Delvers LLC- Surviving Ludus

by Blaise Corvin (ed)

  Now this was something that Peacehatchet understood. His people had always faced adversity, and they had not only managed to survive, they had managed to thrive. The entirety of their galaxy hated, hurt, and hunted them so why would Ludus be any different? What difference would it make if he held an orb or not? While Tartooth spoke the truth nothing had radically changed for him other than his fate now being tied to the whim of the gods. Feh! Fate and the gods be damned, he would face the world head-on like always.

  “I can handle that,” whispered Peacehatchet. His back was ramrod straight and his chin held high. There was no fear in his body, only resolute determination to kill the creatures that had murdered his people.

  “Good.” Tartooth nodded. “Your body is mostly repaired, and your main power is going to take some getting used to, especially by a being as pigheaded as you.” He stared at Peacehatchet’s snout and tusks and added, “Sorry, no pun intended. You’ll know when your power is working, all I ask is that you listen to it. If you do that you should be fine. If you don’t then bad things will happen.

  “It’s very irregular for an orb controller like me to talk to an orb-Bonded, even one as strange as you unless you have a modular orb, which you do not. As far as I know, nothing like this has ever happened before.”

  The imitation Tartooth was about to dismiss Peacehatchet when he seemed to decide to add one more bit of advice.

  “You have gained the power of the Guiding Hand, a very rare and powerful gift. I can’t imagine what someone with more than three synaptic connections could do with this ability. I hope that is something even someone as dense as you will come to appreciate. Tell no one that you are orb-Bonded. The terror this news would spread among the people of Ludus would be an impetus for every creature that lives there to hunt you down and eradicate you.” He poked a finger into Peacehatchet’s head. “Think about it. Everyone on Ludus hates orks. Your existence will be an unparalleled threat. The very fact you exist opens the possibility of more orks becoming orb-Bonded. That makes you the biggest threat on the planet as far as the populace would be concerned.

  “Right now you are an annoyance, a minor threat. You should keep it that way as long as possible.” Tartooth chuffed, “I’ll try to guide you as best I can, but you need to listen to what you are told. You’ll know what I mean.” He turned to go, but then spun around again.

  “One last thing, you’ll be able to converse with the so-called civilized races of Ludus now, so watch what you say. Your tongue isn’t going to get you into trouble, your presence alone will do that, but it could make things worse.”

  Then, Tartooth the Terrible was gone and Peacehatchet was alone in the darkness.

  ***

  Peacehatchet blinked as he opened his eyes and found himself back in his barracks at the base of his bed. His left shoulder was sore but healed so far as he could tell. His plan had worked, and that was all that mattered. He sat up, found himself just a little dizzy, and waited until his head stopped rocking. His mouth was parched and his stomach rumbled. He decided to get some water and see if there was any food left in the kitchen.

  As he stood he felt a slight shove to his chest. Nothing serious, but it felt like something was warning him away from his destination. He ignored the sensation and made his way to the kitchen, only to find it a charred blackened pit. It had been torched! The only culprits he could imagine were the invaders, the people on the bronze war sled that had butchered his people. He didn’t know how, but he would find them and make them pay!

  The force, this time, was not gentle. Peacehatchet found himself prostrate on the ground as if he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. He was unhurt, he’d suffered no physical damage, nor was he in pain, but he found that he couldn’t move. The ork was pinned to the ground as if held there by the hand of a god. Then the warrior started thinking. Tartooth had told him that his power was called the Guiding Hand. Could this be his new ability in action?

  He’d felt a slight pushback when he’d wanted to go to the kitchen, and he’d found it destroyed. The orb had basically told him not to waste his time because there was nothing to be found there. So, if he was right about that, did his current predicament mean that he had contemplated doing the wrong thing? He wanted blood in return for the death of his people. Someone had to pay for their deaths. Maybe he needed to rethink exactly whose blood must be spilled. With that thought, Peacehatchet felt the pressure leave his prone body. He raised his arms in a test and found that they were free to move.

  Orks had a reputation for being stupid and slow, but this was a lie. The Plains People were cautious when they needed to be, and sometimes they tested boundaries. Peacehatchet decided that now was the perfect time for a test. He thought about the scorched kitchen and his dead brothers and allowed his anger to grow in his heart until he was nearly furious. Anger came easily to his kind. When Peacehatchet felt that he was sufficiently raging he vowed to kill the men and women responsible for the events that had transpired in his home.

  Again, he felt the unrelenting pressure hold him fast to the ground. This time, however, the pressure was powerful enough that it made his breathing difficult. That settled it for him. His power warned him off of doing things that would endanger him. Right now he was clearly too weak and feeble to go after the butchers, but that might change in the future. He went to sit up and found himself still frozen in place. He struggled briefly and then admitted to himself that the destroyers of Yanbei Cavern were off-limits to him.

