No sooner does her cry hit my thoughts than I feel a sharp pain in one of my legs. What the heck? I wriggle furiously and kick until I give up and start pumping Earth Mana through the Omni-Elemental Construct. Once I have enough of the brown-tinged energy, I begin to create some room for myself.
Cautious of bringing down more rock on my own head, I soften some sections whilst hardening others, compressing the loose soil into rock pillars that can support the weight above me and creating a little room for me to look down.
And what do I find other than a damned termite clinging to my leg, its beady, near-blind eyes staring up at me hatefully. Why, you little pain in the foot! Get off me!
I somewhat awkwardly try and shift my position but end up just gnashing my mandibles in frustration as I fail to reach my opponent. Eyes now filled with savage joy, the termite continues to gnaw off my leg, its sickle-sharp jaws sawing away.
That hurts, dammit!
This is so annoying! I don’t want to make any large moves since I might bring down more rock on my own head. I’ll have to keep reinforcing the area around me and creating space bit by bit until I can chomp on this fool.
Just you wait, you damn termite! I’ll get to you soon, then you’ll get it!
[Be careful as you move,] I belatedly warn my pets. [You might make your situation worse. You hear me, Tiny?]
The ape grumbles at me and I get images of him lying flat under a mass of dirt. His bones are too solid to break, but his muscles are certainly a little squished.
[Invidia, see if you can Earth Magic your way over to Tiny. Heal him up and then try to solidify sections of stone to bear the weight. Eventually you’ll be able to get free.]
[Yessssss.]
[Master, I can sense the enemy all around us. There are thousands of them digging towards us.]
Not surprising. They don’t have any reason to give up, certainly not now that we’ve been pinned. I’m sure some termites were killed when it all came down, but bugs like them and me are designed for this sort of stuff, our carapaces can take a lot of punishment.
What follows is the most ungainly few minutes of my new life as I slowly and carefully wriggle my way around, eye locked with the hated foe who remains latched onto my leg with grim determination. Just give it up, will you? No matter how hard you try, you aren’t taking my leg!
I eventually manage to dispatch my foe, but I swear to Gandalf that even in death, that damned termite is laughing at me, its mandibles still clamped onto my leg. I manage to shake my limb free, applying a little Healing Magic to iron out the kinks, only to find the dirt beginning to shift around me.
I have a bad feeling about this…
Sure enough, several termite heads push through the soil and attempt to bite me! With extremely limited room, it’s hard to perform any sort of dodge, but I manage to contort myself enough that I avoid the worst of it before leaning forward to chomp with my own jaws. A horrifically stilted melee erupts as we grapple with each other whilst dirt rains down from above.
My brains spin furiously as I pump Earth Mana and rapidly weave it to create some sort of structure around me.
This is such a pain in the thorax! Thankfully I have the spare brainpower to do a lot of work. I’ve dropped the Gravity Domain—for obvious reasons—and my progress supporting the mess overhead is increasing. My issue is, the longer this all goes on, the more termites manage to dig their way to me.
This terrain is well-suited to insects like us, close quarters, covered in dirt, and biting each other in the face. In fact, the whole area rapidly devolves into a seething pile of dirt and stone as we try to get our jaws on each other, or Crinis slithers through paper-thin cracks hunting for victims. Tiny is forced to grapple and crush his foes, or use extremely short punches as he tries to get his feet back under him. Invidia is the hardest hit, the poor demon can’t even think about using an explosion.
Bit by bit, we manage to right the ship and create some space around us, but the wriggling, desperate fight continues as more and more termites force their way through the rubble. I swear I’m going to thwack that ape right on the scone when we get out of here!
140. Colony vs Colony, Part 14
Life in the fourth stratum is considered by many to be the pinnacle of existence. The rich, mana-intensive atmosphere, the wealth and prosperity available to those who are strong enough to hunt the powerful monsters, the abundance for those who can pay for it. Many empires of Pangera have shifted their capitals to this layer of the Dungeon over the thousands of years since the breaking.
This has caused a strange environment to arise in the fourth, as it is, without a doubt, a place of tremendous danger. The monsters that populate the stratum are powerful and vicious, many being intelligent creatures capable of great cunning, even communication. The great sky-wyrms, the most threatening of their kind, have roamed the mountains for hundreds of years. Growing up to a hundred metres long, they are fearsome opponents and have caused the downfall of many a hunting party, and even cities.
Thankfully, the ingenuity of the sapient peoples is nigh limitless. In their fortified mountain cities, it is possible to live an extremely comfortable and secure life, though that peace has been bought, and continues to be paid for, in the sacrifices of others.
[Oh! There you are. Thank goodness.]
[Sarah?]
The great bear snout snuffs about before she shoves her head through the narrow opening and I spy her big bear eyes blinking at me owlishly.
[I’ve been trying to dig you out, the termites are everywhere.]
[Yeah, I noticed. How the heck did you manage to find me?]
[Bears are good diggers,] she says a little defensively. [I’ve got strong claws and a great sense of smell. Why wouldn’t I be able to find you?]
Fair enough. I certainly can buy the part about the strong claws. Those things are beyond strong, they’re terrifying. I’ve seen them cut the air.
[Tiny and Invidia are over that direction,] I angle my antenna to droop down in front of her face and then point to the side, [and Crinis is over that way,] another point. [Though she is also over this way. Her situation is a little complicated.]
She has plenty of shadows to work with, little pockets of darkness that she can saturate with mana and slip tentacles through.
[Where are the termites? Do we know where they are coming from?] Sarah asks me.
I rotate the ends of my antennae in a full circle.
[Like you said, they’re coming from everywhere. From what we can gather, they’re busy crawling over the rubble that Tiny brought down on us, digging their way through.]
Oddly enough, Tiny may have actually done us a favour with his reckless roof-punching. Right at the moment when the cockroach-descended scum were aiming to flood us with overwhelming numbers, the big idiot literally brought the house down. I don’t doubt he destroyed a large number of termites with that one punch, but more importantly, he succeeded in buying time.
After all, that’s the whole point of this exercise. Unable to bring their numbers to bear against us, our foes are forced to dig through literal tons of material before they can put the bite on us. Still, it’s only a matter of time, and not much of it, before they clear the rubble and get to us. In order to have a fighting chance, we need to get the band back together before that happens.
The issue is shifting all of this rubbish without dropping it all on our heads.