Fifteen
 
How Alice managed to make the crude leathers, Kon didn’t know. He had sat there watching her as rune after rune had lit up on her one hand, but he still didn’t understand. There was no stitches, she didn’t have thread and a needle, and she obviously hadn’t cured them, but she had handed him a vest like shirt. It had long open sleeves that could be tightened at the wrist and an overly broad torso that let it hang off of his until he tightened it along his ribs.
The pants were similar, but he kept the ragged remnants of the jumpsuit underneath the leather, the chafing comments fresh in his mind. It was stiff, didn’t move well, and very uncomfortable. He had almost taken it off until Alice had grabbed one of the hounds and smeared its acidic tongue down the front of the shirt and nothing had happened.
“It’s a piece of shit suit, but it’ll work for now. Let’s go, we have a rift to clear,” Alice waved him back the way he had run from. They had stumbled, well Kon had stumbled, on the rift nearly on accident. A small glade of steaming pools that were wildly out of place in the metal forest.
The pack he had run into had emerged out of the steaming pits with a ferocity that had sent Kon running before he could really look at what they were. The chase hadn’t been long, no more than fifteen minutes, but he had been running at his full capacity that entire time. How he had done that, he didn’t know.
“Now when you decide you want to choke out monsters with claws, teeth, and acid, you won’t need as much healing,” Alice said as she forced him into a jog. They ate as they ran, Alice popped bits of charred organ into her mouth while juggling her axe and Kon kept gnawing away at a D-Grade steak.
“You’re feeling really good right? Plenty of energy?”
“Yeah. Feels like I can do this all day,” Kon replied honestly.
“Well you can’t. You have the energy to do it, but not the body to sustain it. The healing I gave you basically washed out the fatigue that was building in the body. Acids and shit from exercise, basically reset you. Now that fatigue is building up again, but you eating that higher grade meat is going to make it feel like you should be able to keep going. So, when I tell you it’s time to stop, it’s time to stop,” Alice said. She sounded serious again and Kon nodded even as he kept running.
Alice set a pace that he could maintain easily enough and it took the majority of an hour to find the springs again. Knowing that the springs were there this time, he slowed down and scaled a tree to look down at the glade.
It was a wide open area nearly a hundred meters in circumference with seven deep, sulfur yellow pits of boiling water. Noxious steam rose off the pits and mingled around the trees, but as Kon watched longer, he noticed that the trees closest to them had grown more yellow with the leaves becoming thin and frail.
“Rifts left alone long enough become ecological disasters at times. Most have ecological systems that are sort of compatible with the world they appear on. There will still be issues. Then on occasion, you get ones like this one. It’s a slow moving disaster. The poison from the pits is killing the trees will keep creeping out further and further until it bumps into a larger rift. You’d die within minutes of entering that rift, your objective is to clear the ten hounds in the steam. Ooops, fourteen hounds in the steam,” Alice said. She pitched her voice so he could hear her from a tree over, but not so loud as to alert the rest of the animals.
“There’s no way I can fight them all. That last pack nearly killed me and would have without Alice’s healing. She only has one left and I can’t rely on that. I need to be able to be self-reliant.” Kon sat there and thought for a few minutes before he decided on a path of action.
Scaling back down the tree was the work of moments and then he had to start looking for what he needed. The hounds were hyper aggressive, charging without hesitation and without a hint of caution or attention to their surroundings. It didn’t take long until he found what he needed.
It took much longer to dig the trench and fill it with sharpened stakes pointing upward and into the air. Alice didn’t help but just kept watch as Kon dug three more stake filled pits. He grabbed some of the leaves, the one with the sharpest edges, and dug them partially into the sides of the paths he planned to run. He worked his way back and forth for hours, trying to memorize the path he would run and around the traps once he got the hounds to engage. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
He finally had to ask Alice for help in making several staves that he stashed in key spots right after traps. Six hours after he started his scouting run, he finished his preparations and went back to the ponds. The entire time Alice had stayed nearly silent, just watching him with raptor intensity.
