Trevor struck the death blow. The giant house centipede collapsed, its thorax snapped in two, its insides emptying like a lava flow.

Everything around me blurred into the background. Every sound muffled as if I was under water. Pure shock. Two craters pocked the muddy ground where Aubrey used to be.

Someone rushed up screaming. Apparently, another giant house centipede had also been on the rampage, and it too had been killed. At least, that’s what I thought I’d heard.

Before my abilities to focus crawled back from the recesses of my brain into the foreground, I could feel my knees freezing in the cold muck. My eyes burned with frozen tears. And, I hovered there, in despondency, for… I don’t know how long.

The sun had fallen low as the day grew long. In the shadow of what remained of the Moonlight Inn & Ale, a dark figure approached. When I made an effort to see who it was, I could also see a village in ruins. People sobbed, and whimpered as they dragged the dead from the street, and sifted through what was left of their homes.

The man walking toward me was Proctor. I suppose I was relieved, though my senses were likely too numbed to tell.

“Adam,” Proctor spoke with a scratchy throat. “Thank goodness you’re alright.”

I could see Trevor’s massive silhouette cut against the sunset as he helped villagers clean up. I focused back on Proctor, then realizing he was alone and on foot.

“Flint?” I muttered to him.

He looked to be on the verge of tears, and his face was smudged black. He shook his head.

“His horse?” I said.

Again, Proctor shook his head.

“They’re gone,” he said.

It was hard to make sense of what had happened. Prior to the cataclysm that sent me into this mad world, I’d never experienced disasters such as this. Without having gone through one, I could only guess it was similar to surviving a tornado. Or, I suppose an earthquake would be a fitting corollary. But, I wondered if anyone else who’d been through it experienced the slowness of time like I did. It appeared hours had passed, and I have no account of them. We’d reached dusk, and I don’t know how long I’d floated in a traumatized trance before Proctor found me.

“The old man we’d met on our journey,” Proctor said. “Kestrel, you remember? He and his sons have platforms out there, up in the trees.”

He pointed toward the edge of the village. You could see columns of smoke against the pink sky out that way.

“Everyone’s gathering there,” Proctor said. “Strength in numbers, I suppose.”

Trevor overheard Proctor, and he bent down to us.

“We should go over there,” Proctor said. “I’m told they have stew. Blankets to keep warm.”

I nodded with acknowledgment. Trevor agreed to go with us. We left the giant bug carcass behind. It would have to be dismantled entirely and cleared. Another time.

In the dim purple streets we passed villagers crying, holding one another. Others stopped and clapped in praise to Trevor who had killed one of those things. Sad as I was, I was glad to see him recognized that way.

When we arrived at the makeshift encampment we could see torches, and bonfires had been lit in a large ring around a section of Moonlight covered with trees. I could hear men shouting up above, and hammering. Kestrel, his sons, and other locals busily constructed platforms well off the ground. Dozens of them. They must’ve been at it all afternoon as soon as the carnage had stopped.

A woman nudged my shoulder, and she handed me a wool blanket. Another villager passed me a wooden bowl of stew, hot off the fire. Normally, not one to wear my emotions on my sleeve, I wanted to cry at the resilience shown by these people. Surely, some of them had lost everything.

“Ay, ay,” a man with cuts on his face yelled as he rushed at us from the shadows. “We don’t want him,” he said, motioning to Trevor. “He ain’t welcome.”

Trevor hung his head.

“Maybe I should go,” Trevor said. “My mom, my cat.”

Two men I hadn’t noticed in the waning light ran over. One was Gak the barbarian, behind him was the stout little builder, Kestrel.

“He’s staying,” Gak said. “You’re Trevor, yeah?”

Trevor nodded.

“Stay, I ask you,” Gak said. He turned his frowning gaze to the cut up man. “This one saved us. He saved you.”

To my surprise, Kestrel came to the giant’s defense as well. “Wasn’t for him we might all have perished,” Kestrel said. “He belongs.”

“Please don’t go,” I said to Trevor.

The angry man slunk away into the dark, clearly outvoted.

“I believe your mother, and your cat are okay,” I said. “It’s better they were out in the forest for all of this.”

Trevor nodded, and he accepted a bowl of stew, tiny though it was in his massive hands.

“I didn’t get it done in time,” I said to Proctor. “The hiring. The security guards.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

We sat on a log in front of a campfire with our bowls, blankets over our shoulders.

“There’s nothing you could’ve done,” Proctor said. “I’m afraid what happened was inevitable.”

“This is untenable,” I said.

Proctor could only nod in agreement.

“We can’t operate like this,” I said, wondering if I was trying to find logic in a situation where it didn’t apply. “How are we supposed to cope? Look at everything we’ve lost. Everyone. Gone. Speaking of which, has anyone seen Chai?”

No one had.

“Perhaps she’s fled to a neighboring village,” Proctor said. “Hopefully, she’s found safety.”

In the wake of such loss words didn’t come easy. You wind up speaking simplistically, repeating aphorisms, clinging to small talk, and empty optimism.

We finished our food, huddled under blankets and furs, and did our best to grab what sleep we could.

When the sun returned the following morning, I woke to a few hundred villagers burying, and burning their dead. It was [January 7th, SPT 1].

I sat on the edge of a tree platform about twenty feet off the ground with my feet dangling. The air was crisp, and ripe with the smell of pine, and spruce. Clouds of mist hung in pockets between crushed stone huts, and above expanses of brown grass.

