14. Survival Rule #2: Water Knows the Answer (3)
14. Survival Rule #2: Water Knows the Answer (3)
Zombies and skeletons.
They were staple creatures that appeared in both fantasy and apocalypse novels. Zombies in particular were so ubiquitous that anyone who had not spent life as a hermit alone on some deserted island would know what they were.
And no one knew them better than me.
My early days on this uninhabited island started with going head-to-head with those bastards, after all.
Just remembering it made me shudder. I'd finally built a temporary shelter and thought I might rest, only for zombie bastards to groan and follow me all night. I had to climb a tree and sleep curled among the branches. When I woke, a mob of zombies was clinging to the trunk below me. That sight... still appeared in my dreams.
I survived because a bear luckily saw that and swept them all away.
Even the bear refused to eat the zombies.
At least the zombies in this world weren't the modern, sprinting kind. If they could run, forget surviving ten years—I'd have died in ten seconds. They were pretty strong, though. I had no idea why.
I thought old-school zombies were slow and strong too.
Skeletons were fairly fast, though still not as fast as an adult. Perhaps they ran at about a child's speed.
Because of that, they occupied the early-game monster niche on this island. The annoying thing was, killing them barely yielded anything useful. What was I supposed to do with rotting human corpses and human bones? But right then, they might actually have been somewhat useful.
They were stupid, weak, and even slow, but sheer numbers like that weren't something I could easily ignore.
"Hoo, that's a shitton of them."
With the bear bastards wiped out, the area around the dungeon was naturally swarming with zombies and skeletons. Their numbers had grown so large that the snakes appeared to have given up stopping them. The bears normally handled these things, so that made sense... and it worked in my favor. My plan required these monster bastards.
I hid behind a nearby tree and rummaged through my leather pouch. The job ahead was extremely dangerous and complicated. One mistake, and I'd end up dancing with both arms stretched forward beside the zombies. It wasn't as if Jackson himself was here to perform the Heavenly Demon Supreme Step, so I wanted no part of that. Being swallowed whole by the Hydra bastard would be preferable.
"Let's sort out the plan first."
Even though it was an improvised plan, it needed a bare minimum of organization. I plopped down behind the tree, picked up a nearby branch, and sketched the rough framework of the operation on the ground. Sure, it was just a few stick figures with lines drawn through them... but I was executing the plan alone anyway. As long as my thoughts were organized, it didn't matter.
I organized the plan that had popped into my head while drawing that elementary-school-level doodle. It didn't take long; the core was extremely simple. This operation depended less on cleverness than on my physical ability.
Once my thoughts were in order, I got up right away. If I wanted to finish this plan to screw over the snakes, I had to move fast. I immediately drew my shovel.
"Let's get going, then."
I stepped out from behind the tree. The skeletons and zombies wandering before the dungeon all turned toward me at once. It was a frightening sight, but I had no reason to panic now. After fighting a bear the size of a house at close range, zombies and skeletons felt like level-one trash mobs.
Still, I could not let my guard down. I had to do this properly.
I drove my shovel into the ground. The distance between me and the zombies was roughly twenty meters. Far, if you wanted to call it far, and close, if you wanted to call it close. I envisioned the object I wanted to make in my head and activated my Skill.
"Craft."
Not Earth Release... but a wall made of firmly packed mud rose from the ground. Two meters high, three meters across, and ten centimeters thick. The strength wasn't on par with concrete, but those dipshits wouldn't be able to put a scratch on this wall.
"Uuaaahh..."
The sound of pounding came from beyond the wall. The zombies and skeletons probably thought I'd suddenly vanished. That was the limit of their intelligence—if it could even be called intelligence when their brains were either rotten to mush or nonexistent.
"Craft. Craft. Craft. Craft..."
I kept creating walls to contain the zombies. After activating the Skill until my throat hurt, I completed a corridor leading away from the dungeon entrance. For the moment, walls blocked the route they needed to take and trapped them inside. I could hear the zombies pounding madly, but that was all they and the skeletons could do.
"Reminds me of playing XollerCoaster Tycoon."
That had been a blast. I never imagined doing it in real life. At times like this, my Skill seemed pretty great.
I ignored the trapped zombies' collective chorus of groans and turned to look toward the pond. I'd already roughly calculated the distance, but just in case, I needed to calculate it one more time.
Things like this were supposed to be designed thoroughly. Probably. The only design work I'd ever done was building dirt houses in Xinecraft. Had I known I'd be pulling this shit in reality, I'd have taken it a hell of a lot more seriously.
