The girl ran.
Air tore at her throat like swallowed glass. Every breath was a ragged gasp, a desperate plea for oxygen her terrified lungs could barely process. Her bare feet slapped against the cold stone of the stairwell, skin shredding on rough masonry, leaving bloody footprints she was too frantic to notice.
She had no name worth remembering. To the world, she was "Lot 7," "Mongrel," or "Trash." To the humans who ruled this city—this festering wound on the earth known as Torantell—she was not a being with a soul. She was a biological error, a vessel of dirty blood to be used until broken, then discarded like a cracked clay pot.
She scrambled into the suffocating darkness of a wine cellar, wedging her small, trembling body behind a stack of rotting barrels. The smell of vinegar and mold was a comfort; it masked the metallic scent of the slaughterhouse the world above had become.
Will I die?
The question, whispered to the woman in a strange robe just moments ago, echoed in the hollows of her skull. That woman... her eyes had been cold, dead things. Those "rescuers" reeked of the same arrogance as the slavers. They were beings who held the power of life and death and believed it their divine right to crush the weak.
If I go with them, I become a sacrifice, her instincts screamed—a feral intuition honed by years of beatings. If I stay...
Above her, the world began to scream. But it wasn't just a scream. It was the wet, tearing sound of a city being butchered.
...
The end of Torantell did not begin with a horn or a shout. It began with a vibration.
It started in the teeth, a low-frequency hum that rattled the marrow of one's bones. Dust danced on the cobblestones. Fine porcelain in the noble districts shivered on shelves. Then, the sun died.
A living shadow swept over the city, blotting out the light with a density that defied nature. It was not a cloud. It was a singular, writhing organism composed of millions of separate bodies.
"Form ranks! Defensive Formation Three!"
The roar came from Captain Vane, a veteran of the Beastman Wars. He stood atop the outer ramparts, knuckles white around the hilt of his greatsword. He had faced trolls; he had hunted elven guerrillas. He believed in the steel of the Theocracy and the protection of the Six.
He was fundamentally, fatally mistaken.
The "dark cloud" slammed into the city's magical barriers. For a heartbeat, there was a dazzling display of azure light—defensive wards flaring in a desperate bid to reject the invaders. But reality is a cruel mistress. The sheer kinetic mass of the swarm was undeniable. The barrier flickered, groaned under the weight of a million tons of chitin and muscle, and then shattered.
It sounded like the sky itself breaking.
The swarm descended.
These were not normal insects magnified by magic. These were monstrosities born from a nightmare. The smallest among them were the size of wolves, their carapaces gleaming with an oil-slick sheen. The larger ones—towering beetles and mantids—were the size of houses, their footsteps cracking the pavement.
"Open fire! [Fireball]! [Magic Arrow]!"
The air sizzled as mages unleashed their payloads. Explosions of flame blossomed in the black tide, incinerating hundreds of the creatures. The stench of burnt ozone and roasted insect meat washed over the wall.
But it didn't matter.
For every hundred incinerated, ten thousand poured through the gap. They were a landslide of biological violence.
A soldier next to Vane screamed—a high, thin sound that cut off abruptly. A mantis-like horror, its body a sleek chassis of bladed death, dropped from the sky. Its forelimb, a serrated scythe longer than a man, blurred.
Snick.
The soldier didn't just die; he was disassembled. His upper torso slid diagonally off his legs, a fountain of arterial crimson spraying Vane's face. The soldier's eyes were still blinking as his top half hit the stone.
"Retreat! Fall ba—"
Vane turned, but a shadow engulfed him. He looked up into the compound eyes of a creature that regarded him not with malice, but with the dispassionate hunger of a harvester.
A pincer the size of a carriage wheel snapped shut.
There was a sickening crunch, the sound of a ripe melon being stepped on. Vane was severed at the waist. He had a moment, a singular second of consciousness as he fell, to see his own legs standing uselessly on the rampart while his torso tumbled into the screaming maw of the city below.
The insects flowed through the streets like a black river. They did not loot. They did not burn. They sought only biomass.
Horses in the stables were stripped to clean white skeletons in the blink of an eye, their panic cut short by the gnashing of mandibles. Humans fleeing into their homes found no sanctuary. The insects tore through reinforced wooden doors as if they were wet paper. They poured down chimneys. They smashed through roofs.
It was a harvest. The humans were merely the crop, ripe for the reaping.
...
Inside the "Gilded Cage," the city's most depraved brothel, the air was thick with the musk of terror.
"Barricade the door! Move the heavy tables!"
Garlo, the proprietor, squealed like a stuck pig. He was a mountain of suet wrapped in silk, sweat pouring down his face in greasy rivulets. "You! Slaves! Get in front of the windows! Use your bodies!"
In the center of the hall, a dozen elven slaves huddled together. They were breathtakingly beautiful, their features refined, dressed in gauzy silks that mocked their dignity. Their eyes were wide, filled with the paralyzing fear of prey that knows the predator is at the door.
Garlo grabbed a female elf by her hair, dragging her across the floor. "If they get in, you go first! Maybe they'll be full before they get to me!"
The elf whimpered, her legs giving way. She collapsed, only to be kicked by Garlo's velvet slipper.
BOOM.
