Consciousness lurched awake amid a violent jolt.
Gauss opened his eyes and took in the faint light from outside. His blurred vision cleared, and what he saw glowed with a dim, phosphorescent green.
What had woken him was…
He looked at the "creature" in front of him.
An insect? Or an insectfolk?
It had a faded white carapace and a hunched body. Its head was a simple oval with no obvious features, a bit like a magnified ant. Deep in its eyes, two embers flickered red, like coals about to go out.
A pair of its antennae rested lightly against the antennae on top of Gauss's own head.
Yes—Gauss realized with a start that he, too, had become an insectoid, lying in a cramped, damp cave of cold, rough rock.
Around him were several other beings much like himself. The little insect in front of him was the one who'd shaken him awake.
"Time for work!"
Through its antennae, the slender little insectoid sent the message straight into Gauss's mind.
He grasped the pure, direct way they communicated.
"Work? What kind of work?"
His head felt like mush; none of this made sense. He only knew he was apparently called Gauss.
"Mining."
Before he could think further, the white insect pressed a rough, heavy object into Gauss's pale, shell-covered forelimbs.
He looked down. A pickaxe.
The wooden handle was grooved from long, clawed grips; the head was some cold, hard metal, its edge badly worn.
Seeing him still dazed, the little white insect paused, then explained anyway.
"Mining is work. Don't mine, you starve."
That he understood.
Gauss nodded and, swept along with a few numb-eyed insects, left the nest-cave.
All the while he tried to remember… anything. Nothing came. Instinct told him he shouldn't look like this. He should have hands, not claws.
But… what was a hand?
The more he thought, the more confused he got.
One step at a time.
They passed through a long tunnel—and the sight that opened before him struck his soul with shock and suffocation.
An underground void, too vast to imagine.
Far above, a domed ceiling shrouded in darkness; now and then a pale-glowing flying beast would glide by, and only by its light could you glimpse the sky of this underworld.
Around them: honeycombed rock faces stretching out of sight. From countless holes like their cave poured a never-ending stream of pale, hunched worker-insects like him. They merged into silent currents and flowed down dense steps and stairways, spiraling toward the hollow's depths.
Thankfully, glowing crystals lit the way, and the smaller insect tugging him along kept Gauss from stumbling and losing himself in the crush.
At the bottom, a massive open-pit mine.
They—these ant-like little things—lived in the burrows rimming the pit. Labyrinthine adits, supports that looked ready to collapse but were rock-solid, bodies writhing everywhere. The clang of tens of thousands of picks on stone merged into a single maddening drone—the only "music" of this underground world.
The stream of workers brought Gauss to an edge of the pit. He and a few bunkmates were assigned a narrow tunnel.
Floating above the adit was a green insectoid that could fly. It didn't work. It carried only a whip, which cracked the air with sharp reports. Almost every worker who passed beneath it instinctively ducked their heads.
An "overseer"?
Another word popped into Gauss's mind he didn't yet understand. He was getting used to that: even if he didn't get it, he'd remember it. The more he learned, the more the meaning would click.
The big flyer seemed to be supervising but uninterested in them personally. Or maybe a pervasive miasma of pheromones in the air compelled every insect to start laboring by instinct.
Gauss's bunkmates, puppet-like, shuffled into the tunnel. The white insect didn't forget to tug the thoughtful Gauss along.
He felt he didn't belong here, but he had no intention of making trouble. He mimicked the workers around him: raised the pick and struck the wall.
Clang!
The dull impact numbed his slim limbs with the rebound. The rock was very hard; his blows broke off only a few grains.
The pheromones in the air quickly prodded him onward. As if on instinct, he lifted the pick again.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Raise, swing, raise again…
Monotonous. Repetitive. Endless.
His mind, after a short resistance, began to be eaten away by the mechanical labor and the collective numbness around him. Thinking grew hard.
Who am I? Where did I come from? With each heavy strike, such questions felt pointless.
"Dig. For the hive." The thought grew sharper in his head.
The numb work went on—until Gauss pried out a few oval stones embedded in the rock, softly glowing, and reached to drop them into the crude vine basket behind him. The moment he touched one, a faint cool energy trickled from his claw-tips through his whole body.
The sensation vanished in a blink—like a single drop of cool water falling on soil about to crack from drought.
Deep inside him, a consciousness almost extinguished suddenly seized that coolness and woke.
He glanced at the others. Seeing each lost in labor, he exhaled.
Instead of tossing the scarce stones into the basket, he closed his claws tight around one.
After a long moment, a clear thought leapt up:
"I—I'm human!"
What's a human?
The second he asked himself, an image surfaced— a body utterly unlike his current one.
