The sun was high in the cloud-covered sky when the trio left Dan’s house. He locked it up for good measure, but it seemed even he himself wasn’t sure he’d ever return. His maps had been folded into his backpack, that he’d swung over his shoulder, opposite a hunting crossbow. He changed into Hiking gear; grey waterproof trousers, and a khaki autumn raincoat with badges of various bands, movies, and a car race, sewn to the front. The badges would have made for a good conversation starter in the pre-Fall days. But now, they were just a reminder of good things that’d passed and that could never be experienced again.
“You should take that off,” Farrah tapped her shoulder. There were days, like today, when she got uncomfortably warm in her all-weather leather jacket. She couldn’t imagine how much worse it would be in an actual outdoor coat after they’d started walking.
“Why?” Dan made an annoyed expression, covering one of his badges. It was of a flag Farrah didn’t recognise, probably in reference to a band she’d never listened to.
“You’ll boil in that. We’re gonna be doing a lot of walking.”
“Unless you have a, umm, heat regulation skill, like Farrah,” Vega chipped in.
“Nah, I’ve just been dying in this every time it got over twenty,” Farrah chuckled. “Not literally,” she quickly added,” Seeing that Vega made that semi-concerned, semi-judging face she always made when Farrah brought up using her Luck for recovery.
“I’ll be fine,” Dan insisted. “Do we need to stock up on something? Ammo, food?”
Farrah shook her head, and Vega made a ‘uh-uh’ noise. Then, Farrah lit her first – and only, she quickly realised, as she remembered how far their destination was from any places with cigs – cigarette of the day.
“Allons-y then,” Dan led the way to the edge of town.
----------------------------------------
Domain Entered: Lonely
Pinned notes available. Display notes?
Yes
No
“Bip,” Farrah announced.
“Oh, right,” Dan spoke, as he read something in front of him, “Bip.”
“Uhh, bip?” Vega said, unsure if she should partake in this ritual or not. Farrah made a mental note to tell her to do as did in these situations to avoid suspicion. There wasn’t a clear code for what Collectors had to or could do, but these small rituals had become a given.
The same domain mastery quest appeared before Farrah’s eyes, and she dismissed it as quickly as she’d done the previous time.
“We do sound so stupid when we say it like that,” Dan noted, as he read off a quest screen of his own. “Like, three grown people, just going ‘bip’ in unison.”
“Well, I assure you, you don’t want to be in a group of grown people,” Farrah chortled at the phrase. He was right, it did sound silly, “who don’t inform each other of System notifications. It’s important to know when quests or warnings pop up, for whom, and why.”
Dan glanced at Vega for some sort of confirmation. She gave him a confused look, before hastening her pace and catching up with Farrah.
“It is true, that’s how Collectors die,” Farrah added in Vega’s stead, her focus almost exclusively dedicated to adding notes to the bullet points she’d jolted down the previous evening.
They walked on the worn asphalt road, with tall unkempt fields of barley and oats on either side of them. Occasionally, Farrah asked a clarifying question about yesterday’s conversation, which was followed by a long and more often than not slightly irrelevant tangent from Dan. She finalised her notes a good two hours later, which was also when she finally took the time to make a proper scan.
Scan
- Directional
- Radius
Cost: Free for 5 km radius from focal point. 1P per extra 55km radius from focal point.
Farrah turned around, looking at the duo. She tried not to sound accusatory, as she inquired:
“You are aware that we’re off-course by about 6 kilometres west.”
“Now we are?” Dan’s tone was aggravated. “We were following you.”
Vega nodded. She was the least guilty of the three, as not only had she only briefly glanced at the map back at the house, but she also had no skills that helped with navigation.
“Okay, my bad,” Farrah apologised, not mentioning that she had clearly been busy that entire time, and in no position to lead the way. “Do you have ‘Scan’?” She asked Dan.
He shook his head. Then, he put down his backpack and took his jacket off, before pulling out a water bottle.
“Navigation?” Farrah asked. That was one of the skills the mastery of which increased passively, the more it was used. Farrah didn’t look at maps that weren’t her own often enough for it to come in handy, but she had it at Expert nonetheless.
