Or would have been.
One of the shield-wielders heard her yelp. He brought his shield up to intercept her, so instead of a graceful landing on all fours, she thudded side-on into the gnome’s upheld shield. The angle was such that rather than squishing the well-intentioned fool, her weight simply sent him staggering back, shield dropping so that Ris’kin rolled to the hard ground in a heap.
Our elbow hurt from where we’d landed on the shield, and this latest tumble had made the pain in our ribs from the mole-rat’s trampling flare up to near unbearable levels, but at least we were where we needed to be. Ris’kin hauled herself to her feet and immediately took off in the direction of my beleaguered lead scout.
As Ris’kin and I tried to fight our way through the press, stabbing and jabbing and slicing at enemy flesh along the way, I realized I’d never replied to Ket’s last question.
“Corey, are you sure everything’s all right?” Ket sounded urgent now.
“Fine! Everything’s fine,” I sang. Ris’kin and I swerved around a rearing enemy, ducked beneath a whipping tail like a massive earthworm, then drove our spear two-handed into a dirt-smeared flank. It was like piercing tough leather. The creature squealed as we yanked the spear out again with barely a trickle of blood from the puncture wound.
“Everything’s fine,” I said again, thankful Ket couldn’t hear what was going on either. The blesmol we’d just stabbed backed into one of its fellows, instinctively turning to bare its teeth in warning before realizing it was an ally, and Ris’kin and I used the distraction to dart away in the opposite direction.
“If you say so,” said Ket uncertainly. “Have you found anything yet? How about Shanky? Is he okay?”
I cursed silently. “Shanky” was Ket’s affectionate nickname for Longshanks, who was of course currently propping open his opponent’s jaws on the far side of the melee. Trust Ket to focus on the one thing that was going wrong, even though there was no way she could have known.
The creature holding on to my lead scout shook its head fiercely—Longshanks’ cries ululating in a way that might have been comical were he not about to become mincemeat—and began backing into one of the hidden crevices the blesmols had come from, dragging my scout along with it into the darkness.
“He’s fine!” I lied brightly. Ket started to voice yet another question, but I cut her off. “Sorry, Sparky, I think we’ve found something. Give me a few minutes to concentrate?”
Yes, I’d recently given Ket a nickname of her own. And she hated it. If there was one thing guaranteed to make her stop talking to me, it was calling her “Sparky.”
Sure enough, the sprite fell quiet, and I breathed a mental sigh of relief as I focused instead on plotting a course through the confusion.
The mole-rats should not have been allowed to move so quickly. By my count there were five of the creatures, but it felt more like twenty-five. They darted in and out of crevices and tunnels with almost as much dexterity as my teensy skelemanders. Every time Ris’kin or the gnomes drove one back, another would pop out of a nearby crevice, then another, and another.
Their sustained speed and aggression were alarming, and Ris’kin’s lightning-quick reflexes were starting to make me dizzy. I almost deactivated Double Sight, relinquishing my hold on my avatar’s mind, then realized just in time that this would have pinged me right back to the Grotto. If that happened, I’d still be able to use Observe to view how things were going—for the grand total of a minute or so, anyway, until my mana ran out—but I’d no longer have any control over the battle, since my connection with Ris’kin could only be re-initiated once she was back within my SOI.
After parrying a swipe of our current opponent’s claws, we twisted out of its reach, then were immediately forced to duck into a crevice to avoid another flailing mole-rat. It was trying to pull away from the two gnomes it was attached to by lengths of rope they’d pulled from somewhere.
I took advantage of no longer being in mortal peril to bring up the blesmol blueprint I’d recently gained (thankfully only I could see the Augmentary overlay; it did not impede Ris’kin’s vision in any way) and skim-read the rest of the Augmentary’s information on our ugly rivals.
The blesmol might be short-sighted, but its sense of smell is incomparable, albeit unorthodox. Millennia of digging underground mean it’s evolved with nostrils fused together, and can only sense things through the nasal cavity in the roof of its mouth.
Though mammalian, this fossorial—(burrowing)—rodent regulates its body temperature in the manner of an ectothermic—(cold-blooded)—creature, allowing it to thrive in the extreme conditions of its native desert habitat—
Desert? Buddy, you are very, very lost.
I hurriedly sifted through the information in search of something useful. A bullet-point list of known weaknesses would have been handy. Instead, all I found were overly long words and depressingly superpower-esque strengths.
In addition to its thermoregulatory capabilities, the naked mole-rat is astoundingly resilient to physical pain, and can survive for hours with minimal access to oxygen.
Okay, so not only was their hide as tough as teak, but they were immune to pain and could survive basically anything, including not breathing.
Not that I was planning on trying a chokehold or anything.
Add to that the fact they were smart enough to spring an ambush, and it would appear they were unstoppable. How are these things not the apex predators of the underground realm?
Frustrated, I flipped back to the blueprint image and scanned it for weak points. The gnomes had managed to kill several of these creatures on their past expeditions; how had they done it? And why weren’t they doing
