Sponsored Apocalypse, ch 19

Long chapter

------


The system notification was about how [Built Different] had just stopped my bleeding.  Again.  That was good, but I was too frazzled to really focus on too much at the moment.

After the madness we had just experienced, Aldina and I had crouched down trying to get our breath under control. My high Endurance meant my body wasn't very tired. But the sheer nerves of the experience had worn me out.

I recovered quickly though, and stood up. Now that there was a break, the surroundings were eerily quiet.  It was like the madness we’d just endured hadn’t even happened.  Of course, the dozens of grisly, torn little bodies around us ruined that fantasy.  Broken tools and improvised weapons littered the asphalt now.  None of them were worth picking up or even examining.

After spitting, I checked my status windows to see what else had popped up during the fight and silently shook my head. That must have been a lot of goblins because I gone up

three levels.  Out loud, I said, “I gained three levels, you?”

Alina replied, “Same.”

Yeah. That actually makes sense. For every goblin I’d killed with my initial bomb, she'd probably killed another with ice magic when they'd rushed us.

Considering my [Bone Strengthening] has saved me from a concussion and might have even saved my life, I decided to advance further along that path.  Time to buy [Elastic Joints], I thought.  It was going to cost me 5 points, which was all I had.  This was going to clean me out.

I bought the upgrade then looked at my updated character sheet.

Miles Lindstrom

Title(s):

First Ten to Five

First Five to Ten

First Transcendents

Level 17

Class: none

Traits: none

Stats:
Str: 7

Dex: 4

End: 10

Int: 6

Will: 8

Luck: 6

Reflex: 7

Armor (nat): 0

Affiliations: Sponsored by *hidden*

Associated Sponsor Titles: *hidden*

Boons:

Free skill voucher at 20. (locked)

Prime Skills:

Tsukumogami Embrace

Spirits of the Past

Built Different

First to Five Eyes

Lower Prime Skills

Bone Strengthening

Elastic Joints

Active Skills:

Saliva of Hared Ha

Bone Truth Eyes

Basic Enchanted Sleep

Pulverizing Pebbles

Angry Arrows

Equipment-related Skills:
Better Days Auto Whisk

Beaded Benediction of Delayed Solace

Stalwart Pan of the Lonely Mountain

Lindstrom Family Hammer

Skills:

Dagger Combat

Hammer Combat

Magic Combat

Club Combat

Spear Combat

Sword Combat

Scythe Combat

Ambush

Healing Salve Application

Firearms (pistols)

Combat Endurance

Available Advancement Points: 0

***

Magic Combat, huh?  That entry was new, but there were no other surprises.  Upgrading had only taken me a few seconds. After that I walked forward, observing the aftermath of the battle.  Something in the general store had caught on fire.  It was starting to go up in flames.

The store was already completely destroyed, which was a small blessing…because I really didn't want to examine the inside too closely.  It was all just a mess of meat paste and debris right now anyway.  If I never confirmed what I suspected had been in the building, then I would never truly have to live with the guilt. I was absolutely fine not ever knowing.

But now there was the question of what we should do. The two of us looked at each other. And I could tell she was thinking the same thing I was.  Part of me really just wanted to go back to her bunker. But that safety was an illusion, one that didn’t even belong to me, to boot. Like it or not, this was my new world.

Finally, out loud I said, “So what now?”

Aldina scratched the back of her neck, leaving dark blood smears. Some blood had splattered her hand at one point.  She said, “Originally, I was thinking we could make our way to town. But now I'm not so sure. Like, yeah, I said I was expecting a lot of monsters. But this many, this far away from the most populated area…”  Aldina nodded to herself. “This is not consistent with my past experiences.  I'm beginning to suspect that maybe the two of us might have had something to do with this.”

