(A/N: Another story. Hope everyone enjoys~)
-x-X-x-
Beckett swings down from a massive outstretched mandible and lands silently, as he’s learned to do. No need to disturb the locals. As he makes his way inside of the Hive, he reflects that really, all of this started back in the Barrens. It was odd that it’d led him here, to this place… but here he was all the same.
Back in the Barrens, it’d not been anything much. Some scorpions, some bugs… some hives. Nothing like the Hive that he was in now. In Beckett’s mind, at least, he’d begun to differentiate the two between the capitalization of the letter H. There were hives… and then there were Hives. The first real Hive that he’d run into had to have been in Tanaris. The goblins of Gadgetzan had even come up with names for the places. The Noxious Lair. The Gaping Chasm. More dramatic than Beckett would have expected from the money-minded little green creatures.
But then, the Tauren of Camp Mojache had named the Silithid Hive in Feralas the Writhing Deep, and the one in Un’Goro Crater had become known as the Slithering Scar. So perhaps it was something about the man-sized bugs that provoked dramatic reactions and terror and horror, which in turn created those ridiculous names.
Stopping quite abruptly, Beckett pushes himself back against the tunnel wall, uncaring of how slimy and sticky it is. He watches as one of the bugs, a large beetle-shaped thing, walks right past him without pausing. The ones that were constantly on the move like this… they were usually fairly passive. He hadn’t had to start a fight with them yet. He’d taken to referring to those ones as the tunnellers and burrowers. They were much more focused on their tasks than on protecting the Hives.
Didn’t mean he was going to get in their way though. Only starting to move again once the bug was past, Beckett sees one of the more threatening Silithid up ahead. This one is very much aggressive, and only through some well-timed, well-practiced distraction is Beckett able to slip past it, and deeper into the cave system, into the Hive.
It was honestly something of a breath of fresh air, finally making it to Silithus where the majority of the man-sized bugs seemed to roam. At least here there was the Cenarion Hold, home to a group that called themselves the Cenarion Circle. He was fairly certain that they would have been a lot more disgusted with him given his condition, but they had bigger problems on their hands. Entire swarms of them, in fact.
At the end of the day, where the tauren of Camp Mojache and the goblins of Gadgetzan had come up with silly names for the hives dotting Tanaris, Feralas, and Un’Goro, the Cenarion Circle was a bit more… logical. Hive’Ashi to the North. Hive’Regal to the Southeast. Hive’Zora to the Southwest. Right now, Beckett was deep within Hive’Regal, which in his humble opinion, had the worst bugs of all three Hives.
He’d taken to calling them Hive Lords, and without a doubt, they were the single strongest creatures he’d had to face alone since he’d been risen into undeath. Unfortunately, he did have to face them… and as Beckett rounds the corner, and finally sees what he’s come here for, he sees the Hive Lord next to it as well.
A grimace stretches across his half-skinless undead face, but Beckett creeps forward all the same. He stops a way off, still hidden in the shadows, still using the dark, dank nature of the Hive against it’s own inhabitants. There, he takes two vials out, and begins applying the poisons to his daggers. His face sets into a more determined expression as he does so, the grimace washed away. He’s going to do what he has to do… there’s no going back now, not when his prize is so damn close.
Once his poisons have been applied, Beckett creeps just a little closer. The Hive Lord chitters, as if it can sense him, turning in his direction, but Beckett is already tossing a small little packet of blasting powder on the other side of the creature. It’s not enough to hurt a fly… but it’s a perfect means to distract the Hive Lord. As the massive bug turns towards the distraction, Beckett crouches down… and then springs forward, both daggers out as he launches himself onto the Hive Lord’s back and sinks his blade’s into its carapace.
He has a couple of seconds before the creature recovers from the initial stunning blow and begins to fight back, and Beckett capitalizes on them, doing as much damage as he can. What follows is a short and entirely brutal fight, mostly by necessity. If he doesn’t want the Hive Lord to call it’s friends in, if he doesn’t want a tunneller to stumble across them while they’re fighting and attack him as well, he has to end this quick.
End it he does, though it’s by no means an easy fight, and at the end of it, Beckett’s flesh is torn, and more bones are poking out than usual, that’s for certain. Once the bug has breathed it’s last, Beckett slumps back against the cave wall and begins to drink a few tinctures to recover his health and repair his damaged undead body. Heh, health… bit of a misnomer for an undead like him, that.
Pushing such thoughts away, Beckett pushes himself up onto his feet a moment later and looks to his prize. It looks sort of like an egg-sack… but he knows better. He’s been out here in Silithus for weeks now, mapping out the Silithid Hives, scouting through them, discovering everything that they had to offer. Reaching down, Beckett pulls his mining pick out of his pack, and after making sure that there are no other bugs waiting to ambush him from behind, he swings the pick down into the ‘egg-sack’.
He works hard and he works fast. When delving deep into the Hives of Silithus, that was the only way TO work. Chunks of teal ore carve off as Beckett takes his mining pick to the Ooze-Covered Rich Thorium Vein again and again. Each piece of Thorium Ore will sell for about half a gold, and he can usually manage to collect a few dozen before he needs to return back to Cenarion Hold for the day.
But the Thorium… the Thorium isn’t even the real treasure. It happens very rarely, to be perfectly honest. One in twenty-five or so, if he’s calculated correctly? It just so happens that this vein is the lucky one in twenty-five. When he sees the glowing glitter, Beckett strikes again and watches as the Arcane Crystal is dislodged from the thoroughly mined Rich Thorium Vein.
Falling to his knees, setting his pick aside, the undead rogue picks up the Arcane Crystal, holding the glowing golden gem in his hands. This… this is why he’s out here in Silithus, dealing with these damnable bugs day after day. This is why he’s risking his unlife. Cleaning the last bits of ooze off of the Arcane Crystal, Beckett stares at the thing greedily.
Truth be told, he barely understood what they were used for. Oh, he had some idea. They were magical, hence the name. And he knew that Alchemists, specifically those that specialized in Transmutation, could turn them into Arcanite Bars, which were then used for a variety of purposes by Blacksmiths and the like.
Still, while Beckett had recently begun dabbling in engineering, making gadgets that were just as prone to blow up in his face or turn him into a chicken as help him, he wasn’t much of an inventor. Yet. For now, all the Arcane Crystal represented to him was gold. Sweet, sweet gold.
Prices changed for a variety of the goods that Beckett sold at the Orgrimmar Auction House. But Thorium Ore and Arcane Crystals, those stayed steady. For a piece of Thorium Ore, he could get half a gold. For a single Arcane Crystal, he could command a price of forty. Not forty silver, but forty gold. Grinning greedily, feeling the closest thing to happiness that he’s felt since he was risen into undeath, Beckett slips the Arcane Crystal into a special pouch at his side, and then collects the Thorium Ore and secures that too.
Then, he slings his mining pick back over his shoulders and rises from his kneeling position. Stepping past the corpse of the Hive Lord he’d killed in order to gain access to this vein, Beckett falls back into the shadows, slinking along quietly and carefully yet again. After all, he’s not done yet. The day is still young, and while Beckett is confident that eventually, the Cenarion Circle and whoever they can convince to help them will have to do something about the Silithid and their slow encroaching march on Kalimdor, that day is not today.
For now, the Hives of Silithus are his to plunder.
))