Logan suspected that if time hadn’t been such a scarce resource, he might have been able to grow a vine that was just that—a vine. But in his urgency, he’d grown the plant as quickly as possible, which meant allowing it to nudge its way in the direction it wanted. By sucking the life force from a rat, he siphoned the rat’s lifeforce to his plant, which naturally made it into a fucked up, creepy rat vine.
But unlike the last time he’d screwed up with the bark ants, this time, growing a creepy vine might be to his advantage. If he made it into not just a barrier against the rats, but something that could attack… well, he might as well have another Cursed Rope on his hands. A Cursed Vine with a hundred limbs!
With a grin, Logan continued transferring the lifeforce from the ten tethered rats. Up and up, the vines climbed, thickening to the size of bridge steel cables, the sides full of snapping mouths.
They writhed upward like worms, latching onto the buildings on either side of the road to provide a solid base. Stucco smashed as the vines punched through the building below him. Logan could sense that they continued to grow inside of the structure, spreading into the foundation and into the apartment underneath.
Out of curiosity, Logan scanned his new plant with [Idiot’s Inspect]:
[Rat Vine: Level 20. A living vine with an overarching need to feed and breed.]
[Highest Stat: Agility. Characteristics: Fondness for humanity. Hidden name: N/A.]
Level 20 already? The only explanation was that by siphoning the lifeforce of the rats, the vine benefited from their deaths. It was one thing to be a humongous hedge vine, but another thing if it were level 1. Even if it were the size of a house, a low-level plant like that wouldn’t stop the rat army for long.
As far as a ‘fondness for humanity,’ Logan had to believe that came from him being its father. Logan cringed. Or its mother. He’d hatched the fucking thing! Luckily enough, based on the description, it had no fondness for the rats.
Although… it’s mention of ‘babies’ gave him pause, he’d work with what he had.
Concentrating with a furrow in his brow, Logan sent, if you want to bite, if you want to rend, and if you want food for your young, you only need to look in front of you. Those things are all the food you need. Kill them. Kill everything in reach.
A large vine at the front of the plant twitched, a mouth the size of Logan’s head snapping, teeth made up of thorns, the insides of its mouth made up of small, interlocking vines, like a weed patch. The thing had no eyes, but it could still sense. As one, it seemed to look at the rat army.
Meanwhile, Logan was at work siphoning life to the vine. At this point, it was as if he were running a passive skill. He no longer had to focus on growing the monster vine, since it was growing itself. All it needed was more life.
Ding!
[You have defeated a Level 46 Two-Headed Rat!]
[…]
[You have defeated a Level 44 Two-Headed Rat!]
[You have defeated a Level 43 Two-Headed Rat!]
[You have defeated a Level 44 Two-Headed Rat!]
[You have defeated a Level 43 Two-Headed Rat!]
[You have leveled up!]
[Life Fabricator is Level 3!]
He’d sucked the rats dry. Ten confirmations at once! Laughing at the absurdity of the situation, Logan peered down the street and opened his senses as he looked for his next victims. It was as easy as breathing to latch onto ten more rats. Shit, he was getting good at this. Could he do more? He stretched himself, expanding his senses, narrowing onto…
Onto…
Karma deprivation.
Goddammit! With a growl, Logan released [Life Fabricator], his euphoria and amusement turning to anger.
180/2,028.
100/2,028.
20/2,028.
His Karma pool was rapidly depleting, and unless he wanted to suffer through a constricted airway, he needed to wait until it replenished before deploying the skill again.
Logan looked down at the monster vine.
He might not need to redeploy [Life Fabricator] after all. The vine was five storeys tall, as thick as three semi-trucks stacked side by side. Each vine whipped the air like Ernie doing a tentacle dance. The rats had come to a stop and pawed the ground, digging deep scratches into the asphalt, but they were seconds away from surging, the ones at the back pushing the ones at the front forward.
Towards the vine.
Eventually, they’d try to climb it. Logan could jump clear of the vine and race down the street, trusting that the barrier would keep the rat army cordoned, but there was a problem. Fang was back there, monitoring the situation, his eyes glinting with intelligence. Even though he hadn’t interfered until now, Logan had to believe that eventually he’d recognize a losing strategy and command the army to turn around and go in the opposite direction until they looped around the block.
While they were distracted and facing a barrier, Logan needed to thin the herd.
After all, it was the perfect opportunity to level up. He no longer had to worry about the rats darting past him and going after Brooke’s group while he was fighting. They were pinned here until they turned around.
Ernie scrambled out of his pouch and onto Logan’s shoulder, peering down at the rat army with greedy eyes. “I know what you’re thinking, slaughter! But don’t you think they would make a good minion army? With Ernie at the helm?”
Logan gave Ernie a fond look. “What, you want them all? Partners share. Don’t worry, you’ll get an opportunity to add to your army. Maybe this time, you can transform so many they’ll stick around.”
