31.
It took a lot longer to convince them to listen to him. Even with the strangeness of the world changing, the adults in the room were nervous to take any type of backseat to a teenager. Every moment spent arguing with them on why and how they needed to level further made Santi want to test the structural integrity of his skull with a brick wall.
Eventually though, he won. The pseudo council agreed to the allocation of resources needed for hunting down and clearing the red goblin’s nest. Then came the hard part of finding where it was. It took most of the evening and well into the night for them to compile reports from people about where they had seen the monsters and what direction they had been heading.
The map they had been using was soon defiled by dozens of markers. Arrows pointing what direction they were moving along with the time next to it. Circles around buildings the goblins had been hanging around at. It was a giant mess, but they had managed to scope it out to their West. Most importantly, it was away from downtown.
Downtown had multiple rifts in it originally, along with dozens of other threats. Threats that made the twin-curse stone look like a child’s play toy. Evolved animals, spirits, curses, and desperate people. Nothing he wanted to tackle without being close to the peak of this tier if not pushing into the Acolyte levels.
They had agreed that they would round up volunteers until they had a large raid team composed of those who were interested in leveling. Most people were, understandably, not interested in risking themselves at the moment. They were like survivors of a shipwreck, clinging to pieces of driftwood in turbulent seas. To keep the metaphor going, then Santi and the rest were those who had abandoned their driftwood to swim downward into hostile waters to look at the remains of a long lost sunken ship.
As night had settled, they had started asking around the camp about people who were interested in going on a raid. Santi had couched his pitch in terms of vengeance, of getting back their pound of flesh from the beasts who had hunted them. He had overheard Tank talking a few times about protecting the future. Santi couldn’t help but smile as the big man talked, soothing aches and pain with his skill as he asked them to risk themselves for the hope of a better future.
They got roughly the same response, even if Santi thought Tank’s message was better than his own. Santi knew what to look for after all. He looked for those who were angry. The beaten down and scared wouldn’t rally fast enough, and those with civic pride and hopes for a future would respond to Tank. No, what Santi was looking for were those who wanted to take their pain out on the world.
By the end of the night they had twenty names. It would work or be close enough. The usual suspects had joined in, Chloe, Daniel, Rayleigh, Paulie, and now Hana. All of them were young and had been from the college and had formed the bonds working together. The biggest score, in Santi’s opinion, was a pair of brothers. Chad and Tristan were both of average size with the perpetual tan of outdoorsmen. In their late thirties both had gray creeping into their brown hair.
It was their bows that excited Santi the most though. Both of the men were avid bow hunters and had used their bows to great success in the time between the monsters spawning and the systems granting classes. They had both unlocked the class Bowman, a common class. It had a lot of branches one could go down, but for right now they were the most competent distance fighters the survivors had.
The older white man, Eugene Brown, had also agreed on it and had brought his late twenty something son, Justin. While Eugene was aged and beginning to slide down the steep slopes of decay, his son Justin was in his prime. Broad shouldered and thick with muscle, he looked like he had been carved from marble. Santi had asked around and apparently Justin had fought with a three pound sledgehammer, crushing everything that had tried to invade their family home.
Marisol, the older woman who had been in charge of the meeting, and her two daughters, Veronica and Sonia, had declined to leave. They had taken over distribution of the supplies and Veronica was one of the other healers in the camp. The last man from the meeting was Abraham, who had declined to go on the raid, but was leading a team to hit the grocery store that Santi had cleared that morning.
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The rest of the raid was filled with a mix of low level Brawlers and Survivors. In terms of a raid team, it was pathetic. Tank was the highest level at seven with the rest of them trickling in around level four. Chloe, Daniel, and Justin were the only ones to have passed level five. Daniel had taken his Pierce skill, while Chloe had taken Toughen, a passive skill that increased her durability. Justin hadn’t bothered telling anyone what he had but based on what Santi had seen of him it was some form of attack skill that allowed him to amplify blunt damage. He wouldn’t have been able to kill some of the monsters he had without it.
Tank and Santi then spent the rest of the night prepping stuff for the raid. First-aid gear, weapons, water, empty packs, maps, and a half hundred other things that were needed. It was in the deepest parts of the night, when the vast majority of the base was asleep, that the screaming started.
“AYYYIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE” the shrill cry pierced the night and Santi was moving instantly for the back of the building and the side door that would lead outside. They had boarded up every window and door aside from the single side door leading out into the small enclosed yard. Adrenaline surged through his veins as fear clutched at his heart. A horn blew in the distance, sounding distant through the brick walls. Goblin horns and warcries.
“WAKE! WAKE! WAR! TO WAR!” Santi gave the cry he had called hundreds of times over the last eight years. This wasn’t the first time the base he had supposedly been safe at had been raided.
People were stirring and crying in alarm but Santi was racing past them without concern. Slamming open the side door he flew outside into the cold night air and the sounds of fighting and screaming grew louder. Men and women were crying and sobbing, begging for mercy, and screaming in pain. The red light of flames was licking up toward the distant sky and Santi forced himself to run toward it.
Leaping through the gap in the wall he landed crouched and drew his sword in one smooth motion. The night was gripping the world in its onyx grip, broken only by the dancing flames of burning wood. The improvised wall was on fire, corpses strewn about it in a variety of shapes. There were still a few human shapes though and they fought with the frenzy of cornered animals.
Santi was racing forward with his spell Air Current cast already cast and giving him near omniscience in a six foot sphere all around him. Santi let his rage and fear fuel him, the adrenaline making his arms tremble as he fell upon the unaware goblin closest to him.
The small creature was perched over a still corpse, its small knife sawing away at the dead man’s leg. Santi decapitated it with a single swing, leveraging his height and overwhelming stats to full effect. Steel sliced through bone like a hot knife through butter and the kill notification dinged with an alert that he ignored.
He became a whirlwind of steel, dancing and spinning as his saber reaped the lives of any goblin who came close to him. Santi fell into the rhythms he had learned with blood and violence for the first time since he had arrived in this timeline. Air Current gave him a complete picture all around him and he fully utilized it.
Leaping over a pair of sprawled out corpses, he landed on one foot and brought his saber around in a falling arc that split a goblin’s back open. Using the impetus of the swing, he pivoted on his planted foot to spin between a pathetic thrust of a spear and a lunging goblins skinny arms. He whipped around, taking the head of the spear user first, then spun past the lunging goblin and slashed its hamstrings.
The two collapsed to the ground, but Santi was already moving again. Half dancer, half drifting wind, he wove around the fight in a frenzy of death. The light of the fires cast him in a diabolical light and the goblins cried in horror as the wind of death wove its way across the battlefield. Another horn screamed against the night and Santi drew up short as the last goblin fell to his blade.
The other side of the compound came the sounds of heavy fighting. Metal on metal and barked commands in the guttural tones of hobgoblins. Santi raced away immediately, leaving the pile of corpses behind him.