by R K Billiau
Their work done, the herd calmed down and milled about doing whatever it is bison do. I slipped my cores back into their slots and walked past the bison into the cave.
Chapter 33
I was halfway expecting to go back to the scene when I had last left the cave, of morose broken people, battered and bloody. I was wrong, very wrong. They were happy and talking and had even gotten the fire going again. It felt pretty good to win a what we thought would be a losing battle.
“HUDSON!” I was tackled by Madison and thrown to the ground with her on top of me. She laughed and stood up, taking my hand to help me up. “Where have you been!? I’m going to guess that you had something to do with that stampede?” She hugged me then pulled back to look at my face, keeping her hands on my sides.
“You could say that. I also… uh… I’m also Level 1 again now.” She laughed again and dragged me to Kai. I clasped his hand and nodded at him. “Sorry about earlier, that was pretty sucky.”
“It didn’t look as sucky as what happened to you. I insta-spawned and was able to watch me eat your face. It was gross.”
I shuddered at the memory. “Didn’t feel too good either,” I said.
“What did you do? How did you get that herd of bison here?” Madison asked.
I told them what I did and how I had earned my new skill. Madison and Kai both laughed.
“What’s the next step though? We need to do something about Tim still and Cora might be out there somewhere.” I craned my head and made eye contact with Chief Arnold who was shaking hands and celebrating with a group of people in the cave’s rear. When he met my eyes, he nodded at me and came over.
“Well, I hope that’s the last zombie we see for a long, long time,” he said, his hand out to shake mine.
I took it and returned the gesture. “I hope so, too. Now we can get this tribe going in the right direction. Our Tim problem still isn’t solved, though. Sure, he might not have his army anymore, and he might not get more undead from our corpses, but he has to be out there at one of those spawn points, and we still need to do something about him.”
“I agree. In fact, I would like your help to deal with that.”
You have been offered a quest!
Quest: Bring me the Necromancer - Capture the necromancer Tim and bring him to the tribe to face justice. Reward 25xp.
Do you accept? YES/NO
I accepted. This would give me a nice leg up on recovering my levels. “Nice,” I said “if you don’t mind, I’d like to go now. I want to close this whole chapter down and be done with it.”
He grinned. “Me too. I’d also like to have some words with Cora, but she can wait until we deal with this threat. You go ahead, I think we’re all excited to get out there and tame this world. We’ve come a long way since you arrived, but we’ve got a long way to go. We at least need to get some clothes made!” He laughed, gesturing at my underwear.
I nodded at him grinning I was becoming strangely comfortable hanging out in my tighty whities, er, fleshies.
“Right, well I’m going to head out there then.” I turned towards Madison and Kai. “Will you guys join me? We had some fun adventuring together earlier, and I know Kai could use some leveling after all that.”
“And clothes,” Kai said.
Madison gazed at me, scanning me up and down. “I don’t know about the clothes part.” Her face turned a little pink. “I’m kind liking this aesthetic.”
I flexed a little, attempting, poorly, to show off. She laughed, and my cheesy grin escaped. “ANYway, let’s go find Tim and bring him in! Can you group us up?”
You have been invited to Madison’s group.
Accept / Decline
I accepted and saw the group window with our health bars, Kai popping in soon after. We headed out of the cave into the dreary afternoon. I shielded my eyes, letting them get used to the brightness and squelched my bare foot up to my ankle in bison droppings.
“Shit,” I said. We all laughed, and I tried to scrape it off with a stick. “I wanna give Tim a piece of my mind just for making me lose my boots.”
“Me too,” Kai said. “My outfit may have been nothing spectacular mechanics-wise, but it made me feel like I used to many years ago when I was deep into my training.”
“Come on you whiners, let’s go check out his camp first,” Madison said, and I let her lead so I could watch her go. She caught me this time though and winked. “Get up here, I need my meat shields in case something attacks.”
