Chương 19: Labyrinth Exploitation

Needless to say, Shave wouldn't let me use the siphon. But I did negotiate him down—he agreed to let me take a close look at it. I could get crafty. Besides, I didn't need a functional siphon right away. I still had some setting up to do. And I only had a month to do it all. On top of it all, I had no salary to work with. But those were only minor problems. If I played this right, my plan could still come together without a hitch. The next morning, I woke up early and gathered as many stones as I could find.

I needed to make my own siphon, and that was going to take practice. I doubted it would be as good as Shave's standard-issue siphon, but I just needed something. Besides, working on my own siphon was going to vastly increase my Focus. I didn't start on the actual siphon right away. I simply practiced carving runes into rocks for as much time as I could before the others woke up.

When they did wake up, I rushed them, making sure we left right away, and along the way, I insisted that I had to be the one who repaired the runes in the dirt. I needed to get better at making runes in any way I could. It was a good sign that a messy rune was still moderately functional. Surely, runes would improve in strength with how neat they were, but I didn't have that kind of luxury nor enough practice. What I did have as an Atoning, however, was practice with handwriting.

I'd written my entire life, taking notes in school, while they were training. It had to count for something. When we made it to the watchtower, I set off again, crossing into the Bane-lands, locating my Labyrinth entrance, and improving my speed. Since I didn't pause to search, I had more time to spend. And that meant more time to lure wild beasts into the Labyrinth. Something had cleared out the upper levels of the Labyrinth already. Probably orcs, but maybe adventurers from the west.

Regardless, I had to fill the Labyrinth myself. First, I needed something to lure them, so I went off in search of meat. Anything worth killing and taking the Presence of was probably a carnivore. I wandered around the Labyrinth entrance, making larger and larger circles, until I heard a beast howling in the distance. It was a shrill wolf howl, but it had a faint rumble in its voice as well, like a raven's croak. I set off in its direction until I found a pair of beasts ripping apart a shred of a corpse.

They looked like hyenas, except they were slightly larger—about the size of a regular wolf—and they had black and brown fur. Their teeth were a mess, and they had long fangs more like a sabertooth tiger than a hyena. Based on their description, these were probably the 'ruin-hounds' I'd heard the others talking about. Apparently, the orcs used them as hunting dogs, but these were just the young ones. When they grew up, they made suitable mounts for orcs—for those who didn't want fell-foxes.

But there were plenty of wild ruin-hounds in the Bane-lands as well. Steeling myself, I made a plan. That corpse, whatever it was, was unidentifiable. It definitely wasn't human, but the ruin-hounds wanted its meat. I rushed forward, leaping over a ridge of mud before descending the walls of the crater they hid in. I skewered the chunk of meat the two hounds were fighting over and sprinted away, not looking back.

The meat hung from the tip of my stolen orc spear like a carrot on a stick, and I twisted it around to hang it behind me, luring the beasts closer. They'd be fast, and I wouldn't outrun them for long. But I just had to get back to the Labyrinth. I took ten steps before I realized the ruin-hounds hadn't followed me at all. It was like their brains had completely lapsed, and they had short-circuited. With the meat suddenly gone, they just stared at each other, jaws tense, eyes accusing.

Like they blamed each other for the meat's sudden disappearance, and didn't know how to deal with it. I tilted my head and scrunched my eyebrows. That didn't seem like a good survival instinct, but perhaps it didn't matter. Something was wrong with these lands, and these beasts seemed more aggressive than any normal creature. So aggressive that they would blame each other for the disappearance of the meat instead of the guy who had actually stolen it? It was like they weren't even thinking.

They were just imitating how they thought dogs acted. A deep sense of horrid wrongness bubbled up in my stomach, worse than any gore or viscera could create. And most importantly, it wasn't working in my favour right now. I needed these ruin-hounds to follow me. I stepped closer and closer, then struck one on the head with the blunt end of my spear. Like I was slapping an old TV, it… sort of fixed the problem. Both the ruin-hounds turned to face me, lips pulled back in a snarl.

That was when I showed them the chunk of meat. And then I ran. They nipped at my heels the whole time, getting closer. They yipped and snarled, and I didn't make it far, but far enough to turn the corner and jump into the Labyrinth entrance. The ruin-hounds followed me, and I used the winding halls of the Labyrinth to outmaneuver the hounds. If it was anything like the first Labyrinth that we rescued the prisoners from, then most of the rooms had two or three branching halls, and they would loop back.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. I lured the ruin-hounds into a side-room, dropped the meat by kicking it off my spear, then sprinted out a different hall before circling back to the entrance. The ruin-hounds, entranced by the meat, didn't follow me. After a few seconds, I stopped, leaning against a wall to catch my breath. The next problem was that I needed the ruin-hounds to stay put until I had a functional siphon. I didn't want to kill them until I did.

