The next day started at ten with classroom time. For once, we weren’t subjected to film of Hercules’s past exploits. Instead, it felt much more like a college class, though the subject matter was all guns and combat strategy. Certain terrain could deflect or at least reduce the effects of sonic emitters, for instance, and Zhenya trained us on how to recognize those advantages.
Most of the education was not directly relevant to me as I wouldn’t be wielding a neural disruptor or gauss rifle anytime soon. What was important were checkpoints. Some of the longer missions contained checkpoints where we could get more gear, lick our wounds, and rest for the night. The licking of wounds was directly related to my abilities as a Medic.
My skills would perform slightly better as my stats increased, of course, but so would the function of the checkpoints. At certain benchmarks which were always multiples of ten, I could get special bonuses for my team. At healing one hundred, Zhenya explained there would be a chance to revive dead teammates even without the field medic perk which was huge. Some of the top tier players from the Hanseatic League focused a massive amount of their training on healing just to get to that perk. The result was often teams with only one Medic but four or five chances to revive fallen comrades at each checkpoint. During some of the more massive battles that spanned weeks or months, teams could find a dozen or more checkpoints.
Much to my dismay, checkpoints were not always obvious or known beforehand. Sometimes a checkpoint would be an objective related to the mission such as a room containing a targeted briefcase or computer server, but other times the checkpoints were completely unexpected. Zhenya told us of a mission he personally completed where his team discovered a checkpoint inside a disabled tank. They were pinned down by enemy fire from overhead, and the only two of them who had survived that long had hunkered down inside a bombed tank. When they closed the hatch to wait out the attack, the checkpoint activated. Zhenya’s teammate had enough healing to trigger the chance, and one of their fallen comrades had spawned inside the vehicle. It made for a cramped few hours of praying not to be blown to bits, but they won the mission in the end, and they couldn’t have done it without the third teammate coming back.
Curiously, none of the other stats influenced the checkpoints at all. It was just Medics. As I had been very quickly learning since arriving on Archon-6, being a Medic was incredibly important. It was no wonder that almost all of the bounties available in the Hive offered incredible amounts of credits to Medics and nothing else. There were so many Cybernetic Warriors, Space Marines, and Temporal Agents that no one ever needed to hire out for those roles.
Perhaps most curious of the lesson was that Zhenya didn’t know all the missions. In fact, no one did. No one even knew how many missions existed or what the ‘final’ one would look like, if that kind of thing even existed. As our instructor, Zhenya could craft missions for the team like he did on day one, but once we officially graduated from our training and started signing up for missions voluntarily through the Hiveboards, no one knew what to expect. Sometimes a detailed briefing would accompany the mission details, and sometimes not.
It got me thinking about the nature of the system and what the hell was actually going on. Who made up the missions? Why? I had too many questions, and like Crunch had explained on my first day, everyone wondered the same things. In the end, the best I could do was shrug it off like everyone else. Maybe someone would figure it out one day and fill in the rest of us. Until that happened, I was just as clueless as all my friends.
At the conclusion of the day’s classroom lessons, I was pleasantly surprised to see my insight raise by one. A small gain, but one I had not expected. Insight, as I learned, essentially governed my ability to figure out situations and what to do. It was sort of a mathematical calculation of my ability to make the correct choice, and it didn’t surprise me at all that I had arrived at Archon-6 with the stat in the single digits. I was never known as a brilliant decisionmaker back home, after all.
When we all finished lunch, it was time for training part two. I hit the button for floor three, and our team arrived in the fitness center and found Zhenya setting up a huge area for drills. Team B was there already and testing out some practice firearms that essentially worked like laser tag back on earth, though with one significant expectation—the weapons still dealt damage, they just couldn’t take chunks out of the walls or blow holes in the ceiling. Zhenya had a huge section of the gym cordoned off for our training, and the machines in the floor had provided us with all sorts of obstacles and barriers.
