Chapter 80: Tunnels to Evil (Patreon)

Logan had a huge problem.

The ground on top of the cliff was flat and covered in grass but empty of anything else. He could walk along the edge of the wall, look down and see for miles. That meant that as he moved closer to his own blob army, they looked like small mice.

That wasn’t his problem.

His problem was that everything that went up eventually had to come down, and Logan had forgotten that although jumping up a cliff had been the time of his life, he had to get down.

Shit. That second Pink Sock sure could come in handy right now.

He could try lowering himself off the ledge by hanging onto the edges and dropping down, kicking with his foot, and envisioning himself jumping—like a reverse boomerang—but he knew that would have a risk. [Regenerate] could grow back limbs and combined with his constitution attribute, it helped him heal, but it was no guarantee. A Logan-splat over that drop would be beyond unpleasant. It might be life threatening.

Oh well, never say that he hadn’t dealt with life-or-death situations before. Compared to when Ernie and Logan escaped from the serpent’s lair, this was nothing.

And he thought he had a way out.

He’d planned to deploy this tactic while he was on the ground, but why not kill two birds with one stone?

Logan backed away from the cliff edge. The top of the gorge was flat and so wide that it went on for a quarter mile. Damn. Just where was this trial? Unlike in the valley with the white doors, the sky looked normal—blue with no pockmarked pink moon. The clouds looked like regular clouds. It had a distinctly Earth-like feel.

Once he’d backed up a good amount, he looked down. Grass, dirt, stone. Perfect.

Concentrating on a patch on the ground, Logan envisioned scooping out an excavator’s worth of material, an immense bucket the size of his largest boulders. Furrowing his brow and keeping that mental image lodged, he willed it inside his spatial storage. There was a resistance, that same elastic sensation, but it was momentary. With a cracking sound, the rock severed, the earth shifted, and a huge hole appeared in front of his feet. It was so large that he could jump inside, and he wouldn’t be able to see out of the top.

Hell yeah, he was getting good at this. Soon, he’d be a spatial storage master. He could see why nations had gone to war over an S Grade item. Logan had barely touched the surface of what it was capable of, and he had no idea what was too massive—it had stored everything he threw at it, even his grandfather’s storage shed.

Logan peered into the hole and then repeated the process. This time at an angle—not directly down. He coughed as a plume of dust kicked up in the air.

With a grin, he jumped into the hole and then focused straight ahead, going diagonal this time. It was like creating a maze, descending, scooping out earth to the sides and leveling off, and descending again. The name of the game was to create a gradual path that allowed him to decline at a steep angle, but not a free-fall.

He was worried that he’d be unable to see as he increased the depth and the sunlight no longer seeped into the hole, but that’s where his perception came in. It wasn’t easy; everything was dim like looking through a screen door, but he could sense the walls of the rock. But eventually, even Logan reached his limit. Pausing, he removed one of the branches that were inside his spatial storage—the ones left over from the logs and driftwood—as well as a smaller towel. Wrapping the towel around the end of the branch, he fashioned a makeshift torch. All he needed was his barbeque lighter.

That would come in handy with the tar.

Once the torch plumed with a steady flame and illuminated the space around him, his tension decreased. Logan had never been claustrophobic, but being underneath tons of earth in a narrow tunnel did things to a person. It was hell of an enclosed space.

Scoop after scoop, Logan continued the jagged path, coughing in dust, rubbing his eyes, and spitting to clear his throat.

Yuck.

But it was working.

And then, with one massive earth scoop, he reached the bottom of the gorge.

The light was so bright his already sore eyes watered. The sun was dipping in the sky, close to dusk, but the outside light was a huge change from a pitch-black tunnel.

Logan extinguished the torch by throwing it inside his spatial collar and then he shook his head, dust flying. He was a filthy mess, but warmth infused his body, a surge of pleasure and success.

He’d done it.

He’d created a tunnel—a hell of a steep tunnel—but a tunnel all the same.

Now he just had to do it on the other side.

***

[Countdown: Day 8 of Day 365 before species culling. Only the worthy survive.]

[Current rank: 38 out of 6,010,919,188.]

[You are currently in the 1%.]

Logan jerked awake and jumped up from the side of his newly constructed tunnel. He’d worked well into the early morning hours last night and had finally decided to take a short nap before the new day began. If there’s one thing he could give the System, it was that it was a hell of an alarm clock.

That meant he had about half the day to finish preparing before the battle started.

Wait a minute.

For a second, his nerves surged, that feeling of realizing that you’d forgotten to turn off the stove while you were half-way to work. His mind raced through the possibilities, but then he gave himself a mental talking to. Even though the last few days had blurred together, a non-stop go go go of physical and mental activity, he would have noticed a purge. They were hard to miss.

The entire day had passed without anything.

Logan scowled. It was yet another case of the System being an uncommunicative asshole, forcing them to guess at every opportunity. Either no purge meant something good—had it finally finished purging what it considered the major carbon contributors? Or it meant something not so good—a worse possibility. An escalation.

Shit. If there was one thing he knew, he didn’t like the idea of Lara and the kids, Tasha and Jack, and everyone else struggling through this on their own. He needed to get out of here. Yet again, he was reminded that once the battle started, he needed to nudge Thorin and Errol along. Logan didn’t have the luxury of letting them take a week to complete this.

