NOVEL FROG Ch. 21: Cockroaches
Cass looked up and down the cavern, wondering what next. Her goal was still to find people, eventually. People seemed unlikely in an underground cavern like this, so she probably wanted to get out again as soon as possible.
Atmospheric Sense informed her the air was sinking into the chasm, and even if there was enough wind to Wind Step, she’d just end up right back here.
As for walking… The cavern stretched in both directions as far as she could see, the ends disappearing into the dark. There was no way up onto any of the shelves on the wall and by extension into any of the many caves dotting the walls. If there was a way up to the surface from here, she didn’t see it.
Lacking any compelling reason to go one way or another, she started walking left.
The crevasse was brighter than she would have expected a deep gash in the ground to be. Part of that was it was probably about noon, and the sun (still hidden behind the clouds) was at its highest and brightest point, but part of that was the luminous mosses, lichens, and mushrooms clinging to the walls and floor in bands of riotous color.
The most common by far was a blue-purple lichen that ran in twisting swirls over the walls, bathing the entire cavern in an eerie blue light.
Starlight Lichen
[A common growth along the walls of the Uvana Deep.]
Amid the swirls of the lichen, mushrooms of every size poked up from cracks in the rock. Many of these too glowed, either to Cass’s ordinary sight, her new Mana Sight, or both. Why some of the mushrooms were magic and others weren’t, Cass didn’t have the slightest clue. Identify wasn’t overly helpful in that regard either.
For example:
Flintshoom
[A small, red mushroom. Dry to the touch and highly flammable.]
glowed in her Mana Sight, but nothing in the description screamed ‘magic’ to her, while:
Mordin’s Breath
[A formless yellow fungus. Known to decrease the ambient temperature of the area around it by a noticeable degree. Large patches have been reported to even instantaneously freeze nearby animals alive.]
did not glow at all, despite ‘freezes stuff instantaneously’ striking her as a definitively magical effect.
Cass had not puzzled out what the connection between glowing to her Mana Sense and magic properties was before she spotted another cockroach.
More accurately, she saw a cluster of six of the things.
Her skin crawled at the sight of them.
They sat in the center of the corridor, doing whatever cockroaches the size of people do. She didn’t want to get close to them. She didn’t want them to exist. Thinking about them made her a little ill.
She definitely didn’t want to fight them and get their gooey guts all over her staff again. She shuddered at the thought.
She skirted around them, leaning heavily on Stealth and keeping to the cavern walls. The cockroaches didn’t so much as flinch in her direction, not that Cass was looking at them any more than was strictly necessary.
Stealth has increased to level 5.
Cass didn’t glance back as she cleared them, hurrying away from the awful bugs, every step she put between herself and them a weight off her shoulders.
Her relief didn’t last long.
Another group skittered around the cavern just ahead. This time there were three of them.
Could she kill three of them at once? Identify said they were levels 6, 4, and 8 respectively. She was level 5 and had killed a single level 7 by itself without much trouble.
She certainly had no moral qualms about killing them. They were gross and creepy and would appear in her nightmares going forward.
They were probably good experience to level up with.
Was that species-ist against cockroaches? Probably.
Did she care? Not really. Very few things evoked the same kind of visceral wrongness as cockroaches larger than a person.
But, there were several reasons to avoid fighting them anyway. First was the inherent risk in any fight. She had walked off her earlier injuries, the wound on her face entirely closed now, the gouge from the boar only a touch sore when she moved wrong, and the bruises she’d been expecting entirely absent.
Her Health had taken a hit again for this:
Health: 17/25
Her best guess was Health worked as a kind of healing pool, it only drained as her injuries healed and only recovered when she was uninjured. As long as there were points in her Health, she healed magically fast. As for what happened when it dropped to zero, she could only assume that still worked like video games, and that would mean her death.
All this to say, fights meant injuries, which meant draining her Health, which meant death—and not necessarily in so many steps. No reason to court injuries if she could avoid them entirely.
Second, she didn’t know if these cockroaches were the kind of monsters that called for backup if placed in danger. The one she’d fought on its own didn’t, but it had also been on its own for some reason. Although she optimistically thought she could fight three at once if she needed to, more than that was more than she had the confidence to try.
She shook her head. No, better just sneak around again. This wasn’t a risk she needed to take.
Again she slipped silently down the corridor, the wind whirling quietly around her.
The passage darkened as she continued forward, the crack in the earth that she’d fallen through narrowing at the surface level until it had closed above her entirely. Did the cockroaches like that? Was this just one long cockroach-infested crack?
She shuddered. She needed to think about them less but it was hard when she’d seen so many.
Was this even the right way? What if this only took her deeper into the earth? She could turn around, but that would take her past the roaches again.
Just ahead, the cavern split into two, the only noticeable difference between the two pathways was one was spotted with cockroaches and the other was not.
