The first scolovian was halfway curled into a tight ball, its back end wrapped up around itself with its stinger tucked away while its front half flailed around on the ground. After carefully stepping to within a few meters of the beast, my feet refused to carry me any closer. I could tell it wasn’t paying me any attention as it writhed around in reaction to whatever chemical Bomilik had sprayed the end of the tunnel with, but I couldn’t bring myself to push forward any further.
Past bites and pinches reverberated through me, gluing my feet to the floor. The small pick in my hand felt like a useless tool against such a thing, especially without the strength and resilience I was growing accustomed to in the real world.
“It’s showtime, man. Are you gonna let Sallis see you acting like a coward?” Max teased, obviously trying to goad me into action. He also hit me with another flood of endorphins and adrenaline, causing my already hammering heart to shift into an even higher gear.
“Shut up.” I replied.
“What was that?” Sallis answered, and I realized I’d answered Max aloud rather than mentally like I had intended. “Don’t go gettin’ all squishy on me now, soft shell.”
I spared her a halfhearted glare over my shoulder. “I don’t see you getting any closer, why don’t you drag the first one out?” I flipped the pick around in my hand and offered her the handle.
Her eyes widened, and she shook her head. “Oh no you don’t, Sir Bossy-Britches ordered you to make count first. Get on in there already.” She made a brushing gesture with her hand to drive me forward.
I answered her with a frown and turned back to face the struggling bug. I slid my front foot forward, and told myself this was fine. This was safe. It’s in a state of confusion and doesn't even know I’m getting close to it. All I had to do was get a little closer and drag it away from the other monster that was a car’s length further down the tunnel and busy running in a spiraling loop from floor to ceiling, scurrying up and down the walls.
My target flopped over onto its back and whipped its front half from side to side, scraping its carapace across the stone floor while its many legs clawed and grasped at the empty air. I let out a small yip, and just barely managed to keep myself from acting on the hard flight reflex that tore through me like a lightning bolt.
“C’mon, Nick. When you found a big spider in your apartment, was your reaction ‘burn it down, it’s their apartment now’? No, you grab the nearest club-like object and give it a big ol’ caveman wham-bam. Now’s your chance to prove you can be that caveman, rather than the smelly little monkey you’ve been up until now. Be the evolved being, use that oversized and underpowered brain of yours.”
I only half paid attention to Max as I settled my thoughts with a deep breath and raised my pick, edging forward another step.
This wasn't just a game, this wasn’t just a job anymore either. This was the next step towards freedom and safety. Backing down was not an option. I couldn’t afford to look like a coward to the dwarven clan. They were likely watching me now, determining my use and value to the hardworking colony. I no longer offered them a tie to a human faction, or a potentially valuable trade partner, only the work that I could do as an individual–augmented, unknowingly to them, by my entwinement with Max. I had to show them what I brought to the table. I had to earn their respect.
Everything told me to throw my pick at the monster, scream as loud as I could, and run the fuck away. I refused to give in to the urge, to the fear. Instead I slid another step closer and readied myself, picking a seam in the armored plates as a target.
I took all my fear and worry and forced it into a tangled bundle of emotions, then touched it to the frozen point of fury within my core being. I used the ensuing burst to fuel an angry shout as I brought down the pick and sunk it into the beast's underside. My blow was meant for the edge of its armor, to hopefully find purchase on something solid enough to drag it back like I was supposed to. My aim was off by a few inches, but my blow still punched the end of the five inch long spike of the pick through the ribbed plating along its belly.
As soon as the blow landed and cracked through its plate, it let out a squeaking hiss and redoubled its leg flailing. Its head curled back around and it bit itself on the curled up tail section, clamping its long mandibles around itself and locking into a sort of figure 8. Three of the legs near to where I landed the blow scratched and grabbed at the handle of the pick, almost with a mind of their own as the rest of its body spasmed and jerked.
