As I awoke, the first thing I noticed was that I could smell something delicious. And downstairs, I could hear the miscellaneous sounds of cooking.
Mmmmmmmm. That smells divine.
Sizzling pots, hushed giggles, cutlery gently clattering against plates, and the wonderously happy, hushed voices chattered away; I was impressed that everyone had managed to sneak past me without waking me up.
Although that also means I'm failing my overwatch duties..
Not wanting to miss out, I decided to quickly head to the bathroom to get a drink and give myself a hygenic scrub down before heading downstairs to join in whatever tasties I could beg or scavenge.
Staring at the trickle of precious water as it fell into my glass, I wondered what we were going to do once this ran out. Water supplies were an important agenda item today for the community as the water mains was pretty much completely gone and people were going to very quickly start using up all the water left in their home systems.
Looking up at the mirror to inspect myself, I frowned. There was a tiny pair of lipstick lips on my cheek, far too small for my first prime suspect-Marri-and additionally there was blue blush, mascara and possibly some foundation dotted about my face as well.
Oh-hoh, the nerve!! I’ll raise this disaster with management later...They should know blue clashes with my green eyes..
Downstairs I greeted everyone with a smile and a wave. They were making pancakes with powdered milk and pancake ready mix, and they’d used the BBQ outside; I saw a scorch mark where Erza had been blasting logs with her Majik skill to make a fire.
It was a wholesome sight.
Good to see humanity is already abusing their powers for mundane things.
Sylvie was talking about her agenda for today, which was to carry out a community meeting to come up with a strategy going forward; she waved me over and wasted no time to start brainstorming ideas on what we should talk about, but it took less than 5 minutes to agree it was going to be: Water, Food and Protection.
Easy peasy right?...
After scoffing down some delicious pancakes, we went out as a group and knocked on pretty much any house that still looked inhabited, inside the estate, and invited people to come and join the discussion over the large grassy area in the middle of the development, which also held a playground. It didn't take long before we gained high attendance and people were standing around quietly talking in groups.
Steve joined ours as Sylvie walked to the front and kicked off the community discussion.
She first focused on water and if anyone had any ideas for long term supplies, and a woman who didn’t introduce herself, simply raised her hand and suggeted there was a good chance of accessing a nearby water well that had been dug for the old hospital in the early 1900’s. It was only a 5 minute walk and would need exploring to confirm it could be manually accessed, but failing that, as a last resort they could dig a well and boil water. But it was unknown how far we would need to dig.
The discussion continued and a lot of people had water butts or collectors in their gardens so there would be plenty of ways to gather water, but boiling regularly would be difficult without electricity, so it was agreed that the existing well source would be a good start, so it was added on the list.
The next topic was food, which ended up generating three possible options.
The First location was going to be the nearest grocery shops, which were about 15-20 minutes walk. The obvious risk here was that a few people had tried this already but bailed when they saw monsters stalking along the way.
The Second was going to be going into surrounding abandoned houses or the nearest town centre. One chap in the crowd mentioned his neighbours, a young couple ‘Aly & Sen’, still hadn’t returned after they had left for town 4 days ago..so it was likely they wouldn't mind if we 'borrowed' from their pantry.
The Third Location was quite a bit more of an intense mission. There was talk of going out into the countryside and searching the farms for any chickens or cows, which personally seemed a bit extreme and impractical. There was a known farm 20 miles away, which would take a whopping 2 hours on a bicycle or 6 hours on foot for a single journey.
Everyone agreed that it would be important to start growing food but in the short term we’d need to start looting and stocking up on long lasting foods, and several people who worked in catering raised their hands to volunteer to cook food in bulk if they were provided ingredients. Some quick napkin maths was formed: ~100 people with an average requirement of 1kg of food a day, meant we would need around 100kg per day as a bare minimum. It sounded like a lot, but if 5 people could grab 20kg of food each a day, then the whole community in theory would be fed. That sounded not actuall that bad at all, but in reality I knew it was going to be rough and some people would most probably die.
For now at least, we'd probably have another 1-2 weeks before people’s home stocks were eaten up completely. so that gave us a bit more time to resolve..
The final topic was around protection.
There were maybe a dozen construction workers that were either staying on site in temporary, now permanent, accommodation, or, general knowledgeable people that just lived in the estate. This was perfect because they all agreed that Steve's idea to fortify the walls and build a gate in the entrance could be done with materials on site. They would need to plan together on how to move the materials and put them together with limited tools, but they would gladly do it as long as there were enough people protecting them whilst they worked.