My job was going to be very straightforward for the drill. There were a handful of tables at the back of each team’s starting area, and injured teammates would appear on them when they got hit. The training’s overall objective was a little more complex than my task. Everyone started with a low quality pistol, and scoring a hit on the other team would upgrade it. Enough upgrades, and the pistol was replaced by a rifle. Our fighters progressed through the weapons until someone got a singularity generator, and then a hit with that ended the training.
The teams spread out, and Zhenya activated a dangling beacon overhead to start the training.
For the first few minutes, not much happened on my end. I stood by the medical tables, my supplies spread out and waiting for patients, without even a view of the action. A monitor installed in my area would have been great to at least pass the time.
Gunfire erupted before long, though the special training weapons were far quieter than what I had experienced in the field, and then our first injured player showed up on my table.
“Well, at least it doesn’t hurt as bad as a real mission,” Choo said, clutching her arm. Blood oozed between her fingers.
I laid her head back on the table and slowly pried her fingers away from the hit. It looked like a moderate graze as opposed to a direct hit. Still, despite seeing the injury plainly with my own eyes, I wanted to get a feel for my improved ranks of Identify Injury. I activated the ability, and several areas flashed to life in my vision.
<
“Oh damn, that’s so much better,” I said, grabbing a needle to sew up our Scout. Knowing from the skill that there was no broken bone was a great benefit, and the treatment recommendation was even better. It was like having a textbook open to the correct page before the injured patient even arrived.
I pulled the skin back together, ran my needle through for seven fairly even stitches, then took a step back to admire my work before applying a topical dressing. Honestly, I was proud of the stitches. Stitch and Suture Rank One, the passive I had unlocked, certainly appeared to be working.
Choo rubbed her hand over the gauze patch and dropped down from the table, ready to run back into the fight. “Thanks,” she called over her shoulder.
Pleased with myself, I reorganized my supplies and awaited my second patient.
I didn’t have to wait long. Our Danish Planetologist—there was no chance I remembered her name—appeared on another table clutching her stomach. There was much more blood than Choo, and the woman howled with pain.
I grabbed one of the syringes of pain medication and pushed in a quick dose before activating Identify Injury and giving her a scan.
<
I shook my head. There was simply nothing I could do. My bag of supplies was deep, but it didn’t include an entire surgical team, nor did I have the skills required to pull bullet fragments from a patient’s liver.
I activated my newest ability, Soothing Touch, and placed my hand on her forehead. She settled down a little, though not much. She still screamed. I couldn’t blame her. She was smart, and she had to know there was very little I could do to save her life. I just couldn’t let her suffer. I gave her another injection of pain meds, then quickly activated Soothing Touch three more times until her screams died down to raspy whimpers. It was the least I could do.
My aether was down to almost half at sixty-one. Before I do anything more for my Danish teammate, Rifle Guy showed up with our African Cultist on the table next to them. They had both been caught in an explosion of some sort, though Rifle Guy had taken the worst of it.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Quickly assessing the damage with another use of Identify Injury, I set about patching him up. The left side of his body had sustained a serious amount of burning, though none of his flesh was critically charred, and several toes were missing on his left foot. I applied a tourniquet to the foot, gave him a full dose of pain meds, and rubbed burn cream wherever I could. He couldn’t put much weight on his tourniqueted foot without a sturdy splint, and my medical supplies didn’t have one long enough to really do the job. Back on Earth, he would have gotten a pair of crutches and a boot, but that kind of treatment would render him essentially useless in the fight, so I had to improvise.
Smiling, I summoned my old spoon and braced it against the man’s ankle. It was just about the right size. I wrapped it tight, made a few adjustments, and wrapped it again.
“Perfect. Let me finish some of these burns, and you’ll be good as new,” I told him.
“Somehow I doubt that,” he groaned. “And grenade launchers are unfair in such small spaces. I don’t know who shot it, but I think it was one of ours. Friendly fire.”
Once I had him bandaged and at least capable of hobbling back toward the fight, I turned my attention to the Cultist.
