Civilization- Barbarians

by Tim Underwood

  The elf who had clambered out of the tree ran towards them roaring, apparently planning to attack the barbarians with his bare hands.

  The barbarian leader rather contemptuously reversed his spear, and calmly smacked him in the head as he ran towards him.

  The elf dropped instantly.

  He then grunted at the man who had been thinking of killing the woman and said something. Underneath him in a subtitled text it said, General sense: We’ll eat her instead of enslaving her.

  Great. They were slavers as well as cannibals.

  Another big popup appeared and visible through the transparent popup everything suddenly seemed to be going in slow motion, the barbarian leader’s thick beard waved forward slowly, slowly, slowly as he continued to chatter:

  You need help!

  It’s been almost three minutes since the barbarian incursion started, and you’ve done nothing to organize your elves to face it! Nothing! Come on.

  Perhaps you need a bit of extra time to give them orders?

  You can use additional spiritual energy to slow down your perception of time. Now while everything is going so slowly, you can order everyone to fight.

  Live long and prosper!

  When I willed the popup to go away, the barbarians continued to move super slowly. In the upper right hand side of my view, there was now a little clock with ⅛ next to it. The tooltip that appeared said that time now moved 8 times as fast for me as it did in the rest of the world, and that I was using 64 times as much spiritual energy — that is 8 squared the usual amount of spiritual energy — to maintain my consciousness, and that as a result my spiritual energy counter was slowly ticking downwards.

  I willed the viewfield to go back to an isometric view of the area, sitting high above.

  A minimap appeared in the right hand corner, showing a massive area around the camp, with a huge blob of green for the hundreds of people there, and thin spatterings of green with the elves off on hunting or other collecting expeditions.

  And there was the thin clump of red, vastly smaller than the green, but sharper, harder and more dangerous.

  I looked at the collection of elves in the area around the barbarians, they had been somehow hunting deer, so they should be capable of hunting barbarians.

  Most were fleeing, but there was a group that the barbarians were jogging towards who had apparently not heard the cries, and this group was still minding its own business. I willed them to flee from the barbarians, and suddenly, seeming to realize their danger, the three of them dropped whatever they were doing and hoofed it quickly.

  Perhaps I should simply tell everyone to flee, and make sure I didn’t lose more than the four people who had already been captured. If I counterattacked with these elves, many of them might be killed, and I might lose anyway.

  Something deep within me, the thing which had chosen protective as one of my traits, could not allow that.

  If harsh decisions must be made, then I believed I could make them. I believed I could cut an arm off, if I needed to, to escape from a crevice I had fallen into, like James Franco had.

  But the time for such torturous decisions was not yet here.

  I tried grabbing with my will the elves who were running, to order them to instead group together where they could all attack the barbarians as one group.

  Nothing happened at first. Time still ran at 1/8th speed, so it was a slow process figuring that out.

  Then one, just one out of the fifty or so fleeing elves changed the direction they were running to head towards what I had designated as the rally point. I looked at the elf. His name was Arnhelm, and he was young and had bravery as trait.

  Still, they all should be grouping together.

  I must have done something wrong.

  So fully focusing my intention on the command, I ordered all of the elves to run towards the rally point. And five more did.

  Damn.

  What was going wrong?

  A new popup appeared:

  Morale Effects

  Your hippie elves are scared of the cannibal barbarians who want to eat them.

  Strange, huh?

  Scared people are resistant to your will and don’t accept your guidance easily. Each time you order them to do something, there is a check of the power of your command versus the level of fear they have. And then they keep running.

  You probably ought to keep your men from being completely terrified.

  Try infusing the command with the accumulated spiritual energy you have, to make it more insistent, and to give them a bonus to their courage. But probably, some of them will keep running anyway. Because cannibal barbarians are scary.

  Desperately I poured my will into the command. Desperate because I was scared, and even though time moved slowly, the barbarians were heading deeper into the center of my area and the elves were moving further away from the rally point. I selected again the fleeing elves, and this time I infused the command with spiritual energy.

  It was odd. This time I felt, with a sense that had never been there before, but which was sort of like the feeling of how hot or cold you are, the outflow of spiritual energy. It felt unpleasant, like I was becoming cooler. And through it I knew exactly how much spiritual energy was leaving my stores to be infused into the fleeing elves.

  This time half of them turned and ran to the rally point.

  Hopefully that would be good enough, I’d have more than thirty to fight the barbarians.

  When they reached the rally point, I had them line up in a small clearing that the barbarians were heading towards.

  Okay good. In the end forty elves had collected, so they outnumbered the barbarians more than four to one. This might be enough, I said to myself hopefully. I didn’t believe that it would be.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  They were all unarmed. No, really? All of my people were unarmed?

  Well, that spoke highly of their bravery. No wonder it had been so hard to rally them.

  I opened the status page of Arnhelm, the one elf who had passed the first morale check to go to the rally point. Morale low. Healthy. High intelligence, high wisdom, moderate strength, moderate endurance, high dexterity, no combat experience whatsoever. Stupidly brave.