As we were wrapping up, Sylvie gave everyone a chance to mention something they had on their mind or wanted to raise once everything else was covered. One person made a very good point about long term toilets but Steve answered this, saying that if people wanted to continue using toiles, as long as you filled up the cistern, you could flush, otherwise it was recommended to use the garden or compost heap.
Toilet paper though..Need to figure out how to build a bidet...
When it came to my turn I did have something I wanted to say.
“Hi everyone. Uhh, my name is Goduyne, but you can call me Godu. We don’t know each other very well but I just wanted to say thank you for coming out to risk your own lives yesterday. If you hadn’t, I definitely wouldn’t have survived. You’re all truly heroes…although I figure it was probably more for Tanner’s sake since he’s definitely prettier than me, but still.” Tanner let out a snort and I got a few chuckles and smiles for that.
“You have a really amazing community here and I hope you don’t mind me and my family staying with you. We’ll definitely help where we can, so urm, really, thank you, again.”
Tanner echoed my thanks and gave me a thumbs up.
I felt a bit uncomfortable saying that in front of pretty much strangers, but I really wanted to say it considering those same people came out to risk their lives only the day before and it was highly likely we would be making a habit of it in the future..
...
..
.
3 days later..
Two days ago, 3 groups of 3 people simultaneously headed out to the shops and the city centre.
Only two people made it back 30 minutes later.
They were being chased by a swarm, 10 in number, of flesh coloured spider like nightmares with white human skulls, with black fangs and eyes dotted around, each one was the size of a medium sized dog.
I’d not been involved in the defensive fight, as at the time I had been spending my days recovering and helping Marri with Lone, thoroughly enjoying the precious bonding time with him. He was such a good baby, rarely making a fuss and giving plenty of clear cues for when he needed feeding, soothing or changing. It was nice being able to help Marri and spend time with her, as even though she did a great job of hiding it, she would constantly worry whenever I did go out..
Because monsters aside, it wasn’t our usual style of life anyways.
We used to do practically everything together and rarely spend time apart, mainly because we liked a lot of the same things, eating, sleeping, 'horizontal dancing', movies, more eating, reading, playing the odd game or two..Probably the only thing we didn’t both enjoy was shopping and it was obvious which one of us enjoyed that more.
Oh how much I would give to be back in the days of when my only problem was being dragged around clothing stores...Oh well. Times change. Shit happens.
But apparently the fight with the monsters had been chaotic at first, as the few people defending were overwhelmed and started to run away..that is until the tides quickly turned as fear turned into defiance once enough people grouped up. In the end, the intruders were swiftly overwhelmed once around 30 people swarmed and killed the mutated spiders with various weapons, however three people had been heavily injured. But fortunately those brave damn souls were healed by some of the other residents who had been granted different types of extraordinary medical abilities, phenoma that was very similar to how the shimmery stuff had healed me except this was on demand, which meant the wounded were stabilised and fully mobile in a matter of hours with mere aches, pains and increased appetites.
On the healing topic, there had had also been a truly exciting development where one guy could effectively ‘bless’ water with healing properties, which, if applied to a wound, it would quickly stop bleeding, seal a wound and help promote rapid tissue repair. These repairing limits were not fully known yet, but so far it had dealt with some pretty serious injuries, and even a sprained ankle. I had watched this blessing in person, him holding his hand over the target and dousing it with a layer of shimmer mist, or Majiks as more people had started to call it, and while the healing limit was unknown, his blessing limits were quickly found out, when he fainted after attempting to ignore a heavy migraine by drinking a healing tonic and 'carrying on'.
The laws of thermodynamics say no. Or should I say Majikodynamics? Ugh terrible name, although not as bad as the one I said in front of Tanner..
Alas, I regrettably had made the mistake of calling the shimmer mist “Majist” and Tanner's eyes lit up followed by a slew of dirty remarks that swiftly punished my loose tongue.
“GUNA’ SHOOT MY LOAD OF MAJIST AT ALL THE MONSTERS!”
“GLUG GLUG! YUM YUM! A NICE BOTTLE OF FRESH MAJIST!”
Yeah no.
It turned out what had attacked however, weren’t really spiders per se; Steve, who invited me to come witness dissecting one of the spiders completely unphased as if he was doing the dishes, informed me that it was a completely new species not of this world, or not yet seen in this world.
Dare I ask Steve how he knows how to disect alien spiders or spiders in general?..
They had new organs including organs similar to animal lungs, rather than trachea or ‘book lungs’ amongst other unknown organs.
