Chapter 202: Damage Control

William Oh has a magic map that reveals your deepest fears, and he uses it to summon your worst nightmares into this reality.

Do I believe it? Nah, it’s just a story, man. Hyperbole.

Steak bug shells were everywhere, creating a black mound that collected up against the posts that formed the fence hemming the insects inside their muck-filled pens.

Will did a quick scan and only counted a couple hundred or so of the enormous meat beetles when there should have been thousands.

Phantom Eye.

187 Charges Remaining.

Will scanned the surrounding area while he continued walking the premises, the farmer nearly manic with equal parts rage and panic.

“And here’s where the rest of them are. I’ve got my son watching them. One hundred and eighty-nine out of a bumper crop of ten thousand. We’re screwed. SCREWED.”

“You know what it was?” Will asked.

“We’ve got a watch on the outskirts 24/7.” The farmer said, shaking his head. “If anyone or anything had come from the wild, we would’ve seen it.

Will scanned.

The farm abutted the Stronghold. All the food scraps from the entire Stronghold were collected and channeled down a single road and given to the steak bugs, who converted it back into meat far more efficiently than typical livestock outside The Tower.

There was a sandstone wall on another side, leaving only one direction a monster could’ve typically come from.

Will knelt and picked up one of the discarded shells, turning it over in his hand.

When he first selected Uru Drake’s Eye as a secondary Ability, he had been overwhelmed by the amount of information, blinded by the persistant blue fog that was Miasma.

Over the last few years, his brain had gradually adjusted. Inch by inch, his vision had cleared until he could see a couple hundred feet away without relying on Phantom Eye. It wasn’t great, but it was certainly good enough for most of his daily life.

Will peered down at the steak beetle shell, turning it this way and that as he inspected the miasmatic scorch marks on the shell.

They were passive channels in the shell itself that Loth had invented without even knowing what they looked like. They trapped Miasma and caused it to shed off like water from a duck’s back, keeping the creature insides free from the magic’s corrupting influence, which explained how the bugs never turned into monsters, and their meat remained when they died without needing preservation magic.

The miasma being concentrated like that as it was turned away from the beetle caused a bit of damage to the nonmagical shell itself, creating growth marks only visible to Will’s eyes.

But that wasn’t the only damage. There was also a half-circle about the size of a coin cut into the side of the shell.

“What’s your Class?” Will asked.

“Livestock Breeder, milord.” The farmer said.

So, not a retired Climber, and instead someone who the Stronghold can’t do without. I’ll have to cut him some slack.

It was funny how the higher you went in the tower, the more consideration you had to give to support staff, simply because of how critically irreplaceable they became.

“I understand the desire to protect yourself and the people close to you from starvation, but I’d prefer it if you took those hundred or so steak bugs that you hid and bred them with the others to allow the population to recover faster, even if it’s only by a few days.”

The farmer, having been the very first to realize that a famine was imminent, had sequestered a small supply of steak bugs in a shed off to the side of his farm, and tried to lie to Will about how many were remaining.

“…You saw that, huh?” The farmer asked, rubbing his neck. “A bottleneck is actually less of a problem than you might think. The females lay thousands of eggs. Waiting for them to mature and stopping the larva from eating each other is where most of the work lies. We’d get roughly the same bumper crop from ten as we would from three hundred.”

“…You have any Ability to make them grow faster?” Will asked.

“One at a time, sure.” The man said with a shrug. “It’s for breeding specific traits faster, not for industrial meat output.”

“Anna, work together with...” Will glanced at the farmer.

“Ron.”

“See if you can’t work with Ron to find a Relic that will allow him to turn his single-target Ability into a chain or an AOE. There might be some Buffers, Debuffers, or Nukers with kit specifically geared for that who might be willing to loan it out to prevent famine. Check the ones who work for us first and the civilians second. Strong-arm them as a last-resort.”

“Got it.”

“And give Ron here about…a hundred pounds of flour from our stores.”

Will glanced back at the farmer. “In exchange, you won’t dip into the steak-bugs until they’re back to full numbers.”

“Understood.”

Will glanced toward the shed in the distance where the farmer had hidden the last steak-bugs, hazy in the miasma.

“It might not be a bad idea to break them up a little so they can’t all be wiped out at once. Can you find suitable places to store them with Ron and get Ria to watch them all until we kill whatever did this?”

Anna gave him a sharp salute, jiggling a bit.

Will caught himself staring, then shook his head before squatting down into the muck of the pen and picking out empty shell after empty shell, getting complete exoskeletons where he could.

Every complete shell showed a hole drilled through it.

Whatever had attacked had restrained the beetle, chewed a hole through the side of it, then scooped out the insides.

It must be small. Too small to eat the beetle all at once. They aren’t that tough after all. Anything the size of a dog or larger would just tear through the shell and eat the steak out from the top.

Circular mouth…

Will paused, remembering.

The Establishing Quest he’d gone on when he was just starting out, when he’d met Loth, Mason and Reggie for the first time…There had been an underground canyon filled with giant worms with circular jaws filled with teeth designed to draw you in…

Circular jaws might be able to bore a hole like this, and a soft body could push through that hole and reach every inch of the inside. It would have to be much, much smaller, though…

A worm? Will thought, scanning the empty shells littering the grounds.