  The bio had a little story about how he grew up in a grand city and then was delighted to be chosen as one of the most spiritually sensitive to live within the sky temple.

  Okay. Okay. We could still do this and win. Okay.

  This was going to be a disaster. Even though the elves outnumbered them enormously.

  What weapons were available? I wildly looked around as I queried the giant system for tracking the resources of the civilization that I’d opened earlier.

  Weapons. Weapons. Weapons.

  And nothing.

  The elves looked between each other and shouted at each other boasts of their fighting prowess in what the system translated as “expressions of false courage which will shatter the instant they are tested”. When they were transported, or translated, or whatever here from those pretty sky temples that everyone would no doubt very much prefer to still be living in, they had taken exactly zero weapons with them.

  What did Stone Age humans do when they needed to kill each other?

  With a desperate jerk of my will, as I could tell that the barbarians had nearly reached my impromptu band, and they had clubbed over the head and dragged together two more of my foraging people, I ordered them to bend down and pick up stones to throw and sticks to use as clubs.

  Unfortunately it actually isn’t that common for there to be big thick chunks of wood ideal for using as impromptu clubs lying around in a forest, so they were left with using rocks or, in three cases, pine cones as weapons. These unmuscled elves certainly were not going to successfully snap and pull thick branches off trees in the two minutes they had left.

  So fucked. I was so fucking fucked.

  And this was a tiny raid party. They’d beat the group I’d gathered together, grab a few more priso
ners, and then run off with them on their backs. They’d pause to eat a tasty elf meal, and then either stick around to strike me with hit and run tactics, eating more and more of my people, or they would go back to their barbarian home with the news that hey, a tasty bunch of elves just showed up.

  Dinner is on me!

  I’d fucked up, and I didn’t even have any idea what I could have done, or should have done to make this better.

  The barbarians burst into the clearing and roared.

  The elves piteously moaned, and though there were four elves for every one of the barbarian warriors, they tossed their stones and pine cones at the barbarians, with a quite impressive accuracy, I have to confess, and then turned and ran.

  Except for Arnhelm, he just bent and picked up another rock to throw, I had to order him individually to run.

  The rocks left lots of bloody noses, black eyes, and general bruises.

  The elves had hurled their rocks from a distance of twenty or thirty yards, and they didn’t have enough strength to seriously injure the spear wielding barbarians at that distance.

  I needed archery to be able to defend my people. Just like in civilization, where archery is always the first important defensive tech.

  Why couldn’t we have started with archery instead of meditation?

  The barbarians hooted in laughter.

  They caught and clubbed three more of my fleeing people, when their leader called out something, which the system translated as, Collect the ceremonial captives. Tonight we feast with our god.

  Though I heard nothing, I would swear the system was laughing at me.

  Then I remembered, I had been promised in the loading screen that I had one warrior, a human named Marcus. Even though I had no weapons to give him, perhaps he could do something. Though one guy against eleven was ridiculous. He’d get killed.

  This wasn’t fair.

  As soon as my will decided to, I searched my people for the human Marcus.

  And there he was, running while holding a club towards the battlefield. He’d apparently heard the alarm and come on his own without orders from me, just like all of the other elves had fled from the screams without any orders.

  Thank god for him being set on an aggressive stance, or sentry stance, or something by default.

  I changed my camera location to follow him as he ran to the battlefield.

  Marcus was an impressive human.

  At first glance he looked just like one of the warriors at the start of a civilization game, with a rough spun sleeveless tunic, a heavy club, and a thick black beard. But he was more than any normal soldier. The club was held lightly against his gigantesque biceps, as though it weighed nothing. He stood six and a half feet tall, and in comparison to the barbarians who averaged only five and a half foot he reminded me of the theory that Goliath in the Bible had been in fact a normal human warrior, just a very tall one, who in those shrunken, disease ridden and malnourished days towered, like a giant, over all others.

  His muscles could not be normal for a human. He barely looked more human than the cute slight elves with their pointed ears. He looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. World. Grotesquely oversized arms with veins popping out, a thick bulging neck, and crazy eyes.

  And the way he held the club.

  You could just tell that he knew exactly how to use anything as a weapon.

  But still, this was one guy, and there were eleven barbarians, who were using sharp spears and axes while he had a club.

  I willed open his stat sheet.

  Was he really human? He certainly wasn’t a normal human.

  Marcus: Age 23

  Morale: N/A

  I hovered over the morale description. Iron discipline: Due to his training in Tantalus the fear of death or defeat can never affect Marcus. He will always fight, no matter how terrible the odds, at his absolute highest level of skill.

  I looked at the stats page. He was at an almost super human level on everything but charisma and wisdom. High intelligence, high strength — oddly they were both equally high. High dexterity, high speed, high endurance, high willpower.

  This was like a character who was optimized for fighting with a savegame editor.

  But there were eleven of them, and they were better armed than him…

  This time I decided to look at the skill tree that he had.

