Words by Michael Mahinay • July 2, 2026

Fiction/Literary • Serialized Novel

For our very first serialized novel, kasing2 presents the first installment of Abyan: An Upgrade of a Lifetime by Michael Mahinay. It takes place in an alternate version of the Philippines known as the Hinira archipelago, specifically in the central region of Tabusa. Iñigo Lacabraso, a fifteen-year old Salamangkero who dreams of becoming a blacksmith, takes a train ride through the sky to Ídla Buglas, based on the real-life island of Negros, where he plans to go spelunking for jewels inside Mount Kalayon, inspired by the real life Mount Kanlaon.

This story is a melting pot of cultures, predominantly Visayan (Cebuano and Hiligaynon), and the creatures that take center stage are inspired by Filipino mythology, but the ones featured here allude to a legend about Mount Kalayon, adapted from the tale about its real-world counterpart. Keep your eyes peeled for more installments! Each installment will also be featured in every new print issue of kasing2.

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When one sets foot on the shores of Ídla Buglas, one immediately feels the warmth surging from the black sand of its beaches to the rich loam of its farmlands. Most describe the sensation as walking barefoot on dawn-baked asphalt; hot enough that it simmers, but not so much that it burns.

Which means that it’s just right for the mananalsal of the Tabusa region to set up headquarters at the very crux of this warmth – Mount Kalayon, but while the caldera provides optimal temperatures for sterling-quality Agimat, there are crucial caveats to consider when you establish a workshop in close proximity to the blistering bowels of a volcano.

Lava was a primary concern, especially since Kalayon has one of the more active calderas in the Hinira archipelago, but any blacksmith worth their tools knows that pits of fire are no more dangerous than crashing waves, blustering gales, or falling rocks. At the same time, any blacksmith born on any of the seven thousand islands of Hinira, be it the northern lands in San Luz or the southern vales of Indomos, is made aware of the risks of erecting a station in the heart of Magkalupi territory. 

So as perfect as the conditions were for a forge, the mananalsal, like any other Salamangkero, were honor-bound to keep their distance, but for some of these tinkerers and metalworkers, taboo was simply a door without a key, and for them, it was simply a matter of making one. 

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The skies above Hinira are regularly shadowed by the colossal coils of the Sky Trains – airborne vehicles that slither through the altitudes like enormous ropes of brass, and with such a punctual, convenient commute – once you get used to the ear popping – passengers are free to go about their daily routines from their seats, whether it’s striking up conversations with those beside them, or immersing themselves in the pages of a book or the minutiae of a digital article. When they’re fortunate enough to be in the presence of a Salamangkero, they either gawk silently or whisper quietly as their Abyan sifts through the crowd. 

But on one particular Sky Train, no one batted an eye at fifteen-year-old Iñigo Lacabraso, who retired to the back end of his cabin, where the air conditioning was the fiercest, but unlike most Hinirans, he couldn’t be less bothered with the cold; his busy fingers and laser focus generated heat as he furiously fiddled with what appeared to be a compass, only this one doesn’t direct one to magnetic fields. It disrupts them. At least that’s what is says on the blueprints he sketched up.

Iñigo looks up from the clockwork of his doohickey and out the window, where an alabaster cocoon hovers on a crisscross of coordinates. So much for a test run. Oh well, even in the most controlled environments, the results yielded may not be the most accurate.

If he wants to be certain of the device’s function, he needs to see how it fares against the sentinels of Mount Kalayon, a place that he’s always wanted to climb. A dream that has garnered him nothing but ridicule and spite. The ridicule came first, when he was deemed nothing more than a boy wheeling along on a chair he assembled from scraps of an abandoned sorbetes cart. The spite followed not long after his official registration into the ranks of the Salamangkero at age ten, when his sorcery manifested itself in an indigo blaze that melted his classmate’s backpack and incinerated half of her textbooks. She would be suspended, and he would be set aside to start his journey to become a warrior of magic and a tamer of monsters. Most kids would just eat up the basics and flounder their way into their calling, but Iñigo had his sights set on being a mananalsal the moment he saw his first circuit board.

Which was about a year before he built his first one.

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The PA’s blared through the cabins of the Sky Train, signaling their descent to Ídla Buglas in four languages – the first being the common tongue utilized on a global scale, the second the northern tongue spoken across most of San Luz, the third being a more jarring, more aggressive sequence of inflections – a trademark of the local lingo of Tabusa, and last was a language he had never heard of until now – the language of Ídla Buglas. 

Not a dialect. This was its own system. One the inhabitants of the Flame Province have managed to preserve through three centuries’ worth of persecution. If there was one thing that the northerners got right about the southern regions, it’s that they were tough.

