[Chapter 86. Slow Advance]
His gaze lingered on the empty space where the system announcent had flickered out of existence, the haunting digital afterimage burning into his retinas. His brow furrowed, teeth grinding together with a chanical grit as he swallowed the visceral curse that threatened to erupt from his throat. "Abandoning extraction?" The words echoed in the hollow chambers of his mind, sounding more like a death sentence than a status update.
His pulse hamred against his ribs in a frantic, syncopated rhythm, each beat acting as a drum counting down the seconds to an inevitable confrontation. "Left in here. Wherever the hell ‘here’ is," he muttered, his breath hitching slightly in the stagnant, copper-tasting air. The thought was cold and detached—a psychological survival chanism kicking in as his mind began to ruthlessly compartntalize the impossible. He was no longer a guest in a dungeon; he was a biological anomaly trapped in a collapsing dinsion.
After a full minute of standing frozen in the oppressive silence of the tunnel, he forced his muscles to respond. Searanox sidestepped the cooling, massive corpse of the Carapace Crawler, careful not to let his boots slip in the viscous purple ichor seeping into the thirsty dirt. His defensive drone hovered just inches ahead of his chest, its hexagonal shield shimring with a faint, iridescent light that cast long, dancing shadows against the jagged walls. Above it, the recon drone floated in ghostly silence, its multispectral lens acting as a chanical eye that processed data far beyond the capabilities of human sight. "Faster reflexes than mine," he reminded himself, his voice a low rasp. "Better situational awareness. Don't rely on your eyes; trust the drones."
He gestured forward, sending the two assault drones and two offensive drones into the darkness ahead, maintaining a strict two-ter gap between each unit to prevent a single AOE attack from disabling the squad. It took only monts of eerie quiet before the recon drone’s ntal report flared in his mind like a hot coal: Hostiles detected. The ensuing encounter unfolded with a grim, repetitive symtry to the last—one massive creature moved to block the narrow tunnel with its bulk while others utilized their powerful mandibles to burrow through the soft earth of the walls, attempting to flank his position.
However, this ti, Searanox’s investnt in heavier-hitting drone models paid imdiate dividends. The high-output energy beams of the offensive drones carved through the "Corrupted" carapaces with far more efficiency than the basic air drones had. The fight ended significantly faster, though the persistent cost in Tech-Points remained a heavy weight on his tactical reserves.
As he squeezed his way past the twitching, steaming corpses of the fallen Crawlers, his mind raced through the ntal map of the dungeon’s original layout. He knew the geography of this place. The tunnels would inevitably widen ahead, opening into larger chambers where his current narrow-passage advantage would evaporate into a lethal vulnerability. `The only reason it’s manageable now is their own massive bodies block each other's path.` He analyzed, wiping a smudge of purple sli from his rifle’s barrel.
The tunnel ceiling gradually began to rise, the cramped earth giving way to a vaulted space that allowed him to stand perfectly straight for the first ti in ten minutes. He stretched his back, his vertebrae popping in a sharp, rhythmic protest against the tension. The passage wasn't yet wide enough for two Carapace Crawlers to pass side by side, but that tactical bottleneck was rapidly changing as the creatures further ahead dug away the earth with an unnatural, frenzied speed.
Facing two Crawlers head-on presented a new tier of difficulty. His offensive drones remained safely in the rear, providing sustained cover fire, but the assault drones were forced into constant, erratic evasive maneuvers as they engaged three to four attackers simultaneously. He considered summoning additional defensive drones to bolster the frontline, but the math was unforgiving: that would require three more units and an additional −12 TP/min drain. `Can't afford the overhead.` He calculated. `I don't even know if a long-term rest is possible in a void-corrupted zone.`
All he could do was maintain his drone count at the absolute bare minimum required for survival. Losing a single drone was an acceptable equipnt loss. Losing both assault drones was… manageable, albeit risky. What he absolutely could not afford was the massive spike in TP consumption required to summon multiple drones in the heat of combat; that would drain his energy faster than his Tech-Points regeneration could ever hope to compensate.
His thoughts spiraled into complex simulations whenever he found a montary lull in the fighting, desperately reconstructing the dungeon layout from his mory of the Blue—normal version of the Burrowing Depths. But as he progressed, the erratic tunnels the Crawlers were carving ford an increasingly labyrinthine network, threatening to disorient his internal compass and trap him in a maze of his own making.
