After the initial light show, the night is overall uneventful. I have trouble falling asleep at first, but once I do, I sleep like a rock until about two in the morning.
That’s when I wake up for my shift on my own, finding Emily on the edge of the roof. Her hood hangs on her shoulders, and she stares intently at the spacecraft that lazily orbits the moon. I keep silent, taking her in as the occasional trail flashes across the sky and lights her up.
She still looks decidedly human, except for a couple of details. Her ears are ever so slightly longer and pointier, like those of an elf, but they’re also crooked. Not ugly by any stretch, just easily noticeable.
Free from the hood, her dark hair flows over her shoulders. Something pokes out of it, though, right atop her head. Two things. They look almost like fuzzy pebbles, and it takes me a bit to figure out they’re antler stubs.
Whatever kind of hybrid she’s become, whatever a Veluthrian is, I don’t know. All I can tell is that the look fits her.
“You let me sleep too long,” I say, and my voice startles her.
She hurries to pull the hood back over her head before she turns to regard me. I just smile as I get up, and we don’t talk about it as we trade places. I take my spot on the roof’s edge and Emily lays down behind me, snoring away in minutes.
The weird craft is still there, lazily orbiting the moon. I watch it for hours, seeing it disappear behind the moon on one side, reappearing on the other, and crossing over its surface before doing it all again.
In the end, I decide to stop worrying about it. The mere fact that we’re not fighting aliens in mech suits right now is a good sign. If they wanted to invade us, they’d be on the ground already and we’d be fucked. It’s more likely that they’re system enabled races coming over to observe our integration.
Pops appears at some point, bringing with him two steaming cups of coffee. He gives me one, and we talk about this and that as I slowly sip the bitter brew. The alien craft is but a short opener, as he came to the same conclusion I did.
Better for us to worry about the things we can actually affect.
Turns out that Jessica did seek him out as well, and he talked to Mike just as the light show started.
“So what do you think?” I ask. “Should we go or should we stay?”
“I think we should stay,” Pops says, surprising me. “Mike has a handle on things over there. People listen to him. If we go, even just to check up on him and leave again, we might ruin things for him.”
I get his logic. Pretty much all of the police force, the authority figures from before, are here. If people see them, they’re likely to want them in charge instead of Mike. It would cause social instability in his safe zone, possibly sending a bunch of survivors over here that we aren’t ready to take in.
I could still go by myself, but I don’t say that. If I go, Pops will want to come as well. For the meantime, the best thing we can do is stay. Send out patrols to find the other bosses, and only start reuniting people after the siege is over.
With that decision made, Pops takes his leave. I stand on guard the rest of the night, only jumping down occasionally with a few others to take care of stray groups of monsters.
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Dawn finds me on the roof, with a bunch of fresh tears in my clothes and monster blood drying into the fabric. I wake Emily up and give her the coffee, having saved some for her.
“It’s cold already, sorry.”
She rubs her eyes and yawns, then she takes the cup from me. A small thanks escapes her, but she doesn’t notice. I give her a few minutes to fully wake up and finish the coffee, and we hastily eat breakfast. It’s just a bunch of scraps from yesterday, mainly cooked strips of monster meat.
The defenders come to relieve us half an hour later, so we go off to look for William. We find the man snoozing in his office at the police station, and I slam a hand on his desk to wake him up. He jumps and nearly topples from his chair, cussing up a storm.
Then he sees it’s me, and he grins.
“Are you staying after all?”
“You’re a sly little snake, but I’ll get you back for it,” I tease him.
“I’m ready whenever you are.”
As much as I’d love to trade quips for a while, we’re wasting time. I pull the conversation back on track, and we discuss what needs to be done. A lot, that’s what. A lot needs to be done. We need to prioritize the tasks, and we decide I’ll go out with some of the fighters to find other survivors.