Which took me a while to understand, but I think the key difference is that animal lungs pull in air whilst book lungs absorb oxygen passively.
But apparently more alarmingly, they also had a skeletal structure inside.
Alarmingly, because the skeleton was the reason they could be so big, but even worse, it could give them a chance to be even bigger.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Unsurprisingly, after the sight of the giant ’arachnots’ corpses, priorities drastically changed. It only took the past 2 days to build up and fortify a larger fence around the whole estate and it was currently something like 4 metres high, with even a small team that had started to cut down trees and add long palisade type spikes to help reinforce and to support some of the scaffolding platforms that would also be going up.
We were turning the development into a well defended safe zone.
I just hope the arachnots can’t climb vertical surfaces…ugh...
Having to carry all the materials by hand was slow, but as expected people noticeably felt healthier and stronger after their 'garden of growth' allocations.
Having the otherworldly power to just level up and start hurling plasma balls around, it kinda goes without saying.
We were also very fortunate that we had good access to an array of analog construction tools and materials, but some people had also received special 'Majik tools', mostly as rewards from the stickman fight.
For instance, a few people had received a simple drill that seemingly didn’t need power or charging, but I suspected it used MP or Majik points, since, the users would get really tired after using it for too long. It was dark grey and didn’t have any branding-what did I expect-and it had all the typical features of a basic drill, however one very interesting thing about it was that it had a VERY fast and powerful setting, that was not to be used for general construction unless you wanted to obliterate your screw of materials.
The setting had a sword icon.
One particularly fitness focused woman had observed that she could now bench press a colossal ~60% more than her previous best of 50kg, which was now over 80kg after she had increased her Sword value to 6; it was unclear if that was a correlation or just a coincidence..But it was interesting to note that her physique hadn’t ballooned, nor had anyone reported too much physical change. Even more counter intuitively was that some people noticed they had lost weight, including the fitness fanatic. Not all however, as I myself had lost a fair amount of fat and definitely had started to gain a bit more muscle tone, but my weight had gone up, not down.
..
Today the circuit of the fence was due to be completed, and it was expected to be the day where the final piece, the gates, would be installed.
Two of them.
Both large, square and made out of lots of scaffolding, wood and bits of metal. They were set up just like those mediaeval castle gates that went up and down, a portcullis I believe Steve called them.
Steve knows a very strange mix of stuff.
Steve had also devised the gate's wind up mechanism, which was a mix of pulleys and a flywheel, connected with a large makeshift crank that could be turned by multiple people very quickly. Again, Steve had explained that the trick lay in the pulleys, called snatch blocks, and they effectively reduced the amount of force needed to lift an object, with the trade off that you would need to pull more rope to achieve the same distance of lift. You could reduce the weight required to lift an object by a factor of 100 to lift it 1 metre, but you would need to pull the rope 100 times more in length to lift it said 1 metre.
Although that's not a problem if you have a flywheel!
But being able to lift what was probably just over a ton of weight with one person was so amazing to see, even if it took over 60 seconds to fully raise the gate, it only took 20 to get it high enough to crawl under, and even less to dump it down. Due to the heavy weight, it had to be constructed in stages and it was just past midday when we completed the final gate installation and it was time to test. I had been helping the installation team with some of the heavy lifting and we all sat down watching a couple of the others checking the pulleys and ropes before making a first attempt.
“All looks good here, Rutin!” A heavily dark tanned, dark curly haired site manager called Bekki called over and gave the thumbs up towards a polish sounding dude called Rutin. The only reason I knew she was a sitemanager was because she had her high-vis jacket on that said SITE MANAGER.
“Excellent News yes. I see not a problem. Good for test Bekki.” The burly, clean head shaved Rutin responded in his thick accent.
She nodded and started to slowly turn the crank as the system creaked and eventually lifted the hefty gate up past the halfway mark.
First test was slow and solo.
Heh, that’s what she sai-
“GGGGRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRLLLLL”
An ear piercing, wet howling roar, sounded off straight ahead around the corner, in the direction of where my dead cars final resting place was-
“NOOOOO! AAAAAH!!”
A child's scream rang out, making my blood cool down and stomach lurch.
“BED IN THE SHIT!!!!!” Rutin bellowed as he pointed; everyone’s heads snapped to the source.
In the distance, round the corner came a young girl, maybe 9 or 10 years of age, wearing a bloodstained and dirty floral dress with a yellow kids backpack, sprinting for her life. She was giving absolutely everything to her legs and looked completely terrified with tears streaming down her dirt and dried blood covered face.
Dear gods..What the fuck has she been through? WHO’S blood is that?!