The guy still creeped me out. His tesla staff surged and crackled with energy off to the side, and he had somehow adorned it with a ghastly collection of small bones strung together with strips of crude leather. Where he got the bones was anyone’s guess. Also, it didn’t make much sense for him to have the staff in the first place. He could summon it whenever he pleased, of course, but the rules of the mission dictated which weapons everyone got. Even if he tried, I assumed the staff wouldn’t actually produce any electricity to incapacitate our foes.
As I worked, carefully applying a layer of burn cream and gauze bandages over his burned flesh, the man wouldn’t stop talking. The language was one I had no chance of recognizing. Suddenly, as I was just about to secure another bandage around his bubbling and bleeding right ear, a wash of green aura descended over the man, and all of his wounds vanished.
It was some kind of magic. I activated Identify Injury just to be sure, and there it was, clear as ever:
<
His burns were gone. The skill was essentially telling me the man was insane, but that was an issue I wasn’t equipped to address.
With no prompting from me, he rose from the table, offered me an awkward bow which I hastily returned, and then he ran off into the arena once more.
I was so taken aback by the man’s healing that I didn’t realize the Planetologist was gone. I searched all over the small medical area for her, but there was no sign. The table where I knew she was supposed to be was suspiciously empty. The only evidence of her presence was a series of blood splatters, but they didn’t lead anywhere, so it wasn’t likely that she had gotten up and run off.
Had she expired? Given her injuries, it was completely possible. I didn’t know if death in the training exercise meant the person would vanish. The Hanseatic League certainly possessed the technology to make it happen. With no way to figure out what happened to her, I chalked it up to yet another of the planet’s mysteries and dutifully awaited my next patient.
Much to my surprise, I didn’t get anyone else to treat, and the training exercise ended only a few minutes later. Our side won. Apparently Shane, our resident mutant, had scored a handful of quick hits and discovered his aptitude with a pistol in the process. Then, when he progressed past the pistol and rifle, the system had given him his plasma flamethrower, and our team won shortly thereafter.
Zhenya dismissed us after only a short debriefing on what had gone right and what had gone wrong during the exercise, and then a quiet pall fell over our team as everyone’s vision turned inward to analyze the experience they received. Being level four already, I didn’t gain enough experience to level up like most everyone else. My experience went from nineteen to twenty-six, and, very surprisingly, my rank in elemental increased by two. I had no clue what it meant. I wasn’t any kind of combat class who could use elemental technology like Shane’s flamethrower. It had to be related to the strange cultist.
“Hey, what did you do back there?” I asked the man. I tried to come off as curious rather than how I really felt which straddled the line between terrified and creeped out.
The old man gave me a sinister smile, displaying a mouth of cramped, yellowed teeth. He shook his staff, and the little bones rattled like a baby’s toy. “Uncama thirsty,” he replied, still flashing his crooked grin. I didn’t know if Uncama was his name or something else, and I certainly didn’t know what he meant by saying Uncama was thirsty.
The Danish woman who had vanished from my table stepped in and interrupted. “I’ll tell you what he did, the sick bastard.” She stuck a finger in the man’s face, though he was entirely unaffected. “This old fuck killed me! He did his little voodoo magic, and I felt him steal my health. I was going to live, too.”
“Whoa, that’s pretty messed up.” I wanted to add that it also sounded extremely cool, but I kept that thought to myself. At least he didn’t drain my life and leave us without a Medic. Whatever the man understood of the system, missions, and his team, he knew enough to target someone who was already dying, and that was a good thing.
I pulled away the Planetologist and led her back to the group. “Hey, we won, right? That’s what matters. Come on, let’s get some dinner and a few drinks. I’m pretty sure all the beer is free in the cafeteria, so the first round is on me.”
To my surprise, Team B’s Medic, the giant bodybuilder who had murdered me in our very fist mission, fell into step at my side.
“Go work out there,” he said.
I was genuinely caught off guard by his sincerity. “Uh, thanks. How did you do? I mean… I’m sorry, I know you guys lost, but how did the healing aspect go?” Making small talk with a guy who killed me two days ago was not my strongest skill.
