By the time Ginny emerged from the basement the next morning, nearly afternoon, her level was 5, her stats were all a uniform 35. She could have gone higher, those E-grade crystals were 100,000 Essence each. The E-grade bottle could hold 100 F-grade crystals or it could gather Essence as she earned it.
She didn’t raise her stats or level higher for a very deliberate reason. She knew she wasn’t used to the stats she had now. She hadn’t done any work to explore the edges of her new abilities and that quite frankly scared her. She remembered almost falling off the swing when she tried to lift her chain just after she gained so much strength. Today was going to have to involve a serious workout, possibly on her jungle gym if the area wasn’t swarmed. Even if it was she might set up a fence.
Ginny was wearing her new quilted armor with all of her gear strapped on. Even her chain had a place to hook on the belt that came with the quilted armor top. She left the hood of her new headgear down and folded the gloves over the belt.
The effect wasn’t exactly not a ninja, but the suit was not a traditional Japanese style. In fact, it had distinct Robin Hood vibes, even though it was all black, not mottled green.
She had just barely sat down when Mark joined her table.
“I’m level 4.” He said proudly. “Just barely. I spent half the day escorting people to the shelter, killing anything I could. That was after the concentration of children prompted the system to grant the safe zone early. Marlene sent Rick and me out to the address of record for all the girls.”
Ginny nodded. That explained why they were all here.
“Hey, do you still have Trauma Buffer on? You seem a little…”
“Wooden?” She offered in his pause.
“Uh… close enough.”
“Yes. I still have it on. There’s a lot to do. Marlene asked me to scout out the nearest level five overspilling dungeon.”
“We found one yesterday.” He dismissed. “Today we’ve already got it rigged up with a set of barricades that funnel the monsters into a coral barely outside the Gables that way.” He gestured away from the club. “We have been Awakening people all morning. I was hoping that you would join me on a patrol. The cousin committee wants me to find and map the local dungeons. Maybe even clear some of them.”
“I cleared the wargs. It’s good for another nine days. We should be looking for monster lairs too. I killed a level 15 Red Crested Raptor at the Fabric Barn.”
He looked awed.
“I think that when I do take the buff off I’m going to be out of it for a day or more, as everything it suppresses comes back at once. I’d like to hit level ten before I fall apart. Then I’ll be able to face most anything in the area.”
“It’s just really not great to bottle everything up and not deal with it.” He pressed.
She pointedly ignored him. “Let me eat and we can go scout the area. The perks menu should come available sometime after noon.”
“Right. It was a bummer that it wasn’t available yet.” He grinned boyishly.
Ginny pushed the food around her plate. She wasn’t especially hungry, but she knew it was going to be a long day. At least she’d seen meals on the shop menu. She could grab food on patrol.
Rick was on guard at the safe zone entrance when they left. He raised his hand in farewell.
“I like you, Crystal.” Mark said as they strolled down the street looking for concentrations of monsters that might mean a dungeon. “You’ve never seemed like a bruised flower the way some of the other girls do.”
She eyed him sideways. Was he seriously trying to confess affection on patrol?
“Ginny.” She corrected.
He looked at her questioningly.
“I don’t think I’ll need a stage name for a while. The club is closed. It’s Ginny, not Crystal.”
He grunted. “Right. Sorry. Is it a bad sign I didn’t know that?”
“Naw. And I’m just as wounded as anyone. I watched my parents die in front of me. I was about five. Drunk driver crossed the line. It was night. I kept expecting the other cars to hit us once we were stopped. I was raised in foster care. They were broke, no next of kin.”
“Uh…”
“Don’t give condolences.” She interrupted. “I’m using the buffer to think through some things I’ve avoided thinking about. I’ll take it down when I think I can let it all go. In the meantime, what is that smell?” It was strong, slightly salty, slightly lemony.
“Uh…” he looked around. They had wandered into a single family house subdivision past the Gables.
“And what is that creaking?” She turned towards a solid wooden fence which was groaning as if the wood was in pain. She hopped up on a huge planter that was growing nothing but dirt and looked over the fence.
She looked at the undulating sea of… “I think it’s lizards.” Ginny said, a bit confused. The heads she could see were large, crocodile large but shaped completely differently. They looked more like gila monsters but chevron patterned.
She gestured for Mark to take a look. He jumped up on the planter behind her.
“There’s the spawn point, in that weird open shed.” He pointed.
“Gazebo.” Ginny corrected. “There must be millions of them. What level do you think?”
He reached in with his sword- one of the ones she’d provided. He skewered four in one go. “Level two.”
“How can you tell?”
“Combat log. It’s under the same icon as the quest log and the resource log, different tabs.”
