WarbyPicus
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Weeaboo Vol. 2 Chap. 23 Embracing the Hard Way
🕑 Added 2024-10-23 16:00:15 +0000 UTCI got myself together. I don’t know how long it took. A while. Not forever. I was becoming more used to the horror, though far from immune. My God. The scope of it. Feeling like a particle of dirt inhaled by some unspeakable monster and then having a momentary view of the lungs you were lodged in, the heart who’s walls you were, somehow, trapped in…
But ultimately you get over it. I felt the cool waves wash over me a few times. Felt my brain refresh. And I got over it. It was horrible, but we lived. So time to get on with living.
We were on order time now. That wasn’t ideal. I needed to build an entirely new wall structure, not to mention an honest-to-whoever gate, for the back door. Can’t say I was looking forward to that. Even moving away all the dirt would be a massive job. We’d turn it into rammed earth walls, of course. No sense in letting tons and tons and tons of dirt go to waste. But it would be a huge job and that meant using up orders.
Had to figure out who was getting that two-headed essence too. Versai seemed like an obvious option, but I still wasn’t sure about who else might benefit.
There was a moderately polite cough from Versai. “Tower Master, you seem to be forgetting something.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“We completed the wave perfectly. Which means a perfect completion bonus.”
I slammed my fist into my hand. “Hot damn! That’s right.” Off I hopped to the Throne Room. To my delight, there was a brilliantly glowing treasure chest, and a new golden dot on my wall
WAVE 8 PERFECT VICTORY!
Award for Perfect Victory: -5% Resource Cost For Field Constructions.
Oh. Now that was a little spicy. This was the second time we got this award. I checked the other plaques on my wall- we got it all the way back in Wave 3. I remember I wasn’t very impressed back then, but now that my fortifications had reached a certain scale? Oh this was getting interesting. It would only get more valuable as the rarity of building resources got-
I cut my own thoughts in midstream. Roads. Are roads a field construction? “MARCI-”
“WHAT? Cough. Tower Master?”
“You don’t… you don’t actually say ‘cough,’ you just pretend to cough.”
Marci, who was trotting up the stairs, did a good job pretending to be deaf instead. I decided that we both mutually decided to ignore the breach of decorum that was definitely her overreacting to my completely reasonable way of speaking.
“Marci, do roads count as a field construction?”
“What else could they possibly be?” She doesn’t need to sleep. She is physically incapable of sleeping. So why does she look like she got asked to cover a shift on her day off after a week of doubles?
“Marci… when was the last time you got to spend time in the dorms?”
She just stared at me. I didn’t know either. Could… could they need rest? Could I need rest? I had a deeply uncomfortable looking bed, even though I couldn’t sleep.
“Thank you. Why don’t you head over to the dorms? Take a break for a while. Err. In a minute. Stick around for now, I still have some questions.”
I tapped on the treasure chest. One uncommon resource pack. Nice! No blue magnesium. Less nice. There were, however, two pit traps in the chest, so I came back around to Nice again. Some summoning crystal fragments, a small stack of Stone Tapes and one hundred Runed Bones. Pretty good loot. Not as good as the perfect pass reward, but good.
Just going to skip over the eight hundred runed bones that just teleported into my inventory pouch just because I connected Gradden March by road. We take what we get, and are thankful. I took a quick look at the daily missions, and immediately ignored them. Five runed bones for killing ten monsters, that kind of thing. Two stone tapes for sending someone out on orders.
I know an abandoned mechanic when I see one. This was a blatant case of gamer psychology manipulation. All those daily/weekly/monthly check-ins, daily missions, special limited time goals, all that? Just driving engagement with the game. It was literal make work, for the sake of getting you to press the button and generate dopamine while listening to the jingle and watching the animations.
“You are being rewarded. You did well,” The game whispers. “Keep playing. Ignore the rest of the world. It hurts. It’s scary. Look, you can press that button and the machine will make you happy again. If only for a moment.”
God I love gacha games. It just cuts out so many middlemen. Why would I drink liquor when I can press a button and be happy, over and over again?
Now… Why was the mechanic given up, given that it works extremely well? THAT is worth finding the answer to. I looked through the calendar. Day eight. I drew some resonance crystals. Not enough to get me a draw, but still nice. Day nine. Tomorrow… tomorrow I get a summons with a rainbow border as my daily check in reward.
And to me, rainbow means a new Six Star. It makes sense. You get one for your initial login bonus, and you get one after ten days in game. It creates the perception that Six Stars are not too hard to come by. Makes you feel strong, clearing out the waves with your OP units.
Well. Regardless of the manipulation, I’d just look forward to it. I am in desperate need of more combat units, after all.
I flung myself back into my armchair, trying to sort out what I needed to do today. I didn’t get to really take advantage of my infinite-orders glitch during the last battle.
“Marci, did your crew manage to connect any resource sites to the Tower last night?”
“No.”
Ah. “How much order time would you need to complete the work.