A LOT of worms. Some kind of swarm. That nobody saw or heard coming.

If they’re moving underground that explains why we didn’t catch them.

As he stood back up, Will felt Anna’s hand on his shoulder again.

“…Bad news. Syrup farm north of us got hit too.”

Will’s brows raised. The cactus farm that they got their syrup from was one of the only ways to get any kind of sugar and prevent scurvy this high up in The Tower, and not getting it was absolutely going to cause a riot.

With steak production crippled, Will wasn’t in a position where he could afford to lose the food source.

“They didn’t see what did it there either?” Will asked.

Anna shook her head.

“Are they little holes like this?” Will asked, gesturing to the hole in the shell he was holding.

Anna’s expression went vacant for a moment as she spoke to her copy.

“Yes.”

Is this calculated? Will thought. It seemed odd for an unknown pest to hit everything at once. Planned.

“Have Ria split up and guard every remaining source of food. Both from whatever this was, and from people trying to steal it.”

Anna nodded.

I need to reassure myself that this is just a horribly-timed monster, and not some plot to destroy or usurp the Stronghold.

“We’re gonna need to go after a raid boss.” Will mused as he pulled out his Map.

“Eh?”

“For the meat.”

“I’ll get Badur and some hunters ready for you.” Anna said.

“And some trackers to find and exterminate whatever these things are.”

Anna nodded.

Will retreated back into his own mind while Anna made preparations.

I need to make sure there was no human element organizing this sudden emergency, Will thought, using the map only visible to himself. He closed in on his current position until he could see himself on his map.

Will sat down and carefully convinced himself that he was afraid that William Oh would discover his plot to starve the Stronghold and track him down.

Once Will had the fear down he added that type to the legend on his map.

Will did a few other types of fear to make sure he didn’t miss any.

Once those varieties of fear were labeled on his map, he changed the contrast, making the colors so bright they practically stabbed him in the mental eye.

Then Will pulled back out on his Map, allowing him to see the entire Stronghold at once, along with a few miles of wilderness beyond it.

Phantom Eye (x16)

Being slightly tipsy while adding sixteen extra points of view wasn’t a great combination, but Will had plenty of practice with this technique by now, and managed to keep his stomach from rebelling.

Will moved all sixteen Phantom Eyes up into the sky and made an enormous rotating ring around the Stronghold, each of them getting a slightly different angle so that not a single shady alley was overlooked.

Select: ‘fear of Starvation plot being discovered by William Oh’

Will mentally pulled it from the legend and applied it to the map, highlighting any instance his Phantom Eyes could see.

Nothing.

Select: ‘Fear of starvation plot failing’

Nothing.

Select: ‘Fear of Tower placing bounty in response to Starvation Plot’

Nothing.

Will cycled through any others he could think of and didn’t get any hits.

It wasn’t a guarantee that this plot hadn’t been concocted by humans, but it was a strong suggestion that this may have just been bad luck, the culprits were long gone, or the plot had been concocted by one person and that one person didn’t feel fear.

Will had met a few of those since he got the ‘fear is a terrain’ addition to Aspect of the Immortal Serpent, but they were exceptionally rare.

People who didn’t feel fear typically died.

Will hadn’t told anyone about this application of the Map Ability. Not even theorized it to Loth…although she’d probably figured out he could do it since he used fear detection during his campaign against Caddock.

Before he had become a Lord, he had considered using it to allow the guards of his Stronghold to find criminals, but Will had since realized that it served him better as a source of mystery.

Lords needed to have a few special Abilities that no one knew about to add to their facade of unassailable power, and this was an excellent one. It was…not quite mind-reading, not quite divination, not quite dowsing. It was inferior to all of those Abilities when used by specialists, but it wasn’t something Will was supposed to have at all, and it sure as Abyss made William Oh seem like someone you couldn’t possibly hide anything from.

So no one in town or in the outskirts of town has any fears related to a plot to use these worm-things to starve us…that I can tell.

Will had to remind himself that nothing was perfect. Especially not his slapdash culprit-Locator Ability. But it had served him fairly well in the past, so Will was going to proceed on the assumption that no one was consciously at fault here until evidence to the contrary was presented.

Where does that leave me? Will mused.

Brianna was coordinating damage control for the Stronghold, and they were forming a team of trackers to find and exterminate the worms, and another team to go Raid Boss hunting.

Badur would be needed to preserve the gargantuan corpse and Will would be needed to help with the actual killing, and to prevent anyone from trying to kill or steal the Logistician while he was outside the walls of the Stronghold.

The man was absolutely vital to the Stronghold’s operations.

Will cocked his head.

…

Select: ‘fear of plot to kidnap Logistician being discovered’

Nothing.

Will didn’t relax completely, but it gave him hope that he wasn’t actually being plotted against.

“Make sure the tracking team is skilled at escape.” Will murmured to Anna as she guided him towards the south gate. “I’m not going to go with them and there’s always a chance this is a trap.”

“I’ll send some Bee with them too.” She said, nodding.

Will nodded and turned his thoughts toward the matter of acquiring a large amount of meat in a short amount of time.

When it came to Raid Bosses with a lot of meat on their bones, only one on the 10th Floor really stood out from the pack:

The Oasis.