Zora barely had time to register the impact before he and the Worm Mage hit the steel roof hard.

They untangled fast. The boy scrambled up first, bare biometal feet skidding against the metal, his flower cape whipping in the wind. Without hesitation, he turned and tried to bolt ahead of Zora—only to twist his fingers, wrench open a wormhole in front of him, and disappear into it.

Or, well, he tried to.

The wormhole opened in front of him just as he moved to step through, but something was off. It didn't align properly. Instead of smoothly vanishing, the Worm Mage misstepped. His foot landed half an inch to the side, his weight thrown off, his balance shattered. He ran into the thrumming edges of the wormhole and dispelled the portal in an instant.

He stumbled. Tried again. Another wormhole shimmered ahead of him, but the same thing happened. He was always slightly out of place, slightly off, and on the third attempt, he lunged at a wormhole opened for long enough that it whizzed past him. Then he fell flat on his face like any clumsy little boy, and Zora had to jerk himself to the side to dodge the wormhole that would've otherwise thrown him through.

Zora frowned.

He's not opening the wormholes right.

He hadn't thought much of it before, but now, it was clear: the Worm Mage wasn't actually teleporting. He wasn't stepping into another dimension, nor was he blinking through reality at will. He could open wormholes to connect two spaces, but the wormholes themselves were static. They couldn't move. They could only open in fixed locations.

And that was a problem, because the train was still moving terrifically fast. Each time he opened a wormhole, it'd stay put for half a second before the train would leave it behind. It was like trying to step through a door that kept running away from him.

Well, that's one hell of a limitation that only shows itself on a fast-moving vehicle like this. I'm not surprised he's only learning this now.

Of course, Zora wasn't much better off. His own spells moved with sound waves, carried through the air, but with the train hurtling at full speed, trying to whip his voice anywhere was a nightmare. The waves wouldn't go where he wanted them to, and they weren't nearly as strong as they should be because the train was noisy as hell. There was also something to be said about the fact that he was blind, and having to rely only on his hearing on a noisy fast-moving vehicle meant his senses were rather dull.

So he turned to look at the boy, and the boy turned around to look at him.

They stared at each other for a moment.

Then Zora tilted his head, sighing softly. "I suppose you don't like trains either, huh?"

A beat of silence.

Then, slowly, the boy nodded.

And that was that.

They both started running again while the other two Worm Mages—clones of the real one, Zora supposed—stayed behind and dropped limp.

Sprinting side by side, boots hammering across the carriages, they leapt gaps between train carriages as Zora stretched his senses ahead. He caught every shift in the air, every rumble of the rails, every gliding beat of the bug they chased—the last Mutant-Class gliding ant was already a hundred metres ahead, streaking towards the front of the train.

As they hopped over the carriage where Zora caught movement inside—where Kita was still fighting her Mutant-Class ant—Zora whipped his staff, slicing a 'swerving strike' down through the left window. At the same time, the Worm Mage flicked his rifle to the right, firing a shot into an open wormhole. The other end of the wormhole faced the right window. Both their attacks smashed through the sides of the carriage half a second later, and there was a choked screech, A splatter of blood.

Zora barely acknowledged the sounds of the Mutant-Class ant crumbling in front of Kita before he moved on, continuing to hop across the carriages with the Worm Mage.

"The ant!" Zora called over the wind. "We have to stop it before it reaches the front!"

The Worm Mage didn't even glance at him. "Why?" His voice was cold, metallic.

Zora didn't answer immediately. At least he could hear it well through his shoes—the way the train groaned beneath them, shaking harder than before, tilting dangerously off the track at certain angles. He was part of the reason the damage to the train had been stacking up over the course of the fight, but now they were heading straight for Nohoch Ik'Balam, and at this speed?

The train wouldn't just crash. It'd obliterate the station and everything else around it.

Zora clenched his jaw. "Because," he said, pushing harder, "this train is about to run straight off the tracks, bash through the station, and then fly into the regional capital. I can't slow it down with any spell when it's like this." Then he looked at the Worm Mage, scowling mightily. "That means we either emergency brake it, or you stop it."

The Worm Mage stayed silent for a long moment before finally speaking.

"... What spell?"

Zora grumbled. "I'm the Thousand Tongue. Warlord of the Northeast." Then, with a flicker of amusement, "It is nice to meet a fellow warlord, even if we are both apparently enemies of the empire."

No response.

The boy didn't even look at him, his expression as blank and unreadable as ever.

