SHAD

"You know what's funny?" I asked as I raised my pick over my head and brought it down hard against a boulder, splitting the rock into smaller fragments.

"What?" asked Major Armstrong as he wheeled a primitive wooden barrow over to me and began loading in the rocks I had just split.

"Grandpa always warned me I'd end up splitting rocks in the hot sun if I didn't shape up." I moved to the next rock and swung overhead. The sun beat down. At least I still had my hat. Armstrong was wearing his cap, which kept the sun off his bald head, at least. Sweat poured down his cheeks, and his face was bright red. Me, I may be a paleface compared to Grandpa, but I've always tanned nicely. I wasn't feeling it nearly as bad.

We'd been out here under the constant noonday sun for what I figured was more than two days now, under the watchful eye of the false conquistadors. Every few hours, one of the orcs or elves dressed in Spanish armor came down from their overwatch to gave us a drink of water. When the overseer stopped by, he was the only one who ever spoke, warning us to keep up the work or the rest of our people would suffer.

Armstrong grunted as he loaded the barrow full of rocks. "Looks like your grandpa was right."

"And I joined the army to avoid all this," I said. "See what it gets me?"

"You've got a curiously optimistic attitude for us having been stuck here for the last two days," Armstrong said. "Got a plan yet?"

"Nope," I said cheerfully. "But sooner or later I will." It was a lie. I actually did have a plan, but unfortunately, it was a Shad plan, and I really didn't want to commit suicide. Not now. Not after all this.

Armstrong and I had been working well together as a team for two days before we'd managed to get captured by the NPCs, and on rock duty for two days since. I felt like we'd made a rapport. The major was a convert to my way of thinking at this point. He had proclaimed more than once already that this wrangling with a reality engine business was much better suited to me and my independent contractors than to normal military types.

He'd made three levels before we got captured. His class was R.E.M.F. I know, I know, and he’d actually blushed when he shared the class details with me. I was impressed at his choice. It focused on buffing miners who had classes derived from the base warrior archetype, which most of the soldiers we'd brought up here had in one form or another. Everything from sniper to entrenchment expert to demolitions engineer was an offshoot of warrior.

Hell, my Gunslinger class and Grandpa's Tomahawk Ninja were warrior offshoots. Though I had never stopped to think about them that way before Sage had come home from school with a paper analyzing the traditional base classes and how they applied to our reality engine.

But that was beside the point. Right now, we were busy making bigger rocks into smaller rocks.

"Right, that's two barrows filled," Armstrong said. "Give me a hand."

I abandoned my pick and went to push one of the rickety wheelbarrows. They looked like they'd been built by someone who had only an axe, no other tools. The wheels were rough approximations of circles that bumped and jolted, threatening to spill rocks from the uneven bed of the barrow as we went.

The quarry was dug into the slope of a steep mountainside. Just in front of us was an enormous earthenwork dam. On the upstream side of the dam, a placid lake shimmered under the brilliant sky. Two hundred feet below, the river ran free and clear. I was 100% certain no actual earthen dam could possibly hold back this much water. But here we were.

In the face of the canyon below us was the opening to a mine. The rest of our people, along with the imprisoned NPCs, were down in the mine, chipping away at ore veins under the direction of the fake Spaniards.

Armstrong and I had to keep wheeling piles of rock out to the center of the dam where a leak was threatening to turn into a catastrophic failure. I pushed my barrow over to the leak, dumped it down, waited as Armstrong dumped his, and then we tamped down the stone as hard as we could with our boots. When we were done, the top of the dam was a little lumpier and a little higher.

I took a deep breath and checked to see if my inventory had started working again, feeling the eyes of a whole squad of NPCs on me.

It still wasn’t working. I cursed Kronos for letting us get into this mess. He had to have known his fragment would be able to rework the rules. Now here we were, stuck up Shit Creek, with my paddle locked in an inaccessible inventory.

We wheeled the barrows back to our rock quarry and started at it again. By the time we got another two barrows filled, the leak would be back. It was a Sisyphean task. Major Armstrong had taught me that word, though I did recognize the story once he mentioned it.

Stolen story; please report.

"Right," Armstrong said as he picked up the other pick and we set to work. "Let's go over it again."

I sighed. We'd talked through our predicament about a hundred times in the last two days, but it couldn't hurt to run through things. Maybe we'd think of something we had overlooked. "Okay. If we abandon our post, the dam bursts, and all of our people drown, which is fine. They'll respawn having forgotten all of this, which they probably want to do anyway. However, we'll also drown all the NPCs, and we need to get the final totem from one of them. We don't know which of them might have it, or it might be buried in the mine itself," I said. "After that, we've got to get to the top of that mesa there, somehow finding a talking raven along the way and getting a feather from him.”

