by Xander Boyce
Due to your rank of Midshipman, new interface options are available to you.
Condensing xatherite level ups, only the highest level obtained will be listed.
Congratulations, Midshipman. Your Acid Dart has reached level 5. Damage has increased.
Congratulations, Midshipman. Your Acid Dart xatherite is ready to be upgraded.
Congratulations, Midshipman. Your Major Refresh has reached level 5. Recharge time has reduced.
Congratulations, Midshipman. Your Major Mana Guard has reached level 5. Amount of damage absorbed has increased.
Congratulations, Midshipman. Your Major Spark has reached level 5. Damage has increased.
Congratulations, Midshipman. Your Minor Dancing Blade has reached level 4. Duration has increased.
Congratulations, Midshipman. Your Cone of Frost has reached level 2. Damage has increased.
Congratulations, Midshipman. Your Fireball has reached level 2. Damage has increased.
Congratulations, Midshipman. Your Storm has reached level 2. Damage has increased.
Congratulations, Midshipman. Major Blink Step has been attuned.
You have acquired wild xatherite!
Basic grade Major Heat Shield acquired.
Rare grade Major Mana Sight acquired.
Master grade Major Gravitas acquired.
Primitive grade Metallurgy acquired.
Xatherite Crystal Name: Major Heat Shield
Xatherite Color: Yellow
Xatherite Grade: Basic
Xatherite Rarity: Widespread
Type: Magic
Effect: Reduces temperature based environmental damage by up to 15℃.
Mana recharge time: 31m 30s
Xatherite Crystal Name: Major Mana Sight
Xatherite Color: Violet
Xatherite Grade: Rare
Xatherite Rarity: Uncommon
Type: Magic
Effect: Allows users to see external mana flows within 15m and all ley lines within 10km. Effect can be toggled at will.
Xatherite Crystal Name: Major Gravitas
Xatherite Color: Orange
Xatherite Grade: Master
Xatherite Rarity: Uncommon
Type: Magic
Effect: Reduces or Increases gravity on user or inanimate objects within 1m by 1.5G. Effect lasts 20 seconds.
Mana recharge time: 59.5s
Xatherite Crystal Name: Metallurgy
Xatherite Color: White
Xatherite Grade: Primitive
Xatherite Rarity: Scarce
Type: Crafting
Effect: Grants access to the Metallurgy skill.
Drew was too tired to pay attention to the new flag he saw on his xatherite, or to worry about his promotion and induction into a knightly order. He instead sat down next to Katie, who had erected walls all the way to the ceiling, leaving only small gaps for air to come in and out.
“No healing spells,” Drew looked at Sarah’s pale face and frowned. Then he looked over at Mitch. “I need to burn his body. He wouldn’t want to be a wereghoul.” Katie nodded tiredly, then helped him move all the bodies out of their little shelter. They piled the orcs on top of each other but laid Mitch off to one side.
They burned Mitch first, tears carving white lines through the dirt on their cheeks. They didn’t say anything, both too spent for words.
Chapter Fifteen — Scavenge
They didn’t bother to burn the other corpses. He just went back in with Sarah and sat down as Katie recreated the walls that surrounded them and Drew cast replenishing rain on cooldown. He wasn’t sure if the spell did any healing or increased the body’s own ability to heal but didn’t think it would hurt. He thought Sarah looked a little bit better after every casting, so he kept doing it.
Katie conjured more glowrocks, but the two just sat there for an hour listening to Sarah’s slow breathing, too mentally exhausted to do anything else. They sat with their backs to a wall, close together, but not touching.
Drew thought to break the silence a few times but stopped. In his mind he was going over the fight, trying to figure out if he had made the right decisions. If he had stayed and fought here, would Mitch still be alive? What if he had run the other direction, or even just circled around the box instead of heading for the entrance? He pictured a hundred ways that the fight could have gone differently. He tried to think of any way he could have been able to contribute in the close quarters fighting. He had the dagger still, not that it would have been very useful during the fight. Could he have thrown it? Would that have done anything? He didn’t know how to throw a dagger.
