As it turned out, Pamela was an amazing seamstress. I’d been expecting to waste half the day experimenting with different armor designs until I found something workable, and part of me wondered if it was worth the time. But once Pamela understood what I was trying to do she seemed to know exactly how to make it work.

She sorted through the pile of coats and jackets Beth’s people had provided, separating them into two piles. Then she deftly took one of the jackets apart, removing the inner lining and a layer of what must have been insulation from inside. She handed me the outer layer.

“Here’s what you need, sonny. Just make a stand to hang this on, and you can mess with it until you get the plates to sit the way you want. Then I’ll sew the lining back on, and we’re set.”

“Thank you, this is perfect. What’s with the two piles, though?”

She pointed. “You need jackets with a nice, sturdy outer layer. This pile is the coats that might work. The other pile is the ones that will just come apart on you if you try it.”

“I see. Thank you, this is a big help.”

She still needed to visit a store, so I sent Jenny and Shasa to look after her and the catgirls while I worked on the first coat. Making the plates and riveting them in place was still a fairly involved process, but it was the kind of complexity I was familiar with. I measure the dimensions carefully, laid out sections of plating without attaching them to make sure they fit together properly, and carefully tested the resulting weight and range of motion as I worked.

The extra room Jenny and I had booked ended up being essential, because otherwise I’d never have had the space to lay everything out properly. As it was Pamela and the girls came and went a few times as I worked, and I ended up ruining the first coat by punching too many holes in it with the rivets. But by lunch time I had a decent suit of something that approximated brigandine armor.

“I thought you were making steel armor,” Jenny commented when she saw me wearing it. “That looks like studded leather.”

“It turns out that there’s no such thing as studded leather,” I replied. “That’s one of those funny historical misunderstandings the reenactor community has been figuring out. There are lots of medieval pictures of people wearing armor that looks like this, and some historians looked at them and thought it was a leather suit with metal studs in it. But these are actually just the rivets that hold metal plates in place.”

I rapped my chest, demonstrating that there was a hard layer under the leather.

“This has overlapping steel plates protecting the chest and back, filling the space where the insulation originally went. It won’t stop a bullet, but claws and teeth aren’t getting through it. I wanted to do the arms too, but it turns out there’s not enough room.”

“Oh, I see. Not bad. If I wear one with my bracers and a helmet that gives pretty good coverage. Only shouldn’t it be longer?”

I grimaced. “Yeah, real armor would be long enough to cover your groin. But all I have to work with right now is these waist-length jackets. For some odd reason the stores in Alabama don’t carry a lot of long coats in the middle of summer.”

“Gee, I wonder why? So, I get the next suit, right?”

“I don’t know, Shasa is the tank,” I mused.

She growled playfully, and punched my shoulder. “She has a shield. I want some protection the next time we get attacked, damn it.”

“I do plan to get you both taken care of today. But sure, I can do you first.”

“Awesome. Now come on, Pamela is making monster cow steak for lunch and you don’t want to miss out.”

“She’s cooking for us? How did that happen?”

“She says she wants to thank us for getting her to the hospital. Personally I think she just wants some reliable help around in case things go bad here. She’s been making phone calls, but it sounds like everyone she knows here in town is either dead or busy.”

“Well, she’s certainly making herself useful.”

I’d been wondering if monster meat would still be worth points after it was cooked, and the answer turned out to be yes. Not that a twelve-ounce steak cut off of a two-ton monster added up to anything significant, but it was something to keep in mind for the future. One meal like this might not matter, but if it was a daily thing it would add up. An extra point every month or two could make a noticeable difference for civilians.

“Have you folks been watching the news?” Pamela asked as she dished up plates for us. “It’s terrible what’s happening out there.”

“I haven’t had a chance to look since last night,” I admitted.

“I’ve been checking my news sites off and on,” Jenny said. “It looks like there was a big wave of monster attacks this morning, mostly aimed at smaller towns. Some places are holding up okay, but a lot of them are being abandoned. Oh, and the Air Force shot down some kind of giant flying squid thing over in Nebraska.”

“Fun. Anything new from the government?”

“They’re recalling all military veterans to service. I didn’t even know they could do that.”

“Oh, yes,” Pamela said. “My brother was right put out when he left the service after the war, and got pulled back in for Korea. ‘Course, he was asking for it. When you can’t tell your family what you do because it’s all classified you’re never really going to be out of the service.”

“Huh. How are they supposed to report in?” I asked.

