From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 111: Still Standing

Five serpents broke the surface.

None of them lunged.

They emerged from the cracked ground in a wide ring around me and stopped. Their heads rose, reading the air, their bodies coiled loosely in the posture of things that had not yet committed to any actions. Their red eyes moved across the scene, the scattered corpses, the dark pools spreading across the pale soil, the separated sections of their pack lying in pieces around a single standing figure covered in dark liquid.

I stayed very still and let them look.

Even with their lower intelligence, they seemed to recognize when the ratio of dead to alive was not in their favor. Probably their survival instinct kicking in.

But their hesitation was a mistake.

The moment nothing was moving, Sense became clean and precise. Five coiled bodies at known positions, no chaotic overlap, no lunging snakes to account for. I could map each middle section clearly, one after another.

I pressed the rock I was holding.

First serpent. The closest one, slightly to my left, still hesitant.

Switch.

Its body split at the center. Both halves moved independently for a moment before settling.

The remaining four started reacting, but they were slow enough to give me another free kill.

Switch.

Second serpent. The other snake that sat the closest to me got cut in half, its top section fell back, convulsed and then went still.

Of the rest, one retreated toward its tunnel. Two coiled, ready to strike.

Third serpent. The one that hesitated a fraction longer than the others, its body just beginning its lunge.

Switch.

Half of it jerked forward toward me. The remaining half collapsed before the lunge could complete.

Two left. The other one that had lunged was now closing in fast and the retreating one was already inside the hole it had come from.

The remaining lunging serpent was already close, too close to even think about aiming. I switched the chunk of silver serpent meat sitting at my hand directly for its head instead and jumped sideways.

The head exchanged position with the meat.

The serpent’s neck hit the ground exactly where I had been standing, its body still driving forward on the momentum of a lunge that no longer had a target. A new head was already beginning to form at the neck stump, the repair process was already starting.

Its tail swept toward me as the snake grew a new head.

Switch. With the head I was holding against a portion of the tail.

The tail strike lost all direction and dropped short.

The body was slowing down, the coordination deteriorating without a head to anchor it. I found its center mass while it was still.

Switch.

The serpent stopped moving.

I straightened up and let Sense stretch outward.

The fifth serpent was moving through the dirt, retreating, its body moving at a high speed through the tunnel it had chosen. Moving target, substantial distance, and Sense was starting to feel thin at the edges from the sustained use. The signal was faint and slightly imprecise.

I focused as much as I could on the middle section and built a rough mental box around it.

Switch.

A chunk of serpent meat appeared next to my hand. It moved for a second, as if completing its last action.

Through the last trace of Sense I felt that the serpent’s rear section was cut, but the forward and middle section continued moving through the dirt, still alive, carrying itself deeper into the tunnel system on the momentum it had built before the cut.

I let the signal go.

Nine dead. One with a severed tail, carrying the rest of its body somewhere underground.

That was probably fine.

I sat down.

The ground was warm from the afternoon, and the air around me smelled terrible. The amount of blood and exposed organic material concentrated in one area produced a smell that was sharp and metallic. I had not noticed while it was happening, I noticed just now.

My hands were dark and sticky. My shoulders and arms from where the overhead serpent had passed. My boots from where I had been standing in the spreading pools.

I stood and reflected on my actual state. I was mostly fine, Switch had cost almost nothing across the entire fight.

I felt mentally wrung out, not from overusing Sense, but from being on edge for what felt like an eternity, surviving on instinct.

I thought about the warehouse. About carrying boxes from one end of a shelf row to another, watching the stack heights, moving the weight to where the chart said it needed to be.

Somehow this was the same skill.

And somehow this felt like something the warehouse never gave me. Control. Not over a shelf, but over my own circumstances. Over whether I lived or died in a place that had been designed to guarantee the second option.

I leaned back slightly and looked at the sky.

A small dark shape appeared in the sky, moving with the purposeful direction of something that had a destination in mind. I watched it get slightly larger as it approached.

Jim had come to scout.

He descended until he was close enough that I could make out his silhouette and the faint glint of his glasses. He stopped at what I estimated was a conservative distance and hovered there.

I stood up and waved.

He did not move immediately. He went still for a moment in the sky, I could imagine what he was seeing from up there. A wide radius of dark fluid across pale sand, silver material scattered, multiple butchered serpent bodies in various states, multiple tunnel holes broken open in a ring, and at the center of all of it, one person covered head to shoulders in dark blood, waving cheerfully.

I considered what that looked like.

Then I waved again, slowly, to confirm I was in fact alive and in control of my own limbs.

Jim didn’t move.

He just stayed there.

Watching.