by Tao Wong
“I know right? I got a great deal,” Ingrid says.
“This is a deal?” I whisper with horrible fascination as I go over the names and Credits. The cheapest bugger to take down is just over two million Credits. I could buy a small spaceship for that much! Of course, it’d be a single-man spaceship which would barely putter around the solar system, but spaceship!
“Yes. What? You think it’s easy going after a settlement owner? Most of the Galactics have banked on their positions to purchase a large number of enchanted objects and Skills via loans. Some of the most in-debt fellows have bank-designated bodyguards,” Ingrid says. “If killing settlement owners was easy, you wouldn’t get a nifty Title for doing it.”
“You have a title?”
“Oh, right! I have mine hidden,” Ingrid says with a smile then gestures again.
Settlement Killer
Murderer, killer, assassin! Where the title holder goes, other owners will fear. The Settlement Killer is the bane of good order in well-run settlements and the hope of the downtrodden in despotic settlements. In the end, killer and savior are but two sides of the same coin.
Effect: Title owner gains a 5% increase in damage done to settlement owners
“How come I never got one?” I frown. I’ve killed a few myself.
“Wars and combat don’t count. Sort of.” Ingrid shrugs. “I got mine after five kills. The number is higher if you receive your kills in a different way. It also depends on the settlement importance and the owners’ Levels, as I understand it.”
“I could look into it if you want, boy-o. I’m sure there’s a ‘completion rate’ somewhere.”
“Never mind. It’s not that important.”
I turn my attention back to the list and shake my head, closing it out. “I can offer a little bit to the cause, but I don’t have the settlement funds anymore. Bipasha might be a better option…”
“Oh, I got the girls and Roxley to cough up the funds for eighty percent of them,” Ingrid says with a smirk. “We just want your feedback on the list itself.”
I nod slowly, taking a closer look. If we have to cut a bunch of those, we’ll want to find those who might be intimidated or backed off sufficiently. It’d help as well to have the settlements near others which might be hesitating. Maybe we could trade one settlement to another…
Thoughts spinning, I balance the numbers, names, and political affiliations with their geographic distance and cost. It’s only when nearly a half hour has passed and I’ve crossed out a bunch of names on the list that I realize Ingrid is still lounging on the chair, eyes half closed.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” I say.
“What makes you think I’m not doing it?” Ingrid smirks. “Ninety percent of assassination is about planning.”
I take the rebuke, having forgotten she could easily be staring at her notifications. In fact, it’s probably what she was doing. I consider prodding further but decide against it. Instead, I ask a more personal question. “Are you okay with this?”
“With what?”
“All the killing,” I say. “I know you’ve been doing it for a while, but…”
“But you never asked?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s what I can do,” Ingrid says softly. “It’s all I have left. They took everything else away.” I wince slightly, the movement hidden almost as soon as it started. But it’s enough for Ingrid to spot. “Are you pitying me?”
“No!”
“Good,” Ingrid says and continues to stare.
Eventually, I look away, my discomfort with the emotional outburst breaking through my self-control. Or perhaps, I let it break. Because among friends, you can be more yourself.
“Because I wouldn’t want pity from someone that easily fooled.”
“Easily…” My eyes narrow, and the First Nation’s woman returns my stare with a slight smile. I wonder if she’s telling the truth, if what she said was the truth or a lie after the fact to cover a moment of honesty. “Funny.”
“Now, shoo. You’re a bit too big and distracting for me,” Ingrid says and shoos me out of the room.
I leave, shaking my head. I swear, it feels as if everyone keeps kicking me out of rooms, cities, and countries.
Dealing with the settlement owners is mostly a job for the others, whether or not my advice was requested. My task list, as usual, mostly deals with Portaling individuals around, planning, and conducting raids with Mikito. Since things have progressed to this point, the pair of us are doing our best to project force to the various settlement owners and clear up any obligations we can. While it sounds simple enough, not everything is going our way.
