Backwoods Dungeon

Chapter Seventeen

Laying a Trap

I got an interview the next morning. Barry Baker called from a company in the city, offering me a job as internal tele-help for employees. The company was both a contractor and supplier of large industrial equipment. If I were to take it, my job would be tech support for technicians in the field who could install gigantic air compressors but were flummoxed by Microsoft Outlook.

Ugh.

We hadn’t discussed pay. My hopes were high since the company was actually national. I didn’t know if I’d enjoy it much. It certainly wouldn’t compare to the high of racking up eight hundred dollars in a few hours while learning magic, but at least I’d be alive.

I also had an idea for a way to have my cake and eat it, too. Unfortunately, it would take another trip to the cave to confirm its viability.

I called Rio to let her know I’d gotten an interview already. I had to cash in those good brownie points while they were available. Even if I didn’t get this job, scoring an interview on the Tuesday after losing a job over the weekend showed initiative! I never wanted Rio to think she’d married a loser.

Even if…

I shook myself. No use worrying about that now.

Of course, that was when I spotted a bill from the doctor's appointment that had confirmed my inability to have children in the mail piled on the kitchen counter.

I loved paying for bad news! Highlight of my day, really.

I sighed, remembering the other motivation for choosing Druid. The healing aura. Well. It certainly worked on injuries. Potions had mostly healed the deadly wounds I’d received, but the aura had done its job, too. Rio hadn’t noticed anything amiss when she’d gotten home on Sunday, except the big scar on my chest that had since faded to looking like an old war wound.

I didn't have any of those, but it was explainable as a bad scratch from the dog, which said a lot about the aura's effectiveness.

Still, there was no way for me to know if the healing worked in… other ways. I certainly wasn’t going to pay for another test. Insurance didn’t pay for this. Sometimes, I wondered how we’d even managed to stay afloat when I had a job. So, rationalizing another fertility test was out of the question.

I supposed I’d know if the healing aura worked when Rio did.

I had little to do except apply for more jobs and attempt my little plan. It wasn’t exactly complex. Grabbing my trusty shovel and a pilfered dagger from one of the dead goblins, my two pistols with ammo to spare, and a backpack holding the Identifier and the Portal Stone, I set off toward the cave around ten in the morning.

I didn’t intend to enter it this time, but I wasn’t going to just assume that my vines had held the entrance closed. Who knew how many of the buggers might be swarming the woods.

I needn’t have worried. Luckily, the entrance to the cave seemed undisturbed. I could still teleport to the waypoint, but I decided against that. One goblin had been waiting for me the first time I’d done so. For all I knew, they could be laying a trap around it. It’s what I would have done.

To an extent, it was what I was doing.

I summoned one more wind totem and buried it where I knew its radius would cover the cave’s entrance. I would’ve summoned another, but I feared encountering more goblins without at least some mana. Instead, I let my mana slowly regenerate. It took about ten to fifteen minutes to recover fully, time which I spent happily crushing an opponent in an online card game on my phone. Then, I summoned another.

And another.

And another.

I spent maybe two hours playing card games and burying wind totems. Then, reading the description again, I decided I’d wait another hour and get four more things, but discovered that after the tenth totem, I could no longer summon more of them. Not without damn near killing myself from mana starvation, anyway.

Each totem apparently held a portion of my total mana reserve. So, each new one I made meant I had a bit less total mana to use for other things. Creating one took about half of my total mana. Fortunately, maintaining them required a bit less than one-twentieth. I had eleven active totems, using up half my mana to maintain. I could no longer make another one without mana starving myself, the same way I had when I’d first used Cyclone Armor.

That didn’t bother me too much, though. It had taken me a while to run out of mana by manipulating vines. I’d also been running my Cyclone Armor and my healing aura simultaneously at the time. I suspected the armor would last much longer if I’d had my healing aura turned off the next time I used it.

I waited for my mana to recharge as fully as it would go before I turned my aura back on. Losing passive mana regeneration didn’t matter much when I already had a full stock. Instantly, all ten of the little totems swam to life. Each of them soaked up my aura like plants soaking up sunshine.

This might’ve all been a huge waste of time, of course. I didn’t know if the totems were actually powerful enough to kill a goblin. I hoped they were. The last thing I wanted was more of the creatures infesting my land. The slopes around the cave were steep, and hardly any of the totems were buried at the same elevation. The goblins might flee at the first paper cut from the closest totem or be sliced to ribbons. I had no way to know because the things clearly didn’t work on normal animals.

Thank god for that. Genji was sitting beside me when I charged the first one.

By the time I’d charged the totems to the point where I felt they’d last for a long while, I was bored out of my mind. Even card games online could only entertain me for so long. I resolved to bring my switch down here the next time the totems needed to be recharged and began the now-familiar trek back up to my house.

It hit me during the walk back.

I hadn’t used any diesel. In fact, I’d gone out into the woods more than once now without any sort of bug protection. Yesterday, I’d applied my fuel trick out of rote habit, but it hadn’t even crossed my mind today.

I would’ve been horrified, except for one wonderful thing.

I didn’t itch. At all.

I didn’t have a mosquito bite on me. I stripped after returning to the house and examined myself in the bedroom mirror for what must’ve been a full hour before determining that I didn’t have a single tick. No spider bites. No mosquitoes. No chiggers. No marks. Nothing.

Bugs didn’t bite me anymore. At all. Hell, I didn’t even seem very dirty. I hadn’t noticed the effect because this was the first time I’d returned from the cave not covered in blood!

“Best… Class… Ever!” I screamed in triumph.

Of course, at that moment, Rio opened the door to see me pumping a victory fist in front of our mirror, buck naked.

“...You get weird when you stay home too much,” she said angelically.

“No… no ticks!” I said weakly, flushing red.

“Sure, Honey. If you say so,” Rio replied, barely hiding her mirth.

Even Genji was looking at me strangely.