You and Noir spend a few more days at your rest stop, AKA your incredibly cozy hunting roost. During that time, you spend as much of your waking hours getting better at stalking, hunting, creating fires, and so on. You even start dabbling in a bit of foraging.

By the end of those few days, you end up with the skills you need to survive out in the wild. Well, the beginnings of those skills anyway. Still, you know more than enough to keep yourself fed, for now.

You also come to learn to make skewers as a more convenient way to hold your food. Or perhaps just more dignified and civilized. After all, skewered meat sounds much better than meat chunks - there’s an implication of differing levels of edibility there.

In addition to the meat skewers, you also learn to find button mushrooms out in the forest. In fact, you only realize that they’re relatively safe to eat because they look exactly like the kind that were once sold in grocery stores.

So they shouldn’t be at all poisonous. From what you know, the poisonous ones are brightly colored while the ones safe for consumption are brownish and earthy.

Then again, you’re no expert. The best you’ve got to offer is middling knowledge from various games and internet videos. You do pick a few other mushrooms out that have a similar shape and color, but are longer or wider or more or less brown. Sadly, you can’t be sure just how safe they are to eat, but set them aside for now.

If you get extremely hungry at some point, then you could perhaps dip into your ‘shrooms.

Besides those lessons, you also learn to find berries - mainly blueberries and strawberries. Blueberries simply because those are incredibly easy to ID and pick. The moment you had seen clusters of the berries hanging on a bush, you knew you had to grab them.

Like with the mushrooms, you also know that ‘bright’ berries are usually poisonous, though you don’t exactly know any details.

The only other berries you attempt to forage are what you presume are strawberries. They don’t exactly look like the store bought kind, but are close enough. These wild strawberries are much smaller and rounder, but are still strikingly red while also covered in seeds.

You pop one into your mouth and bite on it, which fills your mouth with a dense hit of sweetness and tartness. You’re utterly surprised at what you taste, to the point where you’re stunned speechless.

You had assumed this berry would only amount to a fraction of the “regular” kind, that it would be relatively bland or not sweet at all or something. Instead, you find that it’s the opposite. This berry is so incredibly flavorful that it blows the usual one way out of the water.

You wonder why this was never sold in stores.

In any case, with your leaf-wrapped opossum kebabs, handfuls of wild strawberries, blueberries, and button mushrooms, you get back on your way. Not just because you feel as though you’ve learned as much as you can here, but because you’re running out of water. You’re down to just one bottle of water, and perhaps a day’s worth in your liquid bladder. Your canteen is half-full of your electrolyte drink, but you can’t exactly count it.

No matter what, you need to find more water, and fast.

You and Noir set out before dusk falls this time around. But instead of heading westward as normal, you instead follow a wide, but winding hiking trail north of the rest stop.

The trail itself ultimately merges onto a paved road, which you follow northwards. According to your cartoon map, this road should lead you to the first of a few small towns you want to visit. Or more specifically, loot.

It doesn’t take you long to get there, and the journey itself is relatively uneventful.

The only thing you run across is one of the alien fauna bounding across the road, presumably in search of food. Its metal hooves clack and clatter on the asphalt with enough force that you feel the tremors through your legs. You imagine that getting hit by one would perhaps be one of the worst things in the world, so you keep your distance and respect its space.

You ultimately make it to that first small town, named Clavisdon on your map, and it appears to be large enough to house probably a hundred people. The road itself bisects the town, with the slightly larger half filled with various houses. The other half has numerous stores and coffee shops and even a gasoline station or two.

The streets are overgrown, and multitudes of vines creep up almost all the buildings. As with everywhere you’ve been, the crystalline spikes punch through the ground here, destroying roads, buildings, and various structures.

But now you’re coming to realize that they seem to occur more frequently where people are concentrated. The more you leave the city, the more sparsely the spikes appear. And here in this town, there’s suddenly more, though they’re thinner and shorter than what you’re normally used to back in the city.

You wonder deeply what that means, what the connection is. There has to be one - this would be a severe coincidence if not.

You also note that there aren’t any corpses of the long-dead on the roads, and you wonder if the survivors took care of them before moving on. You feel that’s what small towns would do, considering everyone here most likely knew everyone else.

I’m gonna go scout a bit, says Noir.

You open up a Network in response even as she slinks away into the shadows. You figure this will make things easier for the both of you, any time you physically part. Just so each of you can better keep tabs of the other.

You can sense her bloodlust through that same connection, though. And it disturbs you somewhat - something that small and fuzzy and cute shouldn’t be capable of radiating such potent murderous intent. But she does anyway.

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In any case, while Noir does her business, you get back to yours. You look at the town around you with deep interest, hoping to find some places of note. The buildings give off an old-west vibe, but rather than wooden walls these are all made of brick.

Each one is butted up against each other in a row, with their storefronts aligned with each other. The bricks that form the buildings themselves are bright and red, but have clearly become rough and well-worn over time. Attractive brick trim decorates each of these storefronts in unique ways, which gives the whole place an odd charm.

Overall, you find it all quaint and quiet, and in another life you might not have minded living in a place like this.

A quick Scan reveals that there are a number of critters - mostly mice and rats and racoons and opossums and such. All likely scavenging for whatever food they can find. But otherwise, you don’t sense any people or Crazed or Chimera or otherwise.

Thankfully.