Half of me kept an eye on my special visual ability, believing I’d receive some kind of notification from the System given the ruin we’d just been through. There was no such thing.

I climbed down from the tree platform where I’d slept, and found Proctor nursing a clay pot containing a dark liquid which passed for coffee in this world.

“The System’s had nothing to say about any of this,” I told him. “Don’t you find that odd?”

A woman handed me a bit of oat loaf, and I was still numb enough to eat it without complaint.

“Not all that strange,” Proctor said. “Your mission hasn’t changed.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re still expected to build a baseball franchise, regardless of all of this,” Proctor said. “If anything had deviated from that, rest assured they’d have told you.”

It sounded a bit cold when he said it, but I supposed it was better to have someone like Proctor around who could quickly find ballast again. Without him, I might’ve spiraled to the point I’d have failed to meet franchise benchmarks in time.

Here I’d wondered how I could possibly carry on in the face of such devastation, but Proctor’s idea was to do the opposite of what my instincts told me. To dive into the work with even more fervor than I’d otherwise might. Do it as a form of distraction until you’re more healed than you’d even consciously realized.

I didn’t have a psych degree, and as far as I knew neither did he, but I liked the idea of concentrating on something other than guilt, anger, and grief.

“Sometimes the only way through, is ‘up’,” Proctor said.

After breakfast, we joined the people of Moonlight to help clean up the rubble left behind by the monstrous insects. Kestrel and his sons had bravely chopped up one of the huge bugs, and dragged its pieces out to the fields where they burned them. It was explained, that even as much grotesque flesh as you could carve off one of these beasts, the locals did not use them as sources of food as they were quite poisonous, even heavily cooked.

Trevor had a stronger stomach than me, so he joined another crew who dismantled the other enormous carcass, and carried to the bonfire.

For hours we carried on, human chains moving fallen stones into organized piles. It was an impressive organization of villagers, and we made quick progress setting huge sections of Moonlight back into some semblance of order.

Halfway through the day, Proctor and I, stopped when we saw riders approach from the east side of the village. There were three of them. Two in armor, and another smaller man between them. Once they closed in, I could see it was the merchant, Barkley. He’d been out of the village when it all had gone down.

The man offered his condolences, but in a way where you knew he was saying it because it’s something to be said, as opposed to something he actually felt. Regardless, he handed me a velvet pouch with jagged edges, about the size of a bowling ball. It was quite heavy.

“The sample you’d asked for, from Murphy Mountain,” Barkley said. “My men came up with this.”

I pulled on the drawstrings and a gray hunk was revealed. It caused a bolt of adrenaline to shoot through me. A piece of modernity in this stone age.

“Concrete,” Proctor said. “Most definitely.”

“Hard to believe,” I said. But, it was concrete without a doubt.

Then the overlay ability in my vision jumped out at me, and I did my best not to let on, even though it caught me by surprise.

[CONCRETE = aggregates (sand, gravel = basalt, limestone, sandstone, crushed rock = limestone), cement (aluminum, iron, calcium, silicon = marl, clay, limestone), potable water]

“I have the ingredients,” I said to Proctor, without elaborating, but he immediately nodded in such a way I could tell he understood.

Barkley appeared a bit lost. “You have an interest in this material?” He said. “My men report they have this in great abundance in Murphy Mountain.”

“I’d love to know who’s in charge there,” I said. “How they put this together.”

I envisioned a person not unlike myself, though clearly they had some amount of know-how I didn’t possess. I was a bus driver.

“‘Tis a cretin, named Falconer,” Barkley said. “A man of filthy habits. Nevertheless, he’s long been Murphy Mountain’s wealthiest. He will do this thing you call base ball.”

My eyes narrowed at the rider. “What?” I said. “What do you mean? How long? He must be a newcomer to that place.”

Barkley shook his head. “Not at all, my friend,” Barkley said. “Falconer’s lived in Murphy Mountain his entire life. You were expecting he’d be someone like you? New to the area? I’m afraid you’re the only funny clothed individual I’ve yet encountered.”

Blood rushed to my head, and my ears were ringing. “It cannot be,” I said. I turned to Proctor. “Is it possible that other villages didn’t receive people like us?”

“Hard to conceive of that,” Proctor said. “We’re talking about hundreds of villages, and towns.”

Could it be I was the only modern human expected to run a baseball franchise in this medieval world? That wasn’t the impression left by the System. Or, maybe I’d arrogantly overlooked the possibility.

After Barkley and his guards rode away, I carried the chunk to where Kestrel and his sons were chopping trees. You should’ve seen the little man’s eyes light up when I showed him the concrete. He grabbed the sample from me, gripped it like he’d just struck gold. He shouted to his sons, and enthusiastically passed the hunk around.

“Oh, what I could do with this,” he said, looking like a man about to dig into a feast. “Where did you find it?”

“They’re using it at Murphy Mountain to build their security wall,” I said. “I want to do the same. Do you think you could help me source the materials? I can share with you what they are. But, the mixture itself is something you’d have to work out on your own. I’m no expert.”

“Right,” Kestrel said, and his face practically glowed. It was a nice moment in a time of absolute melancholy. “Of course, I can do it.”

“Point of order,” added Proctor. “Before we get ahead of ourselves. We should walk to village perimeter.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“You need to show where you believe is the best place to put the ball field,” Proctor said. “We should mark where we’re building this wall. It’s going to enclose the entire village, including team headquarters, the ballpark, all of it.”

“We do it using this,” Kestrel said. “We shouldn’t have to worry about what’s gone on here ever again.”