When a green Dodge grand Caravan arrived to pick him up, Grey was faintly amused; and when a man stepped out wearing what was clearly riot gear, well over six feet tall, it appeared as if he’d had difficulty fitting in the driver’s seat to begin with.
He looked him over for a moment. “Grey scales, Grey callsign. Simple enough.”
“I’m assuming you’ve got a sledgehammer somewhere, hence the name Sledge?”
The massive figure shrugged, the helmet hiding any expression. “I’m a Warrior; berserker class, just hit level 6.. It seemed to fit. What did you go for?”
No reason to be dishonest. This wasn’t an enemy. “Assassin and necromancer. Burst damage, curses, and minions.”
Sledge clapped his hands. “Well then! That could be useful, on top of scaring the buggers off. The app said this is your first time. You good with taking the oath?”
Grey blinked. “The oath?” The app had mentioned something about that.
“Ahh. Well. You can create a group, permanent or temporary, easily enough, or even a Kingdom. And swear an oath not to deliberately attack any member of that group. The oath is binding; if you break it, all the mana bleeds right out of you, and you turn all the way back to level zero. And, well. You’re no longer part of the group, so there’s no penalty if someone else hits you.”
He smiled. “You can swear an oath to not attack anyone else whose sworn the oath and uses the app, and poof. Everyone knows you’re safe to work with, and someone who already swore can flag your account. The system even gives a little dot over their head so you know they’re a member too.”
He looked at the tablet, then at Sledge. “On the one hand, that sounds like an excellent idea. On the other, there’s some folks who tried to kill me… and I aim to settle the matter. If they joined this guild….”
Sledge looked at him for a moment. “If you’ll swear it just for the group in this car, I won’t put the tag on your account, but I’ll still bring you along.”
Being in the group could be useful. If he could get them to make him a member, and he could somehow exclude the duo, it would give him an enormous advantage in the final battle.
“Fair enough. I, unless one of them is hiding in the van, take a solemn oath not to deliberately harm you, or anyone in the van, unless they attack me first, on pain of losing everything I’ve gained from the system. That work?”
Oath Taken!
The System cannot compel action, but if you take an oath without duress, it can bind you to that oath. Deliberately attempting to harm Sledge, Shockwave, Star, or Stacktopus will result in a reversion to level zero, with all gained attributes and levels lost; you will, however, remain your new species and titles, and gain the ‘Oathbreaker’ title.
The man nodded. “Sounds good to me. Hop on.” He slid open the side door… revealing a surprisingly spacious, comfortable interior. Something that looked more like a limo, with three others seated inside; all of them wearing armored vests gauntlets, boots; fully decked out over ordinary clothing. A girl with blue hair and pointed elf-ears, a… floating bulbous figure with tentacles dangling down, and a man wearing a black duster over his own armored vest.
“Siddown and buckle up; this thing is faster than it looks.”
Grey blinked, as he shit the door, and sat down, snapping the belt on. “This…. Is pretty damned big. Someone used a Tool upgrade on it?”
“Two of em! First one made it get five hundred miles per gallon and regenerate from damage while running! Second one Shockwave used, made it bigger on the inside.”
The van pulled out onto the street…. And then rapidly accelerated at a pace he would have expected from a sportscar rather than a minivan. He shook his head. “Useful. Interesting.” He glanced at the others. “So. Whats the plan here?”
The woman; Star, apparently; leaned forward. “Well. Stacktopus is a manipulator; he can throw things with his brain, and reshape earth. So far, we’ve been dealing with packs of wild dogs, spiders, and rats…. So. Ants are now. We figured, we go to the nest… Stack makes a channel to guide the Ants in a certain path. Me and Shockwave blast em with lightning and fire… You and Sledge hold them back with gun and hammer. Stack keeps the trench deep and clear, and helps where he can. When it looks like you’ll get overwhelmed… you can scare the ants back, right?”
“Right. By the time we clear the nest, all of us should be able to; it kicks in at a thousand kills of a given type. I can make them run for a few seconds, and…” He looked around the group.
“My venom hurts and paralyzes on contact; I can add it to Sledge’s weapons, spit it, or put it on bullets. Once I have some corpses to work with, I can send em in, one or two at a time, to help keep them off Sledge… and maybe drip venom into the nest entrance to screw with the others. And, well. I’ve got a gun with infinite ammo, so I can keep firing all day. Hopefully we can make Sledge’s job easy today; Ants kinda suck.”
“Damn right they do. But if the Chosen are right, we need to stay on top of things, or this whole damn place is gonna become Ant World and we’ll be watching them run things from the damned moon.”
***
As they drove down the road, the others were staring at Grey… as he poured a glass jar of mayonnaise out the window, letting the contents splatter onto the highway… and then started to drool into the still mostly white container; a noxious smell filling the back as he seeped venom into the container.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
When he had it about a third full, it vanished… and another jar of mayo appeared.
Star blinked. Shockwave laughed, shaking his head. “On the one hand; dimensional storage. Solid choice. And… I can get why you want to prep some venom as a..grenade, I guess. Good idea. But… where the hell did you get the jars?”
This time, after dumping out the contents, he simple left his right fingertips in the bottle; and, a bit slower, the liquid started to seep from his claws into the jar. “I looted a grocery truck that crashed into a gas station, maybe an hour or two after the crash. I got cases of condiments, ice cream, milk, juice… all sorts of nonsense. Even a bunch of bottled water… but the venom has an acidic component, and will melt right through the plastic.”
He nodded, as the next jar appeared, replacing the recently partially filled one. “Nice. Wait. And it stays fresh?”
