166 Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-Six – We’ve Got Worms (1/2)
The ground exploded in a shower of dark rocks and sand. A sound reminiscent of breaking boulders and protesting steel rang out over the empty land, carrying for miles.
Briggs hooked Endure on the corner of its mouth and levered down, dragging his Hammer behind him in Axe form.
Weight and strength ripped open the stony hide of the beast, tearing a gaping wound in its natural protection. If it dove into the ground again, the wound would tear open further and force it back to the surface.
The lunge upwards was stalled, it didn't get the tasty prize it wanted, and began to back down.
Five Glaive wielders ran forwards, shouting as they drove their blades, edges topmost, into the sides of the white-ringed black worm. As it withdrew its massive body, their blades slammed down into the top of its tunnel as they grimly held onto the shafts, and it tore itself open on them as it pulled itself back and away.
Briggs hit the ground, ignoring the rumbling underneath him as he watched the worm retreat in his tremblesense. The five men carefully backed away from the hole, returning to their previous spots and pausing.
One, two... ten, eleven... thirty, thirty-one...
The bellow came from below, and Briggs smiled. He could feel the distant trembling of it starting to tunnel again, and then its pain as rocks and debris cut into the open wounds, especially around the jaws that were supposed to open the way for it.
That meant it could retreat, or come to the surface to heal along an existing route... or just sit still for a few days.
”Road clear on this one,” he grunted, and the men nodded. They picked up the thumper that had drawn the beast in with the sound of moving lunch, and headed out.
A lot of people were going to be moving through their Corridor, which meant these not-so-purple mutant worms had to be discouraged. Associating the sound of the thumper with pain would be a good start, if they did not kill them outright.
For some reason, he hadn't been surprised that the Ironblood had experience fighting tunnellers, and after the Void Brothers warned them about the beasts, they took it all in stride. At least four of the Ironblood had cut their way out of worm stomachs by now, while seventeen or so worms had been put to vivus, as human stomachs couldn't tolerate their flesh.
As a point of trivia, it turned out that kobolds could eat them, and the little scaled bastards actually considered the worms a delicacy, because it was far more likely that the worms ate them, rather than the other way around. So, the Ferals were having a fun time slaughtering them, one Worm enough to supply several tribes of kobolds for a week or more...
The river was actually the safest approach vector, because there was no threat to them from that direction... at least, not yet. To be honest, they hadn't seen anything living in the cold, still river, but at least the water was drinkable once it was removed from there.
Men with tremblesense were advancing and marking the path, looking for the buried defenders of this land. So far, they consisted of scuttling thirty-foot centipedes and millipedes, immense buried scorpions and sun spiders, ant lions in their sand pits, various beetles big and small, and these Worms which hunted all of them impartially.
They'd had to burn out two giant ant nests in the Corridor after stirring up a bunch of two-foot, mandible-clicking poison-stingered killers. Collapsing the first nest had brought in no less than half a dozen massive Worms, who had a feeding frenzy on ants while people watched from the distance. The second time, it was scorpions and beetles, happily taking the opportunity to snatch up a bunch of ants who couldn't burrow away.
Afterwards they naturally killed as many of those feasting as they could, not wanting to have to deal with them again, since the over-sized bugs were basically going to treat the people moving through the Corridor as a buffet line.
The planar instability that wafted along with the Warped chased away the vermin, so the Warpbands didn't have to put up with much of their interference, which was rather unfair and lucky at the same time. It was highly likely that the bugs would have been rapidly enslaved by the Warp interference and mutated, but their instinctive dread of the Chaos Storms that swept across the place meant they avoided the Warped.
The Corridor shrank in width, since they didn't want to sweep and guard a wide area of land. Oddly enough, the border was soon very, very clear, since the native vermin began to use it as shelter against the Chaos Storms, flocking to the fringe when the storms came, and either dispersing when they passed, or going to investigate the walking meals nearby, and hilarity ensuing as bugs met extraplanars with similarly lethal attitudes.
Sama's attitude was fairly typical. ”They are Karma. What are you complaining about? Kill them, make Baneskulls or add a Bane to your Slaughter. And someone see if we can cook 'em. Scorp tail is a delicacy.”
Bug-killing duty was soon one of the favored jobs of the mercs hanging around, as it spared them from having to pay for rations, and recipes for bug were easy to come by. Extras were always available for sale to the Mess Tents, too, and pointedly, there were always more of them to kill.
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”So, how many infiltrators?” Briggs asked, as he hammered steel with Sama that night.
”Only a dozen or so, so far. Trying to pass themselves off as mercs,” she snorted.
”Aural scans?” he inquired. Easiest way to find them, but also to defend against, if they knew what they were doing.
”Better. One of the mages with a quirky mind took one of the overgrown ants as a familiar. Guess what is sensitive to the Aura of the Warped?”
Briggs found himself laughing as he hammered a spear head into shape. ”I see the vermin are avoiding areas with vivus, too.”
”They are sustained by agathic energies. Vivus eats them like extraplanars,” Sama explained, and he grunted.
”Why do they avoid the water?”
”It's null agathic, sucks the power out of 'em and neutralizes it. Kind of melts 'em away.”
Briggs frowned. ”That's pretty damn weird for water...”
”I'm hazarding it's like a release valve for the opposing energies here. Any overlarge conflict of energies just disperses into the water and is neutralized, preventing it from getting too out of hand.”
”That would make it a target of the Warped, wouldn't it?”
”It might... if not for the fact that they don't go near it. Why might that be?”