Gathering Strength

by Aaron Jay

  Eventually I got the rhythm of the thing. You had to keep pelting it with a stone every few hundred yards. Every once in a while, I’d let it start trundling back to its tether point while I caught my breath. Then I’d chuck a stone at it and keep kiting it along. It was a long, dull, frustrating and dangerous afternoon.

  Eventually I reached my destination. I came out, Tarrasquito in tow, into the cleared area surrounding the Prairie dog colony.

  Remember when I talked up the wonders and power of math? Well, let me just give a shout out to geometry. Damned useful stuff that.

  The colony was laid out in a circle around a center point. You could sort of make out the sequence of expansions that must have occurred equally in all directions. The holes and hummocks made rings. It was a set of expanding circles filled with furry hunger. Behind me my Tarrasquito was coming along like the juggernaut of implacable death I remembered and counted on.

  The sentries were obviously locked onto me and my Tarrasquito shadow but, just like they had with the iguana, they stayed in position. One step too close and I’d get picked clean just like the iguana.

  Keeping all the pieces of my plan in sight, I waited and judged until I thought I had the right moment. I stood right on the edge of what I guessed was the trip-line point for the sentries and made a count of three. It was moment of truth time.

  The spell I had stored in my ring discharged. I counted two more seconds until the Tarrasquito was nearly upon me and then beaned it in the face with a last stone. It was pretty easy because 1) the monster moved predictably, 2) the monster was close, and 3) my dexterity was amped up due to my spell. Then I took off, agile as a cat.

  Buffed, my speed was way higher than before and I started increasing the distance between myself and the Tarrasquito. This is where geometry showed its usefulness. A chord in geometry is a straight line segment whose endpoints both lie on a circle. What that means in this little scenario is that as I got farther ahead of the Tarrasquito along the perimeter of the circle that was the colony, the straightest route to come and get me was through the circle. The farther I got ahead of the Tarrasquito, the farther inside the circle of the prairie dog colony went the chord that was its most direct route to chewing my face off.

  I knew exactly when the Tarrasquito stepped too far into the colony’s territory because all of the furry little bastards moved like cogs in one giant furry rat murder machine. I ditched left and got more distance from the colony. This had the added benefit of putting the Tarrasquito between the colony and me. It did shorten the length that the Tarrasquito had to reach me. But from the sounds behind me, I thought it would forget about me pretty quickly.

  I risked a look behind me and smiled.

  Prairie dogs were, well, dog-piling the Tarrasquito. It didn’t seem to matter to it though. Its spikes were covered in blood and the prairie dogs’ weapons didn’t seem to be able to pierce its carapace. I saw its mouth distend impossibly wide and it latched onto one of the dogs. The dog’s shriek was almost above the range of human hearing. The Tarrasquito’s prey was crushed and then forced down into its throat, swallow by swallow. The dog was still twitching when it disappeared. This actually annoyed me, as there was no way I could recover any of that particular prairie dog’s equipment.

  It was much more pleasing when its claws disemboweled the dogs. A steady stream of dogs kept erupting from the holes and flowing toward the Tarrasquito. The freakish behemoth turned into the flow of prairie dog enemies and started following it back toward its source leaving a trail of corpses.

  On the prairie dog side of the ledger, the depth and size of the crowd of furry bodies around the Tarrasquito kept growing. Its speed slowed bit by bit as it killed its way toward the colony. After a few minutes, it became harder to see the Tarrasquito amongst the horde of its attackers.

  It kind of reminded me of an educational sim I went through when I was a kid. It was like watching a bunch of white blood cells cluster onto a virus-infested cell.

  I kept what I hoped was a reasonable distance behind the slowly moving pile of furry bodies with a Tarrasquito center. I stooped and started collecting items from the bloody remains left in the battle’s wake. Swords, slings, short-bows, staves, spears, ratty leather armor, some semi-precious stones that I couldn’t tell if they used as currency or decoration, a hand-axe: the loot was picked up and donated. I kept an eye out to make sure that I never ended up closer to an unengaged Prairie Dog than the Tarrasquito buried under the colonies’ defenders was.