“The governor is asking local sheriffs to get them organized for now, until they can work out travel arrangements,” Pamela said. “They’ll have convoys running soon enough, I figure.”

“Wait, back up a minute,” Jenny interrupted. “Did you just say your brother fought in World War II? How old are you, Pamela?”

The old woman cackled. “I was born in nineteen twenty-five. I’m older than dirt, but I’m still hanging in there. Eating like this I’ll be fit as a fiddle in no time.”

“It’s too bad we can’t bring you more magic,” Shasa said.

“Just put it in a bottle,” Mitsi explained. “It’s easy.”

“Wait, what?”

Apparently the System still had plenty of surprises for us to discover. According to the catgirl those balls of mist we’d been absorbing were stable as long as no one was touching them, so if you stick one in a sealed container it will happily stay there until someone uses it. At this rate there was going to be a whole economy of people buying and selling enhancement points.

Assuming there was anyone still alive in a year.

At first glance the domestic news didn’t seem too bad for an apocalypse. Oh, the death toll was horrendous, and the rural population seemed to be rapidly migrating to nearby towns in defiance of the travel ban. But there were only a handful of stories about communities being overrun, and most of them were special cases. A cluster of ski lodges that was nearly deserted during summer, an isolated town where the mayor panicked and ordered an evacuation, that sort of thing.

Most places seemed to be hurting, but holding on and working to build defenses. By now most of the population was armed, and that meant communities had more than enough firepower to deal with the big, scary-looking mutated animals that the System seemed to favor as monsters. Rural communities have a long tradition of pulling together when a crisis comes along, and the big cities seemed to be mostly safe from monsters spontaneously spawning.

But the severity of the attacks was escalating fast, and monsters were an endless source of surprises. Small, fast menaces like the murder squirrels were a lot harder to deal with than giant animals. Bird monsters could easily infiltrate a settlement, and often looked harmless until they attacked. Deadly plant life was popping up everywhere, and there were rumors of stranger things floating around the internet. Insect hive minds, walking dead, predatory spirits, even elementals. It was hard to see how anyone could build a place that was actually secure against such a wild diversity of threats.

Which was a crucial problem, because by now there was plenty of confirmation that monsters were hunting people for points. So if there’s a pack of predators infiltrating your town and eating citizens they’ll get more dangerous with every meal. If humanity got too far behind on the leveling curve all the bombs and bullets in the world wouldn’t matter, because we’d all get eaten by body snatchers or animated shadows or some other menace you can’t just blow up.

After lunch I made an armored jacket for Jenny, which went a lot faster now that I knew what I was doing. I was working on one for Shasa when I heard a flurry of gunshots from downstairs.

I shrugged on my armor, grabbed my rifle and peeked out the window. Nothing was visible, but I could hear quite a commotion somewhere downstairs. I stepped out into the hall, and found the girls already there.

“Any idea what’s going on?” I asked.

There were more gunshots, and Jenny shook her head. “Nothing out the window. Something must have gotten into the lobby.”

I pictured the chaos that would ensue if a pack of murder squirrels got into the building, and shook my head. “Come on. We’ll take the stairs, and see what we can do to help.”

Interestingly enough, we weren’t the only guests headed towards the sound of danger. A couple of college-age men toting rifles piled into the stairwell behind us as we rushed downstairs, and an older man with a fancy-looking pistol soon followed. But given the amount of screaming and gunfire I could hear I wasn’t inclined to wait on them.

When we hit the door at ground level Jenny darted out with her spear in her hands, and Shasa right on her heels. I followed them out just in time to see an ant the size of a housecat try to jump on Shasa.

She casually swatted it out of the air with her mace, leaving a spray of bug bits on the wall.

Looking past them I saw bodies on the floor, surrounded by the broken remains of several more ants. A guy with a pistol in a two-handed grip was blazing away at a group of the creatures, while a woman on the floor behind him clutched at her leg and screamed bloody murder. Another guy was collapsed in the middle of the hall, using a golf club to fend off a couple of ants that were biting at his legs. Judging from the amount of blood they’d already gotten him a couple of times.

The ants skittered around erratically, and with all these people in the way trying to shoot them was asking for collateral damage. I lowered my pistol, and spun up a guided force missile in my free hand.

“Stick together and check your targets,” I called.

Jenny nodded. “We’ve got this. Stay right next to me, Shasa.”

She stabbed at one of the ants that was menacing golf club guy, but the point of her weapon just slid off its carapace. It backed up, turning its attention to her, and I sent my force missile zipping past her to blow it apart.

