Chapter 6: Ants With Guns (Patreon)

“There you are, you…” While unlocking a door via telekinesis was easy as balls, unlocking a huge-ass vault door was significantly more difficult. The bolts were locked in place without electricity, after all, and Jeb only had two strands of Myst.

I should work on that.

Instead, he ordered a pair of Bucks to take turns carving on the door, each of them stepping back and giving their  antlers a moment to recharge while the other went to town on the thick steel plate.

Wha vault door, you ask? The Golden Nugget, obviously. The display nugget was painted Styrofoam, much to Jeb’s dissatisfaction. He’d been hoping to get out of the casino in a few seconds flat. Still, if you wanna steal the Hand of Faith, you gotta be prepared for a bit more work.

Every second counts when Vegas is being swallowed by a runaway dungeon.

Sitting there watching the wall get peeled away, Jeb had plenty of time to think about what was happening. As far as I can know, Dungeons don’t grow at this speed. This is highly unusual. Also, dungeons are said to be created in the wake of the Roil.

The Roil – capital letters – was a temporal storm that had raged across the land of Pharos from the time of the first Stitching. It had a tendency to age, de-age, or mutate anything that went into it, and the land itself rejected its presence, forming a force-repelling mother-of-pearl substance to insulate against its effects.

Jeb hadn’t seen any Faradan stone in or around Vegas proper, which led him to believe that The Roil hadn’t paid these fine terrorists a visit. That by itself was fairly weird, as they were right in its current range.

No Roil, no dungeons…in theory. Where did the cores come from?

1: Cores where they’re not supposed to be.

2: Core not acting like it’s supposed to.

The only conclusion Jeb could come to was that the current ant problem was man-made. Or more likely alien-made. It probably wouldn’t kill everyone, because the insects weren’t fast at pursuit, and some humans would definitely break and run.

What it would do was distract them.

CLANG!

A chuck of steel clattered to the ground, and Buck stood back, his lungs heaving from exertion. There was a man-sized jagged hole in the vault door. More like a tunnel, given how ridiculously thick it was.

So if this is a distraction, then what’s the goal? Jeb thought, climbing into the vault and scanning the contents.

Ahah! The gold nugget had novelty bars of gold for high rollers! Very nice. Jeb snagged a few of those, then found what he was looking for: A big lumpy toddler-weight hunk of gold stashed in a locked case. Thankfully the lock was small enough this time that Jeb could just reach in with telekinesis and turn it.

Jeb grunted as he threw the heavy gold over his shoulder then sprinted back out to the main room.

The Golden Nugget was normally dim save for the blinking lights of the slot machines, but with the power out, the place was dark and silent as a tomb, with plenty of slot machines blocking your view of the entrance.

Frikken’ casino designs. The places were all designed like rat traps to make it harder for you to leave, and now it was dark to boot. Jeb wrapped a string of Myst around himself and picked himself up, clearing his view and heading straight for the exit, leaving Buck to find his way out through the maze of slot machines.

The most likely thing they’re going for is the nukes, Jeb thought, flying down the street toward the problem area. Maybe the planes or other tech? Then again, that doesn’t make a lot of sense either. ‘the aliens’, led by the emperor, had access to dozens of other Air Force Bases and probably knew about hundreds or even thousands of different places with nukes and planes n’ shit.

Jeb was a small piece of the big picture here. There was nothing inherently special about this location. The only unique thing Vegas had was a fuckton of casinos and hookers, and that wasn’t really a new technology to jump on.

So it’s probably not the empire. Independent contractor, then? Why attack the Base, which is heavily guarded, instead of some other location?  Jeb’s Nerve filled in the blank. They probably have a base nearby and transportation from another location would be outlandishly time consuming.

Jeb stopped about a hundred yards away from the front line of the insects, throwing his ill-gotten gold on the smoothest surface he could find nearby, then he hardened the marble lobby of an office building and the air above the gold and started squishing.

So, independent operator, nearby, on a time table, most likely alien, since we don’t know how to manipulate dungeons. Jeb thought as he smashed the priceless gold nugget flat on the floor. Jeb almost winced as he deformed it, but he realized that this was probably the most useful the nugget had been since it was flung out of a volcano.

