Climbing up a colossal tree with a black storm roaring around her wasn’t how Marisol wanted to end her day, but if she wasn’t this high up, she wouldn’t get enough momentum to skate up the giant horseshoe crab’s ramp-like tail.

  the Archive muttered.

  Reaching the top of the tree with her palms glued to the bark, she turned and looked down, swallowing a hard gulp—it was a fifty-meter-tall fall down to the black sand beach, and then she’d have to backflip, land on her glaives, and maintain the forward momentum until she crossed the beach and reached the base of the tail. , she’d have to skate all the way up the hundred-meter-long tail and glide all the way back towards the Whirlpool City… and in this storm? With this sort of wind swirling across the great blue?

  Oh, she it was going to be dangerous.

  The Archive chortled as she dragged her left glaive black, putting her right glaive crackling with lightning in front.

  the Archive said plainly.

  [Dexterity: 3 → 4]

  [Perception: 3 → 4]

  [Basic Wings Lvl. 2 → Basic Wings Lvl. 5]

  [Aura: 1,184 → 1,535]

  [Points: 355 → 4]

  And then a second status screen popped up next to her head, showing her the branch mutation options for her wings.

  [First Branch Mutation Selection available for T3 Core Mutation ‘Basic Wings’]

  [First Branch Mutation Option: Streamlined Wings]

  [Brief Description: Your wings will become more streamlined with a swept-back, diamond-shaped design, further enhancing their aerodynamic properties and allowing you to glide even faster]

  [Second Branch Mutation Option: Flexed Wings]

  [Brief Description: Your wing joints will evolve smaller flexion coils for improved flexibility, allowing for sharper turns and better control during gliding]

  [Third Branch Mutation Option: Stabilizing Wings]

  [Brief Description: Your wings will develop automatic balancing mechanisms, allowing you to stand or move on turbulent water surfaces without easily sinking or tipping over]

  But this time, unlike when she had to decide between ‘Attracting Hydrospines’ and ‘Repelling Hydrospines’, her decision was obvious.

  She was a Sand-Dancer, a speed demon who lived on the very edge of her feet.

  She needed .

  [Basic Wings Lvl. 5 → Streamlined Wings Lvl. 5]

  [Brief Description: You have grown short, diamond-shaped wings especially specialized for gliding between your shoulder blades. These wings are incapable of flying. Subsequent levels in this mutation will decrease the stamina drain from using your wings]

  it said, vanishing off her shoulder as she felt her wings growing sharper.

  Inhaling deeply, Marisol willed more lightning to harden her broken right glaive. Raw muscle strands pulled themselves taught. Drying blood evaporated off her tiny cuts here and there, and a cool wind ran over her skin, ruffling her curly locks of hair.

  She exhaled.

  Then she relaxed her basic setae and let go, falling down, down, and down the colossal tree—only to do a backflip and stab the bark mid-fall, lightning speeding her trail as her glaives cleaved through the tree.

  She split the tree down in half as she reached the black sand beach in two seconds flat. Light twisted around her. The world became a blurry mess. She kept her momentum as she sped straight towards the giant horseshoe crab tail—passing Kuku and the cheering crab children as she did. With great concentration, she began skating the tail, her eyes focused solely on the dark clouds she was heading towards.

  Darkness enveloped her as she went faster and faster. She lost sense of herself, her body. Her mind was racing with a million thoughts, but at the same time, it was so quiet her panting breaths became the only noise she heard.

  Then they, too, went silent.

  The ‘void’ came as the world blurred. It was almost familiar at this point, so she didn’t lose herself in it. Far from it. As she neared the tip of the tail, leaning dangerously forward and hissing out every drop of air in her lungs, her glaives left the ground and she whipped her wings out.

  She caught the winds as she pressed her limbs together, turning herself into an arrow.

  [{Temporary} Speed: 5 → 7]

  Black rain lashed at her face like needles and the wind howled in her ears. The clouds swirled in violent spirals above her. The churning seas raged far beneath, giant waves crashed and swallowed each other. She refused to let the night take her again. With bluish-pink lightning crackling around her glaives, she was sure she looked like a shooting star—streaking across the night sky. She left a trail of stardust in her wake—and just the thought of it made her all giddy inside.

  She was sure she’d looked so pretty before.

  Thunder boomed around her, rattling her bones, but she pressed on with her teeth gnashed together. Even from a distance, she could squint and see the flashes of cannons firing in vain, more beams of light swerving from the backline lighthouses in an attempt to locate their target. The Mutant-Class shrimp was moving with terrifying speed, though. It’d dismantled the second, third, and fourth lines of warships defending the Whirlpool City with a series of deafening . She didn’t even need to see its silhouette, exactly. Her eyes followed the floating wreckage and the sea of debris as she soared over them, and eventually she was close enough.