With a sigh, Katie stood up and Drew looked at her curiously. “We can’t stay here,” she said, looking around. “We need to find a way to move Rothschild.” Drew put his self-recrimination aside and stood up easily, the rain having kept their muscles from stiffening.
“Right, we’ll grab some more pipes, see if we can’t find something to make a litter with.” Drew waited while Katie re-summoned the knight--who must have been crushed sometime after he pulled Chakri away--and then opened the way out. It didn’t look like anything had been scavenging the bodies of the orcs or the ravagers yet, but Katie sealed Sarah back in and they began to explore the Orc encampment.
The camp was spartan, with dirty clumps of bedding piled in corners and what looked to be communal work areas. Drew leaned down and picked up a leather vest that had half a piece of cockroach chitin attached to the stomach. It looked like it would fit him, so he shrugged out of his ODU blouse and tried it on. The fasteners gave him some trouble at first, but he eventually got the hang of it. Amazingly, the armor fit well, albeit a little short in the torso, but then again, he had been half a foot taller than most of the Orcs.
There were three other vests in various stages of completion. Katie, seeing what he was doing, tried on a vest of her own. The first two she tried on were obviously much too big for her slight frame. Drew moved over and helped her get the third one on, which was the best fit of the three, although nowhere near appropriately sized for her. Katie pulled away as soon as it was on her.
They also found chitin pauldrons that were one size fits all; the leather used to tighten it would be easy enough to make additional holes in so that it fit them better. For now, they hung loosely, but it would be a simple fix the next time they were in a safe place.
Drew turned away and frowned. Again, they were working in a silence that he didn’t know how to break. Did she blame him for what happened? Was she just mourning? He dug around at the various items, lifting what looked like rat hide lid off a cockroach shell. Inside were chunks of blue-tinged meat. “I think I found some food.” He wrinkled his nose at the smell.
“Oh god, that’s awful,” Katie said, putting an arm over her mouth and nose. Drew replaced the hide and put it back.
“Oh, shit,” he said, glancing back towards the stairs. “We left the cart up near...up on the third floor.” Drew didn’t want to remember what had happened to Juan and he didn’t want to remind Katie about it.
“I don’t want to go back up there,” Katie said after a few seconds of contemplation.
“Yeah, I don’t really want to either.” He looked around, “But we’re gonna need food and water.”
“Well, we can’t eat that stuff,” Katie said pointing at the recently covered meat. “Maybe if we could cook it.” She glanced around, but there wasn’t anything to burn.
“Probably too bulky to carry anyway,” Drew said, once again wishing for a video game’s magic inventory. They resumed their search for things to assist them and found several bone clubs and javelins. Drew put on one of the quivers, putting an atlatl and several javelins in it. They were heavier than he would have liked, but he didn’t want to complain. They hadn’t seen any movement or monsters during their search of the camp. When they got to Chakri’s corpse, Katie kicked it a few times, and then with a strangled cry she seemed to collapse next to it, head buried in her arms.
Drew knelt next to h
er. He raised a hand to put on her shoulder, but then thought better of it and sat there in silence, her quiet sobbing echoing through the chamber. Drew, afraid he would say the wrong thing, stayed silent, waiting for her to be ready to talk.
“What the fuck are we supposed to do, Drew? I feel so goddamn helpless. Everything we try just ends up killing someone. And now we have no food, no place to go, and who knows what is out there? What if it’s worse? What if this is the safest place on Earth now? What sort of fucked up psycho did this to us? What if Sarah never wakes up?” She looked up, and Drew could see the pleading in her eyes, waiting for him to tell her it was going to be alright, that he was going to be able to fix everything.