The nugget was actually having a pretty good time, not being locked in a stuffy case anymore.

Once he was done, the edges of the plate of gold were ragged and cracked, but the entire thing was more than big enough to wrap around the Core. Once Jeb was done, he moved on to the smaller gold bars, flattening them out with a ton of force applied in quick hammerblows of telekinetic Myst.

“How we doing?” Jeb asked, sticking his head out to check the progress of the Army Ants.

Jeb got a nice view of the side of one of the shieldbearers before the ticks dropped off its bottom and started flooding toward the door, intent on flushing him out.

“Ack!” Jeb bolted deeper into the building, scooping up his gold plates on the way by. Must’ve spent longer on project goldfinger than I thought. Second story second story, where are you? There was an elevator, at least. Jeb wormed his way in, then punched through the roof of the elevator, the chittering swarm hot on his heels.

He flew up to the third story, then kicked his way through the floor to ceiling window, popping the crunched up laminated glass out onto the bugs marching below him.

Jeb flew out of the building feeling the air on the back of his neck vibrate with the skittering of insect legs. He must’ve been gone nearly an hour trying to round up enough gold plates to smother the dungeon cores.

And that might be a problem, Jeb thought, his jaw dropping at the sheer pace of the Army Ants progress.

There were smaller creatures swarming around behind the front line, scooping up the brown goop and mixing it with some kind of foamy spittle to create lumpy defensive structures around each of the whirlwinds of Myst: ergo, each of the dungeon cores.

Others were crafting what looked suspiciously like walls and towers, creating an actual landscape out of the flat circle of brown muck.

And at the center…

The land had dipped so deep that Jeb couldn’t make out the bottom, only the steady march of blue-tinted shieldbearers crawling their way out…and the occasional purple one.

Goddamnit! Jeb could only assume they were steadily getting more powerful.

“Come with me! I want to know if this works before we go for the center!” General Ma’am ordered as she arrived, flying up to Jeb and snatching one of the smaller gold plates out of his grasp.

They flew over to one of the closest myst whirlwinds, near the edge of the tainted circle. There were a dozen men and women waiting on a nearby roof, armed to the teeth. Jeb was pleased to note Machine Gun Sam and Cecil were present. He’d become emotionally invested watching the kid jump from building to building with a Browning over his shoulder.

“Clear that position and give us time to work.” The general said, pointing at the poorly defended outer core.

The group nodded and charged the monsters, cutting a bloody path through the shieldwall and clearing some space around the lumpy fortress. They killed the pale engineers working on reinforcing the core’s defences and started trying to peel the damn thing open. The structure was about the size of a doghouse, but it was hard as concrete and half as heavy, somehow glued down around the core.

With a frustrated grunt, the general put her hands on the thing and blasted it with an explosive amount of silvery Myst. The structure finally crumbled under the assault, and they peeled away the material to reveal…another layer, protected by a fibrous membrane that had absorbed the blast. Something like the rind of an orange.

That’s a problem.

While they were taking their sweet time trying to take out one minor core, the problem was beginning to increase in scale.

The purple shieldbearers were even tougher than the blue ones. It seemed as though gunfire was no longer having any effect on them without a Skill backing it up, and Jeb was fairly certain that they’d start turning red soon.

“Stand back!” Jeb shouted, leveling his staff at the offending cocoon.

Jeb Inhaled, drawing Myst in with the breath, then exhaled on the lift, Siphoning a thick but measured thread of Myst into the staff. The prototype gulped the magic up like a thirsty sailor, and out popped another Buck, bright-eyed and Bushy tailed.

Jeb could maybe do five of those at a time before it would start dragging on his Myst Core, dimming the corona of energy radiating off the star in his chest.

“Cut it open,” Jeb said, pointing

With a contemptuous swipe of its antler, the buck tore the tough, fibrous cocoon to shreds, exposing the tiny dungeon core embedded in hard mud. The buck looked back at Jeb down the bridge of its nose.

The general didn’t bother wasting any time, lunging forward to grab the core and slamming it into the gold plate in her left hand.

