Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
This area should have been filled with monsters. The closer to the anchor, the higher the density of creatures. That was a hard and fast rule that had been proven over and over again in the last ten years. This distribution was exactly why the miners stuck to the sites in close proximity to the gates.
The Sponge was deserted. And the stench kept getting thicker.
Nothing in this breach went the way it was supposed to. I wanted answers.
Another hundred yards.
The odor was almost unbearable now.
Our tunnel turned and opened. An enormous cavern unrolled in front of us, its ceiling three hundred feet high and studded with glowing crystals. A narrow river wound its way through the cavern’s floor.
Monster corpses littered the ground.
Huge, spiked, armored, grotesque, they sprawled along the banks. There had to be hundreds of them. The scale of the slaughter was horrifying. My mind refused to accept it.
This was too much for any being to kill alone. Had a bomb gone off here? But nothing except the monsters was damaged. The walls weren’t scorched, there was no crater, and flowers still bloomed along the banks.
Jovo clamped his hand over his nose and pulled on my sleeve. I glanced down at him. He pointed into the cavern.
I looked in the direction he indicated and flexed. A complex metal device sat in the center of the cavern, opened almost like a flower with concentric ridges forming petals.
Jovo let go of his nose and opened the fingers of both hands raising his arms. “Boom!”
Someone had deployed a literal weapon of mass destruction, but instead of destruction, it was just death. Mass death on an unprecedented scale.
I concentrated on the bodies. They didn’t look native to the breach. Too large, too many of them, and all clearly nasty in a fight. The mechanism of the breaches was becoming a little clearer. Whoever built them took a section of an actual ecosystem, wedged it between our worlds, and then dumped a large number of predators into it. I had no idea how they transported them in or kept them from immediately killing each other, but it was clear that the monsters were plonked here and then expected to spread through the caves. There was probably enough wildlife for them to survive for the next couple of weeks, but by the time the gate burst, they would be ravenous.
It made no sense for whoever built the breach to stuff it with monsters and then nuke them. This felt like the work of a third party. There were the creators of the breach, us, and then there was the alien woman and the gress.
“Gress?” I asked Jovo.
He shrugged. He didn’t know.
It had to be the gress. If the alien woman entered the breach and the gress were pursuing her for some reason, clearing the monsters would make that pursuit much easier. The gress must’ve killed them shortly after the breach was created, if not right away, because the creatures didn’t even have a chance to spread.
But why did the woman enter? Was she escaping? Was she supposed to do something here?
I pointed at the cavern and made a walking motion with my fingers. “Dangerous?”
Jovo took an exaggerated sniff and shook his head.
The anchor lay on the other side of the cavern, through one of the passages puncturing the opposite wall. I took a breath, gagged, and started forward.
Jovo squeezed his marble. A gathering of lees appeared, most of them white furred and green eyed. “Sai. Phff!”
He had started this halfway into the monster slaughter, probably out of sheer self-preservation against the horror and the stench. Apparently, the lees existed in large family groups, and there were a lot of them. They greatly varied in fur color, markings, and eye color. A lot of the clans must have been wealthy, because the lees wore jewelry and elaborately decorated sashes, aprons, and kilts. There had to be some meaning to the clothes, but I couldn’t decipher it. Perhaps it was regional.
The one thing Jovo made absolutely clear was that Clan Kiar was far superior to all others. We’d left the monster mass graveyard behind ten minutes ago, and he was still going.
I was still struggling with the odor. It seemed to stick to us, coating our clothes, skin, and hair. I should’ve gotten used to it by now, but it still bothered me. My hearing and eyesight had gotten better. My olfactory sense probably got an upgrade as well, and right now it felt like a mixed blessing.
Bear sneezed next to me. She hadn’t even tried to investigate the bodies. All of that stench must have been hell on her sensitive nose.
Another squeeze of the marble. A new clan, this one with white, grey, and blue fur colors and turquoise and gold eyes.
“Nuan. Blah.”
“Blah?”
Jovo squeezed the marble, projecting an image of a plump pillow and made a squishing motion. “Nuan. Phah!”