NOVEL WEB CHAPTER 69: DON’T EAT THAT
Griffin Tucker Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 4
Mount Discovery, Province of Aragonia
Griffin checked his map. He took a few more steps, checked again, and nodded to himself. He looked all around, all his senses keyed as high as they could go. The hallway he was in was just like every other hallway in this labyrinthine facility: wide, carpeted with thick grey carpets, with pristine white walls and a dark grey ceiling that arched slightly. Periodically, there were tensa lights that provided soft, directionless illumination to the entire hallway. Only now, most of the tensa lights were out, leaving the halls with long stretches of deep shadow.
He shivered as he readied himself, whispering to Kismet, “Watch the hallway for me, I’m still not entirely sure this is even going to work.”
“The only reason it has a chance is because of the weakening enchantments in the floors, walls, and ceilings,” Kismet replied. “But don’t worry about monsters; I will warn you if any threat approaches.” She hovered in the air, her outfit switching into dark fatigues that blended into the deep shadows thrown by the intermittent lighting.
Griffin nodded and held out his left hand, licking his lips nervously. He focused and pushed tensa into his Dread Consumption graft. Ten kilosparks was a little under half his entire tensa pool and the feeling of it leaving his tensa pool was disturbingly similar to the feeling of bleeding a lot. He’d cut his hand badly in the kitchen with an immersion blender once and the sick, cold feeling of his blood pouring out of him had made an impression.
Almost reflexively, he configured his anima into the Ten Star Vortex gathering technique even as his graft began activating. As the power rushed through him, he felt the slit reopen in his left palm and the warm wetness of a tongue emerge from the mouth and lick the lips that now protruded from his palm. Forcing down his gag reflex, he focused his intent on the floor right in front of him. In response, the mouth on his left palm opened. He could feel the stretching of the lips over the teeth and the tongue pressing down and lolling out as it strained open as wide as it could get.
He knelt and touched the mouth to the spot on the floor he had selected. Immediately, it began chewing and chomping. Hideous sucking and crunching sounds assaulted Griffin’s ears as the mouth devoured the floor. Within half a minute, his Dread Consumption graft had eaten a meter-and-a-half wide hole in the floor and into the huge room below. He could taste the floor through the tongue in his hand: it was as bland as raw tofu with the texture of a crunchy granola. By the time Dread Consumption had finished devouring the hole in the floor, Griffin felt bloated and stuffed like he’d just eaten a bunch of fast food at once and was just now suffering the consequences. He distracted himself from the discomfort by reading the System message that popped up.
Dread Consumption Harvest Result
Items harvested and moved to Inventory
132 kg granite
1.987 sq m carpet
New temporary resistance gained! You now have [4]% resistance to [Geological] damage for 12 hours.
This power is insane, he thought. I ate through the floor and I got granite, carpet, and a 4% resistance to Geological damage. Whatever that is. Do other people—other Reborn—have powers like this? That was a sobering thought. He was all for being a magically powered superhero, but that implied magically powered supervillains. I don’t think I’m ready to be Dr. Strange or Spider-Man. Besides, my powerset seems to be tipping me towards a ‘talented sidekick’ rather than a butt-kicking hero.
Griffin leaned over the hole to get a better sense of what the huge zombie storage room looked like now. A SONAR ping brought back what he’d been afraid of: for as far as he could perceive, every single containment device that had once contained one of the undead had been broken open from within. His infrared vision showed that the room wasn’t quite the freezer it had been before, but it hadn’t gotten much warmer since he’d been there. He straightened and pulled the first of his conjured items from his Inventory.
The pig brains in a pot had worked so well last time that Griffin had decided to try to repeat that serendipitous discovery with one key difference: he was working on the philosophy that if a little was good, then a lot was better. He’d spent several hours over the past few days filling a big blue plastic barrel he’d conjured with pig brains. He had filled the barrel with 150 liters of brains—enough to fill a bathtub. The smell had been decidedly unpleasant; not so much because it smelled bad but because it inundated his room with the smell of pig brains until he thought he’d probably be smelling it in his sleep. It had been a true relief to put that barrel—and the two others he’d made at the same time—into his Inventory.
Griffin then used a length of Reality Twine and a few anchor points to attach the Twine to the barrel and then hang the barrel in midair directly above the hole. He was tempted to just drop the barrel now to see how the zombies down there would react. It would be a good test to see if it could attract the zombies, but he only had two more barrels of brains and he still wanted to dig at least one more hole to suspend another barrel over. He decided against dropping it; the brain barrels were too valuable to waste on a test.
He moved quickly through the halls, following his maps until he found the next spot he needed to dig into. The overstuffed feeling he’d had from eating his way through the floor with his Dread Consumption graft had finally abated just in time for him to do it again. By now, his tensa had refilled and he’d recovered from the drained feeling he’d had from excavating the other hole. He eyed the spot on the floor distastefully; the last time had been deeply unpleasant.
