Chapter Forty-Four

Duck Hunt

Dev had enough on his plate, and while he knew it was better to leave it alone, he came to a conclusion. He was the dungeon. He couldn’t let some random wandering whatever do as it pleased inside of his domain.

The duck had to go.

Rather, the duck needed to be captured, dissected, and rebuilt. It would make an excellent addition to his slowly growing ranks of meshes. He didn’t know why, but it seemed like the duck that mysteriously came and went as it pleased was a formidable predator. The cobra ducks, more commonly referred to as geese by some people, were respected as mildly dangerous, but the people on this world had a deep and respectable fear of ducks.

Dev could understand that. He’d seen the bird in action. Ferocious and vicious did not begin to describe that singular murderous bird. It was fervicious and brutal, and it chilled him right down to the core of his core.

He wanted that bird more than anything. A dozen replicants of that solitary duck would decimate a cadre of soldiers without losing a solitary feather between them. He wanted defenders, and a farmer who raised ducks would be a perfect cover. He could claim he’d trained them and that they were perfectly safe so long as no one threatened them. The townsfolks would give the farmer and his hatchlings a wide berth, Dev was certain of that.

If he wanted it, he was going to have to figure out how to catch it. The first part of his plan being to find it, the second part was to catch it, and the third part was to kill it for assimilation. Dev didn’t believe in killing sapient creatures unless they attacked him. Sentient creatures, though, were fair game. The difference was slim, he knew, but if he could justify killing a spider or a horse then he would have no qualms about taking down a murderous duck.

As far as the dungeon was concerned the hard part was going to be finding the malicious mallard. The beast left no trace of itself after it had killed and then gorged itself on the corpse, of its victims. At one point it might have left footprints, but the upgrade of the streets meant that no one and nothing left a trace of their passing. Not a boot print, a wagon trail, or even the imprint of a horseshoe had appeared in town now that the streets were extremely durable.

The only thing he had to go on was that it often haunted backstreets seeking its prey. Upon consideration, Dev believed that the duck had only attacked people involved with dark doings. Murderers and thieves had been the staple of its diet. The core couldn’t be certain, because he hadn’t been in the town as long as the fowl had, and if he was honest with himself, he hadn’t been paying it all that much attention until it had displayed its feral ways.

What did you do if you had no idea of where the creature that you were hunting was? Dev had never hunted before, but he did know about bait. Could he lure the demonic duck to a place of his choosing? He couldn’t see why not. The bait was simple. All he had to do was whip up a victim and an attacker; let them go at it, and wait for the duck to show up. The bird seemed more active in the evening to late-night hours, and so that was when he would have his drones go about their grisly task.

Dev thought about it a touch longer and realized that one predator/victim duo might not be enough. Three would be perfect. It was a magic number too. The three-eyed tri-clops, three-headed Giants, the three-toed Sloth, it took three tries to make a charm, hence the phrase, “third times the charm”, and three stabs in the back (kidney, kidney, lungs) to achieve a perfect kill were all examples of what made three so magical. So, he was more comfortable having three lures as opposed to one. All he had to do was wait for the right time to send them out.

His next concern was how to catch the creature. What could he put it in? Did he want to transport it across town? Could he kill it there? He doubted that. His minions were low-level drones. Some were sapient, but most just did what he told them to do. Their skills were not all that great, and he had no actual experience fighting.

Tooth did. He had beaten that last invader, Farmer Ted, with just his thumb, but he had access to most of the knowledge in the universe, including fighting styles. Dev’s problem was that he couldn’t access the knowledge in Tooth’s brain, and Tooth could not teach his minions any skills. Minions got their skills directly from their dungeon. Which meant they couldn’t go to a fighting class with Tooth as their instructor. Also, Tooth might know a ton of fighting styles, but he was still low-level, too. He had pulled off that stunt with the farmer by his sheer raw power. Had he been facing an opponent that had some real hand-to-hand combat skill or had been faster, then Tooth’s victory might not have been so one-sided.

Dev didn’t want to involve Tooth with his hunt anyway. The man could only do so many things, and he was stretched thin as it was. Just recruiting the townspeople to give up their land so that Dev could eat their property and replace it with better quality materials was taking a toll. The big man genuinely loved people, but even his inhuman stamina could only take him so far before his patience was worn thin.

No, Dev was on his own. It was his idea and it was his responsibility to deal with it no matter how much he would have liked Tooth’s help. Then Dev realized that he wasn’t alone. He did have an excellent and fully restored Constable Trond Guro to assist him. If Guro fell he could be replaced. It was a no-risk scenario. He still had to conceive of a trap that could catch it, and then hold it long enough for him to get it to his lair.

The way he saw it, he could open a path to his chamber after it was in custody and then he and Trond could try to figure out how to kill it. He really didn’t know how tough it was. It was possible that a simple well-placed sword strike would do the job, but Dev doubted that. That bird had taken down some rough customers like he was picking strawberries. The big juicy ones went first and left his “fingers” sticky. His best guess was that it was going to take some heavy-duty damage to take the bird down. Something along the lines of dropping a three-ton boulder on its head would be the best way to take care of business. The duck didn’t have to be whole for him to claim its mesh and its nature. All he needed was a body. There was no reason for him to be picky about the method or how bloody the results were.

The more he thought of it he like the idea of dropping a big stone block. It was the safest way that he could think of for him and Guro and got him what he wanted. The question was what he could use to catch it.

He watched the little cave spider he’d created back when he was firstborn. It was small, relatively speaking, but it was dangerous in its own right. If he made it bigger it would be a serious threat to the people in the town, size mattered. Its webbing would be unbreakable to the locals, and its venom a powerful paralytic.