“You’re probably way more capable of handling anything that attacks than we are right now,” I retorted. This felt nice; to just wander through the zone, bantering with friends. I hadn’t gotten a lot of this kind of thing on Earth. Everyone was too busy running the rat race or merely surviving to sit back and actually enjoy life a little.
We took a leisurely route, massacring rabbit nests along the way. Now that I could use the cores, I made sure to collect them so I would have plenty to summon once I could level my skills again. I would have to be careful using my Prime power, losing levels was painful, but remedied through hunting mobs. The real pain was not being able to level your skills until you got back to your old level.
Still, I had fun experimenting with my new Conductor skill, training rabbit nests onto Madison. This would be great for practical jokes if nothing else. Kai and I had recovered Level 2 before we made it to Tim’s camp. We entered the grove and saw the circle of rocks. I held up my hand to stop, scanning the area to see what kind of trouble we might get into. “Should we try to Stealth in and get him, or just charge right over?” I whispered.
Kai pointed towards the smaller circle of rocks with the spawn point. “I see two zombies there still.” I squinted and sure enough I could see them too, strangely sitting among the rocks, not moving. Feeling stupid, I pinched the mini-map to zoom out and shared it with the group. Sure enough there were two red dots in the smaller circle, and another behind the Tipi. I pinged the third.
“How about this: Madison and I will Stealth in, since we’ve gotten more of a chance to raise the skill, and we’ve both got Camouflage. Kai, you charge in as fast as you can towards the entrance and hunker down to catch Tim if he runs. He’s probably higher level than you, but your combat skill is high enough that you stand a better chance to take him than we do.”
Kai set his face and made a fist. “I hope he tries to make it past me.”
“I’ll take that as an agreement. Okay, Madison let’s roll,” I said.
“Wait, a sec!” Madison made a hand gesture, and I got the Boost notification.
“Oh, good idea,” I said, applying the Boost to my Sucker Punch skill.
“Now let’s go!” she said, and darted off, crouching in the familiar Stealth mode. I followed her, activating Camouflage when we were about halfway there, my walk speed dropping even slower. We were crouch-walking across open plains of grass. There was nothing to hide in, so we just hoped our skills covered us enough. We arrived near the inner circle spawn point, the zombies still sitting with their backs to us. Madison got my attention then gestured with three fingers dropping them one by one and mouthing the numbers silently. When she reached zero, we popped out and made our throwing attacks at the zombies.
Sucker Punch! You have caught your target unaware!
Critical hit!
You have slain a zombie!
The other zombie took a hit from Madison, but it wasn’t down. It thrashed up to its feet, and charged toward us, skin flapping from its wound. It tripped on the boulders of the circle, flailing like a fish out of water, if fish had limbs, anyway. We both took aim again and threw at the zombie, the combined attack crushing its skull, and it fell to the ground, quiet and still. We both crouched behind the boulders, unsure of what would come next. The zombie was splayed inches from me, its clothes tarnished second only to its flesh. I felt such satisfaction at slaying zombies. It was more than just removing an enemy, it’s like we did the poor suffering fools a favor they couldn’t do themse
lves.
We turned to see that Kai had made it to his place. He was in position but there was no other reaction from the camp. With it being so quiet we came out from hiding and walked in.
Just as we made it to the fire pit, Tim came out of the Tipi, arms laden with skins, followed by a strikingly well-preserved Cora zombie. It looked up and its eyes went wide with hunger and darted toward us. Tim shouted. “Wait! No!” Dropping his load of goods, he gestured at the zombie, intercepting its movement toward us. Kai came out from hiding, taking a combat stance.
Following Tim’s command, the zombie stayed still, standing by its master. “Damn. You got here faster than I had hoped.” He glanced at the pile of goods he had dropped, and I noticed the tip of a knife sticking out of it.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said. “Kai here could drop you before you ever got that thing out. You’re done, come with us back to the tribe.” The look on his face betrayed the overt hatred he had for us.
