Molting the Mortal Coil

The Blacksilver Pawn held up its hands and then a pipe stabbed into the back of its neck. It stabbed through what would be a person’s throat, scraping against the Blue Icesilver spine as it poked out the front of its neck. It kept its hands up and didn’t seem to be injured by the attack. Then a dozen ratmen rifles flew over and opened fire, punching the black oily ‘flesh’ full of holes. The Blacksilver Pawn continued to stand there with its hands up while the pipe was slowly expelled and the holes closed up.

The dozen rifles stayed floating in the air, the woman seeming very uneasy about the situation. Then a second Blacksilver Pawn approached from a distance. It also held up its hands, but one of them was holding a small bottle. It walked up beside the first Blacksilver Pawn and then held out the bottle. It pointed to the wounded man lying on the stretcher and then at its stomach. It held out the bottle towards the woman and bowed its head.

She was not going to treat these unusual monsters kindly just because they held up their hands, but the pill bottle still flew off the Blacksilver Pawn’s hand and flew towards the woman. She took a look at it and the cap popped off without her touching it. Once she was sure nothing dangerous came out, she took a look inside and saw a few tiny pills. She made sense of the pantomimed actions and figured it was something for her partner’s injuries. Even so, she didn’t use them. Her partner wasn’t in critical condition so she wasn’t going to take any chances. Instead, she just nodded to the odd creature and started to back away.

Sage didn’t push things. He was already pleased enough that not all of the humans in this world were violently hostile. Just knowing there were some reasonable ones out there was enough for now. Once the two psychics left, Sage sent his Pawns to clean up the battlefield. They collected all the ratmen’s weapons and equipment, the most valuable being the roach with the cannon on its back and the armor from the burned roaches. He hadn’t wanted to destroy the strange rifles, but with the armor he could now experiment on the strange silvery metal. Thankfully, the psychic woman didn’t seem interested in all the spoils of the war and only kept a dozen of the rifles floating around herself. Once the battlefield was stripped clean and the cannon roach collected, Sage hurried on after the psychic woman. This time he stayed underground, just keeping watch of her with his Spiritual Sense and the Warp Worm’s sensitive hearing to follow her. Since she wasn’t desperate enough to use the pills, she must have a base nearby. Or at least that’s what he hoped.

Surprisingly, he was forced to stop.

The Warp Worm encountered a massive subterranean complex. Outside of the huge city ruins, to what he was calling the north, there was a mountain. Beneath that mountain was some sort of facility. It had thick concrete walls with steel plates as lining, which Sage found out after attempting to tunnel in a few feet. The Warp Worm could slowly work its way in, but he wasn’t sure what else might be inside so he didn’t want to draw any attention. The woman on the surface went to a place where the ground had collapsed and moved into an old sewer tunnel. She traveled a bit further and then disappeared into the wall, and what Sage assumed was a secret entrance.

With the underground complex blocking him, Sage couldn’t get any closer and he could only vaguely sense the woman heading into another tunnel before the door closed. The closed door blocked his Spirit Sense, and so did the fortifications underground. Curiosity peaked, Sage used the Warp Worm to scout the size and layout of the underground complex. It took a few hours, but he learned quite a lot. From the outside, the facility seemed to be a hexagonal prism, about two hundred feet tall and with each edge about two hundred feet long. Sage hopped into the Universe Ring and did some rough math. He couldn’t remember a hexagonal area formula, but he broke it into six triangles and then gave up. Who remembers the formula for an equilateral triangle?

He also wasn’t going to go and take detailed measurements just to get an accurate measure of square footage. The place was nearly twenty floors tall and at least two city blocks. It was big and buried inside the mountain so half of it sank below ground level. There were also a few tunnels branching in different directions. Six of them came from the corners of the hexagon and headed outwards towards the city and the wilderness, while there was another that went up to the peak of the mountain and another that sunk deeper into the earth. He figured that the tunnel going down would be the least defended, since it was the hardest to get to, so that’s where he chose to infiltrate. The Warp Worm tunnelled down deep to the very bottom and Sage found a sort of thermal collection system.

Geothermal heating and cooling, impressive!

It also meant there were plenty of places he could sneak right in. The Warp Worm took him right up to one of the pipes that air was circulated through. Then he placed the Universe Ring up against it and went inside, sending the Warp Worm to his Inner World. For the next few hours, he did some insect breeding until he successfully combined a giant cockroach with the Chameleon Mantis. At the same time, he made some variants of his other four important insects. He hadn’t thought he’d need them here, but this reminded him that they all had their purposes. Linking with the Mantis he used it to slice a tiny hatch into the side of the air pipe after using the Twin Soul to make sure it was clear on the inside. He kept the mantis at the minimum size that could contain him, the six inch tall bug slowly pushed the side of the pipe back into shape and Sage threw a Steelsilk patch over it. Even if he didn’t have spinnerets of his own anymore, he had hundreds of thousands of Dragoons to do the work for him.

The Chameleon Mantis traveled for nearly an hour through the pipes before it finally reached the complex. Sage was wary of sending in just the Twin Soul on its own because he was dealing with a bunch of psychics. He had no idea how easily they could discover or destroy the Twin Soul and had far more options available if he arrived in person. He was in the Hidden Domain to seek treasure and gather resources, but so far the most valuable thing he found was present in these psychics. Even so, he wasn’t so ruthless as to murder strangers without cause. He’d already confirmed that the two psychics in blue weren’t psychotic like the guy in the leather pants, so he was curious to learn more. Information was power. He was stuck here for two years, so he had plenty of time to hunt for treasure. It was much more important to know what he was up against, or even possibly find some allies. That would dramatically improve the rate at which he could earn treasure. Why stumble around blindly when he can learn from the locals?

The Mantis avoided some machinery and used its chameleon skin to stay hidden. It pushed open a vent and crawled along a ceiling. Sage was pleased to see that the underground facility looked very modern and was also in nearly pristine condition. It was nothing like the destroyed ruins up above. Additionally, the people he saw walking around weren’t wearing any gas masks.