Chapter 54
Suicide Bombers?
The fragment moved faster than I expected.
It struck the Regalia like a snake hitting a mouse, wrapping around the glass shell of the bug bomb and squeezing.
The shell cracked. Red smoke billowed, and the fragment's body split open along its length, dozens of smaller worms pouring out to latch onto the escaping energy.
They tore the Regalia apart. The glass shattered into powder, the red smoke was consumed strand by strand, and the fragment's body swelled as it ate, the crimson veins brightening from dark red to a hot, angry orange.
There was no resistance, no backlash. The LadyBomb was Fleeting and was too weak to fight back, too simple to have defenses. The fragment consumed it in seconds, then contracted, pulling itself tight into a dense knot of flesh that thumped with power as a notification hit me.
[Bomb]: Explosive Worms. Imbue your worms with unstable energy. When activated or upon death, the imbued worms will detonate, unleashing a massive explosion. Scales with worm size.
I stood there for a moment, processing that.
Suicide bombers. I'd turned my worms into suicide bombers…
The fragment that had consumed the Regalia uncoiled and slithered back toward the wall, its body now covered in the same shell of the LadyBomb. I could feel the explosive energy stored inside of it. Hot and ready to go off if I told it to.
I pulled back from the Sacred Soul and opened my eyes. Every worm I had was now a potential bomb. Every tendril I sent underground, every scout I deployed, every construct I built. All of them could explode on command.
So each blast scales with the size of my worms, so one of the smaller worms should pop like a firecracker, but if I made one the size of my arm? Would it be a grenade? And if I built something bigger, packed it densely, and fed it extra energy from the core—
My stomach growled, cutting off my line of thought.
Right. Food first. Weapons of mass destruction second.
◆◆◆
The next day passed slowly.
I spent the morning testing the Bomb skill.
Quietly. Sitting on the floor while Zo slept, I separated a single worm from the mass under my skin—a small one, barely the length of my pinky—and imbued it with explosive energy.
The worm's color turned into a dark red, and I could feel it was ready and eager to burst.
I decided not to blow it up inside the inn. Instead, I reabsorbed the energy and pulled it back out of the worm before it could go off. The worm went limp, exhausted, and I picked it up and absorbed it back into the mass to recover.
Zo woke up around midday, rolled off the bed, and spent a few minutes stretching.
"Yo… you eat?" she asked, pulling her hair back into its ponytail.
"Nope. Waiting for you."
"How romantic."
We went downstairs and had the innkeeper bring us two bowls of porridge, along with a slab of salted pork, which we cut up and split between us.
None of the other people sat near us, not that there were many people in the place. There were maybe six other people in it, and they'd sat as far from our table as the room would allow. A man at the bar kept looking at us funny, but I just let it go… we weren’t here to make friends.
After the meal, I left Zo at the inn and walked around the village. It took less than twenty minutes to go through the whole settlement. Which was uneventful, so I headed back to the Inn.
Zo was sitting on the floor when I walked into the room, sharpening her axe with a whetstone she'd bought from the innkeeper for a copper.
The breach. The front. The war we'd been pulled from.
I didn't know if any of it still existed.
Zo and I had been prisoners conscripted to fight on the front lines of a war between the interdimensional horrors.
We'd been thrown through a tear and ended up here.
Whatever connection we'd had to the front, to the war, to the chain of command that had sent us out there to die was now severed.
We had no way to know whether the breach had been sealed, whether the front had held, or whether anyone else had survived.
And if anyone had survived… if the SDC’s military was still functioning. Then two escaped convicts wandering the countryside of some draconic world would be a problem someone would eventually want to solve.
"We need a cover story," I said.
The whetstone paused. "What kind of story?"
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. "That old man at the gate asked if we were Dragoons. The innkeeper treated us the same way. Everyone in this village has already decided what we are based on how we look and how we move."
"Because we are Dragoons. Basically."
"So you want us to just pretend to be wandering Dragoons," Zo said. She resumed sharpening.
"Low-ranking mercenaries looking for work. Nobody important."
"I can do nobody important… Fuck, might be the first time in my life, but I can do it."
We decided to leave the village. The innkeeper was still awake when we came downstairs, stoking the fire in the common room. She didn't bother to look at us, so we just walked out.
The dirt road was firm and smooth under our boots, packed down by wagon wheels. The valley opened up as we walked, the mountains falling back on either side. Within an hour, the road widened into a dirt path, still broad, with stone markers to guide us in the right direction.
Zo walked beside me, axe across her back, hands in her pockets. The road stretched ahead of us, curving through the valley. Behind us, the mountains rose cold and grey against the sky.