"Oh. So that's a human. Those are hands…"
It was like something broke. More and more information welled up from some strange depth within. Metal boxes that move and can eat people are called "cars," the iron birds that fly are "airplanes," the glowing squares showing moving pictures are "screens"… A flood of broken images and concepts from the human world scoured his insect mind, which had been all but filled with numbness.
So—I transmigrated.
The realization thundered through his simple insect-brain.
He sighed. If he'd had a choice, he wouldn't have come here. A quiet human city life was better than being a miner in a lightless brood hive.
But here he was.
Suddenly, the pale ore in his grip went dark and crumbled to powder between his claws.
"Shattered?"
His body tensed on its own. In the worker-miners' collective mind, this was treasure to be turned in. They were born to dig it. And even without that drilled-in belief, they needed to trade the stuff for food. Worn tools needed ore to repair or upgrade, too.
He had somehow siphoned its power—where other workers felt nothing when they touched it and treated it only as hard currency within limits.
He didn't know how it helped—but instinct told him it was good for him.
He kept swinging in the same mechanical rhythm. Now that his human mind was back, he seemed very resistant to the pheromones—he wouldn't be "brainwashed" again soon.
Realizing the ore's benefit, he began actively seeking it. Of course, he couldn't drain them all; that would be noticed. And he needed to trade enough for food to avoid starving.
The digging clanged on.
He had no idea how much time passed. Maybe the "daytime" of this underworld was ending; the sharp labor pheromones ebbed. Across the city-sized pit, the clatter thinned. Workers dragged themselves from their tunnels in dead-eyed lines.
Break time.
"I'm hungry. You?" The white insect who'd first woken Gauss rose on tiptoe, antennae brushing his to pull him out of his thoughts. Without the pheromone pressure, it seemed to recover a spark of "personality," livelier than the others.
Gauss guessed this body had been on good terms with it before.
At the mention of it, he felt a fierce hunger; his gut-sac burned.
"Come on, trade for food." The white insect tapped his forelimb and pointed him toward the slow-moving stream of workers.
They queued loosely and silently toward a section of the pit rim where wide cave mouths breathed a different smell—a rotten reek mixed with some fermenting fungus.
The cafeteria.
Food was dispensed by a more bloated caste with dark-brown shells. They moved slowly, their compound eyes dull, like machines executing a fixed routine.
Workers lined up, tipping pale ore from their vine baskets into a slanted, rough stone trough at the mouth. A brown insect glanced at the amount, then grabbed a lump of sticky black gel from a stack of plates made from dried giant fungi and shoved it into the worker's arms. More ore, bigger lump.
Gauss noticed the green flyers circling low nearby, cold compound eyes sweeping the exchange. Whips cracked now and then as warnings.
Good—he'd been right not to drain every bit of ore by instinct.
After an age in line, it was his turn. He copied the worker ahead, poured his ore into the trough. The brown insect flicked a look and shoved a small lump of gel into his arms. Cold, sticky, faintly rotten. His human mind recoiled; his insect body craved.
His white-insect friend had done well—got a larger lump. Cradling it, it tiptoed back to Gauss. They moved off to an open patch. Just as the white insect was about to bite in, it saw Gauss's clearly smaller portion and hesitated.
"Why's yours so little?"
"…"
Gauss said nothing. Seeing his silence, the little insect wavered, eyed its gel, then, with deep reluctance, tore off a handful and thrust it into Gauss's arms.
"Eat. You're bigger. You'll still be hungry."
He wanted to refuse, but the body's hunger was gnawing him to pieces. He finally muttered thanks, then forced down a bite.
The taste… indescribable. Like chewing fishy, cold jelly. But as it slid down, a warmth spread and quickly soothed hunger and fatigue. The body urged him to keep eating. A few bites and it was gone. He still wanted more, but with none left, he turned to observing.
Besides the gel, pale ore could be traded for other things: new pick heads, a thick resin to patch cracks in one's shell, even a sliver of dried meat from some unknown creature.
The white insect finished slowly, rubbed its forelimbs in contentment, then caught Gauss staring into space.
"Thinking about moss-meat again? Then dig more."
"Got it."
His routine scan had been mistaken, but Gauss didn't explain. They returned to the nest-cave. On the way, he deliberately slowed to study the pit's layout and the other insects.
Most were lowliest workers like them—small, weak, with the simplest tools. Beyond them were the green fliers and the brown dispensers, and now he saw deeper-shelled, broader-shouldered soldier-insects with iron gear on patrol. The red in their eyes burned brighter; their aura was meaner.
High up in the mining "city," some passages were sealed with fungus-like webbing—clearly off-limits to workers.
Strict division of labor and hierarchy.
