I traversed that parking garage as silently as Sekiro on his best day, but I may as well have not bothered. After I had allowed my eyes to adjust to the bright light of day and stepped out into the street, I saw that the last thing on anyone’s mind was going to be little old me walking out of an abandoned garage.
“Well,” I said, my voice sounding thin and weak in my own ears, “you don’t see that every day.”
It was another fine Montanan day. Above me, the sky was pale blue dome, utterly cloudless. The surrounding mountains glittered like teeth in the clear, crisp air. It was wonderful.
And all entirely wasted on my stunned brain.
From what I could immediately tell, I was somewhere in the central part of the Westside area of town. At least, that’s what the stretches of asphalt running in all directions, the massive stores, the fast food restaurants, and the ambiguous warehouses told me. I could hear a dull roar, which might have been U.S Highway-93. That was all that was immediately apparent in my cursory assessment because there was a lot more that was commanding my attention.
It looked like much had changed in the two days that I had been taking my involuntary catnap under that pile of rubble.
Just down the road a ways, I could see a police SUV, a solid black Chevrolet Tahoe, parked by the curb—one of the teams assigned to watch out for Gaspari and his crew, I reckoned. It wasn’t the car that was worrying me though. It was the fact that I could see the sad black-clad shapes of two cops lying beside it in matching pools of blood.
That was bad news certainly, but this wasn’t the craziest thing I could see.
The world had gone completely batshit. The veil had been drawn aside, and the control that we humans so ardently believed we had over all things had been proved to be entirely illusory. All of those moments, where we had teetered on the brink of chaos and oblivion, were laid bare now. To me, it felt like the mental shift that might occur along with realizing you’re no longer at the top of the food chain.
The streets were in anarchy. Cars had been abandoned willy-nilly à la zombie apocalypse. There were bodies littering the sidewalks—and parts of bodies. I could see, in a parking lot in front of a Walgreens pharmacy, another of those strange pillars glowing with blue runes. I couldn’t make out the head carved on the top of that one, but it didn’t look pointy enough to be a wolf. It was different.
Monsters were roaming the streets—creatures I didn’t recognize. Some had wings, some were big, some were small, some had four legs, some two. A pack of humanoid figures with mottled green skin, who I might’ve been tempted to label as goblins, ran down the road chattering madly. They smashed through the windows of Wells Fargo Bank, and a chorus of screams started up from inside.
In that moment, I knew where I was. This was Union Pacific Street.
People were everywhere. All of them looked to have lost their minds. There was fighting, cursing, gunfire, the distant sound of explosions, and, most bizarrely of all, the occasional dazzling firework flash of what I could only attribute to magic.
Thinking that the last thing I needed was to be hit by a stray bullet or spell, I ducked into a row of low bushes. There was no point asking for trouble. Not when it seemed to be being dished out so liberally as it was.
There’s not a lot of opportunity to speculate at a time like that. You either accept the evidence of your own eyes or you don’t. I did. Clearly, whatever insane video game-based wizardry that had taken place in the parking garage had only been part of a far larger whole.
“There goes the neighborhood,” I said weakly, my gaze flicking every which way through the branches of the bushes as I struggled to take in the lunacy squeezing Missoula in its fist.
I summoned my direwolf to my side.
In the heat of the moment, it was a marvel just how quickly I had come to accept that I could actually summon some mythical-looking beast out of the ether at a whim. That was a stressful situation for you, I supposed. Adapt or die—quite literally in that case.
Once the wolf was crouched at my side, I held out a steadying hand and said falteringly, “Ah, just protect me from any threats for the moment, if that’s cool with you?”
The direwolf’s hackles were raised, but it did as I commanded. I started crawling down through the bush line, the direwolf slinking along behind me, its head moving from side to side and scanning for threats.
A movement in the air, some thirty feet above street level, made me look up. A man was flying through the air, dressed in an off-the-peg navy suit, whooping like a drunkard, as he propelled himself through the air on glittering, glass-like wings. I would have sworn he looked like my dad’s old accountant.
“Um,” I said, my jaw hanging limply as I watched the flying accountant soar past. I stopped in my crawling and heard the direwolf halt too.
Just as abruptly as he appeared in my field of view, the man’s wings evaporated. He screamed and plummeted from the air as his ability to fly winked out. With a dull wet crunch, he splatted into the middle of the road, bouncing off the open tailgate of a forsaken pick-up truck with neck-snapping force on his way.
As soon as he hit the deck, a crystalline Gem skittered out from under his broken body and across the road. My eyes followed it of their own accord. Next to me, the direwolf let out a little interested whine; the noise a dog might make when it spots a particularly inviting cat.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Briefly, I wondered how the whole Gem business worked.
Do the creatures drop them when you kill them? Do humans who have been given a class drop them when they’ve snuffed it? Had that unfortunate flying maniac been fiddling with it when he had fallen, perhaps screwing up whatever augmentation or power it had allowed him?
I had to remember that the rest of Missoula’s population had an extra two days’ experience to get a grip on whatever the hell was going on.
A woman darted from across the road and hastily scooped up the Gem that had fallen from the formerly airborne guy. She fished around inside of her sweater, pulled out a taser, and went to press the Gem into it, and—
“Oh, shit!” I hissed to myself, biting a knuckle, and moving some leaves aside so I could see more clearly.