  It was huge, and filled up.

  Large sections of it were invisible, with the text appearing when I tried to open it up, that the current tech level was too low for these abilities to be unlocked.

  However two skills were open that made me hopeful. Primitive weapons mastery: This soldier has a perfect skill in the use of clubs, spears, bows, and anything else Stone Age man could use to fight with.

  Improvised weapons: This warrior has trained to use anything that comes to hand as a deadly weapon. His hands, rocks, cooking pans, shovels, the living bodies of his enemies. No matter what is around him, he’ll figure out a way to kill someone with it.

  Time ran slow for me. I could see each firm-footed step as he ran. He wore brown tightly wound leather wrappings on his feet, while all of the elves, like the hippies I had been promised they were, were barefooted. He ran on the balls of his feet instead of the heels, and I realized somehow despite what must be his huge weight he was almost completely silent.

  Even listening for his foot falls, I could barely hear anything.

  He struck the barbarians at a dead run, like Jason Bourne claimed he keep up for a mile straight. It was only when he was a few running steps away from them did the barbarian group turn from taunting and kicking the elves they had captured towards him.

  Crack! Splat!

  The club and the head of a barbarian he struck both disintegrated into a spray of bloody red splinters.

  Oh God.

  I wanted to throw my stomach up, but alas, I had no stomach.

  Marcus was left with the shattered back end of his stick. The point wasn’t precisely sharp, but Marcus had more than enough muscles to manage despite it being dull. He pounded the weapon through the stomach of the next barbarian in line, punching it right through the whole body. The jagged bloody tip protruded through the man’s back and his legs spasmed because the spine had been severed.

  Oh God.

  This had changed in an instant from a polite game of Civilization into one of those gory horror games I didn’t have the stomach to play.

  A popup now opened, and it pulled more on my flow of spiritual energy to nearly pause the world completely for me. I gratefully looked at the screen that filled my eyes to avoid thinking about how real the splattered brains looked.

  Bits of brain propelled on a shattered splinter of wood had flown right through the point my camera was centered at.

  No voice this time, just text:

  The Blessing of the spirit guide

  Your warrior Marcus is in combat, do you wish to imbue him with your blessing? He will be able to draw upon your spiritual energy, using it to speed up his cognition, allowing him to make quicker decisions as he fights, aim better with his weapons, more precisely dodge or parry blows, and he will gain experience and unlock old combat abilities more easily.

  I willed yes.

  The popup changed:

  Are you sure? Your brain might not be able to deal with these barbarians, but I don’t think Marcus needs any help. He can probably crush all their skulls with their own weapons without any help. You still should imbue him, though he doesn’t need it, to learn how to do so. Your lizard friend gave you a seriously OP hero character to support you for your first few decades. If you missed it, this attack is also serving as a tutorial for you, and you desperately need the tutorial.

  Goddamned system.

  That was the asshole I was already used to.

  I willed yes again, so I could find out what Marcus would do with extra “cognitive power” since that was what my blessing apparently gave.

  Of course another menu came up.

  H
ow much of your power will you imbue Marcus with: Unlimited, he can draw on as much as of your stored spiritual energy as he is able to handle. Or will you specify how much power he gains? The first four 25% increases in the speed of his cognition will cost you 1 unit of spiritual energy per minute. Doubling his mental speed costs 4 units per minute, beyond that the cost goes up with the square of the bonus, 3 times faster costs 8 units, 4x 16, 5x 32 and so on. As Marcus fights to defend your people, your protective trait doubles the strength of your blessing.

  Huh.

  Well, now was the time to find out the limits of the system. I selected that Marcus could draw on unlimited power.

  And time sped back up to one eighth of normal speed for me.

  As the barbarian Marcus had stabbed through his stomach fell towards the ground another swung a stone axe towards Marcus’s head.

  Marcus pulled on my spiritual energy. He sped his cognition up to five times its normal speed. This required thirty-two units of spiritual energy a minute, so he alone used ten times as much energy as my passive generation gave me.

  Marcus ignored the axe swinging at his head, and instead stepped forward past a spear thrusting towards him, and used the palm of his hand to pound the nose of another barbarian into his brain.

  The man spasmed in his death throes, while at the same time the axe swing cleanly missed Marcus.

  Marcus used the body of his latest victim to block several spear stabs towards him, and in the same motion he spun, and grabbed the arm of the man who had just swung the axe, and who was still unbalanced.

  Another nose pounded into another brain, and Marcus borrowed the axe, as its original user needed it no longer.

  A fourth barbarian stabbed at Marcus’s back, and in my time-dilated state I had a seeming eternity, that actually only lasted about two seconds of real time, where I was convinced the blow would strike Marcus.

  But Marcus just leaned to the side as he fixed his grip on the new axe, and the spear blow barely missed him. Before the man who’d put too much force into the blow, expecting it to strike, could pull back, Marcus spun around and buried his new axe deep in the man’s skull. Marcus left the weapon there, and helped himself with his other hand to an axe on his latest victim’s belt.