On the way to the wagon, Gel spotted the few nermites that had escaped them previously huddled against a small rock formation. Not one to miss a meal, the pair finished the rest of them off with little fuss. When they did, a new blood-red prompt appeared in his vision. Its borders were that of humanoid figures guarding homes against monsters and other humanoids alike, and the sounds of battle filled his mind alongside incomprehensible warcries.
Congratulations, you have earned the title: ‘Marauder’! The real joys in life are not found in building or creating great works, but in taking such treasures from those who already have and hearing the lamentations of their hoards! Marauders live and embody the wisdom of that age-old adage: “Meet wealthy people, and then kill them.”. For what is ‘ownership’ when you are the one with the axe?
This title grants a rare, but substantial bonus to attacks made against opponents defending their home from you.
At first, Sean wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about being labeled a ‘marauder’. The description didn’t exactly paint him in a flattering light. But then he realized the wording of the title prompt meant he would get a bonus any time he fought creatures in their lair. Or if he ever went dungeon delving in this world – assume this world had dungeons, of course. Which Sean honestly felt was likely.
Exciting as those prospects were however, there was an even more likely unintended benefit of receiving it. After all, there was at least one important opponent who would be ‘defending their home’ from them in the future.
We’re not there yet, Bancroft. Sean promised the necromancer – wherever the man was. But we’re coming for you.
Once we kill your new pet and figure out whatever all this is, that is. Sean amended a few minutes later as they clambered over the last dune between them and the now-dwindling column of grayish-black smoke.
Nestled in the mini-valley created by a pair of unnaturally long dunes on either side that were more earth than sand, were the still-smoldering remains of a wagon. It wasn’t the same one they had seen back in the forest, which Sean felt somewhat reassured by, but the construction did appear similar. Then again, maybe all wagons here looked like this. He was certainly no expert.
Sean immediately focused on his pulse sense, straining his focus on it to try and listen through the wreckage for any of the telltale thudding beats that would give away a lurking enemy. Gel remained quiet, though the slime’s eyeballs whirled inside Sean’s ribcage and his battle axe was held high at the ready. A moment later, they both relaxed and the slime lowered his weapon.
“Nothing.” Gel grumbled, his tone clearly disappointed. “I don’t see a single morsel left behind.”
“Nothing on my end, either. Doesn’t look like anyone survived whatever this was.” Sean affirmed, slowly scanning the area with his orbs one more time to be sure before making his way carefully down the dune. “I say we scavenge for loot anyway. Who knows, we might find something.”
“I call first dibs on any meat we find.” Gel responded instantly. “And that goes double for corpses.”
“How does that go double for corpses?” Sean asked, amused at the idea. “You can only eat it once.”
“A slime can dream.”
As they made their way down and closer to the wreckage, Sean didn’t notice anything that Gel could eat, much less pose a threat. There were no bodies, no people, and no monsters anywhere nearby. There hadn’t been any since the nermites actually, now that he thought about it.
Not yet, at least. Sean reminded himself, eyeing first the rising plume of smoke, then the battered remnants of the wagon. I’ll bet every creature inside a mile can smell whatever happened here.
A thought struck him.
“What does this smell like?” Sean asked Gel as they got to within a half dozen feet of it. “Think it’ll attract any scavenging hopefuls we’ll need to deal with?”
“Hmmm.” Gel took an exaggeratedly long breath of air inside his mind, and Sean wondered if the slime had literally forgotten he could smell things. “Blegh. No. It smells like firewood and alchemist leathers. Not the good ones, either. The ones they throw out at the end of the week.”
“One less concern for us then.” Sean replied, though truth be told, one look up close at the wagon could probably have told him that.
Purple and yellow banners, charred and dripping wet from whatever had happened to them, were strewn over the mangled wagon like discarded Christmas wrapping. The greenish-grey liquid falling from the banners hissed and sent up quick tufts of acrid smoke wherever it struck the sands. The few places it had pooled reminded Sean of what brown sugar looked like when you accidentally burnt it to the pot while making syrup.
