Nearly kills a hundred people without being noticed

The only thing that occurred to me was to take the Stranger route.

There was a reason that Strangers were one of the more feared classes, and the thing that was going to make this harder was that I didn’t speak the language. Still, I waiting until I found six different people alone, and then I leaped down on them, shoving myself down into the mouths and lungs until they suffocated to death. As they thrashed around, I used my tentacles to keep them from being able to strike the walls or any other structures.

I then took their forms and slipped into their uniforms, which were less like uniforms and more like clan colors. People wore different outfits, but the colors were consistent, and the Celtic needlework on their shirts seemed to indicate some kinds of military rank.

Six bodies went into the fire, and then I was moving out. I started by seeking out single individuals, which wasn’t hard on the bottom levels, as everyone seemed to be working on their own tasks. Nobody seemed to be expecting anything, and so the first thirty people I killed died without any problems at all. There were others in groups that spoke to me, and I was forced to use body language to guess what they were trying to say.

I couldn’t respond, of course, but I tried using shrugs at appropriate points, or to make myself seem like I was busy with other tasks, all in order to get close enough to kill them.

One man managed to dodge the portal opening beneath him; he was more suspicious than the others, probably because things had gotten unusually quiet in the part of the ship which should have been filled with the sounds of footsteps and people doing whatever maintenance duties they were supposed to.

***

I could hear the sounds of some murmuring upstairs, and so when a group came down to check on us, I simply gathered all of me together and killed them before they left the stairs. I took their forms and headed up to take care of their companions, hoping they wouldn’t notice the differences of their knot-work until they were dead.

I’d killed a hundred and fifty people by this point. The level above had the people working on the steam engines. If I killed them, the ship would be dead in the water without people to keep the fuel moving. But I had an observer on shore, and I could see that the first boats with parents on them had reached the end of the canal and had spotted the ships. The alarm would be rung very soon, and at that point, I wouldn’t have to be quiet any longer.

***

Harvest