Day 2.4

August tromped back towards his camp and stopped by the [Lean-to], studying it from the side. There wasn’t anything in place to stop, or protect from, anything from coming in the front or the sides of it.

He had something like forty odd stones of varying sizes sitting in his inventory, and he thought he might be able to stack them together to create at least a partial barrier on the open sides of the structure.

August thought he could try and hunt down some clay or even just dig up some surface dirt to pack the rocks together enough to keep it stable. Then again, if he was planning on digging up any dirt at all, he may as well start with the hole he’d been avoiding. He tested his hands for a moment, clenching and unclenching them gently, and decided to just push forward.

He pulled the [Wooden Shovel] from his inventory and moved several meters away to avoid destabilising the ground around his immediate camp. Ladybug followed after him, once more restrained to waddling along the grass like the rest of the ground dwellers.

August lifted his tool and then thrust it down into the grass—it sunk down several inches. The ground was far softer than he’d expected, most likely due to its proximity to the lake. He pushed against the top of the shovel, leveraging it back towards the ground and loosened a chunk of grass-topped soil. He realigned his shovel and then staked it down again, aiming for the edge of the first hole, and then did it again, and again, and again—digging was an incredibly repetitive task.

August bent down and lifted a big clump of the dirt up by the grass and dumped it by the hole before using his hands to start scooping out the loose soil. Then he went back to shovelling, doing his best to keep each movement slow, unhurried and as energy conservant as possible.

Ladybug plopped down beside the slowly widening hole, its body language seemingly puzzled at what he was trying to do. August sighed at the unvocalised judgment—digging holes mustn’t have been something that [Efkini] were very experienced with, then again, neither was he.

August leaned against the shovel, dragging his dirty arm against his face in an attempt to clear some of the building sweat from running down into his eyes and no doubt smearing more grime across it instead.

A dull thump noise drew his attention, and when he looked down, he found Ladybug stabbing at the hole with one of its chain spikes. It reeled it back in, clicking back into place, and then after a moment of careful aiming, it burst forward again, sinking deep into the soil once more—August started laughing at the sight.

“You’re going to help me dig, huh?” August snickered. “We’ll be done in no time at all.”

Another thump rang out as Ladybug continued its earthen assault, sending sprays of soil and grass up with each attack. August followed the monster’s lead, sinking his own tool back into the ground and letting his mind wander away from the mindless task.

August had been thinking about the [Delegate] skill ever since he’d set Ladybug to guard duty. There were many different tasks available, and he was almost certain he’d seen [Excavation] in there somewhere.

[Efkini] as a whole didn’t seem particularly suited to digging, even if Ladybug seemed to be enthusiastic about helping out. [Otrogon] might have been able to do a bit better with its larger legs and feet, but there might be other types of monsters in Devil’s Nest that were more suitable for a task like digging a massive hole in the ground.

[Efkini] lacked hands, which meant that their ability to pick things up was basically non-existent—they could stake a spike into an object and pull it along behind it, sure, but actually retrieving things without damaging them? They seemed more akin to hunting monsters, something that could kill from a distance while avoiding danger by staying mobile and out of reach.

[Otrogon], on the other hand, seemed like it might be good at gathering materials—August had personally witnessed one of them ripping Bamboo straight out of the ground without any visible effort and toppling clumps of the stuff by biting it off at the base. If he could [Tame] one of them, he could follow it around, stuffing all the Bamboo it toppled into his inventory. He might even be able to ride on its back if it let him.

The problem he kept coming back to was, [Tame] sucked—Ladybug was a unique case, as far as he could tell. With [Absorb], she could sense Mana and had been willing to remain non-violent with him due to her apparent fascination with the feeling of the spell.

If he was going to tame an [Otrogon], he would have to come into conflict with it, and the thought honestly terrified him. Between its massive size, too-wide mouth, its human-like teeth, and the unnatural lack of facial features—it was complete nightmare fuel.

“There were small ones,” August grunted, burying the shovel back into the dirt.

Near that massive one he’d seen, there had been small ones, the size of dogs perhaps—it was hard to tell given the distance he’d seen them from and the size disparity between each of them. Either way, he could try to capture a young monster—a Level 1 [Otrogon], if they existed—that seemed like it would be far more tolerable than approaching any of the ones that were roughly the size of a car.

Then again, he had no idea how long it would take one of them to reach adulthood or how fast they grew. Until it reached a certain size, it would likely be useless for gathering anything, and that would defeat the purpose of taming one in the first place.

The pile of dirt was growing, and the hole was almost two feet deep at this point—given the rate at which they were working, the hole would be big enough to stand in within a month. August sighed, dropping the [Wooden Shovel] back into his inventory and then bending down to the dirt pile.

He scooped up two handfuls of dirt and then tried to put it into his inventory—he muttered a half-hearted thank you to the system when it actually worked before starting to push as much of the pile into his inventory as he could.

Ladybug seemed to draw in by the mysteriously vanishing soil, and August couldn’t help but feel like a magician showing off to an audience. Once he’d gotten all of it, he stood back up and moved back to the camp and sat down cross-legged beside the left side of the [Lean-to]. He began removing stones and placing them down on the ground, straightening them out until a single row lined the edge of the shelter.

Then he dumped some of the soil out and began packing it down around the rocks, filling in the gaps and creating a flat plane of dirt on top for the next layer.

Basic Stonewall Blueprint Unlocked

He repeated the steps, placing the second layer of rocks down on top and then using his collected soil to pack it in snugly. A third and fourth layer came next, and then he leant back on his hands to study his handy work. The blueprint knowledge told him that if he went any higher than that without further widening the dirt layer, he would be at risk of having the entire wall topple over.

Ladybug stopped next to it, her topmost spike barely peeking out over the top, and he wondered if the wall would prevent anything at all from coming inside. He’d just have to keep adding more dirt as he continued digging the [Summon] pit.

“One wall down, two more to go,” August sighed.