87. Down by Two

Down by Two

I frowned as some subconscious voice screamed that the whole situation smelled wrong, which counted as a pun, I guess.

We were missing something. Something we could not see. Something that felt a little familiar.

I checked the air around us again with Force Sense. If something was in the air, maybe I could find where it was coming from?

That attempt partially worked.

It did not reveal exactly what was in the air around us, because the sense was nowhere near sensitive enough, but it did detect that something was present.

It was not gas. I could not sense gas at all. It was more like… dust?

“Guys, I think I need to sit down,” Chi Li murmured, and then actually sat, slipping as she did. “I think those earlier fights exhausted me more than I realized. What about you?”

“Just a little sleepy,” Zhao Mancheng grunted. “I think we can rest for a—”

“No!”

“No!”

Zhao Linshou and I shouted at the same time, glaring suspiciously at everything around us.

The old hunter raised his portable cannon, but there was nothing to shoot and no visible enemy to fight.

“We need to leave. Right now. All of us.”

I completely agreed, though I was not sure why.

Zhao Linshou gave me the answer.

“There is no exit in this room. The enemy wants us to stay here. We came in ready to fight and push through the last few rooms. Now there is a strange smell, and you want to sit down and rest?”

Yes. That was it.

That was what my intuition, or paranoia, had been trying to tell me.

Instead of watching ourselves or the room around us, I stared harder at the only other notable thing in this place: the captives.

They were not in cages that would be hard to escape. Nobody guarded them.

They had not even been trapped, as we had half suspected.

Or so we thought.

When I pushed Force Sense to its limit, I detected slightly denser particles in the air the captives exhaled.

Maybe mist, maybe dust, maybe something else. The only reason I could notice them at all was that there were enough of them before they dispersed into the air.

Then tentacles shot out of every captive’s mouth, searching for things to grab.

Hundreds of tongue-like things wrapped around me in the instant of my surprise, cocooning me from head to toe.

They did not feel like tongues. They were more like flexible wires made of tough fiber wrapped in a thin layer of greasy flesh.

They were right under my nose, and the nauseatingly sweet, rotten smell became clear.

We might have noticed it earlier, but two straight weeks of human corpses and mass death had trained all of us to tolerate that kind of stench.

When I tried to escape the first time, the tentacles tightened. To my surprise, their grip was fairly strong.

Right. Constant Force only prevented me from being trapped through supernatural means. These tentacles were clearly physical, and their disgusting worm-like writhing against my body made that very easy to remember.

I flew upward, but their weight dragged me down.

Through the thin cocoon, Force Sense showed hundreds of fake captives trying to hold me in place, tangling together like a carpet woven from pure ugliness while more tentacles grew out of their bodies.

I was almost certain I knew what they were.

Improved versions of the plant zombies I had fought before.

Faster, stronger, tougher, with tentacles more resilient than the originals.

Unfortunately for them, since our last meeting, I had become stronger too.

By an order of magnitude.

Those tentacles were more like strings than ropes, and enough strings could hold someone down when leverage was unavailable.

But Nearby Object Manipulation meant I always had leverage and a way to use it. In a few seconds, I tore the cocoon open.

Those few seconds, however, had been enough for the others in the group to be caught in similar cocoons. The enormous explosions and ripping sounds coming from one of them indicated that Zhao Linshou was still fighting.

I was flying toward him when Chi Li’s cocoon exploded, and…