“Oh. Guess I should read a manual.” She said snarkily. “So we clear this? Sounds like the fence is about to break any second.”
“Yeah. Uh…”
Ginny set her chain moving, she just barely churned the surface of the infestation, but she was going through the bodies like a saw blade, ten or more per pass.
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These lizards were considerably softer skinned than a warg.
“Jesus.” Mark watched the nonstop stream of blood and monster parts which dissolved in the air as it fell. “I’m going to go back and get about thirty people with spears. There’s a ten gold spear in the shop. You just… play wheel of death until I get back. If the fence starts to actually fall get out of the way.”
“Yeah. See you soon.”
The moment he was out of sight Ginny climbed the fence, right where it bolted into the house. Whoever had built the strong fence had spent a lot of money on the details. She stepped, or rather leapt, from the top of the fence to the balcony, taking the chance that the railing would support her weight. The wrought iron railing was just as strong as the sturdy fence.
She piked up to a handstand and landed squarely on the deck. There was no staircase into the yard, which was a good thing.
She checked for signs of life through the glass double doors, but didn’t see anyone. The balcony was a much better vantage point for her work. Her feet were more than a yard above the swarm and she wasn’t in danger of taking out her own support. Even better she could use her favorite figure eight and the longest reach of her weapon. She didn’t quite hit the ground on her lowest swing which was also good.
Her system imbued weapon cut through these weak mobs like she was churning the water of a lake. Even better, she saw a marked reduction in the tide. The ‘water line’ or ‘lizard line’ moved from nearly the top of the eight foot fence to about two feet down before Mark got back.
“How did you even get up there?” He called.
“I jumped.” She laughed. She watched as the promised thirty people- mostly residents of the Gables- set up things to stand on and started spearing into the mass.
“Can you get down? We’re supposed to continue our patrol.” He looked just a little put out.
“Sure.” She’d been thinking about that a bit. She had even jiggled the door, which was unlocked. She exited through the house, which was abandoned, and out the front door. She joined Mark who was coming around.
“What if the door had been locked?”
“Jump and roll.” She grinned cheekily.
“And if one lizard left the portal every second for a whole day that would only be 86,400 lizards. So definitely not millions.”
He looked at her funny.
“I got drilled on trivia as a kid. Mrs Miller wanted me to go on a TV quiz show. The prize was a few hundred per round, but the date conflicted with a pageant she needed me to place well in to get in the next round, so she dropped it.”
They continued on the path they’d been taking. Mark now had a half sheet of paper that told them where to turn. He also had a new notebook where he was writing down the turns and noting any monsters they encountered.
They took turns making the kills, or rather Ginny was careful to not make every kill, hesitating whenever Mark seemed to have things under control.
“You were in pageants? You mentioned that yesterday. Like rhinestone tiara pageants?”
Ginny grunted as she batted a rabid looking orange mammalian monster off a tree limb and smashed it flat.
“Natural pageants not glitz. The glitz is more expensive and she wasn’t spending that much money on me. The budget was whatever Social Services paid her for my care and whatever prizes we got. No. More like a Sunday dress and answer the interview questions perfectly. Talent and swimsuit and whatever. The prizes aren’t much, barely enough to cover costs, even if you win the prize. I did win a few. Cindy was better at it.”
“Mrs Miller?” He asked pensively.
“Foster mom from almost six until I was ten. She was a stage mom. She had three of us, staggered in ages, wearing hand me down dresses and she sent us back into the system at ten years old because her princess by proxy kink had an upper age limit.”
“Were you…” He skewered a stray monkey looking beast. “I mean statistically foster children…”
“If you’re asking if I was molested? Yeah, but not by the Millers. Mr Miller was a true sweetheart.” She hit the monkey that was trying to sneak up on him while he wrote.
“I continued to get Christmas and birthday presents from him until I graduated high school. No. The molesting happened later and the sexualization of the pageants… well I won’t blame the pageants directly but it didn’t help.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“Yeah, well, it helps to talk about it while the Trauma Buffer is in place. I’ve never had so much calm perspective on it. My next foster family had an older son who was too interested in the temporary sisters and the family after that had a father who took too much advantage. So I acted out in protest until the moms sent me back to social services.”
They crossed a street into a less posh neighborhood. The houses were much older, smaller and yet often just as well cared for.
“I was sent to a group home after that. Stayed there through high school. Not quite juvie, but there were a few girls there who had been assigned there for offenses that could have been served in juvenile detention if the local detention center had room for them. One of them actually taught me to pick pockets. We made a whole game out of it.”
“Did you ever for real? I mean?”
