Chapter 73 - Strike Back Hard
I ignored the queasiness in my stomach as I slid down the outside of the wall, but Anchor’s gravity nullifying effect was only a secondary contributor to the sick feeling. Someone out there was wounded, and I wasn’t there.
It couldn’t happen again.
The muddy mix of soil and spider insides stuck to my boots as I approached the center of the battlefield. Trix was already there next to Beedy, his claws dug into the man’s skin and, presumably, his magic doing its work. Samila, meanwhile, was in the process of stripping off Beedy’s upper armor, systematically checking for blood or punctures with her hands while Tiba did the same at the legs.
Beedy himself looked like pale death, his bloodless face contorted into a mask of pain and his breathing labored and erratic. His eyes were open but unfocused.
It was when Samila got to Beedy’s chestplate that we realized how bad it was. The shirt beneath the armor was gone, eaten away by the corrosive venom of the spider that had bit him. Beedy’s skin, muscle tissue, and other things I didn’t know the name for, similarly, were in the process of being… dissolved. Little tendrils of smoke slithered up from the intensely envenomed areas and gave off an acrid scent.
As soon as Tiba saw the wound, she shrieked, dropped what she was doing and lunged up to get Samila’s hands away from the bite. Then she was digging in her pouch.
“Grorg! Get a handful of sap and shavings! Go now!” She ordered one of her guards who was off before she even finished speaking.
Tiba already had a clay jar of something in her hand, using her fingers to dig something out of it and smear it on her skin like lotion. Samila reached over to pull more of Beedy’s shirt away, but Tiba, again, batted at her hands aggressively.
“Tell her not to touch,” she hissed without turning away from her patient. “These spider bites are hungry. You need special medicine to touch, or you end up like him.”
“Tell her highness that I cannot keep this up for long for Beedy’s sake,” Trix grunted with closed eyes as he used his magic to fool Beedy’s body into healing itself even as the venom ate at it.
“Uh. Tiba. What do you need from us? Tell us what to do.” I pressed Tiba after doing the necessary translation.
Tiba, in a move I really hadn’t expected or wanted to witness, jammed her hand into Beedy’s wound, reaching into the crevices where the smoke was thickest and digging globs of what I presumed was venom out to fling it away onto the ground
“This bite does not happen just now, I think. Quiet Man is made of iron if he runs through the woods like this,” Tiba replied absently. Her mind was occupied with what she was doing, and I got the distinct impression that more questions would not be welcome. She did eventually acknowledge my question, though. “I send Grorg for what I need. Nothing else to do for now.”
“They came at us from under the ground,” Bole said in a low voice. I turned to see the thief, swords unsheathed but hanging loosely in his hands as if he’d forgotten they were there, his eyes unblinkingly staring up into the trees and pointedly not at his friend on the ground. “It’s bad luck. Just bad. The only fucking living things for miles and miles. What’ve they been eating?”
I opened my mouth to try and answer, but I never got the chance.
Something shifted in Bole just then. He blinked, shuddered, and seemed to remember the rest of us were there with him. He turned to me, boiling anger in his eyes. “You said this place was empty,” he accused.
“I don’t even know what this place is,” I countered. “Last time I was here, the place seemed more alive. Now it seems empty. We’ve all seen it.”
“Last time you were here,” Bole repeated as he looked down at his hands and seemed to realize they were full. He gripped the hilts of his short swords tightly now to the point I could hear his leather gloves creaking. “When, exactly, did you have occasion to come here, monk? There’s no one here for you to kill.”
“That’s not really important,” Sissa interjected.“We’re here now, and-”
Bole cut her off. “Speaking of killing, where were you, monk? Fights are what you’re s’posed to be good at right?”
Sissa stepped between us. “You know where he was, Bole,” she argued. “Just where he should have been, keeping out of sight. Sticking to the plan.”
“Oh I know the plan,” Bole countered. ”I know the plan was to keep our precious Brother a secret. That’s what’s bothering me. Why? Why we need to hide a Rising fucking Sun from a mindless mob. What’s his place in all of this?”
Bole kept his eyes locked on mine, squaring his body as if he were just an inch from taking a swing at me even from a distance. “You don’t even need to be in the battle to end it, do you, monk? What with your special training and machines. Where were you? You could have ended this before-” Bole couldn’t finish his accusation, and a hard battle not to look over at his dying friend played out across his face.
I did, however, look at Beedy. I had to. He was here because of me. They all were. Tiba and Trix were still frantically doing what they could, but I could tell Beedy was teetering on the edge.
“Brother Ryan put the mission first, and that’s it. It’s something we all signed up to do, and you did too when you insisted on coming along,” Sissa said.
