Chapter 172: Chapter 166

I patted Axle on the shoulder again and pulled up my psychic phone app. The gray head in the device stared at me blankly and I thought a compulsive apology at him.

“Why?” the psychic deity whispered in my head. “Why are you always sorry when you see me?”

I shrugged and replied, “I feel like I owe you something.” A quick deluge of memories flooded through my mind, little more than a series of images and moments where I felt this creature had helped me.

His eyes widened for an instant, before the practiced serenity came back over him. “Nonsense, your bill is always paid promptly. Who can I connect you with?” he asked, voice stiff. I needed his help against BuyMort, but it was difficult and dangerous to even communicate that with him.

“Then think it,” he whispered in my mind. “I’ll know, and not respond, until a path can be found to actualize your communicative desire.”

A chill flushed through my chest. The tiny hope I’d been fostering was real, he could and would help me in my fight against BuyMort. As soon as I could figure out how. His formulaic reply, even when resonating in my skull, had felt cautious. It was a keen reminder that even this creature, as powerful as he clearly was, had been imprisoned and enslaved by BuyMort.

Freeing him from that enslavement would be the first step in acquiring his aid. But for the moment, I needed aid of a different sort.

“Connect me to Captain Omen, please,” I asked MortMobile.

He nodded and turned away, forming a gray tunnel that connected me with a stern looking Korean man.

“Yes,” he snapped.

I blinked and shook my head. “Uh, hey. Captain Omen,” I stammered, suddenly unsure of how to ask for what I needed.

“Yes,” he snapped again. Clearly he was a man who valued frank speech, so I shrugged and decided to try it.

“We have a problem. Lots of large, aquatic bugs are attacking our desalination plant in Los Angeles,” I told him.

“Yes?” Captain Omen asked.

“Well, you told me to call when they got bad, I assume you know how to deal with them,” I said. “Would you deal with them? For me?”

“Yes,” he snapped. “For a price, of course. I have a fleet standing by, equipped and ready to clear them out. My ships and people can also aid in your repairs, as well as convert those Dearth cargo vessels you’re sitting on into more desalination plants.”

I nodded, blinking rapidly. “That’s exactly what I need. What’s it going to cost me?”

“Nothing, aside from your direct aid in killing our shared enemy. My people are already in motion, all I need is your word, that you will help me rid our world of this evil,” he said, staring at my mask in the phone.

Other people saw their own faces and changed their expressions. They became uncomfortable, most even feeling threatened if they weren’t used to dealing with me. But Captain Omen seemed able to ignore it and stared at where my eyes should be. I couldn’t escape his gaze, and he almost never blinked.

“You have it, Captain. I’ll kill your giant squid,” I told him.

“Very well. Inform your people to pull back and hold fire. My ships are in position, the attack will commence immediately. My people will clear out the whale bugs. Your plant will be yours again within the hour,” he informed me, before cutting off our call unexpectedly.

“Well, that’s the desalination plant taken care of,” I muttered as I swiped away the phone app. “Now to find us a way out of this cave.”

Axle pulled out his own and started making a series of calls to the Los Angeles port, preparing our staff there for Captain Omen’s help.

I turned to face the wall and thought about how to get through it. When my friend and partner put his phone away and looked over, I was ready with a proposal.

“Why don’t I just break through this? We know it's thin now, I can just smash it,” I offered.

Axle nodded, and I saw his mask bulge at the nose for a moment while he tried to compulsively lick his nose. “We do not know where the Sleem tendril is, beyond that wall. Any fragments that fell on it would be enough to warn the main body.”

I nodded. “I thought you might say something like that. My backup plan is to pull off pieces of the wall slowly and carefully, from the hole they cut. Widen it enough for us to get inside?”

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Axle pointed at the hole again, and I cast my light over to it.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe, if you are slow and careful enough, that could work. Try not to drop any particles on the Sleem thread.”

I got to work. My advanced strength and metallic breaker gauntlets made the job easier, and soon I had a decent rhythm going. The hardest part was breaking off the chunks of stone so that they didn’t drop any pebbles on the Sleem, and we had a couple of mildly close calls before it was done.

Once our new door was built in the wall, I leaned out into the chasm beyond it and shined my light onto the walls around us. Smooth limestone as far as the eye could see, with no visible ceiling or floor. The line of Sleem traveled down, so I stepped back inside and shrugged, before getting to work on the wall again.

More pieces needed to be broken off so that I could help lower Axle down with me. I certainly didn’t want to leave him behind, out of concern of the Sleem pipe. So long as we didn’t get noticed, it stayed relatively full of newly birthed green oozes, who happily crawled up the pipe to their dooms.

For multiple reasons, we didn’t want to alter or change that dynamic, especially not while we were anywhere near it.

Once the extra stone had been broken away, and a doorway built in the wall, Axle carefully stepped up to it, and I lifted him from his armpits again. I stepped forward and we plunged over the edge of the chasm.

I held Axle without any trouble, and though his tail was plastered between his legs, the hyena-man maintained his composure and didn’t cause us any problems while falling. Aiming how to land became difficult when we quickly found the remnants of the aquifer.

My own light reflected back at me from the water, and I diverted our controlled fall to a nearby shelf of stone at the lip of the underground lake.

The ceiling lost in darkness above us, and the remnants of an underground lake casting reflections all around, we continued following the thin line of Sleem. The footing was slippery, and the trail cut across shallow sections of standing water.

“They are well hydrated, at the least,” Axle muttered, while investigating one such area.

We walked carefully for longer than I thought we would before Axle stopped and checked his tablet. He peered up, and I followed. The light was still swallowed up by the cavernous ceilings overhead.

“Well, Prescott’s main water intake should be directly above us somewhere,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t think the Sleem used that to escape, the trail keeps going in this direction. They’d have had to climb the wall here to reach it.”

“Be right back, I should check to make sure,” I replied, before activating my gravitic drive.

I fell up away from Axle, into the darkness of the cave. My light focused on the wall to my side, and when I got high enough, I found the intake, jutting from the stone.

The pipe was large, just big enough for me to crawl inside, if not for the screen of mesh surrounding it. Grabbing the wet mesh, I inspected it for any trace of the Sleem, finding only a Dearth Conglomerate label instead. With a shrug, I dropped back to the stone below, at Axle’s side.

“Nothing, no trace of them on the pipes,” I told him.

“Well, that’s good,” he said, as his ears went flat against his skull.

“Doesn’t sound good,” I replied.

“I simply do not know where they could have gone,” he said. “It scares me a great deal to think we could be walking into a giant nest of Sleem down here.

“Oh don’t worry about that, Axle,” I said. “If we find them, I can just fly us out of here. Just be ready for me to grab you, I guess.”

My friend nodded, but his tail was tucked, and his ears stayed flat. Without any other option, we followed the trail of Sleem through the dark.

After only a few more minutes of walking, we found where the pulsing snail-trail led. Directly into a solitary yarsp tunnel. Our hive had been expanding beyond our ability to easily control, and now it had a Sleem infestation as well.

 

 

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