The Seeker rode Yakhai, ragged and patched robe tied at the waist, the robe’s dye long since faded to a pinkish-red in the harsh sun. Her mask covered her face, close cropped black hair poking out from underneath the faded cloth. Yakhai swayed as he walked, cloven hooves at ease on the uneven terrain. Rebecca sat angrily mewling in a basket woven of vines lashed to the back of Yakhai’s saddle from a pair of ten-foot bamboo poles. Bamboo thickets thrived atop the crust, and it took only minutes for the Seeker to fashion a rudimentary palanquin for the fuming feline. This sort of ride was not Rebecca’s idea of a good time. She swayed back and forth far too much and the basket itched at her fur, just woven vines without even a pillow for her delicate form.
They traversed the crust through one of the deeper cuts, a stream burbling alongside them, vines and ferns blanketing the floor and walls of the cut in vibrant, swaying green. Liverwort, moss, algae, and lichens grew in and around the stream, colors ranging from blue-green to reddish-brown.
Turning a corner through the densely forested ravine, they stumbled upon a leaking battery, a cylindrical rod emblazoned with a skull and crossbones accompanied by text in an ancient, undecipherable language. Written entirely in heavily bolded capital letters and featured many an exclamation point, it took itself very seriously, bright red lettering contrasting on the otherwise white and yellow striped cylinder. It had a bright orange handle on one end, just underneath which a crack gaped, from which a noxious green goop leaked, long crusted over on the battery, the area around it discolored and flaking paint.
In a circle around the leaking cylinder, no foliage grew, what little ventured near it brown and wilting. Even the microbes dare not venture close, dead organic matter littering the ground around the cylinder, not even a bit decomposed.
The woman directed Yakhai in a wide berth around it, unwilling to approach the object. Musing aloud, she said, “Been seeing more and more of these cores out in the open. They creep me the hell out.”
As they circled the battery, Rebecca piped up. “Perhaps we could use it to drive the pinchers out of the colony?”
“Wouldn’t work,” The Seeker responded, mask lifted over her mouth as she took a swig from her stoneware canteen, the curve of her chin sharp as she drank from the jug before hanging it back on the saddle. “Suicidal altruism. Part of why pinchers are so damn dangerous. Put something like that in a colony, one of the buggers will grab it and run as far away from the colony as she can before dying.”
Rebecca greened, and not from her glow. “Perhaps going after a pincher nest isn’t such a good idea.”
“This was your idea! You said you’ve been in there before. How did you manage to get in if you’re this scared of some bugs?”
“I squeezed in through the cracks leading to the undercrust outside the nest at night, as befitting of a cat. The cracks are dreadfully narrow, all melted slag and debris.” Rebecca eyed the massive woman in the saddle before remarking, “I struggled with squeezing through, so you have no chance.” She then proceeded to lick her paws.
The Seeker ignored the remark and said, “I need information on the pinchers. You must have seen them, even from afar. What did they look like?”
“They looked like big, buggy monsters. Bodies of a hard red shiny material, covered in curved spikes and hairy. Real nasty looking, compound eyes bulging from an ugly head with a wicked set of pinchers. Ugly mugs, these girls.” Rebecca shook her head.
“Did you count the teeth?”
“Why the hell would I do that? I was running for my life down there!”
“It’s good diagnostic info. Keep going. Did you notice anything else? Did they have stings? If so, how big? Were there any trapjaws or flatheads among them? How many different sizes did you see?”
“They were all big and nasty! I can’t remember all those details! See them for yourself when we get there, we should be approaching their territory soon. You’ll know when we get there. It’s impossible to miss”
—————————————
The Seeker and Rebecca sat shaded underneath a secluded overhang on a tall hill overlooking the pincher nest, the woman comfortably straddling her saddle and the cat in her basket.
Below them, the pincher nest sprawled out over an entire valley, a huge construction of mud and clay built onto the ruins of a Human Age structure and consuming the forest around it. The trees towered over a hundred feet high and the nest went almost all the way up to the canopy, built directly onto the thick tree trunks. It swarmed with pinchers, hundreds active on the outside, crawling around on six legs a piece.
