Mongrel
Returning to Millstone was oddly nostalgic.
This was where everything had started—the whole crazy chain of events that had flipped his life ass-up. This was where he’d met Nyx, the sentient cigar cutter ever lovingly poised around his shaft.
It looked exactly how he remembered it. The town sat in its little bowl of land, treeline surrounding it on three sides. The houses huddled together, cowed by years of weather and wear. In places, the wind had doors and window shutters smacking on walls, a sad ghost echo of the hammer blows that had sounded during the place’s construction. At the north end of the village, up the hill slope, sat the longhouse, a slumbering patriarch to its little wooden children below.
Mongrel waited with Zero at the edge of town and sent the two chimps inside to check out the buildings, make sure there was nothing unsavory waiting to spring out at them. Maybe ten minutes later, Number One came down the main path that cut through the middle of Millstone, giving a thumbs-up.
No monsters. Well, that was something, at least. At the moment, Mongrel would take all the good fortune he could get.
Following the all-clear, Mongrel ventured into town himself. There was no sign of the massacre he and Will had wrought upon Big Deal Buck’s gang. The corpses that had once littered the northern hillside were nowhere in evidence—not so much as a bone. Either Buck had buried his comrades deep, or grinners had rolled through and eaten them all up, bones and all. He found the second alternative more likely.
‘What do now?’ Number One asked, hobbling beside Mongrel as they picked their way through town. ‘Wait for friend? Think he come?’
“I don’t know,” Mongrel said, gaze fixed ahead.
‘Think he dead?’
“I don’t know that, either.”
‘Then what do?’
Mongrel sighed, chewing on his lower lip. “For now? We stay put.”
‘This place dangerous.’
“I know that.”
‘Monster come maybe.’
“Yes. I think we can count on that much.” If grinners were anything, they were tenacious. Even if Will had taken down all the ones that had come after them in that second wave, it was still a good bet that more would come their way, probably sooner rather than later. Grinners could smell death from far, far away, and they flocked to it like flies to a dungpie.
At least, they would most likely wait until nightfall. Grinners preferred to hunt at night, wait until folk were asleep and take them in their beds. That wasn’t to say they would pass up a nice plump lunchtime human, as evidenced by the attack a bit ago. But Mongrel had no doubt that Will had made them pay for their eagerness, and after two losses in a row any remaining beasts would be more wary.
At least, he hoped as much. With only two chimps to work with and at least another day and a half before the others were ready to be resummoned, he would need all the time as he could get to make the place defensible.
Certainly, there was no room to stand around umming and ahhing. He got started immediately.
Rather than shack up in the longhouse, as Buck had done, Mongrel chose one of the smaller houses at the eastern edge of the village, picking one that was still in decently good shape. While Number One and Number Three worked on making the building defensible, Mongrel took Sam inside and laid her out on the floor atop a bedroll.
He tried to determine her condition, but he was no healer, and all he could really discern was that she was still alive. She was running a fairly strong fever, but at least she hadn’t suffered another seizure since the one back at the farm, which he considered a good sign. He fed her more anesthetic to keep her under as Will had instructed, then went outdoors to help the chimps.
They tore down all the surrounding houses in quick order, which both served to give them material to work with as well as improving their sightlines by removing nearby obstructions, creating a relatively clear field around their designated safehouse bar foundations and stovepipes and the occasional wall left unmolested.
Stolen novel; please report.
Using a technique known as Repair joining, Mongrel had the chimps Demolish the ends of planks and pieces of the safehouse’s walls, then place them together and Repair them again so that they were fused together when they reformed, providing strong bonds without needing to be affixed with screws or nails. This allowed him to quickly shore up the safehouse with extra protection, boarding up windows, strengthening walls, and patching holes.
The house would not hold out for long against a determined attack, but it was the best he could do with so little time and so few resources at his disposal. This was not the extent of his plan, however.
Using the Photosynthesis passive, Mongrel’s AP regeneration was doubled while he was in sunlight. And with the Kindred Spirit passive, this allowed his familiars to gain the benefit of one passive of his choice. He had chosen Photosynthesis, meaning that his AP regeneration was doubled again for each active familiar. Even with most of them out of action, that still gave Mongrel quadruple AP regeneration while the sun held, giving him a lot more juice to perform the work he needed done before nightfall.