But not tough enough to break the shackles of tradition, apparently. That would all change today, when a plucky paraplegic too stubborn to switch to prosthetics would take a plunge where no Salamangkero before him ever dared.

Into the depths of Mount Kalayon.

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But this isn’t some madcap run fueled by a misguided notion of masculinity or some self-appointed crucible to prove his competency to be on par with someone who could still use their legs. Iñigo has made peace with his…situation long before his magic had awakened. No. This was just an impressionable teen with big ambitions. So big that it would cost him a tremendous fortune, and since he would never deign himself to loan a favor, the only way for a fifteen like him to earn twelves figures – Salamangkero gifts notwithstanding – was to go spelunking for jewels.

It may behoove some to inquire on the rationale behind such a trip, but a brief skim on Tabusa folklore might enlighten you to Iñigo’s extortionately bold motives.

This tale begins before Ídla Buglas had a name, before it even existed. When there was only the ocean and a beast known only as the Lunaka, whose seven heads were crowned with horns, whose wings could keep it aloft until the end of time, and whose breath could boil the seafloor barren. With this infernal power, it conceived the bedrock for Ídla Buglas – a slab of granite that was devoid of even the smallest sprig of greenery, but the Lunaka did not care to sow and tend to nature; it simply desired a nest where it could slumber in solitude.

And slumber it did for years, until the arch of its spine and the contours of its necks were buried in the soot of its heat. Eventually, life found footholds in the scorching crags, and as small shoots burgeoned into spacious swathes of forests, the Lunaka was interred under a lush carpet of jungle that would sustain itself on the embers of its energy. Energy that would engender the creation of Anito and attract humans from adjacent islands, and once the number of people had sufficiently risen to where communities were feasible, a handful of tribes were instituted. One group claimed the black sand beaches to the west for themselves, another chose to settle in the hills and highlands, while a third occupied a sizable portion of the eastern locales, where the soil would best support the sugarcane they brought with them. 

The circumstances that defined a Salamangkero have not diverged much since then, though one could make the argument that their connection to the magic around them was significantly more profound, especially since they made use of special implements to better refine their spellcasting.

Gems. Scattered throughout the baked earth of Ídla Buglas, determined by the terrain in which they were discovered. Those near water sported a sapphire-like luster to them. Those embedded in granite slopes boasted jet black facets, while those to the east harbored sparks of a garnet shine. No matter the type however, each gem was of a similar, arrowhead shape, which could then be honed into a circular orb that could sit comfortably on any surface.

It did not take long for the tribes to realize that they had inadvertently used shards of the Lunaka’s hide in order to kindle their sorcery, and with all that magic suffused into the surroundings, it did not take long for the beast to stir from its torpor, erupting from a fissure that spewed golden magma. The sight of its seven heads, rugged with diamond debris, caused most of the tribes to flee in dread. Only the Salamangkero stood tall against this behemoth hellion.

And were immolated for their defiance, for the Lunaka’s body was impervious to magic, and the sorcery of this era was but a mild irritation, but where Salamangkero spells merely glanced off its spine, the magic of the Anito – the beasts and birds born from the primordial roots that weave nature and magic into flesh-and-blood entities – dealt staggering blows to the titan, and that was all Kalayon, a Salamangkero from the coasts, needed to see to prompt a diplomatic visit to the east, where he requested an audience with Malahon, the chief shaman of the area. Relatively isolated from her neighbors and initially reluctant to aid what she deemed a suicidal crusade, the maarom ultimately conceded when she descried her people’s extinction from the wax pools she consulted on a daily basis. 

Both sorcerers then sought the help of Masunud, a Salamangkero from the mountain tribes, who had currently been in the midst of a mediation attempt between his people and a disgruntled army of Hulmigyom, who were forced to vacate their mounds when the Lunaka clawed its way to the crust. Seeing an opportunity to resolve tensions as quickly as possible, he accepted Kalayon’s offer without hesitation, soliciting the wisdom of the Hulmiguyom to chart them the fastest route to the Lunaka’s den.

It was on this bed of lava rivulets and molten pumice that the sorcerers made their second and final stand against the creature. Masunud commanded platoons of Hulmighantik to swarm the Lunaka’s girth. Once it was adequately coated in trap-like jaws, he promptly commenced the attack in a brutal scourge of stings and bites that caused the beast to shriek in deafening agony as its veins were racked with venom. Still, it had the strength to ascend to the skies, signaling the Salamangkero’s second line of offense – a storm of Soldugos bombarded the Lunaka’s eyes with a smokescreen of buzzing yellow jackets, preventing it from seeing Kalayon soaring towards it on the bronze-sheeted wings of a Haribathal, waiting patiently for its seven maws to gape wide open…

So he and his Abyan could sever their horns from their necks, and as the sun reached its zenith, the decapitated Lunaka fell to Ídla Buglas with a thud that shook the entire island for a full minute. Its ichor spilling from the stumps of its windpipes in cataracts of darkness, its discarded skeleton gradually entombed by a shrine built from its adamant wings – an altar on which Kalayon and Malahon wed and ushered in a new age of harmony with the Anito and their tribesmen.

