Chapter 13: On The Way

In a small meadow surrounded by pine trees, I set two handfuls of dry twigs down in front of what would soon be our firepit. Marci had put our tent on a clear space on the ground, and it was self-inflating. Lane was shredding a large orange mushroom with his knife. It was oddly fibrous and dry.

“Is that for the fire?”

His patinaed knife working away, scraping strings of the mushroom off, he didn’t look up. “Yeah.”

Dylan walked over, dropped his black backpack on the short grass, and said, “We have fire starter from the kits.”

Lane stopped, looked up at us. “Fire starter?”

Overhead, clouds moved quickly across the slowly darkening sky. The clearing wasn’t large enough to watch the sunset, and the wind rustling the treetops didn’t reach down to us.

I looked back at Lane, saying, “I want to see how this works.”

“Sure.” Kneeling in front of the little stone pit he’d built, Lane spread out the fibers more, then took out a rock. He hit it repeatedly with the back of his knife, throwing sparks onto the fibers.

“Is that flint?”

“Yeah.” He kept hitting it until a spark landed on the dry mushroom bits. Then he blew on it carefully and the spark went out.

“Didn’t take?”

“Not that one.” He repeated this, over and over, with me and Dylan staring, and one by one everyone else in the group coming to watch forming a half circle around Lane, until a spark caught, a little fire grew. Lane put the bent and twisted twigs over the flames, feeding the fire, growing larger and larger, and then adding thicker and thicker branches.

We all clapped and cheered.

Lane looked a little surprised. “Uh, there we go.”

I patted him on the back, “Nicely done. I’ve never seen that before.”

“Never seen someone start a fire?”

“Well, we use fire starter. From our kit.” I pulled out a small, rectangular piece of plastic, pushed the button. Fire jetted from the top.

“Magic?”

“Technology.”

“Mages can start fires instantly, but I’m no mage.”

“I see. Where’d you get the flint from?”

“It’s all over if you know what to look for. Some of the children sell it to merchants that come by, on their return to the big cities.”

“No kidding! I think we’re going to have to visit the big cities someday.”

“I thought you came from there.”

“Uh, we’re from . . . more distant lands. These are new for us. How much longer until we get to the cave?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. We have to be careful tonight. We’re near the giant caterpillar territory. They are large enough to kill and eat a person.”

“Holy shit. Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“How . . . how large are we talking?”

“They can get up to eight feet.”

“Eight feet! That’s over two meters long!” In horror, I imagined one of those breaking through our tent and taking hold of me with all of its arms, and shuddered.

“Meters?”

“It’s our measuring system, back home.”

“We have to keep the fire going. Smoke keeps them away. They hunt at night.”

“Lane, we have to tell everyone this.” By this point, everyone had gone back to setting up their tents. So, I said with a louder voice, “Listen up, people.”

***

The last bits of purple slowly faded into black, but the first few stars appeared before, clouds passing by, then ever so slowly dotted lights appeared across the sky.

The fire crackled and I looked at it.

“So, Lane, giant centipedes?” asked Fred. “How do you kill them?”

“Cutting off their head is the quickest. They usually attack anything that stabs them.”

Fred cradled his submachine gun. “I wonder what bullets will do to them.”

“Speaking of that,” said Lane, “could the village buy one of those weapons from you?”

“Uh,” my mind racing for some way to tell him no, “we have limited ammunition. Even if we gave you a gun, it wouldn’t do anything.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“Can you eat the centipedes?” asked Ave.

Everyone looked at her.

“What? We eat the little ones back home. They’re crunchy.”

Bentley’s eyes widened. “You eat little centipedes back home?”

Ave’s green face looked bored. She shrugged.

Lane poked wood under the orange and red flames, moving it around and stirring up sparks that rose with the grey smoke. One made it almost three meters before winking out. “Yeah, we eat them. They taste like shrimp. But we don’t go out of our way to catch them. For some of the forest elves, it’s a rite of passage for boys. If they survive the encounter, they become men.”

“Damn,” said Dylan. “Hey, these might be your people, Marci.”

“My people are right here.” She leaned over me, poured brown ale from a decanter into my cup, topping it off. Then her own.

“Thank you.”

Marci gave a bright smile, “For sure.”

“If they taste like shrimp, I might go out and earn my manhood,” said Avery. “Anyone want to come?”

“I’m up for it!” Fred stood up then picked up his submachine gun.

“Guys! I really don’t think that’s safe. Besides, we should conserve ammo. We don’t know what we’re going to encounter in the cave.”

“You stay here, pretty boy. We got you.”

“Pretty boy?”

“Yeah, you don’t have these, Boss.” Fred clenched his biceps, which bulged even behind his armor.

I turned to Lane, “Can these things bite through armor?”

“Of course.”

Ave said, standing up, “We’ll be careful!”

“No, seriously,” I shouted at them as they walked into darkness, “it’s not worth it! You shouldn’t leave camp. We have food here . . .”

“Damn,” Bent shook his head. “What’s gotten into those two?”

“I think, I think it’s their character races.”

“What do you mean, Marci?” I asked.

“They seem to enjoy fighting, talking about fighting. They’re always taking point in any battle. They rush in, want to level up.”

Bent said, “They were our security before, so I think that’s just who they are.”

She shook her head, “Not like this.”

