“Who the fuck was that?” Rivea asked, turning back to Ray a bit wide-eyed.
Ray shrugged, “Oh, you know, Anubis, God of the dead. A personal buddy and all that,” he shrugged as if A God walking into a room and casually chatting with him was an everyday occurrence. Which to be fair, it was turning out to be. “That’s the big bad God we have to beat up and defeat. Although, I am beginning to think that ‘defeat’ may be used loosely used term.”
The Drake eyed him with annoyance, “Derrick was looking for you earlier. I think I should leave and send him in, or else I may do something like strangle my annoying Master and seal my own fate.” She stalked over to the door then, pausing, she turned her head back toward him slightly. “Thanks for saving me,” she muttered.
Then she was gone.
Ray was not quite sure how to take that last bit of thanks, but he didn’t have a chance to fully digest it before Derrick burst through the door practically in tears.
“Ray! Oh, my god man, I am so sorry!” he bawled, alternating between tears and fury. “If I had known what was going on … man I would have kicked the demon’s ass! Woulda made him into fucking building blocks! I can't believe I didn’t notice anything!”
The bedridden man couldn’t help but chuckle at his friend's antics. “Don’t worry about it too much, it's over and done with now anyway. According to Rivea that Daemon had some serious psychic ability to manipulate others in a pretty wide area around itself. If you are going to do anything, figure out a way to prevent that from happening again.”
Derrick saluted and said, “Already did! I spent quite a bit of time talking with Talla and the other engineers. We modified the walls of the primary building with some pretty fancy engravings called runes. They remind me a lot of a circuit board,” he paused in thought then shook his head, “Anyway! Apparently each rune performs a singular, specific action. When you hook them together they create an effect! A lot like building a structure! I used what I learned from her, and a few things I bought from the {SYSTEM SHOP}, to build out a system of defenses against abnormal status effects. This shouldn’t happen again,” he finished hotly.
“That’s awesome!” Ray agreed. “Now that that is taken care of, lets talk a bit more about these new arrivals. You explained a lot to me about where they came from, but I need to know more. I got jumped by a good number of Orkin upstairs. A lot of them are dead. That cant be a good thing for the folks who just joined us,” he explained. “I need to meet the leaders of these groups and figure out if they are a threat or not. Who is staying, who is going, and get some rules for our territory going.”
The engineer nodded, “Good plan. Do you mind if they meet here? I don’t think Cassie will let you out for a while. You literally blew yourself up doing whatever it was that you did.”
“Yeah, that’s fine. Bring them in as soon as you can,” he agreed. “Let Cassie know too. I don’t want her freaking out when I have a half dozen people in the room.”
Derrick practically ran out of the room to get everyone together. While he waited for his friend's return, Ray called up his stats to review the changes. What he saw shocked him.
RAYMOND ‘RAY’ FINNEGAN
{RACE}
HUMAN
{CLASS}
SYSTEM LORD
{CLASS GRADE}
UNIQUE
{STAGE}
1
{LEVEL}
9
{STRENGTH}
5
HUMAN BASE: 5
{AGILITY}
5
HUMAN BASE: 5
{POWER}
130 (0)
HUMAN BASE: 0
{WISDOM}
10
HUMAN BASE: 8
{LUCK}
10
HUMAN BASE: 2
{ABILITIES}
CLAIM II
CLAIM HEX
OATH OF FEALTY
SOUL COMPANION
MODIFY II
“Three levels and an upgrade to {MODIFY}? That’s insane,” he muttered. That Daemon must have been insanely powerful… or maybe it was something else that was giving him his levels? To Ray, there could only be one of two things that would increase his level. Combat and actions related to skills and class, or meeting objectives that the System issued. It could very well be a combination of the two.
Pushing the notion aside for now, he examined his new skill. {MODIFY} didn’t have a description that he knew of before the upgrade. But it sure did now;
{MODIFY II}
IMPART YOUR WILL TO MODIFY TANGIBLE OR INTANGIBLE TARGETS.
Ray sighed at the less-than-helpful text as he dismissed his stats screen. That was less than fucking helpful. He knew what the words meant, and he knew how to modify items. But how could he change something that was intangible? He really needed to take some time and experiment in depth, to figure out the extent of his abilities and what he could do with them.
