You have defeated Shayathar Vessel, level 6. +6XP
You have defeated Shayathar Vessel, level 6. +6XP
You have defeated Shayathar Vessel, level 7. +7XP
A list of kill notifications flashed past on my HUD as we listened to the nauseating sound of body after body hitting the concrete behind us. It had been a high overpass, arcing up over another overpass and a highway passing beneath the others, easily a forty, maybe fifty foot drop. Without a slow-fall power of some kind that was apparently too far to survive, at least for a level 7 zombie. I whistled (well, I tried; technically I’d never been able to whistle but don’t get me started, it’s a bit of a sore spot) and thanked my lucky stars I’d had the right skill after all.
“Better keep moving,” I grunted, pouring into Scoot on By.
Bryan and I jetted down the ground-level street weaving around the stationary traffic until we hit true downtown. I leapt up onto the sidewalk and, without any cars directly in front of us, let loose on the speed.
“Where to?” I called over the wind.
Bryan was clearly looking for something, his eyes narrowed as he took in the quiet morning.
“El Zarape,” he said.
“Friend of yours?”
He shook his head. “Mexican restaurant. It’s where you’re supposed to meet someone. Good a place as any to hunker down and wait for them.”
Made sense, I supposed. Electricity hadn’t been knocked out so long all the food would be bad; maybe at least I’d get a free dinner out of this. I wondered who it was we were going to meet but I bit back the question. I was tired of shouting, and it seemed prudent to make less noise anyway.
Bryan indicated to slow down.
“Should be around here somewhere,” he said. I canceled the skills and we walked.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been downtown in absolute silence, but man. It is fucking unnerving. It didn’t even feel like a real town; it felt like one of those model towns they set up just to obliterate with nuclear weapon tests.
The only thing worse was the sound of the dead waking around us.
They slinked out of the dark corners, clamored from cars. Wherever anyone had died, an undead rose.
Which led to a whole new symphony of horror as myriad survivors were discovered by the newly reanimated corpses.
Sure, a lot of people had died the night before, between the sudden loss of all power and motor capacities and the pre-invasion force of Goblette and Sand Witch spirit beasts. But plenty had presumably held on, keeping a silent vigil through the night in upper-level apartments, parked cars, homes. These were the human combatants in the system-approved galactic contest for Earth, and I supposed I was one of them. Although I got the impression from the sounds around me I had hit some kind of fucking luck jackpot, which only served to confirm my “I’m the main character in my own dream about the world getting integrated into a game-system” hypothesis.
“Who is it we’re going to meet?” I asked, but Bryan’s response was cut off by a scream of pure terror from somewhere behind us.
“Jesus!” I jumped a few steps and whirled around, eyes wide.
“Keep moving.” Bryan didn’t so much as turn his head. “You can’t save anyone who isn’t ready to save themselves right now.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, the ‘you can’t save them all’ thing?”
He pointed. “There. Seventh Avenue. That’s our turn, c’mon. You will save them. Some of them. But not today. Today, you get stronger.”
I nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I know the drill. Put your own oxygen mask on before trying to help anyone else, that’s basically it, right?”
He didn’t bother answering.
El Zarape was a rather quaint looking affair. The stucco façade set it apart somewhat from the other businesses on the block, though this being a true downtown, it was only one of many business looking out onto the sidewalk from tall tinted windows. We found the front door was locked, naturally, but there was an alley just another storefront down.
I’d not spent much time in downtown alleys. It was grim, even for an apocalypse. The stench of an overstuffed dumpster—that was only going to get better with no garbage trucks running—saturated the air, and I pulled the loose collar of my equipped shirt over my nose.
“Holy fuck,” I gagged, pausing to try to catch my breath, while somehow trying not to breath, and hoping not to vomit.
Bryan shot me a glance. “That’s interesting. Must be the cultivation thing. Did you get any notifications about that yet? Anything that doesn’t seem related to your levels?”
I coughed and gagged again, but pulled up my status. Even amidst my intense discomfort, I was gratified to see an important gain right away.
Combatant Stat Screen
Name: Quart
Level: 9
XP to Level 10: 1
I chuckled aloud.
“Got something?” Bryan asked.
“Dude. One effing point. Just one experience point away from level ten.”
He grew more serious. “Holy shit, we did it. We leveraged that mall almost all the way to the First Gate.”
“First Gate…?”
He shook his head. “Ok. You’re close, but levels are very strict; it doesn’t count until it counts, you know? You’re not level 10 until you’re level 10. What else do you see?”
I scrolled down a bit more.
“I’ve got a, uh… physique. That’s a cultivation thing, right? Usually is.”
