Eric kept sneaking through the cavern, hours after the others had left. He had no skill in stealth or ambushing, but centipedes didn't have many of the sense-organs benefitting mammals, anyway, including any form of eyesight besides light and dark detection, or "hearing" as a sense with air as a medium. The worst he could do was create vibrations in the ground that attracted their attention, and watching his footing carefully was helping with that. Just had to keep up the soft footwork... Every so often, a centipede would clamber over and brush against him, and he would telepathically force it to ignore him and move on. Hell, with these things being driven entirely by instinct, without a conscious mind of any sort, he could practically order the entire colony to do his bidding. But that would be godmodding, and unlike some people, he had a sense of fun and good narration (lookign at you here, ZTG!) And a love of explosions, among other forms of mass destruction. As he walked along, Eric placed charges Wierd had made in fault lines. There was an active transform fault going through this area, the plates locked and storing up energy over the last few centuries, and if he was careful about placement and timing of the explosives, he could disturb the slumbering giant just enough to collapse this unnaturally large chasm. It was practically rigged to collapse, anyway. The entire thing was a massive limestone cavern, formed from water, and bits of the ceiling crumbled down every so often with the shifting of billions of arthropods. Even a tiny shifting of rock, perhaps the explosions themselves, and the entire roof would collapse. Investigating the walls themselves had proven that the centipedes hadn't dug the cavern, or anything within it, and were simply conforming to the environment around them. This was almost too easy.
After the last charge was placed, he began making his way back to the exit. A significant portion of the centipedes had wandered out into the nighttime air, probably to hunt for game. When he had reached the wall, he found two mature centipedes, each about 8 feet long and a foot thick, confirmed they were of opposite gender telepathically, and then ordered them to permanently enter his service and follow his commands. He led them down the tunnel to the tower a hundred yards or so, the explosives Wierd had engineered would detonate once he blew the one charge he'd run a wire too. He quickly orchestrated a large cave-in of the tunnel behind him to prevent a shockwave through the air from affecting him, making sure the wire wasn't damaged. A second after pressing the pin, there came a thunderous boom and the ground shook violently, both from the explosion and the tiny shifting of the local fault blocks. Eric was already prone and had ordered the centipedes to lay over him to protect him from debri, but none fell, as he'd thought would be the case after crossing a fault line to an adjacent block. The fault, however, had shifted a full 8 inches to the left after the explosions and mini-quake, and the tunnel was thus split to a degree. Oh what fun!
He began digging a stairway to the surface to survey the extent of the damage, praying that the roof had at least mostly collapsed and many of the centipedes would be dead. Indeed, when he reached the surface, there was a massive depression, at the bottom of which was debri, and gore. So much gore! Some of the centipedes were still alive, but were stunned and confused enough, flashing their psychadelic patterns, to ignore him as he walked back down the stairs and down tunnel toward the tower. They'd still need some moderate clean-up, and those out hunting were certainly alive, but his work was done and the nest was effectivel destroyed. The colony would be trying to move to a new home, at that point, making them vulnerable to most any means of attack. It was dawn, and centipedes didn't like the sunlight.
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Topic: If Bay Forum were a Mountain Hall, continued... FULL DISCLOSURE (Read 265991 times)