[Player Log Start!]

[Log Holder: Terry Glasgow]

[Level: 1 – Boss Stage]

Terry was not having a very good time.

He was having to fight through the hoard of decaying humanoids only to be lambasted by a crowd of non-decaying humanoids, all desperate to grab onto them and touch them and pull their attention over to their pitiful selves.

“Please, we need the cure!” A desperate woman cried, her hand a burning vice on his left arm. He had covered the killer mold layer with a thin metal glove, otherwise she would have died upon contact. This was the third glove on their hand, and he was really beginning to feel the moistness build up under the weight of cloth and rubber and metal.

Someone else was gripping his right hand. The bare skin contact made him feel sick. The person had the imprint of teeth in their cheek, and in their eyes was absolute terror. They were scared. Unbearably so. Terry made to follow them, his morals swayed in their favor. The test sample they had made wasn’t tested as much as he would have liked, but it was the only one he had on him, and it was the only hope that they could get.

“Can I get a dropper from somewhere?” He asked, a plea thrown at this mass of humanity in every direction. Murmurings spread out in every direction, and they carried over to Terry the tiny, clear instrument, and a bottle of eyedrops. Perfect. Some of these people must be up to date on the most recent developments with the zombie cure.

“Okay, hold still.” He instructed the person, extracting a few choice growths from the petri dish he had brought along with him, and transferring it into the tube of eyedrops, turning the liquid green from all the specks suspended inside.

The dropper sucked up the liquid, all green and clear. He held in front of his face, brandishing it with all the theatrics fitting of such a lifesaving medication.

“Stay still.” He warned, holding it out in front of him, “Bend your knees a little, and tilt back your head.”

The person with the bite in their face did exactly that, and Terry carefully brought it to their eye, holding back the eyelid carefully as he squeezed the green liquid into the eye. For a second, it covered the film of their eye, obscuring their eyes. And then, the liquid was seeping into the edges of their eye, until there was only a healthy eye remaining.

Terry let out a sigh of relief. He hadn’t ruined the person’s vision permanently, at least.

“Am I cured?” The person asked, raising hands towards their face.

“Here’s to hoping.” Terry replied, “We haven’t… exactly tried this on a test subject before.” The best he could do was amplify the effect he had expected to get. Speaking of…

[Applying Nature Affinity…]

There was a slight green tinge washing over their skin for a few seconds, so Terry had to assume that it worked. Or it may have accidentally made it work faster than before. Oops.

“We wait until you turn out alright.” He decided. Sounds of protests went up all around him, a wall of noise that bowled him and grated his skin into shreds.

“I can’t live that long!”

“What about me?”

“Please, don’t do this to us!”

Asadullah growled, a deep, chesty thing that wasn’t human in any sense of the word. If he could speak, then he would no doubt be chewing them out with several choice words. As it was, his tail was puffed up to three times the size of its little, flicking tail.

Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to put together two people who couldn’t communicate with people properly and have them deal with a group of people who were desperate for explanation. At least they had Tench to take over for them, all calming smiles and friendly bedside manners.

“I know you’re scared.” He whispered, his words stilted and shining with worry, “But you have a choice. Risk turning into an even worse zombie through this possibly faulty cure. Or wait to see what will happen and possibly run out of time during that.”

There was silence. Or, well, not silence. This many people could never truly be silent. Their collective breathing was deafening, especially when interspersed by the soft buzzing murmurs are they discussed it all with their companions.

He was reasonably certain that this was where the bulk of the remaining people in Hygeia were gathered. The rest had taken to the roofs, or sequestered themselves in the sparse bunkers littered about town. There weren’t many of those. Hygiea itself was meant to be a bunker. And yet, they had breached it anyway, using internal sabotage and… fate, for lack of a better term.

What Terry saw in front of him… was not promising. Not as many people were bitten or at risk of turning as they had thought. They were able to get them to separate when he asked them nicely, so that he could get a proper handle on the situation. It was likely that some of them were lying, so as to avoid being used as cannon fodder. That had been horrifyingly common, if the radio from the early days had been telling the truth.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

They had maybe seventy people, if they rounded up. Twelve at risk of turning. Twenty injured but not by zombies. More than thirty uninjured civilians with no remarkable fighting abilities or skills. Seven doctors. One person with experience handling missiles for the army, and had a stack of rockets on hand. And three people with extradimensional knowledge that could save the world. It wasn’t looking good, no matter how optimistic they wanted to be about it.

“Must pull together.” He muttered to Tench when he passed the man, who was helpfully bandaging someone’s twisted ankle, “Be…” He signed out Charismatic. Tench nodded, even as his patient listened into the conversation curiously.

“Want me to pull out the miracle healing?” He asked.

