All my Creation slots were empty except one. It seemed Binky had passed another threshold in his journey to become terrestrial.
I gulped. For some reason it made me both proud and sad, not to mention a little bit worried that he’d run off as soon as he was able.
They grow up so fast.
The steady diet of predatory marsh creatures meant the spider was physically growing as well, as were the badgers. Snakes aplenty meant a constant supply of both meat and skins for everyone, which—regretfully—meant that my entire complement of warriors were soon equipped similarly to the scouts. They tugged uncomfortably at the tight snakeskin trousers, while those on the wagons—spread out a little better now thanks to the warriors’ ability to safely walk again—ogled them shamelessly.
“Is it just me, or are the snakes getting bigger?”
“I think that’s just the trousers,” said Benin. “They are very tight.”
I snorted. “I meant the actual snakes.”
In addition to the tree vipers and slender, brown marsh snakes, we’d started to encounter mud adders and brook asps. Though initially not much larger than the acid-green tree vipers—which were still far too large for comfort, by approximately their entire length—they did appear to be getting longer and thicker the deeper we traveled.
Luckily, my snakeskin-clad warriors were able to take care of them. Now that I had a general and two captains, I could command them directly to attack a specific target without using mana. To help us spot threats more quickly and direct the warriors appropriately, Bekkit suggested color-coding things on the Augmentary map—as I’d suspected earlier, it turned out I could manually designate certain species as ‘hostile’.
The results were pretty terrifying. Once I’d assigned the ‘hostile’ label to every venomous species I’d identified, the map was overwhelmingly flooded with clusters of bright red dots. This place really is out to get us.
“That’s… a lot of red,” Bekkit agreed.
“What are all these turquoise dots?” asked Ket, frowning at the map. “There are almost as many of those as there are red.”
“Those are frogs,” I told her.
Most of them were poisonous rather than venomous; they were technically only a threat to my denizens if they decided to pick one up and lick it—which, let’s face it, was not outside the realm of possibility. The Augmentary hadn’t marked the frogs as hostile, so I’d taken matters into my own hands.
“Okaaay…” said Ket. “But… why?”
“We need to keep an eye on them. Insidious little bastards. I don’t trust them near the gnomes.”
It was much harder to protect my denizens from themselves. I found myself needing to watch them more carefully than the frogs. Several times an hour, I’d catch child and adult alike playing with frogs they’d “rescued” from the overhanging branches. I’d have to send Ris’kin along to take them away, though she always insisted on placing the nasty creatures back in the marsh rather than giving them the merciful, quick end I suggested.
I’d long ago evolved my avatar with the same toxin resistance as the badgers. However, she shunned the marsh’s murky waters, preferring to keep her feet dry by leaping between wagons and dancing along their edges. It wasn’t easy, given the lack of space on the vehicles, not to mention her impaired balance since the loss of her right eye. But she was adapting amazingly, in spite of the chittering squirrel that remained constantly affixed to her shoulder.
Gneil and the other acolytes had their work cut out for them making sure the hoot-hoots did not try to eat the poisonous frogs. I had to send Coll in on more than one occasion to forcibly remove a frog from an owlet’s beak after the acolytes lost their own tug-of-war with the belligerent bird.
The badgers, of course, had no issues consuming the brightly colored amphibians. They had little trouble eating anything. The world was their buffet.
At least someone’s enjoying themselves.
The armorer finished the first set of badger armor, but I refrained from equipping it for now. In this terrain, the last thing they needed was to be even more encumbered; they weren’t currently at risk from large wounds but rather tiny bites in places that armor wouldn’t protect from, and to which they were immune. The ravages of the marsh threatened the animals in other ways though, and at the end of each day’s travel, Gneil went from badger to badger, carefully washing their clawed feet to make sure they were free of injury and rot. Now that I thought about it, it was amazing they hadn’t developed bog foot or some such.
The marshes really were a sort of no-man’s land. It felt as though we’d traveled back in time to the world’s primal beginnings—especially when we passed a half-submerged skeleton. It was thoroughly mummified; its skin stretched across its bones, brown and tight and tough like leather. And it was gigantic. At least twice the size of Coll, even in its current shriveled form.
The gnomes stared at it in awe as we trundled past. Even Benin fell silent in its presence.
The world really is a big place. Thankfully not as big as it used to be, though.
Time remaining for Exodus: 7 days, 18 hours, 2 minutes
I hadn’t imagined it. The ground snakes were getting bigger. Our new shortbows and stonebows proved their worth tenfold, allowing the warriors to take down most of the serpents without risking close combat while also gaining skills in ranged combat. Thankfully, the tree vipers remained the same size. I wasn’t sure the new canopies would withstand the weight of heavier ones.
Stonebows had also been distributed to some of the non-combatants on the wagons—mostly those who’d previously held the warrior vocation—and so, along with the snakeaway canopies, my denizens were as well protected as they could be.
Even so, the tribe’s morale continued to suffer. It seemed the
