The Eccentric Entomologist is Now a Queen's Consort

Elowen leaned closer to the hovering image, silver-blonde hair spilling over her shoulder. "Or who destroyed it," she said, the words soft as cotton yet sharp enough to cut.

The tune crackled louder, filling the shaft like rising water. Rodion's audio meters spiked red. He flicked his wrist; a compartment slid open. Five matte-black discs clicked into his palm. Each bore a single crimson rune that pulsed to the distorted rhythm—as if the hymn itself tried to invade their circuits.

He snapped his fingers. The runes blinked green, re-calibrated. One by one he lofted the Ghost Beacons into the gloom. They rose in lazy arcs, then vanished, cloaked in optical camouflage. Instantly the music faltered, notes scattering like startled birds. Rodion watched sensor readouts dip—enemy pings chasing false ghosts deeper into the shaft.

Only then did he release the breath he didn't truly need. <Interference diluted. Probability of sonic hijack reduced to twelve percent. Proceeding.>

The cable hissed once more as he resumed descent. Below, floor sensors registered: pliant, organic, uneven. He loosened grip, dropped the last two meters, and touched down with a muted splash. Rotting root fibers squelched under his boots, releasing earthy rot mingled with sweet mold.

He rolled a shoulder, scanning. Every breath of air here felt thick, humid, carrying whispers of spore clouds waiting to burst. Scarabs darted ahead, their twin headlamps cutting white cones through the dark. In their glow, he saw pale filaments quiver underfoot—fungal threads recoiling from the vibration.

Rodion's fingers brushed them. They snapped back like violin strings, humming. <Bioluminal reaction marginal. Low toxicity at resting state. Trample threshold unknown.>

A flicker on the far wall. Shadow? No—movement. A slick, glassy limb slid free of the stone, jointed backwards like a praying mantis. Then another. For half a heartbeat the limbs hung there, shimmering, before dissolving into mist.

Elowen gasped aloud despite herself. Mikhailis squeezed her hand, eyes never leaving the feed. Stay measured, he warned himself, He's handled worse than ghosts.

More limbs erupted—three, four, six—hatching from mortar like larvae clawing from eggshells. Each time they phazed in, the masonry around them blackened, as if reality itself burned at the edges.

Rodion's voice cut through the tension like a scalpel. <Moss-Crawlers. Spatial Echo Predators. Three entities. Phase interval zero-point-seven-three seconds. Tactic: forced materialization.>

He knelt, set a silver puck at his heel. Verdant sparks rippled across its rim. Another disc, then a third—each landing with deliberate placement, forming a triangle around his position. Blue rings pulsed outward and clung to walls, sinking into stone like dye soaking cloth. The hum rose—low, bass-heavy, vibrating teeth.

The first Crawler flickered fully into being—mandibles gnashing, eyes milky white. It lunged.

Rodion's reaction was pure geometry: one quick slider step, torso bending only as much as physics required. His right arm snapped like a coiled wire. From beneath the wristguard burst the tri-vector net—three razor-thin cables that fanned into a crystalline lattice.

The net blossomed mid-air, its own rune nodes flickering bright as welding arcs. Lattice loops anticipated the creature's flicker. When the Crawler tried to slip out, the net pulsed—synchronizing with its phase signature, dragging it back into tangible space.

The instant its shell solidified, Rodion was there. No flourish this time, just a brutal piston punch that traveled from artificial ankle to knuckles. The skull burst into a fireworks of prismatic shards. Light scattered across mulch, then winked out.

Up above, Mikhailis whistled under his breath. Precise. Efficient. Like he wrote the monster's instruction manual.

Second Crawler dropped from the ceiling, chittering. Elowen leaned so close her breath fogged the edge of the projection. Rodion's optics ticked left, right—tiny angular adjustments. He traced velocity. 1.4 meters per tick. He shifted weight to his back foot, twisted. Twelve-point-four centimeters to clear the arc of attack.

He moved. The creature's claws sliced empty air, leaving ripples where space momentarily tore. Before it could phase again, Rodion slid a dagger free—edge thin as a sunbeam—and flicked, casual as writing a signature. One clean line of light. The Crawler's body cleaved in two, halves collapsing inward before melting into thick blue smoke.

