“What is it? Don’t tell me…” I had a bad feeling about this.
“Yup, there is a monster ahead. A large, mutated monster that looks like a condensed miasma of the sewer — it was blocking the way to the outside.”
“Say what?!”
What sort of monster is standing in our way now? Why do they keep coming after us? No, hang on, it’s more like we are coming after them… Or something or someone prepared these things up in my way?
Before I could come down that astray train of thought, Tuilë interrupted me with a slap on the back.
“Well, it’s not uncommon to encounter one in places like this. I’m afraid that it may be as strong or stronger than the mutant blood mosquito or even the pale cruncher. We just have to be prepared when facing it.”
“That’s true.”
Preparation always came first in every plan, after all. Without adequate preparedness, only an untimely death would await us at the end of the road.
We strode forward, to the location that Lunaria had told us since the tunnel didn’t branch off to anywhere else. A faint, powerful odor gradually struck my nostrils.
With my nose pinched, I whined, “What bad stench. It’s worse than the sewer we were just in.”
“Are you sure it’s not your body odor? Haha.” Tuilë joked, covering her chuckle with her hand.
“Of course not! Sheesh!”
“Let me check.” She leaned closer and sniffed me. I could feel sweat dripping down the back of my head. “Yeah, you don’t smell bad.”
“Whoa, whoa. Lady, what you did just now is not appropriate.”
However, it was beyond my depth what she would regard as “normal.” We weren’t even of the same race. It finally came to my attention that what I regarded as normal might not be so by her and vice versa.
“Really?” She gave me a confused look. “It’s normal for friends to sniff each other… Well, my family likes to do that a lot.”
“Can you guys stop? We have to get out of here as soon as possible,” Lunaria butted in.
“Are you jealous since you can’t smell? Just let me disassemble you, I’ll be sure to add in an odor sensor or two while I am at it.”
“As I already said, I’m not a drone!” Lunaria was angry that she had been mistaken for a drone for some time now, as portrayed by how Luna-1 was flying in a zigzag manner.
I laughed hard. It’d been a long time ever since my emotion burst like that. Seriously, their hilarious interaction always put a smile on my face — something that I had missed dearly for the past three months.
After calming down, despite my uncontrollable laugh just now, they didn’t question it and instead proceeded forward. The closer we got to the end of the way, the stronger the stench became. There were rusty metal bars that looked like it would fall apart any second blocking our way to the other side by the end of the way.
Looking around, the place was actually an underground wastewater treatment plant with water tanks, basins, and water pipes aplenty. Of course, it was no longer working without any electricity to support this place; the place was even dilapidated and dirty beyond compare. This place was probably abandoned for decades at the very least.
At the center of the largest round tank was an amorphous slithering mass of purple-brownish sludge. It had two pupilless eyes and also an enormous mouth with strands of ooze connecting its top and bottom jaws. There was also trash piling up atop its body and head. No wonder the stench was so bad.
Nevertheless, for garbage to reach this depth within the facility, it was evident that the entire system must have been severely compromised. Whatever the case, determining how strong it was through [Identification] was the key here…
Species: Living toxic sludge (mutant)
Sex: Asexual
Age: 88 years old
Height: 13.2 meters
Source Level: Third Order
Source Element(s): Geo
Stats:
* STR: C (74)
* AGI: D (52)
* VIT: B- (81)
* SRC: C (73)
* SPR: D+ (56)
Accumulation Points: 145 [C-]
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Another Third-Order creature!
It was obvious from its appearance that the monster was impervious to projectiles, and grenades wouldn’t do much good either. In addition, it possessed a source element, making it even more dangerous than the pale cruncher. To add insult to injury, further observations revealed that smaller monsters of the same species were rampant in the area near it.
“This is bad…” I murmured to myself as my stomach began wrenching in pain.
“Look there, Maxim.” Tuilë pointed to the steel walkway with railing a few meters below where we were at. “As long as we can quietly and discreetly get there, we can use the metal ladder in the corner to get to the top.”
To make our way to the top, We had to scale four layers of walkways, Fortunately, it wasn’t dark inside the room thanks to the open roof above.
“Let’s make sure not to attract its attention.”
“Right. It’s better to let the sleeping lion be.”
We discussed the plan to bypass the monster and came up with a brilliant one: to activate the wastewater treatment plant back up and possibly kill the monster with that. Or at least made the mass of sludge inside the open tank to be incapacitated or something.