The heavy oak doors didn't just open; they disintegrated. Wood splinters flew like shrapnel, embedding themselves in the far wall.
Garlo shrieked, a sound so high-pitched it cracked. He shoved the elf forward, using her frail body as a shield. "Take her! Eat her! She's fresh! Just leave me!"
A massive head pushed through the debris. It was an ant, but twisted, armored in black plates that looked harder than steel. Its mandibles dripped with a viscous, green ichor that hissed when it hit the floor. Its multifaceted eyes scanned the room, devoid of mercy, devoid of hate. Purely calculating.
The elf squeezed her eyes shut. She stopped breathing. She waited for the tearing of flesh.
Snap.
A wet, heavy sound echoed through the room.
Warm liquid splashed across the elf's bare back. She didn't feel teeth. She felt... nothing.
Trembling, she opened her eyes.
The ant had ignored her. It had stepped over her.
Behind her, Garlo was no longer screaming. He was suspended in the air, impaled on the creature's mandibles. The insect had bitten him through the midsection. His expensive silk robes were turning red. His hands clawed uselessly at the chitinous shell, fingernails breaking against the armor.
The insect bit down.
CRUNCH.
It was the sound of a wet log splitting. Garlo exploded. Blood, intestines, and fat showered the floor in a grotesque rain. The ant began to feed, movements jerky and mechanical, consuming the man who had thought himself a king of this city.
More insects flooded the room. They swarmed over the furniture, chittering and clicking.
A beetle the size of a dog skittered up to the trembling elf. She flinched, a scream stuck in her throat. The beetle's antennae twitched, brushing against her cheek. It paused, tasting her scent.
Then, it turned away.
It leaped past her, latching onto a human guard cowering in the corner. The guard's scream was cut short as his throat was torn out.
"They... they aren't eating us?"
The whisper came from a male elf, his back scarred from the whip.
The realization hit them like a physical blow. The insects were massacring everyone—the guards, the patrons, the master—but they were maneuvering around the elves with surgical precision. It was as if the elves were ghosts, invisible to the swarm's hunger.
The terror in the room began to curdle into something else. Something darker.
The female elf wiped Garlo's blood from her face. She looked at the smear of red on her hand. Then she looked at the pile of meat that used to be her tormentor.
A bubble of laughter rose in her throat. It was jagged, hysterical.
"Look," she pointed, her voice trembling with a terrifying joy. "He's just meat. He's just... meat."
The other elves stared. The fear in their eyes died, replaced by a grim, vindictive ecstasy. They watched the feeding frenzy not as victims, but as witnesses to a divine judgment.
"Eat them," the male elf whispered, his eyes burning with fanaticism. "Eat them all."
...
Silence fell over Torantell.
It was not the silence of peace. It was the heavy, suffocating silence of the grave. The screaming had stopped because there were no throats left to scream.
In the basement, the half-elf girl waited. Hours had passed. The vibrations had ceased. The buzzing had faded to the north.
Driven by a hunger that finally outweighed her terror, she crawled out from behind the barrels. She crept up the stairs, her small hand gripping the railing so hard her knuckles turned white.
She pushed open the door and stepped into the street.
The world had been scrubbed clean.
The street was empty. Not just devoid of life, but devoid of the dead. There were no corpses. The insects had been thorough. They had consumed everything—flesh, bone, gristle. All that remained were piles of clothes, armor, and weapons, lying in pools of drying blood like the discarded skins of a vanished civilization.
The girl walked down the center of the street. The silence was absolute.
She saw movement in the shadows. From the doorways, figures emerged. Elves. Demi-Human. Dwarves. They stepped into the sunlight, blinking, unharmed. They looked at each other, then at the blood-soaked clothes of their former masters, with dazed expressions.
The girl looked up.
The "dark cloud" was moving north, a smudge against the horizon. But trailing behind it, high in the upper atmosphere, were new shapes.
They were magnificent, terrifying silhouettes against the sun. Great demons with bat-like wings that spanned dozens of meters, their bodies wreathed in hellfire and shadow. They flew with a regal arrogance, herding the insect swarm like shepherds driving a flock of wolves.
The girl did not know what they were. She knew nothing of the Sorcerous Kingdom, of Nazarick, or of the Demon Emperor Jaldabaoth. She was ignorant of the game of gods and monsters.
She only knew one thing.
Those monsters had come to the city of her nightmares. They had looked at the humans—the proud, cruel humans who spat on her kind—and they had eaten them. They had looked at the "filthy half-breeds," and they had walked on by.
Tears pricked her eyes. They were not tears of sadness.
For the first time in her miserable existence, the knot of fear in her gut uncoiled. The humans were gone. The ones who hurt her, the ones who planned to sacrifice her... they were gone.
She looked at the retreating forms of the demons. To the rest of the world, they were the apocalypse. To the Theocracy, they were the end of days.
But to the half-elf girl, standing in a river of her tormentors' blood, they looked like angels.
"Go," she whispered, her voice fierce, trembling with a dark, pious hope. "Go North. Kill them. Kill every last one of them."
She clenched her small fists, a smile breaking through the grime on her face. It was not a kind smile. It was the twisted, beautiful smile of the weak who had finally witnessed the absolute power of the strong.
"Make them pay for everything."
[AN] 5pm thanks for reading ☺