  Just like that, the pressure was gone. He got to his feet and decided that he was still hungry and thirsty and that his next course of action should be to gather some weapons and go out hunting. That thought initiated a slight push on his back, telling him to go ahead. Peacehatchet smiled. He had the greatest power in the world! He would know instantly if he was doing something that would benefit or harm him. He would even know how dangerous it was just by the force that was applied to him. Oh, he was going to have so much fun! He was going to be unstoppable! A niggling thought that the power had to be limited in some way, and there was no way his orb could know everything was annoying, so he ignored it.

  An hour later he had scrounged what weapons he could which included a bronze short sword, two bone daggers, and a bronze-tipped spear. The last weapon would have been impossible to find without his orb. He’d wondered where an unbroken spear might be, and he’d found himself guided by slight pushes and shoves until he’d gotten exactly what he’d been looking for. Peacehatchet loved his new power and praised the day he’d found those orbs. Yes, he’d lost brothers, and he’d basically stolen the orbs from Smartstrong, but it had made him the deadliest ork who had ever lived!

  Peacehatchet bid farewell to the only home he’d known since he’d come to Ludus and strode forward with a gait filled with certainty. He knew exactly where he was going. The world was his treasure chest and he was free to pillage it at will. There was nothing that could stop him.

  Peacehatchet had made it down the hill when he felt something, but not his guiding hand. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and years of patrolling made him drop to the ground. His decision was proven correct when something darted over his head and landed ten yards away. He rolled to his right, since his left shoulder was still sore, and raised his spear in both hands. Before him was a stone spider, something the locals referred to as eight-legged rocky venom biting hill demons, His people simply referred to them as stone spiders since they were arachnids that had an external carapace that was as hard as rock. Their only weak spots were their eyes, and those were small and difficult to strike. A stone spider that was the size of the one he was staring at often required four orks to take down. He was alone, tired, sore, and hungry.

  Peacehatchet then had a troubling thought. His guiding hand had not warned him of the spider. He’d sensed it all on his own. The hand had only worked when he’d decided to drop to the ground. It was satisfying to know that he’d done the right thing, but it had given him barely any notice of
that fact. If he’d been pushed backward, indicating that dropping was the wrong move, it would have been too late for him to do anything about it. At that moment, he was going down no matter what.

  He wasn’t as invincible as he’d thought. The guiding hand wasn’t an early warning system, nor was it fast enough to do him a lot of good in a fight. Once he was up to his neck in blood and battle he wouldn’t even notice the prodding of his power unless it amped up its tactile force, and since the strength of the prods seemed to depend on the correctness of his decisions he concluded that it would be near useless in a life-or-death struggle.

  The spider ushered a challenge in the form of a lengthy hiss. Peacehatchet had seen them do this before. It was a warning. Obviously, the spider had been drawn by the scent of blood and it had been feeding on his dead kinfolks.

  Stone spiders were dangerous and notoriously hard to kill, but their attack power was limited. They did not shoot webs, since they were far too heavy to hang from them, and they did not spit venom. They relied on their strength, their bite, and their impenetrable hide to take down prey. This one did not seem in a mood to fight. It was likely satisfied to feed off the corpses and so merely warned the ork away.

  Peacehatchet considered the beast. He could back off, let it eat in peace, and wait until it left, bloated on the blood of his brothers. That thought earned him a slight push on his back indicating that the idea was sound, but the push wasn’t strong enough to make him stick to that option right away. He reasoned he could face the monster down and attack it in a one-on-one battle to the death. That thought earned him a generous shove forward, causing him to take an inadvertent step towards the spider.

  Again the spider responded with a loud hiss, then clacked its mandibles together. It also raised its forelegs and pedipalps in a display that was supposed to make it look bigger and more intimidating. It scuttled left and right in what appeared to be an arachnid ballet. The creature stridulated more threats and made a small leap forward, just a few feet, but enough to let Peacehatchet know that it meant business.

  The ork pondered his dilemma for a half a second and then decided to trust his orb power. If he couldn’t use it then it was useless to him. Not-Tartooth had told him to listen to the hand, and he trusted that the false god wanted to live as much as he did. He readied himself to charge and was held in place. He still had freedom of mobility, but he could not move forward. Ok, so he’d let the spider come to him. The invisible barrier vanished as he held his ground.

  Peacehatchet tapped the bottom of his spear on the ground beneath him in response to every click, chirp, or purr that the spider made. After each thump he’d thrust his spear forward in defiance of the spider’s admonishments, each gesture making the arachnid a little more irate. Finally, the monster could not check its frustration with him any longer and made three short jumps in his direction before finally committing to the attack.

  This time, Peacehatchet saw the spider coming and he pivoted to his right and slid his spear between its legs when it landed. He leveraged the improvised lever and flipped the spider in a single motion. That was a difficult maneuver, and generally took two Plains People to perform. His strength must have grown for him to have been able to do it so easily.

  The spear was not meant to hurt the spider, only hold it in place while others used swords and axes to dispatch the monster. Sticking to what he knew when dealing with stone spiders, he braced the spear in the center of the arachnid’s body. As soon as he did so the spider’s legs reached up and embraced the shaft as well as they could.