My own body responded in kind, acting without thought. It was almost like when Max had wrenched the controls of my own body and forced me into action, but different. This time I knew I was still in charge, only it was my primal instinct and reflexes driving rather than my evolved brain or stowaway AI. I grabbed the handle with both hands and dragged the thing backwards with hasty shuffling steps.
“Ho! Watch it!” Sallis shouted as I bumped into her in the rather narrow corridor. “Hold it there, ‘n hold it still!”
I grit my teeth and nodded, moving to the side to try to give her a clear line of attack with her hammer. I pressed myself against the side of the tunnel, half crouched with locked elbows and white knuckles wrapped around the handle of the little mining pick. I bore down on it with my weight, leaning forward to hold it against the floor.
Sallis brought up her hammer, stepping into view next to me. With a grunt of effort and an audible swish of air, she brought the heavy sledge down on the beast, aiming not for its head but a few feet behind into its lengthy body.
The creature's hard flared shell cracked audibly, and the beast gave another long whining squeak. Sallis grinned, and let out a laugh that rang up and down the tunnel. “Hah! Creepy gross bastard! Not so scary now, are ya?!”
She pulled her hammer out of the shell, and the creature bucked and writhed around some more, releasing its tail and flailing its head back towards Sallis. She jumped back a step, dodging its swinging mandibles before stepping back in and raining a second blow down nearly in the same exact spot as the first.
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The second blow sounded more like a crunch than a crack, and the entire rear two thirds of the creature went limp. It let out a hiss again and tried to roll over using its front 5 feet or so, but the shattered section was still connected well enough to prevent it from ripping away entirely to carry on the struggle.
Sallis jumped back a few steps, breathing hard and beaming an excited grin at me. “Finish it! Yer supposed to hit your quota first, remember?”
I was locked in place, pinning its disabled back section to the ground still while its front end flopped uselessly against the stone floor. Sallis prodded me with the handle of the hammer. “Go on, set that pick into the back of its head, a few inches behind the eyes between the feelers.”
I spared her a glance, hesitating for another moment to fight down the boiling fear that being close to the thing was causing me. After a long second, I pushed the piece of myself that was too terrified to do anything to the side and gave in to the fury.
My hands wrenched the pick out of the creature, and my arms brought it back down. My brain didn’t really participate in the next few seconds, and I operated on pure base instinct as I brought the pick down again and again. Plates shattered and cracked as I poked holes and tore chunks from the creature. By the tenth blow, my pick was slick from the internal ooze that splattered up with each attack, and its head was a stinking broken mess. I finally felt the pick ring in my hand with the last swing, striking a clear note as the sharp end of the pick hit the hard stone floor underneath the mess I’d made.
I dropped the pick, letting it land amidst the crushed exoskeleton. In my hurry to complete my objective, I grabbed one of its mandibles in each hand and wrenched them back and forth until they came free from the rest of the body and turned back to Sallis.
She gave me a look somewhere between awe, horror, and anger. She brought up an arm and wiped her cheek, where a stray bit of bug guts had splattered. “What in the eight nobles was that?” Her face shifted more towards horror, then made a hard turn straight into anger. “Some ’a that got in my mouth!”
I stared back at her for a second, shaking with adrenaline and the slowly fading fear that had carried me through the slaughter. I tried to answer her, but nothing came out.
“Bahahahahahaha, oh my globe. Now THAT was something. Way to go full caveman. It looks like she’s gonna be the one to bonk you over the head and drag you back to the cave though.”
Sallis hefted her hammer, looking like she might actually take a swing at me as her face reddened and contorted in anger. “You were supposed to kill it, not paint the damn tunnel with its innards!”
I unconsciously tilted the two foot long curved and serrated hooks of the mandibles in my hands towards her at her subtle threat. I could use one of the hooks to catch the first hammer blow and then use the other to hook her wrist and disarm her.