There was nothing stopping him right now from doing a quick experiment now except his lack of Power. He would have to make a few more of those {POWER CUBE}’s when he got a chance. Being able to store any excess was going to be incredibly important going forward. He would have to see if he could make a really big one and then have everyone with spare points at the end of the day dump them into the cube. That would give him one big ass battery to pull from if necessary. Yeah. Yeah, that was a fucking stellar idea.
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Grinning to himself, he looked up as almost a dozen people walked into his hospital room. Derrick led the charge and behind him came an elderly couple dressed in overalls, followed by Verrick, two Orkin, a shifty-looking man dressed in a trench coat, a fat balding man in a torn-up suit, and Rivea. It was a veritable circus.
Ray waited until they had all come in and found semi-comfortable spots around the room. Then he said, “Thank you all for coming. I am going to assume that everyone here leads a faction, group, or is otherwise the representative of whomever follows them. I am also going to assume that everyone here knows, or at least has heard of, one another. We are going to play the ‘introduce yourselves’ game one more time though, because I don’t know anyone here-“
He was cut off by the fat guy in the suit who had narrowed his eyes, “Right. And who are you exactly to ask us to do anything?” he grunted out.
He sounded to Ray exactly like what a pig would sound like if it could speak, and it annoyed him to no end.
Ray leveled his gaze at the man until he began to shift uncomfortably, “I am the guy who claimed this hex. I am the guy whose people died in securing this building. I am this guy who fought Rivea to a standstill and forced her to surrender. That’s who I am. Now who the fuck are you?” he snarled.
The Orkin pain snorted their amusement, and even the man in the trench coat smirked a little. The fat pigman in a suit was having none of it, however. “My name is Kevin Ortmin!” he said pompously as if Ray should immediately know who he was. “I ran this city as Mayor and am the lead for the groups in this facility.”
“No. You are not,” Ray said simply, confusing the fat man as his chins wobbled. “You aren’t the leader of anything. As a matter of fact, I’m debating throwing you out.”
“You can’t do that! Who put you in charge anyway?” Kevin spat, practically spraying Ray with spit and phlegm, but he was no longer listening to the bulbous politician.
Over the last several days Ray had been stabbed, cut, and blown up. He had fought through monsters and undead. He had beaten a drake in combat. He had talked to a God, killed bandits, and founded a safe haven through a brokered deal with an immensely powerful demonic entity.
He wasn’t about to take shit from some fat guy in a suit.
Leafing through the options in his menu, and ignoring the still-talking man in front of him, he found exactly what he had hoped to find buried in the management menu for the territory. Tapping several options, he paused and looked back at the now-sputtering politician.
“Last chance to stop being a dick. In fact, that’s going to be a primary rule here. Don’t be a dick. How about that, Kevin?” Ray said sweetly, smiling at the man. But the suit-wearing politico was having none of it and launched into another tirade. So Ray smashed the option in the menu and dismissed it, curious as to what would happen. Afterall, it was his first time using the territory management screen to exile someone.
Blue lights swirled around the man as everyone watched in rapt fascination as the man was picked up off his feet. Hovering in the air for a solid three or four seconds, he just began to screen when he vanished in a flash of light. Kevin Ortmin, Mayor of what-ever-the-fuck had vanished. Ray hadn’t specified a destination, so he had no idea where the man had gone. And that was probably for the best.
“And that, everyone,” he said causing the people in the room to stare at him, “is what banishing someone from your territory looks like. I am the owner of the territory. I want to grow and build a faction here that is meant to take back Earth from the undead and every other creepy crawly. The goal is to be resurgent, figure out who did this to our world, and kick their teeth in.”
The Orkin stared at one another then pushed off the wall as one. “I’m Dax. Dis is my life-mate Volka,” the huge green-skinned man rumbled. Every word he spoke made it feel like Ray was talking to a tank engine. “You gotz powah. You gotz a plan. We gonna follow you. Just let us get some good fightz in and we gonna be happy enough.”
Ray nodded. That was one group down. He turned to the trench coat man and the elderly couple. The older man spoke first, “Names Carl, this is my wife Marge. I gotta ask, Where did you send Kevin off to?”
