by David Burke
“Okay, I think we can all agree that this worries us but until there is something that we can act on we should refrain from talking about it,” Amelia said.
Meikiyo nodded in agreement, Jay said, “Makes sense,” and Huong finally said, “Okay.”
After that they started eating their rations and Huong got to work crafting a new spear for Jay. They discussed when they should start hunting but Jay insisted that it would be better to wait a bit because of the risk of an awakening happening.
They were all talking about whether they thought it would happen in here or not when they each silently passed out and lay there glowing.
Chapter 36- Moving the Finish Line
The fifth day in their new home was no different than the others. Two hours after sunrise there was a faint shimmering of everything as the very landscape shifted. Jay had not had many chances to notice it as it occurred at the same time as he was undergoing an awakening. This morning was no different.
M1789
Level: 8 (increased from 6 as part of the consequence of awakening)
Awareness: 12
Precognition: 9 - 74%
Sensual Projection: 5 - 28%
Life Sense: 5 - 62%
Iron Will: 5 - 89%
Telepathy: 1 - 45%
Durability: 9
Hardened Body: 8 - 43%
Enhanced Strength: 5 - 9%
Kinesis: 10
Kinetic Bolt: 4 - 96%
Accelerate: 4 - 49%
Kinetic Dampening: 4 - 12%
Metabolism: 9
Regeneration: 8 - 88%
Enhanced Speed: 4 - 73%
Formation: 25
Body Modification: 4 - 0%
Psionic Construct: 1 - 0%
Temporal Manipulation: 25 - 0% LOCKED
Psi Pts: 470
Stamina: 180
Once again he had gotten numerous skill upgrades and added a point to his durability, no doubt because of late-night training. He still hadn’t found the time to train any of his formation skills but he hoped that since they were well on their way to completing their quest that he would have time to do some of the training today.
The girls each woke up and compared notes with him. They responded at different rates to the hunting and training from the day before and that may of course have been in part because it became harder to increase levels as one got to higher levels. The result though was that they were all up to level 5 now.
It made Jay smile as their group was becoming stronger. He had worried that if the next floor or stage of the dungeon was meant for people of level 6 or beyond that he would be forced to leave them behind. He definitely wanted to push on but he had to admit it was nice to have a team around him.
By the time that Jay had taken a bath in the stream and gathered them fresh water he returned to a group of super excited girls. They were positively giddy bouncing all over the place.
“So I can see that you have something to tell me,” Jay said. He was curious but also nervous. Anything that had all three of them working together was either going to be great or them steamrolling him.
“Go ahead, Huong, show him,” Amelia said.
“Oh no, you made the final touches on it, you should be the one to get to present it,” Huong replied.
Amelia nervously moved around. “I don’t know, Meikiyo is the one who figured out how to make it stronger.”
“Just do it, we both added to it but you are the one who started it. Without you neither of us would have had something to add to it,” said the normally quiet Meikiyo as she pushed Huong forward.
“Okay, okay,” Huong said as she turned around and bent over to pick up something off the platform. Jay wasn’t sure what she was picking up as he hadn’t noticed anything in that space before but now he could tell that she had something, maybe a long stick in her hands.
She held it out, with that look that a person gets when giving a gift that they very much want to be well received. “Remember how I told you I would make you a new spear. Well we all worked together and figured out a way to give you an even better weapon than before.”
Jay’s eyes kept drifting over the staff that she was holding in her hands. It was almost as though his eyes had trouble focusing on it. It was the same length as his shaft that had shattered last night but looked at first glance to be more like braided vines than a staff.
As he took it in his hands he was surprised both at how heavy it was as well as how smooth. It still had the woven appearance but the surface felt smooth. It weighed at least three times as much as his former spear but that was really insignificant to him. He saw that one end was tapered where the spear head would go while the rest of it felt uniform.
“It feels very strong. How did you make it like this?”
They all started to speak and their words jumbled together before the other two eventually looked at Amelia and told her to tell the story. “So you know how a certain bone-headed fool broke his spear shaft last night and Huong wanted to replace it, well she experimented but eventually decided that weaving the wood together would give it more tensile strength while remaining flexible. The problem was that it was too flexible.”
“It seems stiff enough,” Jay said.
“Guys always think that,” Amelia replied, snapping a bit at being interrupted. Jay shrugged as he realized the double meaning and both the other girls giggled.
“Now if I can continue?”
“Uh, sorry, of course, please do.”
“That is where Meikiyo came in. She was able to harden the wood with her fire. She remembered watching a documentary once about hardening spear and arrow tips in fire. The first attempt became very hard but too brittle. So they found that if Huong and Meikiyo worked together they could for lack of a better word imbue the wood with PSI energy from both of them. The result was a spear shaft that is much stronger than before while retaining a greater degree of flexibility.”
“This is amazing, thank you so much,” Jay said as he took on a new appreciation of their work. He flexed the staff in his hand and then swung it around a couple of times taking practice thrusts and so on and finding that he could exert more force on it without having to worry about it snapping. “Can I ask how long whatever you did to it will last?”
