[Player Log Start!]
[Log Holder: Verity Monroe]
[Level: 1]
[Party(Main)] had split into two teams. One would seek out the Warp Points, and the other would hold the fort down at the butchery.
While Asadullah, Jared, and Michael got to do the fun side of things, guess where Verity was? Playing guard duty with their ZombieWorld friends.
She wasn’t entirely sure what to think of Ben and Tench. They were okay? Experienced, for certain, and they needed all the experience they could get, but that didn’t mean they were trustworthy. Or reliable. Asadullah was bad enough, but he was very clearly magic. He had been brought into this mess on purpose, with a reason. Tench and Ben? She didn’t believe them. Not for a second. It was too perfect of a coincidence. Too narrow of a chance for her to ever truly buy.
Maybe that was why Jared had left her here, the only person from their original group. She was surly and suspicious, and if they truly had wicked intentions, Verity would be the first to sniff it out.
As of now, they seemed to be doing nothing in particular, simply dawdling about the building, sharpening arrows and sorting out bits of shrapnel from the crumbling walls that made up much of the construction site.
Verity found that she much preferred the parts of the butchery that were already built, even though they were uncomfortably white and sterile and had flickering fluorescent lighting that itched at her eyes. At least the air inside it was still, and there was no dampness around to make her think that acidic fog was rolling into an area. She liked to sit directly under the sealed window on the second floor and sharpen her knives. It was the most easily defensible area, yet still had plenty of escape points. Just the kind of thing she liked.
“Enjoying yourself, are you?” Ben asked as she passed by at some point, a tray full of miscellaneous pill bottles in her hands.
Verity hummed uncommittedly, making her blade grind against the whetstone slightly louder to make an abrasive screech echo through the hall.
“…Well, you keep doing that, kiddo.” Ben gave her a thumbs-up and then continued on her way, walking a little faster than normal. Good, Verity was freaking her out, getting through her masks. On the other hand, Ben’s mind games were having some effect too, as one word kept spinning around in Verity’s mind, long after the vet had left.
Kiddo. It implied not only age and experience over her, but also friendly intent. As if they really knew each other well enough to be considered friends.
Back in her world, even if no one knew about her redsight sickness, she would have been regarded as a threat, for the simple reason that she was one. The way she held herself, the way she fought, the very shape and build of her body implied that she was one of extreme power and ruthlessness.
In the world she knew and understood, no one trusted easily, because anyone unfamiliar could turn out to be a backstabber. Even, no, especially, if they were a child. Youth was a blade that was tightly honed and hidden. The best weapon of all.
No one would have considered Verity Monroe a friend after so little time in her world. And yet, Ben did it without a thought. It was disconcerting. Dangerous.
Maybe it was the lack of humans around them? It seemed that the majority of this world had been overtaken by the zombies, and that kept the remaining dregs of humanity from finding each other once more and rising up. They must have forgotten about the true duplicity and conniving nature of humans, stuck as they were in this half-built butchery.
She should warn them about it, before they fall victim to someone else. Or worse, her own redsight turned on them, like it had on people before who were reliant on her. It hadn’t happened since Jared, for whatever reason, but it was always a possibility.
Tucking her blades into the depths of her pockets, she brushed herself off and got up, kicking her feet out as she went up the stairs. She’d gotten a new set of boots from the random supplies Tench and Ben had amassed over the years. They were brown and had thick soles, with bright yellow shoelaces. She’d tried to kick things with them, and she was reasonably certain that they had metal toecaps. They were now her favorite shoes, mostly because her old ones had holes all over them and were constantly filled with gritty sand no matter how much she tried to shake it out.
Verity was really pumped about these shoes, alright? They were great.
The fourth floor was the only one which was not fully built, but you could still safely walk all over, and it worked almost like a de facto roof. Tench was fixing some of the catapults they had set up, hooking it up to a crumpled metal ball that he was pouring some sort of liquid into it.
“What’re you doing?” She asked. He full-body flinched, scrambling away from her in a panic.
“You’re like a ghost, holy shit.” He whispered, “Where did you come from?”
