We only sleep for a few hours before Jessica wakes us up for breakfast. I stink of sweat and dirt from last night’s work, but there’s little I can do about it. The water pressure is long gone. No more showers, not even sponge baths. As we get ready, I complain about it to fill the silence.
“Didn’t you hear?” Jessica says.
She doesn’t elaborate, playing coy and waiting for me to ask for details.
“No, I didn’t,” I say. “Kinda’ hard to when you spend half your time out there fighting monsters and the other half doing back breaking labor.”
She rolls her eyes at me, but she gets to explaining. “A few of the mages got together to rig up some showers. Warm showers.”
Emily perks up hearing that, and I have to admit, I’m pleasantly surprised as well. It’s nice seeing others taking initiative for a change, fixing problems that the rest of us didn’t even consider.
“Does it cost anything?” I ask tentatively.
“It’s free for now, but they keep track of how long you take. Everyone gets a five minute shower once a day, but the fighters and the butchers get two rounds in there if we want them. Something to do with blood and gore stinking up the place.”
Emily and I look at each other, and we both nod. We get ready quickly, all complaints about tiredness and the lack of sleep forgotten. Jessica leads us away, and we eagerly follow.
“Let’s get some fresh clothes first,” I say as we leave the station together, tugging on my tattered shirt.
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As we wait in the long lines for the showers, I can’t help but appreciate the ingenuity on display. The mages in question are all teens, and while their parents allowed them to pick classes and fight during the first night, they’ve been barred from doing so again. Turns out that the guardian feature lets parents block access to skills.
In order to prevent their newfound talents from going to waste, the teens banded together and came up with this plan. They got some of the scouting and scavenging parties in on it, and they spent all of yesterday gathering the materials they needed as they ventured out into the town. The showers themselves are simple gravity powered contraptions built in the newly encircled park.
Ten metal barrels hang off the ground on supports, in two rows of five. The space beneath them is surrounded with tarps for privacy, and two long lines of people are waiting their turns, one all men and the other all women.
Two of the teens are ice mages, and they make ice spikes nearby to harvest them for water. About ten people take care of that, breaking the spikes with pickaxes and collecting them into buckets. Whenever a barrel empties, they fill it with ice. A couple of fire mages that appear to be siblings — one a fifteen year old boy and the other one a younger girl — go around heating up the barrels with their skills to melt the ice and warm up the water.
They even have a few guards to keep the peace and make sure no one’s peeping on those who shower.
Emily and I sign up with the teen in charge, who takes our names and writes them down. Then we go to split up and get into our respective lines, but Jessica stops us.
“They let the fighters cut in line here, too.”
That’s very convenient, but I find myself worrying about people’s reaction once more. Sure, it makes sense, the fighters can’t waste time waiting in lines. But logic doesn’t mean much to pissed off people who think they’ve been wronged.
With a deep sigh, I do it anyway. We get into the secondary lines for fighters, though these ones are much shorter. Most of them recognize Emily and I from the outings where we helped train them. A few of the guys make small talk with me, and some hundred feet away, I can see some of the women doing the same to Emily.
I can also see that she absolutely hates the attention from her terse responses and the way she pulls her hood lower on her face. She really needs to get better with people once things calm down. I myself don’t mind it, using the chatter to kill time and gather more information.
All things considered, the fighters don’t have much to complain about. They mostly want to share stories about the monsters they killed and the crazy situations they found themselves in. I do the same, telling them of the wild first night I had and about the plans we’re about to enact today.
“That sounds insane,” one of them says, and we all laugh together.
“Yeah, it’ll be hectic.”
“If you’re in a hurry, here,” one of the men says, taking a step to the side. “Go ahead.”
“Nah, I—”
“Yeah, here,” another one further down the line speaks up, offering me his spot.
“I still have to wait for my friends,” I say, nodding towards Emily and Jessica.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Don’t you worry about it, we’ll take care of that.”
A couple of them break off from the line and go over to the women’s side while the others egg me on to go ahead. I do so with a bit of apprehension, and when the man that’s currently in the shower steps out, I take his place. Before I close the tarp, I see Emily getting pushed from to the front of their line by Jessica.
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The shower is a tragically short affair, so I relish every moment spent in there. Once done, I dry myself off and put on the new clothes with some system assistance. It feels great being clean again, but with the plans we have for today, I know it won’t last.
Emily is done before me, already waiting on a nearby park bench. I go sit next to her, and when Jessica is done as well, we leave together. We go to get food, finding Pops already there.
“Good morning!” He yells when he sees us, waving with his usual enthusiasm.
