“A motherfucking dragon?! What kind of fucking task is that, just kill a dragon, you’ll be right!”
Watching as Sheep paces back and forth, I could tell everyone else is very agitated by this task as well. I had first seen it before they left to get the previous task done, but now we knew what we were looking at had made all of us a bit frustrated.
“I thought this quest would be a reward of sorts, yet we need to kill a dragon?!”
“Perhaps it’s not a dragon like we think, but this world's version of a dragon?”
“A dragon is a dragon, there wouldn’t be much difference, right?”
Excluding Aerith, who hadn’t received the final survival basics quest, we had all fell into thought over what a ‘dragon’ in this world could be. There were many versions of dragons in our world, the most common being the big fire breathing ones, which is what we all had in mind. Sighing, I tap my fingers on the desk to get everyone’s attention.
“Forget about it for now, we have other priorities. We have five functioning cars, three sedans, a minivan and the campervan. Aerith doesn’t know how to drive and Lemon had still been learning back in the day. That leaves four of us to drive. Our first order of business is to head to petrol stations and get as much fuel as we can. We also need to find a route out of town that isn’t blocked off by the dozens of cars. We’ll rest for the remainder of today then we’ll get to work tomorrow.”
“There’s a petrol station close by here, so we can head there first.” Nodding to Ghost’s suggestion, we discussed what we needed before leaving the town itself. It hadn’t rained since we arrived in this world, though we had seen rain clouds so we were hopeful since it would mean water. Food is another necessity that we require. We couldn’t buy anymore through the shop and our canned food was running low and while we did have the rice and many more bags at the warehouse it’s not exactly nutritious.
“We can always come back for everything in the warehouse, my worry is committing to the road and finding no suitable places to set up at. We only have enough food for two weeks between all of us.” Winter’s comment hits hard, food is indeed a pain point for us right now. Water is fine, we just need to purify any bottles we found, but food isn’t exactly purifiable.
“Even if I do set up a farm, we still need to process the crops, raise livestock and more until it’s at an acceptable level. With the cap on how much we can buy, it’s highly possible that livestock is only purchasable once before it disappears, meaning we have one shot at raising and breeding them. Not only that, but it’ll take years for us to start actually being able to eat said livestock.”
“So our best bet is non-perishables that haven’t been salvaged by the past residents?” Sheep mutters while thinking over what Ghost had said.
“A lot of problems to resolve before we can truly be set up for the long term. With the solar panel blueprints I can at least get consistent power at a base or building, Lemon can follow up and wire a place up. Alright, tomorrow we get fuel, Aerith and I will remain behind. Once we have collected enough, we’ll take the minivan and campervan to head out of town and check out the places we have marked. I think the potential dam is the most promising, it’s quick the distance but we’ll check it out first.”
“If anything we could set up a temporary base there and build elsewhere.” With Winter’s comment, we arrange the schedule for the night shift and turn in for the night. Once the sun arose and the Husks wander off to wherever they go during the day, Ghost, Lemon, Winter and Sheep head out while I remain behind with Aerith, the two of us planning to go through the maps in search for any potential hotspots like weapon stores, warehouses and so on in the hopes of finding more.
With the maps stuck onto the wall with a few nails, we carefully went through them, neither of us talking. Like me, Aerith didn’t speak much when focused on a task, the only sounds in the room were of our pencils occasionally marking a location on the maps.
The town is as Ghost had reported, massive. It’s nearly the size of a city, though the lack of skyscrapers meant it hadn’t become a city. Or this world didn’t build skyscrapers, meaning this very well may have been classed as a city. We couldn’t understand the words, legend or markings but we got the general gist of things as we kept working over the map itself.
After a few hours, we finished marking most of the map and standing back we viewed it carefully, our own notes next to them that speculated what these locations might be. Ranging from shops to warehouses, I sighed as I sat in a chair.
“So many possible locations, so little time during the day to explore them all.” Aerith sits next to me as I complain to her.
“We could always set up small bases between these locations?”
“Good idea, but the problem stems from how small our group is. We’d need a lot of time to explore every place and if it’s a miss we waste a lot of time. We can’t use the cars in the town either to make the trips easier, the roads are blocked by too many cars to be consistent and the sound would only attract Husks.” Pointing at the map, towards the inner parts of the town I spoke again. “Ghost explored close to the town square before, when he was looking for survivors. There are Heavies and Crawlers all over the place, and while I’m certain we could get through it without much trouble, the problem is that we don’t know what else there might be, after all the System wants us to kill a fucking dragon.”