“Two.” She sounded dead certain. None of that “Well, if everything goes right and if the trucks with the supplies turn up on time…”
I don’t feel like I have two orders to spare right now, though. That back door was weighing on me. I could see the monsters coming for it the instant it was unblocked. Finishing the initial defenses of the rear of the Tower were, therefore, more important than connecting resource sites.
And even more important than that was clearing Hidden Moon Mountain. Which needed that Ghost Touch Potion. Which needed the monster bodies. Which my summons couldn’t touch. I sighed and heaved myself to my feet. God, I really, really did not want to do this.
“Do we have canvas or anything? Any big pieces of cloth from a resource pack or something?”
“No.” Marci was her usual dour self.
“Could you make a big net?”
“Out of rope?”
“Yes, exactly!”
“No. Not enough rope for a big net.”
She is just such a joy to be around. Just a little ray of blue collar sunshine.
This was going to suck so much.
I walked over to the Rampart and found the knotted rope. I climbed down carefully, remembering what happened the last time I tried this stunt. The ground was absolutely littered with corpses. The fast monsters were all roughly the size of German Shepherds. Their human hands that took the place of paws had mutated and deformed. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, and decided not to sweat it. I had so much else to be sweaty about.
I tied a knot at the end of the rope with knots in it. I don’t know how to tie a bowline knot. I’ll admit my knot was a bit of a cludge. Or a lot of a cludge. I was, at the very least, completely confident that it wouldn’t come undone. And since I didn’t want to find out the hard way I was wrong, I tested it repeatedly. It held. That’s what’s important.
Any accusations that I was fixating on the knot to distract myself from what I was about to do is blatantly untrue, and may result in a defamation lawsuit just as soon as I conquer a relic site that provides legal counsel.
“Versai… When I tug the rope, pull me up.”
“Tower Master?”
“Just… just do it. Marci, stand by to assist Versai if necessary.”
I reached out and grabbed one of the fast monsters. It was heavy. Maybe a hundred pounds? I had to really muscle it around, the dead weight flopping uselessly. The leathery hide was gross enough, but it had holes in it, and was leaking. It smelled. Like what, I don’t know. Bad. It smelled really, really bad.
It took a truly unpleasant amount of trial and error until I was able to get my shoulder under it and grab it’s legs in a sort of fireman’s carry. I put my foot in the loop, wrapped my arm around the rope, grabbed hard and prayed. I tugged the rope.
“Haul me up.”
I fell off, of course.
I didn’t say anything, and bless her comfy socks, neither did Versai. I reset, got a better grip, and tried to predict how the weight of the fast monster was going to pull me around.
The second fall wasn’t any nicer than the first.
It took an ungodly amount of trial and error. I really didn’t want to just tie the monsters to the rope and have Versai haul them up because I was focused on work flow. I was considering the number of steps needed to complete the task. We tried a few ways, and it just wasn’t happening.
“Alright, work smarter not harder time. We don’t have nets or canvas, but we do have a TON of scrap wood and some rope.”
In addition to not knowing how to tie a bowline, I have never built a raft or a platform or, frankly, anything at all out of rope and wood. Which was fine. I had unlimited time, even if I didn’t have unlimited resources. This was something I could figure out.
“You want me to jump off the wall.”
“Slowly. Yes.”
“Impressive, Tower Master! I didn’t know you had a way to slow your fall from a great height. Being violently flung off your balcony must hold no fears for you.”
“Oh for- Versai, you know perfectly well how a pulley works. Meat Tray goes up, you go down, I climb up and unload meat tray because I haven’t figured out how to make a swing arm or real block-and-tackle system, then once we have a giant pile of unspeakable, monstrous flesh befouling our once pristine rampart, I schlep them to the Sky Realm.”
“What does “Schlep” mean?”
“What do you think it means?”
“It sounds like something sticky being dragged.”
“So if I am schlepping something-”
“You are dragging something sticky and unpleasant. Really? That’s what it really means?”
“Pretty much.”
“Just… took a sound and made a word out of it. That’s language in your nightmareish homeland. You don’t have water, you have splishsplishsplish. At night you sit around the cracklecracklecrackle and warm your cold hearts. This is why you are so wierd about normal words. It must sound like the language of the Gods to you.”
“Versai, what exactly is a word if not “took a sound and made a word out of it?” Really. I want to know. And why would you think we have cold hearts? My country, even my city, is famous for it’s sincere expressions of powerful emotions.”
She paused for a moment to parse that. “You scream at each other a lot?”
“Daily, if not hourly. I think once every forty minutes is the union maximum for the construction guys, but I’m not in the trades. Mostly I stay at home. It’s peaceful there.”
She nodded. “You are going to carry the whole battlefield’s worth of corpses to Gradden March.”
“We need that Ghost Touch potion, Versai. And if any of the Awakened touch the bodies, they vanish. I can think of so many things I would rather be doing. So, so many. Just… thousands of other things I would rather be doing. But I don’t get tired, and I don’t get sick, and I’m not on a clock. It just takes time, and getting over myself.”
