“What do you want?” Thorn asked. “A little busy at the moment.”
Thorn didn’t want to know that. He wanted to simply take credit for his leadership abilities in getting the crow to assist them, and then ignore the exemplary contributions of the feathered member of their team.
Thorn gave one last grunt and stood up on top of the cable, unhooking the rope from where it had caught on the eye hook. The crow pecked the stone wall for attention and gave Thorn an evil eye.
“I don’t have any extra cores,” he hissed. “Here, this is all I got.”
He fished a Q-Stix from his pocket and held it out.
The crow looked at the piece of processed meat, then at Thorn, and made a low, disappointed “crwk” before it consumed the proffered snack.
“Now take this.” Thorn held out the end of the rope and motioned upwards, to the top of the cavern where the light glared down on them. It was hotter this close to the grow lamp, and he was starting to worry that it would be too hot when they climbed closer to the top.
The crow looked at the rope and made a funny sound, like a sneeze, and took off, flying upwards.
Without the rope.
“Quite the beast tamer you are,” Lief said from his perch on Thorn’s back. “What was that you were saying earlier?”
Thorn didn’t grace Lief with a reply, and instead, spat on his hands and got to work climbing up the rest of the way. The thick, heavy cables were tucked in tightly against the cavern wall and allowed for many good handholds to wedge his hands and feet into.
He made his way up the cavern wall slowly but surely, his new-found strength and endurance helping tremendously. He couldn’t imagine climbing a cliff wall like this before he’d leveled up, much less doing so while carrying someone else on his back.
The only problem was the heat coming off the oversized grow lamp. It was making him sweat profusely, and his hands were getting slick.
They were only ten meters from the top when his hand slipped. He had shoved it between the rock and the cable, and had begun to shift his weight to it, but luckily it only slipped a few inches and he caught himself before he had moved from his footholds.
Fully alert after almost falling to his death, Thorn pushed forward, wiping his hands to dry them and ignoring the baking heat.
The giant light was at least ten meters across and was secured to the top and side of the cavern with a metal framework and deep-set bolts the size of Thorn’s legs. He pulled himself up onto the framework and let out a deep breath.
He dangled his legs over the side and looked down. The pit he had spent hours digging was small and far away… so small that he hoped he had judged the positioning right. It looked correct. He fished a small rock out of his pocket and dropped it, nodding in relief as it landed in the pit.
“Where’s the best spot for you?” Thorn asked Lief.
“Over there in the back, next to that one wall anchor,” Lief said.
Thorn maneuvered over to the bolt that Lief had indicated, and then untied him from his back and re-tied him into his new position.
“All set?” Thorn asked, grabbing a second piece of rope before handing his pack to LIef, who secured it to the metal framing. Thorn wouldn’t need it for the next phase of the plan.
Lief gave him a thumbs up.
Thorn tied his rope to the same bolt Lief was secured to and then dropped it down from the scaffolding. It didn’t quite go all the way to the floor, but it looked like it got close enough.
He paused for a moment, feeling a little bit of vertigo staring down at the floor of the cavern.
Part two of the preparations were now complete. Thorn’s arms and legs were burning from the climb, and the exposed skin on his body felt like he’d gotten a sunburn. It wasn’t too hot above the lamp, mainly stuffy from the rising hot air. He wasn’t looking forward to sliding back down the rope, but now that the main pieces were in place, he shouldn’t waste any more time.
He took the rope and wrapped it under a leg, then over his shoulder, so that it would generate enough friction to keep him from falling, and began to slowly rappel down. The final drop off of the rope to the floor was about three meters, and Thorn landed without any problems.
Lief’s drone flew by, doing a bob and weave in front of him to let him know that it was starting on its own mission and the timer was ticking. He hurried into the pit he had dug and activated his Concentrate skill.
This would be the largest weave he had ever attempted, and there had been no way to test it ahead of time.
The information flowed through Thorn’s mind, and he began to push thin threads of quintessence from his finger, marking them in horizontal rows across the wall of the pit. Instead of a grid pattern, he instead made large numbers of intersections by drawing a second squiggly line over the first horizontal one. After placing several of these on the wall, he proceeded to the floor and laid out several of these as well.
The drain on his free quintessence was starting to increase significantly, and he received a written message in his HUD.
Translation: Thorn had laid down as big a bomb as he safely could, and if he kept laying down more, it might explode in his face.
The last thing he did was kick the bags of shrapnel into position, across the bottom of the pit where he’d made the last set of intersections. Walking out of the pit, he drew his line of quintessence on the ground, down the cavern wall and to the small foxhole he had dug for himself earlier.
One of the disadvantages of this whole plan was how close Thorn was to the action, but considering his next best idea was running into the quintessence void to prevent becoming a meal for beasts, Thorn was willing to take the risk.
