NOVEL NEXT Chapter Twenty Four
Every night, I killed about three households of pigs, and every day I ate my fill while reinforcing my walls of vines and trees, all while keeping an eye on my piggy-prey’s movements. I got to do plenty of experimenting since I had so much food at my disposal, and I managed to figure out not only how to make my vines more resilient, but also how to make them grow thorns! Honestly, it’s something that I wanted to try for a while now, but since I’d been busy focusing on roaming around, I’d completely forgotten to. Really, this orc town is paying me in dividends, in multiple ways!
Okay, so, I bet you’re wondering how the piggies are taking all of this!
Well, the first night of me being here was relatively quiet, you know? I was a very good assassin, and did all my killings nice and quietly. The excess bodies were all nicely hidden in the houses, and I even made sure to close the shutters on their windows so that no one would be able to peek inside. Sure, there was gonna be a smell after a while, but I wasn’t too worried about it really; If there’s a weird smell, that just means more of them will come to investigate, which’ll really turn the house into a party! But yeah, first night went great, and then I snuck off to trap my little piglets in the murder valley.
The next day, the pigs had noticed that a handful of their fellow orcs were missing, and they went to go looking for them as any good neighbor would. It took them a while before they decided to check the right houses though, but when they saw the decoy ones that I’d left on the other side of town (which I’d coated the insides of with artfully decorated blood sprays), they forgot all about checking my side of the town! Or, at least, most of them did. There were a small few, maybe this pig-family’s friends, that came to check the house that I was hiding in with my bodies, but they went mysteriously missing only a short while later. Crazy, I know.
The second night, the orcs were much more worried and vigilant for some reason, which made it harder to pick off the stragglers, but much easier to quietly kill some families in their homes! This time I took out three houses that were against the left wall of mines, thinking that maybe I could trick the pigs into thinking the ‘monster’ was hiding in one of them. Best to keep them off my trail and all, and also I’m just having a little bit too much fun with this whole murder mystery thing! Anyways yeah, the stupid pigs actually sent a little group of them with weapons into a few of the mines to try and look for the ‘monster’ the next day!
What fools!
I even snuck up behind them and yoinked a few of the pigs away for lunch, which I found hilarious. But then I realized that my house/meat-locker was getting a bit too full, and so I grabbed about 6 of the oldest orcs in my collection and went to experiment on my vine barricades. I’m glad I had that idea, too, ‘cuz it really helped me to burn through more of those bodies quicker. Honestly, I was getting to a point where I thought I might have to just debone them when I ate so that I could eat more and save the bones for when all of this was done, so it’s great that I came across this alternative! I mean, dismantling the orcs is already hard enough, without needing to also yank their bones out, too.
Anyways, that’s how I managed to figure out how to put thorns on my vines, although I failed on my
second experiment, which was trying to grow bark on them as well, like a tree. Guess maybe it’s too unnatural for my magic to handle, or ya know, maybe I just suck at being creative like that. Perhaps when I’m bigger I could pull something like that off, who knows! It wasn’t all that important anyways, since I still had plenty of other side experiments to try.
The third night the pigs were really on their guard, which meant sneakily stealing them in the night wasn’t going to work out so well anymore. Good thing I didn’t really give a damn about all that! I still boldly came over and slaughtered a few houses of them, even if they made a bunch of sound and alerted a bunch of the orcs this time. Who cares? They were going to notice me eventually, and it’s not so bad if now is that time.
Also, side note, but I can’t understand the orc’s language? I couldn’t understand what the goblins were saying either, and the humans were also a little bit muddled and hard, although I could ultimately understand them with enough time. I guess magical monsters just had their own unique language? But I’m magic too, so why don’t I understand it?!
I really hope this doesn’t mean that I’ll also be unintelligible when I talk one day.
Best to use all this free experimenting time to try and check on that, I guess.
By day four the pigs had formed search parties, roaming through the town with their weapons out in search of where I was hiding. They busted down any doors they found that resisted them, which meant I couldn’t hide inside of my meat-locker homes anymore if I wanted to avoid a close-quarters fight. Which was fine, since I took the fight to them! Before they could bust into the home I was hiding in, I busted out of it, and started fighting like an octopus! My tendrils are strong now, I tell you. Picking up a few of the piggies as we fought was a breeze, although the weight was a little tough on my root-legs sometimes. I had much better weight management while my roots were buried, for sure. Maybe it has to do with weight distribution or something? I don’t know, I’m just a plant.
After I bowled through a big bunch of the pigs, the rest ran away with a ton of little squealing noises, which made me wish I could laugh, for sure. Since they knew where I was anyways, I decided to find a nice spot overlooking the town with my tasty newly harvested pigs, and focus on growing a little. If I was gonna learn how to talk and laugh one day, that meant that I needed to focus a bit more on growing for sure! And maybe I’d get a little bit more experimenting done here and there, you know?
Ah, this was the life!
~~~
A week had gone by. I’d managed to weed through about half of the orc population the night after they finally saw me, because a whole bunch of them tried to run away from town and got caught by my vine walls. At first they tried to chop them down like anything sane would have, but when I noticed what was happening and brought my vines to life, well… Of course they didn’t stand a chance!
So yeah, after that, I terrorized the little trapped piggies for one more night, and then I decided I wanted to spend more time focusing on my growing and herded all the pigs into their pens. Oh, and by pens, I mean I put all the orcs into some random shallow mines I’d found and tied them up nice and good. I even put some vine walls at the entrance, just in case they managed to wiggle themselves free! Now I could keep my pigs niiiice and fresh until I needed them! Really, I mean it, spiders truly have the right idea sometimes. I hated them in my previous life, but their tactics are really coming in handy now!
Near the end of the week of growing and experimenting, I’d eaten through almost all of the orcs. Let me tell you, the town looked reeeeal desolate about then, although I was anything but sad about it. It’s what they deserve, I tell you! You eat the forbidden capybaras, and your town gets wiped out. I don’t make the rules, that’s just how it is! Hmph.
Unsurprisingly, a few of the orcs managed to use their super strength (and a couple of the mining tools that I completely forgot were in the mines I’d left them in) to escape from their pens, but I quickly put them back once I noticed they were gone, and it was all fine. But there was one orc, who I’d only gotten around to trying to eat at the end of the week, who realized that escaping outwards was never going to work for him, and so he tried to dig deeper inwards. Honestly, it was pretty clever, and if I didn’t have a deep burning hatred of orcs going on right now, then maybe I would have let him live just from how differently he’d acted. If he had such a different thought process from the others, then maybe he might not have been the type to eat my capybaras, you know?
But yeah, no, he had to get eaten too.
I made a promise, you know?
Gotta keep it!
That’s not all that was interesting about this little incident though. Deep inside the mine, where I’d found the orc digging, there was an interesting little stone that caught my eye. It wasn’t that big, but it stood out because of its blue color. It somehow even looked like it had a symbol engraved on it, even though I doubted that the pig was the one who put it there. Of course I picked it up to take a closer look at it, but before I even knew what I was doing, I’d plopped the thing right down into my mouth!
It was fizzy at first… And then it started exploding like how pop-rocks do inside your mouth! It let off a ton of those tiny little explosions, rocking my digestive acid to and fro, and even making a couple fizzy bubbles here and there. And then when it was done… I felt amazing! I was hardly full, and yet I felt like I’d just gotten more nutrients than if I’d eaten about 20 humans!
I felt like I could take down anything!!!
I could build a whole castle of vines with this stuff!
…What in the hell did I just eat?!