Okay, good. I had the armor piercing dialed in about right, then. A few millimeters of chitin would turn blades and deflect fists, but spells and bullets would punch right through it. As would a blow with real power behind it, as Shasa had just demonstrated.

We pushed forward, both girls aiming to circle golf club guy and deal with his other attacker. The guys with rifles came out of the stairwell behind us, and for a moment I thought this was going to be easy.

Then golf club guy tried to stand up, and ended up stumbling into Shasa. She caught him, but that distracted her for a crucial moment as an ant reared up and unleashed a spray of liquid at her. The stuff splashed across the front of her helmet, and she dropped her mace and started howling in pain.

Jenny swept forward and swung her spear, driving the ant into the floor with the edge of the knife blade and cutting it in half. Another ant came out of nowhere, trying to jump on her back, and I barely managed to hit it with my second force missile. The guys behind us started shooting, and then it was way too loud to hear each other.

The rifle guys rushed past us like a couple of idiots, but I was too concerned about Shasa to spare them much thought. I did a quick sweep of the hallway to check for other ants, and then dropped to one knee and put a hand on her shoulder.

Fuck. My diagnostic said that liquid was acid, and it was eating her face.

There was no time to do anything fancy. I burned one of my reserve points to buy a water conjuring spell, and directed a heavy spray at her face. Shasa choked and gasped, fumbling at her helmet for a moment before she managed to pull it off.

Thank god I’d used those safety goggles as a faceplate. Her eyes were fine, it was just the lower half of her face that had gotten splashed. The acid burns were horrible, but that was something I could fix.

Shasa whimpered in pain, and leaned into me. “It hurts, Tom. It really, really hurts.”

“I know, Shasa. I think I got all the acid, so I’m going to heal you now. But this will take a few minutes.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“Hurry, please. It hurts a lot.”

Poor girl. I started the healing, and glanced around.

Jenny was standing over us with a pistol in one hand and Shasa’s shield in the other, making sure nothing took a bite out of us. The older guy who’d been behind us was next to her, covering the lobby in a classic two-handed shooting stance. Several other men were in the lobby, sweeping it for surviving monsters and checking on the wounded.

“I think they got all of them,” Jenny said.

I nodded, and went back to work on Shasa. Acid burns are nasty, and it took several more minutes to get them to heal properly. By the time I was done Earl and a woman I didn’t know were treating the injured in the lobby, and someone had already harvested the bodies. Beth stood in the middle of the lobby with a bunch of armed men around her, looking agitated as she questioned people.

Shasa leaned on me as I helped her back to her feet.

“You okay, girl?”

She nodded. “I think so. That was really scary, Tom. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too. Don’t put your helmet back on yet. We’ll need to wash it to make sure there’s no acid anywhere, and the part that got splashed may need replacing.”

I picked it up, and saw that the plastic goggles were blackened and pitted where the acid had splashed them.

“Yeah, those lenses are trashed. We’ll have to find replacements.”

“Once again, the System finds a way to make the monsters dangerous,” Jenny commented. “But how did bugs that big get inside the building?”

“Let’s find out.”

I made my way over to Beth, who was clearly looking for answers. Earl must have noticed me, because he left the last couple of patients in the stranger’s hands and joined us.

“What’s the story?” I asked.

Beth glared at the greenery outside the windows. “The ants were hiding in the bushes, and rushed out when some people opened the doors. This whole group got inside before anyone managed to get the doors closed, and there are probably more of them out there. What are we going to do?”

The hotel’s landscaping was growing just as fast as all the other plant life around town. When we’d arrived yesterday it had consisted of a row of waist-high bushes and some grass around the building, and along the endcaps in the parking lot. Now the bushes were taller than I was, and they were rapidly spreading to displace the grass.

“We’ll have to clear it,” Earl said. “We can’t defend the place if we can’t see the monsters coming. But I don’t know where we’ll get the equipment. The city’s grabbed up every bulldozer, backhoe and chainsaw they can find for their own work crews. I hear they’ve got a few hundred men clearing a perimeter off on the other side of town, but I doubt they’ll get all the way over here today.”

“Yeah, that sounds like a big project,” I agreed. “I think we’ll have to burn it.”

Beth frowned. “Some of those bushes are right up against the building. What if the hotel catches fire?”

“I can put out fires now,” I told her. “I spent some points on that this morning, when I was worried about the hell cows coming back for another try. The walls are all brick and glass, and I can do the burn in sections so it doesn’t get out of control. We just need to make sure no embers land on the roof. Is there a way up there?”

