Chapter 94

While waiting, he created handles on the heavy beds of timbre that were covered in shiny metal. Critically, he studied them and then grinned. They looked like the sort of terrible futuristic decorations you might see in a robot play at a primary school. But those props would have been hollow plyboard while this stuff was so dense it barely counted as wood.

Ivey tramped up the stairs with a long line of help behind her. Priscilla left his shoulder, going through the mouse hole to provide scouting.

It was cramped. They shifted the springs to two landings down to make room, passing the heavy objects from one person to another down in a conga line. Then they were ready for the assembly.

Priscilla kept track of the eggercough slugs.

“How are we going to this?” the juggernaut asked curiously.

“Not sure, Toby,” Luke answered. “Depends how heavy it is.”

“We need to prop it up on its side,” Toby replied. “It is the only way it will fit through the door. Dave, Luke, Daniel.” He gestured to get them lined up on the side with him. “On the count of three. One, two . . .”

They heaved when he said three.

It did not move.

Toby stood, rubbing his biceps. “Have you bolted it to the floor?”

“No, it is just heavy.”

“Even with all of us, we aren’t carrying it,” Toby said, shaking his head. “We need a pulley system, maybe rollers.”

Daniel thought about it. “I’ll use springs.”

“Not how springs work,” Toby grunted.

“The new rules change things. Let me show you.” Daniel grabbed one of the wooden sections he had used to squeeze the metal into the near-airtight conditions, ready to repurpose it. His hands shaped it like putty. He fixed one side to the door and then stretched it out and handed the other end to Toby. “Hold on to this,” he said with a smile. Then he used his technique to impart tension.

The spring tightened. Toby jerked forward.

The juggernaut leant back and braced himself against the main part of the trap.

“Just caught me by surprise . . .”

Another transfer of tension and Toby flopped like a child in a tug of rope battle with an adult, when the adult suddenly finished it. Daniel smiled at that memory. His sister had torn strips off him later for that. Daniel had not cared; he had gotten sick of the little shit crowing about how strong he was.

“I can see that working,” Toby agreed. “What do we do?”

“Now. Prepare the trap. Every chance we get, we construct out there.” Daniel waved at the door. “In the downtime, I’ll set up this heap of junk to be moved.” He kicked the chunk of wood that all of them together could not shift. It could definitely squish the slugs.

In between the slug patrols, they attached the big springs. First, they stripped away the plaster and got access to the support beams. Then they lugged them in and installed them. In the breaks, Daniel engineered the system to move the main part of the trap. Twenty minutes of work was enough to leverage the top section from lying flat to being half to be on the side. Another five had it suspended in the air, and then it was a matter of guiding it into the hallway. On its side, it fitted easily through the door.

It took a long time, and their main stumbling block was not Daniel’s mana like he expected, but it was waiting for opportunities to act in the corridor. There was a single inquisitive slug that they had to timetable around. Worse, every time it passed, it would shoot its poison. Then they would need to wait a few minutes for the fumes to clear even with Tamara and Hua Chua clearing away the noxious poison. Both of the women when they finished were coughing and wrinkling their noses in distaste.

Daniel cursed the wasted time, as the sun was getting lower in the sky, but all they could do was to endure. The one benefit of the slug was that they knew that the metal sheets worked. Unprotected wood corroded away alarmingly fast, but when he checked the integrity of the timbre, the poison-tight metal casing worked perfectly.

They finished the initial construction, installing the extra coils of wood whose sole purpose was not power but instead to allow the trap to close properly. So much pressure was in the six giant springs that it was conceivable that without that guidance, the springs might twist and send the block sideways instead of down.

Once everything was in place, he spent a further twenty minutes charging the whole thing. Ramping up the tension in the springs by getting his ten helpers to bend wood to create immense potential energy and then transferring that potential power into his springs. The metal beams on the roof started bending. Daniel grimaced. It took another ten minutes to enhance the connections to spread the load.

Finally, it was done.

The trap would not fool a human or even the dumbest of ferals, but these slugs were an evolutionary leap further down the intelligence spectrum. The plan was simple. Yell at ground level using a metal covered shield for protection. When they charged, then slam everything shut. The slug press would hopefully take out a couple, and the door would stop the other two from escaping.

Reset.

Then draw some more and repeat as many times as it took till they were all squished.

Daniel opened the door, and a slug came around the corner.

Luke started yelling to attract its attention. At the tops of the stairs, it was just the two of them, but three healers were down a flight of stairs and the other two out on level thirty-eight. If they got poisoned, they would get rapid healing. There were no further preparations available.