“We don’t really know for sure, but it was obvious that there was a point at which we couldn’t put any more energy into the shaft as it was clearly at capacity. I’m speculating that it has something to do with the material that we are using,” Huong said.
“Okay, that makes sense. Why is it so hard to see even when I know that it’s there though?”
At that Amelia beamed. “That was my contribution. I was able to add it with my visual shroud. I initially wanted to see if I could add Shadow Sheath to it and increase the damage from it, but whenever I tried to put that into it the shaft would start to wither and they would have to start over.”
“Whatever it is, it’s very cool and I don’t think we have to worry about me doing more damage. This is just amazing and you were able to do this in what like half an hour?”
“Yeah, I know I’m pretty excited to see what we can do with more time and resources,” Huong said.
“Definitely bears some experimenting.”
Huong grinned. “Yeah experimenting is good.”
Jay almost expected Amelia to slap one of them for the flirty comment but they all seemed to be a little less on edge this morning. Maybe it was being away from the water in the camp. Maybe the stream either didn’t have whatever chemical was laced into the other water or maybe it had less of it. It was definitely something to keep in mind.
“Right now though we need to fix the spear tip and we were waiting for you,” Meikiyo said.
“Um, okay, but I don’t know that I have any abilities that can shape metal.”
“That isn’t why we waited. We waited for two reasons. First we wanted you to be there when we had to go down to the stream since we will need the water.”
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p; She trailed off as she was speaking and then when she didn’t give the second reason, Jay had to ask, “And the second reason?”
Meikiyo seemed unwilling to continue on so Amelia said, “She says she has figured out how to shape the blade by herself but that she needs you to be able to cool it off and that will require you taking a piece of red-hot metal and putting it in the water.”
“Oh, so I have to get burnt?”
“Only as a backup plan but being fair it is distinctly possible.”
“So what is the main plan then?” Jay asked.
“We are hoping that you can control your kinetic dampening field enough so that she can throw the spear tip to you and then you can sorta guide it to the water softly,” Amelia replied.
“Hmm, that might work. Well, I guess only one way to find out, right?” Jay smiled and then offered a hand to Meikiyo to help her down from the platform.
As they all walked to the stream Jay asked, “Does anything seem different about the jungle this morning?”
“What do you mean?” Amelia asked in response.
“I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I do know that my life sense is showing more readings than it was yesterday or at least at the end of the day yesterday.” As soon as he said the words out loud Jay got a worried look on his face and said, “Hold on a sec, I need to check something.”
He said, “Status” and pulled up his stat sheet complete with the quest information. The Quest 1.2 still showed as active and the time allowed for completion was down to just under 48 hours, but it was the part that had changed which made him panic.
“Shit, shit, shit. Everyone check your quest status.”
They all started shaking their heads once they did as Jay asked, “Same as me? Mine shows that the quest is 0% completed.”
They nodded and Amelia even added, “How the hell does that work?”
“I have a theory if you want to hear it but it's just a theory since I haven’t been able to observe it enough but from the second morning I noticed something.”
“You mean like how the holes the crabs had torn up on the beach were there one minute and then it was like they were gone?” Huong asked.
Meikiyo said, “Or how any trees that got cut down around the ziggurat were fully regrown the next morning.”
“Yeah I bet it has something to do with that weird shimmering that happens each morning and the way it looks like the sun has suddenly moved further across the sky,” Amelia said gravely.
“Good, so you all have seen it too. I have had an awakening almost every morning so I wasn’t sure if I had imagined things the first day.”
Amelia had her conspiracy theory look going as she said, “So what, someone comes in and replaces everything every day? This is getting creepier by the moment. That pretty much rules out people as the ones conducting this experiment. Maybe we really are in hell now.”
“Not necessarily,” Huong began. “Remember the old saying, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic to a more primitive society.’”
“Okay, so you are saying this could be some super mega advanced group of what, aliens? And they have crazy technology that allows them to control time, move the sun, instantly regrow plants, or what?” Amelia asked, growing more intense with each word.
“Not likely time control- more likely they knock us all unconscious and half an hour or so passes. Still it would require an amazing level of technology for them to be able to replace all the animals that we killed yesterday and regrow plants. They must be able to convert energy into matter,” Huong said thoughtfully.
“What I don’t get is why aliens with that kind of technology would bother with us. I mean what could we do for them that they couldn’t do for themselves. Is it just morbid curiosity? A science experiment conducted out of boredom? Maybe they are sadists? Demons, sorta makes sense if this is like hell since we are clearly being pushed on all kinds of issues,” Jay rambled on.
“Those are good questions, and I don’t know. I guess I have always assumed that with this level of technology would come a higher level of consciousness,” Huong answered.
“Ah, the next generation myth,” Jay said.
“What?” Amelia asked.
