Fist Full of Credits: A New Apocalyptic LitRPG Series (System Apocalypse - Relentless Book 1)

by Craig Hamilton

  At least I had gotten the leftover slices.

  I wondered what had happened to Jessie. Or was it Julia? Jamie?

  I gave up trying to remember the J-name and focused on the dangers around us. Errant thoughts could be deadly in a combat zone and the present demanded my focus.

  Small groups of people nervously gathered on corners and watched Zeke and me warily as we passed. Almost everyone was armed in some manner, mostly with baseball bats, knives, or guns, but makeshift weapons—like clubs made from the leg of a table—were also prevalent.

  I saw hockey and football pads being worn as protective armor, though I wasn’t sure that the plastics would really defend against the teeth and claws of the many mutated creatures that seemed to be popping up everywhere.

  I didn’t see many System weapons, and the simmering hostility radiating from the groups encouraged Zeke and me to keep our distance from everyone. I probably could have done more to pass on some useful information, but tensions were high as everyone looked around for monsters that could attack at any moment.

  The sound of gunfire rattled both near and distant, the occasional stray shot whining through the air overhead or ricocheting off a nearby building.

  Twice as we traveled cautiously block by block, the corner groups devolved into skirmishes that blocked our progress. The first time, we made it past after the roiling melee worked its way to the far side of the street.

  The second time, we weren’t so lucky.

  Two men in black and gold Pittsburgh Steelers jerseys broke off from the scuffle and homed in on where we stood on the sidewalk. As they approached, I saw the jerseys were in poor shape, along with the rest of their attire. The fabrics were shredded and torn, filled with unpatched holes. Despite the appearance of their clothes, there was nothing shoddy about the length of broken metal pipe carried by the first man or the massive pipe wrench carried by his friend. Both weapons were gore-spattered from previous fights.

  “Youz got some nice gear, boys,” said the first yinzer.

  “Just put them fancy toys on the ground, and no one has to get hurt.” The second chuckled as he patted the head of the wrench in an attempt to look menacing.

  I rolled my eyes. “How ‘bout you get out of our way, and no one has to get hurt?”

  “You had your chance,” the man with the pipe sneered as he lunged forward, the length of metal spearing toward my face.

  I sighed and held up my left hand, catching the end of the pipe with my palm. The jagged end of the pipe dug into my flesh, but my greater strength brough the man to a sudden halt.

  The man’s eyes grew wide in surprise, but I stepped forward and decked him with a sharp right hook before he could react further. The man staggered backward, and I stepped closer as I followed up with a one-two combination that dropped him hard. The man’s head thumped as it bounced off the concrete sidewalk, and he flopped backward, stunned from the impact with the ground.

  I turned my head to look at the second man, who had only managed to take a single step forward before I’d floored his partner. He froze as I grinned, daring him to make a move. He didn’t, raising one hand defensively as he lowered the wrench.

  “Let’s go, Zeke,” I said.

  The big man stepped past me, and the limp man on the ground let out a painful moan as we left the two would-be muggers.

  The street fight had moved on during our confrontation, leaving our path ahead clear, so we kept heading down Fifth Avenue toward the park.

  Two empty blocks later, the faintest whisper of a footstep from just behind me alerted me to a new threat. I dove to my right, rolling between a pair of stopped cars and popping back to my feet as my attacker recovered from a wild swing that had whiffed over my head.

  It was the man I’d knocked senseless just minutes before, the blood on his head still fresh from where it had bounced off the sidewalk.

  “I’m gonna kill you,” the man said.

  Some people just never learned their lessons.

  The man rushed toward me with another reckless swing of the pipe. I leaned away, taking a half-step backward out of range of the attack as I drew the axe from the sheath in the small of my back.

  I met the return swing of the pipe with the haft of my axe, blocking the blow just above my hand. I yanked my weapon down and hooked the pipe between the shaft and the backside of the axe head. I continued pulling down, dragging the man off balance, and he stumbled forward. Jerking my axe free of his weapon, I swung it into the back of the man’s thigh just above the knee. The blade sank deep into the flesh and bit into the bone.

  I pulled my weapon from the wound as the man screamed and tumbled to the ground. I kicked him onto his back and rested an armored boot on his throat. The man gagged and clutched at my boot.

  “You had your chance,” I said while drawing my beam pistol with my left hand.

  The man’s eyes grew wide as I threw his earlier comment back at him. I fired directly into the man’s face, and he screamed as the energy blast burned away at him. Flesh charred and crackled, but the screaming didn’t stop.

  Deciding against using another charge for the pistol, I stomped my armored boot down onto the man’s head. With an ugly crunch, the screaming cut off sharply, and the man’s body grew still.

  Taking no chances this time, I stomped twice more. Flesh and bone ground into the street beneath my boot, and I looked up to see Zeke and the second goon staring at me. They were locked together in midswing, Zeke pushing his hammer against the second guy’s massive wrench.