“No,” Dan replied, “Water?” he offered to Vega.
“No, thanks.”
He offered it to Farrah next, who shook her head.
“Pathfinding? One of the ‘Echo’ skills?”
“No, and Nope.” He replied, putting the water bottle away, and throwing his backpack over his shoulder again, this time his jacket stuffed between the two straps.
“Do you have anything from the exploration tree?” Vega asked, trying to be helpful.
“The what now?”
Farrah narrowed her eyes. This was one of those things only Vega knew about. The conversation about the mensphere needed to happen too, sooner rather than later. With how quickly Vega turned towards Farrah, with an anxious expression, made the woman set that aside for now.
“Utility tree,” Farrah repeated, before nodding towards the other woman, encouraging her to extrapolate.
“It’s like, umm, one of the basic ways to group skills,” She began. “So ‘Exploration’ covers what Farrah just named, and most of the physical skills, other than the, umm, combat ones. The 4 ‘Echo’ skills are on the magic tree actually.”
Farrah had already begun walking through the knee-tall grass, but turned around just in time to see Dan’s utterly confused face.
“The 4 Echo skills are on the magic tree,” he repeated, with not enough of a joking tone or sarcasm for it to come off as anything but confused.
“Yes, the tree with the, umm, well Farrah doesn’t have any of it…”
Farrah chucked.
“The inventory skills I’m presuming? And the force-field lot that comes either before or after Arena?”
“Mhuum,” Vega nodded. “The elemental and healing skills too.”
“I’ve never heard any other Collector categorise the skills like that. So, where would my-” He paused as if pondering if he should really share his skills with the women.
“Breach is under utility. Weight reduction too,” Vega replied.
“How do you know I have weight reduction?” He stopped in his tracks, giving Vega a suspicious glare.
Vega was just very perceptive. She could if Farrah was reading text, or a map just from how she interacted with a screen, so she presumed that Vega’d deduced it from the way Dan’d dropped his bag, or something of the sort. However, his mind had clearly just jumped to some other conclusion, as both of them were reading screens at that moment.
“Hey,” Farrah called out.
Dan swiped his hand in front of him as if trying to make the invisible screen disappear.
“Sorry, sorry, that was just,” he tried to apologise to Vega. “I promise I won’t do it again.”
Vega nodded in his direction, barely acknowledging him, before catching up to Farrah. With a smug expression on her face, she whispered:
“He has the entire tech tree apart from ‘Radio’, all the inventory skills, and ‘Armour crafting’ and ‘Data Shield’ at Trained. The rest is Expert,”
“Hey,” Dan called out. He sounded fully apologetic now. He started hastily walking towards them.
“And most of the physical skills at either trained or mastered,” Vega concluded, before walking on ahead.
“Hey,” Dan called out after her once he’d caught up to Farrah. “What did she say?” He asked meeting eyes with her.
He looked more in distress than someone in this situation should. After all, he’d gotten Vega on his bad side entirely by himself.
“That you should stop invading her privacy,” Farrah lit up a cigarette, before starting walking.
“Shit,” Dan swore under his breath. He tried to make a few steps to catch up with her, but Farrah tugged on his sleeve, silently telling him to walk with her. “I – This will come off as awful,” He spoke, resigning to this new arrangement, “But she gives me – this feeling. This creepy feeling…” He sighed, before yelling another apology.
“Yeah, we thought the sunglasses would help. It’s an ongoing, umm,” Farrah paused, noticing that she’d picked up one of Vega’s verbiages, “affliction.” She concluded. “And you snooping around in Vega’s System doesn’t help.”
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Dan sighed and scratched the back of his head, his fingers shifting the long stands of vibrant blond that fell over them.
“You used to bleach your hair?” Farrah asked, after exhaling a drag.
“Huh?” Dan looked at her in confusion again.
Farrah chuckled.
“Now, I promise I don’t have a skill that lets me see that,” She had to hold back from laughing at Dan’s expression, “I used to bleach my hair too,” She picked out a lock from her ponytail that transitioned from dark brown to an orange-red, to a dark yellow. “You can actually tell where the bleach lines are.”
