Ch. 94 - Favors (I)

Favors

The creature moved its lumbering body around the clearing, maneuvering with its six trunk-like limbs until its head was less than three meters away from her restrained body, the joints of its legs creaking loudly as they started slowly bending, lowering to the ground the carapace they were supporting.

A few long seconds later, the grass-covered exoskeleton finally impacted with the trodden soil with a dull thud that reverberated throughout the expanse, causing the leaves of the trees to shake and numerous rocks and pebbles to detach from the ruined buildings on the walls right above them, their clattering sounds accompanying the settling of the titan on the ground.

Alice kept gawking at the event as it was happening, completely ignoring the tickling sensation of Basil frantically slithering up her arm, attempting to escape the surging flood of roots that was, little by little, covering her body.

Her entire being was instead completely focused on the compounded, mirror-like eye that was currently hovering in front of her, impassively staring at her bound shape as the wooden tendrils it was commanding gradually stilled when they finally reached her lower torso and completed a vegetal cocoon that impeded most of her movements, forcing her to breathe shallowly to avoid pressuring against the ungiving wood, her snake stopping only once it was able to hide in her hair.

As everything finally grew to a standstill, Alice forced herself to stay calm, making use of the overwhelming feeling of helplessness that had taken her upon capture and attempting to use it to her own advantage.

After all, what good was worrying and being scared when she was at its utter mercy? She wasn’t dead and that was already a very positive clue to the creature’s temperament.

Thusly, instead of panicking, she accessed her well of power and sent a small stream of her warmth towards her brain, forcing it to produce a cocktail of chemicals that quickly lowered her heartbeat, letting her think more lucidly as the fear that had been gripping her brain started easing its grasp, giving way to a form of lucidity that was on the verge of insanity, allowing her the detachment she needed to enact the only plan she could think of, the one that had never failed so far.

It was a eerily calm Alice that continued the staring contest with the massive creature that was now completely immobile in front of her, a living statue that had gone back to its slumber and whose only sign of life could be felt in the roiling magical energy that was still permeating the environment around her, the flora in the surroundings constantly growing at an accelerated pace, with the day-old saplings already looking like plants that had had at least a year to grow while the smaller weeds and flowers around them constantly bloomed and decayed, their bodies consumed by the sprouting seeds they had formed only minutes before while their flowers produced streams of different pollens that made the air thick with strange smells that coated the back of her throat with her every breath.

While all that took place around her, she used the thin layer of Lumen that usually rested over her skin and under her clothes, making it congeal in a cluster that, like many times before that, she forced to move towards what she wanted to consume, constantly feeding the tiny particles with her magical energy as they started weakening the restraints, breaking down cell after cell on their usually-inexorable path.

This time, however, something was actively fighting her efforts, her forehead beading with sweat as she was forced to send more and more of her warmth towards the glimmers working on the bindings as they fought against the foreign magic flowing through their own veins, the feeling not unlike the one she had experienced while fighting the Anathema in Maath’s body so many weeks before, when the being’s magical energy was feeding its own defenses and keeping itself alive as a result. The same was happening right now and, this time, she was not winning, her reserves dwindling by the second.

Nonetheless, she forced herself to keep breathing steadily, her chest sometimes attempting to strain against the ungiving wood while the glimmers slowly worked on it, the substance not regrowing but fighting incredibly hard for every single cell that the Lumen particles attacked, flooding the organisms with a constant and seemingly infinite energy that was slowly sapping her own well, even while she was working to regenerate it and being as conservative as she could with the contents of her reservoir.

In the end, after more than a half-an-hour of constant struggling, Alice felt the first signs of the usual headache starting to appear in the back of her head, a dull pounding that was sure to become the sharp pain of a migraine if she were to continue to expend her waning mana.

With a sigh, she finally relented, letting go of her control on the glowing particles and watching in astonishment as the roots began moving once again, this time flowing back into the dirt and gradually letting go of her body until, after a few seconds, the only bindings that remained were the ones around her ankles, allowing her to slowly sit back up and check herself and her pet for any new injuries; at least until her hands instinctively went for the living restraints, causing them to immediately start tightening once again around her limbs.

“Ok, ok,” she whispered, letting go of the roots one more time and raising her hands in surrender as she stared at her own reflection on the metallic eyes of the beetle, pausing a moment to observe her appearance for the first time in many weeks, silently staring at her pale and grimy face, her hair messy and her lips bloodied after her recent faceplant in the dirt, her dark-circled, hazel and silver eyes glaring back with an incredibly harrowed expression that made her look away after a single glance, shaking her head and instead focusing on the creature in front of her, her mind churning as she attempted to find a way to get out of her situation.

