It has been nearly a month since the apocalypse and Grenriver has turned into a community hub. Survivors trickle in by the day and tentative sigil based economy has emerged. The adventurers guild and law enforcement are well set up and while people still die, it is far less frequently than it has been.
I had almost been certain that the paradise that was forming could not be ruined by anything. Then it happened a man arrived in an armored national guard truck and he said the dreaded words. I’m with the government and I’m here to help.
Day 29, Owen Landers
Armadillo and mosquito both turned out to be inaccurate. The beast that could only have been sourced from the most evil mind in hell was more akin to a giant tick. It glared at Silas as it moved from one downed raptor to the next, slurping each of them up like a meat slushy. Looking over the creature, Silas was unsure how to kill this thing. It was huge and completely armored.
In an odd reversal of what he was used to, Bella and Samantha would be better at killing large and slow enemies. Heating the armored plates to nine hundred degrees should be more than enough to cook it alive. Silas didn’t back down, just because it was a giant bug, didn’t mean he couldn’t do anything to it. Sure it was bigger than him in terms of mass, but it was mostly congregated in an armored meatball. Silas was human shaped, which lent itself better to creative violence than a three hundred pound bowling ball.
“I will do God’s work and rid the world of you,” Silas said. The tick glared at him with its beady eyes, not at all getting his humor.
Silas shrugged and stabbed the beast. The point glanced off the glass like armor. It was so translucent that Silas could see the organs jiggle with the impact. Disgusting. The tick whipped its proboscis at Silas. Its body might have been slow, but its head was not. The proboscis smacked Silas’s leg like a whip, cutting a deep gouge into his ankle.
He was grateful that he had taken the time to bulk up his protections there. Silas retaliated by taking a wood chopping stance. It was probably not good to use a sword in this way, but he had no idea how else to use it. He brought it down, cracking the carapace on its head. The reverberation made him wince as it painfully rattled his hands. He needed to look into rubber grips.
A second proboscis whip came, but Silas was expecting it. The blow was quick, but only when compared to the tick’s lumbering movements. Despite the grossness of this creature, Silas did not doubt his decision to bring it back to Samantha. It only had two traits, eating anything and its carapace. Either ability would be worth getting for Samantha, he just had to figure out how to get the thing back to camp.
He struck it once again only to have his weapon bounce off. The only damage he had caused was a hairline crack to the head, otherwise he had made no headway. It took him an embarrassingly long time to come to the appropriate course of action. This tick was slow, barely able to move at the speed of a geriatric old man with a walker.
Silas walked around the back of the bug, knelt, and grabbed the underside of the shell. It tried to scuttle away, but as he had noticed before, its best attempts at movement were slow. He hefted the back end of the three hundred and fifty pound creature off the ground. It was heavy, but he didn’t need to get it airborne. Straining his legs, he flipped the insect over onto its back.
He blinked at what he was seeing. Picturing the monster as a tick had led him to believe there would be insectile legs beneath. Instead, there was a large fleshy pad that undulated wildly like a snail, though with less slime. Silas tried to place this creature in a neat box that he could understand. It was just so strange, reminding him of those videos with titles like ‘alien creatures in the ocean’ listing creatures that defied normal categorization.
Now that he thought about it, most of those things were in Australia, Bella probably wouldn’t think an armadillo snail tick was weird when compared to a venomous beaver duck that sweats milk. He paused, maybe platypuses were originally denizens of hell that never got cleared out.
The flesh pad undulated and the round shell rocked back and forth. It was not much at the moment, but the tick would eventually build up the necessary momentum to flip itself over. Silas guessed it would take some time to accumulate that momentum and even more for it to escape. So he turned to the raptors, he needed to make something to help him drag the tick back.
One of the bodies, the one missing a wing twitched. Oh no you don’t, Silas mentally growled at the reviving German raptor. Its dead eyes cleared as life returned to them only for a boot to slam down on its neck. Then a sharp object was shoved between its vertebrae, ending the monster’s life for the second time in ten minutes.
Silas purified it and tossed the sigil where he had placed the other one. Then he went about removing the bones from one and bleeding the other. He was getting better at removing a creature’s skeleton. It was not a skill he was particularly proud of, but it was useful when he was on a time limit.