We’d kept walking deeper into the alley and had come to a stop two stories beneath a hanging fire escape. Bryan looked at me again, eyebrows raised.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“It is. Get to iron yet?”
I have him a sheepish look. “It says Iron Physique, 82%. Does that mean I’m almost there?”
Bryan cursed superbly.
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked.
He pointed at the fire escape above us. “Jump up there.”
I looked, agog. “I can’t do that, bruh. My slow-fall skill is for falling, not for lift. And I mean, you should have seen me fucking running down the street when the first beams hit last night. I am not an athlete, to put it mildly.”
“I’m betting that was before you were exposed a second or third time and cultivated Cosmic Qi, yes?”
I slowly nodded. “Well, yeah… but… goddamn, bruh.” My voice dwindled. “Don’t fucking like heights.”
“You’ll get over it. You’ll—”
He stopped speaking at the sound of broken glass and garbage bags being pushed aside. We turned to watch as a corpse pulled itself free from the dumpster behind us.
Now this motherfucker… this was a corpse. Not one of these freshly dead zombies we’d been fighting earlier. No, this dude had clearly been dead for some time. I briefly reflected that it didn’t say great things about this city that a dead body had been allowed to sit in the bottom of a dumpster downtown for so long. But then again, in fairness to whoever had deposited him there, I really had no idea how long he’d called the dumpster home; maybe he’d already been dead for a fair bit before checking in.
The body wore faded blue jeans and a lightweight plaid orange flannel. A couple of overall straps and he could have been a scarecrow. His skin fit the part; it was thin and pallid as parchment paper, ripped in places to expose sinewy muscle beneath. His eyes were white and clouded, his hair long and tousled, and his gums pulled back to expose garish yellow teeth. Despite the “very dead” quality of the body, however, his movements belied a strength and control we hadn’t seen so far. He crawled out of the dumpster quite smoothly and leapt down with ease, knees cracking but not buckling as they bent with the impact.
I glanced at Bryan and saw a whole new level of tension in his face.
Then the most horrific thing that could have happened, happened. The monster spoke.
“Cultivator,” it said in a low, hollow voice. “You will feed me.”
“Like hell,” I said. Then I grabbed onto Bryan like I was Indiana Jones and he was [insert female costar from any given Indiana Jones movie, it’s a different lady every time], bent my knees, willed spirit into my legs, and leapt.
Straight up.
“Quaaaaart! Bloody fucking fuck!” Bryan’s holler was almost lost in the air whooshing by us even though his mouth was embarrassingly close to my ear, such was our sudden velocity. He had reason to be alarmed. The fire escape landing and ladder had only been two stories above us from the ground. The building itself looked only to be about five.
We were probably another ten feet over it already.
“I don’t know how!” I yelled.
“Do the thing! The feather bed!”
“Oh, you mean the sustainable and eco-friendly down alternative comforter thing?”
“Yes!”
You have activated skill: Polysynthetic Fall!
Sure enough, the slowing mechanism worked both ways. Our momentum drastically decreased, which led to our reaching a zenith and beginning a slow descent shortly after.
Happily, we looked to be coming down right over the rooftop of our intended building. I peered down into the alley for a glimpse of the zombie with the voice, but I couldn’t see him anywhere.
“The fuck, Bryan? That guy talked!”
“That’s not good. Self-awareness this early in a Shayathar Vessel indicates a strong spirit, possibly leadership. We don’t want to get on his radar.”
“I think we’re already on it.”
“Yes. That was… quite the jump. Probably overdid it a bit, Quart.”
We made a bit of a mess of the landing, tumbling down on all-fours on the rooftop, but we’d been going slowly enough it didn’t hurt us. Besides, after the feat I’d just exhibited, I couldn’t help but wonder if my body had undergone enough of a change at this point that a little fall of a couple stories wouldn’t hurt me anyway.
“Iron, 82, you said.”
“I did.”
He sighed through his nose, looking at me like a tired adult who has to deal with an energetic child. “It’s not that you’re almost to Iron. It’s that you’re almost to Iron II. Which means you’ve already blown through the First Gate; your stats just don’t know it yet.”
We picked ourselves up and headed for a door. It was locked, naturally, but this time we were not to be deterred. Bryan had me conjure up a knife. He wedged it into the crevice, shouldered the door in, and pulled it back out, wide open.
“They should have used a deadbolt.” He smiled.
“First Gate. That’s the second time you’ve mentioned that, only last time it sounded like you were referring to level 10. What’s that all about?”