“What do you mean the champions aren’t going to help us?” I ask Mikito as we stroll through the destroyed town.
We’ve been porting around so much lately, I can’t even recall exactly where we are—some Baltic country with rolling hills and cobbled streets. The destroyed, small stone buildings and the empty streets offer few clues, especially since I don’t read the local language. The fact that this is an ex-settlement is even more tragic, the city key sold off at some point in the last few years. Now, it’s just a ghost town, a reminder of better days.
“As an organization. Individually, some will back us up. Rae, Jessica, and Jamal are working the Caribbean. But Jessica has to tread carefully,” Mikito says, shaking her head. “Local politics. Cheng Shao is saying she has training of her own to do and is refusing to take part except for official business. Hugo is busy getting the settlements ready in Europe for the Movana. And he hates your guts even more.”
“Because I set up his people to take the brunt of the Movana’s retaliation?” Sadly, since Hugo and his people are literally next to the Movana, their settlements are pretty much guaranteed to get hit.
Mikito nods, and I sigh. We fall silent for a bit as a group of half-owl, half-deer creatures charge out of a cross street, forcing us to focus. When we’re done, I make sure to open a Portal for the group of enthusiastic Butchers waiting to collect the bodies.
The small Town on the savannah on the other end of the Portal is probably one of the most pitiful settlements I’ve come across. Somehow, they’ve managed to be surrounded by a large number of monsters who are all inedible, a rather impressive feat considering the System makes most meat edible. They’d been surviving off a dungeon that had produced a series of mutated wild boars until a year ago, when a passing team of Galactic Adventurers “helpfully” cleared the dungeon. Since then, they’ve been purchasing food directly from the Shop. Katherine had contacted them to get their vote and struck a deal to help finance a long-range teleportation pad in the medium term and to supply them with food in the short term.
Which is how I came to be out here with Mikito, dealing with two birds. Killing monsters to cover our side of a security deal for a nearby settlement and providing food for another. It still surprises me sometimes how there are portions of humanity, of human settlements, which have yet to progress to dealing with Level 50-plus monsters. Even with the experience boost in the first year, many struggled to progress not because they couldn’t, but they wouldn’t.
Fear keeps them down, keeps them from pushing themselves. And it’s in those locations which the Galactics come with their Levels and Skills, Adventurers who have chosen to grow strong. Unfortunately, their presence, their overwhelming courage is a mental blow some humans cannot stand. When every single Galactic you meet is strong, powerful, and confident, willing to risk life and limb, and you’re struggling to survive another day, well… it’s hard to accept. Even if, logically, you understand you’re seeing a small, selective sample.
And so, settlements stagnate. People grow weary, focused on going back to living their “normal” lives. They farm out jobs to others in Quests, giving up experience and loot for safety, sacrificing future strength for current comfort. And so, here we are. People like Mikito and me walk the hills while other Adventurers and the gear we’ve brought releases a mult
i-kilometer taunt. It’s a bit more effective than us running around and hoping to find something to kill.
“Sensors are reporting we’ve got another horde coming in from the south,” Ali reports to us, flicking the updated map to our notifications.
Without a word, we switch directions and jog toward the attack zone. It’s nice to hang out with Mikito, even if it’s not the best use of our resources at this moment. But with only a few days left before the vote, getting involved in anything too elaborate is probably a bad idea.
The horde of monsters is another weird owl-creature combination. There’s an owl-bear, owl-deer, and even an owl-skunk that we have to fight. It looks like Dr. Moreau was working through his owl fixation and left the door to his lab open.
I duck, throwing a series of Mana Darts into a beaked face, watching as the blue projectiles blind the creature. I step in, launching a series of short punches which throws the monster backward before I conjure my sword and cut, ripping a hole through its body and its friend behind it.