For a moment, I stayed perfectly still, waiting and listening. When my panting breaths slowed down, the distant trickle of dripping water pattered in the distance. Tiny claws scrabbled on stone, insects chittered, and the Labyrinth Keepers must have been resetting a distant trap, because stone thudded and cracked in the distance, and I didn't have any other explanation for what it was. Maybe it was just wishful thinking. The ruin-hounds had plenty of food and water down here, though.

They'd find a way to survive in the underground ecosystem for long enough. But they could, in theory, just leave. I'd see what happened. The giant mole in the other Labyrinth hadn't just left for whatever reason. It had food, water, and plenty of creatures to feed on. Why would it? Hopefully, the ruin-hounds thought the same. Hopefully, they were lazy and took the path of least resistance. By my estimation, I still had a little more time, so I practiced carving my rocks again.

I didn't have a chisel, but the orc spearhead worked fine. It wasn't exactly like writing, that much was certain, but it was a similar skill-set. I needed to know if working on the runes in the Labyrinth would help me condense a skill better than doing it outside. In theory, and as Shave had explained, the Labyrinths would recognize combat and the effort of battle. If that was true, then it shouldn't make a difference whether I carved runes here or outside.

But the other Dupes weren't exactly the artistic type, and I wanted to verify it for myself. Maybe it hadn't even crossed their minds. After a few minutes, I stopped. There was no noticeable difference in the rate of skill gain. It was hard to verify, but it didn't feel the same as when we'd navigated away from the mole and snuck past, the same way [Stealth] had condensed. I was about to abandon the idea, but after a few seconds, I ran back to the ruin-hounds.

I didn't have to use the runes to win the fight—I hadn't used stealth to beat the mole—I just had to practice while under the stress of combat or a potential combat situation. But as it turned out, the ruin-hounds were still fighting each other, still squabbling over the chunk of meat, and they hadn't made much progress.

"Hey there, evil weird dog things," I said, for lack of anything else that crossed my mind. I wished I'd had better catchphrases, but alas, here we were. I was cursed with a fundamental lack of witty words. The ruin-hounds didn't seem to care. They might not even have heard, given how their snarls echoed around the room. So I got closer and closer, until my heart began racing. Until, at any moment, one of them was going to lose focus, and turn to me, thinking I looked tastier.

Once my heart was sufficiently racing, I pulled out a stone and etched a new rune on it. Most of the runes on Shave's siphon were about the size of a penny, and mine had so far been the size of a quarter, so I had to get them smaller. For the moment, I was only working on a single rune—one that almost looked like pi, but with more rigid lines. The spearhead wasn't perfect for etching stone, and I was going to damage it, but I didn't really care. It was orc-made, and I had a new one coming from Maurifus anyway.

Once I'd finished the rune, I backed away. One of the ruin-hounds glanced at me, and I readied myself to stab it, but it didn't approach. I darted out of the room before I pressed my luck any further. Under pressure, my rune had suffered, but when I made another one on the other side of the rock a few seconds later, it was smaller, and the lines were neater. That was definitely the progress I was looking for, and it felt like the knowledge had condensed in my mind faster than normal.

It wasn't the same as completing a Skill. Nothing I'd done today was remotely as difficult as sneaking past a giant mole, but it was faster than regular Skill earning. But that was enough for today. I had to get back to the others, and we had to get back to the camp. ~ ~ ~ The process continued for nearly a week. Rune practice in the mornings, walking with the others to the watchtower, then venturing into the Bane-lands to lure monsters into the Labyrinth.

Once I was inside the Labyrinth, I continued working on my runes. They didn't improve nearly as quickly as my stealth had, so I figured that the rate of skill condensation had to be proportional to the strength of the monster I was up against. Mostly, I targeted ruin-hounds, but I found a wild fell-fox, and I used that too. It, however, was a proper hunter, and it didn't need any meat to lure it into the Labyrinth. It just followed me in. A few days after the fox, I also caught the eye of a rotting deer.

Its fur was black, and it was almost bald. Its skin glistened like it was made of tar, and there were sections of its skin that were just gone, revealing yellow bones and trembling lungs. Mushrooms grew on its antlers. At first, I wasn't sure if I should go after it. It was, after all, a herbivore. But when I drew closer, its head whipped toward me. It was missing an eye, and black liquid leaked out the side of its mouth. It was absolutely a threat, and something told me it was a Steel-tier monster.

Still, I lured it into the Labyrinth. I had a ninety percent retention rate on how many monsters stayed in the Labyrinth, and I hoped it stayed long enough. I wasn't going to try to kill it until I'd practiced a little more, though. After a week of gathering and trapping monsters, I convinced Galliard to let me use the reading slate again, and it revealed a new skill: [Carving (Novice)]. Not rune carving, interestingly. Just carving. Maybe I'd need to merge some skills to get the rune carving part.

But whatever it said, I felt like I was ready to build myself a rudimentary siphon.