He shook his head and pushed the button for floor six on the transporter panel. “Not great. I’d love to talk to you about it, actually. I… I really don’t know what I’m doing out there. My healing is only seven, and I think that’s bad. Mind if I join your table and pick your brain a little?”
“Hey, at the end of the day, we’re all on the same team. I’m happy to help.”
We sat down and ordered, and I finally got to know a bit about the meathead. My suspicion was correct, and he chose the nanite injector thinking it double as steroids. In a lot of ways, he wasn’t wrong. At higher levels, he had learned that the injector could be used to not only repair torn muscle and tissue but augment existing structures as well. Thinking of my spoon, I was jealous. But at least the spoon had finally sort of come in handy.
The Medic—Bruce was his name—watched in horror from his plate of brown rice and boiled chicken as I made my way through two barbecue bacon cheeseburgers and a side of truffle oil fries. Honestly, the fries were terrible, but whoever ran the automated kitchen had nailed the beef. “I don’t have to fight and do all that physical stuff, remember?” I said around a mouthful of juice burger.
“Yeah, but I don’t know if this stuff is real. You could be eating crickets.”
I pointed to his rubbery boiled chicken. “So could you. And that chicken looks gross. Its too pale.”
He just shrugged his massive shoulders and shoveled another spoonful of unseasoned food into his mouth. I would take the life of a Medic over that of a bodybuilder any day.
As the night progressed, I explained to Bruce a bit about my background and nursing classes, and we collectively made some realizations about how the stat system worked. Even though we were the same class, my healing ability had started higher because I simply brought that kind of knowledge with me onto Archon-6. The same was true for Bruce’s physical ability. His physical stat was twenty-nine, the highest of the entire eighteen-person team. Rifle Guy was close at twenty-four, and the two of them were the only ones in the twenties.
I told him about the books I had gotten from the massive library, but Bruce informed me that he was exclusively a hands-on kind of learner. He lasted even less in college than I had, dropping out of Arizona State after only three weeks to become a personal trainer. Completely opposite, I loved to read and study. We came to a quick arrangement: whatever useful information I learned from the books I would trade to Bruce for gentler treatment in missions. I didn’t want him to go easy on me—we needed to train at full strength no matter what—but the thought of him barreling at full speed, laughter on his lips and a syringe of nanites in his hand, was terrifying. He agreed that if he was going to kill me again in the future, he would do it with a little more tact.
It was nearly midnight when I finally made my way back to my apartment on the floor below. Bruce’s quarters were a few halls away, and he waved goodbye. Part of me almost expected him to ask to come inside like it was some kind of date, but that didn’t happen. As it turned out, he was just a normal, friendly guy despite the meathead stereotypes.
Before I could pick up my book and get under the covers, I noticed the alarm clock up to more shenanigans. I had turned it to face away from the bed, and now, instead of the time, it displayed something else: the letters C and H followed by the numbers eight, one, and zero.
I slapped the clock, and it flickered once, then returned to the time. 11:54pm.
I tried to read, but my mind wouldn’t settle down. All I could think about was the clock. I traced the characters out in my hand, trying to decipher their meaning. C and H didn’t mean anything to me, but eight ten was the area code north of mine. I knew a few people from there, Flint or Port Huron, but I didn’t have any of their phone numbers memorized or anything. In the age of smartphones, no one bothered to memorize a number. But even if I did, how could I call it?
I was just about to ditch my area code theory when another idea hit me like a ton of bricks: I did know someone from Flint with an eight ten area code, and the first letters of their name were C and H.
It was Chase. It had to be. He was a tech genius, and he was the only one who knew I had been kidnapped. He was back on Earth looking for me, and somehow he had connected to my alarm clock.
The theory got my heart racing. If he could connect to my alarm clock and send me messages… the implications were monumental. He had to know where I was.
Needless to say, I couldn’t sleep a wink.