(Rewritten) Ch. 43 – Sweet Lures

"There's always another way to use your tools. Maybe they're even productive."

– Road Rash, during his stream, while using a fragmentation mine as a bottle opener

***

Tinea, there's a large group of Antithesis heading your way. I believe they've picked up the scent of the recent Antithesis deaths and are trying to find the source. At your current speed, you will meet them where the Four is hiding.

"Large?"

Two Sixes, twelve Fours, and thirty Threes.

"Oh shit, that's a lot." Leah didn't have the experience to take on that many, and I didn't have a shopping strip to turn into a killzone. But…points! Finally! "Show me?"

Tynea threw up a new video, displaying said group winding through sickly trees, roughly two hundred meters out. They were moving slowly, the smaller units sticking to the large Sixes, with several Threes ranging further out and sniffing for tracks.

"Leah?" I came to a stop and shared the visuals with her, watching as she bit her lips as she steered the drone this way and that, to get a better look.

After a few seconds, she spoke up. "I guess we can outrun them? But they'd just follow our tracks, right?"

"Yeah. Well, until it starts raining, anyway. But I don't think running for the next half hour is a good idea, we'll just run into more and more aliens. And even if they lose us in the rain, they might still stumble across the facility."

"Mmm." She nodded. "That, and I promised myself that I'd start making points properly…"

I nodded as well. "I want to actually take them on. We've got enough points to set up a bit of an ambush ourselves and kill the fuckers. Honestly, a few…noiseless grenades would do it. Yeah. I've got some that suck stuff in, rather than explode."

"Okay. Let's do it."

And, just like that, we did do it.

Leah and I kept moving until we came to a good spot just past a small clearing. There were a few natural trenches, deep enough that I could kneel in them and only expose my head. Leah was a little larger and had to actually sit and get her bum dirty.

I bought both of us three Mark I shunt grenades each, with the warning to stay a good ten meters away from them when they went off, and another ten modified ones, for four points each, that we could set off remotely. These I buried in shallow holes several meters apart throughout the clearing, and I placed one of the slop jars in the center, with the lid off, just to make sure the aliens would actually move onto open ground, rather than stick to the trees around it.

Shaking the dirt and mud off my hands, I glanced at the counter. Three points left. Enough for either one additional grenade, or some ammunition.

Ah. Our lives actually depended on our ability to make a kill with what we had prepared—not enough points for new equipment, and we weren't going to find any guns lying around out here. Nevermind the growing horde we'd be facing.

Yup, I'd rather not. Maybe it was time to get creative and invent a new shopping strip-independent killbox.

"How long?"

Perhaps ten minutes. Look out for model Ones.

Oh, right. We hadn't seen any of those for a while. "Leah? I want to see if I can do something else to make sure the xenos run into our trap. Tynea warns me of aerial scouts, though. Can you help keep an eye out?"

She looked around, and her gaze settled on the largest and healthiest tree at the border of the glade. "Do you think you could jump me up there?" she asked, pointing up at a solid-looking fork in its branches, already walking that way.

I caught up to her, had her get on my back, and then I catapulted both of us up from one bough to another, until we finally arrived at the fork she'd indicated.

She got off with a bit of an out-of-breath smile, and said, "We gotta do that more often."

Giggling from her expression, I replied, "You're a samurai. It's just a question of murdering lots of aliens until you can do it yourself." Not that I'd ever say no. "Alright, Leah. Does this spot work?"

She sat down in the fork, and peered out between the healthier-than-average leaves. With a nod, she replied, "Yeah, this works."

After a last look around myself that didn't reveal anything new close enough to bother us, I dropped down and ran over to the jar, turning to where the aliens would arrive in a few minutes.

The jar would hopefully get them to actually enter the glade, but I wanted more reach for the lure. I had an idea, a bit of a fallback to a previous method I'd used; lots of strings of silk, but spread into a huge triangle that would terminate at the jar.

But I didn't think just silk would do, I needed to actually turn them into a scent lure.

I spun a bit of string and tried to soak it in the jar, but quickly realized that would take too long. Fiddling several hundred meters of it through the jar wasn't feasible.

Scent. Something that smelled tasty.

Uh… Oh dear.

Breastmilk. It positively reeked of good nutrients, at least to my antennae. Silk soaked with even just a little of it would be very effective, I hoped. I'd thicken the scent closer to the jar, so they'd get drawn in.