She eyed him. “Yeah, but I stopped when I turned 18. It’s one thing to go to juvie where the records will be sealed after. I haven’t done much crime since then. Hey.” She nodded down the way where a group of wolf sized and shaped monsters were pawing and growling at a door. It was the exterior restroom stall door of a gas station.
“Yup. Feel free to rush in swinging. I’ll watch your back.”
“Great.” She did exactly that. The mobs didn’t even see her coming until they started dying. One of them successfully jumped to the side and around her swing. Mark skewered it before it got a chunk bit out of her.
Ginny stepped up to the door, which was nearing catastrophic failure. There was already a small hole in the second layer of the hollow core. She knocked ‘shave and a haircut, two bits.’
“Are they gone?” Called a scared voice from inside.
“The ones gathered here are gone.” Ginny said. “But the world is swarmed with monsters.”
The restroom door opened and an improbable seven people flooded out. Most of them were teenagers.
“We’ve been in there all night.” The older man in the gas station uniform said.
“Those things were coming in from the back somehow.”
“Probably a spawn point. I’ll mark it for investigation.” Mark said. “We’re just scouting for now.”
“Great. We’ll go with you and help.” The man said. He brandished a tire iron, the long kind not the cross shaped kind.
“We can’t take them back to base. The base is full.” Mark hissed.
Ginny eyed him impassively for a long moment.
“Excuse me for a sec.” Ginny ran up the base of the majestic old oak tree that must have been in this location for centuries.
Older neighborhoods had more of the original trees preserved, and this gas station had probably been built in the early 1900s sometime. It even had a disused service bay attached.
She caught a lower branch and lifted herself up into the canopy. Some conversations with herself should be private.
“System. How do we expand our safe zone?”
Essence and gold. There are a plethora of upgrades available.
Ginny grunted. “Is it possible to link up my core with the base for a quick influx of residential space?”
She grinned as she felt the subtle shift that meant the chatty voice was attending.
That would be suboptimal. The idea is to concentrate survivors into as few safe zones as possible for ease of administration and for the population’s Essence production and mana generation. The very fact that more people live in a concentrated area will make the safe zone measurably better.
“Are you saying that a large population will power the changes in the safe zone? Like a human battery?”
Crudely put but yes. Your core is meant as a temporary shelter for exploitation of the areas of this world which had naturally lower population density. The mana and its changes including large spawns, dungeons, treasure areas and more were artificially concentrated in areas where few humans were living. Unfortunate for the inhabitants, but necessary for creating low mana areas like the one you’re currently in.
“And the reward for bringing the weapons in is exactly what a new safe zone needs to expand in the ways it needs to in order to house the entire local population?”
A single F-grade crystal would suffice. After the general Awakening the Administrator of each safe zone will be prompted to tax their inhabitants, generating enough Essence revenue for the expansion. It hasn’t been obvious to you yet, but the average level one human will generate ten to twenty Essence per day just by existing.
Ginny nodded. “Who is the Administrator of the safe zone where I slept last night?”
Marlene Robinson
“Perfect. Where is the nearest high mana area?”
You could go north about six miles.
That made sense. That way was almost entirely farmland and huge houses on multiple acres.
However, there is currently a barrier between the local low mana area and the surrounding high mana area. The barrier will fail naturally seven to ten days after the general Awakening. It’s a head start, not a permanent feature of the landscape. Human dominance of the landscape as it is now will prolong the existence of the low mana area.
“How many safe zones are in our low mana area?”
So far only two. The trigger conditions are currently a concentration of twenty or more children under twelve years old. After the general Awakening the trigger condition will change to 100 people gathered together and defending one another. The fewer such concentrations the better quality services can be provided. Each low mana area is allocated a set amount of resources for safe zone construction. The fewer safe zones the better they can be.
“Can I have a map or directions to the other safe zone in my area?”
Are you familiar with the Willowbrook Elementary School?
“Yeah.” It was across town, the school the Millers had sent her to as a child.
“Hey. Is there a way to attract your attention? Other than random visits?”
You are already flagged to my attention if you ask complicated questions.
“I kinda thought so. Why do I have so much of your active attention?”
You were the first person to Awaken in your entire region. You earned a Grand Perk for it. It’s in your resource log. You even did it without injury. You have been flagged from the beginning, the first hour of mana intrusion.
“Well. I need to go talk to some administrators.”
The system voice retreated without further comment. Ginny paused in the tree. It was the most peaceful she’d felt since she left her studio. She sighed and climbed down.
“That was interesting.” Mark said sarcastically.
“Yeah. So. You people should come with us. I’ll square it with Marlene and the cousin committee. Just don’t embarrass me while you’re still associated with me bringing you in.” She looked at Mark.
“My plans for the day just changed. Let’s go talk to some people.”