Karl Hausman looked around the Town Council table, guiltily ignoring the new big crack in it. Going to his left, Paul, Jake, Maria, George, Duncan, and Sarah were seated. Ethan was standing, looking uncomfortable. Karl thought about how to coax the skittish man to tell them his information.

“Feel free to pull up a chair,” Karl suggested. Ethan seemed visibly reluctant, but did so. “May I ask a few questions?”

The big man gave a jerky nod.

“This is about the prison break from Solworth Penitentiary? That's where the trouble is going to come from?”

“Yeah, Sir Karl.”

“Do you know roughly how many people were in the penitentiary? And how many got out?”

“Three hundred and eighty inmates. I think maybe a third got out? Hard to say. The guards killed a lot of us.”

“What was it like, right in the beginning?” Paul asked, curious.

“Well, we all got the Blue Screen of Death three days before, just like everybody else. I think every single inmate was poking at it, trying to see what we could get. A lot of people were looking for tools to escape. I just wanted to defend myself first, but I was curious, obviously.” Ethan looked around at everyone nervously, but they were all a lot more interested in hearing the story than in judging Ethan's behavior, and the escapee started to relax a little as he continued his tale.

“We figured out that we could raise our Endurance and Willpower pretty quickly. A couple of guys managed to get a point of Strength, but nobody else could do it. We knew the System was going to have some good parts when bruises and cuts started going away real fast.

“The guards were on high alert, because they weren't stupid. But nobody knew exactly what was going to happen. When the two-hour warning hit, and the System started talking about claiming weapons and armor and tools, we didn't have a lot to work with. Some of us had shivs and those turned into stilettos or daggers. I was in the laundry, so I put on half a dozen shirts and tried to claim it as armor, but it didn't belong to me. So I had to do it with just my own clothes, but it didn't do too much, just made them harder to tear, I guess.

“The guards ordered us all back inside our cells when the counter was about to hit zero. Then Goblins and shit started appearing. A lot of them showed up right in the cells with us, and the little shits never stood a chance. We killed them and took their weapons. Some lucky bastards got seven solo kills and leveled up. Their Strength went straight from ten to thirteen, and a lot of us knew how to get our cells open, so we weren't going to just sit around and wait for bigger monsters to come try to kill us.

“The guards were busy fighting monsters of their own. They did all right at first, but their weapons stopped working pretty quickly, so they were too busy to stop all of us. Some stopped to fight the guards, but most of us just jumped the wall as soon as we figured out that we could. A few of us started throwing our scrawny friends over, too. It's good to have friends when you're in prison.

“Then the guards started shooting us, or tried to; after the first few rounds the guns crapped out, and the tasers didn't work at all. I got shot before I'd even decided whether to go over the wall. I figured I was dead meat, but a couple of hours later I couldn't even tell I'd been hit.

“A swarm of those little imp shits started flying around and attacking a few of us, and one big one. So I improvised a spear and threw it, and that kind of worked, so I did it again and got the Javelin Skill. I leveled up when I took down the momma imp.

“Most of us scattered and a lot of us got Stealth right away while we were escaping. I headed out alone and did my best to disappear. I had to hunt solo monsters, because I got in trouble when I had to fight too many at once. I lost nearly all my hit points more than once and I don't want to find out what happens at zero.

“I slept in a closet the first night. I got in a wooden box so there wasn't room for a monster to appear with me, and if they broke into the box it would make enough noise to wake me up.”

“Smart,” Paul commented.

“Other nights, I slept up in a tree. That usually worked but once I got attacked by a Varshath—one of those snake things?” Ethan paused and people nodded to show they all recognized the name. “That was nasty. And now that I know about the Giant Owl, that's not a great option any more.”

“Well, you don't have to worry about that from now on,” Karl pointed out. “After the meeting, Sarah can fix you up with somewhere safe to sleep.”

Ethan nodded. “Thanks, Sir Karl. Sarah.”

“So what's the danger?” Paul asked.

“Lazlo Morrison. Other guys, too, but he's the biggest threat.”

“What's special about him?”

“He was in for two counts of murder, and was one of the gang leaders in Solworth. He already had a half dozen guys who would follow him anywhere, and he's good at recruiting. He ran the cell block I was in.”q

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“Were you in his gang?”

“Didn't really have a choice. I kept to myself as much as Lazlo would let me, which was a lot of the time because I didn't go looking for trouble. That's partly why I ran; if I stuck around, Lazlo was gonna rope me in to whatever he was gonna do next.”

“If you've been keeping to yourself, how did you find out about what Lazlo is up to?”

“Nick found me. He was one of Lazlo's best guys. He told me to come back with him. I asked him where, and he said Double Hill Safe Zone. I asked him ‘where's that?’ and he told me. I tried to talk my way clear. I did.” Ethan paused.

“Were you forced back into Lazlo's gang?” Maria asked quietly.

“No.” Ethan swallowed. “That's when I got the Kinslayer Title.”

There was silence at the table while people digested that. George had learned from the Renown and Notoriety videos that “Kinslayer” was the Title the System gave you for killing another human being. Karl stiffened as a thought struck him.

“Ethan.” He couldn't quite keep the urgency out of his tone. “Can you tell us what it says in the System description of Kinslayer?”

