Chapter 50 – Sensory Failure

“What was that?” Rosalia exclaimed, jumping back with surprise.

Bjorn narrowed his eyes and stared down at the canopy. “I’m not sure,” he muttered softly.

That was a bad sign. Even our survival-hardened resident island expert didn’t know what was going on.

“Summon, love whip.”

The svelte black dominatrix whip appeared in my hand like usual. I threw it down into the treetops and telepathically commanded it to lash at the tree tops. It was a strange sight, seeing a whip flail around the tree tops as if a drunk flying dominatrix succubus was brandishing it, but it didn’t cause a ruckus. Besides one more bird flying out, nothing else happened during the next few minutes of thrashing around. As a side note, I really did need to improve my telekinetic control of the whip, because right now my control was still abysmal and only level 2. In fact, by using it this haphazardly, the experience bar for telekinetic control was barely even going up.

“Hm, no signs of allosauruses. And the rustle was too high for raptors to be the cause. And we would’ve seen the T. rex if that was actually what it was.” Bjorn was deep in thought. “It might be that the birds were scared off by your golem.”

I nodded. It was possible, but by the look on the dwarf’s face, even he wasn’t fully convinced.

We continued our trek through the valley on Siege Tank Golem’s shoulder. Two hours passed, again without a single sighting of any animals. When we first set off on this journey, I was concerned that we would run into allosauruses along the way. Now, my concern was morphing in the complete opposite direction. We needed to consider the implications of the lack of allosaurus presence in their own territory.

“Let’s set out on foot for now,” Bjorn said quietly. “It will give us eyes and ears into the forest.”

I nodded, remember why he said this was important earlier.

“Watch your… step…” Siege Tank Golem boomed in a deep baritone voice as he lowered his arm into a descending ramp to the jungle floor. Making sure not to fall, Bjorn and I made our way down the golem as Rosalia gently hovered down using her class’s flagship ability [Angelic Hover], her white clerical robes fluttering in the air like she was landing a helicopter.

Now that it seemed the coast was clear, I decided to summon Meat Shield.

“Summon cat.”

The black cat dropped to my shoulder as usual, although she felt a bit… heavier than usual?

I turned my head and looked at her. Although she wasn’t fat per se, I did see a noticeable amount of pudge on her belly that wasn’t there before.

“Meat Shield, have you been sneaking into the snack pantry…” I said in an accusatory tone.

“Nope~” the cat replied, looking away suspiciously. I had a feeling this cat was lying to me.

“Anyway, do you sense anything nearby?”

As useless and spineless as the cat was in combat for the most part, her reconnaissance abilities were second to none as far as pets went. She had a keen and uncanny ability to get out of trouble before the trouble reached her. In fact, the only time I ever saw her even get hit by an attack was during the Battle of Mountain, against the [Orc Commander].

Bjorn looked on curiously at the cat, as Meat Shield leapt to the ground and began sniffing around. They were acquainted from his visit to Luxuria’s hot spring bath earlier in the week. “Hmm~,” she purred thoughtfully, before taking another sniff at a certain patch on the ground. “Hmmm….”

After sniffing around for a bit longer, from the trees to a patch of moss, the cat lifted up her head and looked back at us to report its findings. “It smells like nothing,” she said confidently.

I let out a sigh of relief. Good.

Meat Shield walked over to me and smacked me in the foot with her paw. “Stop looking so relaxed. I said, it smells like nothing.”

“Isn’t that good?” I responded to her.

“No,” the small cat replied dismissively, shaking her head as if I was the idiot in this situation unable to grasp a simple concept. “I said it smells like nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not a single thing. No animals, no birds, no trees, no flowers, nothing.”

Bjorn frowned. “Whaddaya mean?”

“I don’t know what that means,” the cat responded with a blasé attitude. “All I can say is that nothing smells like anything, and everything smells like nothing.”

I shook my head and groaned. “What’s that even supposed to mean?”

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The dwarf narrowed his eyes and snarled. “It means one of two things. Either your cat here has a stuffy nose, or something in the vicinity is blocking us from using our sense of smell.”

“Blocking us from using our sense of smell… like a spirit?” Rosalia thought out loud. She picked a white flower near her feet and brought it to her nose. “You’re right… I don’t smell anything.”

“It could be a spirit,” Bjorn replied tensely. “Anything’s possible on this accursed island. I’ve seen and heard many things that don’t seem to make sense during my time here, although I used to discount them as just being my drunk hallucinations. Falling stones that seemed to move slower than gravity would normally dictate, leaves floating upwards, things like that. Actually, maybe they were drunk hallucinations. Your cat is stone cold sober, though.”

Er… was she actually sober? By the way Meat Shield was walking around slightly disoriented, I felt like she got into the catnip compartment of our pantry in the kitchen.

“I need a drink to calm my nerves,” the dwarf grumbled, uncapping his canteen of home brewed wheat beer and taking a long swig. “Ah– You want some?” he said, offering the canteen to both me and Rosalia.

“No thanks,” I replied.

“I’m okay, thank you though~” Rosalia responded as well with a shy smile.

