by Tao Wong
“No. You’re on water for a while. You can have more when Jase turns up,” she snaps while walking over with a jug and two clean glasses.
“Thaannksss, Mum,” I say with a bit of a slur, squinting as I give her a grin.
“Yeah, sorry, Ngaire. We’ll try not to break anything else,” O says.
Looking at him, I remember what I was talking about, and my smile fades. “Okay, where was I?”
I pour some water and drink a full glass before continuing. “Right, so my pop and all the guys I’d been fighting and drinking beside are dead, I have no idea if my aunt or anyone else in our little refuge is alive, and I’m blaming myself for not being there to help. Meanwhile I’m running back the way I came like the little shit I am.”
O looks at me sadly, and his eye twitches a little. “So how’s this explain your class and those titles? Offense meant; you’re not coming across in the brightest light right about now.”
“Mmmm…” I look down and take another sip of water. “Can’t disagree. I was not a shining ray of light in our darkest hour that’s for sure.” Looking up, I say in a harsher tone, “Listen, if I could trade my life for my granddad’s I would. He was the hero, he should be here, but that’s not how the world works. All this bullshit happened, all the best and brightest died, and I’m one of the pathetic fools who didn’t. Now do you want to hear the rest or not?”
Raising his hands in defense, he says, “Geez! Fuck, yeah, man, shit, trust me, we’ve all had a rough go, I just… I’m sorry. What happened next?”
“Well, instead of running back to the marae, I did one of the things I should have done when all this started, and I headed to Mitre 10. Figured I could find something that might be able to help.”
“Waitwaitwait,” he says, shaking his hands and head. “I know I just asked, but you haven’t said anything about your class yet. Have you still not done that at this point? How did you go almost an entire day with a freaking class? And how didn’t it come up?”
“We had a lot going on, and I just… man, I’d only had like two hours sleep, and I woke up late. I never had a chance to take it all in or go through the options. Besides, we weren’t really talking as we drank. Shit, will you just let me finish this?”
“Yeah, man, okay, sorry. Please, continue,” he says, resting his arms back on the table.
“Okay, so, hardware store. I made my way back to Mitre 10, and I don’t know shit about how to make a gun, or explosives, or any of that. But I knew wood burns, knives cut, and that I should probably try a stealth approach if I wanted to stand a chance.”
“Wait, you wanted to go back? I mean, you literally saw everyone get killed. Surely you knew—”
“Dude, seriously, I wasn’t exactly in a clear frame of mind. All I could think about was paying them back, and I guess seeing if anyone was still alive.
“To do that though, I thought it’d be best to try sneaking in, and if possible, creeping up on them to take them down quietly. Did I know about perception, listening Skills, or spells? That would be a resounding no, but as I said, I was an idiot.
“I ended up taking a bunch of stuff. Some safety glasses, a pair of black overalls, gloves, steel-capped boots, a bag. Also grabbed a few more blades, some binoculars, and a few survival bits and pieces. Last lot of stuff though, they were for burning things down. A handful of lighters, a hose, tons of rope, a twenty-litre fuel canister—which I filled up by siphoning gas from a car along the way back.
“By the time I’d finished stocking up, night was falling again. I figured I’d best scope the place out, so I snuck into the fishing club across the road from the marae, and from the balcony, I took a look to work out how many there were, where they were located, and whether or not I could see any humans alive in there. There weren’t. They’d piled the bodies off to the side, and that just made me angrier. Not only had they killed my granddad, but they’d also killed my aunt, all the other war vets, and everyone we’d been able to gather down here. It was a godsdamn massacre. I was seething. All I could think was that they were going to pay.”
Perhaps sensing that the story was about to get heated, I notice the focus return to O’s eyes as he lifts his arm to rest his head on his clenched fists.
“A number of the snake people had cleaned out the main building and were using it as some kind of base, or nest, or home—I’m not sure what they’d call it. But there were less than a dozen scattered around the area on guard, and none of them were near each other.