Then again, it’d be a lot more unpleasant if I got ripped apart by zombies, he thought. So I’d better get over it and start chowin’ down.
This spot was in the next cavernous zombie storage room to the one that had the tensa batteries and the ethershard he was after. He hoped that the containers full of brains would attract the zombies away from where he wanted to be and he could snag what he needed in peace and then slip out while the zombies feasted. So far, the hallways he’d needed to go down to get to the right spot were clear of plasma cybercentipedes, but Griffin couldn’t help but remember the Mother that had dragged its prey into the zombie storage room. If there was one, there could be others.
He held his left hand out again and poured tensa into his Dread Consumption graft. Just like before, he felt the mouth appear and flesh out on the palm of his hand. He still hated the feeling of the tongue licking its lips. He knelt and focused once more on the spot on the floor that he needed to excavate. The mouth opened wide once more and began devouring.
Just like last time, the mouth sucked up the substance that created the floor, chewing through it rapidly. It tasted just as bland and crunchy as the floor had for the last hole. Just like the last time, another System message popped up after he’d completed using his graft.
Dread Consumption Harvest Result
Items harvested and moved to Inventory
271 kg granite
1.987 sq m carpet
New temporary resistance gained! You now have [11]% resistance to [Geological] damage for 12 hours.
So I get cool powers and resistance from whatever I consume through my hand? Is that how it works? Griffin thought. It must be something like that since I didn’t gain resistance to Capitalism damage after I ate the Monopoly house back in my room.
He checked in on the room below as soon as he’d made the hole wide enough. This hole had taken almost twice as much excavating to create since the hallway he was in was a little higher than the previous one. He hadn’t noticed the hallways sloping, but he hadn’t exactly been paying attention to it.
Unlike the room he’d suspended the first brain barrel over, this zombie storage room was crowded with slowly shuffling zombies. He saw that many of the zombies were looking up, their dead eyes locked on him as they walked in little circles, their arms upraised as they tried to reach him. He heard their plaintive moans float up from the room and he steeled himself against the instinctive chill of fear that shot through him.
Griffin pulled the second barrel of brains from his Inventory being careful not to let it get too close to the edge of the hole. As soon as the barrel appeared, the chorus of moans and groans from the room below increased dramatically. Griffin peeked over the edge of the hole and saw that the slowly milling crowd of zombies had grown and they were all reaching for him with both hands clawing at the air. Their mouths worked, gnashing their teeth as they tried to get to the smell of brains high above them.
It was hard to be as careful as he’d been with the first barrel with the zombies below getting louder and louder every second. Still, it didn’t take long to attach the Reality Twine to the barrel and then the last anchor in the spot right above the hole. He pushed the barrel to the edge and held his breath as the Reality Twine took its weight. Thankfully, the barrel didn’t tip as it swung out over the hole. Griffin steadied it and then hurried back through the halls toward the last spot he’d mapped out: his entrance.
He didn’t want to go through the same hole he’d climbed through before because it was too far away from the room. He’d managed to find a hallway that was closer by half than the original hole he had climbed through and so he jogged there as quickly as he could. It quickly became apparent that this hall, though, was not like the others.
Instead of a clean grey carpet and pristine walls, the hallway was dingy and smelled of mildew. Streaks of dark mold coated the walls and the carpet was matted and torn. Griffin knelt and checked an odd burned gouge in the carpet. It was half a meter wide and Griffin had a sinking feeling he knew what had made it. The plasma beams of the Mothers were wide like that. Griffin checked his map. The only other spot that even got close to the room he needed to get to was the hole he’d climbed through before.
He stood there crouched for a few long moments, unable to decide what to do. He didn’t want to repeat his desperate sprint through the zombie storage room, but at the same time, he didn’t want to become food for another Mother. He crouched there listening for anything down the hall. Nothing. His SONAR showed an empty hallway. Griffin took a deep breath and then stood up straight and started moving forward. He’d follow the plan he made until something went wrong.
The hallway split just about twenty meters further on and Griffin took a left. The map showed that he was just another thirty meters away and another couple of turns down the labyrinthine halls. Griffin kept going, keeping all his senses on high alert as he tried to go as quickly and quietly as possible. The carpet was slightly moist in places, squelching noisily when he stepped in those spots but nothing jumped out of the shadows at him.
Griffin got to the spot he’d marked out on his map and got to work immediately. He spent the tensa, configuring his anima back into his gathering technique so he could refill his tensa pool after using his graft. Once again the mouth appeared on his left hand’s palm and he knelt, pointing his palm at the spot he wanted it to devour. This time the floor and carpet tasted like pickled fried tofu: sour and crunchy but otherwise inoffensive. To Griffin, it tasted a hundred times better than the clean floor.