Thorn waited. He checked his free quintessence constantly, a small trickle of quints feeding the traps he had set in the pit.
He fidgeted in his fox hole. How long was this going to take? Thorn had never used his Concentrate skill for anywhere near this length of time, and he was starting to feel tired. The fatigue was mental, a constant drag on his attention, which only added to the stress. If he slipped up and dropped the skill for a single moment, the whole thing would blow prematurely.
Long minutes passed, feeling like hours. He saw something at the edge of his vision: Lief’s drone, exiting the tunnel. It increased its altitude and circled the fields in a random pattern. A golden pill trailed beneath the drone, and it might have been Thorn’s imagination, but he felt like he could smell its heady fragrance from here.
For this part of the plan, they had decided to bring out the big guns and use one of the three special, fist-sized pills that just screamed of packed quintessence. The crow’s initial reaction to the pill had been one of extreme desire, so they assumed that it would generate a similar reaction in the other beasts.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
They’d assumed correctly. A wave of snakes streamed out of the tunnel and the walls surrounding the tunnel, chasing after the pill hanging from the drone. A few bats streamed out of a crack in the cavern wall; that was not part of the plan.
Lief must have noticed the bats, as the drone suddenly jerked the side and accelerated out of their path.
Dust began rising from the fields, and at first Thorn assumed it was the snakes kicking up the dirt. Then he saw an antlion the size of a small dog explode into the air out of one of the circular depressions he’d noticed in the fields. More antlions were joining the chase, popping out of the field and mixing in with the snakes.
For the most part, the beasts ignored one another, focusing on the bait flying zig-zag patterns around the field.
A roar sounded in the distance to Thorn’s right, and he felt a deep thump vibrate through the earth. There was another thump, and then another, gaining in strength.
Was that the fincroc? Thorn wondered if they had bitten off more than they could chew.
In the direction of the roaring, Thorn could see what Lief had called the production center, a flat squarish building on the shore of the lake. It apparently had vats and an assembly line inside of it for the mass production of glitter pills. Past that production center were at least two more cavern branches, but Lief hadn’t fully explored all of them. Something was coming out of one of those caverns, and that something was big enough to shake the ground.
It couldn’t be the fincroc. From Lief’s description, it was far stealthier.
Thorn whipped his head back around as, out of the corner of his eye, the drone took a crazy dip, almost letting the pill touch the ground. A flash of a wing swooped past where the drone had just been, and the awakened owl beast from earlier soared through the air.
Was every single beast in the cavern attracted to this pill? Their bait was working too well, and things were fast slipping out of control.
Lief must have decided enough was enough; he turned the drone directly towards Thorn and hit maximum acceleration. The crowd of snakes, antlions, bats, and other beasts caught up in the pursuit pulled together and streamed towards Thorn and his kill pit.
The drone stopped when it was directly over the pit, jerking side to side in small evasive moments. Thorn could smell the rich, earthy and cinnamon scent of the pill, and wondered again how it had been made and what it would do if a beast consumed it. If he himself consumed it.
The owl swooped by for another pass, and Thorn finally got a good look at it. At a distance it looked like one of the owls he’d always seen in the forests near his home, but on closer inspection, something was off. Its feathers weren’t exactly feathers. They were brown, but they looked more like bark, perhaps. It was very strange.
Just as the owl got close to the drone, it suddenly swooped to the side and avoided a dive and peck from their very own black-winged crow. Thorn almost cheered, but that cheer turned to a scowl as the crow immediately turned and made its own move for the pill.
Taken by surprise, Lief didn’t try to dodge, and the crow snatched up the golden pill in its talons.
This wasn’t part of the plan. Thorn scowled. Their “pet” bird had finally gotten what it wanted, and was going to screw them over in the process.
They weren’t going to have time to recover from this. If the crow took the pill and flew off with it, all of the beasts in the area would follow. They wouldn’t be pulled into the pit, and their plans and preparation would be entirely for naught.
Another roar echoed through the cavern, this time much closer. While he had been watching the drama with the pill, he’d not paid attention to the end of the cavern. As he saw what was coming, Thorn reflexively shrank down into his foxhole.
It was a turtle, if turtles grew to the size of buildings. And if turtles somehow also grew giant scorpion stingers as tails. He’d never heard of anything like this thing in all of his life. He knew that awakened beasts could evolve, but this seemed extreme. He could see an awakened turtle growing larger; that seemed to be what many awakened beasts became: larger, more dangerous versions of themselves.
But this went beyond that. The turtle’s body was a dark brown, with streaks of green outlining a pattern on its shell. The bright-red tail, wicked stinger glistening with venom, curled over its back like a vengeful spirit. It was like it had been grafted on from a different animal.