Cleaning the bones took a few hours and he had to stop the tick from rolling over a few times. Eventually, he was able to turn the German raptor’s skeleton into a type of hook and harness that could be shoved into the soft pad on the tick’s underside. The tick made no noise when two bone spikes were shoved into its underside. Silas took a moment to collect the sigils and eggs in the rawhide bag before hauling on his makeshift tool.
The beast moved. Thankfully the carapace was smooth to the point it was almost slippery, though it was still not easy. Three hundred fifty pounds was heavy, it was frustratingly heavy when he realized that he had a ten mile hike back to camp. There wasn’t much he could do about that now except walk the distance.
One thing became rapidly clear. Silas wouldn’t be able to sneak his way through the ravines like he had on the way in. An issue he came to realize when he crossed paths with a group of rubber monkeys. If there was one thing Silas had learned since arriving in hell, it was that he had a temper and unlike Earth, taking it out on the nearest wildlife was a valid option.
The monkeys threw a few rocks at him as they rushed in. Silas ignored the shots, they thunked off his armor without doing any damage. They were just as shocked as the first set that he had met when their initial volley was ignored, then again when their shaggy fur didn’t absorb the impact of the mantis blade.
He impaled the first one and grabbed the second with his offhand. The creature was just as strong as he was, despite being smaller. Silas demonstrated why martial arts were split by weight class, not bench record. The monkey was heavy, likely the same as Silas, but he had an additional seventy pounds of armor. So he dragged the beast in and wrapped an arm around its neck.
It thrashed, whipping the four other monkeys into a frenzy. However, the rocks they threw in response were blocked by his unwilling shield. Placing a foot on the impaled monkey he twisted and jerked the barbed weapon free. Purifying the creature gave him another sigil, which he left for later.
The monkey in his arms tried to squirm free and would have managed if the stone blades protruding from his vambrace hadn’t dug into its skin. It thrashed but had a terrible angle to do anything about Silas’s grip. He marched over to the other creatures who backed off uncertainly. That was a first, he hadn’t seen the denizens of hell hesitate before.
“Yeah, that’s what you get for attacking someone minding their own business,” Silas taunted them. He ignored the fact that he was currently dragging around a tick that also had been minding its own business. It was a disgusting bloodsucker, so it didn’t count.
He didn’t know if they understood his words or just his tone, but the monkey’s eyes went hazy with rage. They rushed at him with their hands holding large stones as makeshift bludgeons. He held their comrade up like a shield and they did not spare him. The rubbery fur did a respectable job of deflecting the strikes, though it was not as complete as Silas had expected.
The mantis blade was made of an incredible material, but it wasn’t a magical one. He struck a monkey on the ribs expecting to cut into them. Unfortunately, the blade had dulled as time went on. Constantly using it to chop into shells and bones was just about the fastest way to dull any tool. Still, it was better than anything he could make with bone.
Retracting his arm, Silas surged forward. He used his captive like a battering ram to knock over two primates and thrust the mantis blade through a throat. A twist, yank, and kick got him the blade back and another dead monkey. The one who wasn’t tired of being knocked around screeched before jumping on Silas’s back.
Shaggy feet with opposable thumbs latched around his waist. The monkey proceeded to use both of the rocks in its hands to beat Silas’s helmet like a drum. It did not hurt much, but it did send a shock through his head causing Silas to worry about potential concussions. Still, he had three others to worry about.
He turned and stabbed through his prisoner and into one of the monkeys he had just knocked over. The one in his arms died immediately but the other would live, assuming the stab to its hip didn’t hit any arteries. Quickly dropping his prisoner and his weapon, Silas reached up with both hands and grabbed two fistfuls of fur. He snapped his entire body like a whip, bringing the beast over a shoulder and head first into the rocky ground.
Silas caught the final unharmed monkey by the wrist as it tried to brain him with a rock. He kicked it in the groin with his steel toed boots. The beast froze for a moment. Silas could imagine the pain that was about to hit it, a feeling that never arrived as he stabbed his skinning knife into its brain stem.
He gave the mantis blade a firm tug to tear it free. Meat was clinging to the barbs running down the reverse edge as he removed it. Silas didn’t give the concussed monkey time to regain its feet. He brought the blade down on its neck. It didn’t chop through, but something broke causing the beast to go limp. The final creature only lasted a few more seconds, it didn’t even try to run as Silas closed in on it. Fear was completely absent from its eyes unlike what would be obvious from a normal animal.
