When he got back home after a day spent handling minor crises; with Star absolutely refusing to go anywhere near his truck, with the spider watching events from the dashboard… or to Joshua’s home, rather… he wondered for a moment… if Marcus Grey were ruled missing, would Joshua Grey inherit his father’s home? Or did he have other relatives left out there? It didn’t matter. He wasn’t heading for California any time soon. Not til Nightfire and Golden Boy were dead, at least.
The spider hopped off of his shoulder, and started inspecting the house, as Grey headed to the kitchen; and opened the basement door. The place where the rat cavern had been was now a perfectly smooth stone wall; whoever the cops had working on it had done an excellent job.
He nodded… and after determining this place was the best to put his new spider colony… carefully set the glass case down… and started dumping Fire Ant worker carcasses out; forming a nice pile in the corner… and set the egg-sac nestled inside an open wound of one carcass.
The mother spider examined the work, chittering something, and hopped down to inspect it. It hopped down… and grabbed a corpse; even the workers were bigger than the spider itself… and climbed up to the ceiling… starting to extrude a web…. Binding it. After a minute or so of work, it carefully dangled the body from the ceiling… and then placed some of the eggs into it. This one had died from venom, and had no wounds; the spider carefully cracked a hole in the carapace, and placed them inside.
It then… proceeded to the next corpse.
He studied it. Interesting. During the initial stages after birth, it would probably keep the babies from eating each other; and result in a much higher number of surviving juvenile spiders. He just needed to ensure they saw humans as a food source, and not an enemy… or, if need be, he could simply wait for them to grow into hostile adults, and figure out a way to pump venomous gas into the basement for a quick level boost.
On the one hand… he was almost completely certain a skill upgrade would do it. On the other… it would likely be true just a common pesticide sprayer could do the job, or perhaps a liquid fertilizer applier.
Something similar might be used to turn the acid globules into an acid sprayer, or the fire sacks into a flamethrower. He… should experiment. Find out.
Did spiders like to be touched? A certain level of bonding helped with dogs. Would it with spiders? He gently extended one hand towards the purple-white creature as it was moving to the third corpse. It raised a single forelimb; giving him a sort-of ‘fist-bump’ and then went right back to work, preparing its children.
If he didn’t feed it regularly; if something happened and he died without coming back; when they got hungry, they’d break out of the house, and likely start eating the neighbors, the cops, and become a plague even worse than a spider nest, since they were so much more mobile, and able to make webs.
He thought for a moment… and shrugged, heading upstairs. That would only make it more likely Nightfire would die in the event he failed. Not a problem for the objective.
***
After a quick trip to the hardware store.. Where every single bottle of insecticide and many flammable chemicals were completely sold out… he came home with a variety of sprayers, and several jugs of kerosene.
Examining the sprayers closely, he immediately checked the ones with plastic components, adding just a bit of his venom to them to see if they could handle the more mild acidic properties of it, before moving to the more intense stuff; leaving him with mixes of steel, glass, and ceramics.
Sacrificing a single acid globule, he split it among the sprayers… sprayed just a bit of acid from each on an old crate of mulch in Joshua’s shed to get the acid all the way through their works; and then set them down. He’d try them again in a few hours; and any that worked, he’d try them as flamethrowers with the fire sacks next…. And then stick both into storage, and have options for the next nest, or other swarm they handled.
All that prepped… he went back inside, opened the fridge… locating a whole pile of spoiled food… and bagged it all up, taking the only things that hadn’t gone bad; a few packages of sausage in the freezer; and cooking them up.
His body might have been improved, and made hyper-efficient by the magic… but all the substance for that venom had to come from somewhere.
With a glass of water and a plate of dozens of breakfast sausages… he started to eat.. Relaxing… and getting back to his usual downtime activity… filling jars… this time a case of gallon pickle jars… with venom.
After a few minutes, he decided to head to the living room with his jars, his food, and his water… and watch some news.
The first thing that popped up… was CSPAN. But instead of congressional hearings, it showed a global map… labeled the ‘Crisis’ map… and alternated between that and showing issues in the United States, evacuation routes, numbers to call to get a Chosen…
A film crew’s last moments were shown, as they were consumed by a giant alligator in Florida. An oil platform was awaiting rescue, as a swarm of giant mosquitoes was nabbing anyone who went outside; they were waiting for a Navy ship to arrive and ‘clean’ the area so they could either get back to work… or just escape.
