The mana fried bike was absolutely unnecessary for getting to her studio, which was merely a half hour walk away. She had planned to go to the mechanic shop to check on the van before going back to the studio to work.
Ginny grabbed her helmet before locking up again. The face shield might save her from the gore, fleeting though it may be, blood in the eye was definitely a bad thing.
“Crystal!”
Ginny took a beat longer to respond to her stage name than she would have her given name. She turned toward Mark who had blood on his jeans.
He was an attractive man, broad shouldered, solid. He seemed nice too, too nice to con.
That was the problem with meeting guys at work. The patrons were con marks, she and the rest of the girls were always aware of that dynamic. Some of the patrons didn’t always know it though.
Mark was different, he was a coworker. He was the guy looking out for her safety, which was inherently hot. He also lived in the apartment right next door to hers.
“You’re ok.” He lurched to a halt beside her, sounding relieved. “The strangest things have been happening today. The rats in Marvin’s apartment mutated or something.” Marvin lived down the hall from both of them.
“All I’ve seen are level seven wargs.” Ginny admitted. “If it wasn’t all so real I would think I was dreaming. I’m going to go modify this.” She lifted one end of her chain.
“No. We should find somewhere defensible to ride out whatever this is.”
“Have you ever heard of a System Apocalypse?”
He hesitated. “I mean there was that movie where everyone had implants to see screens or whatever and there were monsters and portals.”
Ginny scoffed. “Yeah. That movie mixed a lot of things up, but that’s the general idea. Real life turns into a game world where you can really die.”
She smelled the musk of a warg on the wind. “Are you armed?” She pointed in the direction of the alley between buildings. “Because I think another warg is coming and if you’re not armed, get behind me and stay out of the way.”
“I haven’t used it yet. The rodents of unusual size were mostly kicked and stomped.”
He grimaced and pulled a Glock from behind his back. He didn’t carry at the club, it was against the rules, but carrying a gun in this neighborhood was common sense. The cops weren’t going to investigate a shooting unless someone important got caught in the crossfire.
Ginny stepped back. Essence healing or not she did not want to get shot.
“Jesus.” Mark gasped as the warg rounded the corner, stalking as if it thought it might be stealthy. For the first time Ginny saw blood in the slobber around a warg’s mouth.
Mark braced his pistol in both hands shot the warg three times.
On the whole that proved to be a mistake. Three more wargs ran out, drawn by the noise, and the first one wasn’t finished dying yet.
“Why isn’t that working?” She muttered.
Just as Ginny started swinging her weapon a notification interrupted her, or would have if she had let it.
Mundane Gunfire is only 25% as effective as Alchemical Gunfire. Mundane ammunition will now reduce durability of weapons at an accelerated rate. Seek shop ammunition for longevity of your weapon.
She blinked the notification away as Mark wildly emptied his clip into the four wargs.
“I’m out.” He gasped, as if firing had been a sprint he’d run.
“Get behind me and don’t get hit.” She stepped forward and made short work of the four injured wargs. They did not dissolve into essence. That was a good sign for his participation in the Early Adopter thing.
“Whoa. Where did you learn to fight like that?”
“Rhythmic gymnastics.” Ginny said snidely. “My foster mom thought it was pretty. Ribbon work was my pageant talent.”
Mrs Miller, who had never invited the fosters to call her mom, had a lot of ideas about how little girls should spend their time. She was also an event coordinator, and the reason Ginny could construct 25 different flowers out of different thicknesses of paper.
“Uh…”
Ginny did not want to talk about kiddie pageants. The memories weren’t all bad, but she could draw a direct line between participating and exotic dancing which would have scandalized Mrs Miller.
“You need to kill five wargs or five somethings over level five to unlock the system right now. I don’t know if partial kills count. Everyone who survives the monsters for two days will unlock it all at once but if you’re lucky you can get it early. That’s how I know what’s going on.”
“Oh. You do seem different today, less flirty, more serious.”
Ginny winced at the thought that dissolving her flirting skill had actually changed her personality. Then again she also had that status buff she should really consider clearing.
