With the siege ended, the town is awfully quiet. We run into the occasional lone monster or small groups of them as we make our way to Mom and Pops’s home, but they’re subdued. Scared.
Unlike before, they don’t attack on sight.
I still chase them down and kill all of them. It's partly because of the newly acquired grudge I have for them, but that's not the whole picture. I have another incentive, in the form of the new quest the system gave out when Bruin died.
Quest: Stragglers.
Description: The death of the wave bosses marks the end of the siege, but some of their minions have escaped. Left to their own devices, they might one day surpass their former commanders. Track them down and eliminate them before they become a threat to your Bastion.
Objective: Kill the remaining siege minions (917/1313).
Rewards: experience (calculated based on number of monsters killed); System credits (calculated based on number of monsters killed).
Those numbers aren't too bad, but they're clearly trying to escape the town borders. That would mean having to hunt them down through the wilderness, and I don't want to take my chances. If there's even a small chance that they might grow strong enough to rival the wave bosses, all of them have to go.
Mom and Mike seem worried for me after I run off to chase a monster for the tenth time. But before they can protest, I point out the quest.
They leave me alone after that, and we travel the rest of the way in silence.
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We reach our destination two hours before sunrise, slowed down by my bouts of monster hunting and by encounters with other survivors. Small groups of fighters have formed and are already chasing the stragglers quest, but just to be sure, I send word back to William to put together more groups.
The quest doesn't have a deadline, but the sooner we can complete it, the better.
The number of escapee monsters goes down slowly but steadily, with only four hundred or so of them left by the time we reach Mom's house. I yearn to keep at it, to run off and kill until I can't anymore, but I stop myself.
We have other things to do.
“How do we do this?” Mike asks, laying Pops's body down on the porch. Those are the first words he's spoken in hours. “I could dig a grave with my skills.”
I think it over for a long moment before I shake my head, but Mom speaks up before I have the chance to. “The monsters might try to dig him out.”
“I could make it deep,” Mike offers.
“I'm more worried about what the system might do to the bodies,” I say. “For all we know, it might raise our dead as zombies during the next siege and use them against us.”
Mike goes pale and, with a small voice, he mumbles, “We already buried a bunch of people.”
I already feel like a piece of shit before the next words even leave my mouth, but I say them anyway. “I could deal with those, but not with Pops. I couldn't fight him as a zombie.”
Mike looks at me, then at the body, then back to me. By the subtle changes in his expression, I can almost hear what he's thinking. Do we stab the heart? Do we destroy the brain? What preventive measures could we take on the off chance that I'm right?
There's a simpler solution, of course, but neither one of us can bring ourselves to give voice to it.
“Let's…cremate him,” Mom says what we're both thinking. She goes to sit next to the body on the porch, giving it a long look before she continues. “Your father always said he'd rather be cremated than become worm food.”
She chuckles as she says that, a forced gesture that lacks any actual humor. I can't remember Pops ever having said something like that, but I might very well be wrong. In the last few years, I haven't spent as much time with him as I should've.
It could be something I missed, or it's simply Mom trying to convince us to do it that way. To ease Mike and I's conscience.
I chuckle as well. “Fine, let's build him a pyre. I'd say he deserves a warrior's funeral.”
“He does,” Mom says with a small smile.
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Mike and I spend the next couple of hours gathering what we need. While he and Mom choose a spot for the pyre and clear the area, I go off into the surrounding woods to get the lumber.
I still have one of the axes, and even though its edge is all bent out of shape, I can still make it work by putting more force behind the swing. I test the trees, and if they're the soft, non-enhanced kind, I chop them down with a single motion.
The insanity of our new reality sinks in once again as I fall thirty trees in just as many minutes. As I work, I have this feeling that I could obliterate the trunks with my bare hands.
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With nothing to lose save for a few minutes to heal my hands, I test it out. I go up to a tree, pull my arm back, and I unload a full force punch into it. Things don't go quite as expected, as instead of the tree toppling, I punch a hole right through it to the other side and get my arm stuck.
Some swearing and wiggling later, I free myself and return to work. I'm interrupted by a few monsters passing through the area and I run them down, but all in all, I'm done in an hour. I have enough wood in my inventory, so I get ready to leave.
But as I pack up, something catches my eye. The tree I punched a hole into not even half an hour ago now lacks said hole. The only hint that I'd even done it is a rough circle in the bark, and even that is closing up with a speed visible to the naked eye.
“Interesting.”
I investigate for a minute, but I'm not seeing things. The plants do get the same boosted regeneration rates that we do. Would they also grow faster? Or does this mean that some of the plant life will turn into monsters?
More questions for later.
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“Yeah, right there,” Mom says.
Mike waves a hand, and mana condenses out of the air to form the skill blueprint. They do a few more adjustments as I watch from the sidelines, then Mike triggers another skill.