Jessica has been surveying the town with Polly, and she found a few other groups and safe zones. Besides our own and Mike’s, there are three others. A rough estimate puts the number of people in each between five hundred to a thousand, so the total number of confirmed survivors is anywhere between three and a half to five thousand.
Problem is that Stelver’s population was just north of sixteen thousand before the apocalypse. A bunch of people are unaccounted for, and while a lot of them are simply dead, Jessica found signs of scattered pockets of survivors hunkering down in their homes. The majority probably haven’t gone outside yet since the system appeared, and if they kept quiet and laid low, the monsters didn’t find them.
Since we have around two hundred fighters, I’ll take them out in groups of twenty at a time. We’ll range in one hour long loops through the town, rescuing whoever we find and bringing them back here. Along the way, I’ll try to teach the fighters how to properly fight using system enhancements and skills.
If everything goes well, I’ll have just about enough time to take all of the groups on an outing today.
“What about you?” I ask William as we get on the move.
“I’ll try to negotiate with the store owners again,” he sighs. “We really need those supplies.”
“Okay. Start sending word to the fighters about the plans for today, I’ll split them into groups myself. I just have something I need to do first.”
William raises an eyebrow, but he doesn’t pry for details. He just says “will do,” and we split up as we exit the police station.
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Finding who I’m looking for isn’t hard. I just have to follow the children, and there she is. They’re hauled up in the town’s library slash museum slash archive, and she supervises the kids as they read their pretty picture books about farm animals.
The moment she sees me entering, she freezes up.
“Jack?”
“Hey, Mom.”
She’s barely five feet tall, with dirty blonde hair tied in a ponytail. Mike inherited it from her, but I got Pops’s black hair. She’s dressed every bit as sharp as I’d expect of her, with a knee length skirt and a thick black sweater. The look the kids have come to expect from her job as the school’s counselor, and I realize she put in the extra effort to offer them a bit of normalcy right now.
Except it can’t hide how tired and worried she really is. It’s the little things that give it away, like the stray hairs or the ever so slightly disheveled attire.
She looks me up and down, taking in the blood and tears in my clothes. Her nose crinkles, but the picture doesn’t look right. It takes me a moment to realize it’s because she’s not wearing her glasses.
“Kids, I’ll leave for a little bit,” she says, putting on a beaming smile. “If you’re nice, we’ll bring out the toys when I return, okay?”
Some of them cheer, and she even gets a few “okay, Mrs. Sophia.” One girl in the background asks for ice scream, and another one corrects her, saying “it’s ice cream, dum dum,” in that brutal yet cute way only kids can pull off.
Mom barges over, and as soon as the kids can’t see her face anymore, she makes an expression like she’s about to kill me. She grabs my arm and pulls me into a side room, where she promptly slaps my shoulder but only hurts herself.
The pain doesn't deter her, and she slaps me again, harder this time. Emily, who is just now entering, goes to draw her bow. I gesture for her to stand down as I take a few more slaps, all too feeble to do any actual damage.
Mom tires herself out in a minute. I take her into my arms with little resistance, and she buries her face in my chest as she starts sobbing. She cries about everything under the sun, from having birthed two ungrateful brats that didn't come looking for her sooner, to now having to worry about monsters and constant deaths.
Just when I think she's about to calm down, she laments about how I look and what I must've gone through. I don't have the heart to tell her that the night defense was a breeze compared to the earlier battles. Good thing she didn't see me then.
A few minutes later, she's completely out of tears. I let go of her, and she goes behind a desk in the room to crash in the chair. Emily has already stealthily occupied the only other chair in the room, a lofty reading armchair with a side table next to it.
I'm left standing up, but I don't mind.
Mom and I swap stories, though I…sanitize mine quite heavily. She must've gotten the boss kill notification like everyone else, so she likely knows I'm full of shit. But she doesn't challenge any of my claims, and for that I am grateful.
Her experience with the system is much more limited than mine, seeing as she hasn’t pick a class yet. After Pops brought her here, she took to looking after the children flooding in with the survivors.
