I contemplate what Pops and William said as I prepare a small team for the attack.

Yours is the final word, and the final word is law.

I take my pick from the fighters, lay out the plan, and they all just…accept it. They help me refine the plan, sure. They tell me their opinions and they let me know which parts I could improve or how.

But they're all ready to ride to their deaths on my word alone, and that scares me. I know we'll all die anyway if we don't stop the siege, and I know that this way we at least stand a chance. But it's still wrong somehow.

The final team ends up being me, Emily, Pops, a handful of melee fighters, and a couple more gunmen. I'm tempted to bring Mike and a few mages as well, but in the end, I decide against it. I thought at first that we could try to trap the monsters between walls and finish them off after the explosion, but it's too risky.

This is not an eradication, it's a stealth mission. Sneak in unnoticed, set up the traps, and detonate them from a distance. The main goal is to interrupt that hibernation buff and send the monsters scrambling, not to exterminate everything. Killing is a secondary priority.

Jessica blows a gasket when I tell her she’s not coming, but I hold firm. Derek and Carter seem weirdly disappointed as well, but they don’t complain nearly as much.

Pops and William try to talk me out of going myself, but I don't budge. If I'll lead, even for a short while, I'm doing it my way.

“Everyone ready?” I ask.

I get a wave of confirmations.

“William, you're in charge here while I'm gone. I can't promise we'll kill the boss, so get ready for a concentrated attack. Oh, and if you haven’t gotten around to it yet, start planting those mines.”

William nods and turns to Mike. “Did you contact Doug yet?”

“We tried, but he locked himself in his bunker right at the start,” Mike answers. “He hasn't come out since.”

“Are you sure he's not dead?”

“Yeah. Someone has this ping ability that lets them map out the terrain and see others. He’s in there and he’s moving around.”

“Okay. We have to see if we can get him to help, we could get some of the women and children to…”

They discuss the matter as they leave together, and I'm once again reminded of just how much better William is equipped for the role. He remembered Doug and his stupid bunker.

“Who the hell is Doug?” One of the fighters asks. His tag reads Chris something.

“You must not be from around here.”

Chris shakes his head. “I was here for a camping trip, pal. And I was supposed to leave the morning when all of this started.”

“I'm a local and I don't know who he is,” another one of the fighters adds.

I tell them about Doug as we make some final checks. The man is a veteran as well, though he served later than Pops and William. He returned home from war a paranoid wreck, scared of anything from terror attacks to asteroid strikes to biological warfare.

That pushed him to move out here to Stelver, where he bought a large property to build himself a secret bunker for the inevitable end of days. The plan was to not tell anybody, but whenever he frequented the local watering holes, which was often, the alcohol would loosen his lips.

Over the years, his bunker became a well known secret. But he didn't actually allow anyone to see it, which turned the thing into a bit of an urban legend back when I was in highschool.

“Well he doesn't sound so crazy now, does he?” Chris says.

“Don't get your hopes up,” I try to temper his excitement. “It's either his basement or a hole in the ground, not some fancy military bunker.”

“Still better than standing out in the open like we're doing.”

I don't tell them the rest of my worries. Doug only made the bunker for himself, so it can't fit all of us in an emergency. Not to mention that we have to be out here to fight, anyway.

Better to let them have some hope.

Mom comes by to check on us and layer her buffs before we leave. She’s clearly displeased, but she gives up on complaining. I wonder if she knows what we’re about to attempt, but Pops probably didn’t tell her all the details.

I give her a tight hug and she buries her head in my shoulder.

“Just…promise you’ll be careful, okay?” She asks.

“I promise.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

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Getting to the trailer park doesn’t take long. It’s only a few miles away to the east, where the town’s periphery meets the woods and mountains. Some wannabe entrepreneur bought a large swathe of land there and made a clearing for tourists to camp out in, charging a daily fee.

As with all things, it didn’t go quite to plan. Tourists stopped using it after a while, so the daily fee was changed to a monthly rent. People figured out that’s cheaper than buying or renting a house, so a bunch of them moved in. Nowadays, the park holds about fifty trailer homes and some three hundred people.

Or at least it used to until recently.

We stop the pets half a mile out and go in on foot, careful to keep noise to a minimum. I take point, with the others fanning out around and behind me. Just like the scouts reported, monsters come and go from the park. They leave in groups of four to six, only to return with their numbers multiplied tenfold.

It’s worse than I was led to believe at first. If we’d have let whatever’s happening here follow its course, we’d have been up against a horde of a few thousands by the end.

I reach the chain link fence first and give a hand signal to the others. The gunmen split up to look for higher ground in the trees, and us close quarters fighters move into the park. We jump the fence at different points along its length, with fifty feet between us.

