Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 301: Chapter 296: Pest Control

Location:Obsidian Range — Eastern Ridge, Ashvein Caves

Date/Time:Late Blazepeak, 9939 AZI

Realm:Lower Realm

The mission board called them Ashvein Scorpions.

The locals called them something considerably less polite.

”Moderate infestation,” Ryo read from the mission scroll, tawny amber eyes scanning the text with the practised ease of someone who’d learned to find the profitable details first and the dangerous ones second. ”Colony estimated at forty to sixty. Venom glands to be collected — twenty merits per intact gland. Bonus for queen elimination.”

”How much for the queen?” Kiran asked. He walked three paces behind, sea-green eyes tracking the cave mouth ahead with the quiet assessment of someone who preferred knowing the exits before needing them. His olive-gold skin caught the late afternoon light. His hands were empty, but Jayde had noticed that Kiran’s hands were never as empty as they looked — there was always something near them, blade or formation tag or the particular readiness that came from growing up in circumstances that rewarded preparation.

”Fifty merits.”

”For one bug?”

”Big bug.” Ryo held up the scroll’s illustration. The scorpion in question had eight legs, venom-tipped pincers, and the kind of exoskeleton plating that suggested evolution had decided defence and offence could coexist if you were unpleasant enough about it. The illustration was roughly the size of a large dog.

Takara, perched on Jayde’s left shoulder, studied the illustration with an intensity that could have been professional interest or culinary curiosity. His blue-tipped ears tilted forward. His tail curled around the back of her neck. Three ribbons — pink left, blue right, gold neck — shifted with the movement.

”The gland extraction,” Jayde said. ”Clean cuts only? Or do they accept partial?”

”Clean. Undamaged glands.” Ryo tucked the scroll into his belt. His signet ring caught the light — the tell he couldn’t quite train away, the noble habit of wearing his family’s weight on his hand even when the rest of him was trying very hard to look like a frontier student who’d never seen silverware with more than two prongs. ”The apothecary in the lower market is buying them for anti-venom production. Damaged glands are worthless — the venom compounds degrade on contact with air.”

”So surgical,” Kiran said. ”Not smashing.”

”Not smashing.”

Kiran’s expression suggested that smashing had been his preferred approach and that this mission had just become marginally less enjoyable.

The bond hummed at the back of Jayde’s awareness — Reiko, sulking but present, a low vibration of resigned displeasure that translated roughly to you are in a cave without me and I have opinions about this. She’d left him at the Pavilion again. He’d expressed his feelings by sitting on Shenxin, who hadn’t complained because the wyrmling had learned that complaints produced nothing except a heavier shadowbeast.

[He’s sulking,] Kazren confirmed from the soul space.

He’ll survive.

[He’s teaching the wyrmlings to sulk. Tianxin has adopted the posture. Green is going to blame you.]

***

The Ashvein Caves were a network of basalt tunnels running through the eastern ridge of the Obsidian Range — natural formations expanded by centuries of beast habitation and the slow erosion of mineral-rich water seeping through volcanic rock. The entrance was wide enough for three abreast, narrowing after twenty paces into a main passage that branched at irregular intervals. The walls glistened with moisture. The air tasted like sulphur and old stone.

”Nice place,” Ryo said. ”Reminds me of my uncle’s wine cellar. Minus the wine. Plus the scorpions.”

”Your uncle had a wine cellar,” Kiran said. Not a question. The flat delivery of someone cataloguing data points he’d use later — not as a weapon, just as understanding. Kiran collected information about people the way other students collected merits: quietly, constantly, without making a show of it.

”Had. Past tense.” Ryo’s voice stayed light. His eyes didn’t. ”The Academy doesn’t leave much room for wine cellars.”

The silence that followed was comfortable. The kind that existed between people who’d learned where each other’s edges were and had chosen not to push. Ryo’s edge was his family — the noble name he wore on his signet ring and couldn’t quite shed, the training that showed in his manners and his blade work, and the way he carved scorpion glands with the precision of a boy raised to navigate diplomatic dinners. Kiran’s edge was harder to find because he kept it further back. The olive-gold skin and mixed colouring hinted at heritage he never discussed and no one asked about — not because they weren’t curious but because Kiran’s silence on the subject was its own answer.

Jayde went first. Not because the others expected it — Kiran would have taken point without being asked, and Ryo was more comfortable in the middle where his combat style had room to adjust — but because her formation sight mapped tunnel architecture the way other people read signposts. The essence traces in the walls told her which passages were active and which were dead ends. The residual heat signatures told her where the scorpions nested.

(This is nice. This is what normal students do.)

We’re clearing a scorpion infestation from a volcanic cave system.

(Normal student stuff!)

She couldn’t argue with that. It was, by Academy standards, exactly normal. Students took missions. Students earned merits. Students walked into caves with their friends and came out with full packs and the comfortable exhaustion of physical work that wasn’t life-or-death. This was what Jade had wanted — the school experience, the friendships, the ordinary adventures that made up a life she’d been denied the first time around. That the girl having the experience was also building a magitech empire and hiding a pocket dimension full of dragons was beside the point.