My task was to secure a way out to the outside, all the while Tuilë would try to activate the plant. She was an Electro evoker, so getting electricity to power up the plant wasn’t something to be worried about. Even if it didn’t work, she would be able to easily escape with her immense physical prowess, and there was nothing to be said for the drone.
After a short moment of respite, we started with the plan. Lunaria had checked all the important parts of the plant with Luna-1 before we went through with it.
First things first, we needed to clear our first hurdle which was to cut the metal bars without alerting the monsters below, but thankfully the catalyst daggers would do just fine in that regard. The cut parts were carefully passed to Tuilë to be placed at the back.
Located slightly below, exactly about two meters, was a steel walkway with a railing that led to two separate paths. The monster had yet to notice our intrusion as we climbed down and went our separate ways.
So far so good.
I crept following the walkway as silently as possible; since I was at the very bottom of the walkway, this was the most dangerous part. By the end of the walkway was a steel ladder, and I quickly climbed to get to the second walkway.
I did that while looking at what Tuilë had been doing in the meantime.
On the other side, Tuilë — under the guide of Lunaria — had reached the control area where the switch was located. Since she was an Electro evoker and a genius mechanic to boot, so long as the plant had a functioning part, she would be able to maximize it to impede the enemy. I wished that was the case.
As soon as I stepped onto the second walkway, I felt an unexpected release of all tension. If I kept with this pace, getting to the top without being noticed wouldn’t be impossible. Perhaps there was no need to even activate the plant.
I didn’t know whether it was because I had distanced myself from the mutated monsters or because of the sudden relief, but I must have become a bit careless. I mean, the rusty metal surface that I stepped on fell into the ground and made a loud noise. Shoot! This thing is beyond broken…!
Just as I feared, the mutant masses of sludge were drawn to the commotion, their twisted forms beginning to advance in my direction. My breathing became chaotic because of the sudden turn of events.
No good, no good. I can’t let my fear get the best of me. I tried to calm my pounding heart and relax my breathing while also increasing my pace.
Fortunately, I was already near the second ladder, thus redoubling my courage was of no issue. Once climbed, I ran again to get to the next ladder.
Annoying.
The people that had designed this place were total morons for having the ladder always at the other end of the path of where the previous was at.
By now, the largest mutant mass of sludge had noticed me and shot spit toward me. With a sidestep, I evaded it with ease, but the toxin spit corroded the place I was just at and melted the already poor steel walkway as well as the wall beside it, and it stank so bad. It wasn’t a living biohazard for nothing.
“Oh, no! A single hit and I’m toast!”
The other mutant masses of sludge didn’t stay still and joined to shoot sludge spit at me. Even though their spits weren’t as deadly as their boss’, getting hit wasn’t an option.
Realizing that its ranged attack wouldn’t hit me, the largest mass of sludge started making its way toward me. With its large size, scaling the walkway to the top didn’t seem impossible. Plus, whenever it passed, the ground got charred black.
I dashed off toward the next ladder and climbed up. I did this while zigzagging the spits until I was at the topmost walkway. There, there was a metal door leading out, but it was locked; it wouldn’t budge no matter how I pulled it.
As I was about to shoot it open like I usually did while checking the monsters that were chasing me—
There was a huge hand-shaped sludge behind me and about to pounce on me. No matter how I tried to dodge, our proximity was too close.
Unexpectedly, Tuilë came to the rescue with her lightning claw and blew apart the sludge into pieces. The largest mutant masses of sludge, the one that was attached to the hand-shaped sludge, got slithered down because of the impact.
“Took you long enough,” I said to her, despite being unable to hide the shock on my face.
She was surprisingly fast in her escape. She must have jumped on each walkway to get to the one above it in contrast with doing what I did by manually scaling the ladder one by one. Talk about superhuman strength…
Looking at the fact that she was already escaping, it appeared that activating the plant seemed to bear no fruit whatsoever. But I decided to ask about it.
“Does the plant unable to be activated? I don’t see Luna-1…”
“Luna-1? Nah, it’s the reverse. Lunaria is the one to trigger it below since I have powered the thing enough with electricity. I’m sure that once this whole thing is on, although the other systems are broken, water will gush in from all the water pipes below and flood this place. And when that happens, the drainage system will kick in and suck the water along with those mutant sludges into the drain hole. It seems to be a part of the emergency protocol of this plant.”
“Whoa! That’s better than expected. Let’s quickly head outside then—”
An earthquake with a high magnitude suddenly appeared out of nowhere, causing both of us to tumble down. The walkway we were on was showing signs of breaking apart — the bolts holding the railing were loosening and the other walkways below were letting out a loud snappy popping sound.
What was going on?