Ethan stared at him in confusion for a moment, then unfocused his eyes a second and read before he resumed talking. “It gives me negative ten percent on initial interactions with people. I figure it means that some people sort of instinctively dislike me on sight.” He shrugged with a sour expression. “Not like it's anything new.”

But that might partially explain the severity of Kat's reaction, Karl thought. Actually, it's probably good that that happened, because if Kat had managed to keep hiding her racism and she were still the Sheriff, she could have made all kinds of trouble for Ethan and Letisha.

Maria cleared her throat. “I will bear that in mind for the future, Ethan, and I apologize if my estimation of you is being altered negatively by the System. I'm not a fan of mind-control magic.”

“Thank you.” Ethan looked around the table. “That's another reason I've stayed away from people.”

“So, what happened next?” Jake asked.

“I went and scouted the Double Hill Safe Zone. It's about fifteen miles northeast of here, or it was.”

“Was?”

Ethan nodded. “I watched while they destroyed it.”

“Destroyed it? Why on Earth?” Sarah asked.

Ethan shrugged. “I guess he wanted to move on. Lazlo's not the kind of guy to leave anything for someone else if he can help it. He wrecked it just to wreck it.”

“Or to take the Core,” George put in.

“What do you mean, George?” Karl asked.

“When you destroy a Safe Zone, you get a Core. It might be valuable. Remember how Jim got something north of forty gold auctioning off the Bear Core he looted?” Ethan let out a low whistle.

“Probably less than half that, actually,” Jake corrected. “Cores made from System Tokens are apparently simpler and more common than Monster Cores, so they are worth less.”

“Still, that's a lot of silver,” Ethan insisted.

“True.”

“So what happened next, Ethan?”

“I almost got caught, is what happened next. I tried to listen in and see what Lazlo's crew was up to, since I didn't get as much as I wanted out of Nick. I got made by one of the scouts, but I managed to get away, barely.”

“What did you find out?”

“There are at least a dozen in Lazlo's crew besides him. Some of them have good armor and weapons. Shop, not monster shit. And I'm guessing they're all at least Fifth Level, and Lazlo's probably Eighth. I just made Seventh myself and I wouldn't go toe-to-toe with Lazlo if I could help it.”

“Any idea which way they'll go?”

Ethan seemed to mull it over. “South, probably. He probably wants to head to someplace like Florida if he can make it, burning everything in his path.”

“George, where is that relative to us?”

George pulled up a map on his tablet and projected it onto the wall. I didn't know those could do that, Karl mused. With a few moments of fiddling, George had it set the way he wanted and got up to point things out like a weatherman. “Here's the penitentiary. Here's us. Here's Lazy Circle, and here's the Bradley Supermarket. Where was Double Hill, Ethan?”

“Move your finger right…stop. Go up…there.” They all took a moment to absorb the information.

“How wide a swath do you think they will cut, Ethan?”

The big man shrugged. “Hard to say. If it was me, I'd have scouts go a mile or two to either side, but if Lazlo is on search and destroy, he might follow signs of Safe Zones and hunt them down.”

“George?” Karl pointed with his chin. “They're headed to parallel the marsh on the opposite side from us. It looks like we're probably in the clear, do you agree?”

“Yes, Sir Karl. But I dislike using words like ‘probably’ when talking about a threat like this.”

“Fair. I don't know that we have the people yet to be keeping an eye out that far.”

“We don't,” Paul said definitively.

“Then I don't see what else we can do besides warn our scouts and intelligence gatherers to watch for signs of the escapees.”

“How long ago was Double Hill destroyed?” George asked.

Ethan counted on his fingers a moment. “Four…no, five days ago, in the morning.”

“Assuming one mile per hour for a group, about ten miles per day…” Paul trailed off, thinking. “Less, because he's stopping to fight and take out Safe Zones…They'll probably pass east of us by several miles, two or three days from now.”

“We don't want to tangle with a group that big and powerful. It would be like the Hill Troll fight at least, probably worse.”

“Agreed.”

“Do we know of any Safe Zones in that direction? If so, we should warn them,” Maria pointed out.

“There aren't any that we have found that way except the Bradley Supermarket…shit,” Paul swore softly.

Karl closed his eyes. “We left signs, didn't we?”

“I assume so, but I'll check.”

“You mean you all put up a sign that said, ‘this way to our Safe Zone’?” Ethan asked in disbelief.

“Most people aren't like Lazlo and his crew. We're busier with survival and seeing what and who we can save.” Karl sighed. “Paul, can you organize a group to go out there and remove the signs, if possible?”

“I'll send a team out in the morning. It won't be all our heavy hitters, we need speed and Stealth. But I'll have to send some people along who know where all the signs are; we wouldn't want to miss any. It's about four hours there on foot, so hopefully by tomorrow afternoon, we'll have erased any clues to our location.”

“Good, thank you.” Karl looked around. “Except for people helping me to write my speech, I think that's it for our meeting tonight? I think I'll deliver it in the morning at breakfast.”

Ethan pointed at his chest and then hooked a thumb at the door. At Karl's nod, the scout excused himself and left the meeting room. Depending on how this plays out, he might have saved us all with that warning. Good job, Ethan.

Karl looked up at the map, then suppressed another sigh as he pulled out a piece of paper. There's always something.