Chương 127: Chapter 203: Attrition

You get a bunch of men together, add beer and attempts to trap small animals, and you've got yourself a recipe for a great weekend… or a trip to the hospital. unknown William Oh has never successfully trapped a monster in his life. Every time he tries, they just walk up and die in front of him. unknown The oasis was a bit like the flat-fish they reeled up from the bottom on the 6 th Floor. only much, much bigger. It could be found in the far south, where the rocky sandstone and scrubs gave way to dunes and sand.

Its mouth was the only thing visible, the rest was buried under the sand, with fake vegetation poking up out of it. The mouth itself the size of a large pond, held open at all times and filled with a special saliva that didn't dry up even with the sun beating down on it. To a thirsty Party wandering the desert in search of supplies and shade, the thing looked like a godsend. A pool of water and a copse of fruiting trees. Food, shade, and a drink. It was a lie, obviously.

The entire monster was roughly three hundred paces long and a hundred paces across. It had a spearlike tongue with barbs that could drag an unwary creature into the digestive 'water' in the blink of an eye. The fruit was mildly poisonous, subtly dehydrating their victims and causing those who ate it to seek out water.

The 'trees' were merely spines that emerged from the monster's back, and if you looked closely, you could see how they lined up with each other, perfectly capturing the spinal arc of the monster below. That was the trick they were using to hunt it, actually. Will consulted his map with the scout's drawing of the monster, overlapping the mental map with it, and comparing the location of the 'trees'. Right… about… here, Will thought, marking a location on the map before flying down and landing on the mark he'd made.

Best way to kill a fish was a quick knife through the spine.

"Over here!" Will shouted, motioning for his group to join him atop the creature's central nervous system. From the ground, it was much more difficult to tell they were standing on a living thing. The telltale signs were lost in the sheer scale of the thing. The team of hunters began excavating sand around the monsters spine. The oasis didn't make any moves to protect itself. It's sole strategy was camouflage and ambush. It simply couldn't conceive of creatures knowing it was there and approaching anyway.

In the oasis's mind, sooner or later they would get tired of digging, eat some fruit and wander towards the pool of water for a drink, like so many other mindless creatures had done over the years of its life.

"We hit scale, milord!" one of the hunters called once they'd dug down about three feet.

"Alright, git, git," Will said, shooing them away to a safe distance. The armor on Phantom Hand morphed into a razor-thin blade extending out over a dozen feet. Will plunged the blade deep down, feeling a pop of resistance from bone before scrambling it around a bit, straight into the monster's spinal cord. The rows of 'trees' around them slammed down before an explosion of sand was thrown into the sky as the flatfish began to thrash in place.

Uninterested in a fair fight, they camped out beside the immobilized monster as it bled out. over the course of several hours, thrashing turned to twitching, and twitching turned to stillness. The spotter cried when he saw the first whisp of Miasma roll off the exposed section of the oasis, and Badur was clapped on the shoulder by several nearby men. Their Logistician clambered to his feet and sprinted over to the oasis and began preserving it.

Now that the monster was dead, the 'hunt' was over and the hard part began: Excavating the meat, and protecting it from scavengers. Will helped out where he could, using his terrain control to clear sand away from the meat and his Phantom Hand to carve away large chunks for the porters to carry over to the magically assembled wagons. The men looked a bit like a line of ants carrying enormous loads over their shoulders that dwarfed them. The oasis didn't move much, so it's muscles were tender and marbled with fat.

Typically it was a bit of a delicacy on the 10 th Floor, since they were hunted so infrequently. A tasty food people associate with starvation, Will thought sourly. There were four thousand mouths to feed at the Stronghold, and while this was a lot of meat, it would only last… a week, at most. It would be a nice, tasty prelude to a period of extended suffering. I shouldn't assume they'll starve just like that, Will thought as he took a break, studying the people flowing around him.

Sure, Will had a lot of responsibility as a leader, but his people were Climbers. They would've gone on this hunt without him. They weren't helpless sheep, and if he thought of them that way, he would be blinding himself to what they could do. Some would have food squirreled away, others might have preservation abilities, and still others would hunt, or grow their own food.

The only reason the first famine was so bad was because Caddock had engineered it to the best of his abilities, clearing the surroundings of edible flora and fauna while deliberately starving the people. The second famine was just a result of the see-saw balancing act of governing a small city, and it wasn't nearly as bad. The third one they managed to avert before it even got bad. They'll get through this one just fine.