Elowen let out the breath she'd been holding, then gave a small, astonished laugh. "He really is solving equations," she murmured, voice half pride, half disbelief.

Rodion didn't pause to celebrate. He pivoted toward the final blip. But the third predator had learned—or remembered. It half-phased through the floor, talons raking mulch like oars. Only its jagged spine protruded, shimmering dangerously.

Rodion plucked one more Magnet-Seal disc from his belt. A flick of his thumb armed it. He skipped it across the floor like a stone across water. It slid beneath the buried Crawler. Force fields roared up—magnetizing every dust mote in a three-meter radius. Earthy mulch stiffened, roots straightening like spears.

The Crawler tried to dive deeper—its shell flashed, bending light—but the charged field pinned every flicker back into physical form. It clawed upward too late.

Rodion's heel crashed down like a hammer on steel. Vertebrae splintered, ichor spraying in slow-motion arcs. A second stomp punched through the chest. The Crawler stopped moving.

Dead.

Elowen whispered, "He's fighting like he's solving equations."

Her voice carried a hush of reverence, but there was awe dancing beneath the words—a soft thrill that even Monkey's lens caught as a slight tremor in her shoulders. High above ground, she and Mikhailis sat cross‑legged atop rumpled blankets, knees bumping whenever one of them leaned too far toward the projection. Candlelight flickered over their faces, mingling with the bluish glow of the dungeon feed so their expressions looked half‑dream and half‑dawn.

Mikhailis felt the quiet tug of pride pull at his chest, warm as a hearth ember. Every move he makes, he calculates to the decimal, he mused, eyes glinting. Yet even that thought carried another: But he keeps the flair for Elowen—and maybe a sliver for me. He gave her a gently teasing nudge with his elbow. "Careful, Your Majesty. Keep praising him like that and he'll start charging us per equation solved."

She answered with a smile that curled slow and secret. "Then the treasury will stretch. Precision is worth every coin."

Back in the shaft, the final crawler—a smear of ghostly limbs—tried one last gambit, burrowing halfway into the floor. Its carapace flickered, edges fluttering like a malfunctioning hologram as it attempted to slip fully out of phase.

Rodion's helm snapped down. Calculations raced: vector trajectory, magnetic polarity, density threshold. He tugged a Magnet‑Seal disc from a hip slot; the puck was no larger than a chess piece, but dormant runes etched on its surface glowed angry crimson. With minimal flourish he side‑armed it, spinning across mulch and stone.

The disc clacked once, little claws biting into the spongy ground. A bassy pulse rolled out—felt more than heard—and the floor flashed iron‑blue. For a single sizzling heartbeat, space crystalised. Phase distortion collapsed; the crawler's ethereal shell hardened into brittle translucence—caught half‑inside the earth, half‑out, like a bug frozen in amber.

Rodion advanced, steps measured, cloak tails barely whispering. He didn't draw a blade. Instead he raised one arm and plunged a titanium elbow downward. The strike came fast—no tension wasted—and landed with a wooden snap. The crawler's spine shattered; bioluminescent ichor sprayed, then evaporated in glittering rain.

Silence settled, thick as sap. A single test beep tolled through Rodion's helm—the automated confirmation that no more hostiles lurked inside his threat radius.

A Scarab—designation S‑29—zipped from its orbit and skittered over broken shell pieces. Its slender siphon probed the corpse's steaming core, drawing pale green bile into a glassy chamber. As soon as it slotted home, uplink pinions on the Scarab's back arced a thread of light upward, transmitting raw spectro‑data to Monkey.

Rodion reviewed the numbers; he scarcely needed to, but habit formed good logs. With two typing motions on the holo‑keys hovering near his wrist, he stamped the mission feed:

<Flag: Spatial Anomaly → Confirmed.>

Up in the suite, Mikhailis murmured, "Spatial echo predators, phasing floor glitches… seems like the deeper we go, the less gravity cares about rules." He popped a honeyfruit seed into his mouth, crunching softly. Elowen caught the faint crease between his brows—the playful prince had slipped for a moment, replaced by the strategist.

"Rodion won't let gravity cheat," she said, fingers finding his. "He writes better rules."