Fila had to catch his breath quickly, since it would only take moments for the heavens to send another arrow his way. He gave a look at the fallen cloud that had now revealed its true form-- a sphere of jagged ice. Although the shape was different every time, it was always exactly twice his volume, Fila and the devil had done the math. It was perfectly engineered to kill him.
Fila was not the only one the sky had it out for, every creature in all of Nitich were fair targets. Humans, dogs, flowers, trees, algae, if the skies detected life, it would stomp it out. The only ones that were spared were the kvesh, the chitin trees and the mawlers. Fila had no idea why, perhaps they were the only ones judged by the gods to be innocent, or perhaps the gods were nonsensical bitches.
"I like that theory," the devil said.
Fila rolled his eyes and got up. Once he left the shade, he had 30 seconds left. If he counted correctly, there were 25 left. He pushed the sphere of ice off of the kvesh's corpse and protruding from its body was his reward — a mana crystal that glowed yellow, worth 100 of the green ones. The remainder of the creature's soul that emerged at death, almost as if the light that had left the creature's eyes manifested as this.
"What goes in must come out," the devil remarked.
"How insightful," Fila murmured.
It had a euhedral shape, flat, sharp, and unrefined, and fit perfectly in his gloved palm. He thought about charging his glove with it, but decided against it, as he had better uses for it later, perhaps when he reached his target. Instead, he took out a green crystal from his sack and willed its mana out. The glow of the crystal faded as the rune on his glove stole its color and the rune shined bright green.
"Good as new," Fila said.
"Yes, yes, it's very shiny, we have 25 seconds left to cross 200 meters."
Fila sprinted towards the entrance of the cave. There were no trees along the way, so he had to make sure to make it to the cave or else his mana crystal would be the next guy's reward. He made it to the cave and fell to the ground, panting.
"One...of...these....days...I...will...decide...to...die...just...out...of...spite...hen...you...get...nothing."
"Sure you will."
"I really will," Fila said as he recovered his breath once more, "I'm just waiting to do it in the most surprising way possible, so you'll be left mulling about it for the next millennia. It honestly might make this whole thing worth it."
"And then I'd spend the millennia after that laughing at you, and then the next one, and then the next one after that too. I win out. It's kind of the point of the contract."
He spent some time at the entrance of the cave, away from the sun so that the sky's timer could reset, and then went back outside to see the mountain in more detail. The entire thing was made of a fine, white silk. Fila suspected that it was made by the spider kvesh, as he had seen one by the entrance a few weeks ago when inspecting the Nest from afar. He pulled on a thread, but it was as hard as iron, yet also sticky. He snapped a flame into existence to test whether it could be burned. It would be convenient if he could just burn the whole place down and not have to face any of the kvesh inside, but the silk did not melt, it only burned and shrunk. It made the silk feeble enough to break, but he definitely could not burn the entire mountain down. Pity.
Fila inverted his orange glove to its blue side, where a different rune was inscribed, and snapped, this time producing a mist. The silk froze and easily broke off when Fila chipped at it with his finger, but unlike fire, ice does not spread quickly. So Fila really would be forced to go in there and face masses of kvesh all considerably stronger than him and without the skies' help this time. Fila sighed. He could only hope that it would all be worth it.
"We are freely walking into an execution, you do understand this right?" the devil asked.
"Yet only one of us will die. I don't understand why all you do is complain when you're never really at risk."
"I'm at risk of a bad contract. If you die before even accumulating any power, then I've wasted 15 years of my life. I spent the last 500 years of my life trapped in that cave because of the last human I contracted, and so I'd rather not waste any more."
"Can devils even waste time? Aren't you immortal?" Fila asked.
"We can die under the right conditions. Not that I plan to tell you any of them, but nice try though."
Fila walked back into the entrance, this time taking note of his surroundings. It was dark, but dim green mana crystals lined the walls, providing just enough light to see. Like the mountain's surface, the walls, the floors, the ceiling, all things were made of silk. Fila wondered how such a structure was even made in the first place. It was also full of the waft of chitara fruit. It was extremely pungent and seemed to be coming from deeper in the cave.
"Pheromones," the devil said. "The kvesh use it to communicate among other things. It's also how your people enslave them, or I suppose enslaved them when you guys were around."
"Can they use it to detect me?" Fila asked.
"Only if they recall your scent, and to recall, they have to encounter it. The kvesh are not intelligent creatures, these are likely only pheromones to send simple messages like signals of recognition or mating pheromones. If you were sending predation pheromones maybe they could use that, but I doubt anyone would register you as a predator of anything. You have the pheromone equivalent of a mouse to them."
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Fila nodded and walked to the side of the walls where the green mana crystals were. He started putting them in his sack.
"We need that to see."
"We have the glove. You'll never know when they will come in handy. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity."
"No that is the opposite of luck. Luck by definition is pure chance. You humans just love to change definitions when it is convenient to you or to sound smart. I'm in your head, I know exactly how smart you are. The implication being, not very, just in case it went over your thick head."
Fila ignored the devil and continued to collect the mana crystals. He did a quick count in his sac, finding that he had 223 green mana crystals in total, most collected from his past few years in the wilderness. He only killed about 8 Greens himself. The rest were found in deserted and the debris of homes touched by the skies. Once he finished, he inverted his glove and snapped a flame into existence, revealing two different passages in front of him. The light was so dim before that he hadn't seen them.