“How about you?” Bjorn shook the canteen and offered it to Meat Shield.

“Okay~ I’ll have some~” the cat replied, jumping over to the dwarf and lapping up some beer that he poured into the palm of his hand. Bjorn rubbed the cat’s head. “Atta boy.”

Meat Shield looked up. “I’m a girl~”

Bjorn laughed and corrected himself. “Oh, sorry. Atta girl then.”

Were these two okay? We were in the middle of dangerous territory, and my dumbass cat seemed to be distracting our guide from his duty.

“Let’s get moving,” I said tensely.

Bjorn nodded. “Yea, a bit of alcohol is good for the spirits, but now we should complete what we set out to do.”

Continuing onwards, we walked forwards until we were approaching the area marked on the diagram as the second chalk circle. I didn’t really see anything special in the vicinity change though, even as we approached the designated area.

“What does the entrance to your master’s tomb look like, buddy?” I asked Siege Golem.

“It is… hidden…” the golem responded. “Near… the… pillar.”

I nodded. It seemed that our objective was to find some sort of pillar, and then we could find the secret entrance to the [Forgotten King’s Tomb] from there.

“What the hell is that?” Bjorn swore under his breath. We just reached the top of a hill overlooking a small valley. In the valley were these animals that seemed to be grazing on piles of mud, so it seemed. So far, what we encountered on this island was no different than what could be seen on a prehistoric version of earth. But this nonsensical, disgusting creature was nothing that ever walked, or… er… slugged its way across the earth’s surface.

It was a pack of what I could only describe as slime cows. With bulbous lower bodies filled with a sac of liquid or flesh or something, the quadrupedal slow moving cow-like creatures crawled across the mud fields with their four stubby slime appendages.

One of the slime cow creatures was lying on its side, shaking periodically. On closer inspection, it was because something was trying to drag it along.

I squinted my eyes and looked. It was some sort of raptor, although it looked different from the ones we saw before, and slightly bigger as well.

“Do you know what those are?” I asked Bjorn.

He took a drink from his beer canteen and swished it in his mouth before spitting it on the ground. “I don’t know what those slimy things are, but the raptors? Those are deinonychuses. I haven’t gone far enough to see them often, but from what I know, they’re similar to the velociraptors we ran into before. Cunning pack hunters, although they’re a bit more cerebral and inquisitive when compared to velociraptors, which are more calculatively aggressive.”

“And by cerebral, I mean that they’ll pick at your organs to see which one they can rip out before you die. Don’t take them lightly, they’re just as bad as velociraptors, only with a different head on their shoulders when it comes to means of torture.”

“I think it’s best we wait for your golem before we proceed. Those bastards are cunning, but they can’t knock down a golem of that size. I guess we’re lucky we came across these instead of the pack of allosauruses we were originally expecting, because a pack of those can topple your golem if push comes to shove. We’ll be safe against deinonychuses on your golem, though.”

I agreed with him. We waited for about twenty minutes for Siege Tank Golem to catch up, and then hitched a ride on his shoulder. With lumbering steps, the golem walked through the muddy valley towards the circled area.

Upon sight of the behemoth golem walking through the mud pastures, the deinonychus that was munching on a slime cow’s upturned belly yelped in surprise and skirted away towards its pack. Strangely enough, the slime cows themselves didn’t care at all about the golem.

SQUISH.

While walking through the field, Siege Tank Golem stepped on a slime cow, crushing it under his large cylindrical stone foot with a nasty squelching sound. Despite this, the other slime cows didn’t react at all, and just continued to slug around as if they were completely unaware of the stone titan standing above them that just killed one of their brethren. I couldn’t tell if these things had no sensory organs, or were just really dumb.

[You have slain a Slime Cow.]

[You have gained 1 experience.]

Well, it definitely didn’t seem like the slime cows gave much experience. The word slime cow was highlighted, so I clicked it. The link brought me to a blank bestiary page. Maybe it was because nobody knew about this creature yet or something, but there was not a single piece of information about it, and even the name slime cow was just what I was using as a nickname. I closed the page.

Making our way through the slime infested mud field, we ended up at a hilly area again. This time, the golem had to walk up laboriously through the steep hill.

“Oh, I see the pillar!” Rosalia exclaimed in excitement. She pointed at the top of the hill, where there was indeed a monolithic kind of pillar with glyphs and writing engraved on the front and the back. As if on cue, the glyphs on the pillar began to glow softly, resonating with the glyphs on my golem’s shoulders and metal coils. I honestly felt a bit intimidated by this ethereal procession, and it felt like we were about to go grave robbing in an Egyptian pyramid, with all the hexes and curses that an endeavor like that entailed.

While the golem climbed the hill slowly, Bjorn looked back. “What the fuck…” he muttered. “They’re following us?”

I turned around and looked. At first I didn’t see them, because they were using the bushes as camouflage. But their perked up tails that rose above the bushes betrayed them. A pack of a dozen or so deinonychuses were trailing us from behind, their tails slithering as if in anticipation of something.

Were they interested in us, or the glowing monolith? Either way, I could see the vile creatures prepping for an ambush while yelping in communication with each other.