If she’d had both her hands free, she would have shown him the virgin shoulder-length curls on the right side of her hair, that had grown from an almost full shave in a world where hair bleach no longer existed.
Dan ran a hand through his hair again, pulling over and in front of his eyes.
“Yeah, I’d been meaning to re-dye it, before everything,” he spoke. “My parents, they were very religious, and they didn’t want any of this.”
“What, of your hair being two shades lighter?” Farrah chuckled, taking one last drag of her cigarette.
“Oh, it used to be blue,” Daniel replied. A happy smile flashed over his face. “So, what about you then? Hair dye, fancy skill, or albinism?”
Farrah looked at him and shook her head with a semi-amused smile. Maybe he’s never met anyone with albinism in real life and didn’t know that the bright red eyes were a myth. She didn’t correct him because she kind of understood where he was coming from. In the few seconds it took for Vega to go ‘umm’ before formulating a reply, the fact that Vega’s appearance was more likely than not a result of the experimentation described in her file caught up to Farrah.
“There’s a flyer about 10 kilometres that way, but it’s not going towards us,” Farrah called out, cutting the conversation short. If Vega wanted to, she could restart it later on her own terms.
Dan gave Farrah an annoyed look, as he’d clearly been enjoying the chatter. He reached out into his trousers’ pockets and pulled out an eyeglasses case. The thickness of the rectangular glasses, that protruded slightly from their black and purple plastic frames, made Farrah wonder how he could see anything without them in the first place. He put them on and squinted into the grey sky.
Vega turned towards Farrah, raising a questioning eyebrow. Farrah winked in reply, before speaking:
“It’s out of range now, we can keep going. Keep those on,” She nodded at Dan.
“I can’t risk breaking them. I already lost a pair, this isn’t even my correction,” He replied, putting the glasses away, and picking up the pace.
“Unless you slip and fall, you won’t break them with us around,” Farrah spoke, reaching for her tin.
A heavy drop of rain fell onto her hand, and she promptly put the cigarettes away, with an annoyed grunt.
“I appreciate the sentiment, Devs” Dan replied, “But I think in an emergency situation, it’s best not to take that risk, and then end up stranded blind in the middle of a city I don’t know.”
Farrah gave him a questioning look. It sounded very personal, and she wondered if that was what had made him give up being a Collector. Before she could ask, about that or the sudden and unprompted use of her nickname, Vega spoke:
“In an emergency situation, Farrah and I will, umm, take care of it.”
Farrah hummed in agreement.
Another heavy raindrop fell onto her nose. Immediately followed by dozens of others. Then hundreds.
“Vega, here,” She tossed over the rain jacket she’d bought the previous day. Then she hastily pulled out the camo plastic sheet that worked night shifts as a makeshift tent, hoping to not let her clothes get too wet. She threw it over her head, and rucksack, holding it in place.
“Told you I’d need the jacket,” Dan said as he put his own coat on.
“Where’s the nearest cover?” Vega asked, awkwardly holding the white coat in her arms.
“Put it on, come on,” Farrah gestured to the right, before activating her ‘Run’ skill.
----------------------------------------
The rain quieted down before the group could find proper shelter. It didn’t stop raining per se, but the droplets had gotten smaller, and fell slower, taking their time to appreciate their time aboveground, before the brown earth would swallow them, and use them to feed its children.
Running for shelter had caused the trio to break their previous formation. Farrah had taken the lead once more, as she looked at her map more than under her feet. Vega had fallen behind, to account for any potential threats that would try to ambush them. Ambushes didn’t really happen in this domain. At least not in the fields. But it was better to be safe than dead. Dan walked between them, visually scanning the fields for anything that resembled shelter. Or blurry outlines thereof.
With about five meters in between each of them, keeping up with a conversation was complicated, so none bothered to start one. That was until Farrah picked up something on her scan:
“Hey, Dan,” She called out, turning around. Her voice wasn’t loud enough to be considered a yell, and she made a hand gesture for the other to keep it down.