  The loot was coming so quickly that I could actually see the counter on my quest rising.

  The moving pile of defenders made it to one of the holes leading into the burrow. The prairie dogs became even more frantic and the battle pulsed, ebbing and flowing on the edge of the entrance for a few minutes. I could only catch a glimpse of the Tarrasquito now and again as they worked to stop it from entering their sanctum. I couldn’t safely come any closer to collect any loot and I wondered what was going to happen.

  Silly me, I shouldn’t have doubted the Tarrasquito. The pile of defenders rocked, swayed, and then the battle dropped down under the ground. I braced myself against the possible attack by some stragglers that couldn’t yet fit into the hole where the Tarrasquito and its coating of desperate attackers disappeared. Thankfully, they ignored me for the moment.

  Some of these last prairie dogs waited by the hole until there was room to leap inside and keep the defense going. A few others spun and ran around frenetically. I was still worried that without the Tarrasquito in sight they would change their focus onto me.

  Standing still and holding my breath I waited until they jumped into different holes, likely to join the fray from another angle down below.

  After a minute, I was left alone. Chuckling quietly, I gleaned all the items left on the corpses littering the surface. The haul was pretty good. Bone arrowheads, buckskin leggings, an odd metal prosthetic that enhanced the incisors. Each was worth a bit more than most of the trash loot I was raking in. The best items I found were a scrimshaw kit and a thigh bone of some creature decorated with a rather elaborate carving of a bunch of prairie dogs in different poses.

  Eventually there was nothing left to collect on the surface. I slowly crept up toward the edge of the hole that the battle had entered. I could hear the battle continuing somewhere down there but given the way sound moves through tunnels, I wasn’t confident in my estimates of how far from the hole’s entrance they were duking it out.

  The pressure of Maya’s bet meant I needed to enter the dark hole below. All I knew for sure about what was down there was that it was filled with corpses and darkness.

  The golden treasure hoard is always down in the dragon’s lair. Odysseus and Orpheus both went down into hell to rescue something: a wife or some wisdom. A deadly trip down into the dark. Those clever, deadly Greeks even had a word for it. They had a word for everything. My dad taught it to me: katabasis. Most of our best concepts are based on theirs.

  The thing about katabasis and heroic endeavors is that for them to count, they have to be able to kill you. The dragon wins more often than not. A lot of descents into the underworld end up as one-way tickets. I wasn’t even going after my wife or the wisdom of the dead. I was doing this for a bunch of trash loot. Fuck it. I leapt.

  *** ***

  The light of the now setting sun didn’t make it far down into the mouth of the Prairie Dog colony. The bottom of the entrance was stuffed with corpses. I began looting to clear the way. Now and again, I would come across a Prairie Dog who wasn’t quite dead. After the first time what I thought was a corpse bit me and I nearly pissed myself, I kept a dagger in hand to end them.

  It took me a good while to unstopper the plug of dead bodies blocking the tunnel. I’d complain, only it was great for beating Maya and Jude. Turns out I’m the kind of guy who will scavenge corpses to win a bet.

  Eventually this first massive pile of bodies was cleared and I could fully enter the colony. Lucky me.

>   Making my way further into the tunnel I had to crouch, doing my best to bear-walk through the dark. I didn’t have to mark and solve the maze of this underground labyrinth of winding and branching tunnels. There was a convenient trail of corpses to guide my way. I just ignored the tunnels that weren’t slick with blood and body parts.

  I think I’ve shown that I am more capable than most of the players you are likely to run into. Sneer at me if you must, but I bet most of you would have made the same mistake.

  The thing about attention is that it is finite. The more difficult you make one task, the less bandwidth you have for anything else. If you want to do something well, get rid of distractions and competing demands on your attention. I was following a trail so, yes, I ignored the other tunnels.