This was a not story one could finish in a night, but one of the offshoots of the Lunaka’s defeat was that its scales were still replete in the subterranean trails beneath Mount Kalayon – testaments to the climactic battle that spawned this revered pinnacle. But this trove would not be so easily accessed. Only those of native lineage are given clearance to explore the now-abandoned shrine’s corridors and the bejeweled nether within – a prerequisite that excluded Iñigo from the get-go. The Lacabrasos are luminaries of San Luz, and while they’ve spread beyond the embrace of their hometown, the volcano’s covenant has not been amended since its inauguration; it has yet to experience an outsider treading its premises.

For none have mustered up the audacity and ingenuity to negotiate the guardians that patrol its frontiers, the most prominent of them being the Dirigmaapoy – seven-foot-tall, four-armed constructs that were extremely prejudiced towards anything human. The general rule was that they were harmless unless provoked, which usually involves some heavy-handed vandalism along the lines of taking an axe to a tree in the name of urban development. 

But Iñigo, who was expecting oblivious automatons thanks to his handy little disruptor, was instead met by a disturbing sight – Dirigmaapoy stalking around the forests that littered the threshold of Kalayon, their backs stooped by a few inches, their limbs slightly jittering, and most of all, the noxious purple cracks that webbed their bodies – Corruption. Very concentrated, and far more lethal than any disease. It’s no secret that Tabusa has been affected to a similar extent by this blight, but witnessing it for himself, and on a Dirigmaapoy no less, caused Iñigo’s usually unshakeable resolve to falter for a few seconds. If these afflicted golems catch even the tiniest hint of him, he will be disposed of with tenfold the impunity that is usually reserved for loggers and poachers. 

Having never taken into account the contingency of Corruption, his disruptor was useless. But if he could find a Dirigmaapoy that had yet to be tainted, he may still be able to continue up Kalayon. First thing’s first, however – he has to do some adjustments to the device, which was not easy when his fingers were trembling from the stakes that were prowling the paths ahead, each unit gripping a spear the thickness of a sugarcane stalk that they can set ablaze at will.

Iñigo presses a button and braces for the worst. Nothing happens, and he tentatively goes for a second press. He didn’t design this thing to be loud and flashy, but he was neither a big fan of silence nor sitting still for for so long.

The shrubbery behind him rustled, and in his fear, he failed to gauge the sound as being too small for a Dirigmaapoy, so his alarm became confusion when he saw something toddle towards him. Something of the same pyroclastic mold as the rogue sentinels roving before, but two feet tall and with the proportions of a plush doll. 

An Anibaga. The precursor of all Dirigmaapoy. A miscalculation in his calibration perhaps, but before Iñigo could try and assess what went wrong, the thunderous stomp of an automaton’s foot pounded onto the left side of his wheelchair, crippling its cloaking settings. The Dirigmaapoy swiftly thrust its spear towards the boy’s forehead, but before it could skewer his brilliant mind out his skull, a beam of pale blue light slammed into the golem’s chest, chipping off a decent portion of its igneous shell. The source? A cannon made of serpent’s cobalt – a metal exclusive to the western coasts of Ídla Buglas. Its wielder? A woman dressed in an embroidered blouse the color of rose petals and leggings checkered with acrylic illustrations of calla lilies. As she approached Iñigo, her weapon collapsed into a navy blue blade welded into the likeness of an ornate clock hand and a shield shaped like a silver star. Going off that alone, she must be a Salamangkero of elite rank. Not a Cardinal, but certainly qualified to Duel for the distinction.

“What’s a kid like you doing out in a place like this?” she exclaimed. Her eyes then swirled to the partly crushed wheelchair, and her face stretched with recognition. “You’re that Lacabraso prodigy! The kid who built a missile from a taho barrel!”

Iñigo’s cheeks were warm with embarrassment. This sorcerer had taken time out of her undoubtedly busy schedule to familiarize herself with his pre-Salamangkero accolades, yet he could not place a name to her prestige. For someone with a knack for putting two and two together, he could never connect a name to a face unless he was consistently exposed to them. 

“I’m sorry,” he said in a tone wilted with shame. “But…who are you?”

To be continued…

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