Tunnel Rat-Chapter 382: Brave Girls get Extra Cheese

After making thoroughly sure that nothing was left alive and no more of the things were coming out of the hole Milo went to the small camp where Brutus and the girls were recovering. Buttercup was sitting in a bed of pillows while Brutus examined her legs. "These are deep cuts. I'm going to clean them with iodine and then stitch them up so your regeneration heals them nice."

"Iodine?! That's the stuff Mama puts on people and even Larry doesn't like it!"

"It will sting a little. You have to be brave like Larry. And brave girls get extra cheese."

"I can be brave!"

"Me too!"

Milo thought they'd been more than brave. "You both did great. I was scared, but you two were very brave." He took a small wheel of cheese and cut it in fourths. "Here's a quarter for each of you and a quarter for you Dad. I'm not supposed to have cheese today, so I'm going to split my quarter into thirds and share with all of you." After the cheese was equally divided he set up his tent, put out his teapot, and summoned his Watch Lizard. Both girls were excited to see Georgie again.

"Who's a good boy?"

"Who's a big boy! He's so much bigger!" Rosie and Georgie played a game of fetch the rock while Buttercup rested.

Milo saw Brutus hand her his cheese and wink at her with a finger to his lips. The cheese would put her fiendish regeneration into overdrive. The fight and her wounds would work off the cheese. Brutus and Gendifur had held long discussions with Bleusnout and Old Healer about exactly how much the twins could have. Raising them was a new experience for everyone, but with Larry's example, they had a lot of hope.

With Georgie on watch, Brutus put both of the girls to bed, and Milo took a quick nap. Two hours later, Brutus woke him and Milo took the next watch while the big guard got some sleep. "I'm going for a little scout around, Georgie, you're in charge of the camp." One woof signaled the lizard's understanding. He leaped to the top of the wagon, standing guard, while Milo went back into the area where they had fought the scarabs. Putting on gloves and bringing out some delicate tools, he began to examine a scarab. The word 'corrupted' was foremost in his mind. He'd fought a lot of monsters, but never something with that word in their name. The System message had been odd, too. The messages were often snarky, but that had sounded like a warning.

The scarab was mostly mechanical, with very little organic material. And what was there was a black goo or chunks of brown chitin under the outer metal shell. The metallic parts of the shell and hollow legs were rusty and corroded in places like the metal was breaking down from some reaction. No two scarabs were the same, and some were more heavily corroded than others.

The squirrels and badger were monstrosities created from living creatures. They were still half alive or had been with metallic parts replacing some of the organics. The corruption on the metal was also in the biological areas, rotting muscle and bones. In the cranium of each was a shattered black crystal. A control device? He wasn't sure and put the carcasses with the pile of scarabs.

That only left the Brood Beast, and Rosie had done him the favor of starting the dissection. The outer shell of the claws and main section showed little, if any of the brown rust, and nothing on the tail. The Brood Beast was a much more complex creature than the other creatures and was made of better-quality metal. Milo deployed his Engineer's Workbench and selected some of the specialized tools provided by the last owner. Black Eddy knew his tools! They were a joy to work with. An hour passed as Milo took the creature apart, studying its makeup. The mechanical parts were beautiful. Miniaturized motors gave the tail, legs, and claws their power. They drew power from small, naturally formed crystals.

He took everything apart, taking notes, and then stored them away. He was especially interested in the razor-sharp cutting edges and wanting to know what type of alloy they were composed of. But that needed more time and different tools.

By contrast, the biological parts were foul and stinking, made worse by being cut open and his zealous strikes with Shadowblight to make sure it was dead. Again, he saw the dark crystals embedded in the rotting flesh, and the corruption was everywhere. It was decaying as he watched, and he learned little from it. He brought out a gallon of cleaning fluid from his workbench, cleaned his tools and himself, and then sent it back to whatever strange dimensional space it came from. For now, he buried the remains of the creature under a layer of rock and dirt.

When he returned to the camp, the girls were up and eating snacks, while Brutus continued his nap. Milo started making a meal over his campfire, cooking puffcakes in a frying pan. Whenever he had three made, he whistled low, and the girls and Georgie took one each and went back to playing. It took many puffcakes to fill them up. Finally, he made a stack for himself and one for Brutus and woke him up.

"Puffcakes? Sure. Hand them over. These are the best things to come out of that whole fiasco with the spiders and caravan, and all. Well, and the girls. And Gendifur. A new house. Larry getting better. Hmm, for such a bad time, it was a pretty good time. But puffcakes are still up there."

Milo had to agree with all of that. "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times."

Brutus chuckled, "Catchy, you should start writing."

"Oh, that isn't mine. Someone else wrote it, but I never paid much attention to that book. Just that famous line from it. I may have to go read it."

"Great, and loan it to me when you're done. I like books. Great to take a nap, and pretend you're reading. Get woken up less on my day off. Genny caught on though. At first, she was happy I was reading It Takes a Village to Make the Cheese. My snoring tipped her off. But, now that naptime is over, and the girls are better, I think it's time we go see what sort of trouble we got into. We can leave the moles here, just in case we need to skedaddle out of here and take another route."

Brutus took a look at both girls, checking for wounds and making them wash up before they went adventuring. He had a spare shield in the wagon and got out new picks for the girls. They came bounding down to the wagon to get them, Georgie loping behind.

Milo looked at his pet, "We have to explore a place where some monsters came from. Want to come?" Georgie barked twice and ran in circles around him, excited to go. "Ok, but they have a nasty bite, so keep your distance, and if we run, no heroics.