Waiting until his Karma had fully replenished, Logan deployed [Mimicry Armour] and reformed his suit, sculpting his ten-inch-long talons on his left hand, holding his sword in his right.
His body brimming with anticipation, Logan rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. With a grin, he used his Pink Sock to launch himself into the air, plummeting into the rat army like a harbinger of death.
***
[You have defeated a Level 52 Two-Headed Rat!]
[…]
[You have defeated a Level 54 Two-Headed Rat!]
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[You have defeated a Level 49 Two-Headed Rat!]
[You have defeated a Level 48 Two-Headed Rat!]
[You have defeated a Level 51 Two-Headed Rat!]
[You have leveled up!]
Logan landed on top of a pile of corpses, panting, his armour soaked in blood and gore as if he’d walked into a vat of red paint. He’d killed so many of the fuckers that forget the vine, he’d created a pile of rat corpses that created a barrier all by itself.
That wasn’t to say that the vine had been inactive.
Using four vines like whips, it had snapped and curled around the body of the rats like a spider spinning its web. The rats had struggled, snapping at the vines with their own multiple mouths, but in addition to the vine being agile, it also had a body as hard as a rock.
We shall feed, we shall feast. We shall rend, we shall tear.
In addition, as the vines wrapped around the rats in coils, it seemed to, well—
Logan could only equate it with sucking blood. The vines drained the rat, swelling and rippling like a regurgitating snake. The blood had to be going somewhere, but Logan didn’t know where. Underground?
Either way, it didn’t matter. The vine hedge had served its purpose, keeping the rats busy while Logan went to town.
He’d leveled up twenty-five times in this fight. Twenty-five times! Ernie had managed to add thirty minions to his army—rats who had upgraded to three-headed rats and were fighting their counterparts.
Not to mention that he’d killed every single two-headed rat. Hundreds of them. With the two-headed rats wiped out, that left the three-headed rats and Fang’s group far off in the distance.
All in all, he could admit to a feeling of immense satisfaction. Logan had managed to deploy [Life Fabricator] to hatch a vine that wanted to be helpful, he’d saved Brooke’s group, and he was that much closer to unlocking [Liche Devourer]. He’d drastically decimated an army of a thousand rats.
But despite it all, he was wary.
This whole time he’d been grinding, Fang and the other high leveled rats had kept far away at the back of the army, sitting on their haunches and watching the fight with bored expressions. As if they didn’t care that Logan was decimating the other rats, or as if they were watching a show with a foregone conclusion.
Despite Logan’s ‘Idiot’ name, he wasn’t stupid. He knew something was up.
It was time to leave.
His overarching task was to find Lara and the kids, and fighting endlessly was all well and good, but it wasn’t getting him closer to that goal.
But if he just left, he was back in the same situation all over again. No closer to finding Lara. While Fang might have the ability of speech, these two-headed and three-headed rats made nothing but chattering noises and squeaks. Even if he pulled one aside and questioned it, there was no questioning something that didn’t talk.
“My minions know,” said Ernie with a pleased hum. Ernie had gotten increasingly excited with each kill and infected minion. He was vibrating in place, his horns jumping up and down, his tentacles jabbing the air as if he couldn’t help himself. “They can find them.”
Logan gave him a sharp look. “Find Lara?”
“There’s a thread connecting them to someone else. Follow it back, and we might find your brethren. See! Stick with me, Logan, and we’ll triumph over everyone!” He lowered his voice. “That’s why I must continue adding more minions to my army. Can I have the rest?”
If Ernie’s rat minions could find Lara, that could be a solution. And yet, so far, they’d only used the minions to distract the other rats. Eventually, they became overwhelmed underneath the swarm. The other rats viewed them as an infection, and they purposely went out of their way to bring them down.
Worst yet, they’d gotten wise to Ernie’s strategy. They no longer tore off the heads of the undead rats; if they did, the heads would multiply, making Ernie’s minions that much harder to kill. Instead, they went for full body attacks.
With the monster vine hedge blocking the rats from advancing, that meant Ernie’s minions would have to escape by going the opposite direction, and yet, at the end of the army was Fang and the higher leveled rats.
“Fuck. Okay, tell them to stop fighting and rush past the swarm, escaping anyway they can. I can jump clear with the Pink Sock, and then we can meet them blocks away.”
Ernie sagged. “Parting is such sweet sorrow. It was nice while it lasted, but Logan, I…” He looked towards Fang and the other four-headed rats. “I don’t have confidence that this plan will work.”
Logan snorted. “It’s not as if I can carry one of those buggers. I might be able to manage their weight, but they’re as large as draft horses. They’re going to have to escape on their own.”
Using his Pink Sock, Logan launched himself into the air, aiming for an apartment ten storeys up. He slammed his talons into the side of the building, giving himself a solid grip, before dropping down to the balcony.
“Come on,” he said to Ernie, turning his head and giving him a look. “Aren’t you usually an optimist? I’m not used to the shoe being on the other foot here. If they dart past—”
Off in the distance, Ernie’s minions were doing a valiant effort of obeying his commands, pouring through the army, bashing other three-headed rats to the side. They made good progress, reaching all the way to the back before…
Well.