  If I could have stood up, or if dead bodies weren’t heavy and limp, if it was possible to know exactly what to look for on the corpses (I found one Dog wearing a toe ring), if they weren’t covered in fur and if it didn’t smell, I might have been able to avoid being surprised by the attack that started with a spear in my back. Or, maybe not. I was in their home turf after all.

  Twisting around, a line of fire throbbing in my back, I saw the spear that had just stabbed me in the hands of a prairie dog. He had brought a friend along who came at me in a rush.

  The prairie dogs had some real strengths: numbers, coordination, speed. Down here with the Tarrasquito clearing and blocking the tunnels, most of their strengths were nerfed. I wasn’t going to be mobbed by attackers who slipped in on me from all directions. The prairie dogs were no bigger than a seven-year-old and came at me from a single direction.

  Grabbing the spear, I yanked and jammed the two Prairie dogs into each other, making them stumble. I piled on top of them. Together they didn’t weigh even two thirds as much as I did. I had a dagger in my hand, which was about the perfect weapon for a tunnel fight. Their scratches and bites just added some spice to a fight that I could dominate. I felt a thrill of pleasure as I ground my knee into one of the prairie dogs, making it erupt with a shrieking whistle. My dagger punched into them as fast as I could drive it. I didn’t bother aiming the knife, and just eagerly stabbed. Blood and fur flew as my arm rose and fell like a jack hammer. The fight was over faster than I would have liked. Taking down mobs had never felt so good. I wasn’t sure why that was, but now wasn’t the time to think about it. I had two more corpses added to the loot.

  The completion bar for the gathering quest was visibly rising. Trash loot was fed as fast as I could strip the bodies. I discovered that I didn’t need to fully remove items from the carcasses. A complete grip and enough of a twist or shift to show it was under my control, and I could hit donate. Even as my efficiency increased, I still wasn’t in danger of looting the remains faster than the Tarrasquito created them.

  After some time, I began to realize that the tunnels under the warren had a pattern. Slowly but surely, the burrow that the Tarrasquito and I were following was winding and spiraling downwards and toward the center of the entire structure.

  The organization and unrelenting nature of the prairie dogs was working against them. If they had attacked the Tarrasquito from other angles or even just stopped attacking it at all, the Tarrasquito would have left and made its way back to the plant it protected. But they didn’t. Worse for them, they attacked most savagely from the direction they least wanted the Tarrasquito to drive toward. Which is, of course, why it kept heading toward the heart of their lair. We wound our way around and down in ever tightening circles. My completion bar inching more and more full.

  *** ***

  Monsters are, well, monstrous. They are normal creatures that are abnormally mixed with each other or deformed in ways drawn from our darkest, most primitive imaginations. Maybe they are larger than they should be, or mixed with human features, making them perversions of ourselves. Maybe they mix together things that nature never allowed.

  The Tarrasquito was a creature of impossible armor, claws and maw. It was a monster of relentless power and unbreakable defense. It was a distillation of things humanity had fought throughout our existence, only more so. An ancient tribesman dealing with a rhino or a grizzly bear would understand the Tarrasquito. My ancestors, however far back, had fought such things, and while other humans may have died at these beasts’ claws, talons or teeth, my ancestors had all lived long enough to breed and eventually create me. Which is why, while the thing may have been a tough problem to solve, it was just a problem to solve. The thing at the center of the prairie dog warren was the other kind of monster. It wasn’t nature enlarged and distilled. It was nature perverted and distorted.

  My father really was a sick son of a bitch if he came up with this thing. I could hear his careful and heavy voice explaining that the Game had to be drawn from ourselves. If the AI and nano was going to be drawn into our games, the games had to reflect us. If the thing I discovered at the center of the colony was really part of our collective imagination, humanity is a sick puppy.

  I came into the large cavern at the heart of the warren in time to see the Tarrasquito fighting a final line of defense. Behind it was something the game system called a Queen Prairie Dog Mother. I came just in time to see it spawn another of its brood. Some sort of egg sac made its way from its massive and distended abdomen out through the translucent tube of its ovipositer and deposited an already adult prairie dog onto the cavern floor. Foals, calves, baby deer and your own child are the only births that are anything other than disgusting. This was simply horrifying.