Still fifteen metres away, it unleashed its spit. Luke’s shield intercepted the spray. The slug was even uglier in person than through Priscilla’s eyes. Daniel hated it, some sort of instinctive biological reaction. He wanted to squish it, which was sort of convenient.

Luke yelled again.

It spat every metre as it advanced. A splatter landed on Daniel’s hand, and he felt the poison going to work. A healing spell hit him. It did not remove the poison and instead restricted the spread. He wiped it off on the nearby wall and huddled further away. Technically, he did not have to stay up, but he wanted to be here to slam the door shut.

Luke took a step down the stairs, carefully keeping his shield positioned. Healing spells were hitting him constantly, and Daniel realised the fumes were burning his throat even as his eyes were stinging. He shut them and used the Plant Sense to track what was happening. Feeling instead of seeing. His senses infused into the trap that he had set. The tension that was caught was incredible. The first half of the slug was in the kill zone.

Waiting. Another splotch of poison went shooting past him. He was having difficulty with his stomach. He dry heaved, and the world seemed to roll around him.

It humped forward.

SLAM!

The trap came down, and Daniel pushed the door shut and stumbled down the stairs, collapsing halfway and then crawling the last few metres to the landing. Luke was next to him, and Carly had her dad’s head on her lap.

Heals hit him. Another heave and this time vomit came up. He held it in, swallowing his nausea, reducing with each infusion of healing energy.

“The next one I am doing from down here.”

There were no complaints, not even Luke. It was pretty clear that having two of them exposed to the fumes just spread the healing too thin. Better by far to have only Luke baiting.

“Did it work?”

Animal Sense.

“Yep.” Squished flat. “I can start preparing from here.”

Then he shut his eyes and went to work rebuilding the trap. First step was to release the tension on the giant springs. Then reverse it so the springs coiled back together, lifting the block of wood. Then joining the central slab to the rest of the structure, and finally redoing the tension until it was ready to splat something again.

The last change he made was to grow a spring on the door. When they opened it, he would store the tension and then release it when he wanted to shut it. It would not slam as effectively as him throwing his weight at it, but it would be fast enough against the slugs.

When he opened his eyes, everyone was ready. Priscilla was on Tamara’s shoulder being fed chips.

“This is her fifth. She said you promised six packets.”

“Six?”

Priscilla looked down abashed.

“Not six, then,” Tamara said more than a little amused.

“The agreement was three.”

“You little minx, I will not trust you in the future,” Tamara said. However, Daniel noted she kept feeding the mouse.

Daniel smiled to himself. There was a reason why Tamara was the mouse’s favourite person.

“How long was I meditating?”

“Around fifteen minutes,” Ivey answered.

Daniel looked suspiciously at the mouse. That was a lot for such a short period. They were the little packets, so he could have eaten that many, but he was a lot larger than the mouse.

“Where does she fit it all?”

Tamara shrugged. “I imagine with the speed of how she moves, she burns a lot of calories.”

Daniel shook his head and then abused Animal Sense to check above him. There was a slug right near the trap. He would prefer some distance for safety purposes. “Our window is in two minutes,” he told them.

A very short time later, Daniel repeated the process. This time he retreated sooner, and Hua Chua was with him, using her magic to clean away the poison as they landed. It surged through the trap space, but not fast enough.

Daniel monitored.

Boom!

They were a floor below and the very ground trembled. “That hits hard.”

“Yeah,” Ivey agreed, sending another heal at Luke. “Did you get it?”

Animal Sense flared.

The second slug was gone. There was not even a touch of its existence left in his magical senses. He gave everyone gathered a thumbs up.

They were lucky! His stupid desire to grow crops. The freakish ability that resulted. Luck!

Two of them were dead, and given his brief exposure to their poison, Daniel could not imagine just how terrifying they would be to fight directly. It had taken five healers to keep him and Luke standing. Standing and meeting them head on would never have worked. Ingrid’s explosive arrows would tickle them, and the fumes of a single volley would overwhelm their standard battle positioning.

They were lucky. Without his unique powers, their advance upwards would have stopped here.

Animal Sense.

The other two were coming to investigate. Of course they were. Daniel indicated quiet with a finger on his lips and with a small touch of his mind, the door shut, and he started the slow process of repairing the trap. Let them slink around, let them cover everything with poison. He did not need to be present to set up their death.

Daniel could not see, but he imagined clouds of green filling the space. Remotely, he monitored the integrity, and there were places where that gas had weakened the wood, but the metal protection he had put in place did its job and prevented too much damage from occurring.

They stopped firing.