  When the second guy saw me looking his way, he pushed off from Zeke and turned to run. I raised the beam pistol and shot him in the back as he fled. The shot staggered him, but he continued to run, and I lowered my aim before I fired again. My second shot clipped the back of his leg and dropped him to the ground, but he kept crawling in a desperate attempt to get away.

  I stalked after the wounded man, holstering the beam pistol to let it recharge. When I reached him, I stepped onto his back and pinned him in place as he cried.

  Ignoring the man’s sobs, I knelt and slammed the axe into the back of his skull. The blade gave a solid thunk, as if chopping into a melon. I levered the axe head free and hacked down again as blood splashed everywhere. I repeated the attack until there was no doubt the man was dead.

  I pushed myself back to my feet, covered in blood. I hesitated then leaned down, tore free the dead man’s jersey, and used it to wipe the worst of the gore from myself and the blade of my axe.

  “Was that really necessary?” Zeke asked softly.

  “Yes.” I sighed. “They attacked us twice, and the second time was almost a surprise. Imagine if we’d been distracted by something or caught up in another fight.”

  I looted the two corpses, finding nothing of value, before we continued on.

  We angled onto Liberty Avenue and followed the wider street west to the edge of Point State Park as the sun touched the horizon, casting the sky in shades of yellow, pink, and ever-deepening red.

  Stepping out from the shadows of the towering buildings of downtown almost felt like entering a different world. Tired from the long day, but unwilling to take chances this close to where we hoped to rest, I scanned the peninsula.

  The Interstate 279 overpasses and ramps crossed above the near end of the park, but beyond them I saw the granite walls of what had to be Fort Duquesne. Before today, the pre-colonial fort had been marked in the ground with the granite outline of a four-pointed star. Now that outline had risen from the ground in uneven walls that topped out about four feet high and expanded to stretch across the entire peninsula that jutted out into the intersection of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela rivers.

  At the closest corner of the fort, an automated turret sat waiting for a threat to appear. Along the straight stretch of the northeast wall, between the pointed corners, sat a gap in the wall where it overlooked the open field that surrounded the fort and separated it from the city proper. In front of the gap stood several
figures guarding the opening. Oddly enough, most of the trees that had decorated the park were now down, affording clear lines of fire for the turret across the entire peninsula.

  The vibrant grass of the green field was cratered in places, singes surrounding the divots, whose centers smoked faintly. A few charred bodies, both human and otherwise, littered the field. A faint breeze wafted across my face, carrying with it the scents of smoke and death.

  As Zeke and I approached, the figures by the fort watched us warily but without the open hostility and resentment displayed by the people downtown. Two, a man and a woman, were clad in dark green pants and tan shirts, the uniform of park rangers from the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. A third man, shorter and stockier than the rangers, wore dress pants and a collared shirt with a loosened tie. The shirt had the top buttons open, with the tie’s knot hanging just past them. The group’s final figure was another woman, clad in a sky-blue dress and leaning tiredly against the wall beside the gate as she panted in an apparent attempt to catch her breath. One foot was missing a shoe, her foot swollen and dripping blood.

  The stocky man turned away from us and placed both of his hands on the wall. A glow surrounded the section of the wall near him, and it slowly shifted upward, growing out of the ground. The granite section rose until it was even with the part of the wall next to the gap, where I would imagine a gate would be if the walls were tall enough. When the wall stopped rising, the man’s hands dropped from the wall, and he sank to his knees, his body shaking with exhaustion.

  The rest of the group watched Zeke and me as we walked toward the gate, and the turret tracked our movements. I held my hands out to my sides, showing them empty and well away from my holstered weapons as I continued walking closer.

  “That’s close enough,” said the male ranger, his face strained with tension and hand resting on his holstered sidearm.

  The female ranger looked just as stressed, but she was unarmed, which meant she was likely one of the rangers on the educational or environmental side of the department, rather than the law enforcement branch like her counterpart.

  “Easy,” I placatingly replied with my hands still held out open. “We’re not looking for trouble. We’re just looking for a place to hole up before it gets dark, and the System has this place flagged as a fort.”

  “The System?” asked the armed ranger.

  I nodded, gesturing around us. “It’s what’s responsible for this. The Mana, the levels, and the mutated monsters.”

  From there, I spent several minutes explaining everything I’d learned about the System and the Shops.

  By the time I’d finished covering everything I knew, the stocky man had recovered and joined in on the conversation. Carl Jenkins introduced himself as a Civil Engineer class, with abilities allowing him to spend Mana on buildings to upgrade and reinforce them. That ability was how they had upgraded the fort walls.

  It was slow work. Carl could only affect one section at a time. And they’d had to fight off several waves of mutated creatures as Carl worked. They had also encountered several groups of people who had attempted to take over the fort. The fights had been short, thanks to the turret that defended the approach, but the group didn’t have the Credits to purchase any further upgrades to the fort defenses.

  According to the System, the fort belonged to the two rangers, Jared Smith and Chrystal Branton. They’d been conducting an early morning maintenance inspection of the park when the System came online and granted them ownership. Carl had been in one of the first groups of civilians that had arrived at the fort, fleeing a monster group that had spawned in a nearby office building. The injured woman in the blue dress was Erica Davis, a Secretary and the only survivor of the latest group to reach the fort before Zeke and me.