“No wonder nobody’s found the library, that pincher nest is a damn sight.”
“Hard to miss, Seeker.”
"Hmmm.” The Seeker bit at her fingernails, eyes glued to the massive structure occupying the entire forest. “We need to avoid a direct confrontation at all costs. These enemies are strong, fast, and numerous, with communications we can’t even detect. If given the opportunity they will swarm us and turn our flesh to sustenance.”
“Surely you can take at least a few of them with that giant sword of yours.”
“I would agree if our enemies were human. Humans are weak, volatile cowards. With humans, if one grabs you, stab her and she’ll let go. Pinchers are different. If one grabs you, it will hang on no matter the damage you inflict, while her buddies only retreat to get more, bigger pinchers. Pain is irrelevant. The individual is irrelevant. The survival of the colony is all that matters to them. Ranged weapons are the only viable option, even with the small varieties. They are a frightening opponent, one we cannot underestimate.”
“It would be a fool’s errand to attempt to wipe them out, even with a full strike team it would be nigh impossible. Though with a team, even taking a few out would be a hell of a lot easier. Social animals fight socially. I’m not playing to that advantage right now while the pinchers are. I would prefer to sneak in, but we'd be found and dealt with immediately. Those compound eyes of their give them wickedly sharp vision, even in low light conditions, and they have some invisible communication that we can’t detect, though they can also make a blasted racket.”
Rebecca, ignoring the Seeker, idly watched the pinchers scuttle around on the colony superstructure’s surface.
The Seeker, back turned to Rebecca, looked at the massive structure, eyes wide through the slits in her mask. “There’s no way we can just waltz right in. Even if we managed to incapacitate some. Their numbers and senses are too great. We need a distraction. Somewhere important. The queen? No. That wouldn’t mobilize all of them. The nursery? Now there’s an idea. Even still, that won’t work unless their forces are substantially reduced. We’ll have to figure out a way to incapacitate a large number of-”
“Seeker, look! Those two are kissing!” Rebecca shouted excitedly, pointing her tail at two pinchers down below on the nest surface, one regurgitating a brown, chunky fluid into the other’s open mandibles, the former’s hairy, glistening abdomen visibly deflating and the latter’s rapidly expanding, overlapping chitinous plates expanding, revealing yellow and black banding patterns as they crept back from overlapping so tightly.
“They’re not kissing, they’re exchanging food.” The woman shot back.
“Gross!”
“Gross for sure, but it gives me an idea.” A wicked grin crept across her face, peeking out the sides of her mask fluttering gently in the wind. “I know how we can incapacitate a good many of these bugs. Then, if we sabotaged the nursery while they were low on workers, create a situation that would require an immediate response, we should have a window. The nurseries are usually high up, protected from flooding. The opposite direction of the library. They’ll be out of our way, giving us a clear shot. Then our only problem is getting out.”
Rebecca mused on this for a moment. “The library almost certainly has a second entrance, sealed from the inside. Such a thing is customary for underground bases. Worst comes to worst, we make a mad dash out the way we entered.”
“I don’t trust counting on a secondary exit we don’t know exists.”
“We don’t know it doesn’t exist! They’re very common!”
“How would you know?”
“There was this one time I-” Rebecca stopped, sputtering, and pointed a claw past the Seeker’s shoulder. “Look!”
A pincher had clambered onto the hilltop beneath them them, and they got their first clear view of this colony’s morphology. Rising six feet from bottom of the claw to curved textured back and almost twelve feet long from mandibles to stinger, this drone stood nearly at eye level with the Seeker. A stinger jutted from the end of the abdomen, over a foot long and wickedly curved, jagged serrations at the base. Teeth on the inside edge of the mandibles glimmered a deep red as the mandibles opened and closed, thick, ropy hairs quivering within. Meandering toward the group, the pincher had not noticed them where they sat, shaded by an overhang.
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“We need to run.” Rebecca said, voice shaking.
