Sponsored Apocalypse, ch 26

Hey everyone, I apologize in advance for the editing mistakes in this one.  I know there will be more of them.

The reason will hopefully make you a little less frustrated with me.  I'm a little behind on this story, at least 10k words, and I need to make it up in the next 4 days.  My arbitrary goal/deadline is to have this book done by the 15th so I can start work on Delvers LLC 6.  In order to hit that, I need to speed up considerably, and that's only possible if I stop agonizing so much over editing.  Honestly, I waste a lot of time with editing.  It's a blessing and a curse...

But the reality is that my first drafts are usually pretty clean.  That's the upside of being a slower writer, I suppose.  If I get the first draft done, then just go over it to make sure I didn't mess anything up too badly, that's like... 60% faster than I usually put chapters out, and the end product will probably be 90% as good.

So...sorry!  But chapters will be faster now.  I'm shooting to be done with this book in the next 4 days.

***

I looked at my new oblivion hound.  Unlike my first impression of him, now he seemed friendly and warm.  But I had a feeling that to everyone but me, his presence would still inspire the same feelings of dread and foreboding that I’d had before.

“What am I going to call you?” I mused aloud.  The hound wagged his tail helpfully, which was still strangely cute, even from a nightmare creature of death conjured by a death god.

Melvin the sarcastic priest had taken me back to earth once my interview with Anubis was over, but not right away.  I’d been given a guest room in the temple, allowing me time to process and get used to my new bond with the oblivion hound.  He was part of me now, and in a way I didn’t quite understand yet, I could actually…take him into my soul for storage.  The hound would disappear, but I could feel him in the back of my mind, resting, watching.

And it was obvious he really, really liked me.  That constant feeling of loyalty had been a guiding beacon to help me deal with the overwhelming weirdness of having an underworld creature living in my mind.  I still had a feeling that I was going to avoid storing the hound inside myself, though.  Apparently he could take care of himself just fine outside.

Now I’d been back and on my own for about half an hour now.  I had to keep reminding myself that it was still technically the day after my world had ended for everyone else.  At this point, I’d probably had at least a week to get used to the idea of how my world had changed.  The sun was going to set soon and I’d found an abandoned house with a large garage to take a nap in.  If I woke up early, I was planning on hunting at night, when it seemed the monsters were most active.

This house had been very obviously empty when I’d seen it from the road.  The door had been open, the garage doors, too.  I’d still called out as I’d approached and gone through the house.  It looked like whoever lived here had left in a hurry.

I hoped they were still alive, still doing okay.  One of the rooms in the home had belonged to small child who was a big fan of the local baseball team.

After closing the garage doors, I’d basically been hunkering down, preparing to sleep.  …and discovered that the oblivion hound could walk through the solid garage doors.  Now we were both sitting on the bare concrete, staring at each other, one of us wagging our tail.

I was thinking out loud.  “You definitely need a name, but some sort of mythological name is probably a little too on the nose and I’m not that edgy in the first place.”

The hound wagged his tail helpfully and cocked his head as I spoke.

“How about something cute then?”  I didn’t get an answer and tapped my lips thoughtfully.  Then I remembered my friend Clara a few years ago.  She’d had a dog named Taco, and I’d always thought it was great.

“Actually…how about…Bacon?”  The hound’s tail thumped the floor so loudly it practically rattled the garage doors.  “Okay, Bacon it is.”

Since the last item for the day was done, I laid my head down on the folded blanket I’d taken from the house, using it as a pillow.  It hadn’t felt right to take any of the actual pillows.  Either due to the temperature outside or my freakishly high endurance, I didn’t feel the need for a blanket or sheet or sleeping bag.  Even the hard ground felt just fine to sleep on.

There were advantages to being superhuman.

Then I used my post apocalypse ability to fall asleep and set an internal alarm.  Just a few hours of sleep would be more than enough.  And although it would dangerous, I had a feeling that hunting monsters for XP would be easier.  Would just need to stay alive.

With that last thought, I fell asleep.

***

I woke up with a paper stuck to my face.  At some point I’d rolled over and face planted some random old receipts on the garage floor.  With a grunt, I rubbed my face clean and sat up.

[First to Five Eyes] was still one of the most useful abilities I’d gained.  I was already starting to take it for granted, but waking up in a dark garage and still being able to see was so helpful that it made me appreciate it all over again.