When the last monkey was dead, Silas took a moment to survey his surroundings. He blinked when he realized that he had been the one to march into a monster’s territory and he was the one who won. These weren’t particularly powerful denizens of hell, but they were still more than he could have handled when he arrived. He wasn’t even breathing too heavily.
That wasn’t to say that this had been easy, but it had also felt that way. Despite being one lucky shot to the face of his open helm from death, he had felt confident. The exertion had been above what he could normally expect from his body. Normally people struggled to go full throttle for more than thirty seconds, but he had done it for two minutes straight. He clenched his fist, this was the power of Flesh Lord. Before he got cocky he needed to remind himself that he was only alive because he had been lucky to get the sigil.
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There was also the fact that these were lesser monsters. Silas had seen several different strata of creatures. There were the pests like bone squirrels and stone geckos. Above them were lesser monsters like the monkeys, cockroaches, and the tick. They seemed to form the bulk of the wildlife in hell. Normal monsters ruled over the lesser ones nearly uncontested, Silas was still unsure of fighting a werewolf or centi-snake fairly. Finally the sentient monsters, they ran the gambit from the upper end of lesser all the way to greater monsters. Their chiefs were the only greater ones he had seen so far.
Silas had tried to categorize the kaiju in his mind, but he lacked any frame of reference. He assumed them to be similar in power to things like Nimrod. It would be a long time before he could even think of killing one of those. However, so long as he kept progressing it would be possible some day.
Today was not that day, today was the day he hauled a tick back to his camp. He ate a quick meal from the drained German raptor before patching up some cracks in his armor. Making sure his greatest asset was fueled was important. So it was with six rubber monkey sigils, two German raptor ones, and an upside down tick, that he started on his way back.
It was a long trip, not only because hauling a large object cross country was difficult. In every occupied ravine he was forced to stop and fight. The rapidly dulling mantis blade became more and more of a problem as time went on. Instant death became a painful blow and grievous injuries were reduced to minor ones. It soon became clear that he was relying heavily on his vitality and sigil to outlast the monsters. Thankfully, food was plentiful and he was able to keep going.
Silas had to repair his armor several times. His most difficult confrontation came in the form of another sphinx. This one had the face of a Middle Eastern woman - at least until it opened its mouth. Most women didn’t have rows of needle sharp teeth. Silas had particular enmity with this creature. So he brutally abused the weakness that was a human’s skull structure.
The sphinx still tore a set of four parallel gouges down his chest plate and bit a grieve hard enough that a row of punctures ran along his leg. The monster’s powers centered around confusion, not combat, so with no time to prepare it fell to him. Silas hoped to never come across a sphinx that had time to set up its mental manipulations. The dream had been bad enough, but what if its enthrallment progressed to the point he couldn’t tell fact from fiction?
He imagined a family being turned against each other by a monster hiding in their attic. Slowly they would be turned into thralls before being consumed or used to bring more victims forward. All while living in a fantasy designed to keep them submissive. He shuddered, every sphinx he met needed to die.
“Finally,” Silas sighed in relief when the lake came into view. He had a moment of surprise looking at the body of water. Was it bigger?
He had not paid particular attention to the lake after noticing it wasn’t evaporating. A more curious man might have asked why, but Silas was focused on escape. A glance around the shores showed nothing. No, not nothing. Several patches of green poked up from a few ravines. Silas couldn’t recognize the plant from where he was, but the mere fact that plants were growing was a good sign.
Could they grow vegetables? Silas missed vegetables, it was a thought that he had never believed would cross his mind, but he would trade his armor for a handful of carrots. He would consider trading his sword for some pizza. Silas shook his head to clear it of daydreams before wearily grabbing the tick and continuing.
The monster had long ago resigned itself to being dragged around. It was a scavenger, not a hunter, and lacked any way to free itself. Both Samantha and Bella turned from their projects when they heard him approach. Silas was gratified when he saw relief cross their faces, it made him feel less alone.
Samantha rushed up to him, “Are you hurt? You have blood everywhere. What’s that? Is that its heart and its guts? Mrs. Cornigy is my science teacher and she would like this one. Can we keep it?”
Silas mentally cataloged the questions. It was a skill developed due to a nasty habit one of his drill sergeants had. He would ask two rhetorical questions, a real one, and then another few rhetorical ones and expect his recruits to remember them. Silas disliked that man with a passion, if they met again, he would punch the man in the face before asking him how he was doing.
