Kev slowed as he approached the last few ships in the grand ship bridge. There were only a few more and he wasn’t really ready to enter the cluster yet. If there was infighting and human on human violence, he wanted a slightly different weapon set. Axes were excellent for cutting down the morankai like sapling, but if you got shot from 1000 feet away, that axe wasn’t going to help for shit. Kev wasn’t sure he wanted to test the effectiveness of either his shield or his armor compared to the weapons provided by The Shop. He had almost ten thousand points, a great amount of points for the first layer, so he could afford to go shopping himself. Kevin gave Kev plenty in the ring, but Kev needed some other things.
Kev bought a good .45 caliber handgun and a submachine gun. Surprisingly, the shop had a silencer you could purchase for each and Kev did. If he was going into a warzone, then Kev was going to go fit to fight humans. Kev didn’t have enough points for any shield worth buying if he was going to fight morankai, let alone abnormals. But if he was going to fight humans, almost any shield would do when he pushed his shield energy into it. A higher quality shield would still be better, but eh, he was on a budget.
He pulled out the sniper rifle and went on the roof. The team had done a great job clearing morankai, but not as good on the beginning part of the bridge. Kev had to kill a few when he first passed them, and more today but he had done so quietly and was now sitting in the cab of some sort of cargo ship. There were morankai between him and the skyscraper but he wasn’t worried about them.
Kev peered through the scope of the rifle. He saw two men sitting on the balcony of the skyscraper that met the bow of the ship bridge. They looked somewhat relaxed, but they kept glancing at the morankai on the bridge. It didn’t appear that any morankai were near them besides those on the bridge. This would have been a lot easier if Kev had the Cloud Step shoes but whatever, Kevin probably needed them more.
Kev considered just killing the men, but that seemed unnecessary if he could sneak in or get in through any other means. Why create an unnecessary advisory even if they are falling into prison rules. With the dark came Kev’s options. He snuck forward as quietly as he could, he killed a few morankai, but it turns out that if you can sneak up on them and throw them overboard fast enough, they won’t make a sound.
The grass wasn’t deep enough to result in their deaths, but the fall did kill a few. The rest just tried getting back to the city as far as Kev could tell. That was one part of the distraction. The guards noticed the morankai walking to the city out of the dark. It made them vigilant but it also made them look down.
Kev got to the cruise liner that entered the cluster, which made it easy to sneak all the way up to the edge. Kev had thrown all the morankai to the prt, the left side, of the ship. So Kev went to the starboard or right side to carry out the rest of his plan. Kev pulled a light silk handkerchief from his pocket and tossed it off the side of the ship. He watched for a moment as it drifted towards the city on the ever present breeze coming off the grasslands. The ship bridge acting as a barrier, pushed the wind a little more directly towards the side of the cluster.
Kev started to chuckle as he went into The Shop and bought a really big umbrella. He had to hold back his laughter as he positioned himself on the railing of the ship. He opened the umbrella. He started to cackle as he activated Light Heavy to make himself as light as possible. He pushed himself off the big ass boat.
Kev whispered to himself “I’m Mary Poppins Ya’ll” as the umbrella caught his extremely lightened weight, drifting on the breeze. He started to float down and towards the city. As he approached the outside perimeter of the cluster, Kev slowly modified his mass with Light Heavy to bring himself down just a little faster, aiming for a landing zone as best he could. He adjusted himself until finally, light as you please, his feet touched down on a sidewalk right next to a building. Kev took a leisurely pace, without a care in the world as he approached the entrance to the skyscraper he had just landed next to. It was perhaps a little foolish, but he was playing the part, with a huge grin on his face.
The whole affair was so calm and slow that he didn’t attract the attention of hardly any of the nearby morankai. One still sensed him and turned to pursue but the rest did not. Kev strolled down the street as quietly as he could, drawing as little attention to himself as he could, to the entrance into a skyscraper. ‘Little’ was not ‘none’ and Kev had a small pack of them chasing him by the time he got into a building. Good news though, only two were on the ground floor of this building.
Kev made short work of the normal morankai. He climbed the building, keeping his ears out for anyone. He didn’t hear anyone until he got to the roof. This skyscraper was adjacent to the one with the ship bridge, but there were still guards. Kev opened the door and snuck out of the roof shed. He crept over to a bridge and crossed it, keeping his eyes peeled. It looked like the coast was clear after this bridge, but he didn’t want to risk it, so he went slow and steady.
Finally Kev was free to move and turned on the gas. He activated Soul Tracker and pinged his mom almost continuously until he crossed a good chunk of her cluster. Just as in his cluster, the majority of it was empty, unlike in his cluster the people were spread out a lot more. Kevin’s cluster only had three buildings occupied really, it kept down on sentry requirements and safety in numbers was definitely a thing.
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Here, people were spread out. He saw individual lights on in skyscrapers. There was no sense of community. A little concerning considering that there was a very obvious common enemy. In the books and movies humanity bands together in the face of a common enemy, like Independence Day with the Aliens or what have you.