Aerith looked at where I had pointed and put her hand to her chin, deep in thought. She then asked me about what Ghost had reported and I told her the details, including the acid-like damage and how the Heavies and Crawlers appeared to be patrolling the area. After staring at the map for a little bit more, Aerith opened her mouth and spoke slowly.
“It sounds like they’re protecting something within the town itself, or at least think they are. Husks, from what we know, aren’t intelligent and rely on their instincts to survive, they’ve never shown themselves able to do more than run at us and attack with basic attacks. So why are they suddenly patrolling an area, it doesn’t make sense. There is also the weirdness of them disappearing into the town itself upon daybreak, are they heading into the inner parts of the town?”
A bit surprised at what Aerith said, I had to reconsider a point she brought up; the Husks indeed did not have intelligence. Looking towards the center of the map I didn’t see anything special, in fact it’s mostly what you’d expect from the middle of a town or city, a lot of big buildings which we assumed to be government type buildings. But that’s based on when the map had been made, anything could have happened since.
“So either it’s extremely valuable to us or dangerous…or both. Whatever it is they’re potentially protecting isn’t worth the effort to investigate, at least not yet. We do have guns once again, but we need to remember we don’t exactly have the supplies to constantly use them. I think we should target the most obvious locations and leave it at that for now, what do you think, Aerith?”
Aerith looked surprised that I had asked her before looking once more at the map and nodding. “The closer ones would suit us if we intend to leave the town sooner rather than later. With enough fuel we can drive and power a generator, letting us purify water.”
Tapping my finger on my knee while looking at the map, I had to agree with Aerith’s suggestion about hitting the closer locations and leaving the rest for later. Right now our priority is getting out of the town, finding a suitable location and setting up a base to ensure our safety. Not only that, we needed renewable sources of water, food and fuel to ensure we don’t die in the middle of nowhere. The problems still existed, but we were starting to see a way to put our foot in the door of sustainability.
“If only we could somehow break the System to get it to give us what we want.” Aerith sighed as I turned to her, a questioning look on my face as she looked started for a moment.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“What do you mean?”
Aerith ponders for a moment before looking at me. “This System looks and acts like a game’s System, right? Then wouldn’t that mean we’re connected to a sort of computer or a computer is running it? So couldn’t we like, you know, hack it?”
I’ve had thoughts on what Aerith is saying about what the System is and after thinking over her question for a moment, I spoke my mind.
“Keep in mind we don’t know anything right now, so this is all theory to all of us and is heavily based on our world's current knowledge and technological advances. I have considered the possibility of us being in a game-like simulation, like those various anime you might’ve seen, but realistically it’s impossible. First point is that our senses are real, far too real for any deep dive technology. It's not possible with our world's technology to make such a realistic simulation that includes touch, sound, sight, taste and pain. Not only that, but to connect with others with no input lag at all is impossible, even with another decade of development, input delay will always exist because information needs to be sent back and forth to another point, like a server.
“Secondly, everything works. There have been no texture bugs, no bugs with ourselves, the environment is interactable which is near impossible on such a scale as it currently is and the System responds instantly with no delay. At this point after a month and a bit of running the server would’ve had huge problems with keeping so much active and working, it would’ve needed to restart well before this point. Perhaps the technology is advanced, but it would need to be so advanced that it outpaces our worlds by several decades.
“Lastly, we currently do not know what the System is exactly. We know it’s at the very least omnipotent. It’s able to give us quests, increase our strength, provide us with raw knowledge, sell us items or even buy them. It’s far far more than a video game is capable of, at least looking at our world’s standard. If you could be given knowledge like this, it would be world breaking technology in our world, there wouldn’t be a need for schools.
“As to if we could hack it…well, lets say the System isn’t a God or sorts and it is indeed a computer, we’d need to find a vulnerability point to exploit, know what programming language it uses and know what we would be looking for, it’s not as simple as typing a few words in Python. In theory, even if it’s a God-like being, then sure it’ll be possible, but we would need so much more information to even begin and that’s only if the System isn’t self-aware and catches onto what we’re doing.”
Aerith sat there taking everything I had said in with a frown on her face before pinching herself slightly, causing me to chuckle slightly. I forget that she’s only fourteen, she very much has an air about her that makes her seem older, especially regarding her thoughts and ideas.
“If it’s a God, couldn’t we talk to it?”
“Ah, then we’ll get into the semantics of what a ‘God’ is. We’ve tried asking it questions but never got a response. Perhaps there is a way to communicate with whoever made it, but for now we need to focus on ourselves and surviving. Let’s get everything we’ve marked down written down and we’ll craft a plan for the next few days.”
