The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 009: Mother of the Sump

It came around the bend slowly, and it filled the tunnel from wall to wall.

Ethan raised the lantern. Yellow light slid across something wet and pale, glistening like boiled fat. A body as long as a farm cart, soft and ridged, dragging itself forward on a smear of its own slime. No eyes. No face he could find, just a puckered hole at the front, wide as a barrel, ringed with rows of gray teeth.

[Sump Slug (Mother). Rank: D. Vitality: 520. Weakness: heat. Attacks: acid spit, crush. Understanding: 12%.]

"Okay," Ethan whispered. "No. Absolutely not."

He was Level 2. He had a hook-knife the length of his hand. He was standing in a pool of dead rats with a hole in his shoulder, and the thing coming toward him weighed more than the tannery.

The gnawers were running too. He saw them now, streaming up the walls and over the ceiling, away from the thing in the dark. Even the rats were afraid of it.

He backed up one step. His boot slipped in the muck.

The Slug stopped. The hole at the front quivered. It didn't have eyes, but it turned toward the sound of the splash, and Ethan understood that it hunted by vibration, the way a spider reads its web.

"Don't move," he told himself. "Don't, don't, don't."

A drop of sweat crawled down his temple and hung on his jaw. He didn't wipe it. The lantern flame wobbled in his fist and the shadows on the wall wobbled with it, and the Slug's puckered mouth swung slowly, like a flower following the sun. Somewhere behind its bulk, water trickled. His heart was so loud that he was sure the thing could hear it.

The Hunger stirred, too. It wanted him to run at the Slug and bite it. That was almost funny.

He couldn't stay still forever. The ladder was thirty meters behind him, and the slug was between him and nothing else. He thought of Tomas's map. A junction ahead, three short side-channels branching off the main one like fingers. He had passed the first on his way in. He remembered it, narrow, pipe-shaped, barely wider than his shoulders.

Too small for the Slug to follow.

He took the lantern off its hook, unscrewed the cap, and poured half the oil along the lip of the channel at his feet. Then he lifted the lantern high and threw it, hard, at the Slug's left side. It hit with a wet crack and the flame spat out sideways.

The Slug screamed.

It was a whistle. High, thin, enormous. The sound hit Ethan like a slap in the face and every muscle in his body locked.

Flinch.

One second. He stood there with his mouth open and his arms at his sides and watched the Slug rear up, spit flying from its mouth in a gray rope.

The second ended.

He threw himself sideways. The spit missed his chest and struck his left leg, below the knee. His trouser burned away. The skin underneath went white, then red, and the pain was so sharp it sounded like a bell.

He rolled. Scurry kicked in and the world went fast. Four steps took him to the pipe mouth, then a long skid on his belly, and he was inside, wedged up to his hips in the narrow tunnel with his chest on cold brick.

Behind him the Slug hit the opening and stopped. Its mass squeezed against the pipe mouth and heaved. Bricks cracked.

The oil he'd poured caught fire.

A line of flame raced along the edge of the channel and jumped to the Slug's flank. Heat rolled down the tunnel in a wall. The creature thrashed. Its ridges steamed and split. Smoke rose in thick black coils and the stink was beyond describing.

Ethan lay on his stomach and counted. The Slug was big. Five hundred and twenty vitality. He'd hit it with maybe a cup of lantern oil, and fire was only a first bite.

He needed more.

He crawled backward a hand's width and groped along the pipe wall. The stone was wet. His fingers found something rough and flaky, built up on the bricks in layers. Yellow powder. Sulfur crust, from the old city's pipes. He scraped a fistful into his hand, and the Observe window flickered.

[Sulfur. Flammable. Releases toxic fumes when burned.]

Ethan smiled. It wasn't a nice smile.

He packed the crust into a handful of torn shirt, tied it with a strip of cloth, and lit the edge on the burning oil at the pipe mouth. Then he shoved it out into the open, right at the Slug's puckered face, and pushed his own face into the crook of his elbow.

The blast of smoke came back at him like a punch.

The Slug made a sound he never wanted to hear again. It sagged against the wall. Its body shook in long, slow waves, and then the whole slab of it began to slump, pulling away from the opening, leaving a trail of black liquid on the stones.

It died slowly. He watched the Vitality count run down.

[Sump Slug (Mother) defeated. Level 3 reached. Mission complete: Reach Level 3.]

[Vitality: 31 / 100. Stat points: +3 (total 6).]

He lay there and coughed until his ribs hurt.

When the smoke thinned he crawled out. His leg was a mess, blistered from the knee to the ankle, and every step felt like walking on hot nails. The Slug's body lay half-dissolved in the channel. A great gray heap, smoldering.

[Absorb Sump Slug? Understanding: 38%.]

"Trace," he said. His voice was a croak.

[Estimated trace: Corrosive Blood. Wounds will burn the skin around them.]

"Gain?"

[Estimated gain: Acid Spit (Common). Low potency.]

He stood over it for a long moment, swaying.

Acid Spit would be useful. Anything would be useful. Two days ago he couldn't have carried a bucket of water up a flight of stairs without his arms shaking, and the thing in front of him could have swallowed him whole.

But he looked at his leg. At the skin peeling off it in wet sheets. He thought about what the trace would do.

"No," he said. "Not this one. Not at thirty-eight percent."

[Absorption declined.]

The body dissolved on its own into gray mist and was gone.

Ethan sat down on the broken brick and put six stat points in with shaking fingers. Endurance, three. Agility, two. Perception, one. The numbers glowed and settled.

[Mission reward: Evolution Gate unlocked. First evolution available. Review costs?]

He reached out and touched the word review.

[Observe evolves to Appraise. Reveals true attitude, hidden skills, and weaknesses of living targets.]

[Cost: one sense. The system selects.]

Ethan stared at it. Sight. Hearing. Taste. Touch. The smell of his mother's kitchen, the sound of Tomas's gravel voice, the weight of a hand on his shoulder. The system could take any of them, and it would not say which until it was done.

His hand froze above the window.

"Not yet," he whispered. "Not tonight."

He climbed back through the drain with the lantern's broken frame in one hand. It took him a long time. Every rung of the ladder burned through his palms. At the top he pushed up on the hatch with both hands, and it didn't budge.

He pushed again. Then he heard a scrape from above. The iron disk lifted, and gray evening light fell across his face.

Rhea Kessel looked down at him, one hand on her sword.

"Took you long enough," she said.