  It turned out that most people had ended up with non-combat Classes, and that left them at a significant disadvantage when faced with the life-threatening reality of a Dungeon World.

  After some further discussion, Zeke and I agreed to help defend the fort for the rest of the night in exchange for being allowed inside. The obvious relief on the strained faces of the two rangers was palpable.

  Zeke headed inside with everyone to take a break, except for Carl, who remained outside with me to continue working on the walls.

  By the time night fell completely, the two of us had made three full laps around the perimeter walls, which now stood nearly six feet tall. The effort had netted Carl two levels in his Class, and he spent a Skill Point on his Reinforce Structure Skill, increasing both the efficiency and effect of the ability.

  I’d handily fended off several monster waves while Carl worked, only one of which had been remotely threatening. The mutated catfish walking out of the river on their whiskers had given me a start, but I’d burned enough of the swarming fish down with my energy pistols, so the remaining few were unable to overwhelm me before I hacked them apart with my axe.

  That attack had drawn the attention of several others within the fort, who ended up coming outside the walls once the fighting had ended. The more salvageable fish were carved up into catfish fillets and grilled over an open flame started by one of the rangers. The number of monsters, and the unusual size of the fish, meant that there was plenty to go around. I snagged a second catfish steak before I returned to guarding the Civil Engineer.

  At the end of the third lap, Carl was dead on his feet. I ended up half-carrying the stocky man into the fort with his arm over my shoulder. Once inside, the man slumped to the ground with his back up against the inner wall and was snoring almost immediately.

  Despite the sun having set hours ago, the full moon gave enough light to easily see, and I looked around the inside of the fort for the first time. I found that there really wasn’t much to it beyond the walls. Several groups of people huddled together throughout, almost everyone laid out and asleep. In the center of the fort, a faintly glowing crystal hovered at about waist height. That crystal gave the rangers control of the fort, and I saw the two of them passed out beneath it.

  I stepped back to the gap in the wall, still not high enough to really warrant a gate, and I realized that I was exhausted too. It was a strange sensation, since I wasn’t physically tired. My Constitution had more than doubled over the course of the day, and by now I was probably approaching the sort of conditioning that would have previously been reserved for Olympic Triathletes.

  My mind just felt sluggish in a way that the numbers in my status couldn’t define, the weariness born of constant threat and staying at the ready for any danger that might appear.

  I lowered myself to the ground in the entrance to the fort. Resting my back against the side wall, I stretched my legs across the opening. Anyone entering would have to quite literally trip over me to get inside.

  I glanced over the people gathered inside the walls again and wondered what I was doing here. Despite my aversion to heroics, I had somehow ended up as a guardian. Would they still trust me with their safety if they knew everything I had done?

  Zeke, stretched out on the ground on the far side of the fort, knew I held few qualms about killing after my actions with the would-be muggers. But even he still trusted that I would keep my word in helping him reach his kids.

  I shook off my doubts and returned my attention to the area outside the fort.

  With things quiet for the time being, I pulled up my notifications and worked through them.

  Level Up! *3

  You have reached Level 6 as a Relentless Huntsman. Stat Points automatically distributed. You have 6 free attributes to distribute.

  Class Skills Locked.

  I hadn’t assigned any points since the library back in Squirrel Hill, so my levels had been creeping up since then. I looked through the accumulated experience updates, skimming over the numbers, and raised an eyebrow in surprise.

  My largest single-kill experience amounts had been from the two men who had attacked as we passed through downtown. Apparently killing peop
le garnered far more experience than slaying monsters.

  I pondered the implications of what that might mean in the long term as I split my free attributes between Perception and Agility again. I still had quite a ways to go before I hit the minimum attributes to unlock the rest of my Class Skills. With the attribute selection confirmed, I looked over my updated status screen.

  Status Screen

  Name:

  Hal Mason*

  Class:

  Hunter*

  Race:

  Human (Male)

  Level:

  6

  Titles

  None

  Health:

  240

  Stamina:

  240

  Mana:

  230

  Status

  Normal*

  Attributes

  Strength

  19 (30)

  Agility

  29 (60)

  Constitution

  24 (50)

  Perception

  26 (40)

  Intelligence

  23 (40)

  Willpower

  20 (30)

  Charisma

  22 (40)

  Luck

  16

  Class Skills

  Hinder

  1

  Keen Senses

  1

  On the Hunt

  1

  Perks

  Gut Instinct

  Combat Spells

  None

  I swiped away the general status menu and took another look over my Class Skills screen despite all the abilities being grayed out. After a few moments, I closed the window before I could get too frustrated over how helpful those Class Skills might have been throughout the day. At least I had higher than normal attributes to make up for the lack of additional abilities. I’d picked up enough from talking with Zeke and the rangers to understand that everyone with Basic Classes received far fewer attributes per level. I felt fortunate that no one seemed keen to discuss specific attributes.