Alpha Physics! Book 3 - Disquiet: A Post Apocalypse Progression Fantasy, page 15
The laughter echoed even louder; at this point, any human would have collapsed helplessly on the ground, physically unable stand anymore from the cackling.
He ground his teeth and focused on his breathing.
Idiot!
He wanted to laugh too. That was so badly done. What was he thinking? If he let the pathway memories guide him, then it would be a different outcome. Worse, he had gotten rid of his gloves in exchange for extra dexterity, but as a result, he had been too squeamish to grab properly and even got bitten. One terrible decision after another.
The interface whimpered as if nursing a cramp from all the laughter. It sobbed again.
Then he hit his head on the table.
Another muffled snort, followed by a moan.
The gloveless hands was a stupid choice; he had not wanted to touch the animal, and that had contributed to its escape. Then it was just clumsiness that had him falling over.
The plea from the interface cried out: “Please stop! It is too much. You are too good at this routine.”
I am not doing standup.
More emotions. “Please stop, please stop . . .”
With a muffled curse, Adrian pushed himself to his feet. He was a long way from recovering but was at least able to stand, and the new position let air flow more freely. As he had been taught in soccer, he put his hands on his head and elbows out to open the airways.
Use identification, gloves, the pathway memories. Everything at his disposal. Remember that the little vermin were tougher than they looked. If you went hard, yes, they might die, but they were much less likely to wriggle away and escape.
Using Ambusher’s Steps but not any actual Shadow Steps, he hurried farther out of town, instinctively understanding that he needed to get twenty houses between him and the scene of the squealing rat.
He picked a random house. Like almost all of them, the front door was wedged open. The moment he got near the house, he smiled. It was perfect.
Chapter 25
At the first rat he saw, identification confirmed that there was nothing special about it. Finally.
Step.
Both gauntlet-covered hands swooped down on the critter hard. There were the sounds of tiny bones cracking. With a deep sigh of relief, Adrian maintained his firm grip around the now-limp neck and plopped the science kit down on the floor next to him.
At last, he performed the experiment, combining bits of the rat’s insides with different bits of the separated scoropid venom. The whole process was over in thirty seconds.
Adrian made mental notes, and the interface obliged: it was like typing on a computer telekinetically. The pathway interpreted the limited results, and he knew he needed more rats.
Did he find a new house or keep searching here? From the smell and visible droppings, there was a big nest here. If this rat represented a nest of normal, unmutated rats, then the choice was obvious.
Time to try a lure.
For the next five minutes, he blocked the cracks in the room he was in. It should not be necessary, but it was good practice if the animals got past his initial attempt. They would be trapped. He scrounged together two Tupperware containers and laid them into a position with bricks to drop on top of them. If all went well, he would get three or four rats out of the lure, and then he would be done.
He brought his alchemic kit out, and within minutes the smelly bait was deposited thirty centimetres in front of the hive entrance he was targeting. It would bring them running.
Sure enough, they swarmed out of the hole. Identification was blinking through information wildly. Almost all of them had a snap growth or charge ability. The Tupperware containers were useless. Adrian reached out with his gloved hands instead. There was an explosion of air right next to his stomach, which sent him flying backwards before he could reach a single rat.
He landed flat on his back. There must have been thirty of them. He felt their claws rush over him, tiny footsteps flashing over his limbs. Soldiering through the nightmarish sensation, he suppressed a girlish shriek and grasped all over his body for at least one rat. They evaded him easily.
The image diverted his attention. A lumbering giant trying to squash a wave of running men. They had looped a length of rope around the giant’s ankle and down it crashed with a thump.
He blinked the image away, trying to get up and grab the couple of rats still on him. They were too nimble. There were bangs all around him as charge abilities detonated, blowing out the holes he had covered just minutes before.
They were all getting away. Out of the thirty he had summoned, fewer than five were left.
Wind Gust.
The rat he was targeting whipped up into the air like a punted football and slammed into the opposite wall. So much easier to cast and even more powerful than expected.
Wind Gust.
Adrian aimed for a different rat. It also spun through the air and hit the corner edge of a coffee table. There was a very distinctive crack.
He rushed over to the first rat and grabbed it. The thing was still moving.
Great.
The second rat’s head was caved in, rendering it almost useless. He stared at the barely alive one in his hand to assess the best method forward. The rat was perfect, clearly weak. It went into a Tupperware container without protest.
Then he worked feverishly on the rat with the caved-in head. All but one of his experiments failed, which was what he had expected. At least it had confirmed that a moderately fast muscle paralysation was part of the scoropid cocktail.
Before the second rat could possibly get away, he tested it. The experiments completed quickly, and they left some ambiguity regarding the final two components of the poison. Adrian rolled his eyes and exhaled. One more rat would do the trick.
With the urgent task done, he looked around the room and decided to switch houses one more time. The damage done to the walls made him genuinely worried about structural integrity. If the swarm of mutated rats had fought rather than fled, it could have gone even worse. As skilled as they were at blowing through wood, the personal risk had not been that high. A bit of magic would have defeated them quickly.