“It took me two hours to sneak up on the first one I killed. I have no idea how or why the System allowed me to do that, or why it never detected me—because I’ve no doubt it was a higher level than my no-class-chosen, no-stats-allocated ass—but such is the way of things.”
I see O move as though he wants to ask something, but he closes his mouth and nods for me to continue.
“When I finally managed to get behind it, I heard its light breathing, saw its scales shifting, expanding, and contracting as it breathed. It was surprisingly easy to slide a blade into its unsuspecting mouth to stop it from making a noise and use a second to slit its throat. There must have been some kind of sneak bonuses applied, because since then, I’ve rarely had as simple a kill.” I look down at this point and take another drink of water.
“All in all, it took until around four a.m. to take out each of the guards. In all that time, no one from inside had come out. I made my way around the outside of the building as quietly as I could, closing all the windows and tying the doors shut. After pouring gasoline around the building, I lit the place on fire and made a bonfire out front.”
Remembering all this causes my chest to tighten for a moment and I stop to collect myself before taking a deep breath and continuing. Eyes wide, knuckles white, and jaw clenched, I can see O has his full attention on me now, and can tell he knows I’m about to get to the part of the story he seems to be most interested in.
“As I waited, I cooked the meat of some of the snakes. I hadn’t eaten anything since the evening before everything started. I thought they were just monsters, and well, to be honest, I wasn’t really thinking about it. In hindsight, I guess I just saw them as massive snakes, and to me, snakes are edible, so surely I should be able to eat this meat if I cooked it well enough.
“Sitting there in the early morning of the second day of our integration into the System, eating snake-monster meat, waiting, and watching for anything to rush outside from the now fully engulfed building, I heard the cries coming from inside. Then the banging on the doors as whoever was inside tried to escape. Smoke billowed out of broken windows and the holes that formed in the roof and walls.”
Ashamed and angry, I look away. “I just sat there, chewing. Blade in one hand, a fistful of charred meat in the other. I watched the fire until the last of the screams died out.”
Looking back and shifting in my seat to get a bit more comfortable I say, “That’s when I finally took notice of the noises coming from the System. Apparently, I’d been receiving messages and notifications the entire time, and only now did the System deem it necessary to force me to open them, so I did.
“One of the notifications told me I’d gained two new titles for worthy acts. The first was Kai Taua, and the message read—hold on a sec, I’ll bring up the title itself.” Opening the Titles system window, I brought up the Eater of War Parties title and read its description.
Kai Taua
Not many have what it takes to slay and kill an entire war party of sentient beings many times your level, but you’re the exception to the rule. Not only did you singlehandedly wipe them out, but you dined on their flesh as you watched their women and children suffocate and burn to death. You are a ruthless one, aren’t you?
Gain: 15% increase to damage against all sentient creatures you consume the flesh of.
Reputation changed with select groups.
Opening the second title, I read that one too.
Pyrorational
Some love the smell
of fire and are obsessed with watching the world burn, but not you. You quickly and skilfully plotted and enacted the arson of a building full of innocent sentient beings many times your level and did so in a manner that meant they could not escape their fate. With a mind as logical as yours, no one could mistake you for a maniac.
Gain: 30% increase to Fire Affinity.
Reputation changed with select groups
Otiniara stared at me with a look of… not quite horror or disgust but certainly pity. “Innocents? Women and children? Fuck man, those are some twisted titles.”
“Yeah, they are. It wasn’t a good night. I can’t say for certain I would have let them go had I known they were sentient aliens. Who, by the way, it turns out are called Volatarians. I mean, c’mon, they’d just killed hundreds of people on one of the worst days in human history, and here they were sleeping in our beds while the world was being taken over by aliens and monsters.
“Although I can definitely tell you that very little of that meat stayed in my stomach after I read those titles.” Taking another full glass of water, I have to steady myself as I feel nauseated remembering that night.
Watching me with a subtle twitch in one of his eyes, O says, “I’ll bet. I guess that kind of explains how you got the Kaikiko Toa class too?”
