We set out for the oasis the next morning, the same four of us — me, Junha, Jiyeon, Seojin — following an old lizardman's map scratched into the dirt.
We smelled the water before we saw it. After two days of dust and a dead-gold sun, it hit like a promise: green, somewhere ahead, real. We came up over a low rise expecting relief.
What we got was the caterpillar.
It was wrapped around the entire oasis. I mean around it — a body as thick as a bus, segment after armored segment, coiled into a full ring with the green water cupped in the middle like something it was hoarding. Its head alone was the size of a car, and it had the lazy stillness of a thing that had never once in its life been afraid of anything.
Seojin made a small sound. "That's. That's a big worm."
"Caterpillar," I said.
"It's the size of a train."
"Still a caterpillar."
And here's the part that made me smile, despite everything: I knew that thing. Not personally — but I knew what it was, and better still, I knew what it was worth. The first cycle taught me a lot of useless misery and a handful of genuinely useful facts, and one of them was this: a full-grown brood-caterpillar, killed intact, is one of the single most valuable kills on the early board. The Universal Merchant Union pays a fortune for the carapace, the glands, the silk. Men hunt these one good season and retire.
We'd come for water. We were about to leave with water and a fortune.
"Change of plan," I said. "We're not going around it. We're killing it."
Junha looked at me. "That?"
"That."
I'd come ready. The interdimensional weapons we'd picked up at the colony weren't decoration — one piece in particular, a long-barreled thing that fired a lance of compressed force instead of a bullet, the merchant had all but sworn could punch through plate. Today we'd find out whether he'd lied.
I laid it out fast, low and serious, the way Dad had taught me and the way a thousand years had taught me before him. The caterpillar was enormous, but enormous is slow, and armored is only armored where the armor is. I'd watched these things die before. I knew where the seams were — the soft band between the head and the first segment, the place it had to flex to move.
"Junha, you're the distraction. Make it lift its head — don't get clever, don't get close, just make it look at you. Jiyeon, you stay back, you stay safe, and you don't move unless I'm bleeding. Seojin—"
"I'll hold the spare ammunition and scream encouragement," Seojin said.
"Perfect."
It went almost exactly to plan, which never happens twice, so I'll take it. Junha got its attention — hurled a rock the size of his own head with that monstrous strength of his and cracked it off the thing's face hard enough to make it rear. The head came up. The seam opened. And I put a lance of compressed force straight through the soft band beneath its jaw.
The merchant hadn't lied.
It went down like a collapsing building, every segment crashing in on the last, and the ground jumped under our boots. For a moment none of us spoke. Then the dust settled, and the oasis lay there gleaming, ours.
We went to fill the water. That's when Junha found them.
"...Minho." His voice had changed. "You need to see this."
Tucked beneath the curve of the dead mother, sheltered in the warm dark she'd coiled herself around, were the young. A dozen of them — caterpillars the size of housecats, soft and segmented, blinking up at us with too many eyes and making a small confused chirp now that the thing that had been protecting them wasn't moving anymore.
I stood there a second longer than I needed to.
I'd just killed a mother guarding her children. I, of all people — the man who came back from the end of everything for no reason other than to stand between my family and the dark — had gone and done exactly that to something else.
I didn't say it out loud. I didn't pretend I hadn't noticed it, either.
"We're not leaving them," I said.
Jiyeon was already kneeling in the middle of them, letting one climb clumsily up onto her hand. "Obviously we're not," she said, like I'd suggested something stupid.
So we filled every container we'd carried from the oasis the mother had died to keep — clean, cold, real water, enough to matter — loaded a dozen baffled baby monsters on top of it, and went home.
The reaction at the house was about what you'd expect.
Mom went very still at the sight of a dozen cat-sized insects spilling out of our packs. Dad opened his mouth, looked at me, looked at the babies, and shut it again — a man choosing his battles. Seojin launched into a wildly inflated retelling of the fight in which he played a far more central role than "spare ammunition" had strictly required.
And Miyoung took one look at the whole squirming pile and fell completely, hopelessly in love.
"They're adorable," she breathed, scooping up two at once. They chirped at her. She made a sound only dogs could hear. "That's it. These are mine. I'm taking care of these cuties, and nobody is allowed to argue with me."
Nobody argued with her.
We had water now — real, secured — and a small fortune in brood-caterpillar to sell the Union whenever we were ready. We had a dozen new mouths I was fairly sure ate leaves and slightly less sure didn't also eat people. We'd had, somehow, another good day.
We ate dinner with a baby caterpillar inching across the table toward the rice. Miyoung named four of them before the meal was through and forgot two of the names immediately.
And one by one — in a house that now held an arsenal, four system-blessed kids, a gangster, my mother's cooking, and twelve monster larvae my baby sister had legally adopted in her heart — we went up to our separate rooms and slept.
The first time, the oasis killed everyone who ever reached it.
This time, it just got us pets.
— To be continued.