“No. It's not mine. A giant tick snail thing. Yes, that’s its heart. No, you get to kill it,” Silas answered.
Samantha’s gush of words was stymied as she tried to match the answers to the questions. Before she managed to do so, Bella arrived, “I was worried you were dead.”
Silas scratched his head, “Yeah, I’m kind of hard to kill now.”
It was not an exaggeration. He was by no means an immortal killing machine, but he was a pretty good personification of the saying ‘what doesn’t kill you just makes you stronger’.
“Still, if you plan to disappear for a day and a half give me some warning,” Bella huffed, “We are vulnerable at the moment, neither of our sigils are as good as yours in this environment.”
Nodding, Silas asked a question that had stumped him, “How are you telling time? You knew when it was time to go to sleep as well.”
Bella pulled up her sleeve in answer. She was wearing a solar powered watch. It was an old piece of technology, as the biotech tended to have better clocks on it. Still, it was an obvious answer that he should have thought of.
“Ah, that makes sense,” Silas nodded, “Back to what you said before, this is an answer to one of our problems. Samantha should be able to get another sigil and this is one of the better candidates that I found.”
Bella gave him a skeptical look.
“No seriously, it should either get her a consumption ability like my flesh lord or an armor ability,” Silas knocked on the glass carapace, “The ability won’t even be a lesser one if the two of you cook it with your thermal cultivator sigils.”
Bella’s eyes lit up when she heard that, “You spent a few days just to get something for Sammy?”
Silas felt a bit awkward when he saw the telltale signs of tears in her eyes. He had no idea what to do when Abby cried and he knew almost everything about her. Quick Silas, change the subject. He thought.
“I see you did some work on the cave?” Silas asked.
Bella nodded, “It turns out that digging into solid stone is much easier than we expected.”
“How so?” Silas asked.
“We simply heated every rock to the highest temperature that we could. They would expand, crush the surrounding rocks a bit and when they cooled down the rock would be loose,” Bella shrugged as if using temperature to mine was no big deal, “It didn’t work every time, but I think it helped.”
Silas glanced at the hole in the formation. It was about waist high, but he could tell that it went much deeper than he could see. He would need to make supports for the interior when it was complete. Bone was ridiculously strong when it came to certain directional forces. A handful of foot wide rounds of bone would work great as supports for the roof. He even had the spare bones for it, courtesy of his tick adventure.
“You want me to kill it?” Samantha yelled after putting the answers to the correct questions.
“Yes,” Silas nodded, “It should have the powers that work the best for you.”
“But what about Mrs. Cornigy?” Samantha whimpered.
Silas almost told her that her science teacher was likely dead, but caught himself. Instead, he asked a different question, “What did Mrs. Cornigy say about invasive species?”
Samantha frowned, her eyes rolled up in her head in the way some children did to show they were thinking extra hard. A few seconds later she found the memory, “They destroy ecosystems because there are no predators and they eat food that other animals need.”
Silas nodded, then patted the tick, “Would she want you to bring this thing to Australia? Nothing down there could eat it.”
He threw a quick glance at Bella. It was Australia, he had seen a picture of a snake eating a crocodile, so maybe there was something that would eat it. He did remember that rabbits were an ecological disaster and bunnies should be easier to handle than a three hundred pound, armored tick. Bella shrugged like she wasn’t sure one way or the other.
“Sorry armadillo monster, I couldn’t save you,” Samantha muttered.
Silas chose to ignore the fact that this girl felt pity for a tick, “You and your mom just need to place your hands on its head and use your thermal cultivation.”
Bella guided her daughter’s hand to the side of the creature’s head. Silas held the proboscis still, while they worked. He had been raised in a hunting family, which was itself in a hunting culture. It never crossed his mind to feel bad for the animals he shot unless he failed to drop them with a single bullet. It was natural, far more so than raising animals in tiny pens for slaughter like many large corporations tended to.
Samantha was not raised in a hunting community. It showed in how her hand trembled. Even Bella’s face was uncomfortable with what was going on, she just cared more for her daughter than the crippled monster. Several tears leaked down Samantha’s face when she used her sigil at her mother's prompting.
The tick struggled as its carapace became hot. Soon, Silas could smell cooking meat, then the giant bloodsucker went still. He jumped back when the glass carapace popped like a soap bubble. The mantis blade was half drawn by the time Silas realized that the shell had simply vanished. There had been a thin membrane beneath the shell, so it didn’t fall apart into a bloody mess.