“Yeah. Maybe. It’s the apocalypse, the apocalypse is serious. Let’s find you another warg. Do you have any other weapons?”
Mark grimaced. “Something capable of taking one of these out? A nine millimeter didn’t seem to do much.”
“Blunt force is working.” She walked to the loose railing on the two step back entry to the vape shop. She’d been meaning to fix it next time she was out and about with her portable welder, but the van was still in the shop. The shop was a lot further than the studio. She wasn’t walking there for a van that might never run again.
She yanked the railing up and dashed it against the concrete. The welds on one side were already weak and ready to break.
She offered him his choice of railing pieces. He took the one with hand rail still attached. He nodded.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I’ll back you up if there’s more than one, but I don’t want to hit you accidentally, if you need to, retreat behind me.”
“I… yeah.”
“Let’s go, take the lead.”
He nodded and took a ready stance as he went, railing held over his shoulder in both hands.
Ginny had seen a lot of gore so far today, but that didn’t prepare her to see Destiny, one of their coworkers, on the sidewalk being actively eaten by a warg. Her organs were missing from her body and the beast was tearing at her leg.
The sight jolted Ginny and then the horror faded, the buff doing its job.
Destiny wasn’t even her real name, that was Connie, but all the girls used stage names. It was a good way to know who only knew you from the club.
Mark gave a little war cry which mostly warned the thing his blow was coming. He hit it square on the spine, but his railing bounced on the mane of greasy hair on its back.
Ginny blinked. The thing had literally moved to present that spot to the blow. She started to say something but a growl from the open vape shop door distracted her.
She turned, chain already swinging. She caught another warg under the chin with a low powered blow, then built up her momentum to take it out with the next one.
Mark yelped in pain behind her, but she didn’t have time to look. She was dealing with the little crowd of wargs in the shop. Luckily, they could only fit through the narrow door one at a time, giving her a convenient bottleneck.
The information inherent in her increased skill with her weapon eased her into using a figure eight motion that kept the weapon swinging and blows raining down consistently. If not for the way each beast dissolved into essence the doorway would have been heavily clogged before Mark was finished with his one warg.
“Oh. Wow. I see what you meant.”
“Yeah. Get what information you can before you agree…” she glanced behind herself. He was passed out on the pavement. “Too late.” She scanned the street, but didn’t see any threats greater than the swarm of spawns she was already dealing with. Hopefully he wouldn’t be out long.
About then the wargs started coming slower, which was great news because her essence pool was getting painfully over full again.
You have 990/400 unused essence. Please use 590 essence immediately or it will be lost in [02:25] minutes.
Essence may be used for:
Self Healing [0/500]
Leveling up [300]
Raising a stat [100]
She did the easy thing. She dumped 300 essence into raising her level, then spread 600 essence evenly across all six stats. As she hoped, her essence pool grew to 500 with the level up, and one point apiece did not cause her to pass out.
While she multitasked, she killed three more wargs, leaving her essence total at 300/500 for now.
“Wow. Uh… what class should I take?” Mark asked from behind her. “Oh. The warg thing disappeared.”
“Yeah. They do that. I don’t have much more information.”
“You are scary good at that. How do you take them out with one blow?”
“I’m already level three and my strength is 9. Although leveling didn’t seem to do anything to change the way I killed them. The stat points do change things. Don’t apply them all at once or you’ll pass out again.” She felt her essence balance begin to strain again and looked.
580/500, but level up was greyed out.
“Why can’t I level again?” She muttered under her breath.
Level up function will become active when you have a minimum of one stat at 20 or more. The stat range for level 3 is 15-25 points per stat.
That caused a bit of a jolt in her mind. She didn’t miss her next head shot but the pain got worse.
“Here. Step into the doorway and fight them one at a time. I need to use essence.”
“Yeah. I used almost all of mine to heal.” Mark admitted.
Ginny sat with her back against the cinder block wall of the strip mall and focused on the street for a moment. There was a small group fighting oversized squirrels in the burger joint parking lot across the street, but they had things well in hand. When she was sure she had a minute or more before anything could get to her, she focused on using Essence again.
She had 650 now. She raised Strength by 3 points to 12, which made it even with Vitality, and Dexterity by 3 as well which brought it to 20.