It was an easy choice. She followed the cockroach-less one. The one with fewer cockroaches was always going to be the correct choice.
To her dismay, it was the one with fewer, not none. A group of four filled the walkway a couple hundred yards down the path and around a bend. Three of the four were bigger than the one she had fought before. The fourth was much smaller.
Identify!
Lesser Titan Roach (Lvl 6)
Lesser Titan Roach (Lvl 9)
Lesser Titan Roach (Lvl 7)
Titan Roach Lookout (Lvl 8)
[Did you know some cockroaches are gregarious? Titan Roaches are. They even breed specialized members of their community. This is one such member. It's much weaker than its siblings but its senses are unmatched by anything at its level.]
No sooner had Cass read its description, than she felt a pulse of mana. It washed over her harmlessly, but immediately the smaller Lookout turned toward her. Its bigger siblings followed its gaze.
Cass froze. She wasn’t behind any cover, she’d just been relying on Stealth to blend her in with the shadows and the ever-so-slight draft that wafted through the cavern. So far that had been enough. But so far she hadn’t been up against anything specializing in Perception.
The lookout’s wings flared as did its mana.
Cass was moving before the cockroach’s spell engaged. Her staff whipped forward to strike the lookout.
One of the other roaches scuttled up to intercept, swinging a leg down in a Mana Strike.
Cass sidestepped the wall of mana but stepped into a wing blade cast by one of the others. The blade struck her arm, slicing another gash in her clothes and rending her flesh. Blood ran down her arm worryingly quickly.
The forward cockroach was winding up another Mana Strike.
She stabbed at its face with her staff, disoriented it long enough for her to land an overhead blow directly to its head. She heard a squelch and felt a surge of energy and Roach #1 was dead.
The other three weren’t idle. The two Lessers, Roaches #2 and #3, were shooting off an endless barrage of wind blades. The air was filled with them.
Atmospheric Sense saw a few safe paths through but there was zero room for error. The Cass of Earth about a week ago would have stood no chance of reaching the remaining roaches. Cass the slyphid, enhanced by her magic stats and armed with Dodge and Atmospheric Sense might be able to make it.
She bolted forward, weaving her way between the blades. She was halfway to the Lookout again when it sparked with magic. Cass’s Mana Sense wasn’t refined enough to understand exactly what it had done, but she didn’t need it to see that all the wind blades had changed direction.
Changed direction to angle directly at her.
Cass tried to dodge out of the way, even got out from in front of the first couple. But they followed her. Three sliced deep before she got out of range.
She panted heavily, doing her best to ignore the pain and the blood.
The Lookout made the Lesser’s Wind Blades tracking. Tracking Wind Blades. What was she supposed to do about that?
She was glad the cockroaches were content to wait for her to reenter their range, rather than chasing her down the hall. On the other hand, if she had been able to pull them down the hall there was a non-zero chance she could slip past them instead of fighting.
Perhaps they knew that and stayed put to prevent such a tactic. Perhaps they did not care about her enough to give chase. It was impossible to say.
She sighed. Now would be a great time to have a ranged attack.
And why didn’t she? All those roaches were doing was manipulating the air, right? Wasn’t air just another element?
Technically, no. But technically, neither was water, stone, or fire, so maybe now wasn’t the time to chase that technicality.
More to the point, air was just as much a classic Greek element as water or fire. If she could control those two, air shouldn’t be any harder.
Stamina: 12/30
Focus: 117/117
Her stamina was flagging from her mad dash away and dodge attempts, but her Focus was topped off again since her last Wind Step.
Max Focus and patient targets conveniently demonstrating the skill she wanted to copy? Another sigh escaped Cass’s lips. Seemed like there was no time like the present to give this a try.
Elemental Manipulation!
She grabbed a ball of air in front of her. As quickly as she could she compressed the ball into a pancake, thinning and thinning the edges as well as she could. She held her control tightly, refusing to let her shaped air escape. And then she just needed to throw it. She pushed the disk as fast as she was able, releasing her control as soon as it reached the edge of her range.
She felt it disperse within inches of leaving her control.
Focus: 57/117
The entire process had taken almost a full minute and cost her 60 Focus. Completely unusable as a combat skill from top to bottom.
Before she tried again, she watched how the mana moved around the cockroaches’s wings. Watched how quickly it accumulated, how it grabbed the air, how it burst off toward her.
She tried again, this time grabbing a specific pattern of air instead of a sphere. She started with the shape she wanted this time. It only took her a couple of seconds to form and throw her disk of air. It cost 3 Focus instead of 60, though it disintegrated just as quickly.
She watched the cockroaches’s Wind Blades. The blades maintained the roaches’s mana until just before they disintegrated at the edge of their range, where they fell apart even faster than her proto-blades did without her mana.