“PLEASE! HELP!” she cried out.
People snapped out of their confusion and started to rush forward, including myself. Behind the girl just a moment later, came round a large patchy haired, wolf or dog like creature that had 4 long insectoid legs coming out the sides of the body, lifting it off the ground and scuttling it along. It sported a large, pointed, furless snout, with 4 beady eyes going down the muzzle, and when it opened its mouth to gargle out a salivating howl aimed towards us, I could see maybe 4 rows of molars for teeth.
Large humanlike molars.
Holy shit.
It looked like a canine because of the snout and the 4 stubby legs with paws, that were still attached to the body but were left dangling uselessly. One of the paws had started to elongate into 4 fingers with the index finger much longer than the rest. It was tall, about 2 metres tall because of the long legs but overall it looked like a grub had been infused with a dog.
Grubdog or Grubwoofer...jesus it's fucking horrifying!
The creature let out another metallic wet howl as it skittered towards us and everyone stumbled and hesitated in shock, including myself. It was awful, shameful, as people skidded to a stop. We weren’t soldiers, nor properly trained to control our instincts, even if we outnumbered our enemy; our brains could not cope with this nightmarish situation.
“THE GIRL YOU SHITS! SHE'S JUST A LITTLE GIRL! FUCK IT IN THE HEAD!” Rutin roared at everyone as he carried on going full pelt past the frozen people at the front.
People seemed to snap out of it and some snarled in anger urging each other on, emboldened by Rutin’s war cry, cursing as they rejoined in charging forward. I felt a surge of excitement and energy washing away all my fear. After hearing Rutin’s words it gav me a level of dutch courage only matched by a 10 pint, pub crawl.
Glad to have a hero in our midst. I'm going to KILL THAT THING.
It was gaining ground rapidly, breathing frantically, extremely focused, legs working mechanically skittering it forward. The girl was mere seconds from being obliterated. Suddenly, i burst forward in speed, reducing the distance to the little girl to less than a metre...
But Rutin had never stopped running forward and those few precious seconds saved the girl's life. He reached her first and threw himself into the beast's legs, tripping it up, flipping it over
But the monster recovered fast.
The legs tucked in with lightning speed and the creature rolled sideways back onto its feet, skidding around to snarl at this new aggressor; it didn’t hesitate to charge into Rutin, making him scream out in pain as the monster gnashed into the arm he brought up to defend himself as he fell on his back. He was pinned down as the monster chewed and growled; an audible snap and crunch was heard. The girl, who had stopped after we had made it past her, was in tears.
“NO! DON’T HURT HIM! LEAVE HIM ALONE!”
Bekki rushed over to her and scooped her up and started sprinting back towards the gate as she wailed and cried out; the Grubdog’s goatlike slitted pupils darted towards the group as, myself, hammers, spears, drills and a short sword wielding girl collided with it, and we pushed it off the screaming Rutin.
The girl with the sword stepped forward, swung it like a baseball bat and with a grunt, she severed one of the legs, causing foul looking blood to gush out.
This caused the abomination to squeal and it slipped in its own slimy blood as 2 others rammed their drills into the stomach, causing heavy bleeding.
Hammers and sledgehammers smashed the legs which broke them like twigs.
As it fell, the creature managed to knock down a middle aged man, it lashed out and bit down onto his neck, before wrenching and ripping out the fleshy arteries, leaving him gargling in all the blood.
There was so much blood.
It was trying to retreat, scrambling to get back, and the group were taking turns in attacking whilst also jumping back, dodging when it tried to lash out with a snapped leg. The sword woman got clipped in the face and crashed head first into the road with a truly graphic *CRACK*.
She stopped moving..
Without thinking, I rushed to Rutin and hauled him up. He wobbled, cradling his destroyed arm as I barked at him to move.
“GET BACK TO THE GATE AND USE A HEALING WATER! MOVE! GO! GO!”
The guy bleeding out on the floor was clutching his neck and kept spluttering up blood as he desperately tried to breath. I pulled out my personal bottle of the healing water and rushed over to him and carefully poured the mix over the missing chunk of his neck. It visibly reacted with his blood and I could see swirls of silver and gold forming and shifting, like paint in water which then exponentially increased in size before it shot out hundreds of lines deeper into the wound and into his body.
His eyes were rolling around and he gripped onto my arm as he started to recover.
Comon don’t give up.