“Don’t give me that shit. The mission is done. We’re made. There was no reason for him to stay out of that fight other than cowardice. Hells, even the vulpa had the balls to jump in.”
Bole was quick. Though Sissa was between the two of us, he slipped around her and was in my face before I could blink. Sissa tried to grab him but only got a hand around his arm.
“You could have ended it with a little flick of your brain or a few swings of your sword, but you didn’t, did you? Now what? We’ve got a man down, and-” He finally seemed to finally gather the courage to look down at Beedy but the sight stole the rest of his words. He swallowed then snarled in impotent rage.
When he finally gathered himself enough to speak again, his voice was a growl. “We’re about to be drowning in infected and for what? Because, you, you spineless, whimpering child- You chose to hide instead of fight.”
“You’re out of line, Bole,” Geddon declared from over my shoulder. “Brother Ryan didn’t do this, and we will soon have more than enough places to direct our anger.”
That’s where Geddon was wrong. I did do this. I was doing all of this, but I was too small to see what I was doing before it was already done. I was constantly playing catch up with the consequences of my decisions, even ones I’d made months ago.
Bole glanced down at Sissa’s hand on his arm then lowered his sword. “I’ve been out of line for years now, meat. Someone needs to be.” Then he took one last, long look at Beedy before he stormed off in a seemingly random direction. He made time to kick a dead spider on his way out.
Once Bole had gone a good distance, Sissa spoke up again, hesitant.
“He’s not entirely wrong about the mission. We’re exposed, or we will be shortly.” She looked over at me meaningfully, not putting salt on the wound but letting me know that she wasn't stupid. She knew that I’d made a mistake not going all in on stealth or violence. I’d tried to split the middle by ordering Trix into the fight but not my turrets, and it had been the worst of both worlds.
There was a groan from Trix, and he slumped over next to Beedy. Samila put out a hand to cradle him and guide his fall.
“He’s,” Trix gasped tiredly. “He’s stable. Maybe. I think I used too much.”
“You did what you could, fuzzball,” Samila assured him gently. She cast a worried look up at me, one that told me she was concerned for my well being, but she said nothing more.
Tiba must have grasped what they were saying through context, because she didn’t need a translator.
“He lives for now, but he needs more medicine. Medicine I do not have here,” Tiba gave as her diagnosis as she slipped her medicine pouch back on her waist, a dour look drawing the corners of her mouth down and her eyes growing a shade harder. “I know where some is, though.”
I didn’t like the way she put that. “We just established that we’re not alone in this forest, and we’re about to have a lot more company,” I cautioned.
“I can get it,” Tiba repeated, standing up straight and squaring her shoulders. The goblin queen’s hard stare was implacable, despite her size.
I nodded to her in acknowledgement but not necessarily agreement. She seemed confident she could do something, but I wasn’t ready to send more people out there. Maybe we could all go together to get the cure Beedy needed, be away from this place before the scourge could arrive. Could I set the drones to do more of the prep work in the meantime to free us up to do this? It would be slower but…
I turned back to Trix. “Will Beedy live without a church healer?”
Trix braced himself on Samila’s hand and stood on wobbly legs, then gave a slight shrug.
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No good options.
I did some calculations on how much time it would take to get everyone out of the valley and to safety, but Samila cut me off before I could really come to a conclusion. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re not getting rid of us. We’re here to save the world, remember? Besides, there’ll be no getting out of this valley now, not while carrying him. The trip itself might kill him.”
“When our ride arrives, they may be persuaded to do something for Beedy,” Sissa offered. “If anything, a ride out of the valley on a dragon would be less traumatic than a cross country ride on Geddon’s back.”
“I am no substitute for a dragon, true. I’m afraid the moment for your ultimate sacrifice must wait a while longer, Ryan,” Geddon said with a ghost of a chagrined smile before he added: “Oh, yes. On that subject, I have more bad news.”
—----------------------
Geddon tapped on an exposed vein of some kind of metal inside the tree, about as thick as my thumb. It clinked when the fingertips of his gauntlet struck it.
“I was on my way to tell you when the excitement happened. They’re all like this. Metal bits on the inside. Some are thin like this, some much more substantial.”
I took a look. Sure enough, there was a big vein of the stuff traveling up through the tree, exposed by the sharpened legs of the worker drones on one side of the trunk and Geddon’s broad saw cuts on the other. Even now, three workers clicked and sawed with their forelegs, ripping off little chunks of yellow wood, but they never tried to pry at the metal. The vein was a yellowish, silver color, mirrored in some way on the bark of the tree that laid around the cut.