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  She saw the tiny, segmented back of the Mutant several hundreds of meters away, and she raised her wings to adjust her gliding path.

  The whole way down, her pulse was pounding in a painful, electrifying rhythm, but she wasn't going to lie: this was easily the most exhilarating thing she'd ever done. She shot through clouds and narrowed her eyes at the quickly-rising Mutant beneath her. It was still sprinting towards the Whirlpool City a few hundred meters in front of it, but it'd annihilated every warship in its way. Every lighthouse was toppled. The only person who could intercept it before it could reach the city was none other than her.

  So, the moment before impact, she flipped around and aimed her glaives at its back.

  The Mutant whirled, beady red eyes widening in surprise as she slammed into its torso. White-hot lightning exploded outwards as she cleaved through a pair of its blocking arms, screeching to a halt and kicking up a massive wave of water behind her as she did.

  She clawed the surface with her fingers, vibrating her hydrospines to maintain her balance and clicking her tongue in irritation at the same time. The Mutant had just dodged and deflected her impaling kick by sacrificing two of its arms.

  She didn't let her momentum screech to a halt, though. Twirling around to face the Mutant head-on, she immediately skated to the right while it dived to the left, her eyes glaring daggers at its shadow beneath the surface. It had the advantage of being able to strike her from below, so she couldn't ever stay still to take a break, but when had she ever stopped moving on water anyways?

  Arms spread out, fingers twirling as though she were paddling through water, she skated hard right while the Mutant pursued her from the left. They were opposites of the same maelstrom. Lightning electrified the sea in her wake while the Mutant’s subsurface swimming kicked up giant waves, and she wasn’t slowing down. She had a routine to follow: Glide. Spin. Pause, raise arms. Twirl and caper. Sharp turn. Sharp pivot. Then jump—soar. She finished skating a whole circle back to where she first landed after twenty seconds, and then she repeated the routine, making the Mutant chase her in circles over and over again.

  By the time the Mutant popped out of the churning waves and stood perfectly still to look around, it was already too late. She’d picked up so much momentum, skated so fast in circles that she’d kicked up a roaring waterspout around them, and it was a circular barrier of wind and electrified water that kept the Mutant from leaving the hundred-meter-wide arena.

  If it thought she was an annoying pest and wanted to continue towards the Whirlpool City instead, it’d have to wait out the lightning, but with her still skating non-stop?

  It’d to fight her.

  Glaring at the Mutant in the center of the electrified arena, she kicked in with a burst of strength, leaning dangerously forward. It picked up two broken halves of a warship and sent them cleaving through the waves towards her, but she jumped and drop-kicked through the hull, shooting through the halves before landing on her glaives. The Mutant flung more debris at her—crates, cannons, planks, even entire masts with the ratlines still attached.

  She dodged and spun and twisted through them all, shrapnel cutting her skin, drawing blood. Each and every last projectile it flung at her was deadlier than any opponent she’d ever faced. The Mutant’s tossing strength was unbelievable, so she to get up close and personal.

  She staggered through the barrage, then arrived under its giant form. Its eyes weren’t catching up to her. It was still staring forward at where she was a split second ago, so she kicked at its torso—and its segmented body folded around her glaive, lightning zapping its internal organs as it punched at her in the same motion, trying to trade blows with her.

  But she’d seen this attack before—it’d folded itself around her glaive not too long ago—so she let her apiclaws spring out and slashed her arms in a cross, severing two of its punching arms. It recoiled with a pained screech, darting underwater, and that was the first time she’d heard it make a sound.

  She sharpened her claws against her glaives as it surfaced a good twenty meters away, its eyes fully alert and opened now.

  She sneered, shooting it a thumbs-down.

  The Mutant folded backwards and cracked each of its segments—the same way she’d bend backwards and stretch her spine every morning before performing a routine—and then it charged. Faster, wilder, and more wrathful than it’d ever been before.

  Dipping in and out of the water to make itself harder to track, it burst from under her like a geyser, punching out with all eight arms in a flurry of strikes. She fanned her wings out and jumped up, kicking its arms away with a sharp exhale. Two legs was all she needed to match eight arms; she fast enough, though her right glaive was still obviously fractured. She needed to electrify her own muscles just to keep it from bending the wrong way.

  Backflipping off its final punch and landing ten meters away, she immediately skated in for a counterattack. It reared its arms back, ready to intercept. She smirked and screeched to a halt five meters in, splashing a wave of water into its face. When it tried to punch through the wave anyways, she met it with a Whirlwind Spin, kicking and slicing off four more arms with flashes of lightning. Again, it cast out a fist, and this time it caught her in the middle of a spin—she gasped as one of its claws stabbed through her right elbow, halting her momentum in an instant.