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Back through the caverns, past the pile of scarabs that now smelled horrible, through the mole tunnels and then the smaller tunnel through the dark iron vein, they went, coming out in the larger cavern they'd only gotten a glimpse of before the creatures had come swarming out. Milo looked at the mine tunnel and tracks. They looked like standard dwarven work, but very old. The pitted iron rails were secured straight to the rock floor with iron spikes. The corrosion matched the other mines Milo had been in. The minecart itself was in poor shape. The wooden sides were rotted and crumbled to the touch.

"I think these are pre-cataclysm mines, from the time of the old city. I'm going to scout ahead with Georgie. Keep the girls here and be ready to either fight or redeploy to the rear and prepare a better position."

"You got it, Scout Master. Me and my assistant guards are on duty, right, girls?" The girls seemed unconvinced. Scouting looked like a fun job. Milo had to agree.

Milo made a point of examining the walls of the room they were in and the start of the tunnel. Like in other tunnels he'd seen, heavy stone pillars and crossbeams were used instead of wood, trees being a rare commodity in the deeps. While dusty and full of small cobwebs, the tunnel was in good shape and didn't look like it would collapse, unlike the tunnels in the area the miners called Shakeytown. This tunnel advanced for fifty feet without a side tunnel and came out into a larger mine shaft. This broader shaft had three sets of rails running parallel and branching into other tunnels. In the dust, Milo saw the tracks of the creatures, coming from the left. He went right, wanting to scout some before stirring up trouble.

After a hundred feet, he took another right, into a smaller tunnel. This one also ended in the vein of Deep Iron ore, but no mining had been done. He went back out and went further. Every hundred feet, a side tunnel had been dug, and each ended in the vast vein of ore. He marked the tunnels he had explored and then continued up the main tunnel to see where it went. Behind him was only silence. No screams, no scuttling.

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The tunnel opened into a vast cavern with huge rock pillars holding up the ceiling. Rails went around the curve of the wall, passing in front of furnaces of some type. Quickly inspecting them, he suspected that the large ceramic furnaces were for smelting the Dark Iron and turning it into 'blooms', large chunks of metal with the impurities pushed to the surface. These would be hammered on an anvil or mechanical trip hammer to work the metal and break off the chunks of slag. Then back into the next furnaces for further refining, and finally a blast furnace to produce steel. It was all here, a full production area where raw ore would be turned into slabs of Dark Steel, awaiting forming into tools, parts, and weapons. By the last furnaces, he saw an area where molten metal was run to over two hundred ingot molds. Some still held the twenty-pound ingots of Dark Steel. He took a few and put them in his stash to test their purity.

What he didn't see was coal, charcoal, and coke to power the furnaces. It was impossible to tell more. There were no bodies here, and anything made of paper would have been destroyed long ago. It would take work to use this place, fuel, and people. That wasn't something to think about though, not with so much more to explore, and the possibility of creatures in here. He retreated and began looking down the left-hand tunnels. Some ended in cave-ins, and one had possibly been a barracks or a living area. The tunnel nearest the furnace room was storage for fuel. He found bins full of charcoal and high-grade black coal, perfect for making steel with little sulfur content. Part of the mystery of the place solved, he returned to Brutus and the girls.

"What did you find? Treasure?"

"More bugs? Any big ones?"

"Some neat stuff, but no creatures. It looks like a place the old dwarves set up to mine and process the ore in this vein. It's huge and extends hundreds of feet in the direction I explored. I think we can all move up to the center area. At the very least, there is room to run, and it seems stable."

With the full group in tow, trying to make little noise, and sometimes succeeding, they explored in the other direction. Two hundred feet down, they came to another large tunnel that went to the left as far as Milo could see. Brutus took out his map. "This heads in the right direction. It could cut off a lot of digging. We'll have to follow it when we've seen what else is in here."

They continued on, following the tracks down the main corridor. Along one wall, the dust was disturbed, showing where the scarabs and other creatures had traveled to assault them. Those tracks continued to a set of large metal doors, one bent from heavy blows from the other side, and partially open. A little light was coming from it. Milo had everyone stay back as he snuck up to the doors and carefully looked inside.

The room beyond was a huge coal mine, with the black fuel showing along most of the walls. Supports held up the ceiling. Steps led down into the room from the doors, with ramps on the side for the rails. In the center, loose coal, metal ingots, ore, and the remains of machines were formed into a large nest. Metal eggs were everywhere, and sitting on top of them was an immense, mostly mechanical snake. It was the color of rust and pitted with corruption. As Milo looked at it, he could just make out the form of a gigantic Copperhead, and see where some patches of copper skin still showed. It uncoiled clumsily, clanking as it did. The head came up and pivoted toward him, and one large mechanical eye irised open, revealing a glowing green orb that cast a baleful ray of light where it looked.

Milo had a sinking feeling, even before a long black tongue came out, flicking in the air and tasting it. The eye pivoted in his direction, bathing him in their light.

Warning: Ancient Corrupted Copperhead Nest Guardian sees you!

And, I've got to be honest, it isn't thrilled to have you visit. Something about your smell? Maybe your past transgressions against its kind? OOOH, or wiping out all those mechanical bugs yesterday! Yeah, that would do it. This snake doesn't like you at all. But then, what snake does?

(If you haven't figured out yet that this is a BAD place to be, you aren't as smart as I thought you were.)