After the first round of two stat points she let a minute pass between each in set of two and the sensations of stat increase were bearable.
Mark was cussing and bashing the same warg repeatedly. “Hey, you done yet? I want to find something easier to kill. These level 7s are over leveled for me.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Ginny got up, feeling oddly refreshed for less than a five minute break. He stepped back and she took over. The battered warg only gave her 30 essence.
“I’ll see you around. I’m going to go check on Kenny and the kids. Maybe we can gather the civilians to the courtyard and keep them safe.”
“Yeah. I’ll check in. See you.” Ginny found her rhythm again instantly. She still wanted to run down to the studio and refine her weapon but the essence was too good here.
There was a brief lull, just long enough for her to pick up the coins and other drops. Scattered among the coins there were three skeins of sturdy worsted yarn and a small dagger in a sheath that would slide on a belt if she was wearing a belt.
She made it inside the vape shop and closed the glass door, which had been chocked open with a wedge of wood. The cashier, whose name she did not know, was dead behind the counter.
Behind the one display table in the center of the very small shop was a kind of portal or anomaly. It looked like a big spiky ball of pixilated light and as she looked at it another warg formed in the center.
She already had her essence screen up and as soon as her balance topped 100 she added a point to Strength. She planned to continue to alternate between Strength and Vitality until they were both 20, then she’d add Dexterity back to the rotation until they were all 25.
Only then she would think about raising her other stats, depending on how constant this spawn was. If she could keep getting 70 Essence per kill indefinitely, raising all her stats made a lot of sense. If the spawn dried up after a certain number of spawns emerged, she might need to budget her essence.
“Is there a guide to leveling?” She asked idly, after all, the system had answered the question about why she couldn’t level yet.
A guide for new levelers and class specific guides are available at the shop.
“Where is the shop?”
An icon, one of two she hadn’t examined yet, blinked once.
She took a few seconds to kill the new spawn and then she opened the shop. The completely opaque screen had several labeled tabs across the top. She touched the ‘for you’ tab and backed up all the way to the door.
Kusarigama 1000 gold
Soulbound Kusarigama 575,000 gold
Essence bottle 100 gold
She might have paused to see if she could get a description of anything, but she smelled musk and banished the screen in plenty of time to bash the new warg. At least the essence screen was transparent.
“What is an Essence bottle?”
An Essence bottle will hold up to 1000 unused essence outside of the body. A full Essence bottle will produce an Essence Crystal which can be absorbed later or traded. A 1000 Essence Crystal, commonly known as an F-grade Essence Crystal costs 10,000 gold at the shop. Many municipalities have a per capita essence tax.
“Of course they do. How long will wargs spawn here?”
She bought the bottle and closed the shop again quickly. The opaque screen was grating on her danger sense. The bottle arrived magically in her hand. It was a delicate little thing with a glass stopper and a long silver chain. She put it around her neck while the system voice answered.
Monsters will emerge until the dungeon is cleared for the first time. If a dungeon remains uncleared for long enough it will overfill and the new spawns will exit the portal. All new dungeons on your world will begin as uncleared. A dungeon may be cleared every three hours. This dungeon will overfill ten days after each clear if it remains uncleared.
“And I suppose the best treasures and so forth are found inside dungeons?” Another warg appeared. Spawn camping this portal was already getting boring.
Not necessarily. Treasures can also be found in beast lairs, on growing spirit plants, as quest rewards and in other ways. Every region, measured by population not land mass, will have at least one Treasure Hunt portal in addition to other treasure sources. It may be assumed that the Treasure Hunt will hold the single best treasure in your area.
“Great. So how do I clear a dungeon?”
Walk into the portal and kill everything inside.
“Yeah, that’s what I guessed. Anything else to know about dungeons?”
You may retreat if it is too much. There will be a delay in overflow equaling the time it takes for whatever you have killed to respawn.
Ginny grunted. Maybe she was too confident, after all she’d avoided any injuries so far, but she thought she could take a dungeon filled with these wargs.
She walked into the portal and started spinning up her chain before her vision even cleared.