Zora listened past him, past the train, past the roaring wind. Felt the shift in the air. The forest fell away around them, the thick fungal canopy swallowed by the night. The train finally broke free of the colossal fungi forest, and now they were shooting into the open expanse of the wavy plains. The soundscape stretched with it—vast and sprawling, no longer muffled by dense, damp trunks.

And in the distance: Nohoch Ik'Balam.

The city was breathing, massive, and utterly unprepared for what was coming.

There'd be no screeching of slowing rails, and no rush of workers bracing for their arrival.

They were still going too fast.

Zora clenched his jaw, picking up speed as the front of the train loomed ahead. Perched at the nose on all six limbs, the gliding ant twitched, its wings adjusting to the rushing air. Its back was turned to them, but neither he nor the Worm Mage could throw or shoot anything at it. It was just out of their range.

"We have to stop both the ant and the train," Zora called, barely winded. "I'll handle the ant. We can't stop the train now, but can you handle it when it crashes through the station?"

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The Worm Mage didn't answer.

But Zora didn't need words to read the boy's face: still utterly blank, entirely unfazed, like none of this mattered in the slightest.

So as the Worm Mage suddenly hopped off the side of the train and fell through a wormhole—disappearing in the blink of an eye—he could only hope the Warlord of the Northwest had a trick or two he hadn't seen yet.

Bracing himself, the city roared past him in a hurricane of sound. He heard it before it swallowed him—streets bursting with movement, bridges groaning under pressure, carts rattling over uneven stones, voices surging in layers of tension and life. Cacophonies of hammering legs, steam vents screaming as they expelled heat, the distant hum of turbines churning power. Being on a fast-moving train certainly warped the acoustics into a tangled mess of vibration and motion, but he could still easily tell they were already hurtling into the industrial heart of the northwest.

And ahead, two hundred metres in the distance, was the end of the line.

Boots hammered steel. The train rattled so hard as it roared into the station that it was barely staying on the tracks, but still he surged forward, muscles tight, the wind tearing at his cloak as he crossed the last three carriages. The rails below screeched—an unbearable, high-pitched wail of metal grinding itself to death—and the voices around him in the station didn't elude his hearing. At first, it was only a few dozen cries, then it was a few hundred, rising to collective shouts as people noticed the train wasn't going to stop by itself.

Then, the gliding ant leapt off the nose of the train before slamming back down with devastating force.

The impact cracked steel, driving the front of the train downward, and in that single instant—the world lost its balance.

The train flipped, and everything went up.

… You better know what you're doing, Worm Mage.

It was cataclysmic. An eruption of steel and bodies and shrapnel as twenty carriages left the rails, launching into the air. Zora felt the ground vanish beneath him, the roaring world flipping end over end as debris spiraled like a storm of jagged knives. Metal groaned and bent, walls collapsed, glass ceilings burst apart in a hail of shards. He heard the impact before it hit—pillars pulverizing under the force of the wreck, stone bursting outward as the train demolished half of the station. People scattered below, their screams swallowed by the thunderous crash of destruction.

For a moment, Zora let himself fly. Wind roared past his ears, knocked the air out of his lungs, and turned his body weightless, twisting through freefall. But he focused. He listened. Through the spiraling destruction, through the violent crack of breaking infrastructure and the tidal wave of chaos, he heard the gliding ant darting out into the open city.

Its wings were buzzing in a sharp, unnatural rhythm, skimming low over rooftops as it sought new victims.

No you don't.

He curled his fingers and rasped "ignite" with the remaining air in his lungs. Heat snapped into existence around his tongue, and then he flicked it onto his staff, scowling at the gliding ant in the near distance.

Then he threw his staff without hesitation.

He didn't need a spell to hit his mark. He'd had years of experience chucking sticks of chalk at his students, and he hadn't missed yet. His burning staff cut through the air in a single, perfect line—the heat of it scorching the wind, flames trailing in a thin, slicing arc—and the sharpened tip struck the ant dead center, drilling straight through chitin and flesh alike. The impact was hard. Thunderous. A gurgling choke burst from its mandibles as its body seized in the air.

But the cackling remained.

Not the ant's.

Not its death rattle.

The cackle that slithered from its ruined throat was Decima's, and it echoed, distorted and fragmented.

"Try as you might, but history always repeats itself, doesn't it?" Her laugh deepened, vibrating with static as the ant turned around mid-air to grin at him. "I'll strive to make it repeat for you, Thousand Tongue. I'm just a nasty, nasty adult like that."

With that, the gliding ant fell, lifeless.

