Chương 14: Herding Sheep to a greater cause

It was a good thing that Plastic Man had the ability to create hard plastic shovels, or the whole thing would have become unnecessarily harder than it had to be. Nihil watched the six survivors toil away under the morning sun, shovels in sand. He'd let them rest one night, although it didn't seem that the rest had been of particularly high quality considering how many of them had spent the whole night sobbing.

His respect for Musk grew, as he was the one who was hurt the most, beaten to all hells, missing a part of his scalp, several of his teeth alongside his tongue, but still hadn't cried himself to sleep. Just muttered something about killing someone. Whatever. Good luck. The skinny man was working methodically, shovel in, shovel out, scrawny muscles glistening from sweat. Sure, he threw a hateful glance at Nihil literally after every minute of activity, but it wasn't like he had the power to retaliate, or ever would.

Another loud crack resounded through the silent beach, filled as it was only by the pained and tired grunts of the working survivors and the gentle lapping of the waves. Another coconut tree slammed down like a felled giant, making the ground shake as it went. Nihil wasn't bothering with any tools. Hardening his skin by moving the density from the inside of his body to the outside and kicking the tree a few times like some sort of Muay Thai advertisement sufficed to fell the tree.

Then, kicking the short stump with his bare feet several times was enough to dislodge enough of the roots so that he could pull it all out, underground system and all. He'd already cleared thirty trees. Black Threads were proving to be incredibly versatile. He'd needed to create the skill in the context of recreating a human body, unnecessary organs and all, to keep the costs down. But as he grew more experienced, the boundaries loosened. A spleen with half its density was still a spleen.

It wasn't like it served a function anymore in this body of his. Regardless, organising the survivors had been rather easy after Nihil had established who exactly was in charge and they were now working very efficiently. The task at hand was simple. Nihil had identified the location aboveground of the collapsed underwater tunnel with Kevin's help and marked the spot.

Coincidentally, further supporting his theory that the solution to this level was to release the fishmen into the sea, the underwater collapse had occurred in an area of the island that the fishmen couldn't wander into as it was too far out of their range. It was about a hundred meters from the beach in the middle of a sparsely grown outer treeline and some thorny bushes. All gone now, courtesy of Nihil. A radius of a dozen meters had been cleared out, leaving bare ground.

A mixture of sand and dirt that was particularly easy to dig into with a functional shovel. In the middle of the clearing were the lines designating the area right above the collapse, where his new subordinates were now working away with the fervour of the frightened. Aliyah and Deborah, who Nihil hadn't put any particular effort into convincing, were digging just as feverishly as the beaten five.

They seemed to have enough brain cells to understand that Nihil had merely killed the chicken in front of the monkey yesterday and that they also had to contribute.

"Wheelbarrow!" Plastic Man announced fearfully, jiggling as he hefted another load of dirt onto the cart he'd created. His powers weren't strong enough to create a wheelbarrow from scratch, but going alongside Nihil's suggestion of treating the experience as a game of lego, creating the pieces and then adding them together, had worked wonders. The hard plastic wheelbarrow wasn't perfect, wobbling in the parts where it didn't fit together perfectly but Nihil managed to drag it off regardless and dump it on the side.

The core idea was very basic. Since the fishmen were blocked off by an underwater collapse, and the humans couldn't approach the structure from underneath due to their lack of gills, they were simply going to reach it by digging through the top. The plan was to dig until they could see the rock wall blocking the tunnel that Kevin had found, after which they would dig a small hole into the top of the tunnel at each side until they could see the water.

Theoretically this would allow the fishman to crawl out of their side of the hole and jump back into the tunnel leading into the sea. After this, the group of humans could fill the holes back in, blocking any seamonsters from escaping towards the middle of the island. This would presumably unlock the more shaded and cool camp of the fishmen for habitation, while also unlocking their hunting grounds as officially competition-free. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

Over the next few hours Nihil continued driving the wheelbarrow to and fro, arguably the hardest part of the job considering how heavy it could get at the frequency at which six somewhat fit adults could fill it. Musk of course was a bit slower due to the pain in his face, while the guy Nihil had thrown a spear at had a bad bruise and stab wound on his back despite the fact that Nihil had specifically aimed at the shoulderblade to block the thrust.

Plastic Man, funnily enough, was working the hardest through his broken nose, replying enthusiastically with "Yes boss!" to every command. It seemed that he was just always eager to follow the loudest personality. Nihil wasn't necessarily a loud individual himself, but, well, there was a reason people said that actions spoke louder than words. The wheelbarrow in his hands rolled to a stop as he returned to the group after another offloading mission.

Nihil stopped, put his fists on his hips and observed the progress. The group had managed to dig the requisite oval area of about five square meters two meters deep during the last few hours. Slow but steady progress. The sun had now reached its zenith and because Nihil had removed all the trees for easier access the rays of heat from above were slamming fully onto the heads of his workers causing rather severe sunburn to start appearing on their necks and shoulders.