The fact that Aldina was fairly calm at the moment was almost a given, but I was somewhat surprised that I’d been thinking so clearly, given all that had happened.  As soon as she spoke, that shattered, though.  What she’d just said hit me between the eyes like a hammer. I physically stepped back. The idea that my existence might have caused more problems and attracted more…evil in my area was something I was not prepared to deal with yet. However, I immediately understood what she meant.

It was game logic.

If the world had changed, and this was a tutorial, then the existence of more powerful players or fighters would also require more monsters or challenges. Otherwise, it'd be too easy for all the “players,” and ironically, would not be fair for the other, weaker participants. Of course, the idea of fairness was all based on the assumption that Aldina and I, or whoever else might be out there with an advantage, killed their fair share of monsters.

In the space of two seconds I considered all this and realized that not only did I have to kill monsters to get stronger, if I didn't, I might be screwing over other people. Because a lot of people out there probably didn't have any survival related skills at all.

Dammit! I thought. Story of my frickin’ life! People have always treated me like shit, but when push comes to shove, I just couldn’t bring myself not to care.  Whether it was putting away the shopping car in a parking lot, or recycling, driving decently, not littering, or even just trying to be polite in shared spaces, I had never been good at living selfishly.  I’d felt a strong compulsion to not be a dick to others.  It was kind of ironic.

I spat on my hand and rubbed the back of my head.  The blow to my skull hadn’t really split my scalp very much, but I figured I should still take care of it.  [Built Different] must have stopped the bleeding.  After a brief check of my notifications, I verified it had.  More than once, actually.  After I took care of my head, I administered aid to the other cuts on my body, too.  Then I tended to Aldina.  She took the spit-based healing with a stoic look.

My headache was almost gone now.  I said, “Since it’s a bad idea to go to town now, how about we check out where those last goblins came from across the street?”

“Sounds good to me.”  The two of us had already been looking in that direction.  Before moving, we both took a bottle of water out of our backpacks and downed them. Then we crossed the street towards the modest neighborhood.

The Alabama forest was pretty, but unnaturally quiet.  I was slowly getting used the lack of ambient sounds, but sometimes it hit me all over again.  In this case it was when we were actually crossing the street.  We couldn’t hear any cars at all.  My best guess was that cars were too noisy and not fast enough.  Maybe everyone who was going to flee already had, but where would they go?

I suspected there were a lot of people stranded on the highway right now, or maybe had already died there.

After getting across the street, I was actually dreading what we might find. So many goblins had come from that direction and had had almost an entire day to do…whatever they were doing. So I definitely feared the worst.  But at least at first, nothing seemed too obviously amiss.  Intellectually, I knew that had to change soon.

The soft noises I’d heard from the inside of the general store before I’d bombed it were nightmare fuel.  Hating goblins was quickly becoming part of my core personality and I was okay with it.

We warily walked down the street. Now I could see evidence of violence. But still nothing too gnarly.  Some windows were broken out. Doors were open. But some of that could have been because people had escaped last night or this morning.  Some missing cars lent some evidence that this could be true.

But since nobody was in those houses anymore, I looked back at Aldina and I jerked my head at one. She nodded back slowly, eyes narrowed.  We moved over to the one I’d indicated and slowly entered, staying as quiet as possible.  The stuffed animal discarded in the middle of the floor was a grim omen.

If the house was unattended, and monsters had been in there before, then I could rationalize that what I was doing wasn't actually looting or stealing. However, the first few houses we explored, small, single storey houses, didn't really have anything of value. In fact, I started to wonder if the people in the neighborhood really had just the left.

This was the self. At least one house we went in should have had some sort of firearms, or bullets or weapons of some kind. But pretty much all I found were knives. Some butcher blocks were missing knives, and I was able to see where the goblins had gotten their steel weapons.

We checked the garages, too.  I did think about taking a machete from one of the houses that we poked around, but decided against it. Now that my bayonet had shown its true colors, and seemed to be a good weapon, I really didn't have a need for a machete which wasn't much better.  Also, all the machetes I found, unfortunately were obviously made within the last 10 years. Definitely not antiques.  I did keep an eye out for some older tools, and I managed to find one that was pretty interesting.