  With its claw still in her arm, it jerked itself forward and followed up with more punches. She ducked, she bobbed, she weaved, but two more claws stabbed into her left forearm, and now it had both her arms in its grip.

  She hissed, lifting her glaives and trying to kick it straight through, but it snapped its torso segments to the side and evaded swiftly.

  It didn’t let her think. It could’ve ripped her arms off their sockets, and she certainly her muscles tearing for a split second, but then she flapped her wings and vibrated her hydrospines as violently as she could to make the water it was standing on wobble. It lost its balance, albeit only slightly, but it bought her enough time to kick and sever two more of its arms with her apiclaws instead.

  Dropping her with yet another pained screech, it skidded back on all four remaining limbs and snarled at her, cracking its head left and right. She did the same, leaning forward and raising her back leg parallel to the sea as well—and she watched, for what she hoped was the final time, as the Mutant dipped under the surface and swam to the edges of the electrified arena.

  It swerved at the last second to begin charging straight at her.

  the Archive said plainly.

  She coughed out a laugh, scowling at the charging Mutant.

  The Mutant kicked up violent waves wherever it swam. It took its sweet time circling around her in the center of the makeshift arena, like when she’d done the same to it minutes earlier. She didn’t reciprocate in kind immediately. She took one slow step forward, keeping her body extremely low to the surface with the Silent Step, and started skating in small circles around where she stood.

  She calmed her breathing.

  She steadied her heart and mind.

  What did her mama look like that day, when the dust devil was kicked away in the middle of a sandstorm?

  She shook her head slowly, a soft smile rising onto her face.

  She exhaled coolly, raising one knee as she spun idly in place.

  And when the Mutant pounced at her from behind—the ripples from its movements having reached her long, long ago—she performed the War Jump, accelerating from zero into an explosive, graceful launch.

  She spun six times in total, and her electrified glaives came down like a hammer against a nail—bisecting the Mutant down in half and slamming against the sea, a crack of thunder on the distant horizon accompanying the strike.

  Marisol stayed balanced on one glaive, head lowered after the downwards kick, exhaling slowly as she did.

  She watched the halves of the Mutant fall apart, sink into the abyss, and only once she was sure she’d killed it did she deactivate her Art.

  The moment she did—the moment lightning left her entire body, not just her glaives—she crumbled like a puppet with its strings cut off, falling over backwards and sinking alongside the Mutant she’d given her all to slay.

  [Objective #10 Completed: Slay the F-Rank Mutant-Class Wraith Shrimp]

  [Reward: Vengeance for the fallen]

  [Grade: S-Rank Giant-Class → F-Rank Mutant-Class]

  … Sinking into the cold and quiet abyss for the second time tonight. She wondered, briefly, if anyone was going to come get her.

  She was close to the Whirlpool City, after all—it’d be a complete shame if that ‘Black Storm’ protocol or whatever meant she couldn’t get in. She’d come such a long way.

  She blinked slowly underwater, feeling her mind drifting asleep.

  But her thoughts trailed off as the little water strider jumped off her shoulder and pointed upwards—at the shadow of a man diving in after her, backlit only by cold shafts of moonlight.

  She couldn’t see who he was, or even make out any of his facial features with her vision being so blurry and hazy, but she saw the flag he carried on his back billowing in the underwater currents… and it was an insignia she’d recognize anywhere in the world.

  She hadn’t spent ten years saving up for her trip to the Whirlpool City to recognize the nine-headed serpent twisted in the shape of a sword, after all.

  the Archive grumbled.

  is the main story of this entire universe, set six years after this story, while is a completed spinoff set thirty-four years before this story. As usual, you don't have to read multiple stories just to understand the plot of one. Each story can be read completely standalone (do note that both stories are vastly different from Storm Strider in terms of tone, pacing, and setting. Both are rather dark, and the main characters are pretty troubled, so they're more character-centric than plot-centric like Storm Strider.

  here with over four hundred members, where you can get notifications for chapter updates, check out my writing progress, and read daily facts about this insect-based world. My is here, where you can read up to eight advanced chapters for both this story and Unmaker currently (and once the fourth story, Thousand-Tongue Mage, is launched in early access, you'll also get eight advanced chapters for that story), so the highest tier will eventually give twenty-four advanced chapters in total. I'll also be doing a poll in the near future where Patrons can vote on the next spinoff I should write after Thousand-Tongue Mage, so... yeah.

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