We go over, chatting as we wait to be served. Pops praises us for the progress we made yesterday, which I wave off with an awkward laugh. Then he gives me a warning about Karen, who stormed in last night and complained about me.
“I don’t know what you did, but she’s pissed,” he says, leaning in to whisper that part. “If I were you, I’d stay out of her way for a few days.”
“I…blew up her neighborhood,” I admit, looking down in shame.
“You what?!”
We go back and forth on that for a few minutes, and in the end, the general consensus is that I pulled a dick move. Not like I disagree, though. Necessary or not, I did just ruin the life’s work of a bunch of people. I’ll have to talk to her — to all of them — and see what I can do to make things right.
Jessica comes to my rescue and changes the subject. She talked to Mike last evening, and he agreed to not do anything on his front. They’ll wait until we’re done here, and we’ll join forces for the final wave boss. William tried to convince him to send some of his fighters over to help out, but they didn’t reach an agreement. Seeing as Mike’s safe zone is closer to the town limits, he’s seeing more monster activity than us.
We all get our food, and Pops gets an extra portion for Mom. We make our way to the library and, after she untagles herself from the kids, we have breakfast together in a cramped office. She tells us that she talked to James as well, and he helped her pick a class. It’s a novice class simply called Elementary Teacher, and although it’s only half relevant to her previous line of work, I for one think it’s a perfect fit for her.
She doesn’t have any skills unlocked as of yet, but from what she says, they’ll be really useful. The first three are called Teacher’s Blessing, Fast Learner, and Curriculum. They sound fancy, but in order, they’re a 2% experience boost, a 5% boost to acquiring and leveling general skills, and a skill that will help her arrange lessons. The first two are buffs she’ll be able to cast on other people, and the last one is for herself.
Pops and I decide we’ll look into ways to get her some experience. We’re sure that if we put a gun in her hands and leave her on the wall for a few hours, she’ll get a few levels.
“I’ll get a couple of guys on that,” Pops says. “You find someone to look after the kids for a few hours, it looks like you need a break anyway.”
“Will do,” Mom answers in a drained voice. “Some of the other parents already offered to help out, but there aren’t enough of us.”
“Get some of the teens,” I offer. “A bunch of them probably have babysitting experience.”
Mom says she’ll look into it, and the conversation moves on. She asks us about this or that, but Pops and I quickly share a look and we silently agree not to tell her about what we’ll attempt.
We’re dodgy with our answers after that, and she knows us well enough to suspect that something is up. But if she does, she doesn’t let it show. She’s just genuinely thankful for our company, which only makes leaving once again all the harder.
But it can’t be helped or postponed. After we’re done eating, I hug her as she makes me promise that I’ll take care of myself out there. Then she makes Emily and Jessica promise the same thing. The two awkwardly comply.
Pops goes in for his own hug and a kiss, and before Mom can say anything about it, he promises he’ll be by my side on this one. Mom just sighs and buries her face in his shirt, not letting him go for a few minutes.
When they finally part, they look at each other and nod.
“We’d better get going,” Pops says, taking the lead as the rest of us follow him out.
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We swing by Kurt’s lab to pick up the explosives he crafted, and we find him working together with a handful of helpers this time. They’re all young, about his age, and they all have novice or adept classes. Two are simply called Chemical Engineers, one is called Explosives Handler, and the others are all Laboratory Assistants.
I pull Kurt aside for a few minutes to get an update. They worked all through the night, making another five boom rods, forty pound mines, and a bunch of explosive material they’re currently busy portioning up into smaller mines. All of that work helped them level up quite a bit, with Kurt himself sitting at a cozy level 7 and the others quickly catching up.
“How are you on crafting materials?” I ask.
“Good for now. The explosive material itself isn’t hard or expensive to make,” he says with a shrug. “We have over two hundred pounds of the stuff. The tricky part is assembling the mines, I could really use a few more people to work on the triggers.”
“We’ll look into it later, but I can’t make any promises.”
Kurt nods and moves to get back to work, but I stop him for one last thing.
“Could you wrap some of that stuff into balls? No triggers, just slabs of plastic explosives for us to toss around.”
“I could,” Kurt says, “but I don’t see the point. You’ll need a trigger to set them off.”
“I have some ideas, you just make a bunch of them.”
“How many is a bunch of them exactly?”
“If you can add the trigger mechanism later, make about fifty of them at a pound each. We’ll need to be able to throw them far enough away.”
“Okay.”
I take whatever mines are good to go, then we all turn to leave. Kurt and his helpers still have a lot of work ahead of them, as do we. With the explosives secure in my inventory, we go around to assemble a small team and get the show on the road.