I watched as the bleeding slowed down and I saw tissue rapidly repairing and growing to connect the severed areas. The silver and gold streaks wrapped around, moulding and shaping the tiny fleshy stalactites and stalagmites of healing flesh, but he couldn't breath. The man stared at me, with wide shock filled eyes, his face was deathly pale as he started to glaze over, his mouth was wide open like a fish gasping for air making no sound as he convulsed once..twice..And then he went deathly still.
His eyes frozen looking into the sky, void of life.
In a blind panic I tried to pour some more water onto the wound but dropped the bottle and it emptied onto his face, practically drowning him. I stared at his desecrated face for a couple of seconds before looking up at the battle that was still raging on further down the road. The creature was on its last stand, but it still had the strength to kick another person off their feet and they crashed into a bush, loudly cursing in pain.
Looking back down, the man's drenched face was completely still and pale, like a mannequin with eyes that looked lifeless and fake. I didn’t know what to do and my mind started racing, thinking about if this was my fault, will his family hate me? I was the last one with him!
Fuck. Fuck! HE’S DEAD! FUCK! F-
*GASP*
The man took a huge gasp of air and jolted up before vomiting the familiar black crap.
He took a few more gulps of air before looking around in confusion and looked at me. A familiar voice bellowed at me to move so I jumped up as Sylvie came rushing over to him holding a medkit. She started frantically fussing over the guy and checking vitals. I nodded to them both and rushed over to help with the fight, but I heard the resurrected guy choking out some words to Sylvie.
“I-I-I’m fine Syvlie, h-he s-saved me, d-don’t worry about me, Finna’s knocked out on the floor over there, check on her, please!!”
As I rushed towards the fight, I felt overwhelming fearlessness and anger. A healthy dose of adrenaline resulted in me blindly rushing straight past the semi circle of people and shoulder charging recklessly at the face of the creature that had been up until now, facing everyone down; it looked just as shocked as everyone else.
My movements felt controlled just before impact as my feet felt the familiar magnetism to the floor, and, upon impact, my feet were firmly glued down as all the force was transferred to the target; even in its shock, it still managed to whip around and snap its maw open in an attempt to intercept and take a chunk out of me.
But it was too little too late.
The kinetic energy impacted directly into its face, with a loud wet SMACK. The creature's head ricocheted back at an unhealthy speed....but it wasn't enough.
The monster recovered instantly and lowered its head before snarling, its lips quivering over the rows of teeth.
Oh shit. Shit! Someone? HELP!
I started to slowly back up but unexpectedly, glasslike, metallic-raindrop sounds sung out into the air from my back, and I felt the unusual internal tug as my shields deployed by themselves.
Huh?! Wha-
The creature used its final working leg to propell itself at me in a last ditch effort to bite off my face, whilst at the same time my insides felt like they were being tazered; my shields made a mechanical BRRR sound, like a printer jamming as they violently whipped forward and guillotined the beast's head off in a smooth single slice.
*Shmmiishhh*
*Thud*
Its head dropped like a sack of shit and its body skidded onto the floor past me as I stood there in shock; my impossibly black shifting shields nonchalantly collapsed back down into their flatpack mode.
Holy fuck that was close.
I stared wide eyed, half impressed, half in shock, as rust started to form on the very dead Grubdog. There was absolute silence apart from heavy breathing and some slight groaning from someone in pain.
I-..I'm not sure how you did that, but thank you very damned much shields. You just saved me life.
I took a few steps back away from the rusting corpse and the others shifted a few steps to keep distance from me.
Turning around I gave them all an awkward half smile and shrugged.
“Faaaaaa-kin’ hell! Remind me to neva’ piss him off!” one of the builders squeaked out.
“Remind me to never piss off the shields..” I was only half joking.
As I started to move away, I collapsed onto my hands and knees.
Ugh my...head...huh-
I looked up as a line of shimmer snaked its way towards me and flew into my eyes.
Everything went black.
I found myself in the garden of growth, looking at the maelstrom; the MP bar was blinking a severe red.
HP [== 40/70HP ==] ++ XFR.MP(-30)!! Cause: USYR
MP [== -30/70MP ==] ++ XFR.HP(+30)!! Cause: USYR
What does that mean-
Whispers of a memory filled with knowledge flashed into my mind.
Ah...
I was being scolded for my recklessness. My shields intervention had cost more Majik than I had in the bank, resulting in a sacrifice of my health.
I mean, I guess that's my mind doing the scolding?
But, point-taken. Sorry....me?
Everything went white and then my vision snapped back to reality and I found myself lying on the ground with people crowding round me asking if I was alright, but all I could think about was food.
"Ughhh..."
Damn I’m really hungry.
...
..
.