Sean eyed the nearest bit of cloth with interest and was surprised to find most of its surface was… bubbling. Carefully lifting a bubble-free section he touched the soaked and popping cloth to some of the wagon’s remaining wood. Immediately, the wood’s surface blackened and charred as it began to burn. A flicker of green-hued flame sprang up from within the charring and began devouring the fiber of the cloth as easily as if it were cotton candy on a cone.
Some kind of acid? Sean wondered, dropping the rest of the cloth before the tiny emerald flame could get close. Directing his thoughts at Gel, Sean asked. “Any idea what all this is?”
“I have all manner of knowledge on mysterious, flammable liquids.” Gel replied enigmatically, before poking one eye out of Sean’s chest to peer more closely at the reaction. After a moment, he rolled his eye up on its axis to look at Sean. “No idea on this one though. Don’t touch it? Or do and tell me how it feels.”
“Helpful.” Sean commented wryly as Gel retreated back into his chest. He noticed his right arm had placed the battle axe between itself and the flame, just in case Sean did decide to be monumentally stupid.
There didn’t seem to be any way into the wagon itself without touching the acid or one of the soaked bits of destroyed cloth, large as he was now. Sean contemplated swapping mass with Gel to make himself fit, but now didn’t feel like the time to experiment with that. Plus, he would probably have to cut his own height in half to even have a chance.
What he did do was remove their packs and satchels before getting his body near the wagon again. Sean didn’t like it, but they were alone and it had just struck him how dangerous it would be if any of that dripping crap ate its way through their bags to the potions. The satchel and packs felt so light now he hardly ever noticed them.
Gonna just leave you riiiiight over here. Sean thought, placing their gear a few feet from the wagon. Still within reach if anything came, but far enough that he wouldn’t splash anything if he had to dismantle pieces of it.
Which it looked like he might have to do. There was something interesting he could see partially hidden in the back. It looked like several boxes covered in more torn cloth, and if he were a betting skeleton that was probably where the loot was. After walking around the wagon once to see if there were any better options, Sean eventually decided to just… rip the entire burned rear end of it off. Not like he was going to use the thing. They had missed their chance at a horse, and Sean would be dead a second time before he let Gel convince him to pull one.
“Mind helping me tear this section off?” Sean asked, rapping the wood of the rear railing with a knuckle and indicating his intent with a gesture of his midnight black hand. The hinges on the rear railing looked either bent or melted depending on which you were staring at, so he figured it would be easy to tear off here.
“Sure thing.” Gel responded, bringing Sean’s broken arm up to bear. “Sure you don’t want to just axe it? I do kind of have the solution to this, you know. Like, right here.”
“I’d rather not get your axe melted by whatever’s spilled all over this stuff, but if you’d like to try anyway…” Sean let the implication hang.
“No, no. You’re right. Tearing it is!” The slime reincorporated his battle axe into his mass, and then the pair of them got to work. “Hrrnngnghk!”
Wood cracked and splintered under their combined grip as Gel pretended to overexert himself, but neither paid it any real mind. Used to the slime’s habit of mimicking human non-verbals, Sean just shook his head with a small grin at his friend’s antics. To the newly evolved slime warrior, the strain was a pleasant exercise of his recently enhanced body. It wasn’t quite like having muscles – there was no build up to his strength, for example – but having to work against so much force felt… good. Even despite having only one working arm.
His grin grew larger as the back of the wagon’s railing cracked and came free. He kicked it absently to the side, reaching past it for his prize. Brushing away the remaining scraps of burlap with his hand, Sean felt his excitement grow with each swipe.
Four wooden crates with a single locked iron box were stacked firmly together underneath the remnant cloth at the back of the wagon. Each of the crates were heavily scored with deep gouges that didn’t appear to have come from bladed weapons, and two of them looked slightly singed. Thankfully whatever had been atop the bunch before it melted or was knocked away appeared to have taken the brunt of the acid splash that had gotten the rest of the wagon. Working in tandem with Gel, Sean quickly placed all four of them onto the sands near their packs, careful to inspect each for any lingering acid.
