Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 481: Chapter 476: Riding the Dark

Location:Mid Ring, Vel’thari Containment — Southern Tunnels

Date/Time:Ashbloom, 9942 AZI — Day 167, 198 days remaining

Realm:Lower Realm, Doha

The exoskeleton’s left shoulder joint ground when she moved it.

Six dead Ravagers on the tunnel floor. The mantis beside her, blade-arms folding back to stillness. Amber fluid cooling on the chitin walls. And Jayde’s left arm operating at sixty percent, the cracked actuator housing leaking hydraulic fluid in a slow drip that pattered on the stone like a metronome counting down the time she had before the joint seized entirely.

The patrol was half-finished. The southern tunnel network was still unmapped past this point. Going back to base meant the scouting run was wasted — she’d have to repair the exoskeleton, fabricate a replacement housing, and come back tomorrow. Another day lost. Another day the colony had to adapt to her patrol patterns.

She looked at the mantis. The mantis looked at her.

The creature that had just killed six Ravagers in six seconds was standing three feet away, warm, fast, and built for the tunnels in ways no exoskeleton could match. It had followed her in here. It had saved her life. It was waiting to see what she did next.

The idea arrived the way the best ideas do: not as a thought but as a recognition.

”Would you carry me?”

The mantis stood up.

***

Climbing onto a Charling’s back was not something any tactical manual had ever covered.

The mantis’s thorax was broad — wider than a horse, with a dorsal surface that curved gently upward from the leg joints to the raised ridge where the wing casings sat. The chitin was smooth under Jayde’s hands. Warm. The ganglion heat that she’d felt through the head-plate was diffused across the entire body, a low-grade thermal signature that turned the creature’s back into something that felt, absurdly, like sitting on a heated floor.

She settled behind the head, where the thorax was widest, and the ridge provided a natural brace against sliding backward. Her legs straddled the body, knees pressing into the joint housings where the middle pair of legs connected to the thorax. The fit was better than it should have been — the mantis’s body proportions accommodating a human rider the way a saddle accommodated a horseman, as if the geometry had been waiting for this.

The mantis didn’t move. It stood perfectly still while she found her balance, adjusted her position, locked her knees against the joint housings. The patience of a creature that understood, on some level that transcended the colony intelligence it had separated from, that this moment required stillness.

”All right,” Jayde said. ”Slow.”

The mantis walked.

The gait was different from what she’d expected. Not the lateral scuttle of an insect. A smooth, rolling motion that transferred from the six legs in a wave pattern — front pair reaching, middle pair supporting, rear pair pushing. The rhythm was even. Predictable. The kind of movement a rider could learn to anticipate and sync with.

”Faster.”

The walk became a run.

The tunnel blurred. The bioluminescent light that lined the walls became a continuous streak as the mantis accelerated through the passage at a speed that Jayde’s exoskeleton couldn’t have matched at full power, let alone at sixty percent. The air rushed past her face. The tunnel curved. The mantis took the curve without slowing — the six legs adjusting independently, the body leaning into the turn the way a river leans into a bend, fluid and fast and utterly in control.

Jayde’s hands found the ridge of the wing casings. The chitin was warm under her grip. The mantis’s body moved beneath her in the rolling wave, and her body moved with it — not fighting the rhythm, not bracing against it, riding it the way you ride a wave when you stop trying to control the water and let it carry you.

They covered a kilometer of tunnel in under a minute.

The mantis slowed at a junction. Stopped. The sensory pits swept the branching passages — left, right, straight ahead. Reading the air. Reading the vibrations in the stone. Reading the pheromone traces that told the creature what had passed through this junction, how recently, and in what numbers.

The mantis turned left. Jayde hadn’t directed it. The creature had read the junction, assessed the routes, and chosen the one that its knowledge of the tunnel network identified as the safest patrol path.

It was navigating. For her.

***

They found the Ravager pack twenty minutes into the patrol.

Six Ravagers. Standard pack. Moving through a mid-width tunnel in the spread formation that had become their default pursuit pattern. They were heading north — toward the dead spot, toward the expanding territory that Jayde’s group occupied.

The mantis stopped. The sensory pits locked on the pack. The body beneath Jayde went very still — not frozen, coiled. The specific stillness of a predator that has identified prey and is calculating the approach.

”Together,” Jayde said. She drew the compound crossbow. Sighted on the lead Ravager’s relay hub.

The mantis charged.

The speed was terrifying. From standing to full sprint in a single stride, the six legs driving the body forward with an acceleration that pressed Jayde flat against the thorax ridge. The tunnel walls became a blur. The Ravager pack had two seconds to register the incoming threat before the mantis was among them.

The blade-arms unfolded.

Jayde fired from the mantis’s back. The compound crossbow bolt hit the leftmost Ravager’s relay hub at fifteen meters, destroying the neural center in a spray of amber fluid. The creature dropped.

The mantis killed the two in front. Blade-arms working in the alternating rhythm she’d seen in the rescue tunnel — left, right — each strike severing the head-to-thorax junction with surgical precision. The bodies collapsed in the mantis’s wake as it barreled through the center of the pack.

Three left. Scattering. The pack’s coordination broken by a predator moving too fast for their sensory architecture to track.

Jayde twisted on the mantis’s back. Fired behind her — an awkward angle, the crossbow braced against her right shoulder, the damaged left arm stabilizing the stock. The bolt hit a fleeing Ravager in the dorsal plate. Not a kill shot. The creature staggered. Kept running.