Bella glanced between Silas and the bag of guts on the ground, “What do we do now?”
“Touch it and when your interface asks if you want to purify it, say yes,” Silas was pretty sure he could also do this, he had helped just as much with this tick as Matteo had with the second werewolf.
Bella looked like she wanted to vomit as she touched the bag with a finger. She jumped back when black smoke enveloped the creature, crackling to a luminous purple. The sigil floating gently above the corpse was not what Silas expected. Instead of a stylized bloodsucker, there was what looked like a WiFi symbol. It was just a dot with semicircular lines radiating from it.
Curiously, Silas attempted to pick it up. His hand phased through it. He looked down at the appendage, a bit disgruntled. Why couldn’t he touch it?
Samantha flinched and Bella’s eyes started flicking back and forth as if she was reading something, “It says we can give it to you, but it will be degraded.”
“Don’t give it to me. Samantha that’s for you,” Silas nodded to the sigil. It appeared that hauling around the monster did not count towards assisting them.
Samantha’s sorrow over killing something was shunted aside by the offering of a shiny new toy. Well, it was just a tick. She leaned over as far as she could trying not to touch the bag of flesh. Her index finger barely brushed up against the sigil. That was enough contact, it dissolved flowing into her fingers.
“What is it called?” Silas asked.
The girl frowned, “Uh, I don’t know, but everything feels funny.”
Right, no biotech. Silas wondered how they would go about determining the effect of the sigil. If an event like this occurred in the past, people would have needed to figure things out without help from their technology.
Silas’s reaction was curiosity, but Bella’s was concern. She knelt by her daughter, placing the back of one hand against the girl’s forehead, “What’s wrong, do you feel sick?”
“No,” Samantha said pawing at the air like there was something there to touch, “It isn’t as soft.”
Now Silas was getting concerned. Nothing said that all sigils had to be beneficial. Samantha poked something in the air and something happened. It was like she had punctured some kind of membrane, leaving behind a bubble like film stretching the length of her finger. When Samantha moved her finger to inspect it, the bubble quickly dried out acting similarly to shrink wrap. Within a few moments, Samantha had a translucent glass coating on her finger.
She proudly waggled the finger at her mom, “I have bubble powers.”
That was not quite what he expected. Silas had hoped for armor and it did make sense that Samantha would get a power similar to the ticks. They needed to test the limitations. Did it need to be hard? Could she dismiss and summon it anywhere? Could Samantha mold it after it was created?
Regardless of the answer to those questions, Samantha would be well protected. The girl immediately answered one question by popping the glass finger. She giggled at the reaction her mom had to it. Bella still seemed a bit concerned that she was unable to see what Samantha saw.
Silas had one very pressing question, “How did you know to do that?”
Samantha had no interface to direct her. She shouldn’t know what she had just absorbed. Silas would have taken quite some time to figure out how to use his bone crafter if he didn’t have it spelled out. Sure he would have discovered it as soon as he tried to make a bone tool the old fashioned way, but that would have still taken days.
The child shrugged, “The same way I make things get hotter. It just feels like the right thing to do. I poke the air and it gets hard.”
She demonstrated a second time by shoving her arm out. It was instantly coated in a bubble that rapidly contracted into fogged glass. Then that popped and she waved her hand.
Smiling, she coated her hand and held it out, “Do you want to touch it?”
Silas very much did. He prodded it with his finger. It was room temperature, or whatever the term for ambient temperature was. Silas frowned, “Didn’t you say that you made the air hard?”
Samantha misunderstood his frown, “Yes, is that bad?”
Bella was already tense and looked at Silas with concern. Silas shook his head, “No, no, it's just that solid air should be incredibly cold. By that, I mean over a hundred degrees below zero or more.”
“It's a superpower, it can break the rules,” Samantha said, it was in a tone that said Silas should already know that.
Silas nodded, “Yeah, but I’m starting to learn that anything that breaks those rules is just begging to be exploited.”
“What do you mean?” Bella asked.
“Well here’s what I’m wondering, does your thermal cultivator only heat things to nine hundred degrees, or can we make a feedback loop with reflected light to get you two limited pyromancy?” Silas knew that he likely wouldn’t create the world’s first fire mages, but they could at the very least make lava to dump off the top of the rock formations. He hadn’t seen much that could take a bucket of molten rock to the top of the head.
