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Chapter 49: Pod People, Always a Problem
🕑 Added 2024-12-17 03:05:33 +0000 UTC“Alright, alright, there’s some potential good news here. We might just have the right people to handle this problem. Seedlings ain’t generally able to grow husks that work correctly for anyone with more than one soul, so Cecile and Elicec are gonna be able to put a damper on that mother root’s plans. Next piece of good news: they grabbed a messenger drone of mine, probably thinking it’s the full me, and any attempt to tamper with it is gonna cause a nice big explosion. That’s gonna lead us directly to where the current pod nest is. Dave, I know you were starting to come up with a plan, but we’re gonna go with mine. I know what these things are, and you’re still real green to all of this, and I swear that if you make a joke about that statement, it will be the last one you make. Glunderlin, yer gonna take the twinog here and let them into the entrance to the caves. You two are gonna take another messenger drone with you. Dave will, too,” Mel explained, making sure to glare at me the moment he brought up the joke part. I hadn’t really been thinking about the joke, but he was right; there was an easy one there, but I wisely kept my mouth shut.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked, not sure where he had me in his plans.
“Yer gonna go kick down the door of whatever building that is about to be a dungeon and hopefully free that core before it ends back up where it started. Fire should work pretty good on the reltleons pods, don’t hesitate, they ain’t real, just puppets of the mother root,” Mel said. I thought I could handle that. I hadn’t really had a chance to see what combat was like with monsters outside of a dungeon, so now was as good a time as ever.
“Got it; what are the mini yous for?” I asked, ignoring their proper name.
“Yer really gonna keep calling ‘em that, are ya? It’s so I know what happened; I may not get all the info, but even their lack of return will tell me a lot. Now get going, all four of ya. I gotta figure out if these mana orbs are safe because we may need them before this mess is over,” Mel said, barking the order. Even Glunderlin jumped to obey, racing us out of the building.
“Point me at where I need to go, please,” I said to the mayor once we were back outside.
“Straight down the road, it’s what looks like it used to be a big open building at the center of the intersection. I doubt anyone will try to stop you going in, but if they do, say I sent you,” Glunderlin said. I nodded and took off at a sprint down the street, hoping Mel would be safe in the room with Chip. There was still some pain in my knees during the run, but nowhere near what it had been on the retreat from the desert. Regeneration hadn’t fixed everything yet, clearly, but it probably didn’t help that I kept adding new injuries on our rapid dungeon fire excursions.
The building quickly came into view and it looked something like a four-way intersection with a large train station built on top of it. There were several guards at the sides I could see, but they all looked terrified of whatever was happening on the inside. Just how few people were actually capable of handling dungeons? Had I already jumped above most of the population? That didn’t seem right. Then again, specialized tasks didn’t always have a large pool of people to pull from. Maybe that held true here as well.
“Sorry, no time to talk. Glunderlin said it was fine,” I yelled as I leapt over the guard standing in my way, mostly to see if I could. The landing stretched something a bit, but nothing broke. While this may have been something any human in their twenties in reasonably good shape could do, it certainly wasn’t something I had been able to do. That confirmed one of my theories: my body was getting rebuilt better than it had been, likely partially because of the strength training I was trying to keep on as much as I could.
I stopped in front of the door and heard a few murmured words of hope from the guards as I tried to open it. It didn’t seem locked, but like something was blocking it from the inside. Good thing I had a makeshift battering ram in my possession. Two heavy mallet blows later and I was through the door and glad for my improved night vision. Every light in the building had been snuffed, but with the little bit of light flooding in from the opened door behind me, I could easily see a dozen figures standing in the center of the room. The fact that they were entirely unmoving, showing zero reaction to my sudden presence, was somewhat unnerving.
“Hey, what are you guys doing?” I called out as I walked towards them. No answer came. There wasn’t the tiniest hint of movement, even once I was directly behind one of the figures. I poked it from behind, my finger going straight through what felt like long rotted away wood. I pulled my hand back and gave it a shove. The figure broke apart, collapsing to the ground in a pile of dust and splinters, revealing a thick root from the foot of where it had stood to the center of the circle of these husks. Each of them had a similar root running to the center into some sort of egg.
My destruction of the husk looked to have triggered something as the egg rapidly cracked, and a creature erupted out of it with a sickening squelch sound accompanied by an ear-piercing cry. Rising out of the egg and quickly growing was best described as a plant abomination. With what I assumed was a head, it stared directly at me with a palpable rage. I realized I should have switched to my fire elemental orb much earlier at the exact moment one of its appendages elongated and slammed me backward across the room into one of the pillars.
I coughed in pain, very tired of being thrown against things. At least nothing seemed broken or even bruised this time, but it had become a repetitive experience that I wanted to stop having. I used recall to quickly hit it with a series of fireballs as it rushed toward me for another strike, pulling my mallet up at the last possible moment, countering its charge with my own hard swing directly in the center of its mass. I managed to knock it down at the cost of slamming my back again into the pillar behind me.
Water started pouring out from several spots in its body, extinguishing the flames as it writhed on the ground to find its footing. That wasn’t a great development for me. I was afraid of switching to the aether orb and just knocking the whole building down on top of us, so instead, I swapped over to my least-used mana orb, imbuing, and, using core projection, infused some fire mana directly into the mallet. Pushing the mana that way felt so much harder than it did on the elemental orb, likely because of how few ranks I had on it, something I was going to need to change when I had more free time to consider how best to do so.
I managed to catch one of its appendages with a swing of my mallet as it shot out at me again, sending a small burst of fire into the dent I left on it. The thing screamed in anger, pain, or possibly even just annoyance. I had no idea which, but the launching of its entire body off the ground at me told me it wasn’t any sort of attempt to surrender. I hit it again with my mallet twice before it managed to land its own blow. A new appendage shot out of its midsection and rammed me hard in the chest. This time, I did feel something break, hopefully just a rib or two at most.
I turned my life orb back on; I was just going to have to deal with the mana drain. I needed the pain dulled and the healing to start, but what I really needed was this damned thing to stop getting back up. I ducked under another attack and landed a swing of my mallet into the joint of the arm-like protrusion. It cracked with my force, and this time, the fire didn’t immediately go back out. I swung again before it could recover, putting more of both my strength and mana into the blow, aiming for under what I thought was its head. An even louder crack resounded through the room as it toppled backward again.
“Help me, please!” a voice cried out, badly muffled from somewhere inside the creature’s body. Dammit, what had it managed to seal inside itself? I grabbed a large screwdriver from my System storage into my offhand and used the mallet to drive it deeply into the thing, ripping off pieces as I went. It soon stopped struggling against me, and I found what had pleaded for my help. The creature had grown around what looked like a dungeon core. No, it was a former dungeon core, now a traveler, whatever that was.
“Are you okay?” I asked it.
“Yes, thank you so much. I thought for sure it was going to use me to destroy all the good my brothers and I have done,” it said.
Before I could say anything, a second mini-Mel floated into the room and yelled in his usual voice, “Dave, we need you in the caverns the second you finish there; the brothers are overwhelmed. Take this new drone, send me back the old one!”
We do not know where the Seedlings come from, only that they first showed up after the expansion of the year 3.92.23-PT and they have been a growing problem ever since. Every attempt to eradicate them has seemed successful, only for a new infestation to spring up years later and be noticed far too late to save the world it was found on. As of yet, no universes have been overtaken, but countless words have been annihilated in the eternal crusade against them. These are only one of many menaces that someone choosing a career in extermination can expect to deal with.
System Paths, Careers in the Spiral by Glarppp