The shovel actually already had a spirit that would recognize me.

[You have been recognized by the spirit of this Shovel]

[Would you like to establish a contract with the spirit in this shovel?]

I chose Yes.

[Passionate Earth Mover]

Some people are born in the wrong era for their skills.  Others cultivate a hobby that they would never find any peace in if it were a job.  The previous owner of this shovel wasn’t paid to dig, but he still dug every day.  His love for digging destroyed his family, but he never had any regrets about it.  Was he selfish? Yes.  But he was a digger.

Using this shovel to dig will allow the user to dig roughly ten times faster than they normally could.  The blade of this shovel will always be sharp, always ready to hack apart roots.

I stood there just staring at the shovel for a second.  What the heck? I thought.

Weirdness of the backstory aside, its ability wasn't bad. Kind of strange, but definitely not bad. What was not so great about it was the shovel itself.  It was more of an entrenching tool in size, not a full size shovel.  The line about sharpness seemed interesting but to use it as a weapon would be very difficult.

I decided to take it with me anyway. At first, I didn't know where to keep it. But I strapped it to the side of my pack and realized that I could still access its power.  At some point, I was going to need to do some experiments to figure out exactly how [Tsukumogami Embrace] worked.

From behind me, Aldina said, “Find anything good?”

I shrugged and nodded and looked back at the shovel.  Maybe it could come in handy in the future.  Remembering Aldina’s caves and how long she’d said it’d taken her to dig them out brought to mind several applications for the shovel.

Aldina got quiet after that and I kept poking around.  Two garages we checked out actually had cars inside, but I had no interest in them.  At least not until I understood for sure why we weren’t really seeing anyone driving any.

As we moved from house to house, it occurred to me how unlikely it was that Aldina was going to find anything useful while scavenging like this.  Unlike me, the system hadn’t stolen all of her gear and a giant hadn’t knocked down her house.

At first, I thought maybe she was just humoring me and allowing me to find antiques. But then I saw her looking under a bed, and later in an attic.  I realized what her real goal was.  “Nobody there, huh?” I asked.  She shook her head.

Aldina was looking for survivors.

I remembered how before we left, she’d packed extra medical supplies and extra antibiotics pills. Now I knew why.  Despite her scars and rough spots, I had to admit she was obviously a more caring person than me.  All of her talk in the past about how she’d only help people if she actually saw them in danger was obviously bullshit.

She kept looking, but we didn’t find any survivors.  And the deeper we went into the residential complex, the more signs of bodily harm and even slaughter there were.  In one house, there was a pile of offal that I decided I was going to assume were pig guts. Because thinking of anything else was something I didn't want to do.

The really grisly find was behind the biggest house in the neighborhood.  It looked like the goblins had been setting up shop here for the long haul.  The rooms had been completely demolished, most of the furniture thrown out the windows.  On the lower floors, mattresses from dozens of beds had been dragged into the larger rooms, making communal sleeping areas.  The kitchen had been transformed into a sleeping area, too.  All the pots and pans were missing, some of the cabinets were open and I could see that the goblins had been stuffing them with rags.

Glancing out the back door made my eyes go flat.  They constructed firepits and makeshift ovens in the large back yard.  It looked like they were working on larger fire pits, too.  The General store hadn’t been their real base, just an outpost.  Stopping cars and killing travelers was likely more exciting work than digging fire pits, though.  We’d likely gotten lucky that most of them had been in the store or who knew what might have happened.

I really didn’t want to go upstairs, but Aldina was already heading there, one hand held before her to deliver deadly magic if needed.

Luckily, there really weren’t any goblins left.  None were hanging around, hiding behind doors, waiting to jump us.  They’d all come at us earlier.  Aldina had killed at least twenty of them by herself back at the General Store, so that made sense.  Luckily she’d definitely gotten much stronger since the day before.  Unfortunately, the upstairs of the house was exactly the kind of nightmare I’d been hoping to avoid seeing.

