All The Skills - A Deckbuilding LitRPG

Book 5: A Rich Harvest

“There’s another nest about twenty feet straight down,” he said, opening his eyes. “And another near that, and another . . . there’s a lot.”

Brixaby, who had just finished up with the last ovoid and was storing the Uncommon shard, nodded and took a moment to cast Call of the Heart, himself. His and Arthur’s trust in the card had taken a dip since coming to Blood Moon.

“Yes, I see them as well. Most pleasing.”

“I can reach it using my Phase In, Phase Out, but I want to make sure that the card has a full charge—I only have a few more minutes until the hour ticks over. I want the full thirty seconds, just in case.”

“Then we will clear out that cavern too,” Brixaby continued, all good mood now.

That was another thing. Looking again at how the separate nests were all structured underneath the eruption point, Arthur frowned. “Maybe that’s how eruptions continue and grow larger.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “The eruption cone itself is hollow, right? Whatever fuels it throws scourglings and rocks and tons of dirt up into the air and it grows larger and larger. Maybe the eruption process digs through the soil, and as it does, it hits more and more of these nests, which hatch and provide new scourglings, which provide energy . . .” He trailed off and looked at his dragon, who shrugged a wing.

“Perhaps.”

Which meant either he was wrong or the knowledge had been suppressed.

****

He and Brixaby did a final sweep of the cavern to make sure they didn’t miss anything, and this yielded a whopping seventy-five Uncommon shards.

That was a good haul, and enough to give their entire wing some buffer.

“Nine people, each with three Uncommon shards a day . . . so just over a week,” Arthur muttered to himself. Life in the hive got expensive quick. No wonder the Blood Moon riders had such a reputation for being aggressive.

“That is assuming that you are kind enough to pay for everybody, and they do not pay for themselves.”

“Well, it’s not like I expect the hatchlings to pay their own way,” Arthur said.

Still, Brixaby grumped, “Perhaps do not tell them of your wealth. They do not know what is happening in here. Or at the very least, they would expect for us to be harvesting more Common shards.”

He had a point. He didn’t mind covering for his friends and his retinue, but at the same time . . . “I don’t think anyone could pretend they don’t have enough shards after this. Those seventy-five shards aren’t even counting what we already harvested from the main cavern.”

Yes, he had done well today, and he was feeling smug about it. And deservedly so.

At that moment, his Phase In, Phase Out card ticked over the cooldown, and he was renewed with an additional thirty more seconds.

Arthur nodded to Brixaby and took a deep breath. Then he got on his hands and knees, staring straight at the ground as if he could bore a hole into it. He had never used the card to drop straight down through solid rock before. In theory, it should be possible.

“Here goes nothing.” He activated the card and crawled forward.

He supposed he could have tried to run downward somehow, but he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it without resorting to a dumb swimming motion. And as Arthur hadn’t swum very often, he figured crawling was faster.

The moment he plunged in, darkness surrounded him. All sound was cut off.

Gritting his teeth, he moved as fast as he could and kept his mind’s eye on the map.

If he had been thinking during that cave-in, he would have used Call of the Heart to lead him in the right direction, but he had been too panicked. Now that he had the map up, going in the right direction was much easier.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Within fifteen seconds, he emerged from the ceiling into a cavern made of bioluminescent blue light. He glanced back to make sure that his entire body was out of the rock, then canceled the card.

And fell a good eight feet, right on top of a very startled nest tender. He didn’t think that he’d actually seen a scourgling surprised before.

Unfortunately, the nest tender’s chitin armor meant that Arthur didn’t crush it like the bug that it was. In the next few seconds, they both scrambled to get away from each other. Arthur suffered a gash to his arm from a flailing knife leg, but the scourgling suffered even worse as Arthur grabbed one of the new extra-sharp knives Brixaby had given him. With his full strength, he drove it down into the thorax.

Skill level gained: Butchering (Cooking Class)

Level 52

He should have cut off the head. With its last breath, the dying nest tender whistled an alarm.

Then, in the next few seconds, other nest tenders were rushing at him.

Once again, Arthur activated the Spear of Justice and readied his chainmail and shrapnel.

The countdown appeared again . . . and he only had fourteen minutes left.

So, it didn’t reset every time he used the spell. It probably had a twenty-four-hour cooldown—something that he would have known about if he had access to the card.