None of the crates were locked. Instead each was held shut only by a single latch, which meant Sean didn’t have to break his way in. Flipping the latch of the first, Sean felt his jaw drop open in unabashed shock. He stared down, feeling like he needed to rub his orbs to make certain of what he was seeing.
Inside were several neatly lined rows of gold bars stacked one upon the next with a purple seal pressed into the top of each ingot. Sean quickly opened the second, then the third, finding silver bars of the same design and specifications in each. The final crate, larger and yet roughly the same weight as the other three, held what appeared to be simply iron bars.
Remembering the locked iron box that had been atop these four, Sean reached over and retrieved it from the wagon as well. This one was about half the size of the crates, yet its construction was elaborate. Ornate, and distinctly ceremonial. There were inlays of silver etchings, though the flourishes did not look like any sort of runes so much as artistic liberty gone off script. If there was some meaning inherent to the patterns, Sean had no clue as to what it was. He couldn’t even rightly say what the whole of it looked like.
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Maybe a tree? Two trees? A bush made of trees? No, that’s not right.
He was about to try to just break the locked box open with his fist when a thought occurred to him. Sean lifted the whole thing in his good hand and had Gel help him angle it so that the lock rested just below one of the still-dripping sections of the caravan. Acid bubbled off the cloth and dripped exactly where he wanted it, but there was no hissing sound. No melted lock. The acid just sat there, wobbling a bit in either direction on its surface.
Damn. Sean thought. I was hoping that would–
The acid moved, and a now-brittle flake of the iron lock underneath it curled away from the rest.
“Did that work?” Gel asked, his vision obscured by the edge of the box currently resting partially against Sean’s ribs. “This thing isn’t exactly lightweight, you know.”
“Yeah, it’s just going to take a few more drops of–” Sean paused. “You’re aware that is my arm you’re using to help lift this, right?”
“If you count using your horribly broken and disfigured bones to extend my magnificent ooze out into knots in order to help you lift whatever this is, then yes. That is your arm. Doing none of the work.”
“... Alright, point made.” Sean admitted, though he couldn’t resist giving a little of his own back as he moved to get more acid to drip in the right place. “I didn’t realize you were straining so hard to keep up.”
“It’s only a strain because we’re not killing or eating anything. If we were doing that, I could go all day.” Gel quipped. “And all night, actually. That sounds way more entertaining than this.”
“What if whatever is inside here helps us kill more things more effectively?”
“... Then I will retroactively consider this time well spent.”
It took about ten minutes for repeated applications of the acid to finally eat their way through the lock. Once it fell off, several of the silver inlays around the box darkened as if they had burnt out. Sean watched them, initially wary of a trap, but when nothing happened he just shrugged and opened the box.
Inside was a single bar of some bright, brilliantly white metal that–
Sean dropped the box to the sand and reeled backwards, holding his one good hand up to protect his orbs from the seering wrongness that had just assaulted his visual senses.
“Wh-what in the name of all that’s holy was that?!” Sean demanded of Gel even as he staggered further away from the box, which had fallen upside down into the sand.
If he still had the ducts for it, Sean would have been blinking away tears right now. His heart would have been pounding – even now his undead nature was forcibly calming him, and after a second he stopped retreating. But he still hadn’t quite gotten over the visceral, instinctive reaction. It had felt like his vision had been forcibly distorted for a second there, as if his very sight was going to get sucked away.
The bar inside had felt like a solid mass of burning hate and blinding agony glaring back at him. Even now, it felt like he needed to look away from the box in case it shifted and revealed the abhorrent thing again.
“What was all that about?” Gel asked, as if they hadn’t just been attacked by some kind of living, aggressive hate-metal. Sean was surprised his nature hadn’t taken over to attack, but there hadn’t been a damage prompt.