The first thing I noticed was that Bacon wasn’t in the garage with me anymore.  Second, something was catching my attention from the nearby toolchest.  I’d already scoured the house and garage, looking for any useful tools or weapons.  All I had was a pile of edible food on the floor next to me.  But now…

I stood and ambled over to the tool chest.  After rubbing some sleep out of my eyes, I examined what had caught my attention.  The screwdriver didn’t have exactly the same pull that other antiques I’d picked up did.  This was was deeper, more subtle.  I wondered if I was getting more sensitive or learning my abilities better.  Maybe this one was more like my bayonet, an antique that I needed to carry or meet some other criteria before being recognized by its spirit.

After pocketing the screwdriver, I fished out the pocket knife I’d taken what felt ages ago from the antique shop in town.  Whether through luck or something else, it was also giving me the same feeling that the screwdriver had.  It definitely had a spirit I could bond with, I would just need to figure out how.

I shrugged, moved into the house for its convenient bathroom, then picked up all my stuff from the floor of the garage.  My pack already looked pretty beat up.  Seeing it reminded me of Tom, and all the other people who had died in the gun store.

Memories of the cyclops, their likely killer, overlaid it all and I narrowed my eyes.  Now that my perspective had changed, I knew that killing the damn giant was a good goal.  That would be also be a good, continuing gut check for my growing strength.  Until I felt ready to kill the giant, I was still weak.

I opened the garage door and blinked.  Around the same time, I noticed a system message that I’d gotten in my sleep and been minimized.  Ironically, the shock of what I saw outside had woken me up enough to finally notice the message.  I’d leveled up.

Outside, bodies of monsters littered the ground, a group of what had been goblins.  They were all mangled and torn.  How I hadn’t woken up from the noise, I had no idea.  Inhuman fluids darkened the front yard in front of the house and down the gravel driveway.

Bacon sat in the midst of it, staring at me with his midnight, pupil-less eyes, thumping his tail on the ground.  The goblin next to him was just…missing half of its body.

“Were you hungry, buddy?”  The oblivion hound stood and ambled over, obviously happy.  There was a bond between us, and I could already feel the fringes of his emotions.  I’d been told that my sensitivity to it would deepen as my relationship grew with the hound.

My mouth dry, I glanced around at the carnage again.  I’d just learned several things about my terrifying hound.  First, unless something really powerful came along, I could likely sleep in peace.  Second, Bacon was a badass.  Third, I got XP from things that he killed.  I’d just checked–I was no longer in a party with Aldina, so the only way I could have leveled up in my sleep was from all these monsters Bacon had killed.

I thought of something else while I looked around and shrugged to myself.  Maybe…

“Bacon, good boy.”  The hound made of inky, physical darkness hopped up on his front paws.  Suddenly, one of the nearby goblins surged up, a dagger in hand.  The monster was missing a leg but was still alive.  Bacon didn’t even turn.  He tail elongated and hardened, punching through the bottom of the goblin’s jaw and out the top of its skull.

The creature fell like a sack of potatoes.  I swallowed.  Bacon wagged his tail and droplets of blood flew everywhere for a couple seconds.

“Good boy,” I whispered, then coughed.  “We need to do a test.  Bacon, can you stay right  there? Stay.”  I slowly walked backwards, keeping my eye on the hound.  He didn’t move.  I kept moving backwards and eventually, I felt a tentative ping from the dog in my mind, a lonely question.  He was asking for reassurance, wondering if I was angry and leaving him.

I tried to send back confidence and curiosity.  It seemed to work because the feelings I was getting through the bond were no longer quite so insecure.

When I was about two hundred yards away from the house, I figured it was far enough for a first experiment.  I’d practiced gathering Bacon into myself for storage, but only when he was close by.  This time I’d be doing so fairly long distance.

Just like I’d been taught in Anubis’ temple, I mentally triggered the gathering process.  Sure enough, a few moments later, I could feel the hound in the back of my mind.  Then I started the mental procedure to summon him.  In about twenty seconds, my oblivion hound sat on the ground, looking at me with curiosity.

“So I can collect you long distance, bring you into my soul.  And you can operate a long distance away from me…I wonder how far…”

I walked back to the garage.  When I was inside, I carefully checked the “feel” of my experience.  Even though I didn’t have an experience bar or anything like that, I could generally feel where I was at regarding leveling up again if I focused on it.  Right now, I was at the very bottom of level 26.  It felt…empty.  I must have been really close to the end of level 25, because goblins didn’t give me as much experience anymore.  Or maybe Bacon was low level and that helped me?  I honestly wasn’t sure about that yet, but I did know that I was barely past the beginning of level 26 now.

