Outside Influences

Bel’s snakes shifted slightly as she tilted her head, watching the sky shrimp as it strode through the air above her. She had avoided fighting them after her first encounter with one of them, but after convalescing for several days she was finally breathing with hardly any discomfort in her ribs. It was time to go on the offensive. She wanted another opportunity to test out her understanding of her own abilities, and, if she was honest with herself, she wanted the confidence boost that would come with a little payback.

Orseis had also been whining, loudly and incessantly, that she wanted to eat more shrimp, but Bel didn’t let that influence her decisions.

The shrimp touched down on a cliff a little more than a stone’s throw away – a stone’s throw at regular gravity. Bel tensed her muscles and pounced.

She’d been thinking about Orseis’ evaluation of her abilities being ‘too powerful’ during her convalescence, and she had to admit that the tentacled girl was right. When Bel’s feet pushed off of the ground they did so without any sound, and without tossing a stone or pebble. Her body moved through the air with the same eerie silence, as though the air were simply moving out of the way for her as she passed. Against any creature that lacked eyes on stalks that could simultaneously watch in every direction Bel was certain they would never know of her attack.

Too bad these sky shrimp have eyes on the top of their head, she thought ruefully. The shrimp twitched as Bel hurtled towards it, and a stride away from the monster she found herself once again encased in a solid block of air. Bel was ready for it this time.

With a though, she pushed liquify into the area around her, converting the nature of the air away from a solid. That would normally take six strokes, but Bel had managed to find some optional pathways that – with a lot of concentration – she could skip. It brought the cost down by about half a stroke, which she thought was a good beginning.

She’d been attacking the shrimp from its side, so it was busy turning to face her as she sank to the ground. Once her feet touched stone, Bel lashed out with a straight punch aimed at one of the joints on the shrimps hammer feet. She pushed out a passive liquify into the armored joint as her fist connected, and when her fist bounced off she channeled a small shockwave through her knuckles, quickly severing the dangerous limb.

Bel smiled with satisfaction: the small shockwave had only taken ten strokes rather than the full sixteen. It wasn’t cheap, and with a potency of five she was actually blowing through a lot of energy, but it was the improvement that mattered.

With the shrimp suddenly armless on its near side, Bel thrust out with her other hand. She used the same liquify-shockwave technique with her follow-up, crumpling the side of the arthropod’s head. It collapsed to the rocks, twitching feebly as the body caught up with the fact that the brain was dead.

Bel poked it in the side, ripping the fresh essence out of its core. She sighed in satisfaction as her core bloomed with new energy, sending her up another two thresholds. Her snakes writhed with satisfaction as she looked down at her kill.

“I’m pretty badass, aren’t I?” she asked her closest serpent. It flicked out its tongue as Bel grinned proudly.

“Now I just need to bring this back to Ori so she stops asking for more food.”

Bel looked at the shrimp. She glanced back up the mountain, where she knew the concealed cave entrance and a hungry girl were waiting. She looked down at the large, bulky, and not easily carried shrimp.

“Ah, dammit. I’m gonna get covered in shrimp bits, aren’t I?”

Orseis wrinkled her nose with disgust. “You’re covered in shrimp bits.”

She pointed to the cave entrance. “Go rub yourself off with some snow.”

Bel sighed heavily, but marched out of the cave and threw herself into the cold snow. Bits of it melted and flowed under her armor, and she stomped the ground to keep herself from shrieking. She would have resisted if Orseis had been complaining for no reason, but after a few days of Bel attempting to make shrimp armor they’d both learned the consequences of keeping uncleaned shrimp parts in their living space. Out in the freezing cold of the fifth layer things were fine, but in an enclosed space heated to body temperature it was a different story.

She shivered as she got up and stomped back into the cave, rushing over to their small fire to warm her hands. Her snakes leaned forward too, eager to cast off the snow’s lingering chill. Sparky did her best to get into the fire, so Bel leaned forward slightly so her magma snake could get more comfortable.

“Hey, don’t drip on the fire,” Orseis complained. Bel ignored her, content to enjoy the small bit of warmth.

“Get your snake out of the fire, at least. I want to cook some of the shrimp.”

Bel groaned in complaint, but she leaned back. Sparky hissed in Orseis’ direction, but everyone was used to the magma spirit’s over-the-top reactions by now.

“So we’re going to hunt down the Dark Ravager’s remaining cultists now?” Orseis asked.

Bel nodded. “Yeah. I think there’s room for me to improve with my abilities, but we need to start making plans to deal with Nebamon and his goons.”

“Did your brother ever find out anything about Crystal?”

Bel shrugged. “Her family didn’t want to talk about her. James went into some long speech the fabric of a moral society and how people are no better than those who are worst off, but I didn’t really follow it. The long story short was that she ran away from home and helped the Dark Ravager’s cult because she didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Oh.” Orseis paused. “That’s sad.”

Bel shrugged. “Yeah, the world is sad. That’s why we’ve got to get to Satrap and stop Technis.”

Orseis shoved a mouthful of shrimp into her face while nodding with determination.

After eating, they buried the leftover shrimp deep in the snow to preserve it for their return. Then they set off on a search for the cultist’s camp.

Bel made good use of the time she spent recuperating by observing the world of the fifth layer. At first glance it was a barren world with a few rocky islands in the snow, but after observing the creatures she realized that there was more happening that was obvious at first glance. The first thing to grab her attention was the frequency with which stone slabs fell from the ceiling above. The loud boom of a nearby rock fall had woken her on several occasions, but the falls seemed more likely to occur where there hadn’t been one for a while. This made them more likely to fill empty areas of snow, which in turn meant that no areas of the fifth layer were completely isolated or desolate.