Inside is about what I expect. Monsters carpet the clearing, packed like sardines. They’re all deep in slumber, leaving narrow pathways between them. The wave boss is in the center, sleeping soundly atop a container home. That’s the only thing in the area coming close to a proper building, and it’s where the owner of the park lives.

Or used to live, anyway. The side facing me is caved in, a ragged hole punched in the sheet metal wall. The other trailers are all torn into as well, most of them thrown on their sides and dented.

I sneak up to a monster, and I use analyze on it the moment I’m close enough.

Gloombug - Level 11.

Health: 170/170

This monster is boosted by a wave boss. This monster is hibernating.

Hibernation: 1 day, 1 hour, 46 minutes.

It’s a giant firefly the size of a human. The glowing end of its insectoid abdomen dims in and out in time with its breathing. I try to focus on that hibernation status effect, but the system doesn’t give more details.

We really need one of those guides.

I wait for the others to make the jump over the fence, and once we’re all in, I give the hand signal to move deeper. We split up, keeping to a crouch as we slowly advance. The monsters don’t seem at all bothered by our presence, too out of it to even notice us. I pass by many of them, taking turns and bends, stopping occasionally to stretch my legs. They’re quickly growing sore from crouching everywhere.

The whole exercise doesn’t go unrewarded, though. With Mom’s buffs, my sneaking skill jumps up in level every few minutes. I analyze every monster I pass and I pay attention to every small detail, which pushes the analyze skill to level up as well.

By the time I reach the first trailer, sneaking is level 4 and analyze is level 2. I try the latter on one of the monsters, but I still can’t see what the hibernation effect is. I can, however, see its mana points now.

Guess I need another level or two. Either that, or some specialized class.

I return my focus to the task at hand. The trailer is still standing, but it’s surrounded by monsters. A couple of really large ones sleep on top of it, hugging each other. Bobcats. One of them kneads the belly of the other, and the sight would be almost cute if they weren’t the size of grizzly bears.

Their weight made the trailer’s walls crumple and bend outwards, reducing it to half its original height. The door isn’t locked, thankfully, hanging on only one hinge.

I go in slowly and give my eyes a moment to adapt to the darkness. The sight that welcomes me is gruesome. Every surface in the cramped space is ravaged, covered in blood and guts. I look down and see half a human skull, the rest of it splattered on the floor.

It’s a woman, and she looks so much like Karen. A shiver passes down my spine. God damn it all.

I take a minute to breathe before I get to work.

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A quarter of an hour later, I have the trailer's propane tank removed and sitting in my inventory. I go to exit, but I hear monsters rushing by and I retreat back inside. The boss's scouts return with more recruits.

I wait until those go to sleep and the scouts leave, which takes altogether too long. Once again, I wish we had some form of long range communication. Even a chat feature would be fucking amazing. I have gunmen surrounding the place, but no way for them to warn us of incoming hostiles.

Nothing I can do about it but hope that the shop will have a solution once we gain access to it.

When I can safely move again, I leave the trailer. I don't do anything to the tank, can't risk the noise from tampering with it. I just leave it up on the trailer with a couple of Kurt's pound bombs, and I signal the closest gunman to target it.

We figured we should do it this way so they won't all shoot at the same explosive and waste ammo.

Once that's done, I keep moving.

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It takes the better part of the evening to get to all of the trailers. The sleeping monsters aren't the problem, it's the ones that keep coming in that keep us on our toes. Soon enough, room to move becomes scarce.

The monsters extend all the way to the fence and past it. I don't need to count them to tell that their numbers are in excess of three thousands by sundown.

We're fucked, but there's not much we can do about it now. We have to finish what we started.

I raid about ten trailers in total, setting up similar bombs on each one. Some of them are overturned, others are sheared in half, and digging through their ruins is tricky. Once in a while, I see some of the others climbing their trailers to deposit their payloads.

We wave at each other.

Darkness settles by the time we're done, and I have a few extra tanks in my inventory. I also still have a few of Kurt's Pound Bombs, so I sneak towards the boss.

Setting up the bombs is only half of the plan. They’re meant to wake up the monsters and hopefully kill a bunch of them. The second half of the plan is for me to meet up with the others one by one, taking any extra tanks they found and whatever pound bombs they have left.

That goes off without a hitch. I send them all back to the pets, and I keep going towards the boss. I have exactly nine tanks and twenty of the pound bombs on me, which are the components for the third part of the plan.

The one nobody, not even me, likes. I look up at the sleeping boss bathed in the light of the rising moon as I advance, and I gulp.

Better get on with it.