The woman in the sweater had just been run at by a dreadlocked woman wielding what looked like an enchanted dagger. Wreathed in a bright halo of hard red light as the dagger-wielder was, I postulated, and almost felt instinctively, that someone like that was real bad news.
Even as I made the observation about the weapon, I couldn’t help but think how corny and plain ridiculous the words sounded in my own head. ‘Enchanted dagger’? Get out of here. However, I couldn’t deny what I saw. A sparkling golden weapon that swept up and down and sliced the sweater wearer’s arm clean off at the elbow.
The assaulted woman in the sweater was engulfed in a flash of golden light and was turned to dust. Just like that. Quick as a snap of the fingers.
I still had the Stoeger in my hand, pressed to my thigh, but I didn’t make a move with it. I didn’t particularly want to make a habit of shooting people. I also wasn’t too enthusiastic about attracting the attention of that woman either.
As the ruthless murderous chick with the dagger sheathed her weapon and sprinted across the intersection of Radio Way and Union Pacific Street, she happened to dash past one of the large, lush ornamental trees that lined the road. A creature burst out of this tree in a shower of bright green leaves.
It was a beast that looked almost like a dryad—leafy skin and mossy hair—crossed with a boar.
Dropsow - Level 1 - Common
They say the only thing you can say for sure about a Dropsow up a tree is that it’s eventually going to come down. Just make sure you’re not underneath it when it does.
It landed on the unsuspecting thief, opened wide a mouth filled with tusk-like teeth, and swallowed her all the way down to her knees. Arms, torso, sheathed dagger and all.
It was, hands down, the most insane thing I had seen thus far, which was saying a lot.
Once more, the translucent Gem skittered away, bouncing up onto the sidewalk where two magic users were dueling—actually dueling, like some bad parody of a Harry Potter movie. Even I, who had been on the scene for one-half less than no time, could tell that these two jackasses were about as far removed from legitimate wizards as it was possible to be.
They were blasting one another inexpertly with spells and missing more often than not. One of them, a portly fellow in a trucker hat, got distracted by the flashing Gem sparkling in the sunlight. This was just the window of opportunity that his female opponent was looking for. In the next moment, she had made her move and blasted the chubby dude into a red slop with a punchy ball of fire that shriveled the grass nearby.
The winner, who, on closer inspection looked a lot like my old high school principal, picked up the Gem. Then she stood in what she probably thought was a suitably heroic pose, with one finger in the air and the other hand clasping the Gem. She looked smug, even from twenty yards off. Then a purple flame ignited on the end of her finger. The older woman tried to wave it out, gently at first and then more and more frantically, before—
BOOM.
The amateur mage exploded in a rolling ball of purple fire, which ripped open the side of a delivery truck; out of which poured a clan of stumpy bugbear-looking things. I watched these roaring knee-high creatures out of my peripheral vision, most of my attention being on the flying gem, as they went ravening down the street. Some of them were actually on fire, blazing purple, arms beating at themselves before they fell dead to the ground. The rest cut left across Radio Way, heading for Home Depot, which looked to be smoking from its roof.
The Gem flew down the road, propelled by the blast. It thumped into the chest of yet another person. This was an athletic Asian man who was wielding a baseball bat with great aplomb against another direwolf. As chance would have it, as I watched, the man grasped his baseball bat with both hands, as the bristling ball of muscle-bound killing frenzy approached him.
I raised my eyebrows as the man scooped up the glittering jewel and slapped it into the bat handle. I couldn’t see precisely what happened, but it looked like the Gem was absorbed into the bat, much like what had happened when I put the Arcane Gem into my Summoner’s Band. The man’s bat became augmented by the Gem—that much was obvious. It changed; grew longer and thicker and went shiny, so that it looked like it was made from a dazzling silver metal.
The Asian dude stared in wonder at his newly transformed bat. He smiled, grinning confidently as the direwolf stalked towards him.
I’m sure it must have come as quite the surprise when the other direwolf came up behind him. This second beast’s paw slashed sideways, and the Asian guy’s head was knocked clean off his neck in a geyser of blood. With matching howls, both direwolves bounded away, disappearing quickly across the stretch of brown grass that backed onto a Cineplex.
I had been staring out, open-mouthed, into the street and watching this particular glassy Gem get handed around, then stolen, then dropped from one person to another for all of three minutes.
And now here it was, resting at my feet. I stooped and snatched it up and shoved it into my pocket.
New Gem added to inventory!
Metal Gem (Level 1) x1
Gem Inventory
Arcane Gem (Level 1) x1
Arcane Gem (Level 2) x1
Metal Gem (Level 1) x 1
Socketed Gems:
Summon Socket A: Arcane Gem (Level 2)
“We’ve got to get the hell out of town,” I said to the direwolf.
I had no idea if the thing understood me, but I felt better for voicing a plan. It was a good plan. It was simple. It hinged only on the going. We could worry about what direction to take once we were moving.
Things were made all the easier, of course, by the fact that I had no family in town. No real friends. Only acquaintances, really. Certainly no one that would go out of their way to come and look for me in the midst of this shitstorm.
I looked through the tangled branches of my flimsy cover, down the road at the parked police SUV. I looked at the bodies. Chances were that the keys for that thing were either still in the ignition or on one of the downed cops.
“Come on, boy,” I said to the direwolf. I pushed myself to my feet and sprinted toward the police Chevy, the direwolf loping along by my side.