it. Even if they pushed the invasion out again, they had a gaping hole in their wall, and nowhere for people to eat, sleep or cook food.

The palace was designed to be easily defended, but against that enormous metal wurm? Cal saw it as a matter of time before the entire structure was torn down.

We’re screwed.

Calvin changed direction, turning toward the north and muscling his way through the crowd of civilians that was carrying him westward like a white-water river, aiming for the docks. The port was guarded by twin towers that stood on either side of the bay, with defensive trebuchets ready to rain fiery death on any ship that got too close.

The Ilethan fleet prowled just outside the trebuchet’s range, circling like vultures. Once they saw the fire spreading in the city, they would be sure to seize the opportunity.

Calvin burst out of the crowd of bodies on a small off-road that led a winding route to the docks, only used by the men and women who lived and worked in that neighborhood.

Calvin took his first step down the street and froze.

I need people.

Escaping by himself was pointless. He needed people to be a wizard-king, and if he lost Baroke, Kala, and Ella after all the loss he’d experienced the last few months, well, his Intuition told him it would cause a wound that he’d have a hard time recovering from.

For the sake of my girlfriends, my future, and my sanity, let’s be heroic, Calvin thought, turning back toward the stream of Gadverans.

Ah, selfish altruism.

Calvin raised his hands and a two thousand giant wasps burst out, each the size of his fist, spreading out over the burning city.

Heart of the Swarm.

Suddenly bursting into giant wasps wasn’t the best way to keep people calm, and more than a few people screamed at the sight of him, trying to force their way deeper into the crowd, but larger eyes had longer vision, so he did what he had to do.

Calvin spread out, covering half the city in a quick sweep with the larger wasps, moving as fast as he could without losing detail.

I just realized you’d be really good at Amber Alerts.

In just a minute or two, he made out Baroke’s heavily muscled frame standing out among the civilians. To his credit, the boy about Calvin’s age was ushering people twice his age toward the castle without any seeming panic. His yellow and brown livery must have given him some sense of responsibility, despite only being in the army a week

Baroke looked up as the buzzing around him got stronger, tensed to fight. Did I show him my wasps? I don’t think I did.

“Baroke!” Calvin said, appearing at the center of the wasps as he dismissed the spell.

The heavy hitter gave an awkward squawk and a reflexive punch, but this time Calvin was ready, and simply leaned out of the way.

“Don’t do that!” he shouted.

“Baroke, let’s help people get the fuck outta here! It’s not looking good!”

“I gotta make sure everyone gets into the palace!”

“The palace is a fucking deathtrap with that thing back there!” Calvin said, pointing.

“What thing?” Baroke shouted over the screams of the people and the roar of the fire.

“Yeah, what thing?” Andra said, seemingly melting out of the crowd of people.

“Dear Kvothe!” Calvin shouted, flinching away from his commanding officer.

“Calvin, Baroke.” The steel-haired woman said, eyeing the two of them. “Good to see you’re alive. What thing?” The crowd seemed to flow around the woman’s steel-clad body like a river around a boulder.

“Some kind of metal Berengas wurm!” Calvin said. “I was near the wall when it came through! The Palace isn’t going to hold up to that!”

“You’d be surprised what the palace can hold up to. Metal Berangas wurm huh?” Andra mused for a moment.

“We’ve got a better chance of cutting through the fleet outsi-“ A metal palm snapped out and caught Calvin across the face, before seizing his shoulders.

Andra looked him in the eye.

“That’s planning for failure, Calvin. Even dumber than regular planning. Take a deep breath, get your shit together, and get ready to fight to win. Now, did you see any Royals guarding the wurm?”

Calvin had gotten a good look at the wurm and its surroundings as a massive swarm of wasps.

He shook his head. “There’s only two people that could be considered that, one girl in black, name of Nadia, one in blue, she called Grant. They aren’t guarding it, they’re coming after me.”

“You?” Andra frowned. “Are you sure?”

Calvin thought back to the princess’s bruise-colored tongue delicately tasting him from the piece of wood.

“Pretty damn sure,” Calvin said.

“I know of her. When did you find the time to make the girl your mortal enemy?”

“Umm….”

“And here I thought you snuck off that night for some show and tell with Kala,” Andra rolled her eyes. “I don’t think one smack was enough for you.”

She refocused on the two of them, her expression hard. “Alright, I’ve got a job for the two of you – “

Kala and Ella came out of an alley and arrived beside Calvin, panting.

“What did I miss?” Ella asked, crossing her arms.

“Are you all right?” Kala asked, checking Calvin for wounds. “You were bouncing all over the city, we thought you might be in trouble.”

“She thought you might be in trouble.” Ella said, crossing her arms.

“-Four of you.”

“Me too?” Kala asked curiously, probably expecting to have to fight to stay with the rest of them.

“Defending cities while they’re on fire builds character.” Andra said with a cold smile. “And if you die, I’ll feign ignorance to your father.”

“We never saw each other,” Kala said, and Andra made a wordless gesture of agreement.

The general pointed at a tower far to the south, on the other side of the city.

“That’s the Academy right there, Bekvah’s Alma Mater. It’s got a fuck-off big machine that controls the weather. Go there, find out why the nerds aren’t making it rain, fix it, and don’t die while you’re doing it.”

What’s thirteen pounds squared in gallons of saltwater?

Not enough to put out a city.

Fair enough.