A screech resounds, my sense of balance shaking briefly before my resistances and the helmet’s defenses kick in, cutting off the noise. Beside me, Mikito is staggering and swinging her polearm. Unlike me, she seems to be going with it, using the induced vertigo and the long reach of her weapon to create an unpredictable vortex of destruction. Anything that gets hit by the blade of her naginata is dismembered and left to flop uselessly on the ground.
An owl-skunk bends over and sprays, sending a visible cloud of fast-moving gas toward us. I hop backward while casting a fireball spell. I let it explode right in front of my hand, the overpressure from the spell battling against the smell. Of course, I get caught in the back-blast of my own spell, but it’s a decent trade. Normal skunks are bad enough—a System-enhanced one features in my northern nightmares.
The entire fight takes less than five minutes to finish. It’s a scary thought, but fights have become so routine, so simplistic even when we aren’t over-Leveled against the monsters we face, the entire damn thing is boring. It’s rare now for fights to actually force me to concentrate. I know, having chatted with a few “real” soldiers from before the System, arrogance like this is a good way to get killed. But I wonder if that piece of wisdom is true anymore.
Back then, a misstep meant a bomb going off in your face, a bullet to the chest. Make a mistake and even if you came out alive, you were in for days, years, of permanent pain and reconstruction. Now, ten minutes later, you’re good to go. And with the way HP works, what would be a deadly attack for a Level 10 is nothing more than a scratch for me. So where’s the line between the wisdom of the past and the reality of the present? I’m not entirely sure, and it worries me.
“John, head east. Mikito, southwest. We have other teams dealing with the smaller incursions.”
Ali’s tone of command breaks my musings, bringing my attention back to the present. Whatever my thoughts, they aren’t pertinent to our current excursion.
Hours later, Mikito and I meet again in the center of town. Teams of scavengers have gone to pull the many corpses back to the town center, where we’ll loot then dispose of the corpses through my intermittently opened Portal. In the meantime, Mikito’s showing me a few new forms to play with. When the notification finally pops up, I find the slight tension in my shoulders relaxing.
“And it’s on. Mikito, Peshawar. John, Kuala Lumpur,” Ali orders once he’s assessed the information transferred.
“Damn it.” I don’t have access to Kuala Lumpur. It wasn’t exactly on the list of places for me to visit. Which I guess is why the Movana chose to attack it. Either way, it won’t stop me. I can pop down to one of the nearby cities with a long-range teleportation pad and get sent to the city within seconds. It’ll just take a little longer. I’m already forming a Portal for Mikito.
“Good luck,” Mikito says to me as she ducks through the dark oval.
I hope that wherever I’m sending her, it’s safe. Not being able to tell what’s on the other side has caused more than one problem for the Erethrans before. It’s why, even though I’ve tried to visit as many new locations as possible to set down waypoints, I’ve also had to do more than just pop in. Moving around the city and its surroundings enough to lay down sufficient waypoints means that an ambush is much harder to set.
It’s only when the Samurai is gone that I realize I forgot to wish the woman well too.
Oops.
I’m sure she’ll be fine.
Chapter 19
Sometimes, when you bitch, the world answers. I’m once again reminded of that fact as I—amusingly enough—crouch on top of Malaysia’s famous twin towers, the night sky twinkling behind me. No haze today—or any day recently with the decline of gasoline-powered vehicles. I’m crouched right between the two towers actually, on the skywalk they’d created. I chose this spot for a few reasons, including the fact that I didn’t expect anyone would think I’d be dumb enough to pop into being hundreds of feet in the air on a gently swaying platform when there’re more comfortable, indoor locations.
Good news is, there wasn’t an ambush awaiting me. Bad news—the forces the Movana sent to take over the city consist of six peak Advanced Classers, twelve mid-range Advanced Classers, and one brutish Master Class. The biggest problem is, one of the peak Advanced Classers was actually a Mercenary Commander whose Skills boost the entire mercenary company’s stats. That left me with the dual problem of locating either of those priority targets and ending them. And deciding who to go for first. I can’t let them take the city or we’ll lose our vote, but as Mercs, I’d rather keep the body count down if possible.