“No clue,” he replied honestly. “That was my first time using that function. I just know it booted him outside of the territory somewhere.”
The man grunted, “Fair enough. You basically killed him. I don’t know how I feel about that.”
“He killed himself,” Ray corrected directly. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our little slice of the universe has gone through a couple of apocalypses, is infested with monsters and undead abominations from the depths of any and every horribly written screenplay, and humanity is on the verge of extinction. I don’t have the time or energy to waste playing political games with someone who is going to aim to be disruptive and cost more lives only to fail to take charge anyway.”
Carl grunted as his wife elbowed him in the side, “What makes you think he would have failed? Politicians have the damnedest ability to turn people into stark raving idiots when it comes to what they want.”
“The System,” Ray said simply. “We all have to follow rules that it lays out. No amount of political maneuvering will turn a frog into a prize stallion. But with enough effort, the System can certainly turn a frog into a creature capable of being ridden like one.”
That elicited a chuckle from both of the elders. “Well said young man,” Marge said, speaking for the first time since Ray had met her. She very much had an ‘iron granny’ feel to her. Nice right up until she needed to beat someone with a cast iron pan. He liked her already.
“We will stay. This seems to be the safest place there is. Much safer than any of those other groups. And much more put together. You even have a kitchen,” she said kindly, a fire being lit in her eyes at the mention of being able to cook.
Ray just chuckled and turned to the man in the trench coat. He immediately held up his hands with a grin, “Dave Smith,” he said quickly. “Like our dear departed friend Kevin, I also worked in the government. I was a spook, primarily in intelligence gathering. My little group is full of similar people with classes that match our life experiences. We are interested in staying as well, and I sure as hell don’t want to run the place,” he finished with a chortle.
“I like you already,” Ray agreed, returning the man's grin. “Our immediate goal is to further secure the territory, find my wayward friends, and expand. I already cut a deal with a dungeon one territory over. Getting there is going to be a nightmare though. We don’t have a safe road and the rivers sure as hell can’t be used.”
Carl raised his hand, “What in tangles name is a dungeon?”
“You don’t have to raise your hand, Carl, just say what’s on your mind. We’re all adults here,” Ray said with a laugh, eliciting a faint blush of embarrassment from the older man. “But to answer your question, a dungeon is a place you go to willingly fight monsters and solve puzzles. If you get to a checkpoint or finish the entire thing, you get rewards in the way of resources, weapons, and goods.”
Carl grunted, “This whole new world just keeps getting weirder. Monsters, dungeons, and this weird floating screen.”
“Oh, you haven’t even scratched the surface yet,” replied Ray with a short laugh. “Anyway, as the representatives of the group that’s came in, I figured we could meet one another and figure out how running this place would look. I can’t do it myself, so giving everyone some dedicated spheres of responsibility would be ideal.”
Derrick cleared his throat, getting Ray’s attention. “I’ve already got that sorted out Ray. Carl will run our agricultural group when we have it going. His class is {APOCALYPSE FARMER}, and he can grow anything practically anywhere that has dirt. Our near-term goal is to build out some greenhouses and purchase seeds from the {SYSTEM SHOP}. Marge, on the other hand, will run our sundries and food group. We need to keep everyone fed and her {DIVINE CHEF} class is perfectly suited to making an edible meal out of anything.”
“That makes sense. How about the others?” Ray asked, curious as to how much had been figured out while he was away.
The engineer gestured at Dave. “Dave will run our intelligence and scouting group. His {SPYMASTER} class is ideal for that and gives buffs and temporary abilities to those who work for him.” Derrick turned to Rivea and the Orkin, “Rivea will run our overall offense and defense. Dax and Volka have been war leaders for their tribe since they were born, so having them under her will be a leadership boon for our fighters.”
He continued as Ray nodded along, “Then there’s me. I am going to run the engineers and crafters group like I have been so far. My {STRUCTURAL ENGINEER} class is applicable to anything that has a structure. That includes groups, which has been incredibly handy.”
Ray laughed. “Well, that was easy,” he chuckled. “For once something came together relatively well. Sounds like we have most of our elements covered. Are there any issues that we need to figure out or address?” Derrick looked at Dave and Rivea nervously before turning back to him.
“Well, there is one thing…”