The turtle-scorpion hybrid (turtion? scorple? nightmare? Thorn wasn’t sure what to call it) was running directly for the pit. Its massive legs looked slow as they moved, belying the frightening speed at which the beast was moving across the shoreline.
The corner of its shell brushed against the side of the production center, blasting chunks of concrete everywhere.
There was no way they could take this beast out. They hadn’t known something of this size was here with them.
“Crrrrrrk.” A loud, echoing cry pierced the air. The crow was circling upwards, above Thorn and the pit below, rising towards the glow lamp above them.
Thorn felt a warmth in his chest. He was surprised and shocked that the crow had not simply flown off to the other end of the lake to eat its stolen prize. The crow was not only uncommonly intelligent in understanding what the plan was, but also incredibly versatile in adjusting on the fly and adapting as things fell apart.
The crow called out a mocking sound again, and the turtle beast echoed its own challenge.
Thorn could hear the slithering of snakes and the loping of other ground animals as they chased the crow. They couldn’t fly, but they wouldn’t necessarily stop and stay inside the pit, either. The original plan had been to drop the pill down into the pit, and then blow all of the snakes to bits in one tidy little boom.
That part of the plan was obviously off the rails.
Snakes were slithering into the pit, a few antlions and even a large spider joining them. More were coming up from behind.
Thorn had a decision to make. Should he wait to blow the pit?
The turtle-scorpion was fifty meters away and closing fast. The crimson tail on its back shuddered and tensed, preparing for a strike. It roared its threat at the defiant crow, circling lazily underneath the hot, bright glow of the lamp.
Being at ground level himself, Thorn couldn’t see the bottom of the pit, but he judged that the first snakes were probably at the bottom of the pit. Should he keep with the original plan? Would they stop, and look up at the crow circling above? Or move through the side of the pit and climb up the stone wall? Would they be smart enough to do that?
If they did, some of them might find Thorn in his little foxhole, putting him in danger. Focusing on the bigger picture, however, that was a pretty small consideration.
All other considerations were fairly small in the wake of a giant, twenty-meter tall turtle-scorpion beast. Thorn decided to wait a few seconds longer.
This was going to be the longest seven seconds of Thorn’s life.
A snake burrowed through Thorn’s foxhole, at his knee level. He scrambled to the side, but the snake was already past, completely ignoring him for the greater prize circling above.
The turtle’s scorpion tail surged forward, blindingly fast. It aimed for the mocking crow and struck the wall above Thorn in a shower of rocks and dust. A small, fist-sized rock thumped Thorn on the side of the head, drawing blood and dazing him slightly. He coughed through the cloud of dust and wiped his eyes, frantically looking up.
“Hrzzzzzzk,” the crow called out lazily, mocking the missed strike from the much larger beast.
Shit. He’d missed the countdown notifications. He immediately let go of the skill and hunkered down in his foxhole.
Thump. Thump. The turtle-scorpion was close to him now. Very close. Its neck was straining upwards towards the lazily circling crow. It bashed its head against the cavern wall in frustration, knocking more loose rocks and boulders down on Thorn below.
Just as Thorn was beginning to wonder when his daggone bomb would go off, an enormous roar filled his ears and everything else went dark.
When the earth stopped shaking, Thorn’s arms pushed away the dirt on top of him and he heaved upwards, sucking in a deep breath of air.
He quickly assessed the situation, his eyes still blinking away white spots. The mass of snakes and smaller beasts were gone; a scattered body part here and there at the edge of the pit, the ground nearby painted with a faint mist of gore.
The massive turtle-scorpion hybrid had been flipped onto its back. It had scorch marks down its right side, and its right front leg, the one that was closest to the pit, was limp and sagging. Otherwise, it appeared relatively unharmed. It had mostly tanked an explosion that had liquified lesser beasts.
Its tail thrashed, pounding its stinger against the sand behind it in impotent rage. It let out a roar, its back legs windmilling in a vain effort to flip itself back over.
Thorn looked up at the light and tried to judge the fall lines. Would the final part of the plan still work, even if things had gone off the rails?
They hadn’t known about this hidden monstrosity, lurking in a hidden lake or cavern in this massive complex. He was going to give Lief a lot of crap about that later.
The original plan was to kill a bunch of smaller beasts and attempt to lure out the fincroc to a specific place, where they could take it out. The plan had worked, mostly, except there was no fincroc, and instead, an even bigger, nastier beast had showed up.
There was a lesson here: there was always a bigger, nastier monster out there somewhere.
Thorn saw something small, like a rock or pill bottle, fall and hit the ground right next to the roaring turtle’s head. Apparently Lief was thinking the same as Thorn: same old plan, just a change in target.
That was close enough… probably. It wasn’t like they were going to move the beast, anyways. Thorn pushed himself back into his foxhole as deep as possible.
“Let it rip!” he yelled up to Lief. “And get out of the way, you stupid crow!”