Dread Consumption Harvest Result
Items harvested and moved to Inventory
134 kg granite
1.423 sq m carpet
New temporary resistance gained! You now have [15]% resistance to [Geological] damage for 12 hours.
If I just keep shoveling dirt into my Dread Consumption graft will I get to 100% resistance? Griffin wondered as he straightened after making his hole. He looked up and down the hallway again, switching his anima back into its sphere configuration so he could boost his senses. I wonder if there’s a way I can make this work to my advantage here? Not unless these are earth-bending zombies I guess. Still, it’s worth thinking more about in the future.
Griffin pulled the last item he’d prepared for the plan from his Inventory. It was a Reality Twine ladder that he’d made out of conjured steel rods that he’d textured so his feet wouldn’t slip. This was the item that had been the quickest to create and he’d decided on a ladder because he didn’t want to try and shimmy up a rope quickly. Besides, with the Reality Twine serving as its structure, he could anchor it to the ground for extra stability. Before he unrolled the ladder, he stuck his head over the hole and concentrated his enhanced senses down into the room below.
A few zombies were standing in place directly below him and a few moving just at the edge of his SONAR range. Griffin chewed his lip, wondering what he should do. The zombies didn’t seem particularly inclined to move anywhere on their own.
Great, my plan is foiled by a couple of zombies just chillin’ there waiting for something to happen, Griffin thought. Well, let’s let one of the barrels go and see if we can get a distraction going.
Griffin felt every section of Reality Twine in his subconscious along with every single anchor he’d created. He called up the System map in his HUD that he had used to plan his route and double-checked the positioning. The first brain barrel was suspended over an entirely different zombie storage area and was quite a distance from where he was now. He decided he’d let that one go first and see how long it took for the zombies here to notice.
He held his breath and found the anchor suspending the Reality Twine attached to the brain barrel over the far area and with a thought, he dismissed the anchor point and waited. About three seconds later, he heard a terrifying, echoing chorus of moans arise from the zombies. He watched through his SONAR as the zombies directly beneath him added their voices to the moaning call and then sprinted off in the direction of the brain barrel he’d dropped.
Okay, looks like the plan’s working swimmingly so far, he thought. He crouched back down and dragged the rolled-up Reality Twine ladder over to the edge of the hole. He used his Reality Twine graft to create two new anchor points for the ladder and rolled it out and down the hole. As soon as he heard it hit the floor below him, he started climbing. He’d have to touch the points where he wanted to anchor the Twine down below, but the ladder was far easier for him to climb down than the rope had been.
Griffin made his way down the ladder as quickly as he could, the echoes of zombie moans motivating him to be a little more reckless than he should have been. He slipped on a rung when he was just two meters from the floor, his foot getting tangled in the Reality Twine as he lost his grip on the rung and he swung out into space. His head only barely missed the hard floor as he swung from the ladder by his tangled ankle.
Kismet suddenly reappeared next to his head, hissing a warning. “Griffin, look!” She pointed back up the ladder to the hole in the ceiling.
Griffin shook his head, trying to focus on what Kismet was pointing at. He heard a dim thump as a shower of dust and rock from above hit him in the chin and made him blink. The confusing sight finally clicked for him. He had been expecting to see the ceiling of the room above but instead, he saw the enormous and disturbing head of a plasma cybercentipede Mother. It was trying to squeeze through the hole but, horrifyingly, its head was too big to fit.
The monster slammed its head into the floor above him again, causing another shower of dust and rock to fall on him. He saw hairline cracks form around the edge of the hole. He wasted a precious few seconds trying to untangle his ankle from the Reality Twine before he realized he could just dismiss the stuff and free himself. He dismissed all the Twine from around his foot and below and suddenly he was falling.
He crashed to the ground of the zombie storage room below, loose steel rungs from his half-disintegrated ladder clanging down around him. Kismet hovered over him and pointed over to his left, “The door to the containment control room is over there! Get up and get going!”
Griffin nodded and rolled to his feet in a sinuous, fluid motion that simply would not have been possible for him to pull off without the Attributes he had unlocked. He glanced around quickly, his eyes confirming what his SONAR had told him already: no nearby zombies. He glanced back up at the enraged Mother and had to leap to the side to avoid the beam of white-hot plasma that suddenly lanced into the ground where he’d landed. The beam followed just behind him as he ran for several steps before it ran out of juice and stopped.
Griffin kept running. He was only a few meters away from the door Kismet had pointed out. He maneuvered around the broken zombie storage containers, managing to maintain his pace despite all the obstacles. It only took a few moments for him to arrive at the door and he immediately tried the handle. Locked. Of course.