[Player Log Start!]
[Player: Asadullah Khan]
[! Log Translated From Urdu !]
[Level: 1]
Asadullah’s fingers were starting to ache. He had spent so much time slashing away at the zombies, his nails had worn away and nearly had been yanked out of their nail beds.
He hissed, massaging the tips of his fingers as they jumped over the fence. Pain lanced through the hands in electrifying stabs.
“You okay?” Michael asked, hands wrapped up in protecting the Console as he landed on the other side of the fence.
“Yeah, great.” He agreed, dropping down from the top of the fence, morphing his hands and feet into wide paws to absorb the force of the landing. He cringed as a claw snagged itself on a flyaway weed. He used to take great care of his hands and claws and nails before he got transported into this strange world. Now, he was slowly falling apart without the freedom to indulge in his regular pampering. Even the djinn in his arm was starting to get upset over it.
He turned his head around to look at Jared, who was trailing behind them with his eyes fixed onto the ground. He had been different ever since he had exited the Sub-Level. Sure, three days on his own could change a boy completely, but this was extreme. Something traumatic had happened there.
Jared was never going to call him out on it, because he seemed to be trying so hard to keep up a high-energy act. It wasn’t a good idea to put the issues in the spotlight now.
A dull brown blur dashed past him to grab Jared and Michael by the shoulders. Verity was here, looking them over quickly.
“Did you see anything of note?” She asked, her voice all business even as concern flooded her eyes, “You missed the timeline we set up.”
Michael laughed and elbowed Jared in the ribs, “This guy has done the first Sub-level!”
“All in three days.” Jared winked.
“Bet I could do it faster.” Asadullah said in unison with Verity.
He blinked, staring at the subtitles underneath her. Verity barked out a laugh, “Three biscuits on whoever does it faster?”
Ding!
[Personal Challenge Established!]
[Reward: 3 Biscuits]
[Participants: Verity Monroe, Asadullah Khan]
“Oh, great, now you’ve sold your soul over a biscuit and the chance to show me up.” Jared snorted, “Good going there, Vera. You keep surprising me.”
“Don’t push it.” She warned, staying remarkably calm for someone as prideful as her.
“But what next?” Asadullah asked, looking around, “We’ve got a plan, right?”
“…A vague outline, more like.” Tench sighed, “Up till now, we were just waiting for more information from you guys. Bring back any such information?”
Jared nodded, pulling off the bags he had wrapped around his chest, “I spent more than three days in the Sub-Level, and I had a lot of time to observe and understand what was happening there, and also what to expect from the other Sub-Levels in the process.”
“Good work, kid.” Tench grinned, “Keep it all in your noggin until we find Ben and have a proper debriefing.”
“Don’t boss me around.” Jared frowned, “I’m the boss, got it?”
“Let’s not get carried away with the power struggles, shall we?” Asadullah sighed, “There’s no general and no soldiers. Just people trying to save the world.”
Silence hung in the air.
Tench whistled, “Asad coming in at the last moment with the most profound shit. You got some issue with the military?”
Asadullah froze. He didn’t know how to respond to that. Military stuff wasn’t something he’d been very familiar with before he had been displaced, but he hadn’t been against them, really. Hadn’t even thought about it before. Except… Except…
(“There’s a storm coming, and the army’s the best place to be prepared for the next strike.”)
So maybe he did have issues with the military.
“They take.” He whispered, “All they do is lure people away with false promises and take.”
The younger ones didn’t understand. He knew it simply as they exchanged confused glances. They lived in a world where the military wasn’t a thing anymore. Probably hadn’t even known what the army was. Sure, they might get it if he explained it to them, because fighting for resources and scraps was something they were painfully familiar with, but it wasn’t the same.
There was simply no way to put it into perspective the way they threw their weight around and squabbled over bruised egos. It was so stupid, no one could ever dream it up without witnessing it firsthand.
“Okay. You appeared out of nowhere, left into the void just as quickly, and made us all think that you had dropped off the face of the earth. You better have brought something worthwhile back.” Ben sighed, marching into the room they had decided was their de facto meeting space. Asadullah had seen Tench use a small green box with a wire sticking out of it to deliver a message to her. He should look into that. It seemed like another useful device to bring back to his world.
Despite all of his bickering about his place as the ‘leader’, Jared immediately straightened up and rattled out a report with an efficiency Asadullah would have killed for.
“It took us five hours to get to the Spawn Point after we left you. The real test was the Sub-Level itself. The language used in the pop-up makes it seem like you can only go into each Sub-Level once. However, it makes it seem like nothing can stop you from going into multiple Sub-Levels. Unlike the regular dungeons you would accept for a sublevel in an RPG, this one transported me to a completely different dimension, with a whole apocalypse of its own and a complex socio-political system of its own. It’s fair to assume that all the others are like this, too.”
He had been speaking for so long that the panel of words had piled up in front of Asadullah’s eyes, obscuring his view of the others. Asadullah would say that he was pretty literate, but this was more reading than he ever thought he’d have to do. All the while, the debriefing continued.