“Another dimension.” She replied in a snap, “Now, what are you doing?”
He laughed nervously, “This is a delayed flamethrower.” He explained, instead of pushing the issue, “Fire is a good distraction for the zombies, but if we launch it directly from the building, it attracts zombies to us, understand?” Yeah, she was getting the drift, “So I’m working on a mechanism to launch a metal ball into the distance, which explodes into fire much later, so that we can avoid that problem.”
Verity hummed, nodding along, “And how does the fire start at a delayed time?” She’d been here to warn them against their stupidly trusting ways, but while they were still excited to share their information, it would be useful to understand what kind of weaponry they had been cooking up inside.
Tench puffed his chest up proudly, all too proud to spill his guts, “It’s actually really exciting! The inside is a different shell from the outside, and while the inside has fuel, the outside has hay stuffing. When the metal ball crashes into the land, it breaks the fuel store inside and sets the hay aflame.”
“Oooh.” She nodded along, trying to play at being interested.
He snorted, “You didn’t understand any of that, do you?”
“Of course I understood it.” She replied, irritation springing to the forefront, “It’s just… boring. You really like this stuff?”
“Sure.” He agreed easily, “Anything that stops me from having to get close to those creatures.”
Practical, if they weren’t the best at hand-to-hand combat. Even then, there was a high chance of being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of brainless meatsacks attempting to chomp down on your brains. Best to keep your distance with long range weapons.
“The zombie hoards are hard to combat up close, then?” She speculated out loud, her thoughts immediately going to Jared, Asadullah, and Michael, who were all exclusively close-range fighters. Except Jared. He wasn’t a fighter at all.
“No, no, it’s not that.” Tench shook his head, “I mean, yeah, if you get caught in a swarm, you probably aren’t walking out of there, but it’s the very presence of those things that I hate having to look at. To stare into those eyes and accept that the rotters used to be someone. They used to be people just like us. And I’m just killing them so easily. Better to do it from afar, where I don’t have to see it.”
Verity paused, looking at a shifting figure in the distance, a zombie bumping into trees unthinkingly.
“Those things aren’t human.” She replied, on gut instinct alone, “Sure, they look humanoid, and they may seem like it. But they were never human, the same way that-” I’m not, was left hanging on the tip of her tongue, yet she managed to stop it from escaping. Still, the sentence hung stark between them, begging to be completed.
“The same way a saltfish isn’t a cutlet shark no matter how much it pretends.” She finished lamely.
“…What’s a cutlet shark?” Bemusement shone in his words.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Verity didn’t know herself. She doubted it was even real, but still she persevered with an outraged scoff, “You guys don’t have cutlet sharks? What fish do you even eat?”
“None. We have been trapped here by our own volition for years.” Tench replied, “Any food was hard to come by.”
Verity had got that impression, looking at the barren boxes of emergency supplies and discarded wrappers of ration bars trashed everywhere in the building. Food had been scarce here, until their magic Console had appeared.
“Was it really that bad?” She asked.
“Yeah.” He nodded, a tad hesitant, “We were scouring everywhere in the forest, breaking into every building, tearing apart all every innocuous thing looking for something that could be preserved or ingested. We were so close to saying fuck it and boiling the leather we had. My belt was at risk!”
Oh. Verity fixed her eyes to the ground. She hadn’t realized how bad it could get for some people. Living on her own as she did, she tended to zero in on her own needs above all others. Luckily for her, her body didn’t want for much. Unnaturally little water and food, surprisingly resistant to the heat, and only sometimes calling for the irrational and immediate destruction of every civilized thing in sight, you could call it almost a decent existence.
“What if you hadn’t found food?” She pressed, “What would you have done then?”
“…We would’ve left.” He replied, staring at her in confusion, “Probably in a month. We’re stupid, but not that stupid.”
“Just like that?” Verity demanded. Her chest felt tight. Desperate. Why was she getting so worked up about it, “You would’ve abandoned this little civilization without a single thought?”
“We wouldn’t be abandoning it.” Tench snorted, “We’d just be moving it.”