“We need more information. This one’s isolated and has yet to notice us, and there’s something I want.” The woman kept her distance atop Yakhai, pulling out a leather sling and a handful of pebbles. Readying a stone, she began spinning the sling. THRUM. THRUM. THRUM. The sling worked up a dissonance through the air before snapping forward, stone flying out of the leather seat.
The pebble crashed into the pincher’s leg at the joint where the leg meets the body, cracking the hard chitinous exoskeleton. A thin yellow-orange fluid began leaking from the crack, dribbling down the rough chitin of the leg.
The drone reared back in pain, mandibles and antennae moving wildly. The creature’s compound eyes shimmered with a pearlescent sheen as they roved wildly, but were unable to find their assailant. It flexed unnaturally, rubbing parts of its abdomen together to make an ungodly screech. Deafening, the noise rang out over the colony. It attacked the eardrums, the Seeker and feline flinching at the awful sound. Yakhai shook his head and bleated in pain, leaping away from the pincher. Rebecca held on for dear life, mewling in fear. The Seeker remained focused on the drone, eyes clenched and brow furrowed. Her lips turned into a snarl. Ears ringing, she readied another stone and THRUM slung it at the pincher’s injured joint. CRACK. Spraying ichor and chitin shards, the joint shattered, severed leg falling and thumping into the dirt.
The worker shrieked and began to retreat from the unknown assailant, but not before making the awful sound again, flexing her abdomen and producing another ear-splitter. Snarling, the Seeker moved to ready another stone, but two soldier pinchers’ shadows appeared on the hillside before them, drawing her attention. Whipping around, she saw the pinchers cresting the hill above them with antennae searching wildly. They loomed almost twenty feet tall to the back of their head, with mandibles nearly as tall as the Seeker, seven feet long. Menace exuded from the soldiers as they approached, bulbous compound eyes fixed squarely on Yakhai and his rider, food for the colony.
“Hah!” Yelled the Seeker as she kicked Yakhai into motion, driving them towards the retreating worker down below.
“You’re going the wrong way! We need to leave!”
“Not yet!”
As they neared the leg lying in the dirt, the Seeker leapt off Yakhai, running to where the chitinous leg lay weeping ichor. She picked it up and sprinted back, jumping into the saddle and kicking Yakhai forward. Lurching forward, they were off, with the pinchers hot on their tail. The woman kept her gaze forward as she methodically retrieved an empty leather canister from Yakhai’s saddle and, pulling out the wooden stopper with her teeth, held the pincher’s severed leg over the opening. Ichor, foul smelling and sulfurous yellow-orange, flowed out of the limb and into the container.
“Seeker, why have you retrieved a trophy of a quarry you failed to kill?” Rebecca posed, holding on for dear life in her basket, shoulders squared and paws firmly wedged in place.
“Shut it, cat. It’s for the dye collection. You should know about that, seeing as you know everything else about the Sanctum.”
“I know about the dye collection. I didn’t think they came from bugs.” Rebecca made a blech noise, sticking her tongue out and scrunching her nose.
“Bugs have lots of uses, and dyes come from places far stranger than you can imagine. Now let’s book it!”
“Seeker, why are you running from your quarry? Are we not here to blood you?”
Rolling her eyes, the woman said, “Confrontation was never an option. We must give the nest time to settle down. We’ll be doing plenty of that with all the gathering we have to do.
“Seeker, what must we gather? You carry so much in your saddlebags, I’m surprised you don’t have trap-making tools.”
In a huff, the Seeker responded, “I’ll explain after we lose these bugs!”
Yakhai bounded over the uneven terrain, racing to get away from the creeps hot on their tail. They sped back the same way they came, greenery rushing past, ferns smacking Yakhai across the face.
Crashing through the foliage behind them, the soldiers’ ground-eating strides kept them close, mandibles snapping as they neared.
Coming upon the clearing where the leaking core rested, the Seeker still took the cautious route around the object, even with the looming threat of the soldiers behind.
A furious clattering noise came from behind them, and the three collectively whipped their heads around to look back, Yakhai still running forward. The soldiers stood just beyond the edge of the Core’s influence, unwilling to approach it. Stomping around furiously, the soldiers could only fume before turning around and heading back to the colony, reluctantly letting them go now that they weren’t intruding.