“This is crazy. I think this is crazier than the other rift. I didn’t know there was so many enemies in that rift at least.” Kon grabbed a stubby piece of wood, went to the edge of the ponds, and lobbed it at the closest shape he saw. Unfortunately the shape he saw was just a tree stump, obscured by the steam it looked like a resting hound. The clang of metal hitting metal echoed out and then the sound of water being pushed around and the packs rushed out of their steaming pits and were coming at him with their vaunted aggression and Kon was cursing as he turned and ran as fast as he could.
He couldn’t tell how many were following him, but the sounds of feet tearing apart the ground and the hiss of acid hitting trees around him kept his head down and his arms pumping as he followed his marked out path.
The first trap he had laid were the razor sharp leaves sticking point up, just waiting for a paw or foot to fall on them. Kon had cleared the path he needed to stay on with his foot, clearing it of any debris and he stayed on the path.
Moments later a squawk of pain happened, then another and another, and the hissing of the trees being slowly dissolved slowed down enough he risked looking behind him. Two hounds followed right on his heels, staying close enough to him that they were safe from the traps. The rest of the pack wasn’t as lucky.
The wounds weren’t bad enough to stop them permanently, but he didn’t need to. Just break them up. He kept running.
A tongue struck him back and then another, but the new uncomfortable leathers held up, and Kon gritted his teeth and kept running. As long as one of the acidic tongues didn’t hit the back of his head he could keep going.
Fallen trees were rare in the forest, but not so rare that they weren’t hard to find. He had dug his first pitfall trap underneath one of them and he ran around the edge of the tree, trusting that the two hounds would just continued to race straight forward and he was rewarded for his trust as they leapt over the tree and straight into the shallow pit covered in two foot long spikes of wood. Neither of them would be continuing the chase.
Across the path was his first stave and he grabbed it and turned to look at his pursuers. A single hound had kept up to him even as it leaked blood from its injured paws. It hissed and shot a tongue at him, but Kon just blocked it with his forearm and stepped into his downward swing.
Aggression didn’t handle tactics well. The lizard hounds died easily enough on their own, their skulls fragile. As long as he could keep from being overwhelmed by them. Kon had to turn after he killed his second injured hound that had followed moments after the first one. Four more had ran at him nearly simultaneously and he was back to running.
Trap after trap he sprung on them by simply running by them. The leaves were the most effective. They didn’t leave them dead, but slowed and strung them out. Each wound drove them further and further into their murderous rage as they hobbled after him. When he stopped to grab his final stave and turned to face the horde, only three bloody lizards had managed to follow him to the end.
Kon finished them quickly. They could hardly move let alone dodge as he raced among them laying about himself with his staff. Each blow broke bones and left the monsters further incapacitated.
He dropped the staff and fell on his ass in the ground after a few minutes and no more of the monsters came chasing after him. A laugh managed to squeeze itself out of his gasping lungs as the adrenaline crash and his hands shook. Alice landed lightly next to him and had the closest thing to pride on her face that’d he’d ever seen.
“Not bad at all. Was surprised you didn’t try to lure them out one at a time and dazzle me with your club swinging skills, but this worked too. Catch your breath and get ready to harvest. With all the dead monsters you should have enough cores to make your next node.”
“The repair node?” Kon asked between gasping breaths.
“Yeah. That’s not exactly what it’s called, but I don’t want you to be confused so we’ll wait till we’re back at the cave and have dinner before I explain it.”
“Can I borrow your axe to help harvest?” Kon asked. Alice looked offended he’d asked.
“What happened to that tooth I gave you?”
“I lost it,” Kon mumbled while Alice shook her head.
“That tooth would be expensive off planet. A D-Grade tooth isn’t exactly easy to find unless you come to a world like this. The amount of money we’re letting rot in the jungle is frankly depressing. Here, I have another tooth for you. Don’t lose this one,” Alice said as she reached into a pocket of her jumpsuit and tossed him a wide triangular tooth. Kon groaned but grabbed the tooth and walked over to the dead hounds and began to harvest.