A swarm of giant hornets were shown over China, being taken out by automatic weapons, with tanks and helicopters coming in to assist, as they swept the wilderness for hostiles…. And then a clearly civilian video was shown of a chinese village being decimated by a bipedal, 20-ft. Tall grey reptilian; it might have been an alligator, a crocodile, who knew what; but now it was spitting out globs of poison to take out helicopters and crushing houses with its tail.
Central texas, the most heavily populated areas, seemed to be fine… for the most part. None of it really seemed to matter, or be useful, for Grey’s plan… so he brought up the tablet… wondered if, maybe, there was any information on Nightfire… and found, to his surprise… a ‘Goldnight’ fan website.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Some lunatic had created a fan website for Golden Boy and Nightfire; and had a wide array of details about the duo.
Apparently, they’d last been seen in texas earlier that day, dealing with a shark which had reached monumental size and tried to eat a boat… and were believed to be home for the night… with no real idea, but plenty of speculation, about where ‘Home’ was.
The duo had apparently known each other before being Chosen, and were from Dallas; and there was a full run-down on the powers they’d been shown using, and most up-to-date details.
He brought up Nightfire, first.
He skipped the rest. He didn’t particularly care what teenages girls had to say about his target’s style choice, but knowing that the Elf-Slayer choice would actually be useful was pivotal. He switched to Golden Boy.
He knew the next entry was style again; and didn’t care for it. This was potentially useful information. Only able to use either fire or shadow magic, not both at once. Was there a way he could take advantage of that, to keep her from escaping? Perhaps the ambient light had to be below a certain level for her to teleport; and keeping her lit up would stop it?
He watched a video of Nightfire wrapping her infernal whip around an enraged bull, hurling the beast into the air… the seething rage deep in his heart starting to boil over. He glared at the tablet, heart pumping faster… the cool, emotionless focus he’d been able to keep for so long shattered… alongside the tablet screen.
He grunted… and leaned back in his chair. Fuck. He’d need to get a new one. Or a smartphone. That was how he kept contact with Sledge’s team, and they’d proven useful so far.
He popped a lid onto the venom jar, and checked the basement; baby spiders had emerged, and were beginning to eat their way through the ant corpses. Unlike their mother, who was watching them all over cautiously, they were pale white, almost transparent, and about the size of his hand… but her mother was about a foot and a half long now. Still level 1… but bigger than when he’d met her.
He nodded with interest… and walked into the basement… giving the same extended fist as before.
The spider hesitated, watching him closely as he walked by her babies… but patted it with her limb again… and he nodded… before dropping another pile of ants from his storage. Wouldn’t do for the babies to go hungry. Until he had someone he wanted them to eat.
She seemed… extremely intelligent. She might be getting bored of the basement. He headed back upstairs… and before heading off to buy a new tablet… left the TV playing on some educational channel; loud enough for the spiders to hear it; and the door open.
Perhaps with enough repetition, she could understand basic english?
No matter. He needed to get a tablet. And to restock on some food items; he’d tossed too many things when he’d been cleaning out the truck earlier… and destroyed too many with his air pressure and re-orienting shenanigans. Only the more durable of the cases were left… and plenty of dried foods and cereals.
As he stepped outside into the street, he heard something… surprising. Gunfire. Plenty of it, from not more than a few blocks away.
There might be some emergency he’d already know about if he’d had his tablet still on… he shook his head, and hopped into the truck… leaving the windows rolled down as he turned right at the end of the street, heading for the sound of fighting… thankful for how quiet the electric engine was.
Not a quarter mile later, he saw it. A group of EPPD officers; mostly human, though one of them was clearly an Orc; using cars as barricades… exchanging fire with a group of men inside a building.
He stopped the truck… and quietly headed over to the deputies, engaging stealth… and not emerging until he was behind cover. One of them… the Orc… almost shot him… before spotting his hands raised.
“The fuck are you doing here? We’ve got a bunch of Cartel thugs in there, with goddamned superpowers! They’re stealing, murdering, grabbing hostages… We’ve got this group pinned, but there’s more out there. You should head home. Hunker down.”
“Name’s Grey. Can show you my ID and you can call your boss if you want to be sure… but I’m friendly, and I live here. I can also go into stealth… and kill those Cartel people for you, if you’d like.” This would be a prime opportunity to level up a bit; and if he ‘accidentally’ killed a few innocent bystanders, it could easily be blamed on the cartel.
The cop looked him over a bit. “...You’re only two levels higher than me. They run anywhere from four to eight… and there’s ten of them in there.”
“If you can just keep them focused on you… there’ll be alot less than ten in a few minutes.” He faded from vision, becoming completely invisible… and the orc grumbled. “...Fine. Make it fast. And remember to stick behind cover… we have no way to know we might hit you if you’re fucking invisible.”