And… I never want another Kim. I never want to have a “brilliant” idea that gets one of my people killed. When they go to battle, they will know I did everything I possibly could to support them. Was I really prepared to let my people die because I think this is completely disgusting? Because the very thought of touching all these corpses makes my skin crawl? Let them die because the holes in the monsters make me want to puke until my toenails come up?
“Sebastian can’t possibly need all these bodies to make five portions of Ghost Touch.”
“He doesn’t. But there are a couple of icehouses in the Floating Quarter. I’m keeping the bodies in reserve. Who says we will only fight ghostly enemies once? Sooner or later, we will find a use for the corpses. And from what I’m seeing, other than the giants, they are only dropping trash. They are yielding less than one Runed Bone per body too.”
Versai looked like she had something more to say, but kept it in. She just grabbed the rope, and waited.
I am not a manual labor guy. Or a DIY guy. I don’t want to paint my own figurines, let alone make a bookshelf or fix a toilet. I hire people for that. I get groceries delivered to my door. Carrying them sounds like a job someone else can do. Same thing with getting dinner- delivery is always better than cooking yourself. Owning a car in New York is an act of both fiscal and literal suicide. When the subway won’t cut it, there is Uber or Lyft.
Anything someone else can do, should be outsourced. I only have one life. I might as well live as sweetly as I can. A principle that doesn’t involve getting dirty, sweaty or tired.
Well. You know what I mean. Once your pant size reaches a certain circumference, sweaty and tired are inescapable. Beats working in an Amazon warehouse, trying to remember which bottle you pissed in and which is actual gatorade. From what I hear, conditions in the warehouses are so diabolical even the Red and Blue flavors might not help you sort out which is which.
I mean, I still buy from Amazon. But I’m sympathetic to the plight of the worker, you know? As long as same-day and next-day shipping keep working, I am very, very supportive of their plight.
The monster bodies stank. I stank. I didn’t get tired. I just struggled to keep the dead weight from shifting around on me. There was no use rushing, but there was no point in going slow either. The job would be here until I was done. One bloody, entrial spilling body at a time.
I’d grab a body and carry it. Sometimes I’d drag it, but that was actually often more annoying than picking it up. The sensations were odd. I could feel that the bodies were heavy. They slowed me down. I had to put real effort into picking them up. But once the weight was off of me, there was no ache. No burning in the muscle. I was utterly fresh. It was just the mental weight that ground down on me.
There was no one else to do the work. No one I could hire. I guess I could have figured out something for my summons. I puzzled at it while carrying the bodies. I could have the Judiths lever up the bodies with sticks and roll them over. It would take an order, but I’d bet they could do it. Heck, they had hoes. Slap the hoe into the pre-drilled hole, and you have meat on a hook, ready for dragging. But it would be a waste. They didn’t have to do this. I could do this. That would give me an extra order I could use to explore, or to build better defenses.
No more Kim’s. Not one more.
There was a hypnotic monotony to the work. You didn’t have to think about anything. You just had to get yourself set under the weight, lift, and carry. The platform could hold a dozen bodies without them sliding off. It was more than
Versai weighed, of course, so my counterweight elevator idea turned out to be useless. And also just plain overthinking. She could haul them up with my crummy pulley system without too much trouble. Versai was, among other things, strong. Being the Queen’s personal thug required high fitness standards.
Body after body after body. My own body was covered in gore. In what I can only call ‘fluids,’ because I don’t know what they were. Bile, and hormonal secretions and spinal fluids and the grease from bone marrow. Hands slippery from shoving fatty guts back into bodies so they didn’t tangle my feet as I walked. It was a nightmare, then Hell, then just something I had to do. It turns out the worst thing in the world becomes just a job with time.
It was a long walk back to the wall. I tossed the body onto the platform, then stood on the platform next to it. Versai hauled us up. I jumped off at the top and hauled the bodies off. Then it was the slow job of schlepping them up the stairs. The gooey noises, the dull thuds. Up, up, up I went, then through the door to the Sky Realm and dump the body into the waiting cart. Again and again.
Until there were none left. The ones in the forest were beyond my reach, but my range from the Tower had grown rapidly. I could walk around most of the clearing now. I don’t know what the tipping point was, or what factor changed. I couldn’t make anything ‘useful’ but I could pick up trash. I could walk a bit. As the bodies left the Tower, so did the gore. At the end of it all, I was clean. My Tower was clean. I couldn’t see any changes around me.
But when I pressed my hand to my chest, I could feel the changes. Next stop, Hidden Moon Mountain. Time to teach the ghosts that even they are not beyond my reach.
Comments
Akkido
The job would be here until I was done. One bloody, entrial->entrail spilling body at a time.
AnthraxRipple
"You don’t have water, you have splishsplishsplish. At night you sit around the cracklecracklecrackle and warm your cold hearts." This had me cackling. The constant language gags are always fun.
phantom
'As long as same-day and next-day shipping keep working, I am very, very supportive of their plight.' Discount on next purchase for delayed shipping :D.