Then, with gritted teeth, the old woman folded the gold plate around the tiny core by hand, utilizing a Body score that must’ve been in the thirties.

She pinched the edges together then rolled them up, making sure it was airtight, and the Myst swirling around the dungeon core…stopped.

It was contained!

Hey, we might actually survive this thing!

Jeb hefted the sixty-pound plate of squished gold nugget.

“Good, now we just gotta do that about seven more times, plus the big one.”

There was the distinctive harsh buzz of a bullet flying through the air, followed by a softer hiss as Jeb’s FMO shields popped and redirected the object back the way it came. All of this happened on a time-scale that Jeb couldn’t keep up with, so he couldn’t pinpoint the direction the bullet had come from.

Jeb ducked reflexively, dropping into the mud and scanning the people around him while simultaneously refilling his FMO shields. Everybody was looking at him with various states of confusion, and nobody had a gun pointed at him.

Jeb raised a telekinetic shield then tentatively poked his head out from behind the scraps of the former cocoon and inspected the Air Force Base and the city beyond. As far as the eye could see, it was nothing but insects furiously trying to shove them out of their territory.

“Do the Army Ants have guns now, or what?” Jeb demanded.

***Kol Rejan, level 57 Courier***

Ah well, it was worth a shot, Kol thought idly, ears ringing. He stood up and jumped off the fifteen-story building, the Barret fifty calibur rifle slung over his shoulder.

Imagine Kol’s surprise when his previous target had been at the site of his new job. Seeing the human’s fat, lip-covered face among the other fat humans felt like a gift from the gods. Unfortunately the veek had automatic defenses, so Kol wasn’t going to erase the stain on his record today.

The only time the crafty Myst user was going to stay still long enough to connect with, was when they were revelling in their first minor victory. Now that he was aware someone had taken a shot at him, he’d be almost impossible to take down.

It was annoying, but it was the way things were.

That dungeon core, though, Kol shuddered, just a little as he fell. He’d never seen anything like it. It was the sort of thing that could wipe an entire city off the map if it was triggered in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

What does the creature even need the human’s bombs for when he has things like that? Maybe it was just how a sindio’s mind operated: Accumulate more power at every expense.

Somehow the sindio had managed to put a dungeon core into stasis the instant before a break, creating a portable dungeon break that fit in the palm of a keegan’s hand, of all things. Kol had never heard of such a thing, but it sure as The Roil made an excellent distraction.

Kol hit the ground, his knees flexing a bit as the concrete cracked under the force of his landing. He checked the two shrunken nukes in his belt, then started bounding across the desert landscape, each stride consuming ten body lengths.

Kol didn’t want to go back there, but proving himself reliable and useful would hopefully keep him alive longer than proving himself a flake.

***Jeb***

When none of the ant-creatures shot at him again, Jeb stood back up, making sure to keep a personal space bubble of Myst around him.

The General gave his shield an appraising look before talking to him, her voice muffled.

“We’ve gotta get the big one now before it gets any deeper!” She said, pointing to the sarlacc pit overflowing with tightly regimented Army Ants. I wonder what the official name is, because if these things don’t have one, I’m gonna name them Jerkoffs.

“That seems fairly obvious!” Jeb shouted back.

“Give Corporal stevens and Christenson a ride, Mr. Trapper. An aerial assault will save time and blood!”

Jeb felt tug in his chest. Five years of conditioning made him want to instinctively snap to attention and do as he was told, but there was an opportunity here. He could see the general was desperate.

“Let’s make a Deal!” He shouted over the hissing of encroaching monsters.

“No time!”

“It’s simple. I help stop these bugs, you don’t try to kill me!” Jeb was purposefully vague about when or where or why she might try to kill him.

“Fine!” she said, grabbing his hands in a bone-crushing grip and shaking it. “Now get your ass in the air!”

Click. Now all Jeb had to do was hold up his side of the bargain.

She grabbed two hands and took off, Myst creating propulsion as she broke earth’s gravity. Jeb was forced to shield his eyes at the amount of wind the woman was outputting.

Jeb shook the pain out of his hand as he eyeballed corporal Stevens and Cecil Christenson. The beefy kid with the honest-to-God hundred pound Ma Deuce perched on his shoulder tentatively reached his hand out.