“Yes, there’s a roof access door, and it’s all flat up there. I think there’s even a fire hose, although I’m not sure anyone knows how to use it.”

“I can handle that part,” Earl said. “I did a few years in the volunteer fire department, and those systems are all pretty standard. You’ll need some shooters to watch your back, though.”

“I’ll turn out the defense force,” Beth said. “Thirty or so people should be enough, I imagine.”

“Better see what you can find in the way of masks and safety goggles,” I suggested. “I can fix acid burns if I have time, but eyes are another story. If someone got blinded I’d have to sink a lot of points into medical spells before I could do anything about it.”

“Lovely. I’ll see what I can come up with. Excuse me.”

Beth went off to consult with her minions, leaving me looking out the windows with Earl and Jenny. We all contemplated the jungle that was springing up on the other side of the parking lot for a long moment, before Jenny spoke up.

“Little projects to make the building more defensible aren’t enough. The System always finds a way in. The only way we can be safe is to stay ahead of the leveling curve.”

Earl nodded gravely. “I think you’re on to something there, little lady. Guns are a great equalizer, but that only goes so far.”

“If this were a game I’d say technology is a great exploit,” I observed. “A group of level one humans can shoot their way through level three or four monsters with minimal casualties, and use the points to speed level themselves. Then you do it again with tougher monsters, until you can handle anything the zone throws at you. Trouble is, this isn’t a game. The System doesn’t conveniently arrange things so you can pick and choose which monsters to fight, and your casualties don’t just respawn.”

“Then we’d better make the most of our opportunities,” Earl said.

With the hotel’s population already on alert it didn’t take long to organize things. Beth found a box of cheap safety goggles in a storeroom somewhere, and a bunch of the men covered up as best they could to protect against acid spit. Earl inspected the roof, showed a couple of residents how to use the fire hose, and found another guy with firefighting experience to keep an eye on things topside. I did a quick patch job on Shasa’s helmet to replace the ruined goggles with new ones, and gave it a thorough wash.

Then we mustered our courage, and stepped outside.

Shasa and Jenny were the first ones out the door, since they were melee fighters who probably had more points than any three of the gunmen backing us up. Nothing attacked them immediately, so I followed them out and turned to the bushes growing up to the left of the entrance.

Was there movement in there, or was it just my imagination?

Earl and the defense force guys started to file out the door, taking up positions to cover us in all directions, but I saw no reason to wait until everyone was outside. I lit the bush with a brief flame jet, and stepped back to watch it burn.

Sure enough, a very agitated pair of giant ants rushed out from under the bush as it caught fire. But we were ready for them now. Jenny had honed the tip of her spear to razor sharpness while the rest of us organized things, and now she casually impaled one charging ant and threw its wriggling body back into the fire. Shasa smacked the other one with her shield, sending it tumbling out into the parking lot, and Earl shot it.

“Stay sharp, everyone,” he said. “There’s bound to be more.

The bushes were damp enough to be hard to light, with lots of leafy green branches and none of the dead leaves and dried up old twigs you’d expect if they’d grown up naturally. But my spells were more like a flamethrower than a match, and they got the job done. I got a clump of bushes burning, and watched them go for a few minutes to see what would happen.

At first they blazed brightly as all their leaves burned away, and little bits of flaming debris got wafted up into the air. But the fire didn’t spread to the other bushes, and it wasn’t long before the leaves were gone. The woody skeleton of each bush would take a lot longer to burn away, but it produced a much smaller fire that didn’t seem as likely to spread.

I moved down the side of the building, and set another group of bushes on fire.

Some of the men were obviously unhappy about this whole project, and I could see why. A week ago I would have said setting fires right next to a building full of people was stupidly dangerous. But today it seemed a lot better than the alternative. Even aside from the monster ambushes, I had no doubt the plants would turn into something nasty if we ignored them long enough. Maybe they’d send runners growing through the walls to infest people in their sleep. Or just erode the building bit by bit, until the whole thing collapsed.

There was a flurry of gunfire as another group of ants tested our perimeter. I burned off a clump of bushes in the middle of the parking lot to give us a better field of fire, and then did another section of the hotel’s perimeter. Our firefighting measures seemed to be working so far, and somebody got the bright idea of making a temporary barricade. A bunch of folding tables were brought out and set on their sides, making an obstacle that the ants would struggle with but we could easily move.