“Yeah?” He asked when he caught up.
“Did you get a domain quest when we left the keep?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry, I refused it. I wasn’t gonna slow us down with a boss fight.”
“Huh?” Vega asked, mostly to make her presence known, judging by her expression.
Farrah squinted at him.
“We can grind quests if you want, we’re not on a timer. What mastery level if your Lonely domain?”
“No, no it’s fine. I would rather get to the nest than waste time on side quests,” He hastily replied with too much determination.
Farrah let her expression show just how wrong she thought he was to dismiss his own safety by ignoring quests, especially when help was being offered. Then she shrugged and swung her Steyr AUG over her shoulder. If Dan didn’t want the kill, she wasn’t going to insist.
“Wait, wait, what are you shooting at?” Dan asked, his tone suddenly concerned.
“The monster over there,” Vega replied in Farrah’s stead, making the woman lower the riffle. She gave Vega an impressed smirk, before nodding in the direction slightly North-West of their position.
“Glass wraith. Do you need the kill or not? It will eventually reach us if we keep chatting.”
Dan squinted in that direction, and with a resigned sigh, put his glasses on.
The visibility was extremely low with the rain falling at a painfully slow pace through the air, colouring it with tiny grey dots. The mutated zombie was moving slowly, spreading its filament-like tendrils through the soil. Its skin was a translucent bluish-grey, that blended perfectly with the cloud-covered sky. And if not for the raindrops running along it, defining its shape against the horizon, some four hundred meters away, it would have been fully invisible. It didn’t have arms, nor legs per se. Its face was a featureless oval, with a fine line, invisible from this distance, that would open to scream at frequencies too low for the human ear the second its tendrils would come into contact with something living.
As interesting as the mutant was to observe, it was slowly moving its legless body towards the group. Farrah levelled her rifle once more.
“Wait, I got it,” Daniel said. He put down his backpack, and took out his crossbow, before creeping a few dozen meters ahead, closer to the creature.
Farrah lowered the barrel but kept her hand firmly on the barrel grip.
“Umm, what do you think he wants with, umm, such urgency?” Vega came up for Farrah and whispered. She looked concerned. Worried even. One of the black straps on her left sleeve had started to come undone from the constant fidgeting.
“That’s a good question,” Farrah replied, in an equally hushed tone. She was out of ideas, and she wanted to ask, but she knew she needed to spread out the questions a little if she wanted a proper, detailed, response. Earlier, when he was extrapolating on yesterday’s conversation, he started to sound tired. She didn’t know if it was the topic or the amount of talking, but she didn’t want to push further that day.
Dan finally got to what he deemed was close enough. A silent arrow shot at the creature, piercing its shoulder.
Dan swore under his breath. And the wound of a gunshot echoed through the fields. But it was too late. In that fraction of a second it had taken for a bullet to burst through the zombie’s head, its face had already split in three.
Vega ducked down, hands over her ears, an expression of extreme discomfort painted over her face. Dan was pushed back by the few sound waves that’d left the wraith’s mouth before it’d lost it. They distorted the rain, and Farrah felt them travel through her, under her skin, over the muscles, before leaving through the other side.
She didn’t yell at Dan about the multitude of skills that helped with aim.
Scan
- Directional
- Targeted
Cost: Free.
Ammo Efficiency
Reduces the chance of using a projectile munition from 100% to 5% per shot. Requires individual attunement to each new weapon.
Expert
Cost: 2P per 5 hours of usage. 1P to interrupt effect.
Domain benefit
Distance and attunement skill restrictions removed.
Aim Assist
Projectiles automatically hit a selected target with known position.
Expert
Cost: 5P per projectile.
Domain benefit: Distance and attunement skill restrictions removed. 85% chance of casting dependant skill [Blast - Force] instead.
She pulled up a map and opened fire.
“Vega, there’s a swarm coming from the North-East,” She yelled in between two bursts.
“Time?” Vega asked as she moved her arms up in a guard, taking a stand behind Farrah.
They were in a field, so it was hard to decide where a point of reference would be.
