Chương 96: Pest Control

The first thing I tried was the obvious solution. I was a god inside my own domain, and these were creatures inside my territory. I should've been able to grab them with my divine will the same way I'd grabbed Mort's junk piles. I reached out with my authority and tried to seize the nearest rat. Nothing happened. The rat kept scrambling across the terrain without any indication it had felt my will at all. I tried again with more force, and then tried a second rat with the same result.

It made sense when I thought about it. The Liminal Lands responded to my will because the domain was mine. Lifna responded because she was born from my mana. The junk responded because it was inert material inside my space. The rats were living creatures with their own mana, and they hadn't entered my domain as followers or guests. They were invaders, and invaders didn't answer to the god whose territory they were violating. The rat that had caught my scent hissed and charged, and two more followed it.

I went invisible. The rats skidded to a halt where I'd been standing and sniffed the air in confusion. They could still smell me faintly, but the visual target was gone. After a few seconds of confused circling they moved on, drawn by the ambient mana of the domain itself. The rats were spreading through the Liminal Lands in loose clusters. Some were exploring while others climbed over the remaining junk piles I hadn't fed to Lifna yet.

A few had discovered the dimensional walls and were scratching at them uselessly. Lifna floated in the center of the domain, rotating slowly. The rats hadn't reached her yet because she was suspended above the ground, but a few were already looking up at her. She was the biggest concentration of mana in the space and they could feel it. I needed to get them into her pull. She could absorb them the same way she absorbed junk, breaking them down into raw material and converting them into planetary mass.

The rats weren't going to float up there on their own, and I couldn't grab them with my will. What I could grab was the junk. There were still a few piles of Mort's contributions scattered around the domain. I reached out and lifted a sheet of corrugated metal from the nearest pile. It rose smoothly. I angled it and swept it across the floor, and it caught three rats and launched them upward.

They tumbled into Lifna's gravitational field, scrabbled at the air with nothing to push against, and dissolved into her surface. The green glow of their mana flickered out. I grabbed another piece of junk and went after the next cluster. A bicycle frame made an excellent rat scoop when swung horizontally, and I caught five with the first sweep before sending them into Lifna's field. The remaining rats started to scatter. They moved faster and clustered in corners and behind junk piles.

Some climbed the debris, which created a new problem. When a rat climbed onto a piece of junk I then lifted, it could push off the object and launch itself in a random direction. Two of them did this and nearly hit me before I dodged. They couldn't see me, but they could feel the air displacement when I moved. A few of the smarter ones were tracking me by vibration alone, turning their heads toward my invisible footsteps. I tried changing the domain's gravity to pull everything toward Lifna at once.

If I could reverse the gravitational orientation so that down pointed toward the baby planet instead of toward the floor, every rat in the domain would fall into her pull. The mana cost stopped me cold. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Changing gravity across the entire domain meant reshaping the fundamental physics of the space, and that wasn't cheap. I went back to the junk.

For the next hour I stayed invisible and moved through the domain in careful silence, hurling debris at clusters of rats. The rats scattered and regrouped. Some of them figured out that the flying junk was connected to something they couldn't see and started tracking me. I launched junk from multiple directions to split their attention. I used chain-link fencing as a net, wrapping it around groups of five or six and lifting the whole bundle into Lifna's pull.

When three rats rushed my position I used a car door as a shield, then flipped it and scooped them skyward. Lifna absorbed everything without pause. New terrain formed in real time as corrupted rat biomass became soil and stone and something that looked like the beginning of an atmosphere. By the time I'd dealt with forty rats my mana was dropping noticeably. Each act of will cost me energy, and the invisibility was a constant drain on top of everything else. I could feel myself getting tired.

The last thirty were the hardest. They'd spread out and were avoiding the clusters that made them easy targets. They moved constantly and never stayed still long enough for a clean sweep. I was running low on junk too. Most of Mort's contributions had been fed to Lifna, and I was down to pieces barely big enough to move a single rat at a time. I used a piece of rebar to knock a rat off the terrain and into the air and spun a hubcap to clip a running rat to send it tumbling upward.

I even whipped a length of copper wire around a rat's body and flung it toward the planet. My mana was almost gone. The invisibility flickered twice, and I had to pull from reserves I didn't know I had just to maintain it. If the remaining rats saw me, they'd swarm, and ten corrupted rats against one exhausted raccoon wasn't a fight I wanted. The last rat was one of the larger ones. It had spent the past hour watching the junk fly with what seemed like genuine caution.

Every time I moved debris in its direction it scrambled to a new position. I was out of junk. The domain floor was bare. I had one hubcap left that I'd been holding in reserve, and enough mana for one more act of will. I circled around to the rat's blind side without making a sound. The rat sniffed the air and turned its head toward me. It wasn't looking directly at me, but it was close enough. I dropped the invisibility and flung the hubcap. It caught the rat in the side and launched it off the rock formation.

The rat sailed upward, hissing, and entered Lifna's gravitational field. She pulled it in and it dissolved on her surface. I stood in the middle of the Liminal Lands with my legs shaking. I was exhausted, but pretty pleased with myself. Every plague rat had been absorbed by Lifna, and the corrupted mana was gone. \ I felt like strutting but no one except Lifna was there to see it. Speaking of which, she was significantly larger now. Her surface was covered in new terrain that was still settling.

I sat down on the bare domain floor. My mana would regenerate, and the church's prayers would help. I just needed to stay still for a while. It was while I was sitting there that I remembered the flashes. Each rat, as it dissolved into Lifna's surface, had produced a brief pulse of blue-white light at the moment of absorption. I'd been too focused on the next target to pay attention at the time, but now that I was sitting still the memory was clear. I'd seen that light before.

It was the same light that planar crystals gave off. Each plague rat had been carrying a mana crystal inside its body, formed from the concentrated mana corruption that had powered them. The mana had condensed into solid form the way all crystals condensed from high-mana environments. Ninety rats meant ninety crystals, and Lifna had absorbed every single one of them. I stared at the baby planet rotating above me.

It was the crystal windfall I'd been desperately trying to calculate how to earn through Loki's teaching fees, and my baby planet had eaten all of it.

"Lifna," I said. She rotated. A tiny mountain range shifted on her surface and the atmosphere shimmered.

"What exactly are you doing with those mana crystals?"