Chapter 55

Max woke up on grainy asphalt.  He sat up to find himself in an alley. The air felt heavy, charged with anticipation.  For a moment, Max didn’t want to move.  It would have felt great to just take a nap.  A whiff of a nearby dumpster helped break the weight of the moment.  Sleeping on a street when there are monsters running around would mean I’d deserve to die, too.  He warily got to his feet.

It was nighttime.  He’d half-expected to see a ravaged city with no lights, but there was still at least some electricity.  Fewer lights shone than before, but the area still had some illumination.

A blue screen popped up before his vision.  How the system was clued into what was currently going on, he had no idea.

You have arrived on earth!

Congratulations on playing with the laws of spacetime with a powerful new sponsor!

Local Time: 11:00 PM

Date: August 29

You have returned within 200 meters of a person you were in regular contact with prior to accepting to receive a Path and train at a Quartet of your own free will.

Max stared.  He thought, I can’t tell if some of this is sarcasm or not.  It was definitely strange that the system was specifically telling him how he was near to someone he knew.  Maybe The Morrigan had something to do with it.  After all, it wouldn’t have matched the spirit of his request if he’d just woken up in Japan, or Korea.  Still, how the system even knew who his friends were was something he could think about later.

There was a countdown at the bottom of the screen.  It looked like he had just about a day and a half before he’d be returned to the Cradle of Giants dungeon.

Do you know where we are? asked Lavinia. Max began to nod his head, but then held up a hand for silence when he heard a shriek in the distance. He shook his head when it didn’t come again.

"By my apartment," he whispered. “Between a pizza restaurant and a laundromat.”

Then, with a hop and a little bit of assistance from Slick, Max bounded straight up far enough to reach the rooftop of the pizza place. He did a quick scan of the city. There was a group of people massing down the street and with his one star mana body vision, Max spotted a familiar face.

He stayed in place for a few minutes to observe the situation, scoping out the area that he could see.  Smoke was rising from a few places in the city, backlit by fire and visible in the night sky against a backdrop of stars.

Damage from fighting was pretty much everywhere.  Evidence of skirmishes had left broken windows, smashed mailboxes, and overturned cars.  However, Max didn’t see any big flying monsters like back when the attack first began. He couldn’t see any portals, either.  With what he knew about monster attacks after his studies in the Quartet, he knew the portal situation was subject to change at any time.

A few military vehicles were visible but Max didn’t see any soldiers anywhere.  There were a few civilian cars on the road, driving slowly, cautiously, but not many.  Several rooftops had people with rifles or shotguns on them, keeping watch.  Most of them hunkered beneath cover or with their backs to a wall, preventing a monster from swooping in out of the dark to carry them off.

His town looked like a warzone.

Max’s attention wandered back to the group congregating on the street.  Blake was definitely down there.  The rest of the group, about two dozen of them, were a motley crew of mostly men in pickup trucks and on motorcycles.  They were all armed.  About half had guns, a few had archery equipment, but all of them carried some sort of melee weapon.

Acting on a suspicion, Max opened his third eye, careful to only focus on Blake.  As soon as he did, he saw a curious aura around the man and text similar to a system screen was visible.

Blake Reynolds

Challenger

Mana Swordsman Path

He grinned and closed his third eye.  This discovery had confirmed a suspicion he’d had after his research in the Quartet.  Then he glanced down, checking his tablet in its bracelet form.  The time matched what he’d seen in his system screen when he’d arrived.

All of his gear and clothing for the Quartet was still on his body.  He didn’t have his phone, or any of the other things he’d had on him when he’d left Earth.  That meant he was still somehow in his magic-created Quartet body.  This posed some interesting questions.  He took a chance and said out loud, “System, I am not in my original body.  If I die here, what happens?”

Surprisingly, a system window popped up answering Max’s question.

Irregular situation.  Allowances made after interference from divine energy.

If you die in a Quartet body while outside the quartet, the system will lose control of the Challenger’s soul.  After death, the Challenger’s original body will be discarded into the closest void world.

Max blinked,  rereading the window.  Then he dismissed it. I guess that answers that question.