“It’s just a Star Trek thing. When Next Generation came out it had the idea that money and financial gain were no longer human motivations and that instead people were simply driven by the desire to better themselves. It’s really kinda silly, since greed is so hardwired into us.”
Amelia hit Jay’s arm playfully and said, “Nerd.” He just shrugged.
Everyone turned towards Meikiyo as she joined the conversation. “Whatever they want with us, they must want more of us, otherwise why put aphrodisiacs in the water. I mean it was all I could do sometimes not to just try and jump on Jay or Liam.”
Jay grinned and that time Amelia hit his arm a bit harder. “Ow, I’m not trying to take advantage of anyone.”
“Like that hurt you, Mr. Hardened Body. You aren’t fooling anyone,” Amelia said.
“Meikiyo has a point though. If we are so valuable that they want more of us, then why are they killing so many of us off,” Huong said in that way that you weren’t sure if she was talking to you or just speaking out loud to herself.
They all looked at each other for a moment then before Jay said, “It’s a science gone bad thing. They are trying to make the strongest humans possible. It’s the only thing that fits both of those observations. Especially when you add in the way that the birth control is effective based on level. It’s easy to protect against lower-Tier guys but costs increasingly more credits as the levels go up. So they are trying to promote breeding amongst the strongest of their livestock.”
“That’s messed up,” Huong said.
“But the bonehead is probably right. It doesn’t matter though. We have to keep playing the game to try and win and just trust in each other. So let’s try to make this spearhead. We are burning daylight and we have to finish the quest before it resets again tomorrow,” Amelia said.
Interlude 3 - Who are the Monsters?
Kenley and Tyson had been friends since childhood. It was in their estimation only fitting that they had both been taken into whatever weird world this was. After all they had shared so many things in life together.
They had gone to the same schools, including college until the little bit of trouble that they had run into. They had both done far more than they should have to the same drunken and drugged sorority girl at a party and had both ended up in the local jail awaiting trial for beating up a guy who tried to protect his girlfriend when they were getting handsy with her at a bar.
Many people only knew them as the life of the party. The first guys to buy a round and the ones who always made sure that fun was had by all, well most all. To the few who had ended up on the wrong side of their shared temper or worse their lustful intentions, they were scum. Either way though they were guys who got stuff done.
It may have been that trait about them that got them chosen for this experiment or it may have been a quirk of fate that gave them the necessary genetics. It didn’t really matter because once they got here, they soon realized that the rules of the society they had come from no longer constrained them.
It didn’t take long before they were leading an uprising in their cluster and the few survivors of the first night found that humans can be monsters worse than any taloned or fanged beast. As the few survivors of the first purge, as they called it, became aware of the benefit of killing other humans, they scoured and looked for ways to break into other clusters.
Each time that a cluster fell below 25% population the wall to the closest cluster would drop and the raiders would charge in and attack. Some of the clusters were better organized than others and in the end all of the original raiders other than the two instigators died. Over four days of non-stop fighting nearly half of the clusters were wiped out.
In each new cluster, Kenley and Tyson found others to join in their att
acks. They always made sure not to fight in the front but kept themselves in relative safety as the relief if their forces were too close to being overrun. Knowing that anyone who survived too many of the battles was going to gain enough stat points to be a threat to them, they always tried to only come in and close out a battle if it was going very badly and only after at least some of their strongest had fallen.
This strategy had two effects, one of which was negative for the assembled people of the various clusters and the other which was a boon. Because they waited in the back, Kenley and Tyson rarely got more than 1 or at the most 2 personal kills per battle. So that after some 50 clusters had fallen they still were only at around 70 total stat points apiece. The harsher effect was that they became very knowledgeable about how to go about this grim business and even learned the best ways to incapacitate the women who would be their victims.
Kenley was a pyrokinetic who specialized in throwing fireballs and spent almost all of his effort in developing that to the detriment of his physical stats. Tyson on the other hand was a telekinetic who practiced sneaky ways to move objects in surprise attacks that would curve in from odd angles. He too was very narrow-minded in his progression and didn’t practice his other skills. Neither saw much need, for if any stood against the two of them, Tyson would simply hold the opponent in place while Kenley burnt him where he stood.
By the end of the fifth day, after two solid days of fighting, the two men were tired of fighting. They wanted to take a day to enjoy a bit of debauchery with their spoils. There were of course both men who wanted to stay alive and were willing to bend the knee and women who were willing to cling to any strong leader, no matter how debased. These followed willingly, but as is the case, for Kenley and Tyson it was not enough to have the beautiful women around them. For them it was an exercise in power and more about asserting dominance than simply enjoying sex. So there were those that they kept as victims, but they were used harshly and never lasted long.
D’varn had been monitoring these events very closely. At first it hadn’t seemed like a very big deal as one cluster fell into chaos and consumed another. However, as cluster after cluster fell and with the already high death tolls from the environmental hazards he had placed as a way of testing and prodding the hoomans, he began to panic. He saw his experiment which had taken decades to be approved falling apart.