I pointed to the north, upstream past the dam on the far side of the lake, where a tabletop mesa that looked like something out of a cartoon rose up red against the blue sky. "Then we summon Coyote and convince him to join with Kronos."

"What if we just don't?" Armstrong said. "If we all just quit?"

"Well, the problem is, we'd have to commit suicide, and then we'll forget why and what we've learned. I don't like the idea of starting this zone all over, especially since we have no way of communicating with the outside. If we all die at the same time, we'll respawn back at the start. There's a good chance we'll think it's the first time and not realize we've been in here for nearly a week already." I shook my head. "I do not like the idea of spending the rest of my life in here, one week at a time."

"No, me either," Armstrong agreed. "So what do we do?"

"We crack rocks and keep filling in the dam until something changes, or we come up with a better plan," I said.

I tried summoning my revolver. When we had been captured, the aliens had used a disarm spell on us all. I was still a bit embarrassed about how that had gone down. I hadn't thought that anything could lock me out of my Quick Draw ability. It wasn't supposed to be allowed.

The fact that this reality engine could mess with my base abilities had pulled me up tight. I wanted to be sure to remember it and investigate what that meant for us going to other engines. I had taken it for granted that our abilities and classes were more or less immutable.

Now I realized that was stupid. Of course, the reality engine was governing the rules of how things worked. I knew this fragment didn't agree with the main part of Kronos. So it had its fingers on the scales, tipping them in its favor and keeping me from shooting my way out of this.

"I think you should make a break for it," Armstrong said. "I can distract the guards long enough for you to make a getaway. You could race for the mesa and try to summon Coyote with what we've got."

"I don't think that'll work. The book was pretty clear about the different totems needed."

"It's worth a try," he said. "Otherwise what? We stand here breaking rocks until we die?"

"I don't like that idea either," I said.

"Then think of something, Williams," Armstrong snapped. "That's an order from a superior officer. You're the one with the experience and expertise at this sort of thing."

"I'm used to having rules," I said. "During the exploit, things were laid out for me. Yeah, sure. I did some crazy stunts. But all I was risking then was myself."

"So what if we lose this fragment?" Armstrong challenged. "Right now we're losing a ton of man-hours. Give up on this one and let's go find another. Something that's easier to beat."

It was a tempting idea, if it didn't mean leaving Armstrong and the others to have to suicide and reset. I took a deep breath. "All right, but I think we should do it the other way around."

"What?"

"No, listen to me," I said. "What I'll do is I'll trigger the dam to collapse. It'll take out me and the rest of our team. We'll respawn at the entrance, and I'll know something's wrong because you're not there. That'll tell me to turn around, leave, and find out what's going on. Meanwhile, you go try to summon Coyote. If we're lucky, you can have a conversation with him. Come out and tell me what all this has been about."

"You're much better equipped for this than me," Armstrong said. "You have a class with skills. You know how these engines work."

"Major," I said. "If we get out of here all right, you go make your report to the Air Marshal. What's your recommendation going to be to her about integrating?"

"I'll explain to her why it's absolutely crucial that she integrates as soon as possible, and that she isn't just going to be handicapped from running this joint task force, but from all military operations going forward," the Major said at once.

"What other recommendations do you have for her?"

"That we set up a strike force under the command of your grandfather with an uncomplicated chain of command reporting directly to the Air Marshal, and broad leeway to conduct operations as necessary, specifically to find other sources of this unobtainium."

"Ethereum," I corrected.

"Ethereum, right, that isn’t controlled by mad reality engine fragments."

I nodded. "Yeah, The task force really, really needs you to make those recommendations. If you die and you forget all that…” I paused and let Armstrong connect the dots.

"Huh," he said. "I see your point, Williams, but I still don't think I'm going to be able to pull this off on my own. We could both make a break for it and give up on getting the last two totems.” Armstrong suggested.

I hesitated. There were so many unknowns, but this wasn't like me to hold back just because I didn't want a reset. It was ridiculous. Even when I had been facing real death back in phase one of the exploit, it hadn't crippled me like this. I was feeling the loss of my Ruger. I wanted my gun in my hand. I wanted an enemy I could shoot. I wanted to be out of here.

As we finally finished filling our next load of stone and wheeled it back out across the dam, I spotted something. I raised a hand to shade my eyes. "You see that?" I pointed out across the valley to where a cloud of dust was rising from the cliff on the far side about level with where we were.

"Dust devil?" Armstrong asked.

"That's not how they move. It's more like someone on the move." The dust was dying down. Whatever had disturbed the ground had either stopped or reached harder ground. I squinted, almost able to make out silhouettes against the bright sky. "It could be anything, but let's keep an eye on it. Be ready to make our move.”

Armstrong nodded. “Come on. Leak's getting bigger. We'd better patch it up."