That didn’t sound right to her. Civilization was a place. A temporary shelter from the cruelties of the world. Weak and fragile walls that could be beaten down to let natural order in. And people who wanted an actual shot at survival, shouldn’t want to leave it. Shouldn’t be willing to separate from it, because the island of safety they had happened upon was probably the only one left in this torrent of madness. They couldn’t move islands. And they couldn’t move civilization. It could only be broken.
Saying all of this was not an option, however, because she had only just set up this uncertain truce between the survivors of this world. Debating complex philosophical questions with an adult who thought himself to have more life experience than her seemed like a surefire way to be kicked out. Not very agreeable, seeing that she was all alone now, with no one else to back her up on this.
“Oh.” She whispered instead, “I guess that works, too.”
He let out a puff of laughter, “Well, in all honesty, we’d probably die before we managed to get to another encampment or run into more people.”
“…Why?” She’d thought them capable enough fighters, and Ben at least had no trouble traversing the area without amassing a herd of stalkers. What made them so sure that the zombies would definitely get them so easily?
“It’s a geography thing.” Tench explained, pulling out a screwdriver to draw a map in the dirt, “This whole place? It’s very hilly. Everything goes up and down and all around. What it also does is make an almost moat-like structure around the town which stops external zombies from entering the area, but also stops us from leaving. Because of the rotter swamp.”
He highlighted all of this with circles and ovals and X marks scattered across the floor in indecipherable patterns.
“There’s an actual swamp in there?” She wrinkled her nose, trying to imagine it.
“Yeah, when it rains, all the water goes through the same treatment.”
“You have water rain here?” She almost couldn’t hide her own skepticism, but she managed to force it down into a plain query.
“What the hell do you guys have?” He didn’t even bother with hiding the horror he felt.
“Acid. Fire. A little bit of poison.”
“I… almost feel lucky to only have the rotters now.” He giggled halfheartedly, watching the rigid corpses shuffle about below.
“You should be.” Verity agreed, following his gaze. She had done this before, stalking through dead wastelands for signs of prey or tails. It was a straight, simple process of searching through every bit of information she was taking in. Except this time, something was different.
Of course, whenever something felt different, the same thing tended to follow. The Game Panels.
[Applying Killer Instinct…]
She frowned as her sight suddenly zoomed inwards sharply. Everything was slightly tinged red in a manner uncomfortably similar to her redsight.
Except everything wasn’t red. A blip of green crossed over the topmost edge of her sight, along with something grey. There was a zombie near the chain-link fence, digging its hands in and yanking. She hefted her gun up from under the jacket, the living arsenal she refused to part with, and sniped the thing in its tracks, making it fall backwards into the muck, brains leaking out.
[You have Killed the Zombie (Lv. 5)!]
[You have been Rewarded 75 Exp!]
[Zombie (Lv. 5) will Revive in 1 hrs]
[0:59]
Damn, they sped up revival times when they levelled up. This one seemed smarter, too. Did that come with the higher level? How did these things level up, anyway? Or were they given randomly assigned levels that stayed constant?
If they were meant to be NPCs in a classic RPG, Verity would’ve guessed that the answer was yes, but who knows how this Game really worked? It was all a mess.
The red was bleeding out of her vision, replaced with the full light spectrum. Sound was coming back in, too. When had she slipped into hearing nothing but a faraway buzz? She hadn’t even noticed.
[Deactivating Killer Instinct!]
That probably explained it.
“-Vera? You alright? You went quiet all of a sudden and just… fired a shot out of nowhere!” Tench waved his hands in a panic, “Where were you even keeping that thing?”
“In my jacket.” She replied, straightening out her arsenal, “Am I not supposed to carry them around?”
If they weren’t, then that was a whole other issue. In a world like Wayside, weapons were power. They were a steady rock to keep you grounded even as everything opposed you. If someone tried to forcefully separate her from her arsenal… they had unsavory intentions that she wouldn’t take lying down.
“I mean, sure you can, but what was that?!” He asked.
“Level 5 Zombies were clawed onto that fence of yours.” She explained, sticking her nose into the air, “You should be thanking me.”