That meant one of two things: either the area the cockroaches could control mana in was significantly higher than her range or they knew how to imbue their mana into their Wind Blades even after the Blades left their area of influence.
Mana Sense has increased to level 3.
Either way, she wasn’t sure this was a problem she could solve here and now.
So what now? Throw herself at the enemy again? Hope that the Lookout could only set so many Blades to track her? Back off and find another way out? It wasn’t like she knew that this was the right way.
She considered all the cockroaches on the other path and shuddered. More importantly, if there were more Lookouts that way, retreating wouldn’t help. She’d just run into bigger groups armed with a lookout or two. The odds would only be worse.
No, she needed to keep going. She needed to find a way to beat them. If she couldn’t hit them from here, then she needed to get closer. She was probably 10 yards from the roaches. Not overly far, but far enough that they could blast her with more than enough Wind Blades. If only she had a method for blocking them.
She took a step forward, her staff ready. It was time to try something.
She was just inside their range. Immediately, the nearest Wind Blade redirected toward her. As it approached, she swung her staff through the blade. The impact knocked her back and left a notch in the wood. Not what she wanted but she had another idea.
Again she stepped forward. Again she readied her staff. Again the Lookout redirected the nearby Wind Blades. Just before her staff and the Wind Blade struck she activated Elemental Manipulation again, grabbing hold of the air around her staff, willing it into perfect stillness.
The wind struck her rod of stillness and broke on the obstacle. The mana-infused air swirled off in either direction. Cass grinned.
Elemental Manipulation has increased to level 7.
She raced forward, enforcing stillness on the air around her staff just before each additional Wind Blade struck it. It was hard to do while moving. She mistimed it twice and was knocked back, losing forward progress and momentum, with each failed attempt.
But, it wasn’t enough to stop her beeline for the Lookout.
Her staff went down on its head with a sickening SPLAT. Trailing roach guts, she spun on the Lesser to her right. She swung up at it but this was the highest level of the original three Lessers and apparently, that came with a better battle sense. It used its Mana Strike to block her swing.
Caught up with the first roach, she couldn’t do anything about the Mana Strike from the roach behind her. It slammed into her back, knocking the air from her body.
She stumbled away, gasping for air. Roach #3 followed, preparing another Mana Strike. Roach #2 fell back, shooting Wind Blades around its companion.
That was fine by Cass. Without a Lookout, the Wind Blades were easily dodgeable. Not even a threat compared to the roach approaching to fight at melee range.
Or, that was what she would have said, if her vision wasn’t blurring from low Focus and her legs and lungs weren’t both screaming as her Stamina dropped dangerously low.
Stamina: 4/30
Focus: 39/117
This was easily the longest single fight she’d ever been in and there had been a lot of running and a lot of bleeding. Concentrating on the opponent was becoming difficult.
But there was no backing out here. She threw herself at Roach #3.
It swung a Mana Strike at her, its arm swinging down like an executioner’s axe.
Dodge said to jump out of the way, Atmospheric Sense said to go left. She did as her skills instructed.
A Wind Blade blasted past #3’s right side. #3’s Mana Strike hit empty air. Cass’s staff splatted the roach into the stone floor.
And Cass was sprinting forward again, dancing around the incoming Wind Blades with Dodge. The last roach attempted to turn to fight her in melee. She didn’t give it the chance to turn. Her staff pounded into its body again and again until the bug was lying in yet another gooey pile before her.
Level Up!
+ 1 Dex
+ 1 End
+ 1 Ala
+ 4 Free Points
Dodge has increased to level 3.
Atmospheric Sense has increased to level 4.
Cass collapsed to her knees as the power of her new level stormed through her body. A grin crept up on her face despite her proximity to roach guts and her overwhelming exhaustion. She didn’t like fighting, she reminded herself, but the results from surviving were every bit worth it.
She glanced over her stats.
Stamina: 5/33
Focus: 39/117
That was far too close for comfort.
Stamina didn’t look too bad, until she remembered her max had been 30 before the level-up, meaning she’d finished that fight with only 2 points remaining. She didn’t know what would happen if she ran out of stamina (or any of her pools) but she doubted it was good. Would she have passed out? That would have been little better than dying if there were still enemies around.
She groaned, feeling the pain in every inch of her body. That Mana Strike to her back had been the final straw. She hadn’t been doing great before then, and the blood still dripping down her arm wasn’t helping, but her whole body wouldn’t ache if not for that.
Somehow, she pushed herself back to her feet. Leaning heavily on her staff, she hobbled a little way down the cavern. She needed to find a safe place to recover without more roaches showing up for a fight.
Cass activated Stealth, though she could almost feel the skill just throwing its hands up and shaking its head asking her what she expected in this situation. There was only so much one could apply stealth to a pained and exhausted hobble.
She followed the offered nudges anyway. Anything better than the prospects of another fight.