And it seemed that the spear would only take a limited amount of damage. He found that out after using the shaft to block a strike from the nest tender.

Suddenly, the spear broke apart into motes of light in his hands.

Arthur flailed back and then desperately knocked away the scourgling again with several blasts of shrapnel as it jumped at him with knifelike limbs bared.

At that moment, Brixaby’s portal finally appeared. Between the two of them—though it was mostly Brixaby—they made short work of the remaining scourglings.

Afterward, Arthur bent over, hands on his knees and breathing hard.

“Maybe we should just use the portal to jump in next time. Do you think the rower would be able to get to the nest if we pointed to the map?”

Brixaby hesitated. “I sense not, somehow. He can generally go to destinations I have never been before, but I’m not certain that we would be able to get that sort of precision with this portal unless I was picturing it.”

“Well, how did you get him to come here in the first place?”

“He had me picture you every single time. Arthur, look behind you.”

Arthur swung around, heart in his throat, fully expecting another nest tender, but it was only Cressida’s snake again.

It sat behind him, coiled and patiently waiting for his attention. When it noticed that it had been seen, it uncoiled and raised its head and spoke in Cressida’s voice.

“The harvesting is going well on our end, but you’ve been gone for a while. Are you okay?”

He caught hints of stress in her tone.

“We’re fine,” Arthur said to it. “Brixaby and I have found a secondary cavern and we’re exploring it, but it’s not large, so it’s not worth everybody coming in. Keep harvesting the main cavern and send me a snake when you’re done.”

With a burst of mana, he returned the messenger.

Meanwhile, Brixaby was taking a quick survey of the room. It was smaller than the last with fewer clusters of ovoids. However, they had the feeling of Uncommons about them.

Suddenly, his nostrils flared, and his head snapped back to Arthur. “You are bleeding!”

Arthur looked down at his arm and realized he was right. In the fight and excitement, he had barely felt it as a light sting, but now he saw it was a bit worse than that. The cut extended down from his shoulder almost to his elbow. It wasn’t deep enough to hit bone or the large vein there, but blood still dripped down to his fingertips.

His Moderate Self-Repair card was working to repair the damage.

“I’ll be fine,” he said, and pulled out a bandage from his Personal Space to begin wrapping the arm. “I’ll have Marion look at it when we get back—” He stopped, looking inward.

His mana was ticking down from his Moderate Self-Repair card, but much more than it should for just this injury. He looked over himself to make sure that he hadn’t missed any more cuts, perhaps a broken bone or something that he hadn’t felt yet. There was nothing. Then he looked at his dragon.

“Brixaby, are you okay?”

“Yes, of course. The scourglings did not come anywhere near close enough to hit me,” he replied, smug.

Was the wound poisoned? No, he had seen Joy’s venom work before, and the wound looked clean. There was nothing wrong except it stank in here.

And then it hit him.

“I don’t think that the air in this cave is good.”Nôv(el)B\\jnn

“What do you mean?” Brixaby demanded, alarmed.

Arthur flashed to how the underground tunnels in the Mind Singer’s hive had been. She had been farming baby dragons for shards and cards, and the underground area had become a hive of scourglings.

More importantly, the air had been so bad that it had actually affected brooding mother dragons who refused to leave their nests. Many had open sores, a lot like the scourglings.

“Are you having trouble breathing?” Arthur asked. “I think the air is trying to infect me with scourge-rot, but my Moderate Self-Repair card is stepping in. How about you?”

“No, I am fine,” Brixaby said, but he seemed to be thinking along the same lines as Arthur. “Those dragons in the Mind Singer’s hive had been down there for weeks, possibly months. Though . . . I do not like the fact that you are bleeding. Scourge-dust can get into open wounds.”

That made a terrible sort of sense. Here, where scourglings were growing, whatever caused the terrible scent seemed to be intensified. Brixaby often said that scourglings were the antithesis of life. And he and Brixaby were now in a cavern meant to nurture them.

Which meant that even if he felt like bringing the rest of his wing to one of these egg caverns, it wouldn’t be a good idea.

But this was still an opportunity, and one that Arthur did not want to slip through his fingers.

Brixaby rustled his wings with a sigh. “I suppose we should head back.”

“Not yet,” Arthur said.

He pulled up the Call of the Heart map again and studied it.

“What are you doing?” Brixaby asked.

“We’re not done yet,” Arthur said. “I want to find the core of this eruption.”