“Ali. Anything?” I call, hoping his answer might give a clue which way fate wants me to go.
“Still updating. Lots of interference, but data’s coming in,” Ali says, floating above the drop. When I look at him, I feel my stomach lurch a little, but his body doesn’t even move under the winds which buffet us up here.
Take out the man who is boosting everyone or the blade driving straight for the heart of the settlement. Normally, it’d be an easy choice—take the Commander because his increase is wide-ranging. But I’ll bet they’ve got a few Advanced Classes protecting the Commander. So not attacking him actually pins down and makes useless a bunch of their men.
As I ponder, the data flashes again and details on the Master Class updates. He’s headed straight for the City Core. If he takes it, he can transfer the city’s numerous defenses over to the attackers, making the battle even harder. Even if we take it back, this fight is as much about morale and showing that we can protect our friends as much as it is winning. We don’t just have to win; we have to win with style.
“Okay, these dots are probably the command group. Lots of data flowing in and out from them, and the comm boys are intercepting a bunch of encrypted traffic flowing towards them. They’re trying to shut it down, but well, they’re under-Leveled,” Ali says.
I judge distances and angles, manipulate my map for a second, and watch as it updates as I plot where to go and how. Without any major waypoints in the city, I need to start setting some down while I traverse the area. At the rate the Master Class is going, I figure I have about eight to ten minutes before he hits the City Core. Maybe more if the resistance he faces is significant enough.
“Can you plot the fastest way in to the command group?” I send over the link while I spend a few moments pulling up the details of the Malaysian defenses to add to the map. Better to have two heads rather than one.
Interestingly enough, unlike the rest of us, the Kuala Lumpur’s settlement owner invested incredibly heavily on fixed defenses. Not only is there the usual slew of beam turrets, mobile sentry robots, and settlements shields, there are also explosive wards, lightning, fire and ice orbs located in self-contained and self-managed turrets. The entire city seems to have been restructured to create a slowly shrinking ring of traffic around the City Core. Multiple layers of shields and walls have popped up since the attack, forcing attac
kers to either follow the route or blast their way through a settlement shield. It takes me a moment to realize what it looks like—a tower defense given life.
Of course, any attacker can punch their way directly through—and the Master Classer is—but the shields regenerate so fast taking them down requires a ton of Mana and firepower. Rather than waste their Mana on fixed, regenerating defenses, the majority of the mercenary corp has elected to run the ring.
“Done. But I don’t think they’re going to be able to hold against that Juggernaut.”
“Then we need to be fast.” I share my own plot with the Spirit who does the same with me. Within seconds, we’ve adjusted the plots to come to a common consensus of where and how we should go.
“Ready when you are.”
I don’t answer the Spirit, instead bunching up my feet beneath me and throwing myself forward, taking through the air. At the apex of my jump, I Blink Step. I hit the roof with one bounding step, bouncing forwards across the gravel top and push off for the next roof even as Ali zips along behind me. Two more Blink Steps, one right over a dagger-close firefight in a crowded back alleyway, and I’m nearly on them, my speed fully built up.
Momentum and one last Blink Step takes me into the middle of the command group, a human wrecking ball covered in Shields and blades, tossing aside the outer ring of mercenaries. Even at the speed I’m moving, I’ve got enough time to scan the group for their Classes. In the middle of battle, Ali’s simplified them all to say Guardian, Warrior, Paladin, Soldier, Mage, or Mercenary Commander—a guide to what I can expect rather than an unusual Class and title I have to spend precious seconds understanding.
“Now!”
The Mercenary Commander roars the command as the Guardian and Soldier next to him brace and take my charge, absorbing my momentum with their mass and Skills. Even as I come to a stop, the mercs are reacting, some picking themselves off the ground while others are training weapons and Skills at me.