Tons of dirt disappear in the blink of an eye, pulled into his inventory. A square hole twenty feet wide, long, and deep is left behind, taking up a good portion of the backyard.
We decided to use a hole for the pyre just to be safe. Better to prevent the fire from spreading before we light it or we might risk triggering some wildfire world event for all we know.
It will also help in dealing with the ashes, something none of us thought of at first. We don't exactly have the equipment or precision of a crematorium, so we won't be left with a neat pile of ashes we could fit into an urn to sit on Mom's mantle.
With his part of the work done, Mike steps back. I take his place, piling logs and tinder into the hole. Never in a million years would I have thought I'd be doing this for Pops, and I'm still not sure how to feel about it.
People start coming into the backyard as I work, stopping some distance away. It looks like William spread the word, and even though I wasn't expecting a crowd of mourners with everything going on, we still get just that.
I see a lot of familiar faces, from cops and colleagues that worked with Pops for years to people he helped out. There are five of them at first, then ten, then twenty. By the time I'm done assembling the pyre, there are about fifty people present.
All of a sudden, the spacious backyard feels too small as I climb out of the hole.
William is the last to appear, followed closely behind by Jessica. He makes his way through the crowd, greeting everyone and making small talk, but she stops in the back. She looks at me for a short moment, a fraction of a second, but she quickly breaks eye contact.
I'm no closer to working out my feelings towards her than I was a few hours ago, back at the safe zone. This isn't good or healthy for either one of us, I know as much, but it's too soon. I'm still hurting, I have neither the energy or the patience for that conversation, and so I choose not to have it.
It'll need to happen sooner or later, but not today.
Jessica melts into the crowd, and I look around for a while longer, part of me hoping to spot Emily as well. But she doesn't appear, and all of a sudden, I feel lonely without her at my side.
I sigh and push the feeling down, refocusing as William approaches me. The last week has taken a clear toll on him, but the last twenty four hours were particularly harsh. He looks deflated, haggard, like he aged ten years.
He still forces a smile.
“Didn't know Tom was a viking,” he cracks a joke after giving the pyre a long stare.
The almost desperate look in his eyes all but begs me to say something equally stupid in return, but I can't bring myself to. I force a smile as well, but I don't have a single funny reply in me.
William sighs, and we move on to other matters. The clean-up efforts are underway, but it'll take a while. He checked on the downtown people before coming here, and except for some small monster attacks that were easily rebuffed, they're okay.
“About that vote,” he says after a while, finally bringing it up.
I fill him in, letting him know that I triggered it myself. He nods, thankfully not giving me shit for the decision.
“Did you check it out?” He asks instead.
“No,” I admit.
“You should.”
He doesn't elaborate, so I bring up the notification to see what's up. The list of names is pretty long, most of them having a handful of votes at most. It's only near the top where things start to get interesting.
I'm at the head of the list with well over a thousand votes, which isn't surprising. Mike is actually in third place, having gotten some votes from the people in the safezone he established. William is in the fourth spot, followed by Jessica, both having a few hundred votes.
That's all well and good, but the problem is with the name in the second place.
Morris.
“Shit, I hoped he got eaten by a monster,” the comment slips out.
He only lacks a couple hundred votes to overtake me, and William gives voice to the shared thought before I can.
“I'm dying to find out who the fuck is voting for him and why.”
“It could be the chunk of the population we're still missing,” I take a guess.
“Could be,” William says. “He might've gotten a safezone of his own up and running in one of the areas we didn't explore.”
We talk some more, but that seems like the most plausible scenario. Jessica did find a few safezones we didn't make contact with yet, and one of them could very well be led by Morris. Hell, he might have just as many people on his side as we do.
It's a fucking mess.
“This is exactly why I didn't want to play politics,” I complain.
“And the bad news doesn't end there, I'm afraid,” William says. “He triggered a vote of his own.”
“He did what?”
I quickly go into the bastion management tab, and after some digging, I find it. The vote calls for all four of the losing candidates to be made into representatives of the people, and the motion already has a few hundred votes.
“What now?” William asks.
I don't feel like it, but I have to kick myself into gear. I was hoping that the vote would give me an out, but not like this. I can't let someone like Morris take control of the town.
“Try to convince some of the people voting for you and Jessica to switch. I'll ask Mike to do the same. Maybe we can divert enough votes from you guys to give me a solid lead.”
We talk some more details until Mike interrupts us. While we were busy playing politicians, he got Pops's body on the pyre. A couple fire mages wait nearby, ready to ignite the fire on our command.
We all step away, crowding on the back porch. I wait a bit in case anyone has some final words to say, but nothing of the sort happens. Seeing that, I nod to give the two mages their signal. They charge up their skills, lighting up the night with rivers of fire that set the pyre ablaze.