He wished that he could make a giant spider, but that would make things even more terrifying for the local populace. They already had a raid to worry about. Throwing in a giant spider, even one that only wanted to catch a malicious fowl would be more than their mental stability could bear.

Did he need a giant spider? He could, he supposed, design some impact webbing balls, balls that could be thrown and would explode into strong sticky webbing after striking a target. They wouldn’t be things that you would just carry around as you went about your day. A hard enough bump could set them off, but Trond and the lures could carry enough that they could entangle the duck easily.

Then Dev got devious. Could he aerosolize the spider’s venom, so that inhaling it would have the same effect as if it had been injected? He didn’t see why not. Making fluid into a gas shouldn’t be too difficult. The core wondered if he couldn’t use the vaporous venom in the same way as he planned to use the impact webbing? It should be fairly simple. He could pressurize the paralytic gas and place it into a solid container and have it released via a valve possibly.

He wasn’t sure about that part. Possibly put the gas in a ball made of metal, add a stem and a handwheel that once it was turned it opened a slot for the gas to come out after a handful of seconds. Well, maybe a delay of three seconds would be a good time for the gas to be released. It would give you enough time to open it and throw it without getting a whiff of the gas yourself. The gas would have to be under a lot of pressure for it to release quickly and take up a large area of space in a short time for it to be inhaled.

That was the last place. Ninety percent of everyone agreed to the deal. You are going to be busy tonight. Do you need anything? I can help in any capacity that you need. Tooth’s voice rang through Dev’s mind. He’d been so caught up in creating and designing that the day had slipped by him.

No, you’ve been great. Why don’t you call it a night and go see your lady friend? I can handle things from this point forward. The weapon shop will be up and running and I’ll have reinforced all the town buildings by morning. Go and enjoy life. Dev wanted his friend, no, they weren’t friends or companions. So far as he was concerned, they were brothers. They were family.

If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take you up on that offer. I’m sure the two of us can hole up somewhere nice and snuggly and read to each other. I might even cheat and recite some love poems that don’t exist on this world and tell her I made them up just for her. What’s the point to having all of this knowledge if I can’t use it to score some points with a sexy love interest? Dev snorted at Tooth’s willingness to plagiarize for love. Then again, Tooth continued, I might just suggest that we set Prattle to working and let it entertain us until we find more interesting things to do.

Why don’t you just do what you think is best. Enjoy the night off. You won’t get many for a long time I’m afraid. Dev shut down their mental communication and got back to focusing on his planning. He could have talked with Tooth all night long, but they both had better things to do. He, for example, had a duck to catch.

Dev spent the next half an hour working on his gas balls and impact webbing designs. It didn’t take him long to find working models via simulations he ran in his visual display. He hadn’t known that he could do that, but he discovered the simulator under his Artificer Menu. That was a subsection of Engineering. The whole thing was meant for him to use to design traps. He could design a trap and then test it to see if it would work, and if it didn’t it would show him where the flaws were. That way an idea didn’t have to be scrapped, just reworked. Instead of a trap, he designed the pressurized gas ball first. The design wasn’t perfect, it didn’t go off on a stable count of three, instead of coming in as early as a two count or as late as a four-count. It was good enough at the moment. He would tinker with the overall design later and iron out the bugs. The impact webbing also failed in being perfect.

The first several designs were too fragile and broke with the slightest jarring. Dev had managed to increase the thickness of the shell until it wouldn’t break open just by walking around, but it had also made it so that the ball of compressed webbing had to be thrown with an extreme amount of force and then it had to hit something solid. Otherwise, it would just bounce off its target and do nothing. Dev placed them both in the win column even though he wasn’t ecstatic about the overall success of the designs. As prototypes went, they did the job. That was all that he asked for when it came to a new design that he was rushed to produce. It didn’t have to be pretty so long as you could kiss it.

He then created the pairs of attackers and victims. One went in the backstreet that was the scene of Trond Guro’s second death. Another pair went in the alley behind the tavern in which the three brothers had their sister lure that noblemen into an ambush, but then had the tables turned on them. The third and final set he had wander through the dark places, the unwitting maiden being stalked but a relentless but unseen killer. Dev had chosen the first to locations since they were places that he knew the duck had haunted, and having the last duo rove about the town was just another way for him to cover more ground and have a higher chance of coming across the devilish drake by pure happenstance, or maybe the movement would attract its attention. He didn’t know, but it felt like them moving around increased his odds of finding the bird.

Those last six minions were all that he could make until he leveled up. He hadn’t realized that he had a limit on minions. He knew he could only make ten dungeon defenders, creatures that worked to protect his interests but were free-willed. He had already burned though eight slots, with Trond, Chozen, his two new guards, and the four shopkeepers. He only had two slots left! He would have to make them count! He really needed to level up.

Dev armed each of his lures with three of his gas balls and three impact web pods. The only variable that he wasn’t sure of was how long the paralytic gas would last on the duck. He knew it would hold a human in place for ten hours since he had made them at the highest level of potency that he could, but he had no idea how t would affect a duck. His snake tester was immobile for a mere hour. He hoped he could live with the difference.

There were still other things that required his attention. He had almost an entire town to eat. That was going to be quite an undertaking. He wished that he could savor the experience, but he was going to be rushed. Between that and completing the last few settings of his collectors and finishing the Weapon of Choice he was going to have to make certain that he paid attention to everything that was going on around him. Getting that duck didn’t take priority, but it was the one thing he wanted the most.

He’d figured out how he was going to get the duck to him. Dev would simply envelop the creature in a diamond sphere and then create a tunnel that the ball o’duck could roll down until it came to where he had set up his three-ton block to crush it. He’d just vanish the diamond before the block hit it. It seemed easy breezy, but he knew better than to assume it would work as he expected. He was getting that duck tonight!

Everything was finally in place. All he had to do now was wait.