“What’s going on?!” Karen yells as we approach the crowd.
All eyes turn on her, and people start screaming again with renewed vigor. I can’t understand a single thing that’s being said. Karen urges them to stop, but her own voice is drowned out by the others.
“Shut up! Quiet!”
The air around her glows for a moment, and her very presence exudes a physical pressure on all of us. The sensation washes over the crowd in waves, making everyone shiver as they fall silent. I myself get shaken by whatever skill that was, goosebumps erupting all over my body as if some mighty monster is staring me down.
“That's better,” Karen says after a few moments of stunned silence from everyone. “Morris, what's going on?”
Morris, one of the people I've mentally filed as the newcomers, steps forward.
“We found a huge horde of monsters,” he explains. “Easily a few hundred of them. They're coming right for us, we have to go.”
The crowd teeters on the brink of panic again, but Karen keeps that skill active and takes the edge off. It's the only thing stopping everyone from erupting into chaos again.
She looks over the crowd, then she addresses Morris.
“More details?”
“Like what?”
Karen pinches the bridge of her nose. “Levels? Location? How long it'll take them to get here?”
“Right,” Morris mumbles. “Well for levels, we saw lots of level 1 monsters, but there were also a bunch of level 2's and 3's. They're coming from the direction of that fire that Billy and his team reported earlier, but I don't know how long we have. About ten minutes, maybe twenty if we're lucky.”
Someone else steps forward, a woman with a shotgun slung over her shoulder.
“There's…also something else,” she says. “One of the monsters is this…ape thing. It said Marrower when I looked at it. It's only level 3, but it's called a wave boss.”
Karen gives me a withering look, as if I’m the cause of all of this. But then again, I just might be. The monsters only spread out after I lit a fire under their asses.
“Good news, Jack. You won’t need to go looking for Kent after all.”
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Assuming the worst case scenario is about to happen, Karen treats the situation as if we only have ten minutes to spare. She keeps half of the defenders on the perimeter, and she sends the other half off to warn everyone else of the incoming horde.
“You have two minutes to gather essential supplies, and I want everyone back here in five! We’ll be moving out with or without you!” She barks.
People scramble, and she goes to leave as well. I grab her arm and stop her.
“Where are you taking them?”
“Downtown.”
“Okay, good. I’ll go out to find that horde.”
Karen raises an eyebrow. “Why?”
“I have fireworks on me,” I answer. “I’ll launch one to warn you when I find them, so keep on the lookout.”
“Give me a couple of minutes, I’ll find some volunteers to go with you.”
I shake my head as I turn to leave. “No time. Plus you need all of them here to help with the evacuation.”
“But…”
“Don’t wait for me!” I yell as I jump over the car barricade. “See you guys downtown!”
I take off before Karen can send anyone after me.
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A few minutes later, I stop in the middle of a field for a quick stamina break. The weeds are tall, reaching up to my chest, but I can see over them no problem. I find an abandoned tractor that I climb up on, my paranoia going into overdrive as I look around. Even though I’ve been heading straight towards the horde, I haven’t come across any monsters yet.
The world is quiet. Too quiet.
A little distance away, the weeds creak. A few of them fall over, making even more noise.
“You know,” I say loudly, “you’re not as sneaky as you think you are. Come out.” Nothing happens, and I sigh. “For fuck’s sake, I know you’ve been following me ever since I left. Just come out already.”
Archer girl pops out from between the greenery, giving me the stink eye. She’s a good head shorter than me, leaving her neck deep in the sea of weeds. She’s also slim, looking like the first stiff breeze would knock her off her feet. The compound bow is by her side, attached to a shoulder sling that also holds her arrows, and she’s dressed in a black tracksuit with red accents and a hood that she keeps over her head.
I motion for her to join me on the tractor. She climbs up in a few swift motions, which makes me reevaluate my initial assessment of her. I can’t quite tell through the baggy tracksuit, but the way she moves gives me the impression that she’s an athlete. Less she doesn’t eat enough, and more lean muscles toned by physical exercise.
“Did Karen send you to keep an eye on me?”
She shakes her head. “I…offered.”
Her voice takes me by surprise, she sounds younger and more high pitched than I thought she would. When I first saw her back in the safe zone, I assumed she's the same age as me — maybe even a few years my senior. But she's probably not a day over twenty one in the age department, making her closer to Mike. I look her over once again, trying to see if I might remember her from anywhere, but I don't.
“Why?” I ask.
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She shrugs. “I need experience.”
The way she talks makes it seem like every word coming out of her mouth hurts her very soul. She has that way about her that only extreme introverts do, the ones you have to pry words out of with a pair of sturdy pliers.
“I don’t plan to fight them.”
She shrugs again, and we fall silent as we wait for our stamina to regenerate. While I’m usually the more chatty kind, I don’t know what to say. I can’t get a clear read on her, and it’s like her very presence throws me off somehow.
“Neat class you’ve got there,” I try to make small talk after a while. “Were you an archer before all of this?”
She nods, but doesn’t add anything else. I’m tempted to crack a joke to get her talking, but I abstain.
“Is your stamina good?” She nods, and I sigh. “Okay, let’s go then. We have to find that horde.”
I climb off the tractor slowly, and once I’m down, she jumps and lands deftly next to me.
“I’m Jack, by the way,” I say.
I put a hand out for a shake, but she goes for a fist bump. I quickly recover and bump a fist against hers. A new notification blooms in front of me.
Social request: Emilia Faust has requested to join your party.
Do you accept?