“So do we grab your hand or someth-ACK!”

Jeb looped a single strand of telekinetic Myst around their waists and flicked them up into the air, then created a platform beneath himself and lifted, leaning on his staff as he rose into the air. The two soldiers fell onto the slab of hardened air and dropped to their knees, eyes wide as it began lifting them up above the roar of battle.

A tongue-spear hit the bottom of Jeb’s magic carpet and ricocheted off as they rose. Jeb ferried the three of them above the hole in the ground, standing beside where the general was hovering, bearing two passengers herself.

“Corporal, clear us a path.” She said, pointing straight down into the maw overflowing with angry insects. They seemed to have some idea about what was going on above them, because they formed ranks, climbing on top of each other and cinching their big fat bug legs down on each other in order to choke off the entrance of the forming dungeon.

Goddamn, these things seem smart.

Not that that mattered too much. Corporal Stevens set the machine gun down on the edge of the platform and unleashed hell. With Jeb’s Myst as high as it was, he was able to catch a faint blue strand of Myst emerging from the kid’s chest and disappearing into the chamber of the gun.

“You got a Skill for that!?” Jeb asked between volleys.

“Heavy Gunner!” Corporal Stevens shouted back with a wide grin while his hands went through the process of feeding another belt into the M2. “Got four levels already today!”

Jeb couldn’t respond through the burst of machinegun fire, so he simply gave a wordless thumbs-up.

Body is probably really good for tinnitus, Jeb thought idly as he watched the magically enhanced bullets blast through the creature’s bodies like Styrofoam. The gunfire was just as loud as he remembered, but it didn’t hurt nearly as much.

“Go, go go!” The old woman shouted as the insects began to buckle, dropping her human cargo before racing ahead of them. There was a burst of silver Myst, creating a shockwave of air which scattered the severely wounded insects like bowling pins, clearing a path for them to charge the Core.

Jeb followed suit and dropped his platform, shoving perforated chiton out of the way as they descended.

The bottom of the tunnel was buried roughly a hundred feet below ground level, but the core was still resting on the plow Jeb had first used to scrape it out of the muck…sort of. The dungeon core had long since transmuted the steel blade to more of that brown mud that spawned Army Ants.

Deep down, Jeb desperately wished he had someone to ask for more specifics about the insects, and dungeons in general, but Smartass was hanging back for Vegas, and the people who put the dungeon here probably weren’t the kind to spill the beans.

He’d really like to know if stopping the dungeon core would stop everything, or if they’d have to cleanse the mud with napalm, or if by touching the mud, they’d already signed their death-warrants

Lack of information is the real killer.

The mud beneath the core trembled, and an absolutely massive shieldbearer emerged whole from the goop, the dungeon core resting on its back.

The creature was at least four times bigger than all of its brethren and beneath the muck, Jeb could make out shiny red armor. Fuck. Actually, that’s hard to see. Is it getting dimmer?

Jeb glanced up and spotted the monsters closing off the exit above them, completely filling in the tunnel with death-machine bodies. This had the dual purpose of being intimidating as hell, and also casting the humans into complete darkness.

“Anybody bring a light?” Jeb asked into the darkness.

***Zlesk***

The children were approaching him, and Zlesk should’ve scurried off to find another hill to watch them from, but Cole in front was flagging him down for some reason and there was a Keegan walking next to the children. A suspicious one. He was dressed like a grampa’s grampa. Zlesk almost wanted to make fun of his outfit if it didn’t give him pause.

The man was dressed like he was from the Time of Legends, with a second undercoat puffing the whole robe out, the long collar, and the hem falling nearer to his ankle than mid-shin.

Either the man enjoyed dressing like a fossil, or he was a fossil. Either option was suspect.

His gaze flicked back to Colt, waving him down. For an instant Zlesk considered ditching the children if they’d stumbled across more than he could handle, but that thought was ruthlessly squished down. He was responsible. These were his children.

Even if they are short, fat, and ugly, Zlesk admitted silently, finally standing from his perch and waving back.

Time to go see how bad it is.