“I don’t know, Katie. I don’t have a clue what’s out there. All I know is that there’s light, and I’m so gods damned sick of the darkness.” He looked down, breaking the eye contact, “I don’t want any of this; I didn’t ever want to be the one that kicked down doors and shot up the bad guys. I joined the Coast Guard so that I could hack drug lord’s computers. I don’t know how people deal with this, the violence and the death. Maybe there aren’t any safe spaces anymore, maybe there never were. But what do we do?” He paused looking around, “We keep moving because otherwise, I know we’re going to drown here. We keep moving until we can’t because otherwise, that’s letting this, all this,” he gestured towards Chakri’s corpse, “win.”
Drew looked up again, meeting Katie’s eyes again. He wasn’t sure what her expression meant. He had never been good at interpreting other people. She reached a hand out to hold his, squeezing it tightly, “Alright, let’s keep moving.” She stood up and grabbed Chakri’s axe; it was heavier than she could easily handle, but she added it to her pile of things and then turned back towards the safe room.
Drew shook his head, unclear as to what exactly had just happened. But he stood up as well, eyeing Chakri’s equipment. The chitin was still in good shape, but all of the leather had been ripped or burned. He didn’t relish trying to pull it off the dead, so he left it there.
Katie had found a fleece blanket in one of the cabinets. With the blanket, two more pipes that Drew cut out of the ceiling using acid dart, and a couple of the uncut leather pieces, they had enough material to build the litter.
Drew also built a splint for the obviously broken leg, hoping that treating it would help Sarah wake up faster. After binding the leg and getting Sarah onto the litter, they prepped to set out again. Katie shooed Drew away from picking up the litter, “If, no...when we get attacked again, you need to have your hands free to cast.” Drew nodded, the look in Katie’s eye telling him that arguing wouldn’t help him.
“Did you level up?” Drew asked, remembering he still hadn’t upgraded his acid dart.
“Yeah, I did,” Katie said, as she stared at nothing. “The human protectorate has demoted me to Seaman Apprentice.”
Drew snorted. It was the first thing like a laugh either of them had done since the break room, “Oh yeah, I got that message too. You get the one about the knights?”
“Knights? No, just the one about the level one thing. What did the knight one say?” Katie asked.
“It said because I was an assault mage, I was inducted into the Order of the Dragon and promoted to Midshipman.”
Katie quirked an eyebrow, “Am I supposed to salute you now?”
“Hah, no.” Drew shook his head, “It did say I got more interface options though, I haven’t taken a chance to check that out, actually.” The only interface he could think of was his Xatherite map. He pulled that up and realized that there were two options off to the side-- SA Sarah Rothschild and SA Katie Sabin. He focused on Katie’s name and a new map appeared in front of him.
Katie’s map was three concentric circles, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere near as many links between the nodes as there were on his, even accounting for the smaller number of nodes.
“I can see your xatherite map, Sarah’s too.” He focused on Sarah’s name and her even smaller map appeared. It was hard to tell at first, but the nodes and lines were roughly in the shape of a blossom.
“They look different,” he said, comparing the three maps.
“How so?”
“Well, mine looks like star constellations. Yours is a bunch of circles, and Sarah’s looks like a flower,” Drew answered, flipping between the maps in front of him. “Also, you both have fewer links than me. And smaller groupings.”
Katie had pulled up her map as well and was looking at it curiously. “Yeah, before you came, we discussed it. Mitch said his map looked like a human, and Juan said his were stars like yours. How big are your groups?” She asked.
“Well, I have a bunch of five and six links.” He looked through Katie’s map, but the largest linked set he saw only had four links in it, and there was only two that large.
“Well, that explains why you have so many linked spells. I was wondering how lucky you had to be to get a perfect grouping. They aren’t even full yet, are they?” When Drew shook his head, she frowned, “Did the tutorial tell you anything about how the maps are generated?”
