BECMI Chapter 9 – Picking up an Animal Friend

The little pixie serpent-fang arrows didn’t do much damage, mostly just sticking in the giant bat’s hide and wings, but a couple were deep enough to draw blood. The sleeping magic made for humanoids didn’t work on giant bats, obviously, and he just grumbled and squealed a little bit as I worked the fang-tipped things out of him carefully, bidding him roll over at one point so I could inspect his belly and get another couple out of his chest. Then a simple and all the holes were fixed right up, the cool wash of the Healing magic prompting him to reflexively flap his wings and bolt ten feet up off the ground in shock. “All better, right?” I called up to him as he flapped around excitedly, while I snapped the last of the scattered pixie arrows in my hands. Most of them had been shattered from the cold and force damage of the going off. He glided back down nimbly and painlessly, landing next to me and going down to all fours. He immediately proceeded to nuzzle me affectionately, and the vivic cleansing of his mouth from eating Burning pixies meant he didn’t even smell bad. “Yes, yes, I know. I’m a good friend to have,” I agreed calmly, scratching him behind his massive tall ears. “I’m also kind of dangerous to be around. I stir up a lot of trouble.” I scuffed the area where the gray ooze had been, now Burning with vivus spread from a random dead cave pixie and being reduced to whiteness and dust on the stone. Tomorrow, there’d be a lot of moss and mushrooms growing in this area, I was sure. The scavengers were probably annoyed they’d lost a lot of fresh meat, but this quiet little stretch of tunnel was getting a nice shot in the arm. Getting rid of oozes and other blobs was pretty much always a worthwhile thing to do. Unless maybe they were parked in front of an invasion force of bugs and eating them willy-nilly as fast as they came, or something similar. Huh… “So, you busy? Got a mate around, taking care of some little ones?” I asked him, pushing him back gently but firmly. It only took a flicker of magic around my hand to make him respect my grip, as he was much stronger than I was. His squeals and chittering indicated that he did not, although if he found one he was more than willing to play the part. Giant bats were not a top-line predator down here, of course, and were routinely hunted down by many of the more magical creatures wandering around… including elves, who considered them dangerous pests and a threat to their children. “I hear you. It’s a hard life.” I flicked up a for him to crouch on, making him jump in surprise again as it popped up, although its silvery color was muted to blacks and crimsons, with the insignia of a black-thorned scarlet rose in the center of it. “Hop on, it’s easier than walking with me.” He really wasn’t made for ground travel, after all. He poked it with one wing-thumb, it didn’t move, and he cautiously hauled himself up on top of it. I started walking along, hauling the bat over twice my size along with me. He looked around in delight, his darkvision the equal of mine, occasionally emitting a high-end sonar squeak I could barely hear to get a different picture of his surroundings. “If you’re not busy with other stuff, would you like to hang around with me? I could use a local fellow who knows this area and can move fairly quickly. There’d be some good food, and if we stumble across some other bats, you’re free to go on your way. If you want to stick with me longer, we can talk about that, too. What do you say?” His keening cries indicated he’d be quite happy to tag along with me if there was food involved. I nodded at his wise choice and trotted along, scanning for other interesting stuff. I naturally had an incredibly detailed map of this area in my Visual File, but unless the things that lived here were very powerful or magical, I didn’t have much information on them. My new friend was happy to chatter about the dangerous and tough beasties here, especially the ones that liked to throw rocks at him. ------ It turned out that he really liked giant spider guts, too, so when a few hunting spiders decided I looked like suitable prey and leapt forward to be impaled by Cantrips, he was only too ready to rip them open and eat the best parts quickly. “You eat much more and you’re not going to be able to fly,” I warned him, while moving down a narrow passageway that did not see a lot of traffic. That was mainly because the progenitor of those wolf spiders I’d just killed lived down here. He keened very softly, fully able to smell what lived down here. There was a definite draft going past us, and some chittering indicating that a whole lot of bugs lived up ahead of us. Shells crunched quietly underneath my feet, rapidly building in size, and tiny bugs began to scuttle and creep out of them as I passed by. My feet were icy cold, however, and none of them tried to scuttle onto me once they felt the cold around me. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. When the aggressive centipedes, spiders, and scorpions starting making threat displays, I flicked up a trio of my and popped them, the vivus rapidly spreading to the insect shells around me and soon starting to fill the corridor up with white mist as it Burned. Scuttling hordes of bugs of rapidly increasing sizes began to empty out from underneath them and the cracks and crevices of this place. My spell was on soon enough, keeping me off the ground, even as web strands began to crisscross and cover the area above us. I could cut them through with fiery easily, incinerating whole swathes of silk quickly if I bothered to make them , often precipitating the fall of spiders and egg bundles and cocooned prey of all sizes to the ground. A section of thick webbing covered the end of the chamber in front of us, although small holes and gaps the insects could scuttle through in retreat from me were all over the place. There were bones of a lot of bats and mice and bipeds of various sizes scattered all around and in the webbing, indicating this place had been found before, and those doing so had paid the price. Duum, or more properly, Duuuuum the Bat was extremely nervous, even as he was grabbing the occasional bug that was too slow, cracking shells and cleaning out their guts. A shadow moved across the other side of the webbing from us. One, that meant there was a light source there, however faint. Two, it was ten feet at the shoulder. Perfect. Popping vermin no bigger than me wasn’t getting me anywhere. I popped a flaming into the wall of fluttering webbing in front of us, another one cycling in to replace it as a of fire instantly consumed the webbing in a ten-foot sphere and sent wisps of fire racing up the connected strands in all directions, vastly increasing the size of the opening. The breeze from behind us kicked up, pushing softly glowing vivic mist out past us in counterpoint to the flames basically eating away the entirety of the webbing in front of us. The scorpion there on the other side turned around to regard the two of us, especially Duum, who froze in terror when he saw it. Great legs as thick as trees scuttled around with startling ease and speed, lidless black eyes like gemstones reflected the flames and the vivus in the light of a cavern whose top was lit up with phosphorescent fungi and stones, and so many bio-luminescent creatures I couldn’t really imagine. The sucker was pale white from head to toe, which was a really bad indicator. It meant he was easy to see, which meant attacking him was probably going to get something killed. The poison coming out of that tail rising behind him was probably absolutely horrible, but the raised claws that were much bigger than I was were at least as much a threat to the two of us. To the I hit the sucker with, not quite so much. Fifteen missiles of magic energy, each as long as my current arm and crackling with multi-hued energies, drove into the head and legs of the giant scorpion. Black eyes popped, its almost crystalline white carapace cracked as it was holed violently, trembling mouthparts blew apart, and multiple legs were blasted away from the body and went flying away as my hit it, and hit it hard. Its dying squeal was long and loud as it collapsed, which was basically the equivalent of waving a huge flag and shouting ‘Come Eat Me!’ to the insect population at large… and maybe warning something else that they had visitors. There was a wave of silence from beyond, and then an absolute explosion of things getting airborne, coming in this direction. I tossed out the spell, both shrinking the corpse of the scorpion down drastically and turning it into a scroll that flipped to my hand. “Time to go, Duum!” I told him, and he didn’t need to be told twice. His talons gripped the edge of the as I leapt onto it, and he beat strongly in the opposite direction. There were a few spiders coming down on lines from above, some of them with up to six feet in diameter with their legs splayed, not small at all. They all popped as punched through them, while we zipped over the mist eating away the refuse on the floor and behind us the cave filled with a whole lot of interested bugs coming our way. Borrowing a page from the swarms, I filled the passage behind us with a , which was basically a spell with spikes on it, not friendly to bugs trying to get through it at all. It covered the passage from top to bottom in writhing black and crimson rose vines as said passage narrowed, and the Holy damage Kickers on it were not going to be appreciated as they tore the smaller bugs right apart and wounded any larger ones trying to bull through. --- Duum dragged us out of the tunnel and back into the main passageway, fleeing down it urgently as the thrumming sounds of a lot of insect wings accented the scuttling movements of a lot of bugs swarming over something behind us. The truly large bugs couldn’t come out here, and likely wouldn’t want to with my spell in the way. I was plenty happy with my first haul out of the Bug Cavern, knowing I was going to be visiting more and harvesting a lot of the place. The cavern beyond had been quite large and low, nothing like the high caverns that the shadelven main cities were built in, but I’d caught glimpses of a massive forest of fungi, so many bugs it had looked like the ground and walls and ceilings were moving, and knew I’d found a nice and convenient source of Karma. Something had to be attracting the things there, so likely whatever it was was something that also didn’t belong there. I knew this because showed multiple tunnels going into the area that cavern occupied, but petering out and ending, showing no sign of the cavern itself in the spell, despite me having seen how huge it was. Whatever was in there was trying to stay hidden, and doing a bang-up job of it. What that meant was something else for me to address. Maybe in a little/long while, when I had more staying power. But that was definitely a place where I’d be able to take on a whole lot of dangerous stuff, and keep right on going for a long time.