Step, step, step.
Outside. Looking back, expecting the house to fall or something just as comical. Nothing happened of course, not even a puff of dust.
There was an image of a man sitting on a recliner on his front porch watching a neighbour stare in frustration at a half-constructed spring-free trampoline. The instruction manual was roughly the thickness of Hamlet, and judging from the builder’s grumbling, something was clearly going wrong. With a grin, the man in his cosy chair settled more firmly into the soft cushions, cracked another beer and pulled his half-eaten bag of chips onto his lap.
“Jane,” he hollered back into the house. “I think it is getting to a good bit.”
Have your fun!
It was a bitter thought, but frankly, Adrian thought if he had spectators, they would enjoy themselves. The interface just did not need to be such an ever-present ass about it.
He passed another ten houses, then sneaked into the eleventh through a flimsy open door. The rats were there, three of them. Lesson learnt—prepare for shapeshifting, electric charge, and finally a psychic ability to stun small animals. That last rat gave him pause for a moment, but the more he studied it, the clearer it was that the effect would slide right off him.
Step.
Grab the psychic rat. The others squealed, then fled.
The captured rat twisted and thrashed but could not get free. Adrian adjusted until the neck was firmly hooked and then, with relief, he completed his experiment.
The trampoline came together, without needing to be pulled apart first, and with a disgruntled huff, the onlooking man grabbed his three empty beers and retreated into the house. “Show’s over,” he called out, presumably to Jane.
With a sigh, Adrian sat on the ground. The previous forty minutes had not been dignified, but he got his results. It had just been so messy.
An image formed. There was a clown. He rapidly pushed it away because, as always, he was not in the mood for the teasing.
He chewed the inside of his cheek. Then moderated his breathing once more. What was done was done. He could not change it.
Air in and frustration out.
The bright side was that Shadow Step still worked despite his diminished key attribute. The first couple of times it had felt shaky but worked. With the additional practice, he had made it respond more and more like normal.
Changes in Agility affected Shadow Step, he remembered. He wouldn’t lose entire levels, but any further slippage would have consequences. That was clear by how sluggishly the ability had activated at first. When he used the skill, he could feel how close he was to the edge, where the skill would no longer function.
He looked down at the dead rat in his hands. It had been worth it. Finally, he had a list of four main mechanisms in the scoropid poison:
Medium-fast muscle paralysation.
Instant pain.
Slow-acting neurotoxin that would kill the brain.
Very slow muscle-wasting toxin.
The fifth and final active component could be safely ignored as it was just another, even slower-acting neurotoxin. The cure for first slow-acting neurotoxin would protect against both. Why scoropids had evolved to have both was a mystery. Maybe on the home planet there was a common hard counter to the slow-acting poison so the additional neurotoxin could come in handy. Many things in this Alpha world seemed to defy sense, but it was an evolving system, so there had to be an explanation somewhere. That said, the system had multiple worlds with regular, random mixing of species, Adrian understood that creatures adapted for myriad, complicated reasons.
The memory of the frantic battle with the insects came back to him. Now that he understood how the scoropid stingers worked, it was clear that the muscle paralysation had almost killed Steve but it could not crack Jules’s troll aspect. When he had given Steve the four different cure potions, two had been ineffective, but the other two had countered the mix in the venom.
Now that he knew what the mechanisms were, preparing the antidotes would be easier. Reviewing the battle made him feel a little better about the upcoming fight. Jules’s prowess in the first fight told him they had decent odds. Even if the resistance potions turned out to be weak counters to the swarm, they would still be successful in individual encounters. Especially with Steve’s pretty ring.
Now that he knew the problem, it was time to design the attack. Deep breaths.
The results were worse than expected, but maybe not so bad. It was almost par for the course that something out of left field would knock him for a six. He sent a quick prayer out to anyone listening to the butchered mix of sports metaphors.
Four active ingredients meant a cocktail of four potions.
Accessing the new knowledge. It flooded back into his conscious thought, guiding the process to neutralise the stings. Antidote, not resistance, represented the easiest path. The question was whether he could also build a temporary potion resistance, which would allow them to fight for longer. Antidotes were great, but only if they were ingested before the poison’s fatal damage took hold.
Mentally, he shuffled through the overwhelming amount of information that he just gained. Eventually, Adrian and the interface worked out how to crystalise the knowledge in his conscious thoughts. It was like a little epiphany firing in his head to remind him of the details when he needed them.
Crafting resistance potions was possible with ingredients he had or should be able to harvest in the surrounding area. But he could only develop a resistance to two of the mechanisms, muscle paralysation and neurotoxins. Those were the important ones, fortunately. That would stop people dying, but there was nothing he could do against the pain. Plus, the muscle-wasting effect would have to be mitigated every ten minutes by a direct antidote to prevent permanent damage to Strength. The others might cope with losing a couple of Strength points permanently, but Adrian had already lost more than enough in the last twenty-four hours.