Takara dropped from her shoulder to the ground. In the tunnel, his role shifted — less passenger, more scout. He moved ahead in short bursts, pausing at junctions, ears rotating independently. His large blue eyes adjusted to the darkness with an efficiency that had nothing to do with ordinary kitten biology and everything to do with whatever he actually was. She’d stopped pretending not to notice. He’d stopped pretending she hadn’t.

The first cluster was twelve scorpions in a side chamber.

Ryo’s assessment: ”Twelve. Workers. No queen.”

Jayde’s assessment: formation tag — a Galebreath pulse channelled through a containment ring she’d built last week. The pulse hit the chamber at precisely the frequency that disrupted arthropod neural clusters. Eleven scorpions dropped. The twelfth staggered sideways, clicked its pincers twice with impressive defiance, and then also dropped.

”That was efficient,” Kiran said. He’d drawn a blade at some point — the motion so smooth she hadn’t seen when it happened. He looked at the eleven unconscious scorpions and the formation tag in Jayde’s hand and put the blade away with the faintest expression of disappointment. ”How many of those tags do you have?”

”Enough.”

”Enough meaning—”

”Enough for you to stop looking like I took your dessert.”

Ryo was already crouching beside the nearest scorpion, extraction kit in hand. The Noble Academy training showed in moments like this — his hands were steady, precise, the cuts clean. He’d been raised to carve roast pheasant at diplomatic dinners. The transition to scorpion venom glands was less dramatic than it sounded.

”Twelve clean,” Ryo announced two minutes later, holding up a sealed case of translucent glands. ”Two hundred and forty merits when we cash out.”

The bond pulsed. Reiko, checking in. Still alive. Still caving. Still without you. Calm down.

A rumble of dissatisfaction. Then silence. Then a faint secondary vibration that felt suspiciously like a wyrmling being sat on.

***

The second cluster was deeper — thirty scorpions in a main cavern with a high ceiling and the kind of phosphorescent mineral deposits that made the walls glow faint green. Prettier than it had any right to be, given the number of venomous arthropods covering the floor.

”That’s more than twelve,” Kiran observed.

”That’s our bonus,” Ryo said.

Because in the centre of the cavern, surrounded by worker scorpions arranged in concentric defensive rings, sat the queen. Twice the size of the workers. Venom pincers the length of Jayde’s forearm. Exoskeleton plates thickened with age and layered with the crystalline mineral deposits that gave Ashvein Scorpions their name — the carapace glittering like black glass embedded with veins of dull red.

The queen turned toward them. Six eyes. All of them focused.

”Formation tag?” Kiran asked.

”Won’t work on the queen. The crystalline plating acts as a natural insulator — disperses the frequency before it reaches the neural cluster.” Jayde studied the defensive rings. Three concentric circles of workers, arranged with the geometric precision of creatures operating on hive instinct. ”The workers, yes. The queen needs direct engagement.”

”Direct engagement,” Kiran repeated, and his hand was already on his blade, and the disappointment from earlier had been replaced by something considerably more engaged.

”Ryo — workers. Same approach as before. Kiran and I take the queen.”

”And the cat?”

Takara was already moving. He’d circled wide — hugging the cavern wall, using the phosphorescent shadows, positioning himself behind the queen’s defensive rings with a tactical awareness that neither Ryo nor Kiran questioned anymore. They’d learned. Everyone learned eventually. The kitten was strange. The kitten was useful. The kitten did not require discussion.

Jayde activated two formation tags simultaneously. The Galebreath pulse hit the outer ring — workers dropped in a cascading wave, clicking and staggering and collapsing like dominoes made of bad decisions. Ryo moved into the gap, extraction kit ready, already working before the last worker hit the stone.

The queen surged.

Fast — faster than something that size should have been, the crystalline legs finding purchase on stone with a sound like glass on slate. The venom pincers opened. Essence gathered in the glands — visible as a faint amber glow beneath the translucent chitin, building toward a spray that would cover a three-metre arc and dissolve anything organic it touched.

Kiran hit her from the left. Blade work — clean, economical, targeting the joint between carapace plates where the crystalline armour was thinnest. His focus was absolute. No excess movement. No wasted effort. The blade found the joint, bit deep, and Kiran was already pivoting away before the queen’s retaliatory pincer sweep passed through the space he’d occupied.

Jayde came from the right. Not a blade — a formation spike. A concentrated burst of Inferno essence channelled through a delivery array she’d designed for exactly this kind of problem: armoured targets with predictable defensive responses. The spike hit the queen’s underbelly — softer, less crystalline, the biological trade-off of investing everything in dorsal defence at the expense of ventral vulnerability.

The queen shrieked. A sound like tearing metal.

And then Takara landed on her head.

From above. From the cavern ceiling, where he’d somehow climbed without anyone noticing. His weight was negligible — he was a kitten, after all, however strange a kitten — but the placement was precise. He sat directly between the queen’s primary eyes, blocking her vision entirely. His frill flared. His large blue eyes blinked once, slowly, in the phosphorescent light.

The queen froze. Not from the formation spike or Kiran’s blade or the workers dropping around her in unconscious heaps. She froze because something was sitting on her head and her six-eyed hive brain couldn’t parse the input.