Since it hasn’t killed me yet, that means that it probably wants something, and I think I do know what that is, I just need to be sure before making it angry and get squished as a result.

“Can you understand me?” she attempted, repeating the question in every language she knew and working very hard to prevent her voice from cracking when, after a few minutes, one of the creature’s short antennae twitched slightly, the only response she seemed to receive from the enormous insect in front of her.

“No easy communication method like with the spiders,” she muttered under her breath after repeating herself a few more times and finally accepting that her queries were falling on deaf ears, her hopeful expression turning into a frown as she got up on her slightly-shaking feet, the roots remaining attached to her ankles but otherwise allowing her to remain standing without many issues.

The fact that the titan hadn’t reacted violently from her sounds and movements was gradually lessening her apprehension, the belief that the creature wasn’t inclined to squish her growing by the minute.

This is okay, she reassured herself as she took a few tentative steps towards the huge, unblinking eye, stopping only when she was right below it.

It’s progress and If I manage to make it my ally then it’s definitely going to be worth it afterwards, I just need to keep trying. She finally thought as she made a show of pointing at herself with one finger before enunciating her name slowly and clearly, waiting for a few moments before pointing back at it and waiting expectantly.

To her dismay, silence was the only response.

This is going to be very hard isn’t it?

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After more than an hour of vane attempts, Alice stomped away from the creature, the roots attached to her feet dragging behind her and making her mood even worse, her fear having quickly melted and given way first to hope, and then to anger and exasperation as the creature didn’t react to any of her attempts at communication, be they in vocal, signed or written form.

The only reaction she was getting, to her dismay, was whenever she attempted to touch the roots around her ankles, the wood instantly starting to grow back over her body if she attempted to break it and becoming more severe the more damage she caused to the bindings, something she discovered after she used her knife to cut away one of the manacles and was subsequently forced to spend a good fifteen minutes completely wrapped up and unable to move.

“Goddammit,” she swore as she kicked a recently-grown mushroom on the ground, sending it bouncing into the now-thick undergrowth before turning around and glaring at the huge, immobile creature that was keeping her captive, her withering look lasting only for a few seconds before she sighed and put her head between her hands, “Stupid massive bug. Why couldn’t I get a new Maath? I damn miss having a fricking intelligent conversation. I guess this is a matter of doing it directly. I just hope I’m not misinterpreting what it wants,” she told herself as she got back up on her feet, slowly picking up her spear before calmly and deliberately walking towards the first frontal leg of the creature, her movements slow and fluid to avoid looking more menacing than she was.

“Since you don’t seem to be interested in answering me, I’m going to attempt what I believe you want me to do,” she attempted to explain with a calm voice, “I’m not going to try to injure you and I really hope you are going to do the same to me,” she said, her breaths deep and regular as she walked closer to the grassy edges of the massive exoskeleton, stopping only when she was less than a step away from it.

“But, if you decide to kill me, I’ll do my absolute best to fuck you up as much as I possibly can before kicking it,” she added as an afterthought before taking a first step on the rhinoceros beetle’s carapace, her breath catching in her throat when she felt the roots accompanying her every step start to painfully constrict her limbs, the pressure growing for the duration of one of her heartbeats before suddenly stopping and growing slack once again, allowing her to keep going upwards.

She took a sigh of relief, it looked like she had overcome the first trial.

Still tethered to her vegetal chains, she quickly made way to the apex of the hill, using the butt of the spear like a walking stick and bending forward to keep her point of balance as close to the ground as possible, her pace speeding up when, a few minutes later, she finally caught sight of the first crystals poking from the low grass, dozens of them spread all over the top side of the mound, with the largest of them appearing closer to the top, the only portion of the shell lacking them the one directly behind its huge oaken horn.

Momentarily dropping her spear on the ground, she approached one of the smaller ones, dropping on her knees and observing the small shard, no larger than two of her fingers and poking from the soil by just a few centimeters, like something stuck in there by a child.

Digging around the object, however, instantly revealed the way it had sunk deep into the hard exoskeleton underneath, breaking apart its surface and sinking as deep as it could before stopping.

After unearthing as much of the crystal as she could, Alice wrapped her fingers around it, an expression of complete concentration appearing on her face as she tightened and untightened her grip, anxiety once again twitching and twisting in her stomach like many hungry eels.

“I really hope I’m right,” she murmured before starting to pull, her expression growing tenser as the roots around her limbs started tightening anew before growing slack once more as the shard was removed, its absence leaving only a thin divot in the exoskeleton underneath.

She sighed in relief as she threw the first fragment down the hill, aiming it so that it clattered on the ground in front of the monster’s eye, breaking into smaller pieces upon impact.

“We’ll see what happens when I finish I guess,” she finally muttered to herself as she got back up on her feet and walked to the next one.