Despite his urgency, he couldn’t hold back a wide grin as he weaved his way into his blob army. They saluted him as he passed, nodding their bulbous heads, and then gave him double takes. Logan looked down at his dirt-covered body and grimaced. He supposed that even the System programming couldn’t overcome the sight of a commander covered in so much dirt that it flew off him like a hurricane. It was as if he’d just walked out of a desert and into a windstorm.

Logan shook his head again, shedding yet more dirt, but he suspected that he’d need a shower to get the caked-in crap out of his pores.

“Zig,” he said, raising his voice.

The captain swivelled around like a Russian tea doll. In one of his appendages, he held a handful of hay, the other held a large bundle.

Logan felt better about ‘evil’ Zig after seeing that. There was nothing better than a leader who helped his team with the grunt work. Leading by doing demonstrated that you were part of the team more than anything else.

“Commander,” Zig said eagerly. “You’re back from your evil scouting! Is that the dust of your enemies I spy?”

Logan blinked. “I don’t have that kind of evil power. How is everything going?”

The blob preened, proud. “As you commanded, the preparations are well in hand. We’ve fastened boards to all the wagons and connected them in a line. We’re just finishing up the last of the hay bundles now.”

“Good job. Once you’re finished with that, have the blobs set them underneath the wagons, five underneath each wagon should do. Set the extra to the sides. But for now, I have another task for you.”

Logan walked over to the end of the wagons. “I need two of these. I’ll take this one, but I’ll need to take the one at the other end as well. We can shore up the line though—don’t worry.”

“Where would you like us to move them?”

“Nowhere.” With a blink, Logan willed the two wagons into his spatial storage. Since he wasn’t severing anything, the process happened in a fraction of the time.

The blobs made excited sounds and vibrated in excitement as they clutched each other. They looked as if they were about to swoon, their three saucer eyes pinned to Logan in worship.

Logan felt his ears grow warm. “Here,” he said as he willed out a ton of the dirt and rock from inside his spatial storage and deposited it next to the missing wagons, creating an impenetrable pile of… dirt.

“Your evilness!” breathed Zig.

“That rock pile is so high that you shouldn’t have to worry about guarding it. Station blobs behind the remaining wagons instead. But for our next step, I need ten soldiers.”

“Where will you be taking them, commander? For a flaying, perhaps?”

Logan scrubbed his face, wiping away another line of dirt. “No flaying,” he said, firm. “You can come as well. You’ll need to be in the loop.”

Zig puffed with pride and made quick work of flagging down enough soldiers.

Logan led them through the army and over to the tunnel on the right side of the sheer wall. He’d designed them so that they didn’t open on top of his own army—he wanted enough battlefield space to make them strategically important.

“See this tunnel?” said Logan. “It goes to the top of the gorge. Send five blobs and yourself up this one and five more into the one directly across on the other side. I’ll meet you at the top.”

Zig looked into the tunnel with wide eyes. “That wasn’t here before,” he said with a quivering voice. Then he hesitated. “But how will you get to the top, commander?”

Logan gave him a sheepish grin. “Don’t worry about it, just start climbing. It’ll take a while even going at full speed.” And the blobs… were blobs. They’d be sliming up that tunnel, not running.

Zig blinked his three saucer eyes and then snapped, “You heard the commander. To the top!”

Once they were out of sight, Logan took a running leap at the sheer wall and deployed the Pink Sock to jump like a slingshot. Having the blobs watch him do this felt like showing off. They were already too enamored as it was.

The jump up was just as fun as the last time. When everything died down, when the System Integration was over—and once everyone survived—he could see himself going crazy with the sock.

Once Logan reached the top, he removed one of the wagons, pushing it close to the edge—so close that the wheels were at risk of falling. Then one after another, he removed massive scoops of the dirt and rock from his spatial storage and filled up the wagon. Backing up, he deposited another five scoops on the ground right next to the edges of the cliff, so close that a blob should be able to push them over with a bit of manpower.

Even after all that, he still had to wait another half an hour before Zig and the other blobs climbed out of the tunnel.

Zig panted and looked around, peering around in confusion before spotting Logan. “Your evilness,” he coughed, his bulbous head looking flushed, his body drenched in sweat. “You truly defy our expectations! What ingenuity! What power! A tunnel in a mountain! A tunnel in a mountain!”

The other blobs murmured in agreement, wiggling their appendages in excitement.

Logan rubbed the back of his neck and shifted, awkwardly ducking his head as his stomach sloshed. The System had done a number on these buggers. Logan might as well be a messiah with the way they were treating him. Never let it be said that he didn’t enjoy the occasional compliment, but this was taking it to the extreme. He knew their fervor was a System construct. It was his [Eager Beaver] title all over. The System had messed with these thing’s heads, brainwashed them, and he would like nothing better than to give them back their autonomy.

“Gather around. Here’s what I want you to do.”

***

[You have completed the battlefield arena holding tutorial! Be prepared to be transported to the viewing room in 10 seconds…]

[9…]

[8…]

That was all Logan could do. With his limited battlefield knowledge, he’d employed and prepared the best strategy at his disposal. Now, it was just a matter of whether it was a smarter strategy than Arsen and Asthea’s.

[7…]

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[5…]

He wasn’t sure what would happen when he exited the battlefield prepping area—were the blobs frozen in place? But even if time continued while the System transported him elsewhere, they knew what to do.

[4…]

[3…]

He’d made sure to cover his spatial collar again, reforming his neck and shoulder armour, keeping his boots and forearm guards. Since he was going last, he didn’t bother reforming the whole suit.

[2…]

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[Commencing transfer to viewing arena!]

----> Go to chapter 81.