“Seems like an awful long way to go for a Sub-Level.” Verity pointed out, “And it’ll be like this for every Sub-Level? Who designed this Game?”
“Because it hasn’t been made for us in mind.” Asadullah replied, “It’s all being crafted in a real world where people have real lives and the Game is just being woven around them. Probably the route was planned by djinn, so it all clicks, really.”
“…What?” Tench blinked, “Does that mean anything?”
Asadullah wilted under the attention, “I mean… no...” He admitted, “But you asked!”
Jared slumped against the wall, “Can’t believe I thought you could single-handedly save Wayside.”
The comment chafed at his ego. He didn’t know much about Jared, really. Verity was on a closer wavelength with him than that guy. So why did he care whether the little slime found him unsatisfactory?
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Because the first time they met, Jared had hugged him tightly and pronounced him to be an angel. Most people didn’t look at him and see that. They saw bad decisions piled upon bad decisions, all built on a base of consorting with djinn.
Nothing close to angelic.
And now Jared was realizing how wrong he was about that. It made something twisted curl up in Asadullah’s gut and he didn’t like it.
But this wasn’t his home. If he burned a few bridges on the way out, who cared? It was time to start holding his ground.
“What do you mean by that?” He asked.
Jared blinked, “What?”
“What you said.” Asadullah repeated, trying to tame the way his hands were shaking, “About me. What about me makes it seem like I couldn’t help you in your mission?”
Ben covered her face with her hands. In an instant, tension crackled through the room. Verity had her eyes fixed on the ground, but he could see her slipping her hand underneath her jacket. She was just waiting for things to go south.
An odd look settled on Jared’s face as he cleared his throat, “I didn’t mean any offense.” He finally clarified with a sigh, “I just meant that I had looked up to you more than I should have. You’re just a person like the rest of us, with your own strengths and weaknesses.”
“Alright.” He muttered, trying to quell the discomfort in his chest. Of course, it made sense. He really was human underneath it all. It was good to humble himself.
“Anyways, continuing onwards, it was a fetch quest.” Jared moved on, “Had to solve a mysterious clue and find an item that was necessary for survival in the Sub-Level, which turned out to be oxygen tanks. I stored it in the Console’s Inventory, if you want to take a look.”
Intrigued muttering and Ben tugged the Console out of Michael’s hands to verify that.
“We also gained a lot of Experience Points.” Asadullah added proudly.
“By ‘we’, he means he got the XP.” Michael snorted, “We’re useless compared to him.”
“Same.” Tench shook his head morosely, “Verity is scary against the rotters.”
“Any idea what we can do with the XP?” Ben asked, clicking across the screen several times, “I’ve got the profiles pulled up and you have… Woah, hundreds of points stored up. What can it do?”
“I’d assume it can be used to level up.” Michael frowned, leaning over to read the screen with her. Everyone crowded up, too, so that they could see the screen. It was open to Verity’s profile. One click, and then the Abilities window was materializing in the real world.
[Use Exp Points!]
[448 Exp Points Available]
[Overall Level: 8 (+)]
[Power Stats:-]
[Durability: 3 (+)]
[Strength: 6 (+)]
[Agility: 5 (+)]
[Charisma: 2 (+)]
[Abilities:-]
[Sharpshooting Lv. 8 (+)]
[Resource Conservation Lv. 8 (+)]
[Hand-to-hand Combat Lv. 8 (+)]
[Tracking Lv. 7 (+)]
[Killer Instinct Lv. 9 (+)]
“Okie dokie, Vera, the stage is all yours.” Jared announced, “How’re you going to play this?”
Verity scanned over the panel, reading it again slowly, carefully planning out her future strategy. And then her hands were flying across the panel, clicking on buttons with feverish intensity.
[Deposited 400 Exp Points in Tracking Lv. 7!]
[Level Up to Tracking Lv. 9!]
“Tracking?” Asadullah asked in surprise, “Why that one?”
“So that we can find the cure-maker, remember?” Verity reminded him, “We’re the only ones with Tracking abilities, Asad, we need to level up fast to keep the mission moving along. It’s all on us now.”
Asadullah nodded seriously. The logic was sound, but…
“No matter how high our Tracking gets, we’ll never be able to find a cure-maker just like that. We’re going to need a trail of some kind or it’s all for naught.”
Silence hung between them as they contemplated this new idea.
“There’s nothing we can do about it.” Ben decided, “Level up the Tracking, and then we’ll cross the bridge when we get to it. Maybe spread out far and look for traces left by a survivor and shake down each and every trail.”
“Trial and error? That’ll take longer than forever.” Asadullah sighed, “You just don’t want to admit that we’re flying blind.”
“Are you really that desperate to poke holes in every hope we have?” Tench asked, irritation stinging in his voice, “We’re really trying, man, so work with us.”
“Sorry.” Asadullah muttered, “I’m really bringing the mood down, huh? Don’t mind me, I wouldn’t to sour your fun little adventure by asking questions you all really should be.”
“Hey, none of that now. Work out the tension on the zombies if you have to.” Jared cut in, pointing them towards the window, which overlooked the chain-link fence, and the undead wandering outside it. When no one moved to go outside, he leaned back with a self-assured smile, “Then let’s get back to the mission at hand. Leveling up the ones who’ve amassed experience points.”