I give the mental assent, and a new element pops up in my interface. Party members, it says, positioned under the various bars in the upper left corner of my vision. There’s only one entry, reading Emilia Faust - Level 7 Arrow Conductor. Two smaller bars are under her name, her own health and mana. A big “18” is written before the party members header, and when I focus on it, the instinctual knowledge tells me that’s our party power.
No idea what that actually is or how it’s calculated, but it also doesn’t matter right now.
“Nice to meet you, Emilia,” I say.
“Emily,” she corrects.
We take off side by side, in complete silence.
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It doesn’t take us more than ten minutes to find the horde. We run into them just as we’re leaving a patch of forest, and before I can say anything, Emily is gone from my side. She runs up to a nearby road and hides behind an abandoned car, so I move to do the same.
After I reach her and crouch down, we both peek over the car to get a better look.
This is definitely the biggest group I’ve seen yet, a few hundred monsters of all shapes and sizes moving in an ordered procession through the countryside. The bulk of their numbers is made up of mutated bugs, some now big enough to reach my waist. Ants, beetles, even some flying insects like flies and wasps.
The latter, with their stingers the size of drills, send a shiver down my spine. But at the very least, it looks like their wings didn’t keep up with their accelerated growth. All of them are grounded, trying and failing to take to the skies every so often.
Some mammals are thrown into the mix as well, animals such as opossum, raccoons, former pets like cats and dogs. Even a few deer and boars.
The fact that they’re all moving together isn’t too weird, I’ve seen that already. But not on this scale, and not with this much coordination. Where the other monster groups moved chaotically, only stopping when they came across people by accident, these guys seem driven by a purpose.
It looks almost like a military march.
I watch for a little longer, not planning to engage. I just want to confirm a suspicion I have.
One of the monsters, a mutated pitbull with a nasty, pulsating growth on its neck, starts barking. It separates from the group and charges in our direction. I feel Emily tensing up next to me, and I look over in time to catch her pulling out the bow.
“Hold off on that,” I whisper as she loosens an arrow from the quiver. “We need to do this silently.”
Emily nods. She nocks the arrow, but she doesn’t draw the bow.
I put the crowbar away into inventory and retrieve a couple of knives, hoping I’ll manage to pull off a fast kill that won’t attract the attention of the whole horde. But the pitbull only gets half-way to my position when a loud hissing sound makes it skid to a stop.
A shiver passes through the whole horde like a wave, the hiss making all of the monsters stumble for a moment. I search for the source and spot the Marrower in the back ranks of the procession. It gets up on its hind legs, letting out a stream of hisses and squeals. The mutated pitbull whimpers and turns tail, rejoining the group as they tighten their formation.
“That’s one of the wave bosses,” I whisper, “and it looks like it’s commanding the other monsters.”
Emily once again nods without saying anything. I pull out one of the fireworks and wave it around.
“We need to pop this thing to warn the others, but I think we should put some distance between us and the monsters first. They’ll be drawn to it.”
She nods, so we sneak away back the way we came.
----------------------------------------
“They’re moving slower than that Morris guy predicted, but they’ll still hit your safe zone in about twenty minutes or so,” I say.
We book it through the countryside until we put about a quarter of a mile between us and the advancing horde. Not far enough to lose them entirely, I can still see them behind us, but far enough that they won’t catch up easily.
Running that fast puts a decent dent in our stamina, so we stop behind a toppled bus to catch our breath and so that I can launch the firework.
“What I wouldn’t give for a flare gun right now,” I complain as I fix the launch stick into the dirt.
Emily climbs up on the bus to take a look inside. She doesn’t find anyone, at least not alive, and she opts to stay up there to keep an eye on the horde. Now she’s leaning over the edge, watching me fiddle with the little rocket.
“It won’t go high enough,” she says.
Words coming out of her mouth like that catch me by surprise, but I try not to let it show.
“That’s what I’m worried about. Any ideas?”
She shrugs. I pull out the lighter and go to light the fuse, but I stop at the last moment.
“I might have something, but I need your help.” She doesn’t say anything, just stares at me expectantly. I take that as a yes and go on. “We can tape this to one of your arrows, I bet you could shoot it higher with that skill of yours than it would go on its own.”
She frowns and hugs her bow.
“God damn it, is that a yes or a no?”
“I don’t have many arrows left,” she says.
I sigh. Again. If she sticks around for long enough, I have a feeling it’ll become a habit.
But despite my feelings on the matter, I understand her concerns. She’s an archer, she needs arrows to make the most of her class. Without them, she’d be next to useless.
“If I make you a few wooden arrows, could you use those?”
She nods, so I get to work. I gather a handful of more or less straight sticks, and I quickly shape them with a knife. I take one of Emily’s arrows to use it as a reference, and while the ones I make aren’t the best, they’re passable. I don’t bother sharpening their tips, just making them slim enough and giving them proper slots at the ends to fit on the bow’s string.
Emily takes them from me for a quick inspection.
“They’re shit,” she says.
“Yeah, I figured. Will they work or not?”
She nocks one and fires it into the distance. It flies wildly, unable to keep a straight trajectory without those little fins at the end. Not to mention that it isn’t sharpened, and the weight distribution of the shaft is all over the place.
“Good enough,” Emily says.
She hands me back the best arrow in the bunch, and I tape a firework to it. I hand it back when I’m done, along with the lighter. Emily doesn’t waste any time, she lights the fuse and launches the rocket arrow upwards.
It flies much higher than I expected, aided by one of her class skills. Then the rocket’s own booster kicks in, taking it even further. By the time it explodes, it’s high enough to be visible from a good few miles away.
Emily stares up at the colorful sparks that fill the night sky, but I have my eyes on the horde. They growl and howl in unison, and a few of the monsters take off in our direction.
“Let’s go.”