“Pretty much. Kaikiko Toa, the Vengeful Warrior. The System informed me that after completing a hidden quest, one of the rewards was the ability to choose this as a unique class. Well, choose isn’t exactly the right word, the System assigned me the class, seeing as I had yet to choose one, and considering I had spent the last day and a bit killing, or helping to kill, creatures with actual levels, all those experience points instantly shot me up to Level 10.”
“And the loot?” asked O.
“From the snake people? Yeah, after allocating my Skill points and reading what information I could, I went around and looted everything. But seeing as how I didn’t exactly have anywhere to sell it and that the weapons and armor didn’t suit me or my stats at the time, I simply stored most of it in my flat until the Vaaharu turned up and gave us access to the Shop. That’s how I got to thinking that I’d be able to afford the gear I want, which is also why I haven’t turned my place into a safe zone yet.”
“Aw yeah. What’s this gear that has you so excited you can’t be bothered with personal safety?”
“Music.”
“Huh?”
“Music,” I say again, giving him the simplest and most straight-forward answer possible. “First is an implant, then a module with all of humanity’s music on it. The implant is only a basic model, but together, they’re still gonna cost a small fortune. And they are what I’ve been saving for.” I give him a smile. “Pretty sure that answers all of your questions. How about you start answering mine?”
“Huh? Hmm, right.” He shifts from side to side in his chair. “What about Ellie?”
“What about her?” I say, slouching in my chair and crossing my arms, not wanting to get into it.
“C’mon, man. What’s up? You two were good together.”
“Until we weren’t.” I humph. “Not everyone adapted to the System, or they’re still adapting. Whatever.”
“Mmmm, you sure that’s all? Feels like there’s more to it than that,” he says with a cocky expression.
“Yeah, months more,” I retort with a touch of anger as I sit up straight. “But fine. Short answer is we met up the day after everything went down at the marae. She’d hidden with a group over at the Rex Morpeth Park Soccer Club. They’d barred the doors, frantically killed the few things that managed to spawn inside, and hadn’t left.
“Things were as fine as they could be for the first month, but I could tell she was becoming more and more depressed. She refused to come out and level up, and she hung out more and more with the freeloaders at the high school. Then while I was on a trip to Ōpōtiki to look for survivors, she got hooked on some Shop-bought-but-locally-duplicated drugs and cheated on me with her dealer when she ran out of credits.”
“Daaamn,” says O.
“Mmm. Yeah. I found out, but not before trying to help her get off them. She wouldn’t, or maybe couldn’t listen, which is odd, considering the perception increase they gave her, but whatever. We got in a fight, she told me she’d fucked her dealer friend—who, by the way, had genetically altered herself via the Shop, turning from a her to a him—and I broke it off. Seeing her on my doorstep today, which was less than half an hour before you saw her, was the first time I’d really talked to her in probably six months, and now can we please move on,” I say as I shrink back into my seat.
“Fuck, man. That’s rough. Gotta say though, didn’t know the Shop could do that. Think there’s still a chance for you two? I mean, she is technically completely clean now.”
“Mmmm, so A, neither did I. But where there’s a will there’s a way, I guess, and B, not likely. I’ve zero doubt she’ll be back on them the second she wakes up, especially if all it takes is a booty call with her new boyfriend, and I doubt she cares enough to want to. So, fuck her.”
From behind me, I hear the scuffing of a chair. As I turn, I see Ellie’s hair as she runs out the door of the Pub. Well, that’s just great.
“Couldn’t have warned me that she was awake?” I ask.
“Didn’t want to ruin the surprise if you thought there was a chance. Although, I guess there isn’t, so…” He shrugs and winces. “Plus side, your guess was mostly right?”
“Fuck you.” I take another drink of water. “Well, she’s gone now. If she comes back, she comes back. I’m not chasing after her, not tonight, and I don't feel like it’s my job to. We fixed her. I spent my hard-earned money on a cure—which you so kindly made redundant—and I have no obligation to her. If she wants to come back, she’s the one who’ll have to come crawling on her hands and knees and with words made out of pure godsdamned gold.” I finally turn back to O. “Ohhhh, okay, now you. Quit dodging the questions. I laid my hand on the table, it’s your turn.”
