Demonic Devourer's Development

Chapter 96 - Break In

For the first part of my plan, I scouted the surroundings of the fortress for the right monster. It had to be just so. Just big, bulky, aggressive, and stupid enough to work as intended. Good thing was that by then I had a good idea of which monsters qualified.

Insects were the stupidest, but least aggressive of the bunch. They didn't have enough brains to pursue the prey with a determination that can only come from stubbornness. That required some personality from a monster, and personality required brains, which insects lacked.

Mammals were better in that aspect, but some of them were too smart. They might just ditch me and my plan entirely.

Reptiles were the golden middle ground. They had brains, but they were lizard brains. Barely enough to get by, in most cases.

Though it was hard to say sometimes to which category one monster or another belonged. Some were straightforward, but some were such weird chimeras of creatures that I had no idea what to think about them at all. This is where my personal experiences of running away and hiding from these beasts were useful.

The monster I found and picked in the end was a reptile, one that I, for myself, dubbed as a wyvern. It had a five meters long, snake-like body and two limbs that formed leathery bat-like wings. The shape of the wyvern's body didn't allow the creature to fly well, but it was more than enough for the cramped cave space.

It wasn't the biggest monster there was, but it had a stubborn streak, zero eyesight—it mostly oriented itself by scent and sound—and plenty of pure physical strength and speed to do what I wanted it to do.

The hardest part was finding a proper bait and not eat it myself. It was a rat, fat and delicious… especially if I roasted it on something. Instead of eating it, I had to sacrifice it for my plan.

With the rat, bloodlessly killed by breaking its neck, in my hand, I positioned myself at the edge of the wyvern's senses. Before that, I memorised my route between this place and the fortress, so I already knew how I would escape, and where.

Then, I cut the rat wide open with my claws, releasing the thick smell of the tiny animal's blood. The wyvern scented it in an instant. Its whiskers wriggled; it raised its flat head and tasted the air with its forked tongue.

It turned its whole body towards me and began to slither towards the rat with increasing speed. I flapped my wings, raising myself in the air, and kept doing so as noiselessly as I could without falling down while I used the scent of the rat's blood to lead the wyvern towards the fortress.

At first, it wasn't hurrying its chase… but its patience was short. When its prey didn't slow down or stop, the wyvern lunged for it—and for me—and I had to speed up. Some other predators would've left me be at that, or tried to track me later by the scent of blood, but not the wyvern.

It simply followed its instincts and gave chase.

I flew like an arrow from it, through the winding pathways and open caves. Mostly through the former, since in them the wyvern had to work harder to fit with its wings. Even with them, it slithered with an astounding speed, and the faster I flew away, the more agitated the wyvern became.

It was a good thing that the fortress wasn't far away. The rainbow stream that flowed from under its walls covered the area in multicoloured light, but there wasn't so much of it that my approach would be well-seen from the inside, assuming that someone even watched through the embrasures at this very moment.

And wyvern was still eyeless and blind, and followed not me, but the bleeding rat corpse in my hand. My hand, that I previously covered in a "glove" (more like a sock) made from my web.

Without stopping in a place for a moment, I made a powerful swing and threw it, together with the sock, right in to the fortress's bone gate, while I changed directions and darted aside.

The wyvern, too focused on the scent of blood, didn't even pause. It didn't stop even when the rat hit the gate, leaving a nice splatter on it, and plopped on the ground. It tried to slow down, but it was too late—with a resounding crash, the wyvern's body slammed into the gates.

As alarmed shouts were heard from the other side and the wyvern, agitated by them now, bashed into the gates again, I flew to the fortress's walls to do the next step of my plan. While everyone's attention was on the gates, I got to an embrasure and began to squeeze myself through its narrow opening.

It required me to plaster my ears and hands so close to my body I was sure they melded with it for a while, but after some liquefying and wriggling, I found myself on the other side of it.

The first thing that caught my attention were lights. Lanterns made from the rainbow water were everywhere, casting the entire settlement in their glow. The simple village, with houses out of skins, bones and stone, in their light looked like an enclosed realm of fey. And in the very middle of it stood a stone dome, from which the rainbow stream came.

Too bad the inhabitants were too ugly for fairies. I saw them rushing to the gates with spears, clubs and knives, all ugly and just a little wrong in their features. On the pathways between the houses, similarly ugly women hurried to hide from the threat. Outside, the wyvern still didn't give up.

I didn't wait for the end of its confrontation with the villagers and instead flew away. The first part of my plan was a resounding success.. Now I just had to find out the road to my step two: finding a way to exploit the power of the rainbow water to its maximum extent.