“Wait, really?” He blinked, turning to stare at the fence, scouring it for any disturbance, “I didn’t even notice. What’s the significance of a Level 5 Zombie?”
“Hell if I know.” Verity rolled her eyes, “Come on, lets head down and kill some more.”
“Why would we do that?” Tench asked, sounding confused but still keeping pace with her as she turned around and began climbing down the stairs.
“I mean, it turns out that this is all some big video game, right?” Verity pointed out, taking the stairs two at a time. She tried not to let herself get distracted by admiring her new shoes. Now wasn’t the time to let her mind stray, “And what do we do when we’re at a low level?”
“We grind!” Tench snapped his fingers.
“Oh, good, so you had video games before this.”
“Who didn’t?”
“…Asadullah, apparently.”
“Whoa, tough break.” Tench snorted, “Wonder what he did as a kid?”
“Mountain faerie guide, to hear him explain it.” She dutifully filled him in, drawing her spear as they came out onto the bottom floor, where there was a narrow courtyard separating them from the zombies that lurked outside.
“Hello, yes, where did you get a spear?” Tench spluttered, “I don’t think you’re meant to have that. It’s not safe for a kid.”
Verity rolled her eyes and shoved the spear into his hands, “You think you can do it better?” She challenged.
“Ah, come on, Vera, you know that’s not fair…” He melted under her intense stare, “Fine! I’ll give it my best shot.”
His movements were unsteady and inexperienced, but then again, it wasn’t hard to push a stick with a spike through a hole in the chain-link fence and into the eye of a humanoid with no thinking abilities. The zombie went down in seconds after one such inelegant stab.
[Gideon Tench has Killed the Zombie (Lv. 1)!]
[He has been Rewarded 15 Exp!]
[Zombie (Lv. 1) will Revive in 6 hrs]
[5:59]
[! Gideon Tench’s Latent Ability: Hippocratic Oath is in Contradiction to this Action !]
[-1 on all Stats until a Life has been Saved in Balance]
“…Hippocratic Oath?” Verity repeated, staring at the panel, “What’s that?”
“It’s an oath doctors take, to preserve all life and help save everyone.” He explained, before frowning, “You could see the panel? No one could before.”
[All Party(Main) Members can see Each Other’s Personal Panels!]
“Well, that answers that.” Verity noted, taking the spear off his hands, “Now, watch this!”
“Being a little cocky, don’t you think?” Tench smiled.
“It’s not cockiness when you can back it up.” She told him seriously, spinning the spear with practiced ease. Panels filled the side of the fence and cheerful dings chimed through the air as notification after notification came up.
[You have Killed the Zombie (Lv. 1)!]
[You have Killed the Zombie (Lv. 3)!]
[You have Killed the Zombie (Lv. 1)!]
[You have Killed the Zombie (Lv. 2)!]
All in a few minutes. Kill after kill racked up easier than anything she had ever done before.
“See?” She asked, turning back to him. Red had started creeping into her eyes. She needed to be more careful.
Tench gaped at her open-mouthed before he shook his head and wiped the dumb look off his face, “Damn, I guess that’s what I get for underestimating you.”
“Don’t make that mistake again.” Verity told him, giving him the unblinking stare that Jared had told her made her look like a ghoul, “I know we’re kids and all, but that doesn’t mean we’re helpless. I’ll have you know that we’re capable of a lot more than you think.”
“Yeah… I get that now.” He agreed, “It’s just a little hard because you’re like… babies.”
“I’m going to hit you.” She warned, twisting the spear towards him. The only thing that saved him was the timely arrival of the panels.
[Proximity Alert!]
[Console & Party(Main) Members in Range]
“Jared’s team must be back.” She noted, “It’s been days. Do you think they found an Individual Sub-Level?”
“They better have, and then we can finally move on!” Tench agreed, “Ah, man, it’s like we’ve been waiting for two years to move on with this!”
“Well then, Gideon, better get ready to pick up the pace, because I’m not spending two years on this Game.” Verity made him swear, “Come on, get Ben and lets do a debrief.”
[Player Log End!]