“Again, we should use one of the death rods!” Rebecca yelled from where she was being jounced around in her basket.
“No! Not only are we likely to kill ourselves, it has no chance of working!” Called out the woman, shaking her head.
“It could be a distraction!”
“I could also throw you as a distraction!”
Rebecca hissed, then flushed with embarrassment.
—————————————
The Seeker hacked at the underbrush, cutting vines from trees with a small belt knife when Rebecca spoke, “I still don’t understand the plan.”
“Trophallaxis."
"What the hell is that?"
"The key to our success. The fluid exchange we witnessed earlier. Pinchers move food from mouth to mouth. That's how we get them. Poison a food source and have the poison proliferate through the colony." She paused, wiping sweat from her hands. “Of course, we have to make a bit of a detour before we can think about poison. We need tar. There are tar pits a day’s ride to the northeast. They are technically in the Demon’s sphere of influence, but I think we’ll be fine.”
Over the next couple days, the Seeker spent a great deal of time sitting around a campfire, making twine and weaving baskets from vines. Clay she smeared all over the vine baskets, leaving a round opening at the top. Several baskets rested near the campfire, clay applied and hardening. It was rough and quick work, no finesse in sight, but no gaps or cracks were anywhere to be seen, and the final product was a set of large sturdy pots. Fashioning a carrier of bamboo to be slung across Yakhai’s back, the woman quickly mounted the pots and the trio was on their way.
The first indication they were nearing the tar pits was the smell. An awful stench overcame the group, and before long they found themselves overlooking a series of pits, each a deep hole in the ground, slowly bubbling. The pits stretched across the landscape, and on the far edge of the field the Seeker could just make out a structure of some kind. Glinting light came from the structure, but the Seeker shrugged it off, unworried. This was a quick errand, get the tar and get out.
Before she approached the tar pit edge the Seeker removed her robe, hanging it on one of Yakhai’s horns. She wore supple leather garments, creased and scuffed many times over, dyed a deep brown. Unveiling a metal hook tied to a long braided leather cord, she attached it to a twine harness tied around the pot before carefully lowering the pot and allowing it to fill with tar.
Sleeping through the ordeal of filling and lifting the pots, Rebecca snoozed, more comfortable for having nabbed a scrap of cloth from one of Yakhai’s saddlebags to pad her basket. Three feathers accompanied it, trophies of the birds who dared to get too close.
Noxious odors emanated from the campfire back at the makeshift camp, the Seeker sitting further from the fire than usual, tending it carefully. Rebecca and Yakhai sat at a separate fire, over which a bird roasted.
“What’s all in that nasty amalgamation you’ve got stewing there, Seeker?”
“Bird stock. Salt. Poisonous mushrooms. A touch of pepper and a dash of nutmeg.”
“It’s doing nothing to disguise the smell.”
“I’m well aware. It should disguise the taste, however.”
Rebecca, furry mouth greasy with bird fat yawned and said “I’m bored of waiting around. We need excitement.”
“Awful stance to take, as a coward. Be grateful we have no competition for our prize and that it’s somewhere well-protected. Flood and fire are no issue so long as the pinchers protect it. I worry only that the books have disintegrated to no more than dust.” The woman responded, bent over her vile cooking.
Hours passed, the Seeker batching out more poison, concentrating it and storing it in a big earthenware jar. Finally finished with her work, she lidded the jar and turned to Yakhai and Rebecca, only to find Yakhai fast asleep and the feline nowhere to be seen.
“Did the little coward run off?” The Seeker wondered aloud, looking around and seeing no sign of the little cat.
“RUN!” Screamed Rebecca, racing into camp from the rocks above.
Jerking her head toward the noise, the Seeker’s eyes widened and she leapt for Yakhai’s saddle, sword drawn and ready in a flash. Following right on the cat’s tail, a giant snake stretching over thirty feet long slithered into camp, tongue flickering in the light of the twin fires.