Of the life on the layer, the predators had been the first to grab Bel’s attention. The eight-legged fox-worms and sky shrimp especially since she was the right size for them to consider eating her. However, it was actually the saber-toothed deer that seemed the most impactful to the other creatures.

Herds of them wandered over the sides of the cliffs, scraping lichen and moss from the rocks and chewing up any reachable shrubs as they went. When their preferred food was out of reach they slammed their hooves into the rocks, using some ability to smash the rocks to bits and knock down their desired plants. They were busy reshaping the landscape, turning the rocks falling from the layers’ ceiling from sheer, flat slabs into rounder hills. This, in turn, meant more usable space for the layers smaller inhabitants, and more usable ground for the small shrubs that thrived in the layer.

The herds of thunderhooves – Orseis had come up with the new name after watching them demolish a cliff – didn’t stick to a single mountain. They travelled from rock to rock, and where they went they left large, flattened pathways through the snow. Bel had been unlucky to miss them on her first day, but they formed highways that went from island to island. Larger rocks had more traffic and wider paths than the smaller, older rocks that were disappearing beneath the snow.

The very largest highways were even worn deep enough to uncover small streams of melt water, filled with wide varieties of hardy water life. Orseis had been so excited at the thought of more fresh seafood that she’d nearly jumped head-first into the near freezing water, but Bel had restrained her. It was good that she did, because a few moments later a large tracer, a super-sized version of the seal-like creature she’d encountered with Beth and James in Satrap’s Labyrinthos, swam by. After that, Orseis checked the water for threats before breaking through it and reaching through with her tentacles. She did manage to pull up a few fish, but she also pulled up an equal number of eels. The first one that she tried to eat swelled with pus, nearly gluing Orseis’ face shut with slimy mucous. Her excitement for the water diminished after she was forced to spend half an hour rubbing the mucous from her face.

The delay wasn’t too much of an inconvenience. The variable sizes of the highways made it easy to tell what kind of rock would be at the end of any particular path, which allowed Bel and Orseis to follow a route that only stopped at the tallest rocks. They got their bearings with each one and were soon in the area where Bel had seen Nebamon’s people descending from the layer above.

Five large rocks from their original starting point and she found herself perched on a high cliff, overlooking the cultist’s encampment. They had flattened a wide area in the snow, at least a hundred meters across, and ringed it with a wall made of sharped bones. A corner of their area covered a frozen lake. They had punched a hole in the thick ice and had set up multiple fishing lines to provide themselves with a constant stream of food, meaning that they would rarely need to leave their guarded compound to gather supplies.

Despite the safety offered by their wall, the cultists didn’t work alone within the compound. They operated in four groups of three. One group occupied a tall watchtower of stacked stone in the center of the camp while another trio were gathering fish. A third group was working on something, but Bel couldn’t tell what. That group had Rikja in it, but all Bel could see was an occasional flash of flames. At first she’d thought that they were cooking something, but a longer look revealed that they were repeatedly heating and working some small objects.

The final group wasn’t anywhere that Bel could see, so she assumed that they were in a large tent made of worm fox hide. After waiting and watching for a while that hunch was confirmed when the groups rotated. One group of three entered the tent and, a minute later, the final group exited. Bel’s eyes narrowed when she spotted Nebamon’s familiar figure; it would be impossible to miss his swagger.

“So, it looks like there are around a dozen of them?” Orseis asked, interrupting Bel’s train of thoughts. “Charging in there is suicide, you know.”

Bel snorted. “Then we won’t charge in. There are other ways to do this.”

Orseis’ brows lifted. “Oh? Are you gonna share? Any advice from your parents?”

Bel shook her head. “Just stories from Beth and James.”

She considered that for a moment. “Well, mostly James. Beth would just run in there stabbing, I think.”

Orseis’ w-shaped pupils narrowed. “Stories from your brother? Don’t take this the wrong way, but he’s not what I consider a fighter.”

Beth shrugged. “Yeah, Beth was never impressed with most of the stuff he talked about either. But she always listened when he talked about war.”

Bel ran a hand through her snakes while she thought about James’ meandering monologues. “According to James, war in the Old World is so sophisticated that it isn’t just fighting anymore. There’s a complicated mess of money, information, and diplomacy that goes before any actual violence.”

“Sounds like they just weren’t serious,” Orseis dismissed. “And money and diplomacy have nothing to do with our problems.”

“Well, they were so good at destroying stuff that the powerful countries couldn’t afford to fight each other,” Bel explained. “Sometimes though, big armies would try to crush smaller ones. We can use some of the tactics that the little ones used in those situations.”

“Like what?” Orseis asked, intrigued.

“Something called ‘guerilla warfare’.”

“Which is what? Stop using words that don’t mean anything.”

“It’s not – no, nevermind, arguing with you is never worth it.”

Bel pointed at the camp. “We’re going to start by filling their water with eels.”

Orseis eyed her skeptically.

“And maybe we should go back and gather some of that itchy plant as well.”

Orseis cringed. “But it makes my skin itchy.”

“I know,” Bel replied with excitement. She balled her hands into fists and punched the air. “Trust me Ori, this’ll be great. They won’t know what hit ’em.”