Terry blinked, put on the spot. They were never the one people went to ask about these sorts of things. They only listened when he was talking about mushrooms, and prodded him towards the specific areas of mycology that they were interested in, not what Terry wanted.

It was an odd feeling, to be entrusted with something so out of their league.

“What you want.” He finally decided, removing themself from the situation.

The person to receive the cure – Lucinda, he found out – hovered around the group of the turned. The entire room seemed to be glancing at her intermittently, as if trying to ignore her, but finding that they could not. He was almost sympathetic to her, having felt that same constant attention leering down from him in the halls of the research facilities. But Terry had no comfort to give, so they remained silent.

Asadullah was having the hardest time out of all of them. He remained sequestered in the corner the entire time, trying not to drag attention to himself. Or his… extra body parts. He was always rather outgoing, willing to insert himself into situations and conversations, no matter how out of his depth he might be. Yet, now he had to withdraw, for the betterment of the mission. Terry wanted to swap places with him. That way they would both get the amount of attention they preferred.

Since that was a level of reality breaking that he could not manage, however, Terry simply caught his eye, pointed towards the ladder that led to a small roof that was now their only exit, after the entrance door had been barricaded shut.

Asadullah nodded, his hat shifting ever so slightly in a way that they knew meant his ears had twisted up in excitement. Disguising a smile, they wove their way through the crowds, giving quiet looks of condolence, and acknowledging people as much as they had to so that he could get out of the way.

This was made much easier by a sharp ding and a sudden murmur of wonderment that sounded behind him. Tench had pulled out his most reliable trick, and now the ball was really rolling.

Quickly moving to avoid the inevitable stampede, Terry made a break for the ladder, scrambling right after Asadullah, who turned out to be good at climbing in both full cat form and out of it, too. Terry pulled themself onto the roof, panting up a storm as he collapsed there, chest heaving.

“You looked like you were having fun.” Asadullah commented, grinning from above him. Terry flushed brightly and glanced away from his honey brown eyes, instead staring at the silver wires of whiskers which peeked out from around his mouth, every so often. No one said anything for a few frozen seconds.

Then Asadullah’s ear twitched. And Terry remembered that they were having a conversation. And he was expecting a response from them. Was he supposed to keep the flirty banter going? Or were they the only one feeling the sparks of romance between them?

“About as much fun as you.” He decided on saying. Asadullah laughed, sitting down next to him in a cross-legged position. Terry tried to copy the pose, but his legs started cramping up two seconds in, so he decided to just sit like he normally did.

The sun was setting. They had gotten through the first day of the Boss Level. It felt unreal to believe, with the sky a whirlwind of greens and blue from the cool sunset, as if the image of the actual sunset had been altered to make the tint opposite to what it was on the color wheel.

If they weren’t mistaken, there had been filters for that kind of thing. He wondered if there might be some phone out there that still had it, if they plugged it in to charge. Or if the data had all been lost when the internet went down. He wondered if any of those words would make sense to Asadullah, translation issue or not.

“They love you down there, you know?” Asadullah told him, “You could be their very own Guardian.”

“Not a Guardian.” Terry laughed, remembering Asadullah’s stories about being the Guardian of Mira, roving through the mountains like the mythical spirit he got his powers from. It was flattering that Asadullah saw a little bit of himself in Terry, but that was just it. Seeing things that weren’t there.

“No, you’re not.” Asadullah agreed, “And I like that about you? You know what you want. And this isn’t it. And I have… so much respect for that. Even if you’re kind of a mess about it.”

Terry nodded, signing along, “That’s me. Being a mess.”

“I was trying to be nice!” Asadullah groaned, mock offended. His words were like smooth music to Terry’s ears, and not for the first time they found themself straining to hear the separate words and vowels and recurring syntax to compare to the translation. It was slow going, but he thought that he might be making some progress on understanding what he was saying, apart from the translation subtitles.

“Tell me more about this King Zombie.” Asadullah instructed, “I don’t have these video games, so no one’s bothered to lay it out to me. Where did it come from? Why is it here?”

Terry nodded, testing his voice out a little. No tightness in his chest. No noose around his neck keeping all the words inside.

“The King Zombie seems to be… the boss character here.” He explained through breathy words, “It should be a drastically higher level than the zombies we’ve dealt with so far. Usually, there isn’t much of a reason given to why they exist, in video games. But the System we’re dealing with almost feels like a video game pulled out into the real world, bending nature to fit into its support structure, so I’m sure someone would have had to prematurely level up the King Zombie until it reached a level that…”

They froze mid-sentence.

Asadullah looked up at him, pupils constricting into panicked slits, “What’s wrong?”

“I know which of the zombies is the King.” Terry whispered, the realization hitting him like a truck.

[Player Log End!]