“A lot of them are orphans now,” she says grimly. “Some of the parents died right away, or they died defending the safe zone after they got here.”
The kids are mostly pre-teens or younger, with the teens and older having gotten classes. Said teens make up most of our mages, actually, with the adult fighters opting for more familiar combat styles like melee or firearms.
The system has some guards and limitations in place for the very young, something like a supervision or guardian feature.
“I haven't seen it myself since both of you are too old,” Mom explains, “but some of the other parents told me about it.”
The parents get special access to this feature in a tab I don't have, and from there, they can see and control a bunch of stuff about their kids. Anyone below fourteen can't get a class at all, or even any levels. Starting from seven years old, though, the kids can enter a teaching phase.
What that means, no one knows yet.
Then, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, the kids can either get a class with approval from their parents, or enter an apprenticeship.
Once again, no one knows what exactly that means.
After the teens turn eighteen, they have free reign over their choices. The system opens up fully to them. Though, with the dire state of affairs right now, a lot of parents opted to let their kids get classes if they could.
“What happens if their parents die?” I ask. “Do the kids get full access then?”
“They can set other back-up guardians,” Mom says. “I’ve been working with them on that. A lot of them chose other friends, but more than I’d like asked me to do it.”
“And what happens if…you know…teens have kids?”
Mom shrugs. “No idea, and I hope we won’t find out.”
I drop that train of thought for now, but I put a pin in it for later consideration. I’ve been a teen myself not so long ago, I know how it goes. It’s not a matter of if, only a matter of when.
“Okay. I have to go for now, but where will I find you later?”
“Still here,” Mom says with overbearing regret towards all of her life choices. “Where are you off to, by the way?”
I get on the move, dodging the question. I grab Emily’s arm and pull her out of the armchair, then out of the room as she stumbles behind me.
“Jack!” Mom yells and rushes after us, but the desk, and then the kids asking for toys, slow her down.
“Love you, Mom! See you in the evening!”
“God damn it, Jack! Don’t get yourself killed, you hear me?!”
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After I confirm that Mom is — and will continue to be — safe, I go looking for William again. He helps me split up the fighters into groups so that we’ll have a little bit of everything.
It’s mostly brawlers and melee fighters, but there are a few ranged fighters as well. Barely any healers, though. Stelver doesn’t have a hospital, just a handful of general practitioners, a couple of dentists, and their nurses or helpers.
We have some of the general practitioners and the dentists here, but their classes aren’t focused on healing. Their skills, that they don’t even have access to yet, mainly allow for providing diagnoses by reading those complex charts provided by the health bar and planning treatments around the information.
The nurses, of which we only have five, are the actual healers. They’re not eager to go out there again and face the dangers, but William and I plead with them until they cave. They’ll come out on two outings each, to hopefully keep all of us alive and gain some levels for themselves.
As the first group goes around to get ready, I ask William about his negotiations with the store owners.
“A couple of them agreed to give us their stock, but most of them are stubborn idiots,” he complains. “Not like that food will last much longer without refrigeration, so I don’t get why they’re so hung up about it.”
“Did you try bartering?”
He gives me a of course I tried bartering look.
“Right. What did you offer them?”
“Besides protection, there isn’t much else we can offer.”
I try to think of some alternatives, but there really isn’t much else. If we had resources to trade, we wouldn’t be in this predicament in the first place.
“I have some ideas,” I say eventually, “but they’ll have to wait until later. I don’t have all the details ironed out.”
William gives me a defeated “okay,” then he’s off to tend to other duties. Emily and I wait around for the fighters to return, so I pass the ideas I have by her for a second opinion. She thinks them over for a bit, then she rocks her hand in a so-so gesture.
“Anything you’d add?”
She shakes her head. I sigh.
The first group, well, regroups, and after I add them all to the party for the shared experience, we leave on the first outing.