It hit like an invisible boulder rolling the wrong way on a mountain road. The first steelplated scorpions that emerged from the mineshaft had their bodies folded, legs torn from end to end. In an instant, the two front-runners came apart from claw to tail.
Behind them, more giant scorpions screeched, but the swarm was undaunted. They continued shoving through the carcass of their fallen brethren like a tide shouldering driftwood.
Again.
He exhaled, poured five more mana into his prosthetic, and the second windsphere roared down the funnel again. Another wave of scorpions was sheared open, plates peeled like lids, their pale jelly spilling before the bodies even realized they were dead.
***
Name: Steelplated Scorpions
Grade: Common-6 ~ Common-8
Might: 19 ~ 25
Swiftness: 6 ~ 11
Resilience: 21 ~ 31
Clarity: 3 ~ 6
Mana: 50 ~ 55
General Description: Giant mineral-eating scorpions that metabolize ore into metallic chitin, ranging from one meter tall to three meters tall. Linked to a brood-queen via a rudimentary mind-thread. Their main abilities are as follows:
- Ore-Marrow Carapace: Their mineral chitin grants additional resilience and weak magnetism.
- Tunneler’s Whisk: They can sense acute vibrations via their tail spines, improving their response in underground tunnels.
- Brood Impulse: They can obey their queen’s immediate directives via the queen’s steelplated hivemind brain.
***
Apart from being unusually tough because of their metallic chitin, the steelplated scorpions were the only species of giant scorpions in the entire world that lived in broods. Normal scorpions were solitary and reasonable creatures, but steelplated scorpions shared one mind stretched across a thousand skittering legs, because they were all empathically linked to their queen—their mother—who could issue commands without making a single sound.
They were terrifying foes for underground miners, but they were, in their own way, even easier to tame. After all, tame the mother and the children would swagger… which meant, at this moment, the tamer who’d gotten their hands on the queen certainly already knew Dain was here.
But are you going to come out and face me, or are you just going to sit behind your little army and buy some more time for yourself?
He fired his third windsphere. Then he fired his fourth, his fifth, and another wave of carapace and stingers disintegrated in the chokepoint. Five-mana windspheres had enough power to instantly shred the giant scorpions, which weren’t really ‘giant’ like the golems were. They were simply giant for scorpions, meaning most of them were only about his height and a fair bit stronger.
… You’re really not coming out, huh?
Gonna make me slaughter all of your scorpions first?
As he twitched his eye, one of the scorpions slipped through the mineshaft—a relatively big one, legs skittering, tail raised high.
He opened his Bloodlight Eye. A beam of violet-red snapped across the cavern like a thrown spotlight, freezing the scorpion mid-lunge for a second, but one heartbeat—that was all he needed. He dashed forward, closing the distance in an instant, and jammed his oreblade into its mouth before ripping it up through its head.
Not bothering to watch the body fall, he immediately snapped his gaze back at the mineshaft and fired a sixth windsphere, shredding the next wave of scorpions before they could spill through. Not a single one of them even managed to send an attack his way before they were felled.
They’re not that tough individually. Their chitin plates may be steel, but only where they’re plated. The windspheres envelop them and shred everything else that isn’t covered.
This is totally doable.
Fortunately, he didn’t get nauseous or even have to exhaust his stores of mana right away, because bootsteps thundered behind him. Ilvaren skidded back into the cavern first, twin shortswords drawn, and then Kargun followed like a runaway minecart, followed by Sahlir, and finally Yasmin. All four of them raced past Anisa and Rena, stopping next to him with distasteful looks directed at the mineshaft cramped with scorpions.
Dain exhaled and let himself grin. They’d all returned faster than he expected.
“Good timing,” he said, rolling his shoulders once. “We’re going to stick to our plan: the four of you frontline warriors are going to rotate on duty. Two of you will fight for an hour, and then the other two will swap in while the first pair rests, and you’ll just keep doing that while chugging down the Stamina Potions you bought. Anisa and I will provide as much long-range support as we can, so which pair wants to start first?”
He didn’t even need to wait. Ilvaren already stepped forward, scraping her shortswords against each other, and Kargun’s grin widened to match hers.
“Aye, let me crack the first shells,” the dwarf rumbled.
“No, let me carve them first,” the elf snapped.
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Dain smiled.
It was going to be a long, boring week.
The days blurred. Every hour of every day was more or less the same: either the Ilvaren-Kargun pair would be frontlining against the scorpions, or the Sahlir-Yasmin pair would, sweating and cursing and spilling scorpion gore by the opening of the mineshaft before they built up a physical wall of carcasses that the next wave of scorpions had to dig through. Usually, that took the scorpions about ten minutes, which—combined with Yasmin’s swordstaff making earthwalls to narrow the mineshaft even further—gave everyone enough time to chug some Stamina Potions before returning to the fight.
It was slow, brutal, and perhaps not the most efficient work, but it only had to work.
Occasionally, Anisa would practice her crossbow shots. Occasionally, Dain would throw in a few windspheres and join the frontliners with his oreblade. Occasionally, someone would get stung by a poisonous stinger and they'd have to be pulled out of the fight to receive an antidote, which they'd bought tons of just for this request. Unfortunately, the scorpions only slept about five hours a day, and someone always had to be awake to make sure not a single scorpion could slip by, so getting irritated by the lack of sleep was just another part of the job. If not for Rena butchering, disposing, and turning the scorpions they killed into scrumptious dishes, Dain feared they’d all have lost their minds by the end of day one.