I reached out and put a full mana bar toward trying to Shape it, only just managing to get the whole thing saturated before I was tapped out. The vein of metal was bigger than it looked, a branching lightning bolt that ran through a good ten feet of the trunk and down into the roots. I Shaped off a sample of the closest part and Consumed it.
“Nickel and osmium,” I announced. “Tough stuff if I’m remembering that part of science class right.”
“It is,’ Geddon confirmed. “And there is a great quantity of it. At first I thought its presence was a fluke of nature, and I sought to cut through with my characteristically heroic effort. Then I ran into more and more.”
I took up a piece of bark that was lying on the ground, running a finger over the dual tones of brown and yellow-gray. It pulled my mind back back to my first day on Ralqir. “Nali did say this was the best place to train new animators. I always found that odd. Never got to ask why.”
Geddon put a hand up to his scruffy chin, the picture of deep contemplation. “Metal trees?”
“They’re mining drills,” I realized aloud “I’ve seen these things’ roots stab through solid rock. I never thought to question the implications of that. The trade off in energy has to be huge. Then again, this place has magic. Who knows what’s possible? They’re capable of tapping into ore veins, I bet. They probably bring ore up from deposits down below, slowly, over centuries.”
The big leori frowned and ran a hand over the titanic mendau. “Does your new understanding include a way to cut through it? Organ Grinder may be a blade of future legend, but our enemies will be within striking distance soon. If our plan is still to use the light, this will make things hard,” Geddon said.
“If you try to cut through this stuff with… uh… Organ Grinder, it’ll drain the battery fast with how much it’ll have to refresh the Willing Edge spells. It’s too slow,” I replied, largely agreeing with his assessment.
This was bad. The trees needed to come down, or we wouldn’t be able to hold out long enough.
They had to come down and soon.
“Do what you can,” I ordered. “Give the trees the proper cuts so they fall the right way and then expose as much of the metal as possible. I’ll figure out a way to get through the rest.”
“Can your bugs chew through metal?”
I shook my head, but, internally, I was already spitballing ways to remedy that issue.
“Ryan!” Samila shouted as she jogged up to the two of us. The look of worry and frustration she wore told me there was even more bad news.
“The goblins are gone,”
—---------------------------------
I was in my work area fussing over the new drone prototypes when we got our first legitimate scourge attack.
The alarm came as a sort of collective tensing and reorientation of the turret barrels on the northern side of the fortress all at once. It was a distinctive sound, metal sliding over metal followed by a harsh snap as they clicked into place in unison, oriented on their target.
Sighing with frustration, I put down my new and improved(?) drone and made my way up onto the battlements, putting one foot up on an uneven, petrified bark ‘crenelation’ as I strained my eyes to see what the scourge had decided to send us. Unlike my turrets, I had to use actual, mundane, sight to pick out my targets. Nothing yet. I knew it would be soon, though.
The goblins were still out there somewhere. The last thing Tiba had said to me before she’d left was that she knew where medicine was that could help Beedy. If she and her guards were out doing that, I hoped they were close to done. Things were about to get interesting.
Ideally, I would have liked to avoid committing to the fight until they could get back. Of course, there were a lot of things I would have liked to have done before this moment.
I still hadn’t quite solved the metal core problem. As I’d predicted, once Geddon had gone around and made the cuts he’d need for the felling of the trees, he’d tried to cut through the center core of one of them with his sword. He only got about half way into it before the teeth started to spark against the hard metal inside the tree. Then the sword needed to charge or we’d lose one of the only tools we had to get through the rest of the cutting.
The undercuts, at least, were as good as Geddon could make them, or that’s what he said. The veins of ore inside the trunks were strangely distributed, spread out like blood vessels, and our resident leori logging expert had to work around them much of the time. Now that I had leveled my affinity for the alloy and, consequently, upgraded Detect Nickel, I could confirm that the inside of the trees were a labyrinth of metal veins, impossible to saw all the way through without five more chainswords and a week of time we didn’t have.
I’d set all of my older model worker drones on the problem, having them strip as much of the wood away from the metal parts of the trees as possible, but I still hadn’t been able to get the drones to eat away at the metal veins themselves. The workers just didn’t have the strength to dig into metal harder than themselves or the power required to do more than scratch the stuff, even after I gave a few of them experimental pincers to work with.
The most progress we’d made so far was using one of the laser turrets to spew a bunch of purple light at the trunk of one of the trees from close range on the theory the metal would count as ‘organic.’ Sure enough, it ate through a lot of the organic matter, bark and wood included, leaving only rainbow smudge goop behind, but the metal remained. The inaccuracy of the setup came back to bite us too, in that it started to eat away at the wrong parts of the tree. According to Geddon, if we took away matter at a low enough point on the trunk, we might end up with a Mendau in our laps instead of falling away from the fort like we needed them to. No one wanted that, to be crushed to death.