The trap lifted back into position with Daniel remotely controlling the wood’s internal structure to get the results he wanted. The only difficulty was winching it up centimetre by centimetre and keeping the heavy weight centred and moving up smoothly. Once it was in place, his army of warriors lent their strength, pulling down the bar of timbre he was using like Vikings on a rowboat. He transferred the power and then they repeated. It was like they were bench pressing half a tonne each per iteration, to prime the trap.

Finally, it was done, and Daniel focused on hasty repairs. There was not much to do.

Animal Sense.

The two slugs were still lurking around, though they had stopped spitting poison. Hopefully, they were out. Actually, hopefully, whether or not they were out would not matter.

All he needed was for one of them to enter the trap zone. With two lurking, he did not want to send Luke up.

Carefully, he grew a green vine out from a gap in the metal sheets. The fumes in the air immediately started eating away at its integrity. Luckily, he did not have far to go. Automatically, he created dead wood. It was a barrier, but it would not last that long. Then he focused his power into the very end to form a bud. A seed it dropped, which bounced on the bottom.

Both slugs focused. Spittle flew at the ball, and it sizzled. It was a seed, and this stuff was so potent it would destroy even dead wood. The seed had no chance. He had known that. But it had done its job. The slugs were focused where he wanted them to be.

The second fell. This time, the poison hit while it was still falling, knocking it into the door with a distant thump.

“What’s happening?” Ivey asked.

“I am trying to lure them remotely.”

The slugs edged closer.

The third ball was released. This time, they let it bounce before both of the slugs sent their deadly saliva flying at it. They were both moving forward, so he relaxed and expended no more energy.

Come on, he thought to himself. One of you get into range.

They were both just outside the kill zone. One paused, then the second likewise.

In the middle of the floor, right where he wanted them, a flower blossomed, courtesy of an almost invisible conduit.

Poison killed it.

They were not moving.

A flower sprouted on the furthest edge of the bottom layer of his trap. The slug leant down and bit it. It ate the flower.

“Yes.”

“What?” Tamara asked.

One finger held up to encourage her to wait.

More flowers blossomed. Both were at the same spot and they started wilting immediately as residual poison assaulted them. Both slugs moved forward, lowering their mouths to eat.

It was happening.

There was some resistance from the metal layer, but more flowers opened up. The metal protection on the bottom layer was perforated, but it was the least important part of his traps.

The two slugs grazed on them, humping ahead. Halfway!

It was too early. Squishing the front would just let the backs regenerate.

“A little further, please.”

Flowers sprouted just at the edge of their range.

“Come on.”

They were not moving. He sprouted additional flowers near them. Both caterpillars ate them but did not move forward. His original ones died, so he recreated them.

“Move!”

Why? Why were they no longer following? Another delectable morsel just out of reach. One inched forward, but he held himself still. No more flowers. He could wait, from now on he would just replace the losses. If they tried to retreat, he would trigger the trap.

Agonising seconds ticked by.

“What is happening?” Tamara asked.

“A little further,” he whispered, imploring them to move closer. The brave one shifted fully on the trap, busily devouring the offered treats. Glutton!

He could kill one right now. But it was better to wait. The slugs were not quick. In the event they started to retreat . . . then smack , they would get squished. Nervous sweat ran down Daniel’s face. There were only a couple of flowers left. Glutton reached for the second last, and then the cautious one surged forward, clearly wanting one treat before they all went.

Whomp!

The stairwell they were standing on shook.

Animal Sense.

The slugs were gone.

He jumped up in excitement. “Got them.”

“Both?” Luke asked.

He smiled at the man sitting next to his daughter. “Yep. Mr. Training Dummy, you’re out of a job.”

“At least till your next scheme.”

“Nah, it’s Dave’s turn next.” Dave glowered at him. “What? I don’t want you thinking I am racist or speciesist or something,” Daniel told him, grinning. “Equal opportunity and all.”

“Dan.” Tamara’s voice was not approving.

“What, too far?” She looked at him, and he summed up the situation. It was not worth everyone being annoyed at him. “Sorry, Dave, just talking shit.” Tamara smiled at that, and he felt butterflies in his stomach. What on earth was happening? He was supposed to be with Ivey, and Tamara had a boyfriend. “Let’s go save people,” he said to distract himself from the running thoughts. He suspected his cheeks had just reddened alarmingly.

She has got a boyfriend. The thought echoed in his head as he led them up the stairs. But considering she spent her day fighting next to him with Jayden nowhere in sight, it was easy to forget.

“Anything dangerous left?”

“Nothing the standard parties can’t take care of.”

He took them through a quick tour of the new floor, pointing out people and monsters, and then sat down for the next bit. His magic was back at full. It was finally time to determine what stalked the floors above him.

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