But Zora had no time to mull on her words, because he was still falling, and the city was below.

The wreckage of twenty train carriages spiraled through the air alongside him: jagged beams, shattered steel, massive slabs of iron hurtling downward in a falling storm of destruction. The weight of it all was staggering. It was an avalanche of metal poised to erase entire city blocks in a single impact.

And he could do nothing about it.

He had no breath left for a spell, no time to shape the syllables, no speed fast enough to move his hands in the right sequence. His mind calculated distances, impact points, collateral—saw the inevitable moment where hundreds, maybe thousands, would be reduced to nothing but bloodstains on cracked stone.

Then he heard it.

A ripple. A fracture in the air itself.

Thirty giant wormholes bloomed across the city in perfect formation, each splitting reality open with a force that sent shockwaves rolling through the streets. Their edges pulsed and churned with energy, yawning wide to consume the falling devastation, and one by one, the train carriages vanished into them. Devoured before they could strike the crowded avenues below. The screeching metal, the shrieking wind, the deafening roar of collapse—all of it was swallowed, rerouted, and undone by the wormholes.

Zora's stomach flipped as his trajectory shifted as well. He fell through one of the giant wormholes alongside a train carriage, and the world twisted. His centre of gravity suddenly changed. He went from falling down in an arc to dropping straight down, and he had half a second to figure out just what the hell was going on before he slammed into cobbled ground.

Pain detonated through his ribs, but he wasn't alone in the evacuated city square. While he groaned and flung a "barrier" around himself, the rest of the train debris poured down in a brutal storm around him. Carriage after carriage slammed into the square like meteors, and the consecutive impacts were like giant spikes ramming into the ground, the sheer impact sending dust and shards of broken stone flying in every direction.

His sound wave shield wobbled every time a chunk of metal slammed into it, but it held. He listened, barely daring to breathe as steel howled and groaned, and then, after what felt like minutes of this—silence.

A long, hanging silence that stretched, heavy and trembling.

He exhaled slowly, pulled his staff back into his hand with a "come back", and clawed to his feet, clutching his ribs.

The thirty or so giant wormholes above the city square began to shrink. Their edges curled inward, closing like the slow, deliberate mouths of a giant worm. The last of them snapped shut with a final, airless pop, and then there was nothing but the shattered train, and the thousands of onlookers gathered just beyond the ruined city square.

They weren't looking at the devastation.

They weren't looking at Zora.

They were staring at the Worm Mage perched atop the untouched water fountain in the centre of it all. His rifle dangled loosely from one hand. His face was blank—utterly expressionless as usual, as if the feat he'd just performed meant nothing to him—but his fingers twitched slightly at his sides, and his shoulders heaved with an invisible weight.

Then—without a word, without a sound—he tipped forward.

Fell.

Face-first, right into the ground.

Zora blinked at the same time Kita tumbled through a wormhole behind him, landing with a yelp, her limbs flailing as she hit the ground. She scrambled up with her twin sawtooth blades in a battle-ready stance instantly, still breathless, but she froze the moment she realised she wasn't in a train carriage anymore.

Now she, too, was staring at the unconscious Worm Mage like everyone else.

What a boy.

He didn't stop the train, but he prevented the worst possible outcome by catching everything with his wormholes.

Would it have killed him to tell me what his plan was before leaving me on the train, though?

Of course, the boy had pushed himself too hard. A feat like that—dozens of massive wormholes devouring an entire catastrophe before it could even happen—wasn't something he imagined a human could do lightly. Even if the Worm Mage had made it look effortless, the cost had caught up to him in the end.

Zora sighed, then let out a sharp whistle in Kita's direction. The sound cut through her daze, making her jolt and turn to him, eyes wide.

"Come on," he muttered. "Patch him up."

She swallowed once, then nodded. A flick of her wrist, a sharp slice across her palm with her sharp nails, and the scent of blood hit the air. The reaction was immediate—a thousand of tiny army ants immediately surged towards the unconscious Worm Mage alongside Kita to make sure he wouldn't die lying on his face.

Zora, on the other hand, merely listened to the rhythmic thump of boots in the distance. Workers and guards and soldiers were picking their way through the wreckage, and very soon, they'd reach the square to deal with the fallout of the battle. The city would breathe again.

The northwest would breathe again.

… Decima, Decima, Decima.

While soldiers flooded into the square to cordon the wreckage off from the civilians, he turned his ears to the sky and listened for any signs of the Magicicada Witch.

There were none.

And he was still no closer to her than he was three months ago.

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