“That bar!” Sean said, feeling even his frustration with the situation going away with another shiver through his spine. He swiped at his orbs with his good hand, rubbing the sockets carefully as if to clean them. The action did nothing to aid his sight, but it still made him feel better. “Was the box trapped? Some kind of defensive magic?”
“I couldn’t see in the box.” Gel pointed out. “You had it up too high.”
“Alright, well… fine.” Sean admitted. “Here, let me just…”
Sean pulled the chest back out of the sand, and this time angled his head purposefully away as he opened the lid. A grunt of startled discomfort sounded in his mind, followed by a half-bewildered ‘Hu-uh?’.
Gel stuck a questing fingerbone from into the box. An instant later there was a sizzling sound, a flash of light followed by a yelp of pain, and then his arm shot back. Sean felt the slime recoil a bit inside his ribcage as if trying to retreat just as he had a second ago. A part of Sean was glad that he hadn’t been the only one to have that reaction, but he also felt like his curiosity was now going full bore.
“Gel, what–” Sean began, before he was interrupted by Gel whistling low and long in Sean’s mind.
“Whoever was driving this wagon must have been rolling in meat.” Gel commented, a touch of real respect in his tone. “That bar is infused all the way through with life mana.”
It was clear from his tone and brief explanation that Gel expected this revelation to get some kind of reaction out of Sean. It was just as clear to Sean however, that he had no idea what ‘infused with life mana’ meant. Fortunately (or unfortunately), he had just seen the metal in action, so at least one of its effects wasn’t hard to guess. Sean recalled what ‘truesilver’ and other like metals did in Earth’s own lore, along with a line from the prompt that had congratulated him on his latest evolution.
Hark and rejoice, agent of Death and Chaos…
“Does that mean it’s some kind of bane for death creatures? For us?” Sean asked after closing the lid and briefly considering tossing the blasted thing back into the acid to melt.
“Essentially, yes.” Gel responded after a second. “Don’t touch it.”
“No? But that looked like so much fun.” Sean said, over-emphasizing the sarcasm he placed on that first word.
“It really wasn’t. Burning sucks.” Gel said, pretending not to notice the sarcasm. “That one touch cost me two health.”
“Two!” The slime reiterated, holding up Sean’s right hand to display the parts of his ooze that were now falling to the sand as if rotten. “I’m not all bones like you, I can’t just take damage like that.”
“You’ll be fine.” Sean reassured his friend, but then a thought struck him and he placed his hand back on the chest. “You know… having an anti-undead weapon around would be pretty handy for whenever we fight that thing chasing us. Or when we go kill Bancroft.”
“Assuming you could even hold it, yes, I would agree.” Gel countered.
“Solid point.” Sean admitted, but he already had a counter. “But what if we used your ability to anchor onto things to forge a handle for it? Or if that doesn’t work, use one of those iron bars for the handle, and the life-bar-thing for the blade.”
“Oooohh… That could work!” Gel readily agreed. “It’s worth trying, at least. Once we can actually make it into a blade, that is.”
“We do still have those tools from the farm.” Sean pointed out. “And if that doesn’t work, maybe we drag it to a blacksmith.”
“A blacksmith willing to build a life-mana-infused sword for an undead? One that won’t flee in terror from our magnificent new form? Do you have one in mind?” Gel seemed genuinely curious, enough that Sean couldn’t detect any snark in that comment.
“No…” The slime warrior admitted. “But that’s a problem for another day.”
“We could always just beat stuff to death with it.” Gel added cheerily. “Or un-undeath, I suppose. Redeath? We could bludgeon things with it, is what I’m getting at.
“Also true.” Sean cast his gaze about, looking for a bag somewhere in the still-burning and still-melting ruins of the wagon. “Then we’re agreed, taking the hate-bar.”
“Taking the hate-bar!”
“What’s that metal called, anyway?” Sean asked, lifting a large leather pouch from the wagon’s interior floor that might work. A signet ring fell, and Gel caught it before it hit the sand.