Asadullah sighed and let all his anger dissipate. It wasn’t worth it. They needed to get down to business. It was quick work to dump the rest of Verity’s Exp Points in her lowest stats.
[Deposited 48 Exp Points in Durability: 3!]
[Level Up to Tracking Lv. 4!]
And then, it was Asadullah’s turn. Since he’d been up and wandering around, his accumulated points were even higher than Verity’s, coming up to nearly four hundred points.
“This is ridiculous. Next time, I want to come along.” Verity complained enviously. Asadullah laughed and ran his hands over his panel of stats. His very own roster of power, completely at his disposal.
He was going to have fun.
[Deposited 400 Exp Points in Tracking Lv. 8!]
[Level Up to Tracking Lv. 12!]
[Deposited 350 Exp Points in Charisma: 5!]
[Level Up to Charisma: 7!]
[Deposited 250 Exp Points in Overall Lv. 8]
[Level Up to Lv. 9!]
[Overall Stat Boost of 0.25!]
“Ooh, so that’s what happens when you level up.” Jared noted, “Good to know. That way we can balance out the stats and focus on some sectors while progressing it all at the same rate.”
“He’s having too much fun with this for the weakest guy here.” Verity muttered, “Guess he has the longest to climb compared to the rest of us.”
“How dare you, the gap isn’t even that large.” Jared replied with a frown, “I don’t even need high attack or defense or anything, since my charisma and natural intellect balances it all out.”
All three of the other dimension-displaced Players booed at him loudly.
“Aren’t you going to use your points?” Asadullah asked, mostly as a tease, but Jared resolutely shook his head, as if the idea was unthinkable.
“I think I’ll hold on to them for a little longer. Gather more data and feel out all the options.”
“We’ve got a lot of options and data now, Mr. Charisma and Natural Intellect.” Tench noted with a grin, “Now riddle me this: what’re we going to do with it?”
Jared squared his shoulders, “Don’t worry about it for even a second, man. I’ve got a plan all figured out. Been cooking it up since I popped out of that Sub-Level, and this meeting has just furthered my resolve on that.”
Somehow, his words calmed Asadullah down. Maybe it was the way he spoke, or how he held himself, or maybe even his insanely high charisma stat, but when Jared spoke, Asadullah wanted to listen. Which was a rare feat, considering how opposed he was to hierarchies of power.
Still, if they wanted to get through this alive, he’d have to accept that there were others who would have better plans. Others he should listen to. Even if it annoyed him at times.
“Well then, spill it.” He encouraged, leaning back on his haunches in preparation for Jared’s lecture. Just by the way the boy lit up, he had a feeling that this would take a while.
----------------------------------------
They set up a guard roster, not just to keep an eye out on the zombies, but also to start racking up points. Ben led them deep in the center of the town, where they set up an outpost in a giant room filled with giant coils of cables and machinery everywhere.
“What is this meant to be?” Asadullah asked, marching through the building and fighting down the urge to violently sneeze.
“Used to be a power plant a while back.” Ben explained offhandedly as she dug through a cobweb-covered plastic box.
Asadullah frowned, trying to catch a glimpse of this fabled plant. It didn’t look like any flora had grown here ever, but maybe it had all died after the apocalypse? Then he noticed the giant circuit set up in the middle, connected to a set of turbines that dwarfed all the other machinery.
“Oh, you mean a generator!” He realized, “Why would you call it a plant?”
“Just a turn of phrase, kid.” Ben shook her head, “It’s not like we’re here for the electricity anyway. This is just the safest place I could think of.”
There was a sudden rattling sound as a figure stumbled out from the shadows. For a second, Asadullah hesitated, waiting for the survivor to help themselves up and introduce themselves.
Except then their face came into view, moldy green, rotting and falling apart. Before he could even recover, a knife was already whipping past his face, embedding itself into the zombie’s eye.
“Not as safe as you think.” Verity muttered, reaching forward to grab the knife from the monster without a second thought.
“Yeah, the plant lasted the longest, but eventually it fell, too.” Ben agreed, “It’s mostly okay, and I’ve sealed up anywhere a rotter could’ve slipped in but keep your guard up anyways.”
“And why are we risking this?” Michael asked.
“Because we’re trying to lure zombies towards here to farm more points.” Asadullah reminded him, “And we don’t want the rotters at our actual doorstep.”
“Ten billion points to you, Asad.” Jared nodded, “This is going to be our new training grounds while another group goes out and knocks out the Individual Sub-Levels.”
“Huh, that sounds… doable.” Verity mused, “And with your earlier plans, the multi-tasking will be a breeze!”
“I want to go next.” Michael blurted out. Everyone looked confused at his boldness, even himself. He immediately started stammering out excuses, “I mean… I was there when Jared did it. And Asadullah already got a bunch of points in that excursion. I should get a chance to, too.”
Asadullah laughed and slung an arm over Michael’s shoulders, “Of course. Go for it, man!”
[Player Log End!]