They were working through it however, which made him somewhat happy. He really had found a bunch of people committed to the mission hadn't he?

"Break time!" Nihil announced unceremoniously with a booming voice that caused several flinches.

"Noon to afternoon is the worst time for manual labour. Don't work yourselves to death, you're going to make me look bad!" It was as if his words were a magic spell, because they caused all of the seven survivors to fall to the floor in positions of sheer exhaustion. They lay there, sweating and red, like a bunch of cooked lobsters.

"Put up a plastic tarp over the clearing to block out the sun," Nihil ordered Plastic Man, who gave a weak nod. It was at times like this that he was grateful that the abilities gained in the tower simply were, not requiring any sort of cooldown or energy pool. Unless of course one imposed those restrictions as part of one's strategy.

"Drink something and rest in the shade," Nihil continued while shaking his head.

"I'll go get some meat. Good job!" With that, he turned around and left. Or, well, not really. Only a few dozen meters into the island, after he'd disappeared into the foliage and was sure he was out of range of Musk's mosquitoes he climbed a tree from which he could see the group, plastic spear in hand. At first they just lay there like a bunch of beaten dogs, roasting in the sun, next to their shovels and their little excavation project.

Then, slowly, Plastic Man rolled onto all fours and gripped the sand beneath him, slowly pulling out a long tarp of plastic that immediately started fluttering in the wind. He and Aliyah managed to attach the four ends to the trees at the edge of the clearing Nihil had uprooted, casting the entire thing into shadows which caused a lot of sighs of relief going by the more relaxed position that people started laying in afterwards. Minutes ticked as Nihil observed, fiddling with the hard plastic spear in his hand.

Some of the survivors eventually got up, going to the beach and returning with some coconut shells full of collected water, which promptly disappeared down thirsty gullets. Nihil didn't have to imagine the group's complaining about how the hard physical labour was increasing water consumption past storage levels, he could hear it drifting towards him through the air. Notably, nobody critiqued him due to his absence. Too scared, maybe?

Or were they self-aware enough to realise that they had tried to threaten Nihil into doing involuntary labor in the form of hunting for the group a mere 12 hours ago? Probably not. That would involve too much introspection. He continued observing, knowing for a fact that the time to intervene would come soon.

It was as Musk, the most damaged, the most sickly but also somehow the most hateful of the group, stood up and started simply walking off into the opposite direction that Nihil went off into that he knew it was time to act. Musk was trying to act non-chalant, but if he was really going to go take a shit his walk would have been more honest, his butt-cheeks more clenched. Piss? With that amount of sweat? Forget about it. Nihil stood up on the large branch he was occupying.

Straddling the trunk with his left arm while his right arm holding the spear wound back. He'd gotten quite a lot of practice throwing spears recently, a skill he'd never had the chance to develop much from hiding behind all his undead in the past. Was this the romance of chucking things very far, very accurately? Nihil had to wonder as he hurled the spear in his arm forward, aiming for the space right in front of Musk.

The spear shot through the air with a whistling sound that immediately alerted the group of survivors, but before they even had the opportunity to look up, the spear was already quivering in place, buried halfway in the sand in front of the frozen Musk, easily identifiable even from afar by the blood matting his half scalped head. The man looked down at the spear which had basically passed over his shoulder for several seconds, before unceremoniously turning around and going back to the group, head down.

The chatter stopped completely and the survivors sat in silence in the shade. Nihil shook his head as he jumped off the tree.

"Like herding sheep, I swear," he complained as he started running as fast as he could towards Kevin. He wasn't going to hunt. He didn't trust the group enough to leave them alone for the hour or so it would take him to find an anaconda or a dodo big enough to feed six manual labourers. Instead he ran to the outcropping Kevin was inhabiting to pick up the smoked snakemeat from yesterday.

"No time to chat," he told the surprised man who'd been exploring the sea as ordered, searching for any other hidden treasures. He grabbed several slabs of meat before turning around and running off again. Just a few minutes after he was back amongst the survivors, holding aloft his smoked meat.

"Actually, I still had this stashed somewhere!" he announced happily to the exhausted group, before dropping the meat onto a leaf he'd plucked for this explicit purpose. He didn't say anything about the plastic spear buried in the ground not far away, simply going over to pick it up. As he did so, the survivors fell over the meat like starved dogs, which was sort of true. Nihil returned to the group and looked at the meat which had disappeared in 30 seconds flat.

"I guess I'm going to go hunt after all," he suddenly decided, leaving the clearing again, this time for real. He still needed these people for a few more days. The sooner the hidden quest was resolved, the sooner he could stop playing around with this group of jokers. This was exactly the reason he preferred the undead.