Beedy was doing poorly. His breathing was labored, and he hadn’t awakened for more than a few minutes since he was wounded. Bole had come back a couple times in the past while to check on him, too angry to speak with me but not able to stay away either. He used the pretense of scouting to keep away and not watch his friend fight for his life. He was out scouting right now, but I didn’t fear for his safety like I did the goblins. The man was too mean and too risk averse to die.
Once the turrets all turned to the east, not firing yet but certainly tracking something, it only took Trix a moment to pick up on the threat as well. He sounded the alarm just before opening up with his rifle.
I looked over at the three turrets that were tracking the threat, where their barrels were pointed, then put on my mask just in case. As soon as the creatures were close enough, it would probably be superfluous-
*BRRAP* BRRRAAP* *BRAAAAAAP*
All of my turrets on the east side of the fort, two triangular clumps of three, let loose at once, as soon as their targets got into their effective range of 200 yards. Every barrel was oriented vertically.
Up.
There they were, black against the bright green of the forest canopy. These particular scourge had leathery wings, but the monsters themselves weren’t exactly flying. Their bodies were powerfully built with muscular legs that ended in gripping claws that they used to swing from branch to branch, only deploying their expansive wings when they needed to glide from one tree to another. The things seemed to be built to glide as much as climb in the thick branches of the mendau, scrabbling around the trunks and through the thick foliage as much as flapping their wings.
Even from where I was I could tell they were sizeable creatures, maybe a little larger than the size of the average human from wingtip to wingtip, but their actual bodies were closer in size to goblins than mine, childlike except for the amount of muscle they had.
Interesting creatures. Flying-squirrel-monkey-goblins.
Too bad they were scourge.
Scourge Touched Predator Bat defeated.
You have been awarded 72 experience points. (80 base, +18 nemesis, +8 chain, -10 level, +40 group, -64 non-combat class)
Scourge Touched Predator Bat defeated.
You have been awarded 80 experience points. (80 base, +18 nemesis, +16 chain, -10 level, +40 group, -64 non-combat class)
Scourge Touched Predator Bat defeated.
You have been awarded 88 experience points. (80 base, +18 nemesis, +24 chain, -10 level, +40 group, -64 non-combat class)
Scourge Touched Predator Bat defeated.
You have been awarded 96 experience points. (80 base, +18 nemesis, +32 chain, -10 level, +40 group, -64 non-combat class)
Whereas Trix’s gun seemed loud before, it was nothing compared to the collective bursts of explosive power from the turrets. Gone were the days of using just enough power to get by. I’d refitted these models for punch and rapidity, their massive recoil uncaring for hypothetical users’ delicate muscle tissues or bones or humanoid capabilities to compensate for the kick. They were all raw, explosive, ballistic efficiency, and their terrible reports could be felt in everyone’s chests.
The forest collectively winced as the area became sonic chaos for a brief, ten second span.
Then the guns stopped as suddenly as they started, and in the deafening silence, the sound of soft bodies *thup*ing into the forest floor was all we could hear. One or two bats, perhaps the fastest of their kind or last to die, smacked wetly up against the fortress walls and rolled down the roots, leaving greasy smears of mystery fluid behind before they disappeared into one of the standing puddles.
I ran a discerning eye over the carnage, nodding in satisfaction. None of them had even come close.
“First round goes to us, I guess,” Sissa called from her post on the battlements. She looked down at the crumpled form of the Predator Bat that had hit the wall. “No way the goblins didn’t hear that. I hope whatever they’re doing, they do it fast.”
Suddenly, something roared in the distance, something wild and unmistakably huge. Additionally, disturbingly, on the wind from the north, there was an unmistakable change in the ambient sound, a white noise that drifted through the air and tickled at the ear, just quiet enough to believe it wasn’t what I knew it was.
“What the hell is that?” Geddon asked, spinning to look in every direction at once and holding Organ Grinder in a high guard.
“Many, many things,” Trix shuddered. “Distant but many. As we feared, we are discovered prematurely.”
I pulled off my mask and let it drop down to the forest floor. There would be no need for it anymore. Ever.
“On the bright side,” I ventured. “We just pressed pause on the apocalypse. Let’s give Ralqir a moment to catch her breath.”
Samila let out a celebratory ‘woop’ and shot me a predatory grin from her spot on the wall. I did my best to match her with a grin of my own.
We’ll give them hell. The rest is up to you, Jassin.
As I turned to head back to my workshop, I spared one last glance over my shoulder as the last body of the scourge scouts thudded down to the ground.