“And,” he continued, “I want to level up. Don’t you? We’re only going to survive here if we do.”

Marci shrugged, looking away, “Yeah, actually.”

I couldn’t believe we were talking about playing this game, working on our characters. “No, guys, our mission must come first. Why can’t we stay focused? All these people, their lives have been ruined by the nanotech!”

“Yeah, but realistically,” Bent said, “what can we do? Even the Victoria with all her firepower couldn’t stop the nanotech for more than a day or two. It’s already everywhere on this planet, in every living being.”

“Well . . . the computers,” said Marci. “If we can find the computers, maybe we can turn it off.”

“Nope.” Dylan shook his head, “Not if it’s alien tech. We won’t know how to interface with it.”

“Even alien programming boils down to ones and zeroes. We can crack whatever language they used, whatever drives the nanobots.”

Lane jumped in with, “Adventuring is a hard life. I don’t understand your quest, but I hope you return to the village to help us grow. It’d be easier for you, I think, to gain power with a stable place of residence.”

I did a double take. Whoops, we were discussing information out of his grasp. I decided to change topics. We could – and would – discuss this later, as a group. But we also needed information. “How dangerous is this cave, Lane? What’s in it?”

“The last adventuring group didn’t listen either. We invited them to protect the village, but they also wanted power, like you do, and attempted the dungeon.”

I stared at Bentley, but said, “We don’t want power.”

“Did you just call it a dungeon?” asked Dylan.

Lane said to me, “Yet you’re going after the core.”

“Yes, but not for power. We need it to, uh, help the world.”

Marci nodded, “It’s for everyone we are doing this. Your entire world.”

“Right,” he nodded. “Power. Only one of them made it out. She spoke of many traps and the undead.”

“The what?”

Dylan leaned forward, “Like vampires? Zombies?”

“I doubt a vampire would live in a dungeon,” Lane said. “They prefer cities.”

I facepalmed. “Sure. Ok. Vampires live in cities. The only things I know that live in caves are bears. We’ll watch out for them.”

“Zombies, skeletons, maybe ghosts.”

Bent said, “I doubt our guns will have any effect on the dead.”

“Come on guys, this is crazy,” said Marci. “They can’t possibly be actual zombies. The nanotech doesn’t animate the dead.”

“I’m just relaying what she told me.” Lane took a drink. “I haven’t personally seen the undead, but she was shaking and pale, even when she made it to our village. A miracle the centipedes didn’t get her first, given her injuries.”

“What happened to her? Did she join your village?”

“She said one of her companions-”

A loud shot rang out in the night like a thunderclap. Then another three and another three.

“Shit!” Dylan wiped ale off his pants, “That startled me.”

“It sounds like your friends found the centipedes.”

More automatic fire.

I stood up quickly, “Come on! They may need our help.”

***

Another burst lit up the clearing briefly, just as we entered. Ave and Fred were both pointing their guns at a monstrous centipede, still twitching. It was as large as Fred, each of its segments had two rusty-brown legs reaching out, some moving as if running, others pinching together. Hair raised on the back of my neck, and I did not want to get any closer.

Fred looked up, grinning. “It damn near bit me!”

Ave added, “We got two of the bastards!”

“And ten XP each.”

I shone the flashlight around the clearing at ground height. Short, trampled grass, small stones scattered around, some with dark ichor dripping down them. No more giant bugs seemed to be here. A shiny liquid ran down Fred’s boot to his sole.

“Hey, Fred, your leg has something on it.”

Gun cradled against his arm, he looked down, “Yeah. That’s where the bugger tried to bite me. Bounced off the armor.”

“Better let me take a look,” said Marci as she moved toward him.

“I’m good. I’m glorious!” He waved at the villager, “Hey, Lane, how do you gut these?”

***

I brought the shell and meat to my nose, sniffed. “It really does smell like shrimp.”

“Tastes like it too,” said Ave, munching away.

The scent of cooking shellfish surrounded the camp, intermixed every now and again by the smell of burnt insect carapace when the flames licked a little too close. I tried to ignore it and ignore what I was about to put into my mouth. “Not bad. Yeah, shrimp! That is nuts.”

“Not really,” Marci said, “these are distantly related to shellfish.”

“I wish we had some lemons.” Dylan took a bite.

“They’re pretty good with butter.”

“You think more will head this way, Lane? With the cooking smells?”

“As long as we keep the fire going, we’ll be fine.”

Just as I was about to take another bite, I glimpsed Fred rubbing his foot. But then he clapped Ave on the back and reached for another piece, saying, “Ten XP each. Twenty would be as much as the quest XP we’re getting.”

Bent leaned forward, said to him, “You think we could farm these?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, we’d run short of ammo.”

“There’s more drop boxes.”

“Fred, you really want to stay on this mountain, shooting centipedes in the dark? What if the next one gets through the armor?”

“We just have to be smart about it. Bring a goat or something as bait.”

Bent spoke up, “Usually, in most games, the best mobs to farm are in the dungeons. The cave we’re going to, Lane called it a dungeon.”

Fred brightened up. “I sure hope so.”

“Dungeon,” said Marci. “Why do they call it that?”

“No idea, but I hope there are no torture chambers.”

“Yeah, those would be bad.”

Ave wiped her mouth, then said, “Unless they’re BDSM chambers.”