With a shuddering shake of my head, I threw the violence still coursing through me to the side and pulled the mandibles into my inventory. My HUD made a bright ping and the zeroed out counter on my quest flipped to log its first entry.
“Sorry, that was… intense. I hate these things.” I turned back and looked at the remains of the creature.
“Me too! But you don't see me pinging out about it.” She stepped up beside me and spat to the side. “Gah-rah, that’s messy. You ready to do it again?”
I scowled over at her, before reaching down and pulling my pick out of the remains of the beast. “Not really, but I’ll do it anyway.”
The next slaying was a little easier. We approached the lengthy creature while it ran its endless spirals from floor to ceiling. The thing was nearly long enough to make a full circle as it chased after its own stinger. Sallis let out a targeted puff of the same pepperminty vaporized mouthwash-like chemical that Bomilik had used, timing it perfectly and catching the thing right in the face.
It let out another of those quiet hisses, and immediately curled up into a tight ball around its head, its body looping through its wide mandibles into something that almost resembled the front tire and forks of a giant fat-tired motorcycle. It was simple enough to rip its exposed mandibles off from there, but they would take a while to die from the poison and Sallis would be granted the credit. At first I tried a more restrained and precise version of my earlier strategy, I rained blows down on the center of its wrapped up body until the quest marker ticked up to two. The process took nearly a full minute and left me winded and splattered with snotty greenish gore.
By the third kill, I was tired enough of that method to try something else. Thinking back on how I had killed the very first one, I switched to using one of my armor plated fingers as a sort of stinger of my own. I’d crack one of the plates with my pick, and then inject them with a formula Max suggested that would quickly kill them without poisoning the whole carcass.
That strategy was much faster at dispatching the beasts, and by the end of my 10 kills I’d nearly overcome the terror of having to approach the huge flat monsters. I still didn’t like it, but the reflex to run the fuck away had lessened tremendously.
In a matter of minutes, we had cleared my objective and I had 10 sets of mandibles safely in my inventory. My HUD pinged and the quest’s text along the side of my view breathed with a golden light, but the final objective of ‘Survive the migration’ remained open. We had a worrying moment there at the end when a group of six of the scolo had pushed through and charged down the tunnel at us, but Sallis stopped them with a fresh blast of the vaporized mouthwash stuff. Still, we had to give ground as more of the beasts showed up soon after. My last two kills took place nearly a hundred feet back from where the first had been slain, and behind two new layers of the sprayed chemical defence.
Sallis and I switched weapons, her taking the pick while I took up the sledge hammer and worked to assist. Our banter died down as we gave ground and worked in silent cohesion, both now understanding exactly what we needed to do and too busy worrying about how much more quickly they seemed to be breaking through each new line of repellent. After her second set of mandibles, a message notification popped up.
Kazek: The raiders have left our territory, bring back two of the carcasses when you have made count. I’m sending someone to relieve your position
Not even a minute later, Jozoic came trotting up from behind us. One of his cheeks was all scratched up from some injury. As he took in our position, crouched over a dying scolovian that Sallis was finishing off with the pick, his eyes bugged out and his voice held a note of concern.
He said, “They’ve pushed this far already? We are only a hundred head from headquarters.” Which roughly translated as a little under a 450 feet.
I pulled the latest slain scolovian into my inventory and turned to him, offering him the hammer. “Here, give the next one a whack a few feet behind the head when Sallis pulls it over. Kazek wants me to hurry back and start loading stuff up.
He nodded and took the hammer without question, trading places with me while Sallis sprayed the next writhing target with a blast of pepperminty mist. With a parting nod to Jozoic and a friendly slap on Sallis’ shoulder, I left the pair and jogged back towards the forge room. The fear of being near the monsters had lessened, but I couldn’t help but draw in a long sigh of relief once the sound of the clattering and scraping horde faded into the distance and was overtaken by the sound of dwarven voices and the familiar noises of my row at work.