Chapter 54: A Green Bean Firestorm - Part 1 of 2

Author's note: This is only the first part of the chapter. I have company coming over, and I didn't have time to edit the rest before they arrive. Part 2 will go out this evening!

Tasha croaked like a bullfrog—a bastardized sound like someone who was belching and clearing their throat at the same time—and just like that, Logan’s stomach sank. Did he go to all this work, almost give himself Karma deprivation, and end up fixing Tasha’s surface problems but not what made Tasha Tasha?

“Tasha…?” he said again, clenching his hand into a fist and peering down into the pit. Zombie Jack hadn’t noticed Tasha’s changed state, and he was still doing his best to claw his way out of the hole.

Tasha blinked again, her eyes pale and icy blue. They looked like blue eyes covered in white tissue paper. Logan hadn’t known her long, but even he remembered that her eyes hadn’t looked like that before he’d left. Since her fungi hair had shrivelled and dissolved into black sludge, she no longer had any hair, just small tufts of purple on a bald scalp. Her brown skin looked pale, way too pale, and her lips were chapped as if she’d just walked out of a desert.

Little by little, Logan hardened his resolve, convinced that whatever he’d tried had failed, and that he’d have to put her down after all. It felt like glass shards were eating into his stomach, hitting him where it hurt the most.

He’d wanted to save her.

He’d needed to save her.

Tasha blinked again, dazed, and then peered down at her fingers, staring at the nailbeds which were devoid of nails. Dropping her hands, she gazed around the dirt pit surrounding her, then got sight of Zombie Jack and promptly scooted back and tripped over her own feet.

Logan swallowed, that glass shard feeling transforming as he crept closer to the edge of the pit, looking from her to Jack. That wasn’t the actions of an unfeeling, bloodthirsty zombie.

When Logan shifted, he caused the dirt on the edge of the pit to fall, scattering over the ground and onto Tasha’s arm. Gasping, she peered up at him, her mouth gaping, showing an intact human tongue covered in black sludge.

“L-logan,” she croaked, licking her lips and making an expression of distaste. “W-what the hell is going on?”

***

Logan sat on the bare ground in a lotus position and stared at Jack and Tasha, who were both sitting haphazardly on the ground.

Once he’d hauled Tasha out of the pit, Logan had repeated the same process on Jack, forcing the infection out by commanding it with an uncompromising mental voice. He’d fed [Liche Devourer] by sucking more Karma from the green bean plant, which he’d realized had an unintentional positive side effect. To stop the green beans from replicating, you had to harvest them in a special way. Each green bean pod had a concentration of Karma like a knotted rope. But that was the extent of the plant’s Karma.

Logan had needed so much Karma that he’d sucked the knots dry, which meant that when he went to clear the infected plant, he could do it without having to worry that he’d make the replicating problem worse.

As for Tasha and Jack, Logan didn’t know what to think. Although Logan had put Jack through the same process, he looked even more off than Tasha, with fingernails that were half an inch, sharp and tinged with blue. Unlike Tasha, whose gold threaded skin had reverted to normal, Jack’s hadn’t completely dissolved. Instead, it looked like he had thousands of thin red scars as if someone had run his whole body through a cheese grater.

When Logan scanned them with [Idiot’s Inspect], they looked normal:

[Tasha Frederick: Level 29. A human being.]

[Highest Stat: Constitution. Characteristics: A healer. Hidden name: Tonks.]

[Jack Donson: Level 24. A human being.]

[Highest Stat: Perception. Characteristics: Loyal to those in his sphere, indifferent to those outside of it. Hidden name: Jack.]

According to the skill, Tasha had prioritized her constitution attribute, which made sense after her encounter with the minions at the resort. Because the System classified her as a healer and she had a higher constitution, did that mean she could fight off the effects better than Jack? But regardless of the physical leftovers of their infection, they seemed normal.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” asked Logan. Before he let them mill with the others, he needed to make sure that he could trust them and that they wouldn’t revert back to their infected state.

Tasha was looking at her missing fingernails and the green bean plants around them, her expression first dazed and then filled with horror as she ran a hand over her bare scalp.

“We were outside,” said Jack, his voice rasping. He kept darting his gaze from Logan’s face to the ground, swallowing heavily, his expression pinched. Then he turned to Tasha, hesitant. “We were outside?” he asked her as if in confirmation.

Tasha’s eyes were damp. More than anything, her missing hair seemed to have thrown her.

Logan’s eyes softened. Although he couldn’t relate, since he’d already managed to burn off patches of his hair in the perception trial, he knew that to a woman who had died her hair purple, paying special attention to her hairstyle, suddenly waking up to find a bald head would be beyond disconcerting.

He wasn’t looking forward to the first time she looked into a mirror, since it wasn’t just her hair that made her look off. Although the longer she sat on the ground, the more her higher constitution attribute seemed to help, there was still something distinctly off. The raw nailbeds had healed and there was the first hint of normal nails. However, her eyes were still icy blue and covered in a white film, her lips chapped and her face pale.

At least there was one thing he could do. With a mental rummage, Logan searched through the contents of his spatial collar. He’d cleared out Lara’s house. She had to have at least a few different hats lying around.

With a blink, Logan willed out a pink baseball hat and a white sunhat, the ends frilly and like something out of a Katherine Hepburn film.

Logan winced. Not to say that Lara had good taste.

“Here,” he said, pushing the hats towards Tasha.

She blinked at them, her eyebrows furrowed, then looked from the hats to Logan. “How did those suddenly appear? You’re walking around with hats now?” she asked as she grabbed the baseball hat.

When he’d obtained access to the Tree Fridge and his cat spatial collar, Logan had made the decision to lie and pretend that he’d received a skill that let him store his grandfather’s shed. By now, he knew that it made no sense to keep the existence of the spatial collars to himself. At least to Tasha and Jack. After all, what was the worry? They were both so low leveled that even if in the unlikely possibility that they became untrustworthy, there was no way they were any threat to him.

Besides, if empire building and becoming a ‘lord’ was on the horizon, he would need the help of people like Tasha and Jack to manage it. If they didn’t know what resources he had at his disposal, it would be like expecting an employee to perform without all the facts.

Logan reached behind his neck and twisted the collar so that he could unfasten it underneath his chin. He’d either had it underneath his shirt or underneath his armour, so this was the first time he’d taken it off since he’d bought it from the Tree Fridge.

For all its power, on strictly appearance’s sake, it looked ridiculous. A true human sized cat collar including dangling tags. Either the true System had a warped sense of humour, or it was the product of his glitchy AI minion. Logan suspected the latter. From his cat collar to his Pink Sock, all those ridiculous items had to be the product of a warped, twisted AI mind.

That brought to mind the question of whether he’d find the same items inside of his Tree Fridge. Or yet again, what Matt managed to clear out first. He knew that Matt had bought his other Pink Sock, but surely, he hadn’t had enough Karma to afford the rest.

Tasha finished adjusting the ballcap and then peered at the collar with a furrow in her brow. “You’re suddenly in the possession of a cat, Logan?”

“Use [Identify] on it.”

Both Tasha and Jack got that faraway look before their eyes widened.

“Does that do what I think it can?” asked Jack.

Logan nodded and then fastened the collar around his neck. Every second he’d held it loose in his fist had caused a prickling sensation of unease. He’d come to rely on it, and the thought of losing it put a dagger through his heart. Imagine walking around with only the clothes on his back! He’d be at a severe disadvantage.

<----Go to part 2.