by John L. Monk
As one, the other crabs in the area swarmed toward me. I jumped into the air, flew to the farthest one, and killed that too. The crabs fought with each other to get at me, and I was able to kill two more before fleeing again. Back and forth we went, one side to the other, until there were none left. When it was over, I counted thirty-two of the creatures. This made up for about half the XP I’d burned.
Before Mythian decided I wasn’t going to use the crabs—thus hastening their decay—I began flying them one at a time toward this latest worm’s lair. I spread them out equally, about one every fifty feet, spaced closer together as I neared the entrance. When everything was ready, I flew a corpse to the flat killing ground just in front of the closed capstone and laid it down gently.
“Any sign?” I shouted.
Felix shook his head emphatically.
“Welp,” I said, “here goes nothing…”
I began jumping up and down, signaling to the lurking worm that dinner was served. Just like last time, the capstone flew up and the trapper bolted out. Ready for it, I flew back toward the nearest dead crab.
And waited.
This worm was actually a little bigger than the last one, with even more of those feelers around its circular maw. I could feel its will pulsing outward, though weaker than before due to the distance between us:
PANIC!
COWER IN FEAR!
SUBMIT!
THERE IS NO ESCAPE!
My logs showed the attempts failing, and with room to spare.
The worm halted completely except for its head, which seemed to stare down at the dead crab almost curiously. Despite being eyeless, it bent to within feeler range and nudged it around as if it had never seen so strange a thing before as free lunch. I worried it would suspect a trap and bolt back to its hole, but then it seized the crab with its feelers and shoveled it into its maw.
On cue, I began jumping again.
“Hey, ugly!” I shouted. “Come and get me!”
The worm issued a roar that sounded like a high-pitched scream overlying a deep, bone-rattling foghorn. It then shot forward.
I took to the air and retreated to the next crab to wait. The worm didn’t wait, though—it gobbled it down quicker this time, no fooling around.
Again I called it, and again it pursued me to another free snack. The worm’s appetite, it seemed, had no bottom, and I was happy to keep feeding it.
Many crabs later and the entrance to its lair was lost behind the jagged landscape. It was only then that the worm seemed to sense its exposure. It halted halfway to the next crab and twisted around, looking back. It threw another look at the crab—and at me jumping up and down yelling—and then it turned back. Weighed down by almost thirty crabs, it moved much slower than it had in the beginning.
“Seeya, sucker!” I shouted, soaring past it, chased by its ear-splitting roars and psychic assaults.
Back at the clearing, Felix was standing in the mouth of the tunnel. The capstone was half open, held up by a long metal lance from his bag. The stone and part of the lance glowed red, throwing off heat in shimmering waves. I could just make out the fire runes on the top side of the stone.
“Quick, get in!” Felix yelled.
I flew into the tunnel just as the worm came into view. It roared again and made right for us.
“Close it!” I said.
Felix just laughed. He raised his hands, and strands of rope shot from his fingers to coil sizzling around the lance, filling the tunnel entrance with the smell of cooked pasta. Then a hard tug, and the glowing capstone fell over the hole with a deafening crash.
“What an utterly brilliant plan,” Felix said, staring in admiration at the glowing stone.
On the other side, grunts and roars of rage carried through. Clearly, the stone was too hot for the core trapper’s parasitic appendages. Tiny blasts of psychic rage brushed the edges of my perception. The creature was trying to convince us to come out and grovel.
Beaming under the praise, I said, “Thanks. And I like those … uh … whatever it was you shot from your fingers.”
“Noodles!” Felix said. “Spoodles of Noodles, specifically. Very useful in cities or arboreal settings. They stick to anything, allowing you to brachiate vast distances at furious speeds.”
The lance was still smoking, though no longer glowing. Still too hot to touch, which is why he removed his bag and scooped it in.
“Time runs funny in bags,” he said, “but it should be cool before we need it again.”
I knew what he meant. Nothing rotted in bottomless bags. There was also an endless supply of air in them. If used to breathe underwater, the game would see it as an exploit and begin deducting karma. One of the oldest exploits in the game, and totally forgivable in my opinion.
“How long will her runes last?” I said.
“Two hours. Elfie never specialized. We should get moving.”
This tunnel was a little bigger than the last one, which made sense given how large the worm was. It was also longer. Halfway down, our ears began popping from the change in pressure. Tormegazon, it seemed wasn’t just a wide turtle, it was also deep.
Just like the last hole, the way began to narrow, forcing us to our hands and knees, this time with Felix leading.
“Dang it,” he said. “It’s no use. Let’s head back.”
On the way back I said, “I still think we’re onto something. The fleckulent comes from this island, or so we think.”
“That’s what they say.”
I nodded. “But nothing we’ve seen on the surface seems noteworthy or special. The one difference is those nigh-invulnerable worms and the tunnels, and this one went deeper than the last one. My ears were popping.”
Felix snorted. “Dwarf ears don’t pop.”
I looked at him curiously. “Really?”
“Yes, now finish your thought.”
“I’m saying we keep looking. We’re only a day into this.”
“And we still need to get out of this hole. Thank goodness you’re great at planning and have already figured that out.”