“It was you,” he said and pointed at me. “You trained the whole damn herd of bison on me and my undead.”
“Yep. You got me. You were trying to kill and/or enslave my entire tribe, so it was kind of justified.”
“I was just trying to get ahead in the game! I wish you weren’t all so stuck on that and could see how any advantage should be used!”
“You sound nothing like Cora,” Madison said. “She hated all the game talk.”
At the sound of her name, it was like a switch flipped. He looked up at us, his face a mask of turmoil. A chastised puppy mixed with a small, lost child. “What do you know?” he asked, voice shaking. “Why isn’t Cora here? She was supposed to be here, to be with me in all of this.” Madison frowned, and I could tell she was feeling sorry for the guy, yet another victim of Cora’s.
“We don’t know why, but we have an idea,” she told him. I could tell she was trying to build some rapport. I let her and Kai talk, filling Tim in on what we had learned about the game, and what we had learned about Cora. While they did, I took a moment to change my title from First Prime to Vassal of the Adjudicator so I could access my Character Scan skill.
I scanned him to get an idea of what we were dealing with.
Name: Tim
Race: Human
Class: Shaman
Main Attribute Block: Spirit
Highest Attribute: Aura
Highest Skill: Comfortable with the dead
Personal Skill: Survival
Secondary Skill: Raise Zombie
Carryover Skill: Comfortable with the dead
His carryover skill was as Arnold had said:
Comfortable with the Dead; You feel completely comfortable around undead and they with you, undead see you as one of their own and will be drawn to you. You will eventually be able to control them. Grants: attunement: Dark.
“She… was using a brainwashing skill on me?” he asked, his voice still shaky.
“It’s hard to tell… we know she twisted people to do what she wanted, and I find it hard to believe that she wouldn’t do that to you too,” I said. “How do you feel about Chief Arnold and the tribe now?”
“I don’t know, I feel… frustrated… and angry still, I guess. The way they treated me was not good, when I had the means to take our gameplay to the next level.” In a lot of ways I felt like I was talking to a child. It was disconcerting, but it took the wind out of the sails of my anger. A little anyway. “I thought things would be different here, in this world. But people still treat me the same. I thought with my skill I could be something... more than just the creepy guy who plays with corpses that nobody wants to be around.”
“How did you get that Raise Zombie spell?” I asked, to change the subject. He seemed to like talking about his build and optimization so maybe I could learn something if I could get him to open up. I knew I was onto something when his eyes lit up.
“It just came to me. I was setting up my trap, and when my zombies had sent someone back for spawn, I concentrated on his remaining corpse and imagined it rising as a zombie. I had seen that happen so many times I knew what it would look like. I felt my mana drain, the corpse rose, and I got the skill!”
That fit what we knew about the game mechanics. I wondered if it could really be that easy to learn magic though. I wanted some time to experiment with that. “We want to bring you back to the tribe,” I told him, not beating around the bush any longer. “They are pretty pissed, and you can’t just keep living out here haunting them. You won’t get any more zombies out of any of us, so you’ve got to deal with them. You’ve got to figure out a way to make peace.”
He sighed morosely. “I know. When you destroyed my army, I knew it was all over. But I kept thinking at least I would have Cora. If we worked together, we could still level and take on the game. But she never came back.” He dropped his face in his hands. “I don’t know if she ever intended to.”
“Anyway,” I said, tired of the whiney romance crap, “it’s time to go. Will you come with us or will we have to force you?” I could empathize with the guy, but only so much. He needed to answer for the death trap, and for making so many of us lose our levels and our gear, not to mention our morale.
“I’ll come with you. It was different when I had Cora to work with the tribe from the inside, but I don’t want to play solo.”
“Did you have any more stuff?” Madison asked. “Bringing some presents might make them more lenient.” I felt like Madison was taking this better than I thought she would, considering her first day out of the tutorial was spent in Tim’s death trap.
