Duskbound

Chapter 57

And that's eight... nine... and ten. How many more of these damn things are there?

The scorplings weren't so bad one at a time, but the last batch had been three of them, and they'd come at him from both sides. Only his enhanced agility had kept him safe from being caught in those pincers and stung to death. To be fair, he hadn't actually been hit yet, but he wasn't willing to bet on the durability of his skin to resist monsters in the mid-thirties level range.

The worst part was that the scratching sound they made when they walked wasn't getting any quieter. If anything, more and more of the monsters were showing up. No, the worst thing is that those stingers are definitely poisoned. It turned out that the flesh walls really were flesh in all the ways that counted, and more than once one of the scorplings' stingers had scratched the wall or floor.

The flesh had immediately started to putrefy, and even though the effect hadn't spread that far from the injection site, that was relative to the size of the wall. A few feet in every direction might as well be Velik's whole body, and he had a human's circulatory system. The wall was full of thick monster blood that barely even oozed out of any wounds it took.

He'd already looked up the price of an all-purpose antidote in the system store and wasn't in a hurry to drop fifteen hundred decarmas on it if he didn't need to, so avoiding the stingers was a high priority. His early strategy of severing the muscles at the base of the tail was still working, but that was a lot harder to pull off when there were three of them all coming at him in a tight tunnel.

He was seriously considering retreating back to the cavern he'd discovered and risking dealing with a champion just so he'd have room to move when the next batch of scorplings found him. There was a solid chance of that plan backfiring on him and making things worse, but if he did nothing, he'd eventually make a mistake. Maybe that would be because he was tired. Maybe it would be because the next group would have four or even five scorplings. Or maybe he'd simply run out of time and his [Duskbound] bonuses would expire with a rising sun he couldn't see.

There could be hundreds of even thousands of these things down here. If he wanted to move forward, he needed to take the risk. Otherwise, the best thing for him to do was fight his way back to the surface and abandon the whole plan. No way.

Another scorpling found him while he was backtracking to the cavern, leaving him to once again wonder what weird senses they had that allowed them to track him down. [Apex Hunter] was usually good about figuring that stuff out, but these monsters were too foreign for him to piece it together. Maybe it's some sort of scent tracking? But then how do they fight once they actually catch up?

Even without eyes, they seemed to have some sort of sight analogue. They weren't graceful by any means, else one of them would have tagged him long ago, but they at least attempted to block his spear when he stabbed at them. If they couldn't 'see' him, he couldn't think of another way they'd be able to tell where the spear was when he was swinging it around.

Huh. That's actually working pretty well. These things aren't coordinated, just fast. I should have tried this earlier.

The other three scorplings reached the fight then, but with a tunnel too narrow for all of them to get through, that ended up helping Velik. Unlike other pack monsters he'd fought in the past, these ones didn't work together at all. They didn't outright attack each other, but the ones in the back didn't hesitate to climb on top of their brethren trying to reach Velik. That didn't do much for the front line's capabilities, but it did give him plenty of openings.

Things were going well. He killed one, then another of the scorplings. The remaining three all had injuries on them slowing them down and, more importantly, preventing them from using their tails freely. [Phalanx] was working well, despite the soft light coming from the spears messing with his [Night Vision] enchantment. It couldn't seem to decide if it needed to be active or not, and as a result his vision kept flickering between the strange white outlines of things and his normal sight.

That might have been the reason he missed a sixth scorpling coming up from behind. It certainly didn't help, either way. Whether it was that or the distraction of fending off a trio of monsters while directing four phantasmal spears at the same time, the end result was the same.

He heard the soft swish of a descending stinger, had a moment to register that none of the ones in front of him were responsible for the sound, and felt a burning pain in his shoulder as one of the monsters finally got a hit on him. Velik jerked away, but it was too late. Even as the stinger slipped out of him, the pain intensified and the burn started to spread.

"Argh!" he cried out, unable to help himself. His arm dropped uselessly, still on fire but no longer listening to his body.

[Phalanx] worked overtime for the next few seconds while he got his spear into his other hand and his back to a wall. The new scorpling clacked its pincers as it chased him down, and the three from the start of the fight worked in concert—probably accidentally, considering what he'd seen of their pack tactics—to pen him in.

Velik slashed the air in front of him, trying to drive them back. The blade of his spear skipped off one of the scorplings, its tough skin preventing it from drawing blood. At the same time, the poison spread down from his shoulder into his chest and his heart started slamming into his ribs.

Well, shit. That's probably not good. Should have bought that antidote before I needed it.