This seemed to be much more of a Walking Dead every group and man for himself sort of issue. That was actually alright by Kev. He’d get his mom and take her down the bridge. He should be enough and then they could go to the big cluster and be better prepared if other people in Kev’s family show up. Kev was Kevin, but even he didn’t know if Kevin was with Katie yet, and he didn’t know what Kevin was going to try to do with her. He might try to make it to the central cluster too, but maybe not.
Kev checked Soul Tracker and felt that Katie was pretty close to Kevin, at least compared to the distance they were from one another. That eased Kev’s heart a little as he continued sneaking through the skyscrapers. At this point he wasn’t worried about anyone seeing him, it was unlikely that everyone knew everyone else so they wouldn’t recognize him as an interloper to the cluster. However, that didn’t mean they’d be friendly about it and he wasn’t really interested in being shot. Kev could probably stop a bullet with his armor if he reinforced it well enough, but at the same time he wasn’t overly interested in testing that.
Kev pinged his mom. She was in a building that was, comparatively to the other buildings, crawling with people. He really didn’t want to fuck with all of them so he decided to go in through the bottom. The skyscraper Kev was on at least looked empty based on the number of lights he saw on, so he opened the shed door that led to the steps and entered the building.
Kev pinged for morankai but found the building emptier than he would have expected. That probably meant that there were people here. He carefully and quietly climbed down the flights, checking every few floors for evidence of a balcony. He finally found one on the 18th floor and he went to the lounge then out onto the balcony. He tied a rope around the handrail and threw it over the edge. He straddled the, admittedly overly thin, rope wrapped it around his leg, then over his opposite shoulder around his back and to his free hand. He hopped onto the edge of the balcony and repelled himself down. With light heavy active, it was a simple thing. He had to stop halfway because he didn’t have enough rope, pulling another from the shop and tying it to the end was an exercise in caution for Kev.
Once he got to the bottom, he entered the building his mom was in. A few morankai followed him in and he killed them soundlessly, even catching the bodies before they hit the ground to be extra quiet.
Kev thought me might be being paranoid but he didn’t want to get caught up in some bullshit. He pulled his shield and his silenced .45 caliber. Pretty much any enemy Kev had now was probably going to be a human. He silently climbed the floors of the building. Moving from one staircase to the next depending on whether or not he heard anyone. He actually learned that making his armor heavier with Light Heavy made it quieter. He wasn’t thrilled with the revelation but he made himself lighter so it evened out.
The skyscraper was perhaps 70 stories tall. Relatively tall for this area of the cluster, which Kev figured made sense if they were trying to keep it secure from human combatants. The “high ground” or whatever. Kev had to climb practically the whole thing, increasingly hiding from people in odd ways. He felt like Splinter Cell.
At the 63rd floor Kev hit a snag. There was a man stationed at each of the doors above him. Some were whistling, one was snoring, and the third was noisily reading something. Kev thought it might be the floor his mother was on. He needed to take a risk. Kev snuck up the floor to the man who was snoring as he sat on his chair. He was prepared to knock the man out, but he didn’t want to hurt anyone yet. He didn’t know anything about the situation. Just because the people on the bridge had told him that there were a lot of people fighting people in this cluster, didn’t mean that everyone was an enemy. Not yet anyway. The man stayed asleep as Kev entered the 62nd floor.
Kev pinged his mom with Soul Tracker and confirmed she was on this level. He crept down the hall as quietly as he could, pinging almost constantly to get an idea of her direction. Kev heard someone walking in his direction from around the corner, he looked around for a place to hide and only found an empty room. He opened the door and popped inside leaving the light off. He had a brief panicked moment when he thought the person was going to walk into that room specifically, before they walked on by.
Kev breathed a sigh of relief and pulled himself off the wall he had been “Hiding” on. He cracked the door open and watched as a tall, shapely woman walked down the hall away from him. She was dressed in perfectly ordinary clothing. Kev shrugged, gave it another five count and walked into the hall headed towards his mother.
Kev stood in front of a door that looked like every other door on the floor, but behind it he could feel his mom. He tapped his armor ring to remove his armor. He stored his shield, his gun and his Advanced Mask. He activated Soul Tracker one more time before lightly knocking on the door. In the movies, Alicia, his mother, would have opened the door immediately with a look of utter bewilderment on her face. Instead nothing happened.
Kev knocked again, a little louder but not wanting to alert any of the other people on the floor that he was there. Again. No sound from the other side. Kev thought he heard the shapely woman coming back down the hall and he knocked again, a sense of urgency entering his insistent but quiet knocks. Finally he heard someone, he desperately hoped his mother, get up, remove the door stop and forcefully open the door, Anger on their face.
As soon as the door opened, Kev rushed in, closing the door quietly. He turned back around to his mother. There was the look of bewilderment he had been hoping for.