Bodies lay everywhere, mostly women.  It didn’t take a CSI specialist to figure out what had happened here, even without the torn clothing everywhere.  Most of the bodies were very obviously, very gruesomely dead.  Blood had absolutely covered and stained most of the floor.  It was actually sticky to walk in most places.  The only reason the place didn’t stink even worse than it already did was because all the gruesome mess was fresh.  Flies were already starting to find their way into the house.

Everywhere my eyes landed was another new nightmare.  I carefully unfocused my eyes as we went from room to room.

I’d always prided myself on a strong stomach, but this was pushing my boundaries.

We finally found a single living person in the last room.  It was hard to tell how old she was.  I guessed mid twenties, but she was so covered in filth, bruises, and blood, I wouldn’t have bet on it.  Sweat-matted hair was a halo around pain-stricken, frightened eyes.  It took her a few seconds to recognize us as fellow humans, but she’d not had the energy to do much other than flutter a finger.  Her body was so broken she’d barely turned her head when we walked in the room.  What had been done to her…I was simply not prepared to witness it and actually…focus on it.  It felt like my sanity was wavering.  But as I stood there processing the horror around me, really, truly seeing it for the first time, Aldina stepped forward.

She knelt and placed a gentle hand on the woman’s forehead.  The victim’s reedy, uneven breath seemed to grow easier, and Aldina removed her hand.  I could see frost on some of the woman’s hair now.  It must have been cooling and comforting.

I spat on my hand, but Aldina shook her head.  “Miles, there is no way.  Unless you have an ability to heal her internal organs, she’s going to die a slow, painful death. This is why we kill any goblins we can.  The most we can do here is deliver mercy.”

Slowly, I shook my head.  My gaze met the woman’s on the floor, her eyes pleading.  What she wanted was important.  It was not our call to make. She was conscious, struggling even now to take one breath after another.  To live.

“No, let’s ask her.”  I firmed my jaw and looked Aldina in the eye.

Alinda looked at me with an inscrutable expression.  “Okay.”

Trying to be strong, keep my face neutral, I got on one knee and carefully moved closer.  My knee brushed against the dirty, bloody, repulsive mattress that the woman was lying on.  I tried to hide my flinch back.  The woman’s mouth moved and I bent down, moving my ear closer to listen.

It took a long time to hear what she said.  “Kill me.”  The last word was a drawn out sigh.  I had to suppress a sudden, involuntary sob.  It spasmed my chest.

I just stepped back and nodded, looking away.  “Do it,” I said, voice raspy.  Aldina gave me a look with some pity and compassion mixed in, which almost made everything worse.  I was suddenly breathing too fast.  My head felt like it was floating.

The walls spun.  I walked out of the room quickly to what used to be the upstairs den.  My hands found the windowsill to steady myself, but I looked out the window and saw the true horror of the backyard for the first time.  To one side where I hadn’t been able to see it before, I discovered where people from the neighborhood had gone.  They were naked, gutted, stacked up in a careless pile.  Just meat waiting to be cooked.  The goblins had been constructing some sort of smoker to the side as well.

My gorge rose and I felt dismay, anger, revulsion, and sadness all burst out at once. This time I couldn’t hold it in. I threw up.  Violently.

I ran out of the house.  It was too much.  Then I sat on the curb of the street and let my eyes go unfocused, ignoring all the signs of horror that had happened in the neighborhood, including the ones I’d ignored before.  The sight of a discarded, broken toy on the sidewalk truly almost made me lose it.

Tears ran down my cheeks and I angrily rubbed them away.  I needed to get myself under control.  If monsters attacked right now, I wouldn’t be all that useful.