Since you’re barely tired, you head towards the commercial area of the town, where you find some basic shops. There’s a tourist shop, which still has much of its memorabilia on the shelves - shirts and keychains and travel mugs and hats and whatnot. You have absolutely no need for any of these things and quickly move on.

You veer over to the convenience store and gasoline stations, where you find that they’ve been picked completely empty. All that’s on their shelves are layers of dust.

Everything that’s electronic has also been removed, such as all of the drink coolers and the cash registers. The only evidence that they were ever there are the outlines of caked dirt at the very edges of where they once stood.

Seeing as these stores can’t help you in the slightest, you move on to what appears to be a shop selling bait and tackle, fishing rods and hunting supplies. Or used to, anyway. The small rack where the fishing rods would go is completely empty, along with the bins that would have held various live or synthetic lures.

It makes you wonder if there’s a body of water near you that you could fish in, but the map you have doesn’t reveal anything of the sort. It’s all forests and hills and towns as far as you can tell.

Besides the well-looted fishing section of this shop, there’s also a corner with a small gun rack behind a counter whose glass has long since been shattered. This area is also devoid of anything useful - no guns or ammunition or even magazines or holsters.

You are glad to see some boxes under one length of the counter, and you quickly pick through them to see if you can find anything. Most of the boxes are empty, sadly. But one still has what appears to be a small metal rod.

The packaging says it’s Firesteel, and shows a three-part illustration of someone scraping the back of their knife against the rod, sparking kindling, and lighting a fire.

You immediately pull out the firesteel and test it against the back of your survival knife. As advertised on the box, a whole lot of sparks erupt. You don’t even hesitate to pocket it - this is incredibly valuable to you. This should allow you to light campfires with far more ease. Certainly more efficiently than any hand drill.

Then you turn towards the last section in the shop, which is also its smallest. Here, there’s a kind of peg-board on the wall with a number of hooks sticking out of it. The dirt silhouettes around the pegs appear to be crossbows of various sizes.

Although the pegboard is empty, there are a number of wooden buckets in front of it. Each one has a handful of crossbow bolts in them, clearly in differing lengths and widths and fletching.

This easily piques your interest, and you go diving into the shelves closest to the peg board. Inside one, at the very bottom and pushed all the way to the back is what appears to be a forlorn crossbow. You fish it out with a bit of effort, then study it as though it’s some kind of alien specimen.

You know absolutely nothing about crossbows, and are unsure exactly how it works, or if this thing is even good. It’s somewhat smaller than crossbows you’ve seen on tv shows and games - perhaps only about 40 cm in length.

When you try to fish for bolts that would fit in its channel, you find most are too long for it.

You then turn the crossbow around in your hands as you try to appraise its quality. Although you don’t know much about how these are built, you can at least see if it’s made of good stuff, right? It seems relatively cheaply made, as far as you can tell.

Then again, it has been left forgotten at the bottom of a shelf in a small town. Clearly no-one else does.

You attempt to pull back the string to lock it in a firing mode, but it’s tough. You struggle to pull it back, and find that you have to empower yourself slightly with your Temperance to set it in place. Once it’s latched, you hold it out and pull the trigger.

This causes the string to whip forward with a deeply satisfying FWUNG. The sound and the feel of it surprises you. It’s quiet and has a good punch. A pity that the whole thing vibrates madly, which makes it hard to keep steady.

Eventually, you come to the conclusion that this is likely just for target practice and wouldn’t be much good for you out in the field. Not for hunting, anyway.

So you set it down and resume your scavenging session, hoping to find more tools. However, as you look through the bins with crossbow bolts in them, you find a handful of odd packages. These also have bolts in them - five to be exact. These are made of aluminum, and have pointy tips.

Not only that, but the picture on the front shows it to be some kind of forearm-mounted quiver, with the bolts nestled inside of elastic bands.

It dawns on you that these are the bolts meant for the pistol crossbow.

You tear it open out of sheer curiosity and find the materials are relatively cheap. The fabric on the quiver is pretty basic, and the bolts themselves are cheaply made.

Despite that, you find yourself drawn to them, and almost absentmindedly strap the quiver on your left forearm. You tighten its velcro straps until it’s relatively snug, then slide in each of the short bolts through the elastic bands.

The tips on the bolts slip nicely into small elastic pouches at the very end, holding them in place.

You’re not gonna lie - this feels incredibly satisfying on your body, as though you’ve added an essential bit of kit to your equipment. One that you didn’t ever think you needed.

With your budding Telekinesis, you grasp one of the bolts nestled in your quiver and pull it out of its spot. Although you’re relatively slow with it, you eventually manage to get it all the way out, at which point you fling it back and forth through the air in front of you.

A slight headache creeps around your eyes as you continue practicing, but you try your best to ignore it. This is too much fun.

As you move the bolt around, you know for certain that you don’t need the crossbow. There’s no point in lugging around something whose quality you’re not sure of, especially when its replacement is weightless and formless.

Not only that, but a crossbow would need constant maintenance and cleaning and - you dunno - oiling or something. You’re not exactly prepared to do that, and the bow would just be a massive burden. Even if all you do is try to sell it.

With that in mind, you fish for whatever other forearm quivers and bolts you can find and shove them into your backpack. As cheap as they are, you’re certain they won’t last long on the road and will need replacing.

Once you’re done, you head out the doors with the intent to scope out the next spot. But before you can take more than a step outside, someone yells at you to “Stop right there!”