“I have no idea. Not a lot of education amongst those peasa– villagers.” Gel admitted, peering at the ring.
“Recognize something?” Sean asked.
“Nope. Thought I did but the symbol doesn’t match. Wing’s pointing the wrong way.”
Shrugging, Sean inverted the bag to make sure there wasn’t anything else and then carefully grasped it like he was trying to use a ziploc to grab a stick of butter. Being sure to avert his orbs fully away from the chest, and with Gel’s help, Sean managed to shove the bar into the pouch without further harm. He dropped the signet ring inside as well for good measure and then tied the pouch to one of his lower ribs. Something deep in his mind rebelled at keeping the refined hate-nugget so close to his chest… but if it helped them kill Bancroft and survive his minion, then the discomfort would be worth it.
“You know, I’ve been wondering about something.” Gel commented as Sean glanced about the area again, trying to figure out how best to take dozens of bars worth of valuable metal with them… and if it was even worth it. It’s not like they needed money really, but when had there ever been a time where having several dozen ingots worth of precious metals had ever been a bad thing?
“What’s that?” Sean asked absently, wondering if this particular situation was worth abandoning his earlier desire not to become a cart animal. If I put the crates on it, I could probably pull it…
“Why is the sand moving?” Gel asked, pointing Sean’s arm off to the side.
“Why is the sand what-now?” Sean asked, snapping his attention away from their newly-acquired precious metals to stare in confusion at the unmoving ground below them.
For a still moment in time, nothing happened. Then a section of sand not twenty feet away suddenly fell in on itself. Sean felt a chill that had no place in the desert heat run down his spine as he watched the hole expand rapidly to form a shape that he recognized. One that he had seen all over back in Dry Run, but one that was quite obviously bigger. Several meters worth of dune simply dropped into the bowels of the earth as it grew, with no sign of ceasing.
In those brief few seconds it took Sean to process that, another hole opened up a dozen or so yards from the first.
Only this time, it was closer.
…
A shiver of rejected fear and brazen excitement rushed down Sean’s spine. He knew, objectively, that it would be foolish in the extreme to just jump into the ever-widening maw opening up in the ground. That’s not something one just did.
It’s probably a sandworm. Or a group of sandworms. Sean thought, trying to quell the burgeoning desire in his chest to rip out the heartbeats his pulse sense was now starting to pick up from underground.
Sean tried to use logic to fight the murder-happy hunting instincts he had been satisfying earlier in the day. To fight the desire to attack this obvious challenger coming to claim his spoils.
Jumping down its throat just means it’ll crush us in its stomach. The logical part of his mind reminded him, even as the savage undead side bared its teeth in anticipation. Sean was painfully aware of the weakness to bludgeoning damage listed in his traits, and he had a feeling that weakness would apply to being squeezed to death.
Then another hole opened up in the sand not far from them, and both Sean and Gel watched in horror as their packs – and the crates they had just looted from the wagon – tumbled down into oblivion. Every logical gear in the slime warrior’s mind froze as he watched his precious magical frying pan slip out from the pack and fall out of his reach.
Hot, roiling anger flooded him.
“Sean!” Gel shouted in his mind, every ounce as outraged as the slime warrior now felt. “Sean, they’re eating our stuff!”
The first wave of Sean’s anger was quickly shut down by a shiver of his undead nature, but not before he started moving. He charged forward, the suppression of his emotions insufficient to batten down his once-more swelling rage.
“Oh, no the fuck you did not!” Sean all-but-screamed, as he swan dove fist-first after what was rightfully his.
Every fiber in his bones prepared to rend the very fat off of this new foe, sear its flesh in its own grease, and then feed Gel the aftermath using the very implement it had just tried to steal from him. Whatever this new aggressor was, they were going to pop it from the inside out and feast on its remains in style. In that moment, Sean would have it no other way.
Gel shouted a battle cry of his own as the sands rushed past them in all directions, the earth splitting wide to accept them like a widening, hungry maw.