Death Cap - Thirty-Seven - Slow and Careful Preparations are Rewarded with Quick Victories

The cushion exploded with a burst of spore-y shrapnel and then a cloud of [Dead Man’s Cough].

I shifted my aura towards the door, to a box they’d left next to it. It exploded apart as well, releasing more spores into the room.

That wouldn’t be enough, of course. Each [Dead Man’s Cough] only had so many spores, and the warehouse was relatively large and my dispersal wasn’t perfect.

Which is why I had brought a lot of mushrooms.

Three more bursts came from near the ceiling, and soon the room was filled with [Purple Starball] spores and even more toxins from my [Dead Man’s Cough] mushrooms hidden in the rafters.

Now that they were appropriately distracted, I reached over to the copper wire of the lights, grabbed a rusty old pair of wire cutters I’d found and wrapped in plenty of cloth, and I grunted hard as I snipped the wire.

The room, of course, went dark. To the muggers who’d just been outside it might have been debilitating.

To me, the chaos was beautiful.

Of course, it wouldn’t last. While Jack went down coughing, hands grabbing at his throat, the other boys weren’t so unlucky. A couple of them had pulled up their shirts and were covering their mouths, while somehow Averell was just outside of the area my mushrooms were in when they went off and was spared from the death cloud.

I pulled something out of my bag. That jar filled with nails and explosive mushrooms. The jangle had William and Joe looking up, and they caught sight of me through the thin haze of spore dust in the air just as I tossed the jar over to them.

In mid-air, I filled it with mana, then I reeled back, taking Sir Nibbles with me so that we’d be behind some partial cover.

There was a loud bang, much louder than the previous ones, as if someone had just dropped a stack of bricks onto the ground.

One of the boys started screaming, but I was more concerned with the nail that appeared in the ceiling right next to me, planted in the wood point-first with a thump.

That was dangerous. I made a mental note not to be within the fragmentation range of any explosives I set off in the future. That could have hit me somewhere important, and then I would have been in all sorts of trouble.

I glanced over the edge again. The boys had taken that blast full-to the face, but it seemed as if their clothes were enough to stop most of the shrapnel from penetrating. Unfortunate, but not too surprising. The force pushing those bits of glass and metal around wasn’t that concentrated.

I’d work on it.

In the meantime, they were all now covered in little scratches and cuts. William, who had covered his face with a scarf to keep the spores off, had lost the scarf and was now wheezing on all fours.

Jack was just dead. He’d slipped to the floor, face tinted an unhealthy blue shade. One less concern to deal with.

“You’re dead!” Joe shouted up at me. He grabbed a shirt off the back of a chair, flicked dust off of it, then tied the clean side over his lower face as a sort of makeshift bandana. He jumped up and started to climb up the wall to reach me, using the wooden beams in the walls as handholds the same way I’d done to reach my spot.

I hesitated for just a moment before I decided to focus on the last few mushrooms I had hidden in the room. My aura whipped around, activating more mushrooms which popped and filled the room with even more spores. They wouldn’t be as effective now that they were covering their mouths, but some of them would work with mere skin contact and if the spores got into their open cuts then they might work even better than they did through the lungs.

Joe’s hand grabbed onto the edge of the beam I was on, and I scurried back.

His head moved over the edge, eyes burning with anger and the promise of violence. He had a nice gash on his forehead, and a little cut high on a cheek that was oozing blood out slowly. “Come here,” he growled.

“No thank you,” I replied.

Then I blasted [Blight] at his face.

Almost as soon as the magic touched him his wounds turned a sickly white on the edges. More importantly, the shirt he was using as a bandana started to go threadbare and the bit of colour dyed into the cloth was washed off.

Joe reached over and tried to grab at my foot. Instead, he got a face-full of Sir Nibbles who darted ahead so fast he was nothing more than a hissing, angry blur with scything claws that scratched and tore at Joe’s face.

I felt my gorge rise as one of the boy’s eyes was ripped out of his face. I thought I was inured to violence, but that was a bit much.

Joe screamed as he lost his grip on the beam, only catching himself at the last moment while Nibbles backed off. The man was hanging off with one hand holding onto the wooden beam, the other was touching his face.

Obviously, I stomped on his hand with the edge of my boot.

His grip slipped, and he fell down to the ground with a hard crash. It wasn’t a deep fall, so I doubted it did more than bruise him.

Glancing over the edge, I took in the state of the other boys, then whipped out my Aura to touch them all while turning it to [Blight] on contact. It would worsen any wounds, maybe speed up the rate at which they passed, though I doubted it a little.

My magic was woefully slow to act, and while infected injuries could be lethal, they were lethal over the long term.

Joe groaned and rolled to his front, then he looked up, one eye glaring at me. His bandana had fallen down to rest around his neck.

I flung a [Dead Man’s Cough] at him from above and it exploded against his face with a very satisfying whump. He rolled back, choking for air.

Sir Nibbles and I stayed where we were while the boys grew slower, more sluggish. Averell was the last to go silent after a good three or four minutes of struggling. I think he’d been hit by more [Purple Starball] dust than anything else, so the other poisons took a long time to take him out of the fight.

Of course, I wasn’t so stupid as to just jump down without verifying anything.

I waited another five minutes, hoping that the kerfuffle hadn’t called too much attention to the warehouse. I doubted the boys were quiet neighbours, so some banging and shouting would probably be dismissed as normal.

Five minutes of no-movement was a decent indicator that everyone below was dead. It also gave the spore powder time to settle into a fine dusting over everything. Still... I tossed some [Bottle Pops] next to everybody and let them bang apart.

When none of them moved after that, I just waited another minute for things to settle once more, then I made sure Sir Nibble’s mask was well fixed to his face, and I made my way down.

I needed to clean the crime scene, at least enough that no one would know that mushroom-based poisons were involved.

The obvious solution was fire, but fire was overly destructive at times. This building was connected to dozens of others, and people likely lived nearby. So I went to the washroom, found some clothes and plugged the drains.

I went around picking up the biggest chunks of mushroom I could find, then I flushed them down. Then I opened the taps and let the flooding begin.

The muggers had a few weapons around. Knives and bats and such. I spread them around. The room already looked like a fight had taken place in it, more weapons around would point towards those being used.

It was a little grisly, but I stabbed a few of the boys and left the knives there. Anyone looking quickly would assume that this was some sort of retribution or a reverse mugging.

Then, finally, I checked the safe behind the couch.

It wasn’t much of a safe, just a rusty old thing. That didn’t matter when I started pulling out the contents.

Coins. Entire pouches full of coins. Most were just stacks of halfpennies, but one had nothing but shillings and another, smaller bag had a couple of dozen pounds in it.

There was some jewellery too. Nothing too intricate or beautiful, but some silver brooches and brass earrings with little bits of quartz or other semi-precious stone embedded into them. “This is a real jackpot,” I said.

Sir Nibbles sniffed. He didn’t care.

“Alright, but if you don’t want a share, then that’s on you,” I said as I scooped everything up into my satchel. Water was starting to wash across the floor in a slow, seeping wave, some of it bloody, a lot of it brown with dust.

I grabbed both kerosene lamps, tossed them onto the couch hard enough that their containers broke, then I lit a match.

The place was filling with brackish smoke as I left.

Hopefully, the fire wouldn’t spread too much.

***