I was just starting to think we had this figured out when a flock of pigeons dive bombed us. Whatever they were dropping looked like poo, which would have been bad enough, but when it hit a target the stuff detonated with a sound like a firecracker. The little explosions weren’t lethal, but they were powerful enough to inflict some painful wounds.

One of them hit my arm while I was trying to sort out what was happening, and for the first time my defense aura actually did me some good. The biological bomb detonated with a loud bang, but it barely did anything. It felt like a light punch, and I doubted I’d even have a bruise. That was a far cry from the shredded clothing and bleeding wounds I saw on other people who’d been hit.

Naturally the whole crowd started shooting the moment they realized what was happening, but a small bird on the wing is a pretty tough target. A few of them fell out of the sky, or just blew apart from the impact of a more powerful round. But most of the flock survived, and started to circle around for another pass.

Well, the good thing about our methodical progress was that it gave me plenty of time to recover my mana. I had plenty of juice to throw together a big explosive force missile, and mix in some fire for extra destructive power. I waited for the flock of pigeons to line up their second attack run, and then pitched it into the front of the group as they closed in.

The fiery explosion looked spectacular, like something you’d see in a movie. Most monsters would have just gotten singed, since it didn’t actually have all that much power behind it. But pigeons? A whole clump of them fell out of the air, stunned and on fire. The rest of the flock, which probably numbered a hundred or so, broke off the attack and scattered.

“I got one!” Jenny announced excitedly. “Holy cow, I can shoot a pigeon out of the air with a pistol now! These skill upgrades are sweet!”

“I think we’d best get some duck hunters up on the roof,” Earl drawled.

“If you think that will work,” I agreed. “Short break to treat the wounded and reorganize?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t it feel like we’re being tested for weaknesses? If something out there is watching us, I don’t want it thinking that attack worked. My girl Linda is a nurse, and she’s already got an aid station set up in the lobby. You just keep at it, and we’ll handle things.”

I wasn’t sure if he was right, or just being paranoid, but it wasn’t worth arguing about it. So I carried on with burning away the bushes while the injured guards retreated inside for treatment, and a handful of fresh faces came out to replace them. Earl asked around for experienced hunters who’d brought shotguns with them, and soon had a group of them watching the sky from both the parking lot and the roof of the hotel.

Finally we finished off the landscaping, and I found myself contemplating the expanse of small trees and underbrush on the other side of the parking lot. At the rate it was growing it would be full-blown jungle in another day or two, and we couldn’t afford a hazard like that growing right up to the edge of the parking lot. It would have to go. But that was probably where the ants came from, and there was room for plenty of other hazards out there.

“Alright, people, now for the big one,” I called.

“Just a sec,” Earl replied. He conferred with an older man in fatigues, and orders went out. The defense force finished shifting their barricades to cover my new position, and allocating men to watch in every direction. With the parking lot full of cars it still wouldn’t be easy to keep smaller monsters from sneaking up on us, but it was better than nothing.

“Alright, go ahead,” Earl finally called.

I nodded, and lit up the edge of the encroaching jungle with a sustained jet of flames. I swept it back and forth, lighting bushes and small trees on fire along a wide front.

A horde of giant ants emerged from the underbrush off to my right, and rushed the militiamen.

A deafening flurry of gunfire met them, and ants immediately began to fall. But there were dozens of them, and they weren’t easy targets. Some of them took cover under the parked cars, using their small size to stay under the vehicles as they ran up the aisle towards us. Others stayed in the open, but skittered and jinked erratically as they advanced.

Jenny and Shasa turned towards the fighting, and actually took a step in that direction before I pulled them back.

“Hang on, girls. Something about this doesn’t feel right.”

The leading ants had almost closed the distance, but there weren’t enough of them. A few dozen ants against nearly thirty armed men? That wasn’t going to go well for them. So unless they were just acting on blind instinct…

I was expecting a simple bait and switch. Another group of ants attacking from the opposite direction. Maybe a return of the bomber pigeons, if they were actually working together. Something along those lines.

I was not expecting a bunch of fist-sized holes to appear in the ground along the edge of the parking lot, and start spewing out giant ants right at my feet. Too late I realized that aiming my flame jet at the larger plants had left the grass and underbrush right at the edge of the concrete untouched, creating a safe zone that small creatures could swarm through.

“Oh, shit!” Jenny exclaimed, sweeping her spear through a pair of ants.

Shasa yipped in surprise, and stomped on another ant.