“As far as the contents of the space go, only a few minutes have passed; time only passes for the fractions of a second I take stuff in or out. So… yeah.”
He watched as Grey kept going… and by the time he had the sixth jar ready to store, the van was pulling off the interstate, and Sledge was calling back…
“Time to go, folks! Stack, take the sky and scout out, please. And be careful.”
The strange, bulbous, squid-like creature floated out of the van, into the sky, as the others filed out… and looked out into the desert at a pileup. At least a dozen cars had crashed together, mostly with skeletal remains still inside; and not from decay. From the remaining fluid, splatters of blood and even spilled drinks in the vehicles… sometime in the past day, some of these people had still been alive.
Grey studied the vehicles. Well. No need to wait for the ants to die to animate a skeleton. He’d probably get titles for animating ten, a hundred, so forth undead anyway; no time like the present to start.
Stopping by a brown Ford Expedition currently crushed between two smaller vehicles, there was a body in the front, and three children in the back; at his current grade, he could likely only animate the adult, or the two children.
He glanced at his allies; the squid floating up into the sky to spot for the nest, the others mostly just looking at the horizon, scanning for signs themselves. They might get weird about animate children. He should stick with the adult.
He’d never done it before… but the system had imprinted the knowledge of how to put together the ritual as if it were a wiring diagram he’d gone over a thousand times. He carved the circle into the shoulder of the interstate with his claws… and when he had it right… or close enough… he took the skeleton sitting in the driver’s seat; mostly just a loose pile of bones held together by clothing… and set it in the circle.
By now, the others were watching with a grim fascination, as he placed a hand on the ribcage… and there was an audible pop, faint white light glowing in the circle’s carving…. And the skeleton rose to its feet.
He glanced at the others. “This one is a little stronger than a typical adult human. I’m gonna give it a machete I bought at wal-mart, and it can be the first to go down to the ants. For the rest… I’ll be carving another one near the sight, and I can animate ants as well kill them to send in to fight their friends.”
Star looked at the figure, shaking her head. “That’s… a bit disturbing. Useful…. But disturbing.”
Up above them, there was a hiss; somehow, he knew that the squid had just said ‘This way’.... As it started to float off away from the road.
Sledge nodded, looking at the others. “Well. I’ll take point.” He reached to his back; and a massive sledgehammer, glowing faintly blue, appeared in his grip. “If the ants aren’t shooting something at him, Stack will go ahead and start making the path… most of the ants stay in the nest, unless its disturbed.”
“Well then. What are we waiting for?” Grey reached into thin air, taking hold of a machete… and a sealed jar with a horrific-looking blend of green soupy liquid with white globs floating in it… handing them both the the skeleton… before starting to march forward. How many ants were in a nest? Would he be able to hit Insect-Slayer IV today? Oh. No, that one was like a million ants. No way there could be that many unless they were tiny.
***
They could see the nest, now. A hill, perhaps nine feet tall…. With the squid floating perhaps thirty feet in the air.
Dozens of ants… ranging from about a foot long to as much as three… were all standing, watching the squid, as he slowly circled the nest; seemingly alert, but not doing anything… yet… either not knowing, or not caring about the way a growing ditch was steadily being formed around the nest…. Leading to a trench heading towards the group, with solid, sheer, walls.
“So. I’ve been giving it some thought. I think…. When the trench is how we want it… I should send the skeleton in to chuck the jar of venom down the hole. Not sure how they’ll react to him, since he doesn’t smell like food… but if there’s a whole miasma of envenomed, vile-smelling air at the entrance, it has to be bad for the ants that are escaping. And if it dies… we don’t care.”
Sledge chuckled. “The recommendations to deal with the ants are to dump a firebomb down the hole to fill it with smoke or nerve gas, smoke the monsters out. The venom might be useful; but the smoke would get further. I was gonna kick things off by throwing an armload of smoke-bombs down the hole. The ones that don’t come pouring out to escape… die.”
“Well hell. Why not both? Give the skeleton the smokebombs. It can just go as deep as it can before they kill it. Skeleton, here.”
The thing stopped. It was wearing the ragged remains of a shirt, and nothing else… and Grey pulled one of his backpacks out of storage; dumping the clothes that were inside into a loose pile inside his storage, before putting the jars of venom in. “How do you set the bombs off?”
“Pull the pin, and they go off after ten seconds.”
“...Got any string?”
***
The speed with which Stack worked was impressive; whatever powers his species had, building walls and primitive structures would have been trivial for them, as with less than half an hour of work, he’d formed a deep trench, pointed at the party, over a hundred yards long; ending at an equally deep trench surrounding the nest.
The skeleton was floating through the air, lifted by Stack… and gently set down beside the nest entrance, as the host of ants watched… immediately starting to charge forward the moment it neared the ground.
Stack hurtled upwards as fast as he could, as a few streams of acid spurted up from warrior ants at him; Grey couldn’t tell from his position, but it didn’t look like they all missed.
Perhaps twelve seconds later, buried deep within the nest…. The smokebombs nested in the bagfull of venom all detonated….and the whole thing started to fill with the fumes.
The response was immediate. Ants started pouring out of the nest by the hundred; a carpet of them so numerous it was impossible to count.
At the end of the trench, the group all looked at each other, then at the oncoming horde.
Sledge stepped up to the exit of the trench, and grunted. “....Well. This looks like it’ll be fun.”
Grey stepped up beside him… the two revolvers suddenly snapping into view in his hands. Sledge blinked in surprise for a moment; his Examine likely telling him they were Epic and Legendary weapons; before giving a grin… and turning back to face them. “Alright, people! Don’t exhaust yourselves. There’s enough ants for everybody.”