The Eternal Winter - Book 1 - Chapter 46 - Worms (Patreon)

                                                                                              Alexander North

I grit my teeth and rush forwards, dodging from side to side to avoid the stupid pale blue globs that are both melting the floor and freezing parts of it at the same time before I reach the first worm and slice into it with my claws, which go clean through it in an instant. As if its flesh were made of jelly or something.

“They seem weak individually,” I shout back to the others while tearing through another, and then another, and another. And after every single kill, I manage to absorb their energy at the same time due to their deaths happening before my hands even leave their bodies.

A very satisfying feeling fills me, stuffing me full the more of them that I kill. But somewhere in my little kill frenzy, I hear someone shout in pain from behind me, making me look back to see one of the IT civilians with a burn and frostbite on their leg.

I grimace at that before opening my mouth to shout, just for the captain to beat me to it, “Sergeants Michael and Michelle, protect the civilians!”

Fortunately for the others, now that the worms are moving around and no longer have their underbellies covered, light has returned to the tunnel. So they’re now able to see again and quickly get to work killing the worms that head towards the civilians.

And unlike with the spiders, the worms’ blood are not made out of some frostbiting material and don’t do anything to what they touch. It’s just the stuff that they spit out that does that.

I continue tearing my way from worm to worm, but over time, their numbers just seem to grow larger and larger instead of shrinking.

“Just how many are there?!” I hear Cynthia shout from a few meters away from me as I find us surrounded on all sides now by the worms. Meanwhile everyone aside from me is in a ring around the civilians, while I’m running through the worms themselves ripping them apart with my claws.

“Too many!” I shout back, but despite that I can’t help but feel a bit of a thrill at this. Mostly due to the high given to me by the massive amounts of energy I’m absorbing.

Only one more minute passes before I hear a scream coming from the private that I had brought along with me and Cynthia from the hallway, making me turn to find him with two of the worms slowly chewing through his armor while attached to him like leeches.

I narrow my eyes before rushing over and ripping them off, then going back to my killing spree. This then repeats itself several times until an incredibly loud screech echoes from the direction of the lieutenant colonel’s battle with the frozen symbiont and the large worm. Following that, the worms all begin ignoring us and rushing down the tunnel in that direction, leaving the rest of the soldiers and civilians around me to all collapse to the ground with their armor in shambles from the worms trying to chew through it.

I look around at them as they all let out exhausted breaths before watching the worms leave.

A few seconds pass by in relative silence before the captain mutters, “Looks like they saved us again…”

I can’t help but nod my head in agreement as the light of the living worms vanishes, leaving only the light of the dead ones still around us. And I can’t help but move around to absorb it, but I’m stopped by the captain as he sits up and says, “Don’t absorb all of them. We can use their corpses as light sources.”

His order makes me frown for a second on instinct before I nod and only absorb the energy from all of the corpses except for a few. But after I finish, I turn around with my frown returning as I ask, “Is it safe for you-” just to stop as I find the private already holding one of the worm corpses still full of energy in their arms. And after seeing nothing happen to them, I drop the question.

Looks like nothing happens if a regular human touches them.

That’s good. Wish they were more careful though.

I turn to see the captain staring at me, so I state, “Nevermind. My question was answered by private Holston.”

He turns at that to see the private holding the corpse before he nods his head back at me and turns to face forwards again. Meanwhile I turn to look at Cynthia while walking towards her and asking, “You good?” And after seeing her nod her head in affirmation, I turn back around at the sound of the captain ordering, “Let’s continue forward.”

All of the soldiers let out a “Yes, sir!” before we continue our trek through the tunnel, using the few corpses I left remaining as a light source this time.

As we walk though, I finally let my terminal notice appear for the frozen ones that we’d killed.

/ Notice \

The following user statistics have updated:

Speed: 2.10 -> 2.19
Senses: 1.94 -> 2.06
Energy: 1.86 -> 2.14

\End of Notice/

My eyes widen in shock at the vast amount of energy I got from them all, but outside of that, the other gains aren’t as impressive considering the massive numbers of worms we killed. Also, it looks like the worms just give those three stats. I’m a little surprised they give speed though. Senses and energy make sense I guess, considering how they navigate in the dark, and how practically everything gives energy. But not really speed seeing as they were pretty slow in their movements. They just had a very large numerical superiority to make up for it.

We continue walking for several minutes until we run into what must be hundreds of hatched eggs, each with their shells cracked and laid out across the floor, making it so that every step we take makes noise echo down the tunnel. But it’s at this point that I realize something.

Why didn’t the terminal alert me to the frozen symbiont and the large worm’s energy level? Shouldn’t it have done that?

Before I can ask my terminal about it, the sound of something chewing on the egg shells reaches my ears, drawing my eye to a tiny spider with the same appearance as the other ones just eating through the egg shells. But the moment it spots us, it runs away, down the tunnel.

That can’t be good.

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