I pointed at Tim. “You know this is Tim, right, Madison? THE Tim. The Tim of ‘Tim’s Death Trap’?”
She looked at me, dumbfounded. “I know? What are you trying to get at?”
“Never mind.” Huh. Maybe she was just a better person than me.
Tim ignored us and waved his hands toward the pile on the ground. “Everything I have is in there.” I nodded to Kai who checked it out.
“This is great!” Kai said, pulling out what looked like a few full sets of Hunters garbs and several bison skins. Without hesitating he equipped one set of clothes and handed the other to me.
“What were you doing with all this stuff, anyway?” I asked Tim as I put on a set of clothes. It felt nice to be wearing something again.
“When we reset the tribe, with Cora as the Queen…”
“Chieftess,” Madison said, “not a queen, boy did she have an over-inflated ego or what?”
Tim glared at her, then shook his head, his glare turning into a frown. “When we would reset the tribe, I would bring all this stuff in so we could… I don’t know, provide or something.”
“You should have just brought it to the tribe in the first place,” Kai said. “It would have been the right thing to do and would have helped them a lot.”
“Cora said that they all hated me and would refuse anything I tried to bring them.”
The three of us grimaced at that. This poor guy was being used badly by that manipulative witch.
“It’s time to go,” I said. “Will you come with us willingly, or do I need to tie you up?”
Tim put his hands in the air. “I already said I’ll come, but I’m bringing her,” he said, pointing to the Cora zombie. “She’s special and the last one I have.”
I wanted to throw up a little in my mouth. How ‘Comfortable with the Dead’ was this guy? My whole body shuddered when my mind tried to go where I wished it wouldn’t. “Bringing that with you won’t be a good idea… I doubt it will be too kindly looked upon.”
Tim balked at the idea, squaring his shoulders as he stood up. “I understand, but zombies are the way I advance in the game, and if I can just show them how useful they can be…”
“Look, I understand you think you’re like a pet class now, but the tribe will not be happy to see this thing.”
“I’m not leaving it,” he said squaring his shoulders in stubbornness.
“Fine, whatever. Just don�
��t be surprised when I get to say ‘I told you so’’. I ushered him along and we walked. When we made it back to the cave, it was once again a hive of activity. It was nice to see the happy faces of people crafting, or cooking, or otherwise working on skills and advancing in the game without fear.
With our arrival the happy faces turned sour and angry. Someone ran into the cave and came out moments later, Chief Arnold in tow. He saw us and looked taken aback with how fast we had returned.
Quest Completed: Bring me the Necromancer - Capture the necromancer Tim and bring him to the tribe to face justice. Reward 25xp.
Kai and I both exploded with light, the XP bumping us over the Level 3 mark. I could advance my skills again and hopefully I wouldn’t ever lose that much XP again.
“That was fast,” Arnold said. Then he saw the Cora zombie. “What the hell is that thing doing here?!”
“I told him not to bring it,” I said, shrugging.
“Why did you let him?” He turned his attention to Tim, his face showing a level of animosity that was almost a physical force. “Well, we aren’t going to let you keep it. In fact, you’re not going to be getting much of anything for a while.”
Tim stood there, stoic. “What do you mean? I came here willingly. I want to make amends.”
“I don’t give a damn if you came here willingly or not!” Arnold screamed. “Screw your ‘amends’! What you’ve done is unforgivable!”
We were drawing a crowd, now, the people of the tribe forming a semi-circle around us, many nodding their heads.
“You’ve tortured us, made us into slaves, took our gear, our XP, many of our tribemates and set this tribe back further than you can imagine, and for what? So you could have an easier time in this world?”
“I tried to tell you how we could advance faster, you wouldn’t listen!” Tim spat back.
“Because we aren’t psychopaths! We weren’t going to kill our own so we could use these…” Arnold waved his hands at the Cora zombie “disgusting things in our tribe!”