We passed by the Pit, a large brick hole in the ground located near the center of campus. It was once a center of activity. Every time I had been there previously, it was filled with students going to class, people advertising clubs, or preachers denouncing the sinfulness of the modern world.
The Pit was still filled with people, but they were all dead. What had once been a beacon of UNC’s social life had been reduced to little more than a mass grave. There were more than a hundred people torn to shreds and intermingled inside of the Pit. The monsters must have dumped the bodies into the hole at some point during the carnage.
I blinked, and the Pit was once more populated with smiling students talking to each other and enjoying the bright midday sun. The image of the Pit in my mind was so distinct from the scene in front of me that my mind interposed my memory on top of my vision. This hallucination was one I wasn’t in a hurry to dispel.
Liz looked like she was going to throw up when she saw the pile of corpses, and Carlos pointedly looked the other way.
As we walked, I recounted the last hour to the other two. I explained my encounter with Epsilon and the flood of information that entered my brain when our minds were linked.
“And the continent-sized spaceship is piloted by the albino aliens?” Carlos asked, trying to hide the doubt obvious in his voice.
“Yes,” I muttered. I knew it sounded crazy, so I took my phone out of my pocket and started searching for something to provide evidence for my claim. I searched for any reference to landmasses or spaceships over the Atlantic Ocean.
As I searched, Carlos continued to speak. “So, what’s the plan to find Starsteel? Liz’s dad has been stuck with just Mithril and Spiritwood to make our weapons.”
“Uh.” I vocalized a long utterance to buy myself a second to finish the word I was typing into my phone. “The Diluvians’ ships, of course. They ought to be made out of Starsteel just like Epsilon’s ship. We might be able to use them to get back into orbit. In case that doesn’t work, I can just deconstruct a few and use the material to make some new ones.”
“Ships?” Liz asked. “What do you mean?”
“The Diluvians must have come down on Sarcophagus Ships. I saw the meteor trails on the ISS live stream.”
“Sorry Vince, but that’s not right,” Carlos said. “The monsters in town came through portals.”
Right, I may have been too hasty in my assumptions. After seeing Epsilon’s dramatic arrival on the planet, I had assumed incorrectly that every monster arrived on one of those ships. It made sense that the Diluvians didn’t arrive via Sarcophagus Starship. I hadn’t run into any craters in the ground on my way to campus.
Carlos scrolled through his phone for a few seconds before finding something. He held the screen of his smart phone out for me and pressed the start button on a video.
The video was taken on the northern quad near the Old Well. Once Carlos hit the start button and the video started shaking with the motion of the cameraman, a large circular rift in reality opened on the edge of the frame. When the camera changed angle to better view the gate, I could see the other side of the rift.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Dozens of Diluvians stood or crouched in a dimly lit room. For an instant, they seemed disinterested. When they noticed that the gate had opened, they were gripped with an instinctual drive to attack, and they immediately charged through. Within seconds, half a dozen nearby students were torn limb from limb.
What caught my attention, however, was the opened rift in the background. With the bat-headed Diluvians removed, I could get a better look at the room they had just escaped from. It was barely distinguishable in the fidelity of Carlos’s phone, but I could see rows of metal bars line the room’s walls. A moment before the rift closed, I realized that the room was a prison cell.
I was starting to comprehend the nature of what was happening. Something bigger than the Earth and humanity was going on. If not for the deadline hanging over my head like a sword poised to strike, I would have taken a few minutes to organize my thoughts and explain everything to Carlos and Liz.
As it was, however, I only had the privilege to consider things in the short term. I returned my own phone to my pocket without checking the search results. The quest to prove my own sanity would have to wait for a moment.
“I see,” I said with a sigh. “We still need to find Starsteel, though. System. Do you know where we can find Starsteel?” I certainly did not expect the System to give me a helpful answer, but I had no other leads.
[AFFIRMATIVE]
AFFIRMATIVE
[A METEORITE OF PURE STARSTEEL CRASHED NEAR A BUILDING YOU KNOW AS PEABODY HALL]
A METEORITE OF PURE STARSTEEL CRASHED NEAR A BUILDING YOU KNOW AS PEABODY HALL
Wow. The System was a lot more helpful than I had expected it to be. Peabody Hall was only about two thousand feet away in a straight line.
“There’s some Starsteel by Peabody Hall,” I told Carlos and Liz.
“We can just ask it where things are?” Carlos said with a smile. “System. Where is the nearest monster?” After a moment of silence, Carlos spoke once more with a frown on his face. “System. Are there any monsters between us and Peabody Hall?” Carlos sighed. “Okay. It can’t find monsters.”
“Good to know,” I said. “While we walk, we should go over our classes and levels to better plan for combat.”
“Okay,” Carlos said as we turned the corner and entered the southern quad, Polk Place. Wilson Library sat to our south, and Dey Hall was to our west. “I’ll start. I took the [Knight] class, and I’m currently level 3. The most notable thing about the [Knight] class is this skill called [Draconic Integration], which converts your SDC to MDC. Everybody else gets the skill at level 5, and taking [Draconic Integration] at level 1 disallows you from ever casting a spell. I also have the skills [Battle Trance], which increases my combat skill for a minute. This skill recharges after an hour. My last skill is [Cleave], which I can use once every thirty seconds to empower one of my attacks.”
“Shit,” Liz swore after hearing Carlos explain everything he got from his class. “I should have picked [Knight]. I had no idea that MDC would be such a big deal. Anyway, I picked the [Priestess] class, and I’m level 3 right now. Beyond normal [Spellcasting] that I’m sure you both understand, I also have the [Heal] skill, which allows me to heal someone when I touch them. At level 3, I got the [Prayer] skill, which gives me the option to buff other people as long as I’m reciting a prayer. This is why I’m holding this notebook.” She gestured toward us with a small notebook that was marked with several lines of text. “I looked up a bunch of prayers and wrote them here. Basically, my class hasn’t been very helpful ever since I started. I still don’t have any MDC, and I haven’t been able to heal anyone because the Diluvians kill anyone they touch instantly.”
I paused and considered her class for a second before coming to the obvious conclusion. “It sounds like you should stay in the back and support Carlos.”
“That’s what we’ve been doing,” Carlos said, agreeing with my assessment.
I explained the details of my own class, though I omitted any mention of my [Bypass Limitation] skill. I had already used it that day, so it wasn’t useful at the time. By the time I was done explaining, we had almost reached Peabody Hall.