Damn.
Fang and the other high leveled rats suddenly exploded, slamming Ernie’s minions with tails that might as well be sledgehammers. The barbed tails sank into their hides, spraying blood, the minions flying into the buildings on the side of the street with an explosion of shattering glass and crumbling plaster.
Ernie’s other minions were blind to the threat and continued pouring down the street straight towards Fang and the others.
It was over in seconds.
Ernie flopped over Logan’s shoulder like a limp fish and let out a sound of despair.
Logan swallowed. Fang and the others had made him wary, that hair on the back of your neck sensation of something not being right. Until now, all he’d known was that they were high leveled, and acting strangely. Now, he knew that they were a serious threat. Against one, Logan might have a chance. But there were dozens of them. If they came at him all at once… well, Logan didn’t like those odds.
“Are they all dead?”
One of Ernie’s tentacles twitched in acknowledgment. “I’m depressed, Logan! Depressed! Such despair. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions! I don’t like when numbers go down! They should always go up, never down!” he wailed.
“Shit.” Logan dissolved his facemask and scrubbed a hand through his stubble, rubbing his eyes. He suspected that he reeked like nothing else. This whole area had turned into a biohazard, with flies swarming around piles of corpses. Some of the rats had trampled over the rotting garbage, tearing the garbage bags so that festering trash seeped into the street, which only made the situation worse.
At the back of the army, Fang and the other high leveled rats had gone back to sitting on their haunches, staring up at Logan. Their expressions were difficult to decipher; all Logan knew was that he didn’t like it. He suspected that they wanted him to go back to fighting.
He knew better than to cooperate.
“Back into the pouch, Ernie.”
Ernie grumbled but obeyed. Losing a minion didn’t physically hurt him; but it gave him an emotional scar. An emotional scar of advancing his army only to have the result clawed back when a minion died. Logan could admit to the same addiction—he liked leveling up. He’d be punching the walls if the System took away his skills.
Launching himself into the air, Logan soared over his vine hedge and then dropped down to the street behind it. Looking up at it without any rat corpses in the way made him once again shocked that he’d managed to grow the thing. Even now, the vines moved like worms, mouths both large and small snapping at the air.
But the size of the thing had the benefit of acting like the barrier he’d originally wanted. Even Fang and the other high leveled rats wouldn’t be able to scale it without serious trouble. That meant that to go after Logan, they would have to retreat and find him another way.
Logan would make sure that didn’t happen.
With a flash of blue electricity, the Cursed Rope scaled over top of the vine and then drifted down to Logan’s eye level. The user is strong, the user is strong, it purred, before reverting to its inert form.
With a blink, Logan threw it into his spatial collar. It had been remarkably well behaved since Logan had threatened it. Almost too well behaved.
Feeling his shoulders drop as his tension released, he looked down the empty street. Even though he didn’t have a way to find Lara, he couldn’t deny that he’d made massive accomplishments.
Even better, he was convinced that he’d find Brooke and the others if he deployed [Life Fabricator] and scanned for their lifeforces. He’d lost Ernie’s minions, but the group might have knowledge about the rats or a clue to help him find Lara.
It was only a matter of time before….
What.
The hairs on his arms standing up, a prickling sensation on his scalp, Logan clenched his fists, a muscle on his neck twitching as he turned around.
Yeah, he hadn’t been imagining it.
At the bottom of the mass of vines, a hole had opened. A tunnel. And from that tunnel, something clawed its way to the surface. At first, Logan thought it was another vine. It had green shoots, after all. But that’s where the similarity to the monster vine ended.
It…
How could…
Logan blinked in disbelief, doubting his own vision.
It was the size of a large dog, with four legs and a long body. And yet, the body was made up of what could only be a… well—a plant. The thing was covered in green shoots, as if it were made of a creeping wall vine. As Logan watched, what he thought had been the shape of a dog fluctuated and suddenly, it was no longer a dog, it was no longer anything.
It was a vine. A vine that writhed in the air before reforming, morphing, warping, until instead of four limbs, it reformed into…
Tentacles.
It looked like Ernie.
Then just as fast, it was a vine once again, darting through the air before reforming and lengthening into a form that had two humanoid looking legs. Two arms.
It looked human. A human covered in green shoots.
“What in the world…” Logan swallowed, his throat dry.
“I don’t like any of these forms!” said the humanoid looking vine. It had a child-like voice. “Bah, I don’t know how you walk on two legs. How are you supposed to balance!”
The human form collapsed as the vines writhed again, shrinking, until suddenly Logan was looking at something the size of a housecat.
“Mother!” it said, this time in an even brighter childlike voice. “I heard what you said. I can help! When you hatched us, you gave us a link to the rat hive. I think there are other humans there. And I can lead you to them!”
“Aww!” said Ernie, crooning. “What a cute little thing!”