I drew my pistol, but realized before I could even aim that it wasn’t enough. Half a dozen tunnels all crowded with ants meant we’d be swarmed in seconds.

“Back up!” I ordered, stepping to one side and warming up another flame jet with my free hand.

Three ants immediately tried to jump on me, but my spell was a split second faster. The rush of fire caught them in midair, turning them into flaming missiles that thrashed helplessly as they bounced off me and fell to the ground. I played the flame jet over the nearest tunnel mouth, setting grass and ants burning, then swept it across to the next one.

Shasa whaled away with her mace, blocking an acid spray with her shield and stomping at anything that got close. Jenny dodged and wove around the attacks that came her way, stabbing frantically with her spear. A few of the men directed their fire in our direction, picking off ants that weren’t too close to us. But the defense force was an ad hoc group with barely a semblance of organization, and they were too distracted with their own fight to react quickly to ours.

Most of the ants were entirely focused on me. Like they’d realized I was the main threat, and if they could just kill me no one would be burning down their cozy little patch of jungle. They rushed in from every direction, some spitting acid while others tried to bite or jump on me. I fended them off as best I could with my flame jet, while my mana supply shrank precipitously. Flames spread across the grass, engulfing more ants and blocking another tunnel, but there was no time to finish the job. There were too many ants already, and more were emerging faster than I could kill them.

Then a furry blur struck the ants that were trying to flank me, reducing them to a spray of gore and broken chitin.

“Bugs. Ick. They taste nasty,” Bitsy complained.

“Hurry up with the fire, Tom,” Mitsi ordered. “Show these stupid monsters why everything is afraid of humans. Um, except for cats, of course.”

The catgirls were as fast as murder squirrels, and I swear their claws shredded ants without even touching them. Their deadly arrival distracted the ants for a critical moment, disrupting their advance and thinning their numbers enough to let me focus.

I covered another tunnel mouth in flames, cutting off the flow of reinforcements. Shasa howled, sending half the ants reeling in fear, and Jenny opened up with her pistol. That gave me time to burn another tunnel, and another, and then suddenly we were running out of enemies.

A minute later I was watching the field burn, surrounded by monster corpses and panting for breath. Sweat poured down my body under my armor, and my mana and defense aura were both dangerously low. But a few shallow bites and an acid burn on my arm were the extent of my injuries, and that hardly seemed worth noting.

“Everyone alright?” I asked.

“Just… peachy,” Jenny gasped out.

“Stupid bugs are no match for cats!” Mitsi announced. Bitsy was too busy grooming her hands to add anything.

“I’m okay,” Shasa said. “I got bit a lot, but it’s not bad. Wow, this aura thing really works.”

The defense force wasn’t quite finished with their fight, but they were obviously at the mopping up stage. I did a quick scan of our surroundings, and found no other threats.

“When did you guys get here?” Jenny asked.

“We were watching from the window,” Bitsy explained. “Then we saw the ants were gonna get you, and we decided to help.”

Shasa looked up at the building, and back at the catgirls. “How did you get down so fast?”

Mitsi sniffed. “We opened the window and jumped. Duh. It’s a good thing we were here to save you.”

“Yeah, that was great. Thank you!” Shasa replied innocently. “So what do we do now, Tom?”

“Collect our points, let the fire burn while my mana regenerates, and then do it again,” I said. “The fire isn’t spreading much, so I expect it’ll take another hour or two to clear out this field. But I bet that was most of the ants.”

“They were definitely trying to assassinate you,” Jenny pointed out. “I bet there’s a hive queen who can see through their eyes and give orders, or something like that. But I think you’re right, that was probably all the troops they could throw at us.”

As we were talking Earl finished directing the evacuation of the wounded, and came over to touch base with us. But then we were interrupted by a sound that seemed completely out of place in this grim new world of monsters and bloodshed.

My phone was ringing.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Tom? This is Sheryl, with the Dragonslayers? Listen, the boys and I have gotten into a bit of a bind here, and I was really hoping you could help us out.”

I looked around at the burning field, and the horde of monster corpses that were just starting to seep mist.

“What do you need?” I asked.

“Well, one of the guys found something that looked like treasure on the map, and we decided to go check it out. Turns out the System spawns more than just monsters. But we kind of got chased into a safe zone by a bunch of giant boars, and the guys are all banged up and Hanna is out of mana, and I don’t think we can make it back to our trucks without help. So, um, I was thinking we’d give up a split of the treasure, if you guys could help us out?”