The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 008: The Drains

Ethan woke on a cot in a cellar that smelled of damp paper.

A strip of grey light came through a vent near the ceiling. Somewhere above him a floorboard creaked, then another. He lay still for a few seconds and let Stalker's Instinct slide out. One breath upstairs, slow and old. No one else within fifteen meters.

Good. His arm ached, his stomach growled, and he'd slept maybe three hours. But he was alive, and nobody had come through the door.

Tomas was at the table with the water-warped book open in front of him and four candle stubs burned to nothing. His eyes were red. He hadn't slept at all.

"There's bread," he said, without looking up. "And cheese. The cheese is older than you, so be gentle."

Ethan ate. The Hunger was quiet this morning, a low animal grumble in the back of his head. He cut the bread into slices and the cheese into thin curls and chewed slowly, to keep the grumble down.

"Find anything?"

"A great deal. Most of it I don't like." Tomas rubbed his eyes under the lens. "The author calls it the Ledger. Whatever's in your head keeps accounts. You take, it records. You grow, it bills you. A memory, a sense, a bond." He tapped the page. "Years. That one is underlined twice."

"Years of what?"

"Life, I'd assume."

Ethan put down the bread.

"I don't think I'd have said yes," he said slowly. "If I'd known that part."

"You'd have said yes. You were dying." Tomas's voice was flat but not unkind. "I'd have said yes. Anyone would. That's the cleverness of it." He closed the book. "Tell me about the mission."

"Reach Level 3 in seven days. Six now. Penalty undisclosed."

"Of course it is." The old man took off his lens and polished it on his sleeve. "A threat dressed up as a task. It wants you to grow quickly, boy. Ask yourself why."

"I don't have to ask. I'm weak." Ethan shrugged. "Everyone I've ever met would say the same."

"That isn't the question I meant."

He didn't have an answer for that. He finished the bread.

"Where would I find something to fight?" he asked. "Something small. Something nobody's watching."

Tomas looked at him for a long time. Then he sighed, got up, and went to a drawer. He took out a sheet of yellow paper and a stub of charcoal and began to draw.

"The Hunters' Guild won't take a null," he said as he sketched. "You can't register. You can't enter a Rift Gate. The legal ones are staffed and watched, and the illegal ones are worse. But under this ward there's an older thing. The city's drains. Eight hundred years old, built by people who knew how to dig. When the rifts opened across the kingdom, small things started to climb out of the cracks. Nobody cleans them out. Nobody cares, as long as they stay down there."

"Small how?"

"Rats the size of cats. Slugs that can melt a boot. Gnawers." He added a cross. "The hatch is behind the tannery on Pitch Street. The smell hides it. Go in the morning, when the street sweepers are out, and nobody asks why a boy is going into a stinking hole."

He pushed the map across the table. Ethan took it.

"Don't go past the third junction. I have never seen the fourth. I've heard what comes back from it." Tomas rummaged again and set a battered iron lantern beside the paper, a coil of rope, and a short, ugly hook-knife with a cracked handle. "My late brother's. He gutted fish with it. It's sharper than it looks."

"Tomas. I can't pay you for-"

"Then don't." The old man waved a hand. "I'm not doing this for you. I'm doing it because I've been waiting thirty years for someone to walk through that door." He pointed at the cellar stairs. "Go on. Come back alive. That's the f*e."

The tannery hatch was exactly where the map said. It was a rusted iron disk set into the cobbles, half buried in dung. Ethan lifted it with both hands and the stench almost knocked him down.

He climbed in anyway.

The ladder was slick. At the bottom he stood in ankle-deep water so cold it hurt, and lit the lantern. Yellow light spilled across a long arched tunnel of black brick. A channel ran down the center, thick with green scum. Something far away dripped, steady as a clock.

Stalker's Instinct opened.

He sucked in a breath. The tunnel was full of them. Dozens of small bright pulses, fast and nervous, scattered along the walls and the ceiling and under the water. Not one of them was bigger than a cat.

[Drain Gnawer. Rank: E-. Vitality: 30. Weakness: nose. Averse to light.]

He took a step. The water sloshed. At the far end of the lantern's reach, a dozen pairs of tiny red eyes lit up.

"Okay," Ethan said. His voice came out shakier than he'd hoped. "Okay. Come on."

They came all at once.

They were rat-shaped, but too long, with flat pink snouts and teeth like needles. They poured down the walls in a gray tide. He swung the lantern and the front rank flinched back, squealing, but two of them got through, low and fast. One latched onto his boot. The other leaped for his thigh.

He drove the hook-knife down into its nose. The thing shrieked and dropped. He kicked the other one off his boot and stamped on it, and the crunch went all the way up his leg.

A third one hit his shoulder. Teeth sank into the muscle.

He yelled, slammed his back against the wall, and mashed the gnawer between his spine and the bricks until it let go. Blood ran down his arm. The Hunger rose in him like smoke, and he bit his lip hard enough to taste copper, and held.

There were more. There were so many more.

He fought with his back to the brick, lantern in his left hand, knife in his right. He learned fast. They hated the light, so he kept it high. They always went for the legs first, so he kept his stance wide. They flinched when he hit the nose, so he hit the nose. The knife moved on its own after a while. Left, down, twist. Left, down, twist.

When the last of them scurried off into the dark, he was standing in a puddle of his own blood and a dozen dead rats, heart hammering, gasping like he'd run a mile.

[Level 2 reached. Vitality: 52 / 100. Stat points: +3.]

He laughed. It came out as a wheeze. His legs were shaking. His shoulder was torn open. But the number was there, glowing, real.

[Absorb Drain Gnawer? Understanding: 61%.]

He thought about it. Looked at the little furred corpses. Remembered the Hunger, and what the Stalker had left behind.

"Trace first," he said. "Tell me the trace before I say yes."

The window flickered.

[Estimated trace: Flinch. Sudden loud noise will cause a one-second freeze.]

"One second's a long time in a fight."

[Estimated gain: Scurry (Common). Short burst of speed in confined spaces.]

He weighed the two. Then he nodded.

"Do it."

Cold light drained from the nearest corpse into his chest. A skittering feeling ran down his legs, like many tiny feet. He looked down at his hands and they seemed, just for a moment, faster.

Then he heard it.

Not the dripping. Not the water. Something deeper, further down the tunnel in the dark where Tomas's map had no line. A slow, wet, heavy sound, like someone dragging a wet sack over stone.

Stalker's Instinct caught the breath a half-second later. It was enormous.

The water in the channel began to ripple in small, even circles.