“Uh huh. Okay, fair ‘nuff. But let’s get a few more drinks. My shout this time.”
***
Getting ready to tell his tale O stretches as he rolls his shoulders then takes a swig of beer. “Right, so you know I was up in Aucks, ey? See, I’d been running with this lot working outta TAPAC, The Auckland Performing Arts Centre. We’d been doing this vampire-rock cabaret, and the shows usually ran ’til about two thirty, meaning we didn’t usually get out of there ’til three. So when the System happened, I was onstage and in the middle of pretending to suck the blood out of one of the guests as one of our final acts. All of a sudden, everyone is freaking out because of these floating blue System messages.
“I had a few solid options but ended up choosing the class Creative Conjuror. I literally get to fight with the power of music and art.”
“That’s fucking awesome!” I say as I excitedly sit up straight. “Do you have to use actual instruments, or are they made magically, or what?”
“Actual,” he says as he scratches his head. “It’s more like, I can channel magic through the instruments and art, but because I can sing, my vocal cords count as a weapon, so I’m rarely without one, especially with the auto-regen.”
“Nice,” I say, nodding in affirmation before having a sip of beer.
“Yeah. But that’s not the story. Turns out working across from the zoo when a ton of mana is dumped on the world isn’t such a good thing. As soon as that first hour was up, we were swarmed by tons of rapidly evolved animals from the Auckland Zoo.”
“Fuck,” I say as I cough on the beer I just swallowed.
“Not yet. See, most of animals that came our way were under some kind of mind control spell. At first, we thought they were just swarming monsters, but then someone worked out how to read basic stats and conditions of monsters, and we found out they were being controlled. Then it turned into a game of Where’s Waldo? with Waldo being the person or creature pulling their strings.
�
�Fun fact,” O says, pointing a finger at me. “Being a magic user who attacks the mind, I actually have fairly decent resistances to mental magic.”
“No shit? Me too!” I say, puffing my chest out in surprise. “Something to do with my anger and sense of vengeance being too powerful for most mind attacks, so I get, like, fifty percent resistance or something. Don’t really come up against those kinds of things, so I’m not sure how effective it really is.” As I say this, O’s eye twitches. In my foggy state, I try again to remind myself to ask what’s up with that.
“Well, if my twenty percent is anything to go off, you should be fine. Anyway, a few bloody fights later, one of the guys who’d been a guest at the show works out where the caster is, and we all work our way through the monsters toward them.
“Cost us twelve people from our group and who knows how many people who just happened to be on the streets at the time, but we finally found out that the one in control was this heavily altered tuatara that had grown to the size of a horse. This thing was massive. The tiny bumps on its back had morphed into this fluorescent blue mohawk of sharp spines that ran right down its back to its tail. But as weird as that was, you know how they have that third eye? Well, it had grown to be, like, twice the size of its other two, and this fucker was throwing around mental magic like there was no tomorrow… which I guess isn’t too far from the truth.”
O stops, eye twitching as he skulls a full tankard and belches. “‘Scuse me. So um, yeah, this new tuatara also has a new name. The status screen said it was called a Manawatara, and as more and more people were killed, it grew in power. Before we could reach it, it turned its actual sight on us, and then I’m basically fighting by myself, as I and, like, two other people manage to resist its mind control powers.
“The… well, the next few hours sucked. The Manawatara chased us across town, and it kept adding humans and monsters to its horde that it would send against us. We were all exhausted from hours of running and fighting. I’d managed to cast Dispellere, this low-level dispel magic spell I had, on a bunch of people, and we were making a stand on the Auckland Harbour Bridge. I couldn’t even tell you how many the Manawatara was sending after us, but the entire road for as far as we could see, stretching right down the motorway and covering the entire area around the harbor, it was just a sea of creatures and humans, all being mind-controlled and all coming for us.”