"Gonna have to use my Skill over a hundred times."
Still, if it meant I could screw over those snake bastards, was there anything more rewarding than that? I could do this much hard labor with a smile if it was for the sake of fucking over those snake shits.
I took the bearskin I'd prepared in advance from my pouch, draped it over myself, and sprinkled snake-repellent powder across my body. Fortunately, it was harmless to humans. If it had contained anything dangerous to people, this operation would have been impossible.
Ugh, the smell.
No matter what, I just couldn't get used to this stench, like socks soaked in sweat. But it was my lifeline, so I had to endure it.
I checked the direction of the pond once more, then started walking toward it as I began building walls.
"Craft. Craft, Craft. Craft. Craft. Craft. Craft. Craft. Craft..."
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God, my throat hurt.
I needed some pond water.
I scooped up a drink of the clear pond water with both hands—water so clean it looked like a mountain spirit might pop out of it. Drinking the water seemed to clear my head.
As expected, water knew the answer. Lord Water had answered this pitiful castaway: fuck up the snake bastards.
I roughly wiped my mouth and looked back at the fruits of my insane manual labor. The sight of the earthen walls stretching out in a straight line, exactly like something you'd see in a survival crafting game, was a spectacle.
Would it be an exaggeration to call it the Great Wall? I pulled some jerky from my pouch, chewed on it, and took a moment to catch my breath.
"I don't see any snakes..."
I had chopped apart every lunatic that charged me on the way. Had the others grown afraid after seeing so many die? Then they should have smelled the repellent and fled. Most ordinary snakes did run, so the fearless ones that attacked had only themselves to blame. I could crush them with my Skill before they did anything, while walls kept the large ones from approaching at all.
Even a snake couldn't climb a sheer wall. The trip had still been exhausting. Maybe it was fortunate that the Hydra bastard hadn't appeared, though that scheming creature wouldn't reveal itself easily. Sending only a few oversized anaconda-like snakes showed how little it thought of me. Naturally, a snake dripping with arrogance wouldn't personally appear just to catch one human.
Anyway, it was time to head back now. To the front of the dungeon.
It was already past noon and the sun was beginning to sink, but that didn't matter. I could pull an all-nighter if it meant screwing over those snakes. Besides, if I didn't fuck them up quickly, they'd only get more troublesome.
I started walking briskly toward the dungeon. Unpleasant hissing surrounded me, but I ignored it. The smell deterred half the snakes, a quarter couldn't cross the earthen walls, and the remaining quarter would be hunted by me if they got through. Oversized but stupid anacondas couldn't catch me.
And they couldn't destroy the earthen walls I made either. The walls were rooted in the ground—could snakes constrict that? Could they headbutt it? If they slammed their heads into it, their own heads would shatter first.
"Damn, the noise pollution from these things is no joke."
When I left the snakes' territory and returned to the front of the dungeon, the sound of the zombies' moans—layered over each other like a lagging computer—irritated me. Hearing it with just one wall between us was seriously bad for my mental health.
"Alright, you little shits, I'll let you out, so wait a second. Dismantle."
The wall separating me from the zombies lost its shape and collapsed. More must have spawned in the dungeon while I was away, because a mass of them packed against the wall and began shambling toward me. Someone with no means of resisting would probably have broken down and collapsed at that sight.
But right then, they were my reliable comrades in screwing over those snake shits.
"Let's gooo!"
I kicked off the ground with force. It was time to charge toward the pond again.
And so, leading countless zombies and skeletons, I advanced toward the pond. The path to the pond was smooth sailing. No matter how much of a joke zombies and skeletons were, when they piled up in the hundreds, they weren't something you could mess with easily. In the end, I arrived at the clear, clean pond without any interference.
"Let's get going, then."
I kicked off the wall, leaped, and landed on top of it. The zombies advancing to catch me looked around when I suddenly vanished from their sight, then reached upward when they spotted me above them. Yeah, just keep doing that.
My comrades.
Meeting you had been fucking awful. I hoped we never met again.
I retreated along the top of the wall and used my Skill.
"Dismantle."
The wall at the far end collapsed into a mound of earth. The zombies and skeletons conditioned by my XollerCoaster Tycoon-style corridor began spilling into the snakes' territory. Some zombies fell into the pond as a bonus.
Agh, so satisfying. This was revenge.
With this much, my territory would be safe for a while. The snakes would be too busy stopping the rush of zombies and skeletons to even think about attacking me.
With a light heart, I followed the top of the wall back the way I had come.
It had been another rewarding day.