  At its mothers hissing shrieks it stood, breaking the veined skin of its egg sac and joining the attack. It grabbed a weapon from a pile of weapons made from the bones of the creatures that had been brought to feed the warren’s mother.

  The mother was monstrous. It was cemented in place to the ceiling of the cavern with what I could only guess was a sort of hardened mucus. Whatever held it in place was something biological. Its head, arms, shoulders and legs were about twice the size of mine, or four times the size of its children. Hairless and pale, its limbs, head and torso looked positively vestigal compared to its belly and reproductive system. That took up at least a third of the cavern and was filled with dozens and dozens of gestating prairie dog men. Prey was killed and butchered and brought here to feed this furnace of biological expansion. The belly rested on a massive pile of bones that gave proof to how this system worked.

  Some primal part of me needed to burn it from existence. This thing needed to be eradicated. If I had been a regular player with the ability to autocast, I would have launched fire from my hands. Even if I was killed right after, I’d have done my best to incinerate this abomination. But I couldn’t. My goddamned luck stat and hardcore mode meant I’d have to make a bunch of goddamned yoga poses if I wanted to burn this thing.

  Control the breath. Take air in the nose and out the mouth. I didn’t want to breathe, I wanted to unleash hellfire. The only way to do so was to get myself centered and control my breathing. The part of me that desperately wanted to unleash my rage against this monstrosity could only get what it wanted if I slowed down and acted with care and intent. The breathing exercise and discipline of casting broke the hold of whatever was whispering in my mind’s ear. Mind clearing, I just managed to divert the spell into my ring of spell storage instead of foolishly entering the battle between the two powerful monsters. Then I sat down panting and began to meditate. What was wrong with me?

  Whatever was driving me, I had to clear my mind as the battle between the Tarrasquito and the Prairie Dogs grew more and more intense. I wouldn’t be lucky enough to have the two sides kill each other off. I did my best to center myself and throw off this suicidal rage. I could almost hear a small voice that sounded like my own thoughts whispering of violence and loot, fire and death to my enemies. I ignored it.

  Looking at the two sides tear into each other, an old poem came to mind that my father used to recite to me as I went to sleep as a child.

  There once were two cats
of Kilkenny

  Each thought there was one cat too many

  So they fought and they fit

  And they scratched and they bit

  Till (excepting their nails

  And the tips of their tails)

  Instead of two cats there weren't any!

  With the memory of my father’s deep and rumbling voice, something unknotted inside me and the last vestiges of whatever was affecting my mind faded. For the first time in what I realized was quite a while, I was able to take a clear view of my situation.

  The Tarrasquito was worn down. Somehow, I hadn’t noticed that as I followed it deeper and deeper into the depths. All I had focused on was gathering loot and the pleasure of finishing off stragglers. I hadn’t bothered to check and see if my Tarrasquito was about to die and leave me stranded deep inside the colony.

  The Queen Mother had used up nearly all her children to do it, but the Tarasquito was now nearly dead. One hit point at a time, over and over, paid for by the endless corpses of its children, it had been worn down by the Queen Prairie Dog Mother.

  There were only two prairie dogs left defending their queen. The queen attempted to hatch another but she clearly did not have enough time or perhaps meat to fuel the process and the half-formed creature inside the roe sac was only able to take a few breaths before it collapsed half in and half out of its egg. In that time the Queen lost one of her final two defenders.

  The last prairie dog was doomed. I thought that the Queen had better figure something else out if she wanted to survive. The Queen must have agreed with me.

  She erupted with a scream of rage and twisted, pounding on the walls of the cavern. Bit by bit she peeled herself free from her own abdomen, egg sac and whatever mucilage was plastering her to the wall and ceiling. Her massive egg sac sloughed to the ground, leaking fluids and half gestated children over the pile of bones. Strands of something stretched behind her as she stepped out, ready to kill what had entered her kingdom.