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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”