Back in the cold, damp cave, most workers curled up into a sleep-like state. The white insect said goodnight and dozed off. Gauss, though, didn't feel sleepy; he lay thinking through the day.
He needed more ore. Something inside him was waking. If he amassed enough energy, maybe he could break free of this numbness.
In the dark, he opened his claw and looked at his pale, shell-plated forelimb—so unlike a human hand. He didn't know where this was, but he knew he had to escape—or the pheromones would consume him entirely.
Tomorrow, he would dig harder.
In this vast underground pit-world, a worker-insect with a human soul quietly lit a spark in his heart.
…
Time blurred into day after day. No entertainment. No days off. Wake up, leave the nest—mining on the way, mining at the face.
Gauss lost track of how long it'd been. He only knew he'd absorbed a great many pale stones—not in a single day, but over time. As he did, his body grew stronger; he could dig out more. Armed with day one's lesson, he controlled how much he siphoned and made sure to trade for enough food. He didn't forget his friend; now and then he'd use surplus ore to treat it—repaying the favor.
Two bottom-rung insects, side by side day after day, grew close as coworkers. The white insect was different from the numb miners—its eyes still flashed with curiosity and a sliver of self. Gauss found himself drawn to that. The white insect must have felt the same.
Everything seemed to be looking up, but urgency gnawed at Gauss. He felt the soldier-insects and flyers linger on him longer when they passed. Had they noticed?
"Soon. Today, I think."
The energy he'd absorbed felt like a bowl filled to spilling.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
His swings came faster. Deep in his work, a heavy thud sounded outside—as if something massive had hit the ground.
"Workers in the tunnel, out. Now."
The pheromone voice's owner didn't enter—the tunnel only fit workers—but the "order" brooked no refusal. His tunnel-neighbors shuffled out. The white insect friend wavered and started to follow—
Gauss yanked it back.
"Wait. Give me a moment."
His nonexistent "heartbeat" seemed to race. Maybe the game was up. Walking out would end badly.
No time for anything else. He emptied pale stones from the white insect's and other bunkmates' baskets into a pile, then lay down on it.
The pale stones dulled to gray before the eye, cracking from within and powdering away as the cool energy inside them surged into Gauss like rivers to the sea.
The white insect's red eye-lights flickered violently at the sight, its head a whirl of fear and confusion. Its worldview had just flipped.
"Inside—out. Now. Or be judged traitors to the hive." The pheromone command outside sharpened, edged with killing intent.
The white insect trembled, glancing from the tunnel mouth to Gauss, at a loss. Its thin legs shook uncontrollably. It had little will of its own—everything felt over. Just moments ago it had been happily digging, planning to trade for a slice of moss-meat for its always-peckish friend. These days had been the happiest of its insect-life: its mate had gotten smarter, could actually talk instead of just nodding blankly.
If life could have stayed like that, it would have been content.
But… how did it come to this?
The murderous pheromones pressed down from outside, crushing its tiny body.
Then—sudden change.
Crack… crack…
A fine, clear splintering came from Gauss. The pale, slightly soft worker shell on his body crazed with dense fractures. The old plates sloughed off, revealing a new layer beneath—shining silver, near metallic.
His back carapace burst apart. A pair of membranous wings unfurled from the tear, blazing with light, spreading at startling speed.
A surge of power blasted out of him, shoving the killing intent back in one wave.
"Hrrr—!"
A low, guttural cry pushed from his throat. He snapped his head up; the two red points in his compound eyes now burned like a forge.
In the depths of his mind, an ancient-looking book creaked open.
[Activating the Adv…Evolver's Manual. Reward: STR +1, CON +1, AGI +1.]
[New Trait: 'Hunter's Instinct'.]
[New Trait: 'Flight', 'Sprint Slash'…]
After a long moment, Gauss surfaced from the flood of prompts and saw the little insect curled up in terror, staring at him in disbelief.
"Let's get out of here."
"O-okay." It was terrified; all it wanted was to run.
Outside, a squad of smaller soldier-insects formed up to enter. "Kill all nearby workers. Leave none. They've been tainted by a False God."
Growling, the soldiers pushed for the narrow tunnel—when, the instant the first shoved its heavy head inside, a silver blur scythed down like the keenest blade.
Shrrip!
The intruder's head—and its thick mandibles—split clean in two. Viscous body fluid and shards of its energy core sprayed everywhere.
One hit. Dead.
Gauss scooped the little insect up and shot from the tunnel, hovering. His body—cold, beautiful, a weapon made for killing—was on full display to the gathered swarm. Scarlet-lit eyes lowered to the floor. His cave-mates had been crushed to pulp. As an aberration, there was no going back.
No retreat. Only a way through.
He lifted his scythe-like forelimbs. A silver arc ripped the air.
He launched skyward.