Chapter 95

Animal Sense expanded.

His attention was first caught up below him. Although they had been nominally cleared, there were so many still alive. He was not sure if the hotel had been lax in its pet management policy and pest control, or whether the event summoned monsters everywhere, but for whatever reason, the abundance of life was extraordinary.

He catalogued what he was seeing. No mind worms, luckily. His core now actively scanned for them, but there was still a scattering of weasels, so Priscilla would continue to require a human escort. Rats, insects, spiders, mice, a cat in the roof crawlspace, and even a zombie near starvation that appeared to be trapped in a bathroom and missed in the rooms’ sweeps. One of the clearance teams had been slack.

Daniel threw that out of his mind in order to focus above him. The distinct lack of life.

His consciousness flicked over floors, looking for a monster. At the very edge of his range, he found the target. It was like a bucket of ice water being thrown over him. He recoiled. Whatever it was, was antithetical to his senses. He could pick it up, but not like normal. Instead, it felt like pure evil.

A headache formed, and Daniel was back in his body, gasping. The scattered information he had gained had sucked all the mana out of him. Malevolent, potent, immense, vile, a genuine threat unlike the slugs.

Daniel massaged his brow while considering what he had learnt. A large part of him was tempted to forget the people above them and just abandon the top four floors. Throw his energy into locking the place down and hope that monster did not come down to them. Whatever it was had throbbed with power. If he reinforced the floor . . . then, maybe.

The touch of horror faded somewhat. Rational thought re-established itself. There were humans up there, and given the creature had hunted and presumably eaten everything else, those people must have been fighting back.

The beast could be fought.

As terrible as his senses had registered the creature, it was not invulnerable, despite how alien it felt. It could be beaten, and if they were going to fight it, they had to do it now.

There were no more people to save below them, at least on the floors he could sense. Daniel’s army was not about to magically expand, and there was no reason to think something as mundane as a floor, even reinforced, could stop whatever it was. The creature had consumed all the life on multiple floors. Whether it was in the crawl spaces or locked in apartments, it had gotten everything, which meant the concrete floor might be a pretty excellent barrier until it got hungry and then not so much.

It was a ticking time bomb.

It might go down the lifts. The thought went through him, and if they were lucky, that is what it would decide to do. The moths could fight his battle for him.

Daniel looked up at the roof. Even that might not work. He was not sure the moths would win, and if the monster could beat them . . . then when it got to their floors, it would be even more powerful and then. . . . He rubbed his eyes helplessly. Then they would lose.

Another thought occurred to him. It had killed everything but had not opened up the stairwells or lifts. That was significant. It knew about the moths. That was the only explanation, and either it was killing them or its base instinct had let it avoid the fight. The problem would not solve itself. It was on him.

When it ate the people above, then it was coming.

“We need to kill it,” he told himself, knowing that he had already made this decision the moment he had felt the creature. They needed to get stronger, because the stuff on the ground was even more deadly than that thing above them. But he was kidding himself. The primary driver was they could not afford to leave an enemy behind them. His back itched thinking about the zombie floors they had skipped in order to rescue the people on the upper floors. Once this last monster was dead, they would clear them and then reassess. If their only opposition was below, then they could take things slower and by default be safer.

Course committed, he got up to find Ivey. She was in a small team clearing a room with another healer at her side.

Seeing him, she glanced at what everyone else was doing and came straight over.

“You look like you have something important to say.”

“Yep. We need to go up.”

Ivey looked doubtful nodding towards the window which was showing the red colour of a setting a sun. “Do we have time?”

“One monster,” he told her.

“That makes me even less willing to say yes.”

“If we leave it, it’ll come down and kill us.”

“Maybe.” Ivey did not sound convinced.

“It can break through the floor. We’ll need to meet it on our own terms.”

“I don’t—”

“Trust me.”

“Okay.”

“What?”

Ivey smiled. “I said okay. I agree with you.”

He looked at her suspiciously, but she just grinned back at him, eyes challenging him. Something had got her to change her mind.

Dave emerged, saw them, and pulled out a couple of cores that he threw to Daniel.

“Yeeda tatag.”

“Speed cores,” Ivey translated in a bored tone.

“Thank you.”

Dave gave him a big claw up as Daniel swallowed the small objects without hesitation.

“How long do I have?” Ivey asked while retrieving a backpack from the floor.

Daniel glanced at the sun and his almost-depleted mana. “Twenty minutes,” he told her.

“Where?”

With a shrug, Daniel pointed at a nearby room before walking over to it.

“Wait,” Ivey called out. “I almost forgot I have gifts as well. She pulled out five ziplocked bags. She handed him the first two bags. “These are from your kills. I did some trading on your behalf.” She handed him a third bag. “I gave up the termite cores for feral. Three speed, three earth, two ice.”

“Ice?”

Ivey looked over towards where Dave was standing. “It was the only other zombie cores available.”

“Sure, Dave can have the ice.”

“We figured,” Ivey said, holding the last two bags in her hand. “Forty termite cores, a mix of grunts, soldiers, and the king. I only traded away the worker cores.”

“Crafting,” Daniel said without hesitation. “Give the grunts to the general pool, and I will use the stronger ones to create living weapons.”

Ivey nodded before waving the last bag. “These are eggercough slug cores.”

“The things I squished.”

“Yep, but only two survived the process. I am uncertain how you will react, but hopefully they will improve your ability to heal.”

He hesitated for a moment.

“Theoretically, they are way less dangerous than those electricity cores and probably more useful.”

He grabbed the bags. Along with the other cores he had, Daniel was confident that he was going to have an awful night at some point.

“Anything else?” he asked. Ivey shook her head. “Okay, let’s do this.”

With that, Daniel went over to the room he had showed her, sat down, and started building a stairwell.

His heart was beating quickly, and all he could think about was that this was another make-or-break moment. If they won, they would emerge stronger, but if they lost . . . well, if they lost this battle when they engaged on their own terms, then they definitely would have perished when the monster came for them. Fighting now was the right choice.

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