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He halted all forward movent, calling his drones back to a tight defensive periter. The first major chamber was just around the next bend. He summoned another recon drone—the 6 TP cost was a painful but necessary tax on his reserves. Intel was currently worth more than energy; walking into a room blind in this environnt was equivalent to suicide.
As the drone's sensory feed synchronized with him, the color drained from Searanox's face. He stared into the middle distance, seeing nothing with his physical eyes but the horrifying image burned into his mory by the drone.
Seventy massive, translucent eggs were clustered among the bioluminescent roots that hung from the ceiling like weeping willow branches. A Venom Lasher—a multi-legged, serpentine horror—crawled with predatory grace among them. He had never encountered a Lasher himself, but Iris’s reports had been detailed enough to haunt his preparations. He knew exactly what would hatch from those eggs the mont the vibration of a prolonged fight reached them.
He dismissed the recon drone, his gaze sweeping over his remaining chanical units with a grim realization. "Can I fight seventy of those things at once?" he asked the shadows.
His mind raced through the tactical permutations. The answer was a definitive "No." He would be sward, overwheld by sheer volu just as Iris had been during her initial disastrous run. With a decisive thought, he dismissed the two assault drones, feeling a slight relief as his TP regeneration ticked up to 6 points per minute. He turned on his heel and began a tactical retreat back down the tunnel.
His eyes fell on the two massive Carapace Crawlers sprawled dead in the passage behind him, their heavy armored bodies nearly sealing the tunnel.
An idea sparked—a spark of cold, pragmatic genius. A low, dark chuckle escaped his lips as he summoned a Cargo Drone. Without needing a specific command, the drone began to store the first corpse before moving deeper into the tunnel. It returned monts later, depositing the mass of chitin and at with a heavy thud.
Searanox followed the drone this ti, peering down the passage he had just cleared.
The first Crawler's body was positioned firmly against the left wall. The next was wedged vertically between it and the ceiling, forming a crude, grotesque blockade. The cargo drone flew past him again, returning with the third body. This process repeated with clinical efficiency for several minutes until the tunnel was partially blocked by a wall of high-density biological matter, three bodies deep and stacked two high. He repeated the process on the right side of the tunnel, leaving barely a half a ter of open space between the two macabre barriers.
Minutes bled into a longer stretch of ti as his cargo drone ferried bodies back and forth from previous skirmishes. Searanox stood with his rifle at the ready, his eyes scanning the walls, hoping nothing would burst through the dirt and render his makeshift engineering project useless before it was finished.
He decided to push the limits of the barricade, adding two more bodies to each side, extending the physical barrier to six ters in depth. It needed to be deep enough to withstand a literal flood of Venom Lashers. Judging by the size and the pulsing violet light within the eggs he'd seen, these weren't the "Common" variants, but Greater ones. If his plan held, the longer the battle dragged on, the more the attackers would slow each other down as their own kin died and piled up in his engineered kill zone.
With the last massive corpse dragged into place, he dismissed the cargo drone to save on the maintenance cost.
Going through the plan once more in the theater of his mind, he summoned two more offensive drones. After a long, heavy breath to steady his nerves, he dismissed the recon drone to summon another defensive drone. His tactical total now stood at:
─ 4 Offensive Drones
─ 2 Defensive Drones
─ Status: [6/10] Active Units
"All right. You know the plan," he whispered to the humming machines. "Volley fire. Pile them high in there. Barriers in front—block that entrance. Cycle your shields at your own discretion. I don't want to see a single bug on the other side of this wall." His voice was barely a murmur, as if he were afraid the sound itself might trigger the avalanche he knew was coming.
His drones buzzed in synchronized acknowledgnt, two of them moving forward into the narrow gap in the passage. The others arranged themselves in a tiered firing formation behind him. A sudden, violent violet pulse flashed deep in the tunnels beyond his barricade, lighting up the earth like a subterranean lightning strike.
His forward drones returned to his field of view seconds later, followed by a sound that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up: a persistent, wet tapping. It sounded like heavy hail falling on a tin roof—but in the context of this damp, airless tunnel, the sound was eerie, dull, and utterly robbed of any natural beauty. It was the sound of thousands of tiny, sharp legs striking the stone.
Then, the first one erged into the light: a Greater variant of the crawler he had encountered before, but this one was significantly darker. Its chitin was a polished, obsidian black, shot through with glowing purple veins that throbbed like exposed arteries across its carapace. It hissed, its mandibles clicking in the dark, and behind it, a thousand more eyes began to reflect the light of Searanox’s drones.
The kill zone was ready.
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