  Peacehatchet found his free hand sliding his axe from his belt, and even though it was his left hand that held it, he brought the head of his weapon down over and over again until he heard a sickly crunch that indicated that he’d broken through the “soft” underbelly of the creature. Three more blows and the spider’s legs fell away from the spear and it lay still and silent.

  His axe was dented and chipped, but he could repair it a little with a whetstone. And the area before the abdomen would provide him some tasty meat. He would just build a fire around the body and let the monster roast in its carapace of rock. That earned him a good shove forward from his unseen benefactor and he set about to make it happen.

  As he gathered firewood it struck him that he had just killed a beast that generally took a handful of his people to take down. He’d done so fairly easily too. His body was far better than it had been, his senses were sharper, and his reflexes keener. Before he’d become orb-Bonded he would never have sensed the spider’s assault. It would have killed him from behind and Peacehatchet would have never known what had happened. Yes, he’d had leverage, but stone spiders weighed as much as small boulders, and he would never have been able to dodge its jump so easily. He’d taken the monster down and never felt a bead of sweat roll down his body.

  Peacehatchet also realized that his power only worked when he asked it about something or had something particular in mind. He could use it to hunt for food. By the nine hells, he could state what he wanted to eat and it would likely guide him right to it, but it wouldn’t alert him of dangers on the way. For example, he reasoned he might be hungry for the meat of an eight-legged grass deer his people called Sliepndoes, but the orb would not tell him that the cat-like jagwires, felines that were dark as shadows and attacked with electricity, were also hunting nearby.

  That meant that he had to be very specific in what he asked of his power. He tested this out. While he was picking up wood he would walk in several directions and never felt anything hold him back. Then, when he’d spotted a viable piece of fallen tree limb he asked it to guide him to the nearest piece of firewood, and he’d been jostled as he’d walked until he’d been led to the limb. He’d wisely closed his eyes to see how good his power was, too. It took him directly to the branch but had not alerted him to a root that tripped him or a divot that nearly twisted his ankle.

  His next test was to prompt his power to lead him to the safest piece of firewood. It took him five minutes to get there, and he’d passed up two smaller chunks that he would have grabbed had he not been employing his power. He grabbed those on the way back, carefully picking them up. One rested by a nest of flame ants, insects whose bite burned worse than fire, and the other was cover for a horned viper. His axe removed its head when it lunged for him, and it became a nice snack before he’d dug into the tasty spider flesh.

  Next, he asked his power for the direction of the nearest monster and was pushed toward the east. He noted that it had directed him via pressure on his shoulder rather than his chest or back. Then he asked it to lead him towards the deadliest monster in the area. This time his other shoulder met a brick wall erected in a westerly direction. That meant it could tell him the general vicinity of an unknown danger, but would not want him to go towards it, well, likely unless he was ready for it. This was the difference between the first monster and the second one. It’d also wanted him to fight the spider.

  At the moment, he was too weak to challenge the strong creature, but that could change as he fought and got stronger. One day he might be pushed by his orb to battle that unknown enemy, but not today.

  The orb, he realized, was likely not truly omniscient, but it knew a lot. It also lacked a good way for it to communicate with him. And there it was. He realized that he was more intelligent now, it’d changed more than just his body. The day before he wouldn’t have known what the word omniscient meant. Now it and many other unfamiliar thoughts were crammed into his head. He had been improved, and now had the intellect to allow him to suss out how to use the orb in the best manner possible.

  This was likely why it’d expanded his mind in the first place.

  His train of thought led him to believe that he had to ask the right question at the right time. For example, Peacehatchet had concluded that he could ask if the area he was in was safe enough to sleep in for the night. If he received any kind of negative answer then he could ask if it would be safe for an hour, then two, and then t
hree hours and so on until he received a negative answer. That would give him a pretty good idea of when a roaming monster might pop up, or even hostile Terrans or Areva. He just had to figure out the right questions until he got the answer he was looking for. This wouldn’t be very helpful for split-second decisions that were made in a fight, but if he were going to do something stupid in general, the hand would let him know, so long as he thought about it.

  He was beginning to get a grasp on how to handle his orb’s abilities. And then it hit him: he could just ask where the nearest unused orb was. He’d never have to hunt them down! He could, at any given moment, know where the closest Dolos orb was located. This meant power. He decided to give it a try, but when the thought came to mind, he felt something strange, a push in that direction, but a stronger push away. He frowned and asked out loud, “I want to know the direction of the nearest Dolos orb that lies to the north of me.”

  He was suddenly shoved to the ground harder than he ever had been before. He swore that if he looked he would find a bruise. Peacehatchet was no fool. He understood that the first time had been a gentle warning to not go that route. The second time had been a polite way of telling him not to ask again. The message was received loud and clear. The ork made the pronouncement that he was going to sleep by his fire through the night, and received a firm push on his back to go ahead. He didn’t question the response’s validity; he just lay on the earth and closed his eyes.

  A Guiding Hand, Chapter Three