After five minutes of careful thinking, he had distilled the plan down to seven antidote potions and the two resistance potions. A combination of them would neutralise the venom stings.
No. He caught his naïvely linear way of thinking. If the resistance potions were in play, then the crew would not need the antidote potions. Maybe he could keep a few in reserve as a precaution, but it was not vital. That dropped the requirements down to two antidote potions to stop the muscle-wasting plus the two resistance potions. They would need to just live with the pain.
Chapter 26
With the plan formulated, Adrian needed to cross-check his inventory. The calculations were not simple—ten different ingredients per potion, some ingredients that overlapped recipes, and dozens of substitutions available to be utilised. Sometimes, substituted ingredients were used in the same portions as the originals, but often it was more complicated, with two herbs being swapped out for four others. The interfaces crunched the options effortlessly and presented a summary table.
Of course, he was missing materials. Several ingredients were still needed for the antidote potions, but he was pleasantly surprised to find that he was equipped to make all five paralysation resistance potions and two neurotoxin resistance ones. That was better than he had expected, but still nowhere near enough in total.
To totally clear the infestation of scoropids, Adrian figured it would take hours of fighting. So that meant they needed dozens of each type of antidote potion and at least two doses of resistance potion per person, as they each lasted six hours. He needed many more ingredients. The trader could help, of course, but it would be expensive. Much smarter if he gathered as much as possible himself first. The list unfurled as he finalised his reasoning and revealed eight critical missing components.
Missing ingredients:
Taragol Muscle-Wasting Antidote
Way Orangeroot (missing)
Land Hairy Milkweed (missing); Way Duck Sunflower (substitute)
Swamp Thyme (Insufficient quantities)
Inefficient Antidote to Muscle Wasting - Single dose counters very slow-acting toxin. Double dose partially counters slow-acting toxin.
Swamp Thimbleweed (missing)
Swamp Lavender (missing)
Pale Hedge Pokeweed
Medium Muscle Paralysation Resistance Potion
Thymiamsa (Insufficient quantities)
Spotted Grass (Insufficient quantities)
Weak Neurotoxin Resistance Potion
Hempain (Insufficient quantities)
Western Cursed Cap (Insufficient quantities)
Regional knowledge and his gathering skill combined and told him that all the herbs should be available in the surrounding territory. The question was, what would be the most advanced route to gather them?
There were swamp herbs, altitude fungi, and standard temperate forest growths to collect. With only limited time available, it would be best to chart the optimal path.
If only there was a way to put it on a map to help plan.
It was not that subtle but . . .
His interface flashed and with a click, a map filled his vision. A triumphal smile formed before quickly being wiped away. The interface was suddenly looking at him suspiciously like a parent debating whether to punish a child.
Oops.
The map was immaculate. It had colour-coded areas already painted to show the range of the herbs on the list. It was amazing; it would have taken anyone in his team weeks to put together pre-event.
A sense of danger loomed. The interface was still considering the “punishment” but rapidly concluded that the tipping point had passed.
Thank you.
The threatening focus vanished. The memory of the dog trainer quip was still fresh in his mind.
Are you training me?
Yes . . . No . . . Of course not. An officious man with spectacles appeared, busily looking down at his notes and ignoring Adrian. Personally, he was sure the man was just shuffling blank sheets of paper back and forth menacingly. Alarm bells went off. It was the wrong man. The man’s hand blurred. Oh no, Baron Trout had hired an assassin. A dagger was flying at his face. Flinching backwards. There was a click, and the vision collapsed to blankness.
Before he could see why, his hands were raised to protect his face in real life. Anyone watching would have thought he had caught something flying at him out of the corner of his unfocused eyes. Bloody thing. At least the threatening image was gone, and who the hell was Baron Trout?
The map was still open, and it was easy enough to plan an optimal route.
Reinvigorated with energy, he returned to the trader to find out the cost of the ten ingredients that he required.
“How were the rats?”
He looked suspiciously at the trader. She smiled innocently back at him, her whiskers quivering slightly.
“I caught the ones I needed.”
“Wonderful, I heard they could be tricky.” She touched her ear as she spoke. A smile was tugging at her lips.
“Umm.” She was definitely smiling. “Easy enough once you learn the knack.”
Abruptly, she ducked under the cart, and he was sure he heard sniggering, but a moment later she was standing back up as professional as ever, a book that had herb prices written on it held in her hands.
“Can I help you?”
After he explained what he needed, the cat girl seemed to open random drawers for almost a full minute before responding to him, never once referring to the book she had retrieved earlier. Finally, she held out a piece of paper that listed the ingredients, quantities available, and the energy costs per unit. It was a flowing calligraphy that she could not possibly have written herself that quickly. She smiled teasingly, almost challenging him to say something. With an effort of will, he held his tongue yet again.