"Milord!" A sound called Will's attention away from where he was thinking, idly leaning against Anna while plucking at the frayed edges of his Class around his left wrist.

"You need to see this." The porter said, his eyes wide. Will rose to his feet and sprinted after the man. They arrived at one of the cargo wagons where the preserved meat was covered in a tarp to prevent damage from dust and sun. The man flipped the tarp up and revealed a chunk of meat about as tall as a man and two men long. The bottom corner of it was riddles with holes, with a trail of slime leading down the wagon wheels to the sand below.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. What the Abyss? Are they following us, or are they just everywhere, and too sneaky for us to know?

"And nobody saw this happen?" Will asked, taking a splinter from the wagon and picking up a bit of the slime, fascinated by the miasmatic structures flowing through it. None of it looked anything like the stuff he'd gotten from his Class. The slime back at the farm had already combined with the muck of the pen and disappeared or dried, but this stuff still had a bit of it's original Miasmatic structures. Even as he looked at them, they were slowly breaking down, returning to Miasma.

Will's mind combined hundreds of the tiny squiggles to give himself an idea of what this unique magic should look like. The very tail end of the strands looks a bit like some of the structures I make when I use Aspect to freeze terrain. Could it be the 'terrain' keyword? Will thought, plucking out a single strand and inscribing the details into his Map's legend as he pondered the slime. Or perhaps 'grip' inverted? Some kind of lubricant, most likely.

Does it enable it to swim freely through terrain, or perhaps I'm wrong about the 'terrain' keyword and it simply makes it more difficult to detect? There must be a reason why nobody's seen them so far.

"No, um, nobody saw it. sir-milord." The porter said, shaking his head manically, eyes wide. He was oozing fear, likely anticipating Will getting angry at him. It was some kind of monster. It had to be. Nothing natural could escape the detection of a full crew of some sixty Climbers and make off with some of their food without magical Abilities of some kind. The question was… what were those Abilities? And why wasn't it attacking anyone? Most monsters mindlessly attack, driven insane by miasma.

This reminds me more of something with its wits about it. The human-avoidant behavior of a natural animal. Like the foxes outside the Ring. Cunning creatures that avoid humans while also stealing from them. Worms just don't have big enough brains to do that, do they? How smart are they? Are they thinking, or just avoiding people by instinct? How does it know whether or not Climbers are there?

"Get all the other meat together, up off the ground and have it all put under watch by…let's say a dozen people from all angles.

"That'll cut into our speed, sir."

"Better than getting it eaten." Will said, rubbing his neck.

"I'll get back to work to help make up for the people on watch."

"What about this meat?" the porter asked.

"Might be tainted." Will said.

"Let's use it as bait. I want you to leave it alone and check back in five minutes, then ten, then twenty, and thirty minutes. Keep an eye on whether or not any more of it gets eaten." This was a decent test to see how smart this thing was versus how bold it's behavior was. If it didn't return at all, that might indicate the worms were rather intelligent. That would imply that they saw the humans notice the damage, and decided to cut their losses before the humans created a trap.

That suggested a high level of forethought. Otherwise, the gradually lengthening checks would hopefully sus out how long the worms might wait while the food was undefended before they were confident enough to start stealing it again. How bold it was. As it turned out: the damn things weren't very smart, but they were very bold when they were sure no one was watching. Five minutes later the porter came running back to Will to tell him that the meat they'd left undefended was now twice as worm-eaten. Wow.

That was fast. Will pulled up his Map and measured the distance between where the men were hauling meat and where the wagon was parked. So it waits for humans to be… at least a hundred and fifty paces away. Will told the porter to stand progressively closer to the wagon while continuing to check it every five minutes. About half an hour later, Will got a report from the porter that it had stopped eating the meat after he got within a hundred and twenty paces of the wagon.

Will told him to get back to his job, and Will would take care of the rest. After about two minutes had gone by, Will created a Phantom Eye and whipped it around towards the wagon. He caught the tail-end of something pale and slimy leaping off the wagon wheel and disappearing seamlessly into the ground. Will continued staring at the wagon with Phantom Eye for several minutes, but nothing happened. … They can sense Phantom Eye? Will thought.

He'd expected they sensed humans through their footsteps, or breathing, or something physical, but Phantom Eye should've been undetectable by those criteria. As an experiment, Will made another Phantom Eye and placed it at about two hundred paces above the wagon, while dismissing the other. About a minute later, he could faintly make out wriggling white shapes darting up the side of the wagon wheel and diving into the meat, swimming through it with the speed of a fish in water.

