The scorpion let out one last, bone-chilling scream that made the stone breathe and the air shiver.

Alex felt it lance through his nerves; a reflexive shudder rippled down his arms.

For a heartbeat he thought the creature was charging something catastrophic—a final surge, a suicide blast, a queen's vengeance.

But the pitch cracked, guttered, and died.

This wasn't power. It was a bell tolling the end.

Ding

[You have defeated the scorpion queen]

[You have received vile poison blood]

[You have received armor Chitinous Armor]

[Apocalypse Baby Kicking In]

[You have received vile Acid Blood]

[You have received blade Chitinous Blade]

He didn't get to read the descriptions.

Chittering rushed toward him, multiplied in the tunnels like rain on tin.

Alex turned, body angling, chin low.

He waited, listening.

The echoes differentiated into dozens—no, scores—of little claws skittering fast.

Then he saw them: a wave of small scorpions, slick, black, glassy under the dim fungi-glow, racing over bone and rubble, antennae flicking like wires tasting blood in the air.

He had thought the scream was only a death cry. It meant something else. A summons. A dinner bell. The pulse that said: mother is down; feast.

They were coming to feast on their mother's corpse.

"It's mine," he murmured, voice flat, more promise than claim.

With the system still dark, there was no gentle intermediary to convert and channel the spoils into his core. He hadn't drawn the energy the kill should have given him.

Raw Emi still clung to the queen like heat to iron, and his pathways ached to drink it. If the brood ate her, that reservoir would be gone—no root, no shard, no marrow left to pull from, just a hollow triumph and lost fuel.

They poured into the chamber, legs click-click-clicking, mandibles sawing the air, bodies shouldering through a rubble of siblings.

Too many to cut, too many to herd, a tide pressed by instinct.

He needed to change the math—burn surface area, thin bodies, make lanes.

Alex's eyes brightened, a pale inner flare like twin stars focusing. Heat gathered not on his skin, but behind his sight—something patient and terrible waking up.

[Solar judgement]

Laser beams escaped from his eyes—clean, narrow lances of white that tore lines through the gloom. The first sweep scythed a crescent across the nearest rank; shells swelled, split, and flashed to gray. He adjusted his angle by a thumb-width and drew a second line, then a third, stitching the swarm with incandescent thread.

He rose, boots lifting off shattered stone, hovering above the writhing carpet to hold a better angle. The beams tracked like guided razors. He kept burning—searing them dry in ribbons, carving neat corridors of ash through the press. Where two bodies overlapped, he lingered for a precise breath to let the light bite through; where tunnels narrowed, he widened the beam into a fan and washed the choke point in day.

They screamed in high, metallic keens. More poured over the fallen. He didn't stop. He narrowed the beams to needles for penetration, widened them to sheets for crowding, stepped left in the air and drew a box around a knot, then crisscrossed it into nothing. A hatchling leapt, tail stabbing at empty sky; he clipped it mid-arc and it fell already ash. The cavern filled with the smell of cooked venom and scorched chitin, a bitter chemical sweetness that stung the back of his throat.

They came on anyway.

Alex blinked away the afterimages and let the light go dark.

He dropped back to the ground in a crouch, slid across slag and splinters to the queen's ruin, and planted a palm on the cold armor, fingers splayed over the massive breastplate where his blades had caved the seam. Up close, she was a mountain even in death, plates ridged like forged steel, ichor slicking the cracks he'd made.

"Mine."

Inventory light skinned the corpse, a subtle, translucent shimmer.

The colossal body shrank into icon and mass, then blinked out—safed, sealed, and out of reach to anything that crawled.

The swarm surged, furious now that the prize had vanished. Bodies climbed bodies to reach the last heat in the room. The front rank tangled on its own dead, but the pressure behind didn't care; the tide wanted him now.

He rocked on his heels, judged distance, and sprang straight up. Cloak snapped. Air grabbed him cold. Tails stabbed where he'd been and shattered stone. He drove higher, outpacing the nearest tips, then kicked off a busted rib of stalactite and angled toward a fissure that veined the ceiling.

The cave's roof funneled into a throat of rock—a natural shaft that breathed stale wind. He rode it like an elevator built for ghosts, palms brushing walls for balance, shoulders twisting to slip through narrowings. Below, claws scraped at stone in a storm sound; the brood didn't hesitate. They pursued, a living auger grinding up the shaft, legs sparking against quartz.

He kept climbing. The shaft bent left, then steepened into a slanted tunnel, light leaking thinly from above—a paler glow, the cave's idea of a sky. He hit it in a rush, burst out of the throat into a broken gully spined with black basalt. Cold air slapped his face and cleared the acid from his lungs.

Alex turned in midair. The tunnel mouth behind him glowed with the swarm's oncoming shimmer—little bodies stacking into a wedge, tails lifted, mandibles working a single, mindless word: consume.

He raised his hand. His thumb and middle finger found each other, light sparking between them like a secret.

He snapped his fingers.

BOOM!

A first charge went off deep, the blast running the throat like a bell. Dust coughed from the mouth in a ring. For an instant the swarm stalled, as if confused by the air's sudden fist.

BOOM!

The second in line lit, linked to the first, then the third, a daisy chain of buried teeth. Pressure spiked, then the world below erupted. Fire bloomed through the tunnel network in concentric breaths.

The gully floor shivered; the basalt ribs threshing its sides flexed and screamed. Dust geysered up in a pale column, then tore sideways as the shock rolled out, hot and hungry.

Flames tumbled from the cave mouth like a reversed waterfall and poured over the rocks, bright tongues licking the gully's ribs. The leading edge hit the clustered brood and erased them, shells blistering, legs curling, heat burping venom into brief green flares. Stone spalled. The air thundered. One last wave of bodies tried to climb out through the blaze and disintegrated into drifting gray.

A third and a fourth detonation chased each other down intersecting veins, turning the throat into a furnace. Roof-slabs sheared and dropped like guillotines; pillars buckled; veins of quartz flashed and burst. Heat lifted to meet him, an updraft that smelled faintly of copper and resin. The pursuing wedge collapsed on itself, legs scrabbling once, twice, then the shaft sealed with a grinding convulsion.

Embers sleeted from the mouth and pattered the basalt like iron rain; the thunder dwindled to a truly exhausted sigh.

The entire place blew up, his flames consuming the numerous little scorpions that had congregated.

Alex shot out of the fissure like...