Kiran’s second strike found the neural cluster. Clean. The queen dropped.

Takara rode her down. Landed on her carapace as it hit the stone, sat up, and began grooming his left paw with the air of a creature whose contribution to the mission had been both decisive and aesthetically superior to everyone else’s.

”Fifty merit bonus,” Ryo said, already extracting the queen’s gland. ”Plus the workers. Total haul for this cavern—” He counted. ”Seven hundred and fifty merits.”

”Split three ways,” Kiran said.

”Two hundred and fifty each.”

The bond pulsed again. Reiko. Status?

Queen down. Kitten helped. Coming home.

A vibration that might have been a grudging acknowledgment. Might have been continued sulking. Hard to tell when he was being deliberately opaque about it.

***

They walked out of the caves into the late afternoon sun. The Obsidian Range spread below them — dark stone and green valleys and the distant silhouette of the Academy rising from its mountain like a blade of carved basalt.

Ryo counted glands. Kiran cleaned his blade. Takara had relocated to Jayde’s head — his preferred elevated position, weight negligible, dignity absolute.

”Nine hundred and ninety merits total,” Ryo announced. ”Three hundred and thirty each. Not bad for an afternoon.”

”If we ran this twice a week,” Kiran said, ”that’s—”

”Twenty-six hundred a month. Give or take.”

”Not bad.”

”Not bad.”

The comfortable silence of people who’d fought beside each other enough times that the absence of conversation was its own kind of communication. Ryo tucked the sealed cases into his pack with the careful precision of a boy protecting an investment. Kiran walked with his hands at his sides — empty again, blade somewhere she couldn’t see, the readiness folded back into the stillness that was his default state.

The sun dropped behind the western ridge. Shadows lengthened across the Obsidian Range. Three students and a kitten walked the mountain path back toward the Academy, packs heavy with scorpion glands and the quiet satisfaction of a job done well and paid for honestly.

”Same time next week?” Ryo asked. ”The mission board refreshes every five days. If the scorpion population rebounds—”

”It will,” Jayde said. ”Colony reproduction cycle is roughly twelve days. By next week, the workers will have replenished. The queen’s gone, so they’ll be disorganised — easier haul, but lower density.”

Kiran looked at her. The look he gave when she said something that revealed more specialised knowledge than a frontier second-year should possess. She’d learned to recognise it — the slight narrowing, the fractional pause, the assessment being made and filed and never spoken aloud.

”You read that in a bestiary,” Kiran said.

”I read a lot of bestiaries.”

He nodded. Let it go. That was the thing about Kiran — he noticed everything, questioned selectively, and trusted that the people he chose to stand beside had their reasons for the things they didn’t explain. It was a kind of loyalty that didn’t require understanding. She valued it more than she could say.

They split at the Academy gate. Ryo to the Merit Hall to register the glands. Kiran — somewhere, in the quiet way Kiran went places, without announcement or explanation, present and then not. Jayde watched them go and felt something settle in her chest that had nothing to do with merits or scorpions or supply chains.

Friends. Real ones. The kind you walked into caves with and walked out of caves with and didn’t have to pretend around, even if pretending was what she did with everyone else.

(We have friends.)

We have friends.

The Academy corridor was quieter at this hour — dinner rush drawing most students toward the dining halls. Jayde took the long route, past the eastern courtyard where the last sunlight painted the dark stone amber and the training dummies stood in rows like patient soldiers waiting for tomorrow’s students.

She thought about Green, who would be finishing dinner prep in the Pavilion kitchen right now — the Hearthstone Cooker running on medium, the smell of something involving dried mushrooms and too much garlic drifting through the common room. About White, who trained in the evening hours when the wyrmlings were asleep, and the Pavilion was quiet enough for the kind of sword work that required silence to hear your own footwork. About Yinxin telling the wyrmlings their bedtime story — queen memories reshaped for small ears, histories that spanned a hundred thousand years compressed into ”once, a very brave dragon...”

About Reiko, occupying her entire mattress with deliberate intent.

A shadow flickered across the courtyard wall. Quick. Above her sightline. There and gone — the kind of movement she’d been noticing more often in the last month, always peripheral, always vanishing before she could track it properly. Coincidence. Probably. The Academy had birds. The Academy had wind. The Academy had a thousand explanations for shadows on walls that were simpler and more boring than the alternative.

But Takara’s ears had tracked it too. And his expression — briefly, before the mask of kitten indifference settled back into place — had been satisfied. As if something up there was exactly where it was supposed to be.

She didn’t ask. He didn’t explain. The arrangement held.

[Reiko,] Kazren reported, [has relocated from Shenxin to your bed. He is occupying the entire mattress. This appears to be deliberate.]

Tell him I’m bringing fish.

[I told him. He has not moved. But his tail twitched. I believe this constitutes negotiation.]

Jayde’s mind was already elsewhere. Templates. Supply chains. A Nexus channel to the Verdant Reaches. Forty Refiners. Thirty-six thousand merits a month.

But for now — fish. Mattress negotiations. Home.