Book 3: Chapter 13: Looting

  “Oh holy fuck, you were waist deep in there too, how did you not die from the stench?” Kate gagged, leaning over, hands on her knees as she turned away from the basilisk mother corpse.

  “I’ve smelled worse.” Alex said. “Have you ever heard of Garret’s weaponized-funk?”

  Kate’s eyes flickered from him over to Garret, who was actively cutting through slabs of reptile muscle. At the mention of his name, Garret looked over at them with a blood splattered smile and danced his eyebrows.

  “I can only imagine,” she said. Then she promptly emptied her stomach at her feet.

  “Try not to imagine so vividly,” he laughed.

  The air still stank of smoke, blood, and basilisk rot when the last vial of stomach bile did its work. The mercenaries, along with Doran, who’d been petrified lay panting, their limbs wrapped in strips of cloth to keep the bleeding at bay. Whatever traces of venom the wounds still had, it made healing spells and potions rather ineffective. They were just going to have to suffer through for a bit until they could heal the old fashioned way.

  Kate wiped her mouth and shuddered before staggering away in apparent attempt to find cleaner air to breath. Alex shook his head and continued watching the work being done to dissect the basilisk mother. For a moment, there was silence, broken only by labored breaths and the faint hiss of steaming bile on dirt.

  The minutes just before had been dangerous. Even after Alex’s explanation of his thinking and actions, the others all looked at him warily. It appeared they just weren’t sure what to believe about him. And, Alex hadn’t exactly helped in that regard during their travel. He’d been standoffish, aloof on many occasions, and down right brutal in others. Such as when he was so nonchallantly cutting of limbs from his fellow caravan guards, even if it was to save their lives.

  Then there was his fight with Ghrukk, the brutal aura of his martial style, and the feral sort of feeling he knew he gave off due to his Wym-heart constitution. All of this mixed together to make Alex look, and feel, like a crazed sociopathic killer. Which was far from the truth… or at least he hoped it was.

  The tension had built steadily, everyone eyeing Alex or each other, searching for answers in places there were none to find.

  Then Ghrukk laughed. Loud and booming, his halberd slammed into the ground as he stood, the bandages around his ruined arm still soaked through. “Hah! You disgust me, human. I like it. Using the beast’s own filth to spit in its face. That’s Ork thinking.”

  Rynel barked a laugh of his own. “Reckless as all hell, but damned clever.”

  Even Doran, still pale and trembling, gave Alex a grudging nod. “Remind me never to piss you off, lad. An’ I owe you one, I’ll remember tha’.”

  The tension eased like a relaxed bowstring. Soon the circle of mercenaries and Worldstriders turned practical, drawn knives flashing in firelight as they began the grisly work of carving down the basilisk mother. A corpse of its size was treasure to the right hands.

  Scales were pried loose in sheets, heavier than shields and harder than standard mortal steel. Bones were pulled free of tendon and muscle, cracked and split, set aside for weapon hafts and reinforcement. The venom sacs, still gleaming green with a nasty sheen, were lifted out with care and passed toward Allie, whose grimace at the smell didn’t stop her from stowing them with practiced hands. Myrae, and a couple of the other alchemists, claimed glands and lesser organs, muttering among themselves about tinctures, pills, and potions.

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  When it came to the beast’s core, the mood shifted. The orb was pried from her chest with no small effort, a baseball-sized jewel of crystallized aether that pulsed faintly in the moonlight.

  “The prized haul. A peak early-stage Adept Beast Core, who gets it?” Sarson called out to them, holding the item above his head.

  “It goes to the person who killed the beast. That’s fair, that is the way of the fight.” Ghrukk stepped forward, his aura flashing momentarily to emphasize his words.

  All eyes turned to Alex.

  Sarson tossed the core to him, and he caught it with relative ease. He was surprised by the weight of it in his hand, or the lack of it. He had expected it to weigh a lot more based on it’s size, but Alex felt it weighed just about as much as the pseudo-core he got out of the badger mother, even when the core in his hand was five times the size.

  “You think aether energy weighs a lot, fleshsack?” Obby’s lanky illusion body loomed in from his left, causing Alex to flinch. He hated when Obby used that projection, it was fucking creepy. “I’m a rock, filled with immense aether and data, far beyond this core, how much do I weigh?”

  That was a fair point. Alex assumed that Obby was some sort of divine level item or artifact that just hadn’t had all its potential unlocked. If that was the case, he would be stuffed full of aether, and should weigh a literal tonne. And yet, Alex felt no such concentrated godly energy, and the pebble weighed, well a pebble.

  Alright, fair enough, I get it.

  Everyone was waiting now, looking to see what Alex would do with the item. He could simply put it away in his bracelet, use it for cultivation later. But it was an earth-attuned beast core, and a powerful one. It would be better off used for someone else.

  He felt their stares on him, weighed the moment… and handed the core without a word to Tom-Tom.

  The kobold froze, both hands clutching the glowing prize. “M-me?!” His pot helmet clattered as his tail thrashed wildly. “Dragon-blood-one, this… this is—”

  “Yours,” Alex said simply, patting the little lizard on his shoulder gently. “Make it count.”

  Tom-Tom’s eyes gleamed like he’d just been handed the crown of a kingdom.

  The division of the basilisk corpse continued, fair, efficient. Nothing was wasted, even slabs of muscle or thick ropes of tendon were taken aside and stored away. But Alex had his own claim in mind. He pried loose both of the basilisk’s eyes, each one a huge orb slick with ichor, and slid them into a dimension sack with the practiced ease of a man pocketing groceries.

  “Those aren’t for decor, are they?” Garret asked, wrinkling his nose.

  “Not planning to mount them over a fireplace, no,” he chuckled. He added a few vials of thick, green-black blood alongside his growing collection of wyvern’s blood in his possession. Already, ideas ticked away inside his mind. Wyvern blood for potency, basilisk blood for aether concentration… combined, something that might push his body’s constitution past its limits.

  But that was an idea for something later. For now, he wiped his hands on a rag, looking over the butchered battlefield. The basilisk mother was dead, but the weight of what they’d spent to kill her lingered with the reality of questions unanswered.

  He looked to Holly, Cole, Devon, and Garret in turn. They had all been hit with the basilisk’s gaze during the fight, no matter how briefly. Which meant their minds had been altered in some way, and Alex needed to find out what those alterations meant.

  He had two basilisk eyes in a sack, some glyphcrafting at his disposal, and some friends with their own contributing skills. If they could pull it off, they might be able to make a potion that mimics the gaze-attack’s effects.

  But was he crazy enough to bring that idea to everyone’s attention?

  Who would be willing to take such a risk? Knowing exactly how to control the effect could allow them to get rid of traumas and parts of their memory that they just would rather live without, but it came with a side effect of not being yourself anymore, should things go wrong.

  It could also be used as a potential weapon in the future, if Alex was sadistic enough to use it.

  He just didn’t know if he was; crazy enough to use a weapon like that, or to offer his friends the chance to use it on themselves.

  Was it a gun he was comfortable with throwing on the table in front of everyone?