He shrugged.  “Okay, no dying then,” he muttered.  Then he easily jumped down from the rooftop and jogged over to the group of people massing on the street. They stayed to one side, letting the occasional car pass on the other side of the road, but the majority of the group was in a small parking lot.  Some of the waiting people turned in startlement as Max headed over, weapons coming up. He held up his hands and shouted, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, calm down!  Human here!"

“Max, is that you!?”  Almost immediately after that his friend Blake ran out to meet him, also holding his hands up to calm down the others. "Not a monster, guys!  Not a raider!" he shouted. Then he turned to Max, grinned, and the two of them hugged.  “It’s been a week and a half since the attack, man.  I was beginning to think you might be dead.”

“Still here.”

Blake’s expression was strained.  His features, normally open and honest, were scrunched up from stress and lack of sleep.  The freckles across his nose were almost lost in shadow.  “Well, I’m glad.  Some folks…some folks, well, you know.  But what can you do?”

A few people ambled over, curious. One of them, a young woman holding a crossbow, pointed with her free hand at Max's non-local clothing.  She cocked her head and asked, "Are you a returner?"

"What's that?" asked Max.

Blake answered for her.  "Returners are what everyone is calling the people that come back.  The ones from the Quartet schools.”  Something seemed to suddenly occur to him because he widened his eyes and asked, “Have you been at a Quartet, Max?"

"Well, yeah, sorta," said Max.

"Good enough for us!" Max's friend smiled, a bit more life returning to his face after the first happiness he’d shown when they’d seen each other.   "There haven't been many returners yet but they're probably the reason why the city still stands.”   His friend smiled again but there was no warmth in it this time. “Of course, they’re some of the biggest assholes, too.”

“What happened after all the monsters appeared?" asked Max.

"I think you mean A-Day or M-Day, whatever people want to call it," said Blake.  He snorted and shook shook his head.  “Well, it didn’t take long for everyone to figure out this was world-wide.  Our city wasn’t important enough for much of a military presence.  Most of the vehicles you see around are from soldiers who came here on their own.  Maybe deserters?  What’s the term? AWOL? They didn’t last too long, not without numbers.”  He sighed.  “The military everywhere else, all over the world is spread so thin that they've mostly concentrated on the bigger gates, or portals, now.

“Everybody's been kind of on their own. We would have been fucked if not for the Returners.  And also especially for people developing powers, like you, Blake," said the young woman with the crossbow.

"Yeah, like me," Blake amended, "it would be even worse than it already is."  He turned to Max.  “So it turned out I have powers.  Or something.”

“Yeah I had a feeling,” said Max.  He clapped his friend on the shoulder.

Blake coughed and seemed embarrassed.  “I think it has something to do with what you were– Actually, let’s talk about it later.”

“Sure thing.”  Max glanced around and noticed lights as well as people on their cell phones. "It looks like some of the infrastructure is still up," he said.

"Yeah, the government has been working overtime making sure that we at least have communication. We can't always get through with calls but texting usually works. The Internet is still up too."

"Good to hear.  So what is everybody doing out here?" asked Max. “Who are your friends?”  He glanced around the area again.  Where they were, and where Max used to live wasn’t very far from the college.  He could look that direction and see more lights than the rest of the area.  Maybe the college was being used as a disaster relief center.  He’d find out later.

“We’re getting ready to head to a battle.  Some kobolds are trying to take over a large apartment complex.  People are barricaded in their apartments and have been sending SOS messages for the last hour.  Somehow, someone has enough signal to be live streaming from their room.  Everyone here is part of the militia that formed a few days ago.  We’re getting ready to head out.”  He glanced sideways at Max.  “You’re really a Returner, right? Are you coming?”

“Well, let me ask you a question first.”

“Shoot.”

“I lost my phone.  Can I use yours to log onto my email and send out some messages?  I need to do it ASAP.”

“Sure thing!  In fact, you can do what you want on the way.”

“Well then,” said Max.  He mentally nudged Lavinia and suddenly glowing, ectoplasmic armor formed all over his body.  A few people in the militia group audibly gasped.  A middle aged man stumbled and almost fell.  “I guess I’ll come along, then.”



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This is the end of book 1.  Chapter one of book 2 will be up on Monday. :)