"Two paths lie before him. One is the path of --"
Fila felt himself being pulled forward into the left path, like a leaf in the wind. He tried to pull away, but the force only got stronger, and he was completely drawn into it. His feet left the air as he was now flying through it. It was completely dark within the passage, but he got flashes of light, seeing different openings passing by. He couldn't see much inside them but he did see blurs of green and yellow objects inside them.
“I guess we're not doing that then,” the devil sighed in disappointment.
Fila bit back a scream as the exhilarating pressure surged, propelling him faster through the air. His heart raced with the intensity of the moment. Ahead, an opening glowed brilliantly, beckoning like a celestial gateway. The pressure vanished, and suddenly he was ejected into a massive chamber filled with green light. Fila was almost pushed into the open air but managed to gain footing on the opposite side of the chamber, his feet catching onto a sticky ledge also made of silk.
This chamber was the opposite of the area he just came from, a wide open space that was as bright as the outdoors. The space was so large, spanning what Fila could only assume was the entire height of the mountain. He looked up, worried that he was forced back outside and exposed to the sun, but he saw a pointy ceiling at the top. He was definitely still inside the Nest, and seemingly in the middle of it. Fila found the source of light was actually coming from below. A glowing green obelisk, as big as thirty men, sat in the center of the room, with eight-sides, each carved with a different rune. This was what he came for. The Needle, an artifact provided by Poda, the goddess of the Nitichs given to the humans to give them the same power as the kvesh, exoskeletons. It pulsed with power and beckoned to his soul. But below the obelisk were many kvesh of all sizes and variations bustling about. Spiders, beetles, mantises, cockroaches. There were hundreds on that floor, most Greens, but there were a few Yellows among them. There were those just bustling about, but there were those who prostrated to the obelisk in a manner Fila could only assume was worship. Kvesh could worship?
"Told you we should have come on another day."
Fila did not want to make a sound because, as he looked up from the obelisk, he realized there were more of them. The kvesh lined the floor, the walls, the ceiling. There were hundreds of tunnels inside the entire room, all in different spots, and kvesh were coming in and out of them continuously. This was the center of the Nest in all meanings of the word. There had to be thousands of them.
I don't think another day would have changed our circumstances, Fila thought to the devil.
He paced around on the cliff, playing with the cuff of his glove, and thought. What would be great right now was a distraction, a way to get all the kvesh to leave the chamber or to occupy their time so that he could undergo Metamorphosis. A fire would not get far, silk does not burn well, and Fila would not be able to handle the kvesh after they discovered the source. Ice was useless, the kvesh do not freeze alive, and again there's just too damn many of them. He would run out of mana for his glove. He could make an ice slide all the way down, but he was sure he would just be overrun by the kvesh before he made it . Fila sighed. Sneaking seemed to be the only viable option. He could make an ice slide all the way down, but he was sure he would just be overrun by the kvesh before he made it even ten paces to the Needle. Fila sighed. Sneaking seemed to be the only viable option.
He jumped down and clung onto the top of the ledge. The ledge was sticky, but not so sticky that Fila could not pull his hands away from it. A way to get down, then, but it still did not get rid of the bugs on the walls. Was there a tunnel that connected to a tunnel at the bottom? How did these damn tunnels work?
He felt a gaze on him and went still. Had a kvesh noticed him already?
He looked up and was met by a pair of wide-open jade green eyes. Human eyes. Fila nearly let go and fell off the ledge. His hands became clammy, and he felt like all his strength was being sapped away. The last human he had met was a hunter four years ago who helped him while he was about to starve to death. Before that was his mother who had the same jade green eyes as this woman. It was like seeing a ghost. He had thought that most humans had either left Nitich entirely or were in hiding far away from a place infested with kvesh like here. Why would anyone sane come here?
As Fila recovered from his shock, he noticed that the person who the eyes belonged to was completely cocooned in silk. All that was exposed was their eyes. Next to this person was another wrapped in silk but with the blue eyes of an untouched lake, and seemingly younger. The blue-eyed one had little to no wrinkles, while the green-eyed one had too many. He could tell they were both women from their eyes, but all other details were masked by the cocoon.
The younger one was blinking her eyes rapidly, seemingly trying to communicate something to Fila. The older one’s eyes were just scanning him from head to toe. The older one's eyes unnerved Fila to no end. The last person he wanted to be reminded of was his mother, the traitor, the one who forced him to contract the devil in the first place. But the woman was clearly not his mother, she was too old and his mother was dead. He had made sure of it. But now he had to decide what to do. Was he to free them? How was he to know they were allies? Just because they were all human did not mean they were going to help him. They might not even be Nitich in the first place. So he hung on the ledge, considering all the possibilities.
Fila felt an uncertainty he hadn’t felt since before leaving the cave. He looked at the women, then looked at the obelisk in the middle of the room. He looked at the older woman once again and could only see his mother's eyes. He made his decision. At the end of the day, the only one he could trust was himself, especially in this new world full of survivors. If they truly were survivors too, they would understand.
He took off his glove and inverted it. He snapped the glove and aimed the mist at the top of the women’s cocoons. The threads that were connecting the cocoons to the top of The Nest froze and shattered, sending the two women tumbling to the ground.