Despite not intending to spend any time there, he sent the chimps to work on the longhouse. They performed some Repair welds on the windows to dissuade entry that way, but left the double doors at the front as they were. He had them dig a pit in front of the doors, fill that pit with spikes made from sharpened sticks, then cover it with rotted planks that were Reinforced so that they held when stepped on, and finally covered with gravel and soil so that the trap was concealed.
Finally, he had the chimps climb up in the rafters and Reinforce the heavy ceiling beams, then intentionally weakened them with strategic uses of Demolish so that everything was just about held together. By that point it was late afternoon, sky turning a deep gold, and he lit a great fire in the hearth of the longhouse before having one of the chimps bar the doors from the inside, then clamber out through one of the smoke holes set into the ceiling.
With the work more or less complete, Mongrel had everyone retreat inside the safehouse, Zero included, which left people and animals crowded into the single room. He forbade any fire from being lit as night approached, which meant that the safehouse looked dark and abandoned while slits of light shone through the boarded and shuttered windows of the longhouse.
They sat in the dark; silent, weapons drawn, barely breathing.
Mongrel did not get the chance to feel silly for overpreparing. Not long after nightfall, black shapes began to steal into Millstone, and proved that his caution had been prudent after all.
The beasts stalked between buildings, indistinct silhouettes in the dark, coalescing on the one lit-up building at the far edge of town. Mongrel found that he had never missed Will as much as he did now—without the kid’s sensory abilities, it was impossible to get an accurate count of how many grinners they were dealing with.
It was clearly a lot, though. More than either of the other times they had attacked by a fair margin, maybe as many as twenty or thirty.
Evidently, all that losing had riled them up something mad.
They poked around the longhouse a little while, prodding for weaknesses, before beginning to make their way inside in earnest. Grinners had an uncanny ability to chew their way through just about anything due to their Unceasing Hunger, and the scraping of teeth on wood became louder and more urgent as the beasts set to work, the blood-chilling sounds breaking the tranquility of night.
They discovered that the doors were the weak point, and a whole pile of them quickly broke them down by biting and tearing and pressing their weight against them. The doors were flung wide, and the grinners poured inside, shoving and snapping at each other in their haste to devour any life they found inside.
Unfortunately for them, there was no easy meal waiting inside the longhouse. Only a casket waiting to slam shut.
The chimps waited for as many grinners as possible to get indoors, then released their sustained casts of Reinforce all at once. Without the added structural integrity provided by the skill, the roof beams broke with a great groaning of overstressed wood, and the entire ceiling came crashing down on the unwitting monsters. There were howls of pain, desperation, and rage, and a desperate scraping of claws as the grinners that had avoided immediate destruction scrambled to flee.
Piling out of the same doors they had come in, the grinners stepped onto the rotted planks, no longer strengthened by Reinforce, and fell right through, impaling themselves on the spikes. It quickly turned into a second massacre as the ones behind shoved the ones in front, forcing their brethren down onto the spikes.
The only ones that survived were the handful able to safely step over the backs of the other grinners once the pit was full of thrashing soon-to-be-corpses, and they limped off into the night with tails tucked between their legs.
“You keep after them,” Mongrel instructed Number Three as he unbarred the door to the safehouse. “Stick to the trees, take some shots when you can. You don’t need to finish them off, just make sure they don’t get the idea to swing back around. Number One, go out there and see if you can find Will. I'll stay here and take care of the girl.”
The older chimp seemed less than pleased to be sent out under these conditions, but they both did as they were told, and Mongrel found himself alone inside the house, sitting against a wall with his sword across his lap, flinching at near every sound.
[Congratulations! You have reached Level 12!]
The sudden message made him jump, squeezed a trapped fart out of him. Once his heart rate settled, Mongrel chuckled to himself and shook his head ruefully. He had never expected to level up again, had never really felt motivated to try for it.
His life had been so much simpler before he’d found William Greene washed up on the Shore of Awakening. Before Millstone, before everything.
It’s all that damn brat’s fault. It’s because of him that I’m out here with a horde of grinners nipping at my ass hair. He thinks he’s angry, does he? When I find him, I’ll give him a piece of my mind. You bet I will.