Chapter 202: Damage Control

William Oh has a magic map that reveals your deepest fears, and he uses it to summon your worst nightmares into this reality.

Do I believe it? Nah, it’s just a story, man. Hyperbole.

Steak bug shells were everywhere, creating a black mound that collected up against the posts that formed the fence hemming the insects inside their muck-filled pens.

Will did a quick scan and only counted a couple hundred or so of the enormous meat beetles when there should have been thousands.

Phantom Eye.

187 Charges Remaining.

Will scanned the surrounding area while he continued walking the premises, the farmer nearly manic with equal parts rage and panic.

“And here’s where the rest of them are. I’ve got my son watching them. One hundred and eighty-nine out of a bumper crop of ten thousand. We’re screwed. SCREWED.”

“You know what it was?” Will asked.

“We’ve got a watch on the outskirts 24/7.” The farmer said, shaking his head. “If anyone or anything had come from the wild, we would’ve seen it.

Will scanned.

The steak-bug farms abutted the Stronghold. All the food scraps from the entire Stronghold were collected and channeled down a single road and given to the steak bugs, who converted it back into meat far more efficiently than typical livestock outside The Tower.

There was a sandstone wall on another side, leaving only one direction a monster could’ve typically come from.

Will knelt and picked up one of the discarded shells, turning it over in his hand.

When he first selected Uru Drake’s Eye as a secondary Ability, he had been overwhelmed by the amount of information, blinded by the persistant blue fog that was Miasma.

Over the last few years, his brain had gradually adjusted. Inch by inch, his vision had cleared until he could see a couple hundred feet away without relying on Phantom Eye. It wasn’t great, but it was certainly good enough for most of his daily life.

Will peered down at the steak beetle shell, turning it this way and that as he inspected the miasmatic scorch marks on the shell.

They were passive channels in the shell itself that Loth had invented without even knowing what they looked like. They trapped Miasma and caused it to shed off like water from a duck’s back, keeping the creature insides free from the magic’s corrupting influence, which explained how the bugs never turned into monsters, and their meat remained when they died without needing preservation magic.

The miasma being concentrated like that as it was turned away from the beetle caused a bit of damage to the nonmagical shell itself, creating growth marks only visible to Will’s eyes.

But that wasn’t the only damage. There was also a half-circle about the size of a coin cut into the side of the shell.

“What’s your Class?” Will asked.

“Livestock Breeder, milord.” The farmer said.

So, not a retired Climber, and instead someone who the Stronghold can’t do without. I’ll have to cut him some slack.

It was funny how the higher you went in the tower, the more consideration you had to give to support staff, simply because of how critically irreplaceable they became.

“I understand the desire to protect yourself and the people close to you from starvation, but I’d prefer it if you took those hundred or so steak bugs that you hid and bred them with the others to allow the population to recover faster, even if it’s only by a few days.”

The farmer, having been the very first to realize that a famine was imminent, had sequestered a small supply of steak bugs in a shed off to the side of his farm, and tried to lie to Will about how many were remaining.

“…You saw that, huh?” The farmer asked, rubbing his neck. “A bottleneck is actually less of a problem than you might think. The females lay thousands of eggs. Waiting for them to mature and stopping the larva from eating each other is where most of the work lies. We’d get roughly the same bumper crop from ten as we would from three hundred, because food and population density are only limits here. The Kobold who bred these things…” The man shook his head in admiration.

“…You have any Ability to make them grow faster?” Will asked.

“One at a time, sure.” The man said with a shrug. “It’s for breeding specific traits faster, not for industrial meat output.”

“Anna, work together with…” Will glanced at the farmer.

“Ron.”

“See if you can’t work with Ron and any other Breeders to find a Relic that will allow them to turn his single-target growth Ability into a chain or better yet, an AOE. There might be some Buffers, Debuffers, or Nukers with kit specifically geared for that who might be willing to loan it out to prevent famine. Check the ones who work for us first and the civilians second. Strong-arm them as a last-resort.”

“Got it.”

“And give Ron here about…a hundred pounds of flour from our stores.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Will glanced back at the farmer. “In exchange, you won’t dip into the steak-bugs until they’re back to full numbers.”

“Understood.”

Will glanced toward the shed in the distance where the farmer had hidden the last steak-bugs, hazy in the miasma.

“And the other farms had a similar overnight attack? They all need better protection. Can you find suitable places to store the bugs, preferably with stone floors. And get Ria to watch them all until we kill whatever did this?”

Anna gave him a sharp salute, jiggling a bit.

Will caught himself staring, then shook his head before squatting down into the muck of the pen and picking out empty shell after empty shell, getting complete exoskeletons where he could.

Every complete shell showed a hole drilled through it.

Whatever had attacked had restrained the beetle, chewed a hole through the side of it, then scooped out the insides.

It must be small. Too small to eat the beetle all at once. They aren’t that tough after all. Anything the size of a dog or larger would just tear through the shell and eat the steak out from the top.

Circular mouth…

Will paused, remembering.

The Establishing Quest he’d gone on when he was just starting out, when he’d met Loth, Mason and Reggie for the first time…There had been an underground canyon filled with giant worms with circular jaws filled with teeth designed to draw you in…

Circular jaws might be able to bore a hole like this, and a soft body could push through that hole and reach every inch of the inside. It would have to be much, much smaller, though…

A worm? Will thought, scanning the empty shells littering the grounds.

A LOT of worms. Some kind of swarm. That nobody saw or heard coming.

If they’re moving underground that explains why we didn’t catch them.

As he stood back up, Will felt Anna’s hand on his shoulder again.

“…Bad news. Syrup farms north of us got hit too.”

Will’s brows raised. The cactus farms that they got their syrup from was one of the only ways to get any kind of sugar and prevent scurvy this high up in The Tower, and people not getting their sugar was absolutely going to cause a riot.

With steak production crippled, Will wasn’t in a position where he could afford to lose the food source, either.

“They didn’t see what did it there either?” Will asked.