“Uh…”
No, I didn’t have a way out. We couldn’t touch the capstone because it was too hot and would be for an hour and a half.
“You hear that grinding?” Felix said.
“What grinding?”
A few minutes more and I heard it too.
“What’s going on out there?” I said.
“My guess is it’s digging a new hole. Probably hopes to intersect with this one. If it does that…”
“We’re dead,” I finished. “It’ll be armor and teeth all the way down. A death trap. What’s the timer again on your relic?”
“A week, and it won’t work on chitanium. So let’s hurry.”
We started running. A few minutes later, we reached the still-glowing capstone. The grinding was much louder now, and the air sweltering.
“Too bad there’s no such thing as ice runes,” I said wistfully.
Felix, sweating profusely into his now-glistening beard, tapped me on the shoulder and we retreated.
In a voice elevated to carry over the grinding, he said, “If we’re lucky, we have maybe ten minutes to live. My health pool’s 18,000 un-buffed, 60,000 buffed. Fire protection, 2100, but I slapped four runes on that thing. And in this enclosed space… It’s like an oven. I think I can survive it.” He sighed in frustration. “If Elfie were here, this’d be a no brainer. She’d blast it to smithereens from a distance.”
“How’s your pain resistance?” I said.
“Adequate. Less than fire. Ward 2 strong. There’s recipes I know, but I need my stove and it’s back on the ship.” He reached up and patted my shoulder in a way that was almost grandfatherly. “This was the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of.”
The twinkle of mirth in his eyes faded when the core trapper roared again, this time far too close for comfort.
“It’s only XP,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “How many more of those muffins
do you have?”
“Four. I can’t make more and still have enough for Marie’s Antoinette’s Revenge. Well, unless we find a fleckulent. Then I’ll be able to make quite a bit of either. But Howard, you don’t have to do this.”
“Don’t forget, I have this.”
I waggled the hand with Elfie’s ring.
“Ah, yes, I’d forgotten,” Felix said. “By all means…”
The slow digestion I’d had going burned 7200 XP an hour. I increased that to 13,500,000 an hour, or 225 thousand a minute—the most I could pull at once. This would consume the muffin—sitting at around seventy-five percent—in less than a minute. It upped my strength and vitality to 25,000 each, and my resistances to 5000 across the board. It also filled me with so much hyperactive energy I wanted to explode in about thirty directions at once.
I launched myself at the stone and pressed my hands against it. As I shoved, the shield ring protected me long enough to see the porous rock outside the lair. Less than five seconds later, the shield was gone and my hands were burning. With 5000 pain resistance, it felt like a tickle. Later, I’d clock my damage at 11,000 points a second—incredibly high for anyone not gorging on delectomancy.
“Aaaagh!” I screamed, shoving as hard as I could and trying not to gag on the smell of burning meat.
With an earsplitting crack, the capstone broke in half, and I tumbled forward into a roll. I twisted and saw the worm had backed out of its hole to come bearing down on me. With a yelp, I launched myself through the air, soaring into the night sky like a rocket.
I was so high on my own mighty energy that I forgot to squelch the burn until a game message arrived:
YOU HAVE LOST A LEVEL!
“Howard!” Felix yelled as I made my descent. “Didn’t you hear me yelling?”
I blinked stupidly at him and shook my head. “No, I…”
“Never mind. Come on. Let’s get back to the ship.”
With a final look at the core trapper below—bellowing in futile rage—I nodded and followed him.
Chapter Thirty-One
Although my plan had been technically perfect (being a plan to get into the hole), that didn’t stop Elfie and Felix from laying it on thick when we were back together.
“It was like an oven,” Felix said. “We were this far from being cooked and served to perfection!”
Elfie, who’d woken to defend the ship after we’d left, smiled tiredly. “Out of the fire, into the frying pan.”
“Our goose was cooked!” he said.
“Burning the candle at both ends.”
“Ah, but the worm had bigger fish to fry.”
I cleared my throat. “We were as cool as a cucumber?”
Loud enough for me to hear, Elfie whispered, “I think he wants us to drop it. You know … like a hot potato.”
To me, it seemed Felix’s laugh came louder than the occasion called for.
“You guys are a real riot,” I said. “Anyway, Feelsy, if you still want to keep going, we’ll have to ensure our escape. In fact, maybe Elfie should go instead of me.”
Surprisingly, she shook her head. “Bored as I am—and I am—there’s no way you, or even Felix, can cover the whole ship without casualties. But I have something that might help you.”
She reached into her Portable Hoard and handed me a ring of keys.
Bump Keys
Gets you in and outta tight spots, see? So’s you don’t gotta worry no more. Only don’t go trying ’em on anything magical, on account of they don’t work so good there. Now get goin’—scram.
“I’ve seen these before,” I said. “I was a warrior-thief at the time so I never needed them. They say you have to be quick, though, or squish…”
Elfie nodded. “They only last a few seconds. Felix and I use them to rob lucid warehouses in Brighton, and we never get squished. Great way to gather herbs and spices, but sometimes there’s a bumper crop of saffron. Or truffles! Remember that Fee-fee?”
“Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen,” Felix said tragically.
“You two?” I said. “Stealing?”
“No different than beekeepers harvesting honey,” she said without a hint of remorse. “The warehouses fill up with goods brought in from all over. To cover the cost of the keys, we loot everything and sell what we don’t need.”
“That said, we’re not greedy,” Felix said. “Greed’s a sin, you know.”
“Felix is a non-practicing atheist,” Elfie said solemnly.
I stared between them, trying to see if they were putting me on, and then just shook my head. If I’d known they were thieves, I might have worried more about my 20 million. Not that it mattered at this point. They’d already proven themselves trustworthy a hundred times over.
“There’s only ten,” she said, holding out the keys.
I smiled and took them from her. “We’ll make it work.”
Felix and I waited until morning to head back out. We wanted to see if respawns resulted in the exact same worms we’d fought before or ones of different sizes. This would help answer our running theory that bigger worms had longer holes. If we were right, we’d save our bump keys for the truly humongous core trappers.
“Down there!” Felix said, pointing to where we’d fought the first one. “I’ll be the bait this time.”
I cocked my head at him. “I thought you said dwarves were too little to attract their attention.”
Felix snorted. “Never trust a dwarf when he’s lying.”
With that parting salvo, he flew down and started jumping around while cackling in a high-pitched voice. Surprisingly irritating. Once again, the capstone flew up and a worm shot out. Ready for it, he leaped away, clearing the grinding maw of death by several feet, then returned to my side.
“Same worm as last time,” he said with a boyish grin.
“Guess my luck’s finally turning.”
“Nothing bad can happen now…”
We spent the day scouting the island for more worms. We used our internal maps to mark where the biggest ones were, then came back to relieve Elfie, who looked miserable and haggard from lack of sleep, though still beautiful.
Elfie spent the next day stocking up on sleep while Felix and I did our best to fend off attacks on the ship: crab attacks, humanoid fish called fin runners, and slow-moving acidic starfish that nearly engulfed us before we noticed. The latter weren’t so much dangerous as physically destructive, and we had to muster the entire crew to pick them off the hull and fling them away.
With the worms mapped and Elfie rested, it was time for me and Felix to go hunting. Our first lair was that of a truly large worm whose hole went down much deeper than those previous, but which still ended up narrowing and stalling in a dead end.
Once again, I’d lured the worm away with dead crabs, just barely regaining my lost level in the process through tightly controlled digestion. This time, when we needed to leave, I removed one of the keys from the ring and threw it at the red-hot stone. Upon impact, an open doorway appeared in the middle of it. With Felix right behind me, we stormed through. My shield, I noticed, deflected small amounts of fire damage from the superheated air.
The worm was busy burrowing a new hole, so it missed us entirely, and a few seconds later, the door disappeared as if it had never been there.
“Handy,” I said.
“We buy them from an enchanter we know,” Felix said. “Hundred thousand a key. They say there’s an improved version—works on warded rooms—but I’ve never heard of anyone who makes them.”
We tried three more worm lairs before finding a hole that didn’t pinch shut at the end. It kept going deep into the turtle shell, whose walls went from hard and rough to porous, and then spongy as we neared the flesh.
“Watch your step!” he called back.
Too late, I slipped on the surprisingly slick floor but caught myself. A trickle of some dark liquid ran down the middle of the tunnel. Curious, I stooped for a closer inspection.
“It’s
blood,” I said.
Felix nodded. “Turtle blood, to be precise. This isn’t just a hole in the shell. It’s a wound. Come on—let’s keep going.”
The walls of the tunnel gradually changed from gray to dullish pink to bright cherry red. The brighter parts were covered in thousands of tiny worms similar in every way but size to the massive core trappers on the surface. The smallest was around two inches, and the largest close to two feet in length and maybe five inches in diameter. They clung to the walls and ceiling by their feelers and gorged on the exposed wound. Their immature bodies were partially translucent, and we could actually see the chunks of bloody flesh as they sluiced down.
“I hate these things more than I should,” I said.
“Disgusting,” Felix said, edging around one of the larger ones as it writhed spastically.
“Should we keep going?” I said. “Feels sort of weird … you know … inside something living like this.”
Felix grimaced. “Kind of like Bite’s Lair in the Trial of Pain, except without the faces in the walls screaming at you.”
“And the smell,” I said.
“And the conversation.”
“There’s something to this beyond the grossness,” I said, taking the lead in case I needed to tank. “If there’s a fleckulent to be had, I can’t think of a more fitting place for it than way down here.”
He didn’t agree or disagree. He just followed as I carefully picked my way around the worms and tried not to slip again.
The creatures didn’t attack us, but they did fight with each other for sections of particularly bloody flesh, and several times we came across worms eating each other. The story or theme behind this, I figured, was that the bigger ones would eat the smaller ones and then turn on each other. Whichever was left over would become big like the ones outside—maybe even fight them for supremacy. This would never happen, of course, given what we knew about respawns, but it was an interesting ecological story the devs had set up.
Ten minutes later, Felix and I arrived in a hollowed-out cavity in the flesh infested with thick, wriggling worms. But no fleckulents.