Chapter 40-The Camp

Chapter 40: 40-The Camp

The glowing purple crystals on top of the centipede’s skull under Sol’s left hand suddenly turned a dull, cloudy blue.

The clicking of the eighty yellow legs down in the ditch cut off all at once as the brain froze solid into a block of glass.

Sol didn’t wait for the dead muscles to relax.

With a furious grunt, he used his left hand to snap the frozen upper mandible offat the root, freeing his mangled, acid-burned right forearm from the jaws as the twelve-foot carcass slumped heavily into the ditch and immediately began breaking apart into a massive cloud of silver mist.

Sol dropped onto his rear in the gravel, cradling his right wrist against his stomach.

The wool coat was completely gone, eaten into green slime.

The skin on his right forearm was a mess of bubbling, yellow-green chemical burns mixed with his own red blood, sizzling furiously as his internal furnace worked overtime to incinerate the venom before it could travel up his elbow toward his heart.

"Let me see," Valera dropped to her knees beside him, wiping the frozen greenish ichor off her right gauntlet on the snow before pulling the glove off entirely.

She pressed her bare, ice-cold palms lightly on either side of his elbow, above the burn, cooling the raging inflammation in his veins while Sol used his left teeth and fingers to scrape the sizzling acid off his forearm with a handful of clean snow.

"Look at that," Sol panted through his teeth as the pain slowly dulled from a white-hot scream down to a heavy, throbbing ache, his High-Stage vitality already sealing the pitted flesh into rough, ugly scars.

"A Level 1 insect. Doesn’t even have a brain bigger than a walnut, and I had to feed it my arm because I didn’t have two feet of iron to stick in its mouth."

In the center of the ditch, the silver mist finished rising toward the sky, leaving behind a large, deeply colored purple Peak-Stage shard, along with the two curved, foot-long mandibles.

Valera reached over, picked up the heavy Peak shard, and tossed it into their leather collection pouch on top of the four Medium-Stage shards they had saved from the last two days of hunting.

"You can’t keep fighting with your forearms, Sol," Valera said seriously, looking at the fresh, pitted acid-scars wrapping around his wrist.

"Out here, everything has poison, or spines, or acid blood. If we run into a Level 2 Crowned beast and you try to catch its jaws with your sleeve, my frost won’t be able to put you back together."

"I know," Sol stood up, flexing his right fingers slowly to make sure the tendons weren’t dissolved. They were tight, but they worked.

"And I can’t use those centipede fangs as daggers either, the second I pump heat into bone or chitin, it turns to brittle ash in ten seconds. I need some kind of metal. Heavy metal."

He looked up out of the ditch toward the crumbling concrete pillars of the old highway stretching north into the fog.

"Where’s the nearest iron?" Sol asked. "We can’t go back to Hearth City’s Merchant Ring, and we can’t walk all the way to Gomorrah bare-handed."

Valera stood up, sliding her right hand back into her Night-iron gauntlet.

She looked north along the ruined road, then squinted toward the low, rocky hills three miles to the northwest, where a faint smudge of gray wood-smoke, real wood-smoke, not chemical fumes was rising slowly into the slate-colored sky.

"Not everyone lives in the three cities," Valera said, pointing toward the hills. "There are small holds out in the buffer zones. Outcasts, deserters from the Merchant Ring garrisons, nomadic trappers who hunt Low-Stage skins to trade with the outer caravans. If there’s smoke on that ridge, there may be a hold."

"And if there’s a hold, somebody’s got an anvil or an axe to chop that firewood," Sol said, picking up the leather pouch of five crystals and tying it to his belt. "How do they feel about strangers?"

"Well, most of them don’t care who your family is, and they don’t care about the Inquisition," Valera said, pulling the collar of her torn shirt up against the wind and pulling a strip of dirty rag out of her pocket to tie around her lower face, hiding her pale noble features.

"They only care about two things: whether you’re strong enough to kill them, and whether you have shards to pay for what you touch."

"Good," Sol said, rolling his scarred shoulders under his ragged undershirt now that his coat was gone. "I speak that language."

It took them ninety minutes to climb the rocky goat-trail leading up into the basalt hills.

The settlement didn’t even have a real wall, just a twenty-foot ring of sharpened, frost-hardened pine logs lashed together with rusted highway cable, propped up between two massive boulders that blocked the wind from the Deep Wastes.

Painted in faded red rust across the flattened hood of an old truck hanging above the narrow wooden gate were the words: THE SLAG-HEAP - PAY AT THE GATE OR BLEED.

In Sol’s thermal sight, the little stronghold held maybe forty people total.

Most of them were Level 0 baseline humans huddled around three open wood fires in the center of the camp, scraping hides and boiling pots of thin root-soup.

Only eight thermal signatures carried the distinct, cooler blue knots of Level 1 Moon Cultivators, five Low-Stages walking the log catwalk with heavy crossbows, one Mid-Stage with a halberd and two High-Stages sitting outside a corrugated tin shack near the back boulder where a small coal forge was glowing a bright, welcome orange.

There wasn’t a single peak cultivator in the entire camp.

As Sol and Valera walked up the snow-packed trail toward the open four-foot gap in the log palisade, two of the Low-Stage guards on the ground stepped into the gap, lowering rusted iron boar-spears across the entrance.

Both men looked like they hadn’t washed since the last thaw.

They wore thick coats of stitched musk-dog fur, and their left cheeks were branded with an iron circle, the mark of contract-laborers who had run away from Hearth City’s outer quarries.