“Not really; the only thing it said was that I had more nodes than average.” Drew flipped through the nodes, and focusing on the various xatherite, saw that the new value of rarity had been added to all his xatherite. “When you look at your xatherite, do you see the rarity?”
Katie pulled up an individual xatherite and then shook her head, “No, just name, color, grade, type, effect, and cooldown. What are my rarities?”
“Well, all of your xatherite are widespread, except for the knight, which is common.” Drew looked over his xatherite too, and all his old ones but storm were likewise widespread, with storm being common.
“Let me see if I can give you some of these new wild ones.”
He sent selected Major Heat Shield and then tried to trade it to Katie.
You are attempting to trade the basic grade, yellow xatherite, “Major Heat Shield” to SA Katie Sabin, are you sure?
He confirmed it with a thought and it disappeared from his map. “Yeah, I got that, major heat shield? Is this one of the ones you got off the bastard with the battle-axe?”
“Yeah, the other three are major mana sight, a violet, major gravitas which is orange, and a white one called metallurgy. The first two are uncommon, heat shield is widespread, and metallurgy is scarce.”
Katie glanced them over, “I can only slot the violet and yellow; my whites are pretty far away. But I think you should probably do the mana sight one and maybe this heat shield one. Those both sound like they’d be more useful for you. What does gravitas do?”
“It allows me to change the way gravity affects either myself or an object near me. I can make it either heavier or lighter.”
“Damn, that sounds cool. You think you can use that to fly?” Katie asked, and Drew shrugged, trading it to her.
“I dunno, you can look at the effect.”
“Ugh, master? I don’t think we have the time for that headache.” Katie frowned for a minute, “Did you slot that teleporting xatherite in the middle of the fight?”
“Uhm, yeah. I couldn’t think of a way to get out, so I could use my spells without slotting it.” Drew answered before Katie hit his arm under the pauldron.
“And it was rare, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You idiot, I thought you said you couldn’t slot it,” she said with a glare.
“Well, I had to use a white slot for it, which I was hoping not to do.”
“Drew, you have to tell me stuff like this! You could have slotted it before the fight, and then you wouldn’t have blacked out for a minute when we needed you.” Katie hit his shoulder again.
“I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t...I didn’t think it was that important.”
Katie shook her head and looked back at her xatherite, “I can upgrade create light. Have you upgraded anything?”
“Oh yeah, it’s fine, doesn’t hurt like slotting it does,” Drew said, a
gain remembering that he could upgrade acid dart. He clicked over to the red and upgraded it.
Xatherite Crystal Name: Major Acid Dart
Xatherite Color: Red
Xatherite Grade: Basic
Xatherite Rarity: Widespread
Type: Magic
Effect: Creates a small globule of acid from a finger that travels in a straight line until it impacts a target, dealing small amounts of acid damage.
Mana recharge time: 16.1 seconds
Well, it finally upgraded its damage from minor to small amounts.
Chapter Sixteen — Planning
Drew had to fireball a hole in the barricade. They weren’t going to be able to get Sarah through otherwise. But when they were finally through and out in the sunlight again, both of them stopped and just soaked in the light.
For the first time in who knows how many days, they could see further than the glowrocks could shine, and it was like a weight had been lifted from them both. It was only when they could feel the warmth of the sun and wind on their skin that they realized just how oppressive the closed darkness had become. By unspoken accord, Katie set Sarah down, and they simply stood there for a moment, drinking in the outside world again.
They were on a small road that traveled around the base; across from them was the parking garage for the building, and on the other side of the garage, just barely visible through the walls and pillars, was a forest. To their right and down the hill was the exit from the base. The road ran alongside the beltway before rejoining the rest of the Anacostia neighborhood of DC. To their left and up the hill were a few more Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security buildings, while beyond them was the abandoned mental hospital and its replacement.
Either way, they were in the middle of Barry Farm, one of the most dangerous places in DC pre-advent. How the advent had changed that, Drew had no idea, but he didn’t really look forward to finding out.