A strange feeling of guilt and weakness threatened to overwhelm me.  Aldina had been cold as ice a minute earlier.  But I forced myself to think rationally.  To remember.  Aldina had been through this kind of thing before, likely actually much worse.  Meanwhile, this was the first time I’d come face to face with anything like…this.  I remembered the stories I’d read of the horror US soldiers felt while liberating Auschwitz.

The perspective helped.  I breathed slowly and evenly.  Techniques to manage stress and keep a rational mind had been part of my preparation for the end of the world.  I was glad for it, but now I knew how woefully inadequate all of my efforts had truly been.

I wasn’t sure how long I sat out there.  But some time had passed before I heard Aldina approaching.  The house behind here was starting to smoke.  It looked like she’d started a fire.  Maybe she’d even moved the corpses in the backyard into the house.  A fresh wave of guilt ran through my body but I forced it down.  She was not a normal woman.  Like me, she had superhuman stats, and unlike me, she’d already been through stuff like this.

But I vowed to help her if she ever needed to put the dead to rest again.  In general, I didn’t really like most people.  But nobody deserved what had happened to the residents of this neighborhood.  Based on the amount of art we’d found and the absence of many weapons, I assumed this neighborhood had been a peaceful, creative one before yesterday.

Aldina  said, “I think it's pretty obvious now that we're not going to find much else here. We can keep looking around at the other houses if you want, though.”

So we’re going to pretend nothing just happened.  That was okay with me for the moment.  I didn’t say anything out loud, just nodded.  We moved on and checked out three more houses.  I felt like I was moving woodenly, but it felt good to be busy.  It helped clear my head.

Getting lucky helped, too.  I found a 1911 pistol in a drawer of a nightstand in one house that we explored. I thought about taking the pistol, but it was just extra weight and I didn't really need it. Instead, I only took the 45 ACP ammunition. There was a partial box with about 35 rounds.  Just like that, I’d more than doubled my ammo.

But there really wasn’t much else of interest.  In two houses, I did find other firearms, but they were out of ammo.  The people who’d lived there had used them as part of their last stand.

Thankfully, we didn’t find any more bodies.

I was starting to think we weren’t going to find anything else of interest until we got to the end of the neighborhood.  At the second to last house on a cul-de-sac, I saw something weird.  The house had all sorts of junk piled in front of the doors and windows.

At first, I thought maybe it was survivors that had held up against the goblins, somehow were still alive. When I glanced over, I saw a look of hope on Aldina’s face and figured she was thinking the same thing.   But as we got closer, it was obvious the junk was piled up from the outside, not the inside. Now Aldina was frowning in confusion.

She moved up to the door and began pulling the junk out of the way. Most of it seemed to be trash bins, some still with trash inside.  It was a weak barrier. As I helped Aldina move the stuff out of the way, I wondered what the hell the goblins had been doing.  If anything, a barrier this flimsy seemed….more symbolic than anything.

Once the piled up junk was out of the way, Aldina cautiously opened the splintered door.  She used a flashlight to shine inside.  Nothing.  Every piece of trash caught by the wind, every creak in the trees made my nerves explode.  I couldn’t wait to get out of this area, but I kept my mouth shut.  It was obvious that Aldina needed to see that there were not any survivors before we left.  I knew her well enough now to know that.  Sometimes her apparent brusque attitude didn’t seem to reflect her real motivations.

There didn't seem to be anything amiss inside the house, even after waiting a few minutes.  We moved slowly, even more cautiously than before.  Methodically, quietly looking from room to room, I finally noticed that Aldina had stopped in a doorway.  I moved up right behind her as she began slowly walking forward again.  But then she suddenly stopped, and I bumped into her.

Too late, I saw the shimmer in the air right in front of us and the slight movement we’d just made, losing balance, was enough to start a chain reaction.  I could feel myself getting pulled into…whatever it was like I was being pulled out by an ocean tide.

Both of us vanished into the swirling…portal that had been hanging in mid air.