Chapter 13: Chapter 13. The Good luck chapter

The rat tunnels, of course, were a misnomer. There was a heavy bronze barred door, with a grating in the middle.

Carolinus had warned me that they were not actually rats, but they were stupid. She said that it was dangerous, and not to fall asleep without making sure I was protected, but that each of the creatures was not quite equal to an adolescent kobold, which meant considerably less dangerous than a goblin.

I had a backpack which was surprisingly heavy, some armor crafted from the carapace of some kind of semitranslucent beetle, plenty of water, and a number of tools I had asked for, including a saw, hatchet, small hammer, more appropriately sized knife, and an odd sort of pair of copper pliers.

Wire drawing was apparently beyond their level of technology, but they had offered some fine threads which were more than capable of supporting my weight and were nearly invisible. To me, they looked like fishing lines but softer, and they were made from a combination of wool threads and some sort of spinnerette-bearing monster’s silk.

I had scrounged in what they referred to as the ‘scrap heap’. It was actually well-organized, consisting of a lot of copper bits of various shapes and sizes, I was no master trap designer, but I could think of dozens of snares and modern traps as well as had a lot of ideas for my own versions.

I kept thinking of traps I could quickly assemble. They had called it the ‘rat tunnel’ so I kept thinking of rodents of unusual size. There were no springs, which was a shame, but the same carapace which made my light chest plate, greaves, and bracers would, when immersed in water and dried, lose a lot of its rigidity and become quite springy instead. I got more than a few pieces of that as well.

When I was considering the kind of torsion springs I was used to, and the ability to create bases in the solid stone of the walls or floors itself, appropriate items lit themselves up with a golden glow that I happily collected. To be fair, except for the fatigue, the way my claws dug through solid stone like clay was probably the best asset I could imagine, pure magic.

When I heard I was going to be thrown into monster territory for a day or two, I was a little ticked off… but these creatures didn’t really have the kind of parental instincts I was used to. Their parenting was more akin to an apprenticeship in the old meaning of the word, where they take on and train a young kobold in a set of skills and that kobold pays them back by helping them and then eventually joining the colony with whatever skills they had been taught.

To me, as a human, the idea that they had no personal connection to offspring was weird and uncomfortable. I knew some human societies had tried that idea, but it always eventually broke down. The why was complicated, but usually, it involved a parent that actually cared about their children singling them out, which threw off the entire artificial system.

Kobolds, on the other hand, could not tell their own offspring. Seasons came, generally all the fertile females at the same time, They had many eggs, the eggs were sent to the birthing pools, thousands of tads were born, and a few dozen survived to grow limbs. Personal parenting was kinda pointless. Brutal, but effective survival of the fittest. I had to wonder if the experimental batch my body had been part of had gone through that winnowing process. The tads looked a lot like baby alligators and were just as aggressive until they grew to a more humanoid form.

I looked back at the heavy door, and a warrior waved at me. The door had a simple sliding lock set into it that could open from either side, and it wasn’t intended to stop kobolds, but as it was, the darned thing was probably too heavy to unlock or push open for me.

So yeah, it wasn’t supposed to be locking me in, but it was effectively the same thing. Still, Carolinus hadn’t seemed too concerned, and she’d treated me well so far, so I tried to not take it personally. Hopefully, this would be obtaining advancement, which was the road to the future. I had been in worse danger through endless wars in the Navy, bad enough that it looked like I hadn’t survived one.

I was as stealthy as possible, sneaking my way along the curved walls that looked more like carved tunnels than natural caves, and hugging the shadows as best I could. I was looking for a slightly larger area, where two or more tunnels crossed, where I could set up my traps.

There were other traps here, mostly scrapped or destroyed, but it was clear that this was a favored area for trappers to either test or practice their creations. One of the creations was outlined in red, and I carefully stepped around what looked to be a very poor pit trap covered by some sort of stone.

Definitely a proving ground of some sort, but whatever kind of pit it had been had apparently failed the test, especially since I could have seen it easily even without the red outline in my mind’s eye. The latches on the edge were supposed to hold the pit in place, with a central fulcrum that I suppose was supposed to pivot the entire cover. The problem was, it wasn’t balanced well, with too much weight on one side, and the latches on that side had to be set too firmly, firmly enough that it would probably take something the weight of a human to set it off if they didn’t immediately identify the overly-smooth stone of the lid.

There were even tracks in the dust on it from other kobolds. Bigfoot...err…

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No, not kobolds. Those were paw prints. Apparently, this was a pretty good place to set traps, but the paw prints looked almost like hands in spots. Far larger than mine, and slimmer. There were elongated prints and shortened prints that looked almost like hands, and the front paw prints were about half again larger than my own.

They couldn’t have been too much heavier than me, or they would have set off the pivot on the pit trap, but that still left a lot of leeway. If they were that big, some of the paw trap ideas were going to be flat useless. Springs were the real problem, and while the softened carapace would work great for a lever with a minor spring effect, a real snap trap like a copper bar that snapped across a hole simply wouldn’t be strong enough.

Making a real pit in the stone with my claws was right out. I would be exhausted before I was even partway done. I had my weapon, though, and I started emptying the parts out of my backpack that probably wouldn’t work well enough.

Sure, it would be cool to have giant spinning blades or spears that shot out of walls like in the indy movies, but those were seriously fantasy. So I went lower-tech.

The junction was about twenty-five feet across and possibly eighteen feet high at the highest point, an irregular connection of two tunnels, and the first thing I did was hollow out some widely-spaced footholds that were at the extents of my reach, irregularly set, and then hollowing out a hole like the one at the mushroom farm. I hadn’t wanted it to be permanent, but it was much easier to cut nocks in the stone overhead and attach copper hooks to hold the swinging stone cover in place, as well as a third hook that went into a knock in the door itself to hold it closed while I was inside, rather than trying to haul the heavy thing up with me when I took cover.

Around the larger pit in the middle, I went for budget. Have you heard of Punji sticks? The Vietcong were famous for shallow holes that had sharpened stakes at the bottom of bamboo guaranteed to penetrate a G.I.’s boot and probably maim them or even poison them if they covered the stakes in something nasty.

Well, I didn’t have greenery to cover it, or bamboo stakes, but making sharpened copper rods was easy. Because I was unsure of their weight, and I had little interest in simply maiming the rats, I made tiny pits, about a foot wide, with niches in the side where I hooked the stone spikes on all four sides, and little bends of carapace to make sure that they would stay at a 90-degree angle.

I covered them up with little strips of stone almost as thin as I could carve, and then more flakes and stone dust. It probably wouldn’t fool a human who was on the alert for anything dangerous, but over the next several hours I managed to create a dozen of them before I ran out of steam and hooks for securing the backs of the spikes.

Twice I had heard snuffling and chittering noises and hid in my bolt-hole the first time, but the second time, well, I had to curl up behind a pile of rock that I had created myself and hope nothing saw me.

What came out of the tunnel was not a rat. I concentrated on trying to look like a rock, rather than a small kobold huddled up behind a pile of rock scraps, and to avoid catching attention. I even mostly closed my eyes to prevent the large orbs from attracting attention. I just wish that my hide more closely matched the color of the stone in the vicinity, rather than its bright blue.

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