Will brought the Phantom Eye in close, and the monsters moved like lightning, diving into the ground with hardly any resistance. They moved quick, like they had a skeletal structure. Closer to the speed of an eel, than a worm, but Will wouldn't know until he cut one open. So they're fast, voracious, cowardly, and have supernatural senses. They give the impression of being smart because they're so flighty, but in actuality they're pretty mindless. Those senses, though…

Most things can't even sense Phantom Eye at all, let alone from a hundred and twenty paces away. Will could see the eyes, though. They were complex bundles of miasmatic structures in the shape of orbs about the size of an orange. Do they sense miasma? Miasma itself is everywhere on this Floor. Miasmatic structures? No, the steak-bugs have some minor miasmatic structures. If it was any miasmatic structure ever, these things would starve. They don't seem to mind Badur's preservation Ability, either.

Will brought himself in just outside the worm's apparent range, then withdrew the Phantom Eye. A minute later they were swarming the meat again. Will deliberately stepped down on the ground in the same manner he did when he was making platforms of air. In an instant, he solidified the earth under his feet about three hundred paces in every direction. If he did this right, they should dry up on the surface, unable to tunnel back down into the cool depths of the earth, since the ground was now as hard as steel.

Under the gaze of his Phantom eye, Will saw the worms jump like they'd been shocked despite not even being in contact with the earth, leaping away from the point of origin of Will's Ability and tumbling haphazardly through the air for a moment before diving headlong into Will's reinforced earth. Rather than slam into it and writhe hopelessly where they could catch them like Will had hoped, they burrowed through his hemisphere of solidified earth and escaped to the northeast.

Will could feel the tunnels they made in his controlled terrain. Rather than being disappointed, or worried, Will couldn't stop grinning.

"Something good?" Anna asked.

"They can sense Miasmatic structures, and their connection to terrain is better than mine." Will said. That's gotta be an excellent Sacrifice. Whether it's for Map, or Aspect of the Immortal Serpent.

"… I need a sniper and a spyglass." Over the course of the evening, while the others were doing their job, Will was trying his damnedest to kill one of the slimy bastards. Will gave up on the sniper pretty quick. He couldn't find anyone who could hit a lightning fast eel-thing about the size of a man's dick from a hundred and twenty paces without any Abilities or Relics. The ones who could hit them, the miasma in their attacks were detected far in advance and the worms dove into the ground.

When they tried using traps, the worms avoided them until Will realized that the traps had miasmatic structures in them, created by a passive that the trapmaker had. Then they tried a completely nonmagical trap: A metal bucket with food above it that the worms would fall into. The worms ate out the bottom of the metal bucket, demonstrating that the 'no Abilities' rule of this game did not apply to them. Next, they tried an oversized rat trap that would cut the critter in half.

By this point he had attracted a crowd of Climbers who had clustered around him, passing the three available spyglasses back and forth while discussing methods to trap this newly-discovered menace. When the rat trap snapped down and cut one of the little bastards in half, a cry of victory erupted from the group. There was much fist-pumping and back-patting all around.

"Oh, wait…" One of the Climbers with a spyglass said.

"They're eating the dead one." Will stood up.

"Where you going?" Anna asked.

"Gonna go get some explosives." Will said. Several of the nearby Climbers murmured and high-fived. Will returned only a couple minutes later with a – he was assured – completely nonmagical bomb. The worms didn't go near it. Either the shopkeeper was mistaken, had lied to him, or the chemicals in the bomb were repellant to the worms. In any case, Will was forced to seek alternatives.

Eventually through trial and error, they created an enormous, completely nonmagical steel grate, and buried it in the earth underneath a chunk of bait. When the worms came for it, they triggered the trap remotely and about a dozen worms were flung tumbling high into the air. Will and the other Climbers, totally invested in being the first to catch this new monster, sprinted forward, sending up clouds of dust as they ran at inhuman speeds to catch the worms before they hit the ground.

Will sent Phantom Hand forward and caught one of the wriggling bastards in mid-air. It tried to dodge, but Phantom hand was faster in the air, crushing it's body in an instant before bringing it back to Will. The other Climbers came away empty-handed as the worms were nearly as fast in midair as they were underground. Will opened his palm and Inspected the worm. A detachment of the Raid Boss 'Attrition'. A pale imitation whose only goal is to bring food back to the main body.

"…Interesting."