The mantis turned. The pivot was impossibly tight — the rear legs anchoring, the front legs sweeping, the body rotating in the tunnel like a compass needle finding north. Jayde gripped the wing casing ridge and held on as the world spun.

The mantis ran down the staggering Ravager and finished it with a single blade-arm strike. The remaining two fled into a side passage. The mantis didn’t pursue. The sensory pits tracked the fleeing Ravagers until their vibrations faded, confirming they were gone.

Six Ravagers. Forty seconds. Two crossbow kills, three blade-arm kills, one wounded and finished.

Jayde sat on the mantis’s back in the tunnel’s sudden silence. Her heart was pounding. The compound crossbow was warm in her hands. The mantis’s body thrummed beneath her — the subtle vibration of a metabolism running hot after a sprint, the ganglion heat elevated, the breathing rhythm faster than its resting rate.

The sensory pits turned toward her. The head-plate angled back, not far enough to reach her hand, just enough to orient on her face. Reading her. Checking.

”I’m fine,” Jayde said.

The mantis made a sound. Low. A vibration in the thorax that transmitted through the chitin into Jayde’s legs and up her spine. Not a word. Not a click. Something between a purr and a hum, resonant and deep, the sound of a creature expressing something that its species had never needed to express before because its species had never had a partner before.

Satisfaction.

They continued the patrol.

Three hours. Twelve kilometers of tunnel network mapped by a rider on a mount that moved through the dark like it had been born in it — which it had. The mantis navigated by sense, not sight: the sensory pits reading air pressure, vibration signatures, pheromone gradients, the thermal differentials that told it where tunnels opened and where they dead-ended. Jayde learned to read the mantis the way the mantis read the tunnels. A shift in the body’s angle meant a turn was coming. A tension in the middle legs meant something ahead had triggered the prey-alert. A slowing of the gait meant the creature was listening to something Jayde’s ears couldn’t detect.

They found worker columns twice. The mantis flowed around them without breaking stride, the drone-caste Charlings parting to let the larger predator pass the way fish part around a shark. The workers’ sensory pits registered the mantis as colony, higher caste; do not engage. They registered Jayde as nothing at all — the pheromone disruptor residue that clung to the mantis’s chitin blanketed her signature.

She was invisible while mounted. The mantis’s own pheromone profile, still keyed to the colony despite its independent cognition, masked her entirely. Workers didn’t react. Drones didn’t react. Only Ravagers — the predator caste, with sensory architecture refined enough to distinguish between colony members — would detect the anomaly. And Ravagers, as the patrol had demonstrated, didn’t survive the detection long enough to act on it.

The tactical implications stacked in Jayde’s mind the way they always did: precise, sequential, building toward conclusions that expanded the range of what was possible.

Mounted, she could cover the entire Mid Ring in a single patrol shift. Mounted, she was invisible to the colony’s worker and drone castes. Mounted, she had a combat platform that combined her ranged precision with the mantis’s close-quarters lethality. Mounted, the damaged exoskeleton wasn’t a limitation. It was a backup system.

The mantis was not a replacement for the siege bow. It was better.

They mapped three new tunnel branches. Identified a second Ravager staging area — smaller than the nest she’d found, but active, the pheromone traces fresh. Jayde marked it on the mental map she’d been building since Day 1 and filed the location for a future strike. Not today. Today was about learning what the mantis could do.

What the mantis could do was everything.

***

They returned to the dead spot at dusk.

The sentry — one of Meifen’s students, posted at the boundary with a crossbow and strict instructions to challenge anything that approached — saw them coming from thirty meters. The crossbow came up. The challenge died in the student’s throat.

Jayde rode a Charling out of the dark.

The mantis walked into the dead spot’s perimeter at an easy pace, the blade-arms folded, the sensory pits sweeping the familiar terrain. Jayde sat on its back with the compound crossbow across her knees and the specific, calm authority of a woman who had been riding insects through tunnels for three hours and found the experience efficient.

The sentry lowered the crossbow. Stared.

Meifen came out of the Resolute. Stopped. Her hazel eyes tracked from the mantis’s head-plate to Jayde’s position on the thorax to the amber fluid still drying on the blade-arm edges.

”You rode it,” Meifen said.

”It let me.”

”You rode a Charling.”

”It’s faster than walking. And it handles Ravager packs without slowing down.” Jayde swung off the mantis’s back. The dismount was less graceful than she’d have liked — the damaged exoskeleton made the left leg stiff on the drop. ”Twelve kilometers mapped. Two Ravager staging areas identified. One pack engaged and cleared.”

Meifen looked at the mantis. The mantis looked at Meifen. The Grade 5 woman and the ancient Charling regarded each other with the mutual wariness of two predators who served the same commander and were still negotiating the hierarchy.

”Does it have a name?” Meifen asked.

Jayde looked at the creature that had carried her through the dark, navigated for her, fought beside her, and purred when the fighting was done.

”Not yet,” she said.

The mantis pressed its head-plate against her palm. The warm, steady pressure that had become as familiar as her own heartbeat. Then it settled at the dead spot entrance, blade-arms folded, sensory pits oriented outward. Watching. Waiting.

Guarding.

The students gathered at the Resolute’s viewport and watched the Charling that their commander rode into battle take up its post at the door. Some of them were still afraid. Most of them weren’t. All of them understood, in the wordless way that cultivators understood power, that the creature sitting outside their home had just changed the rules of what was possible in the Hollows.

Day one hundred and sixty-seven. One hundred and ninety-eight remaining.

The dark had just gotten faster.