It was probably going to take a while.

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Not all the shards were easy, Alice discovered as she worked, some of them were incredibly fragile and broke the moment she attempted to pull them out, forcing her to use her knife or even her fingers to dig for the leftover fragments in the divots.

At first, even that part hadn’t been a problem since most of the smaller fragments were too small to reach the flesh of the creature, its exoskeleton acting like a pair of gloves against stinging nettles, absorbing all those annoying prickles and preventing them from reaching the actual nerve-endings.

All in all, that meant that she was able to spend most of her day working quickly and efficiently, pulling out crystal after crystal without having to worry about hurting the creature and getting squished as a result, the last of the smaller spikes clattering on the ground and breaking into a fine glassy dust by the time the sun was starting its path towards the night.

Only once the smaller crystals had been removed did her work become more difficult, the larger fragments requiring her to pay actual attention as they were clearly embedded deeper in the flesh of the beetle, sometimes causing it shiver as she slowly pulled them out, her bindings tightening accordingly and promising a very painful revenge if she were to mess up.

Now, as the light began to fade, whenever one of the crystals broke, she used the Lumen to recover the pieces, moving slowly in the puddle of sticky and bloody lymph that always filled every crater she opened up, using her wonderful little helpers to transport the inorganic material out of the wound and into her expecting hands.

By the time the day had given way to the night, Alice had cleared a good portion of the creature’s back and was left staring at the less numerous but much bigger crystals that still littered the grass, some of them thicker than her legs and a single one as wide as her torso, clearly embedded incredibly deep into the creature’s flesh, the grass around it growing thicker than the rest.

Those ones are for tomorrow, she told herself as she dropped the last one down the hill before picking her things back up and slowly moving down the shell, finally reaching the ground and going back towards the creature’s compound eye.

“I’ll continue after sleeping,” she told it, speaking slowly and clearly in the vane hope of behind understood, “I’m tired now.”

Without another word, Alice turned around and walked away, accessing a bit of the magical energy that had slowly been replenished as she worked and using it to increase the bioluminescence of her skin, moving around the clearing and picking up whatever wood she could find while ignoring the fact that some of it was currently aging as she held it.

Piling it up, she once again lit up a fire a few meters away from the creature, watching the way the flames were reflected into its eyes, their color changing whenever a different stream of pollen was burned by the heat, some of the substances in the air even causing chain reactions that lit up the entire clearing in bright deflagrations that lasted less than a heartbeat, blinding her for just a second before giving way to the darkness once again.

Upon confirming that the fire didn’t seem to elicit a reaction from the titan, Alice slowly picked up her bag and opened it for the second time, rummaging inside for a few moments before pulling out what had once been a round fruit core that she had planned to cultivate in the future, now a confusing mess of whitish roots and partially crushed leaves growing without a real direction around the glowing ellipsoid she had stuffed in the sack, somehow using the light it was producing as sustenance along with the magic produced by the beetle, the lack of water having stopped its growth before it could actually mature to become a complete plant.

Even now, in her hands and upon contact with her own magic, she could feel the way the strange energy of the titan was influencing its growth, the stiff, green cells it was made of constantly splitting and growing, only slowed down by the resources it was lacking.

Let’s see what happens, she thought as she placed the plant on the ground after having briefly removed all the jewels that had been caught in the roots, attentively watching it begin to plunge its suckers into the expecting ground and open up even more of its heart-shaped, fenestrated leaves that soon began growing larger and larger as time went on, the center of the plant soon extending into a large, if slightly-deformed, white lily that, over the course of a few minutes, opened up into a beautiful flower with stamens covered in bright-yellow pollen, its sweet smell attracting many bugs that immediately plunged into its chalice, allowing a quick and autonomous pollination that then caused the flower to shrivel up and die, its bulb instead growing larger and pigmented as time passed.

An hour came and went before Alice was once again left with a plump and perfectly ripe fruit in her hands, its sweet flavor filling her mouth while the new core was already germinating on the ground beside the mother plant, effectively giving start to a new colony in the matter of a few hours.

This is amazing, she thought as she ate, thinking of what that creature would be able to do on Earth, its presence alone able to grow food in immense quantities and to speed up the regrowth of plants that would otherwise take years to get ready.

We could put it in the amazon and help it grow back! she exclaimed in her head, the image of the huge beetle walking around the rainforest able to make a smile appear on her tired face for but a moment, at least until reality came crashing back in and she reigned herself. Or it would simply get captured and used by some kind of multinational firm most likely.

“Not that it matters, right now I’m the one being used,” she reminded herself, kicking the restraints for the last time before curling up around the fire and letting her tiredness take over, the warm light of the coals reflected on the glinting eyes of the beetle as the hours passed and the forest grew around them.