Farrah turned slightly to the right, taking a few steps so that Vega could keep her position too.
“This is north,” She fired a shot at her feet and into the horizon line. “Swarm at two-thirty.” She said, before spinning around again to take down zombies flying at them at them at absurdly impossible speeds from the South-East.
She heard a squashing noise and several shrieks. She felt something large, the size of her hand, smash into her rucksack.
“Vega,” She called out, not adding ‘don’t throw the bugs at me’.
A quick apology came, that was quickly drowned out by the sound of gunfire.
“Fuck, what are those things-” Dan’s voice came from the west.
Farrah turned in his direction, eyes up on the sky, as she fired seven more shorts. She glanced at him smashing a skull into the ground. In his defence, that was a big one. Usually, the insectoid mutations that developed exclusively inside skulls broke the bone from the inside, using bits of it as a shell, and rearranging the skin and muscles to form elongated limbs and thin boneless wings. That skull had been just over fist-sized and deemed small enough for its previous owner to keep it as is.
Several more of the insectoids fell into the tall grass.
“Seven,” Farrah ordered to Vega as they synchronously moved around once more.
She fired four final shots in the air, before firing one into the grass, a three-o-clock. The grass got pushed down, hit by an invisible ball of energy. It brought down five of the small creatures, that flew up the second they realised their cover was gone.
Farrah didn’t risk firing ‘Blast’ instead of a regular shot this close to two allies. Left hand on the barrel grip of the Steyr AUG, she reached out for a hatchet. But before she could do anything, Vega dashed past her. She lept up in the air, smacking down two of the creatures with a crescent kick. She hit one of them her palm, with enough force to break its shell, and send it flying into the wings of another. She landed next to the one that’d just lost its ability to fly and stomped on it without much grace.
One bug managed to survive and flew at Dan with an angry screech. Vega dashed under it and hit it upwards with the base of her palm. It made a cracking sound before falling to the ground as a mass of brown and purple goo.
Dan swore and took a few steps back.
With immediate danger out of the way, Farrah turned to where she’d last spotted that vanishing yellow dot. She fired ten shots spread around its last known location.
“Are there more?” Vega asked, having quickly returned to her position by Farrah’s side.
“No, we’re done. But we better not linger here too long,” She replied, putting away her weapon.
“I’m sorry about that… I swear I was aiming for its head.”
Farrah hummed, and shook her head, waving him off.
“This is a good domain to practice and mess up. It will take hours for flyers to gather around the corpses, and we’ll just have to be a little more vigilant during the night.”
Surprisingly enough, Vega agreed. There wasn’t a touch of annoyance, sarcasm, or disdain in the little ‘uh-uh’ noise she made. Being a bad shot didn’t seem to be on her list of Daniel’s flaws.
“Okay, yeah,” Dan nodded, as he went to fetch his arrow. “How long till we reach the bunker?”
“The coordinates are about 150 kilometres away. So anywhere between three days and two weeks,” Farrah replied, as she began walking.
“Pardon? Why don’t we just run there?”
Farrah stopped in her tracks. That was a valid question. She preferred to walk to maximise her chances of triggering a quest, and giving herself more opportunities to grid some skills if she needed to. But with her current predicament, she no longer needed to worry about that. Yet, every minute spent away from the OBELISK was a minute she could live worry-free of what her last quest held.
She turned around to look at Vega who’d started to fiddle with the straps on her arms again, as she stared somewhere into the grass. Dan had a hand on his hip and was still expecting a proper answer. Depending on the lie she’d tell, neither of them would be the wiser. But instead, she chose to say:
“I’m not in a rush.”
She began walking, ignoring Dan’s complaints, which turned into him trying to get Vega on his side, then finally settling down for a few long minutes, before deciding to start a casual conversation again.
Somewhere thirteen or so kilometres to the north, no yellow dot blinked over Farrah’s map. And over a hundred kilometres ahead, in the direction they were headed, a spot that was once marked by a small sticker on a physical map stood equally bare of zombies. It was quiet in the endless fields. And for now, the trio was alone.