For the rest of the day, Aerith and I fine tuned the plans while the other four moved between the petrol station they had found and here. They had great success with obtaining fuel, the tanks under the station itself had quite a lot, so they were bringing as many jerry cans as they could bring back, filling the vehicles we would be using and heading back out. By the end of the day, they had completely filled the cars and gotten multiple full jerry cans to use.
After a rather uneventful night, Sheep and I headed out to the campervan with a simple plan; check out the heating system for the shower and the microwave, our plan is to potentially dismantle both then reassemble it to learn the blueprint. While I wanted to start shifting away from needing the System, right now it isn’t possible, and if I could learn more blueprints and build more machines I could get more Job Points.
We focused on the microwave first. It’s in fantastic condition as it is, the only thing it needs is electricity, same with the lights in here. The oven seemed to run off gas and electricity, though we had no idea how to get gas for it.
Carefully watching as Sheep dismantled the microwave slowly, I had to admire how easily he made it seem. Upon asking, he said that whenever he starts to dismantle anything the System gives him knowledge on how to dismantle it, similar to blueprints except he didn’t seem to have a disadvantage. Then again, we had only been dismantling basic technology and guns, nothing advanced at least yet. His Job Points mainly revolved around reducing the time it took to dismantle, the condition of the parts and how long it takes for the System to dismantle those parts and the condition of them.
“Think you got it?” Moving aside as he finishes, I stand over the dismantled microwave and breathe out.
“Only one way to find out.” I had memorized most of what he had done and, reversing it, I used his tools to slowly rebuild the microwave, and once I finished the knowledge of how to build the machine entered my mind.
Blueprint: Microwave Acquired.
+2 Job Points
This is the first time you have constructed this machine.
+3 Job Points.
“Good shit Ruby. Now, shall we do the hot water system?”
“Sure.” We had found where the boiler had been for the shower earlier. I had to admit, this way of learning blueprints is extremely overpowered, though it is limited to what we can dismantle and reassemble, it also meant a load of Job Points early on.
Currently I sat where I had been, having just unlocked Advanced Blueprints, with the next three nodes similar to the earlier ones. Computers, Radio and Electricity. Those were the three nodes, each having three levels, meaning three new blueprints. Electricity is interesting to me, as it would mean potential ways of continuous power. I had the solar panel blueprint thanks to the Nexus event, but the problems of building them is that we didn’t have certain parts and when built it couldn’t exactly be moved a lot.
Radio is also a big advantage to us, we need a form of long distance communication. It would allow us to work in teams of two or three and be able to respond to each other at any time. It could also mean we could communicate with others in this world if they also have radios.
Computers, while tempting, had no priority right now. Without continuous power to run computers, they wouldn’t amount to anything. They wouldn’t even come with an operating system and while I knew coding, I couldn’t exactly just code an entire operating system from scratch. Nevermind Python or Java, I’d have to go with Assembly and Gods only know I hardly know any Assembly. It is possible the System could teach you coding, but I didn’t want to risk it, not yet.
Reassembling the hot water system, which we happily discovered to be electric, I gained another blueprint and two more Job Points. Being able to build both of these with the materials we could easily access meant easier Job Points, but for now…
“For now, we’ll work together to dismantle and reassemble machines that are easily built. I wonder if this is what the System intended…”
“Well, it’s our little exploit either way. So what's next?” Sheep replies as we walk back towards the office.
“Getting out of this town. The others should be returning soon with whatever they could bring back in terms of rice, coffee, sugar and powdered milk. We’ll load everything up this afternoon and head out to the first location tomorrow. Though I am a little nervous, no building and spending the night in a car is a bit rough.”
We were worried that Husks would swarm us from the ground at night. We knew we had to risk it, though Sheep and Aerith had both brought up a great point, that Husks don’t just appear in cars or buildings for a reason we didn’t know. We planned to cover the windows and kill all lights and power once nightfall arrived in the hope that we wouldn’t be swarmed.
To prepare, we have been watching the Husks at night and never have they ever once attempted to get into a car or house for no reason. We could only hope that remained the case, we needed to risk it to advance with building a base.
“It just never gets easier, does it, Rubes?”
“Mm. I just want answers, at least tell us what’s coming and when.” Sighing loudly, I looked around in case the System decided to drop a quest or warning at that moment, but nothing came.
“Well, staying in the town won’t be viable. We noticed yesterday an increase in Crawlers roaming around and it’s possible more types are out there.”
“Not to mention the dragon we’re expected to hunt. Once we have a place to set up a base, we'll expand quickly as long as we build our foundation strongly.”
Sheep and I remained silent, both of us understanding that while our future still seemed bleak, we were at least building up the hope that we could solidify our chances of surviving in this world, though we still had a lot of unknown to face.