Zlesk approached the kids, all senses trained on the black-robed keegan following along beside them. The keegan gave Zlesk a glance, then looked at Colt, whose gaze was fixed on Zlesk, and seemed to dismiss him entirely, continuing to speak about something. It must have been horrible threats, because Colt looked like he was suffering terribly.

I’ll teach you to extort my kids… Zlesk thought, burying his anger as he approached.

Finally, Zlesk got close enough to hear.

“…As it turned out, the water table beneath the city shifted somewhat as a result of the experiment, leaving tens of thousands without water for a few days. A few days! All they had to do was dig deeper, but hundreds of years later, it’s become this aggrandized story about Xen conjuring deserts and destroying cities with the power of his Myst, which he had no motive for, mind you.”

So he’s…boring Colt into submission? Zlesk internally updated his register of human expressions.

“This reinforces my thesis. I’m trying to prove a hypothesis that the longer you live, eventually people make up stories about you, and the most entertaining stories stick around. The most entertaining stories are the ones with mass destruction, and so no matter what you do, on a long enough timeline, you will eventually be cast by the stories that surround you as the villain.”

His accent is old, too. Zlesk was so preoccupied watching the strange man that he didn’t notice Nancy charging him for a glomp. The nine year-old was a little girl, but she had an unusual amount of Body and fifty extra pounds of steel armor.

It nearly knocked him to the rocky ground.

“Ooof!” Zlesk groaned, patting Nancy on the back, still watching the scholar. The keegan’s eyes lingered on Nancy’s antics for just a moment too long, before he spotted Zlesk watching him.

He’s after the immortals. It was common knowledge that thirty nobles of Solmnath had been purged for research into immortality aiming to farm levels. It was less common knowledge who had become immortal.

That knowledge was out there, though, and Zlesk was absolutely sure someone would figure it out and come after his kids sooner or later. This had been part of the plan he’d established with Jeb. If the children were going to have targets on their back, then they might as well make them capable of taking care of themselves.

And until then, Zlesk would kill anyone who tried to target them for Impact.

The keegan glanced up and met Zlesk’s eye, and the two men shared a moment. Mostly a glare-off.

I know what you’re here for, you bastard.

“You must be the children’s guardian. I apologize for the misunderstanding,” He said, sweeping into a fluttering – old – bow. “Call me Vex. Your immortals have nothing to fear from me.”

Zlesk frowned. He expected denials, but he didn’t expect the guy to come out and spill the beans that he knew some of the children were going to live a looong time.

“I believe it’s better to make friends among the long-lived than mindlessly hunt them.” He said, offering Zlesk a hand.

“Hoping for kickbacks for your grandkids eighty years down the road?” Zlesk asked, taking the man’s hand and watching for any sign of malfeasance.

“Something like that. I like to take the long view.” Vex said, innocently shaking Zlesk’s hand.

“Yo, Zlesk, what’s a sindio?” Colt asked, arms crossed in front of his chest.

Zlesk’s head snapped up, his gaze darting back to Vex, ice running through his veins.

The keegan rolled his eyes and slumped his shoulders.

“Children, I want you to form an orderly line and march back to Solmnath. Your work here is done. You did great. I’ll stay here and talk to Mr. Vex for a few minutes.”

Colt’s brows raised and he glanced between the two keegan towering over him, before shrugging.

“Okay, whatever.” The kids formed up and marched off. leaving Zlesk alone with his doom. He watched until they finally disappeared behind the mountainside. At least the sindio wouldn’t kill Zlesk in front of the immortals he was trying to ingratiate himself with…

If he was even telling the truth.

“So what happens now?” Zlesk asked, his heart hammering in his chest.

Vex shrugged. “I don’t know, man, you’re the one being weird.”

“You’re not gonna kill me?” Zlesk asked.

“Like I said, I’m trying to make those kids my friends. Probably wouldn’t win me any favors by killing you.”

“Even if I tell them what you are?”

“Is that worse than you not coming back at all?” the sindio asked, crossing his arms, his eyebrows raised in a keegan smile. “Because their first impression is going to be hard to shake with words, and that first impression is…boring and harmless.”