He nodded and we made our way inside, finding a stairwell. We closed the door behind us and lowered our voices but continued to chat as we slowly descended. Bryan had an old-fashioned matchbook in that jacket pocket of his, and he occasionally would strike a new match. Aside from that, the stair was pitch black. I enjoyed the strongly sulfurous scent with each strike.
“Most humans compete as leveling combatants. Get XP, mostly from killing monsters and other combatants, and eventually you level up. Maybe you’ve noticed that each level requires the corresponding amount of XP, times ten?”
“Yeah, I saw that. Seventy XP to reach level 7, then another eighty for level 8. And on.”
“Yes. Well. Most humans start with a rating already somewhere between levels 3 and 6, which comprise mortal standards for qualities the system has quantified—strength, intelligence, and so forth. The more you increase in level, the more superhuman these qualities become in you. Until finally, you reach level 10.”
“The First Gate.”
“Right. So named because single digits represent the first great plateau; fewer than half of all human combatants currently alive will pass through to level 10, simply because fewer than half will survive the increased combat from invading forces over the next few weeks.”
“And most people probably didn’t spend all night last night power-leveling.”
He gave me a knowing look. “Bloody hell, Quart. Nobody has power-leveled as much as you at this point. Well, probably not. I don’t know.”
“This is all good news for me. If, albeit, bad news for more than half of the human race, I suppose.”
He stopped moving and held up a hand. For a moment we were utterly silent.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“I did… hear something, yes. But I thought it was just the echo of our voices.”
We were still and quiet a moment longer before we resumed our descent. When Bryan spoke again it was in a hushed whisper.
“Thing is, the fact that you are cultivating Cosmic Qi has really fucked up how the system quantizes those qualities. Because some people, Quart, chose to cultivate instead of level, remember? And for them, the First Gate is—”
“The Iron Physique.” I pulled up short, eyes wide in the darkness. “Holy shit. I’m like… what, secretly level 18?? Is that what you’re saying?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. No way to tell without getting some admin help on this.” He glanced up briefly and I wondered if he was looking up because he was nervous we were being followed, or to indicate our Elf-God-Man in the sky. “But it’s very clear your strength and agility are in fact far higher than your stat screen suggests at the moment. This is—I’ll say it one more time for the people who skim-read—new territory, Quart. And, Christ, when you take into account the whole Qi Magician thing as well—”
“Shhh!” I stopped him with a hand and we fell still and silent again.
This time I was the one who’d been listening, because as he spoke I’d begun to piece this puzzle together myself. If I had a whole set of higher, secret stats—ghost stats, I decided I’d call them, just because it sounded so fucking baller—then I should be taking charge of all sorts of shit in this operation, including surveillance. I sent a little pulse of spirit to my ears, visualizing them as physical pools and sending spirit up a pair of little streams to them. The streams engorged as rivers in spring, and the spirit pooled and eddied around when it reached either side of my head. Immediately my hearing had become so sensitive I’d needed to hang back a few steps so as not to be pained by the thundering sound of Bryan’s whispers.
And then I’d heard them.
I couldn’t discern much from the noises, so I couldn’t be sure if it was our new friend, Mr. Voice, or not, but someone else was definitely in the stairwell above us.
Coming down.
“Put the match out,” I whispered, so softly I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. But the match faded away, and we were left in the inky blackness. Bryan reached out for me and guided me to stand with my back against the wall as he did the same. I still had my Edward Breadknife Hands activated, having not taken the time to restore them yet, and I held them at the ready.
The stranger had also ceased movement, but after we stood still for about a minute, I heard them cautiously continue. They moved with care and clear intent, and I knew from the context Bryan had provided that if this was indeed a zombie exhibiting this amount of intelligence and fine motor control, we were probably well and truly fucked.
When they were less than a floor above us, they paused and leaned out over the stairwell. If there had been a light in the space, they would probably have been looking right at us.
“Are those… knives?” a woman’s voice whispered.
Startled, I realized she was looking right at us. Belatedly I realized I could have already sent a burst of spirit to my eyes, and I did so. The room lit up like a mountain ski resort surrounded by windows and I blinked in pain. I raised my hands to shield my eyes and cursed as I nicked myself with the blades.
Bryan sighed again.
“I guess so,” she said. She made her way down around the last bend of stair to us, clearly no longer worried we were zombies, and fished something out of a bag on her shoulder. I removed my hands from my bloodied face to see her holding up a bottle of cheap looking red wine toward me, cork firmly ensconced.
“Good,” she said. “You can open this, right?”
I looked at her like she was off her head. “Lady, I’m not a can opener.”
“No?” She pointed at my right pinky. “That one looks suspiciously capable.”
I glanced at it and saw that instead of a breadknife, my right pinky did, indeed, resemble a wine bottle opener.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I groaned.