But there was something slightly off about this whole request.
On day two, Ilvaren asked between swings, “How many more days, human?”
“About five more,” Dain answered, merchantly optimistic.
On day four, Kargun demanded the maths while Dain struggled to rip his oreblade out of a scorpion’s back. “How many more days, boss?”
“Probably three more days, give or take,” Dain answered, not entirely confident.
On day six, Sahlir shouted from atop a mound of scorpion carcasses, “How many?”
“We should be done by tomorrow,” Dain muttered.
But then day fourteen arrived, and the scorpions still continued pouring from the mineshaft like an irritated river that refused to dry. They were all running on pure fumes and spite. Even Rena’s impressive ability to invent a hundred new recipes for scorpion meat had finally hit a wall. There were only so many ways to disguise the taste of metallic shell and sour jelly, and even worse, the frontliners’ stomachs churned from potion sickness. Yasmin and Sahlir, at the very least, looked like they were going to puke their last bottles out.
Dain ripped his blade free from a scorpion’s skull and sucked in a breath, sweat and heat sticking under his collar. Kargun, Ilvaren, Yasmin, and Sahlir stood beside him, all panting, all glaring into the mineshaft where more scorpions still clawed through the dead.
“... No fucking way,” Dain muttered. “We’ve been thinning them for two entire weeks. The queen shouldn’t be able to reproduce this fast.”
“Where are they even getting the nutrients from to support this rate of growth?” Rena asked, sitting behind them on the pelt mattress with a pot of scorpion stew on her lap. “Didn’t we seal off the other tunnels in and out of the infested cavern for this exact reason?”
He narrowed his eye at the mineshaft. “We did. Which means either the tamer modified the queen with some sort of relic, or there’s a sixth tunnel leading in and out of the cavern that isn’t on the maps.”
“Should we return to the Guild and report it, then?” Yasmin asked, wiping sweat off her forehead. “This doesn’t feel like something we can handle. The local townsguard should—”
“If we do that, we lose our reward,” Dain mumbled. “Well, maybe we’ll get a thank-you note and a bit of compensation from the Guild for bringing them new information, but even then, if we want to prove there’s a sixth tunnel or a mutated queen, we’ll need proof.”
Rena reached into an open satchel and lifted a small, clear glass orb. “I still have a few unused Reality Bubbles. Would they help?”
“They would. As long as we can capture a scene of the infested cavern, we’d have all the proof we need.” Dain nodded. “You’ll stay here, Rena. Keep camp. In the meantime, the rest of us will take the fight inside and try to kill the queen—and the tamer alongside her—but if we can’t do it, we’ll retreat with the Reality Bubble.”
Anisa hesitated. “But can we even survive inside? The queen, the tamer, and the scorpions… and we’re out of Stamina Potions. We don’t have much mana left, either.”
Dain paused.
He didn’t really want to do it—and his thumb worried the seams of his satchel as he mulled about making the offer—but then he sighed, reaching into his Void Archivist’s Satchel and pulling out five thin vials of Manabrew Potions.
They were dark, viscous, and glowed with an unwholesome purple sheen. Cursed Manabrew Potions, of course, that he secretly bartered from Belara using most of the scorpion meat scraps that Rena put in his food. He’d meant to sip them slowly once they were done with the request—one every week to keep the mana core sickness at bay—but more than any personal gain, he just wanted this request completed here and now.
“I bought a few extra Manabrew Potions from the relics store,” he lied, tossing one over to each of the frontliners and then to Anisa and Yasmin, leaving none for himself. “They’re no Stamina Potions, but the mana and mana regeneration they give should be enough to rejuvenate you all… enough to slaughter your way through the infested cavern after we rest a few more hours, I hope. They might have an unintentional side effect of making your joints heavier and creakier for the next four days, though, so—"
Ilvaren, Kargun, and Sahlir immediately downed their potions, no questions asked, and exhaled like men who’d been given back their legs.
“Taste better than usual muck,” Sahlir said curiously. “What this potion made of, again?”
Dain grinned easily. “Not sure. I guess they’re just really high-quality potions,” he said, looking at Anisa and Yasmin as he did. “You’ll drink them too, right?”
Yasmin narrowed her eyes, and Anisa tilted her head in a prim, unreadable way. They still drank their potions, of course, but their looks scraped right through him. They knew for a fact he didn’t buy the potions from any relics store, because they’d basically been neck to neck with him the entire time they were in Braskir… and they also knew he was someone who knew how to make Altars, even if he hadn’t been carrying one around for a while at this point.
But they didn't press him about it, so he pretended not to notice their suspicious looks as he glanced over his shoulder, giving Rena a solemn look.
“We’ll rest five hours first to get some mana back before we go in. After we enter, Yasmin will make an earthwall behind us and seal the mineshaft to make sure Rena is safe out here,” he said. “And if we’re not back in three more hours after that, just assume we’re dead. Run back up to Braskir and tell the local townsguard everything.”
Rena’s expression tightened. “Sure thing.”
With that, the six of them squared their shoulders and turned to face the mineshaft again.
An unknown number of scorpions aside, a trap could be waiting for them. The queen could be waiting. The masked tamer was most probably waiting for them with some trick up their sleeve, but… damn if he let the local townsguard finish this request for them.
If there was a one-eyed inside, he wanted to be the one to beat them half to death first.
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