I attached the end of my first millimeter-thin rope to the ground right next to the jar, and walked several meters backwards, where I touched it to my nipple after activating the stilling functions. The silk absorbed the drop of milk as easily as the drizzle, swelling slightly. And, indeed, I could taste the sweet scent wafting from it.

I turned around, and lifted my tail above my shoulder, like a gantry. From there I fed the string past my breast with one hand, and held it out sideways with my other, recognizing that I didn't need to glue the string to the forest floor - I could just drag it from tree to tree as I ran along, letting the fibroin absorb another drop of milk every step.

Yeah, that made things much easier.

Over the next three or four minutes, I sprinted back and forth, building the triangle and adding drag lines to fill it in. It was strangely reminiscent of my filling out the panels of Leah's new top, earlier, which made me think about her again. There were times where she showed a…worsening fragility.

If I wasn't mistaken, things had taken a rapid turn for the worse just after she'd gotten pinned by the Four against the tree. That seemed to shake her badly, enough that I had to actually get her out of a funk. She'd basically asked me for permission to call her people, instead of just stating that she was going to do it right then.

That…wasn't normal. Not for an adult. Nor did I associate that sort of helplessness with her.

When I first met her, she'd been raw and ragged, and she'd had to recover from her injuries. I'd provided for her, literally and figuratively, and it had seemed to have stabilized her. She'd teased me freely, and been emotionally warm. Secure. Free, in a way. But over the last few hours, with every fight, I'd detected more and more uncertainty and fear instead. And, understandably, a very strong need to go home.

But was it just getting home that she wanted, or was it to escape from…here? Was it just the things that had happened to her, or was she collapsing from everything coming at her at once, also? And there's also the fact that her fragility showed after fighting, specifically. Did she have issues with combat itself, or would she be fine facing Antithesis in more normal circumstances?

I wasn't sure if I could do anything for her I wasn't already doing. There was no stopping for us—Leah didn't have the luxury of just not fighting, she needed the points to keep herself and those she cared for, safe.

I'd be willing to sponsor her—but she wouldn't accept that, I didn't think. Maybe if I was the assigned "breadwinner," sure. Maybe if she was emotionally whole. But we weren't, and she wasn't, and she needed to fight.

Nodding to myself, I figured I'd just continue to help her de-stress often. I'd be physically warm and initiate lots of contact. Leah loved hugs as much as I did. I could totally see her cuddling her 'littles' in a big pile (and I so wanted to be a part of that!). And I'd pick her up and give her new nice things to focus on. But ultimately?

Ultimately she needed a therapist, which I sure wasn't.

Well, enough of that. I wasn't gonna work a miracle for Leah.

So. I finished up all the scented silk strings, with not a lot of time or milk to spare. Tynea had painted a red blob on my minimap, letting me track the location of the alien group we'd ambush momentarily, and if they got any closer, they'd catch sight of me through the trees.

On the way to Leah's tree, I called her through my aug. "Leah, I'm done. They'll hit my funnel in just a few seconds. Do you want to stay in the tree, or do you want to use the trench?"

I leapt up to Leah in a single jump, and waited as she considered the choice. She'd have an easier time of staying safe in the tree, but even if she'd gotten fairly used to the fake plasticky proprioception of the Sleeve, she was still quite clumsy.

Oh. That might just be multiplying the stress, too. Should I suggest full cybernetic replacements first chance we get? Or is the escape vehicle more important?

Focus.

She turned to me, and answered my question. "I'll stay up here. If you stay on the ground, you'll be out of range of my gun's muffler."

"Alright."

Tinea, the Antithesis have detected your silk lures.

The video feed of the group showed the group hitting the funnel. The leading Threes began tracking along the lines; it was an interesting study of Antithesis teamwork dynamics.

Half the group split off and wandered away at an angle, until they came across the next string. There, the process repeated itself, until eventually four Threes arrived at the outermost string on one side, where again, two split and ranged further out. When they didn't find more strings at some vaguely defined distance, they turned to amble back towards their brethren.

The same spiel played out on the other side of the original group. As a whole, the aliens were slowly but surely mapping out the funnel, despite lacking conscious awareness of their actions.

Eventually, all the groups had balanced themselves around the Sixes on either side of the ever-tightening funnel. Just in time for a breeze to catch the smell of the food jar.

The entire blob of Antithesis froze for a second as every nose turned towards the new scent of biomass, before they surged forward.

***