“Alright Bacon, I have a mission for you.”  I felt curiosity through the bond.  “Go ahead and leave here, head down the road until you see a blue store.  A building.”  I described an easy to recognize landmark about two miles away.  “Head near there, find some monsters, and kill them.  Can you handle that, buddy?”

Bacon didn’t quite nod, but gave a dip of his body.  He seemed excited through the bond.  Then he turned, phased through the door to the garage, and was gone. I’d seen him run before, and the underworld beast seemed tireless.  He could probably run two miles in a little over a couple minutes.

Not for the first time, I wondered how smart he really was.  He was definitely not quite a person, at least not in his level of intellect, but he wasn’t an animal exactly, either.  I couldn’t assume all supernatural beasts were this easy to communicate with.  Before I’d left Anubis’ temple, the monks had all seemed to regard Bacon with a sort of reverence.  One had told me he’s never even seen an oblivion hound before, just heard of them.

I stayed quiet in the garage, alert in case I got any new visitors.  The fact that there were so many dead monsters out front made it seem unlikely to me, but some of the ones Bacon killed must have come after there were already corpses present.

Thinking of the dead monsters actually made me leave the garage and look at the bodies again.  Like I’d seen before, one of the dead creatures was just…  half-gone.  But now that I was looking closer,  I noticed that its chest was ripped open.  “Was Bacon eating their hearts?” I wondered.  It didn’t seem so, though.

Then I noticed a small, marble sized orb roll of the chest of one goblin.  It was black-green and was missing a piece of it.  It looked like it’d been gnawed on.  “Weird.”

Around that time, I felt a movement in what I was starting to think of as my “XP bar.”  I’d just gotten experience, which would have to be from Bacon killing something.  The movement wasn’t too much, probably about the same as I’d get from killing a goblin these days.

I smiled.  This wasn’t the best possible information I could have gotten, but it was still pretty damn good.  Now I could figure out a few more things.  Some of it would need to be tested, but I was going to make some assumptions for now.

First, Bacon was not getting more XP than I did.  This meant he was probably locked in at around the same rate I was.  Second, I could get XP from a serious distance.  Two miles away might as well have been two hundred, based on my understanding of the system.  I was going to assume from now on that there was not limit to the distance I could still get experience from Bacon killing things.  I’d change my mind on that if I ever got evidence to the contrary.

Lastly, Bacon was highly intelligent.  I made a conscious decision at that point to treat him like I would like… a kid brother.  Even though I wouldn’t ever make the mistake of treating him like a pet, not since he was obviously a murder creature from the abyss, I would always remind myself to regard him as my partner.  He was.

Having Bacon now was probably an incredible game changer.  This was my ticket to having any kind of real shot at rising to the top.  The top of what, I didn’t know yet.  And part of me, a worried, small part of me, wondered if I’d sold my soul for power.

Maybe.  On one hand, Anubis was a “Good,” god, and now that I’d been straining to remember what little I knew of him in mythology, I could buy that.  Death itself wasn’t evil, after all.  But I wasn’t stupid, just slow sometimes.  There was always a possibility that I’d been tricked.  I also flat out didn’t believe that there was no price to pay for all of this help I’d gotten from the jackal god.

All of that had gone through my mind before I’d accepted becoming his champion.  But ultimately, I was willing to pay the price for power.  It sounded kind of…edgy when I put it super bluntly like that in my head, but I was getting used to it.  Everyone had to make their own choices.

I figured that if I’d been willing to gamble with my life in the Challenge Portal, what’s a little more flirting with disaster?

And Bacon was a freaking beast…in more ways that one.

Now I needed to do two more things to fully understand this aspect of Bacon’s full utility.  I knew he was at least a couple miles away right now.  After a little bit of concentrating, I called him back into my soul.

It worked.  I thought I could see a flash of darkness, even darker than the night, then the hound was nestled inside my soul again.  With a more familiar effort, I summoned him back into the physical world.  He seemed happy to see me for a few seconds, then abruptly turned and snapped up the little orb I’d seen on the ground.  It was gone in a second.

“Was the nasty goblin marble yummy, boy?” I asked.  I got a tail wag in response.

“Alright,” I thought out loud.  “Now we gotta go kill something together.”  If Bacon killed a monster and I got a significantly different amount of experience while next me, I would know that there was a proximity penalty.  If he didn’t, the system truly just recognized the hound as an extension of me.  The two were subtly different, even if I sent him to fight by himself.

I packed up my things and set off into the night to find something to kill.