SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 82: First Encounter With Worms

Ollen didn’t waste time once the decision was made. He sent a servant ahead to the guard quarters while Lena waited near the entrance of the estate, and within fifteen minutes four guards had assembled in the courtyard.

They were equipped heavier than standard post guards, short blades at the hip and longer ones across the back.

They were broad across the shoulders, grey-skinned, with the slight forward lean in their posture that she had noticed most demon soldiers carried,

Ollen himself came out in different clothes. The green coat was gone and he was wearing something darker and more practical, with bracers on his forearms and boots that had seen real use.

He looked at Lena when he stepped out. "You’re going like that?"

She looked down at her dress and then back at him.

"Yes," she said.

He held her gaze for a moment and then let it go.

They moved out through the rear of the estate grounds and onto a wide dirt path that cut eastward through open field.

The sky above was going orange at the edges and the light was flattening out, turning everything the same dull gold.

The grass on either side of the path was still short here, maintained, but Lena could see where it changed further ahead.

A line where the managed land ended and the wild growth began, taller and darker and dense enough that the interior was already shadow even in the remaining daylight.

The guards moved in a loose formation ahead of them. Nobody talked much.

Ollen walked beside her and spoke in a low voice. "The swarms have been heaviest about half a mile into the eastern zone. There’s a cluster of livestock pens we haven’t been able to fully abandon yet, a few animals still there that we haven’t relocated. We’ve been posting guards but they can only do so much."

"Have you lost any men?" Lena asked.

"Not yet," Ollen said. "Injuries. One man lost two fingers on his left hand when a swarm got ahead of us faster than expected. The creatures are small but their bite is sharp and when there are enough of them on one spot at the same time it adds up quickly." He paused. "We’ve been lucky so far."

Lena looked at the darkening growth ahead of them and said nothing.

They reached the edge of the tall grass and the torches suddenly felt more necessary. The path narrowed and the growth pressed in on both sides, and the sound changed.

Out in the open field there had been wind and the distant sounds of the estate behind them.

One of the guards near the front raised a fist and the group slowed.

Lena looked past the guards toward where the path opened slightly into a small clearing.

There were two wooden pens there, rough construction, and she could hear the animals inside them moving with the particular restlessness of things that could sense something wrong nearby.

Then she heard it. A low sound, almost like rain, but wrong. Too rhythmic. Too close to the ground.

"There," one of the guards said quietly.

They were coming out of the growth on the left side of the clearing. Pale and thick, each one the length of a forearm like Ollen had said, moving fast in a way that didn’t match their shape.

They didn’t slither exactly. It was more like they poured, the whole mass of them flowing together over the ground like a single thing with too many parts, catching the torchlight in flashes of wet pale color.

Lena counted quickly and stopped at around eighty before the count became meaningless.

There were more coming out behind the first wave, pushing forward, spreading toward the pens. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

"Formation," Ollen said.

The guards moved into a line across the clearing between the swarm and the pens. The other two drew their longer blades and planted their feet.

The swarm hit them and for a moment it looked manageable. The blades came down in wide sweeping arcs, not stabbing but pressing and crushing. A good number of them died in the first thirty seconds. The guards worked efficiently and without panic.

But the swarm didn’t stop. More came out of the growth to replace the ones dying at the front, and the guards had to keep moving their feet to avoid the ones that slipped through low and fast along the ground.

One guard stamped hard three times in quick succession and swore under his breath. Another dragged his boot across the dirt to scrape something off it.

Ollen stood slightly behind the line with a short blade in his hand, watching the edges, ready for anything that broke around the formation. He moved twice to intercept small groups that had looped wide, cutting them off before they reached the pens from the side. He was quick for his age. Efficient. There was no wasted motion in how he moved.

Lena stood back and watched all of it.

She watched the way the swarm moved as a whole, not just as individual creatures. The way it pressed and tested and redistributed when one angle was blocked.

The way it seemed to have a general direction it was pulling toward even when parts of it were dying. It wasn’t intelligent exactly, not in any way she could name, but it had a kind of gravity to it. Everything bending toward the same center.

After about ten minutes the pressure eased. The swarm thinned, the ones still alive pulling back toward the growth in ones and twos, and the guards held the line until the last of them had retreated.

The clearing went quiet again.

One of the guards was breathing hard. Another was checking his leg where his trousers had been torn at the ankle, inspecting the skin beneath.

Ollen turned to look at her. He wasn’t breathing hard.

"That was a small one," he said.

Lena looked at the edge of the growth where the last of the creatures had disappeared back into the shadow. She thought about the numbers.

Eighty, maybe a hundred in that swarm, and Ollen called it small.

She thought about the Worm Mother sitting somewhere deep in that growth, stationary, producing.

She thought about the patterns she had watched in the swarm’s movement. The direction it had come from. The direction it had pulled back toward.

She thought about what it would look like when they actually found the source.

"This," she thought, "is going to be troublesome."