Their prisoner was an eighteen year old Fighter named Sam. They got very few secrets or explanations for the attack from her. What they did get was a picture of what was going on in the city of Dewport.
It was not encouraging stuff.
Dewport's history was a mirror of West Hills’, but with much less drama and more desperation and despair. A Slaver Node hadn't festered below them and sent an army of zombie nodes to spread chaos through the city. The Lurker of Loving Purpose hadn't dropped in to smack their toughest Users around and make cryptic denouncements. As far as he knew, they hadn’t had to deal with the mind bending nature of the Feral Artisans.
Instead, there's had been a slow but desperate battle against Spore Tyrants on one side, while trying to hold back the Inoculation on the other.
While that seemed like it would be an easier fight than West Hills, the small city hadn’t had the advantage of being an official Enclave like West Hills did. For whatever reason, they had received much less support from the System. They were granted fewer Users and other important perks, like medical centres and the occasional orbital strike.
Derrick found this a bit odd, as the fight in Dewport should have been the easier one to win. Dewport hadn't had the Grey Legion snatching people out of their homes or a Feral Artisan sucking an entire parking lot into another dimension. The Inoculation was troubling but ultimately there was only so much damage it could do to Users.
If the System had wanted to, it should have been able to push back the Spore Tyrants relatively easily. Maybe the alien AI had just made a mistake or it was just the random nature of Injections. West Hills might have just won the teleportation lottery.
Anyway, the point was that things had gotten dark in Dewport. The Scourges sucked for everyone. One day you were an office worker named Becky or Tod, the next you were fighting tentacle monsters in the sewers because an alien AI disguised as a vending machine had put a chip in your brain and a melee weapon in your hand.
Things were bad enough when you knew your family was safe and that you would have a safe place to fall back too. Dewport and its Users had lacked those small comforts.
The worst part was that the city had lacked the large System shelters offered in West Hills, which meant regular humans had nowhere to hide and had succumbed to the Spore Tyrant's infectious spores and the Inoculation in huge numbers. Apparently, even now, the smell of burning bodies, mixed with the pungent scent of mold and rot, covered the ruined shell of the city. Well over half of the city's population was thrown into those fires before things got under control. The survivors had taken to wearing their masks in their sleep, to escape the smell.
Derrick couldn't help but grimace at the thought of that bit of horror. The idea of people fighting under those conditions was as horrifying as it was inspiring.
The military base in the area had helped. But the nature of the military and those that served in it meant that few of them had become Users right away. They had tried to stem the tide but were not equipped or trained to fight killer alien fungus. Most of the soldiers died before they could become Guards and benefit from the innate resilience of Users.
The survivors that became Users had stepped up though, realizing that they lacked the numbers to save the city, they had worked with and encouraged other Users to fight.
Still, the Spore Tyrant’s weren’t the alpha Scourge for nothing. Multiple times, the desperate combat Users had been on the edge of losing the city entirely, near overwhelmed by the Spore Tyrant’s auril fuelled growth and clouds of toxic spores.
The Primal Scourge spread through the sewers like fire and choked the air with clouds of spores, using the bodies of the fallen as food and weapons. Sporelings and Bleeding Tooth Behemoths swarmed through the streets in unstoppable waves that tore Users apart or melted them with acid. Defeat was inevitable.
Enter the Captain.
At first he'd just been a regular Guard User. A nameless soldier from the army, first to battle and last out of it. Commendable but hardly unique. Derrick's old friend Jenny, had been like that. As casualties mounted the Captain survived and more often than not, found themselves in charge of the efforts to save the city from the monsters that would devour it.
According to Sam, the Captain never slept or rested, just fought tooth and nail for the entire first week. Half a dozen times the hero of Dewport had been declared dead. Buried alive in flaming rubble, dragged below the ground by grasping tentacles or riddled with poisonous darts. Only to show up for the next desperate fight with a flamethrower in one hand and a sword in the other, shouting encouragement and beating the inhuman back with powerful blows and superhuman will. When the System had declared the city free from immediate threats and officially recognized it as a safezone, there had only been one choice for their leader.
Dewport, a small lakeside city of no particular importance, before the Scourges, had a population of about forty thousand. Even if most of those people were now dead, that put an army at the Captain's command.
That command, currently seemed to be sending heavily armed and fanatical infiltrators into West Hills for purposes unknown.
“Well, that does suck,” Meg admitted and took a drink from her silver flask. It was an ornate thing, moulded to display eagles and snakes. A moment of contemplation turned into a scowl. “After we finish this Flint Creek business, I'll need to set up some kind of border patrol. Not really what my boys are good at, I have to admit.”
Her, Derrick and Blake were sitting on a patio that was attached to a roadside hotel and bar. It was a big patio but the three of them were the only ones on it, although Breakneck members swarmed the general area. The black haired biker leader had shooed the others away.
“Hire new ones,” Derrick sagely advised. “You should have the points and there's no shortage of people that need training.”
“The whole Captain story sounds like propaganda to me,” Blake announced. “Said hero would have been wearing a mask whenever people saw him. Maybe different dudes wearing the same outfit, Dread Pirate Roberts style? System gear is tough, you could just strip it off the corpse and slap it on another guy.”
“All of them with the same name?” Derrick asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Maybe profile names can be changed,” Blake answered. “Has anyone looked into it?”
“It could be mostly true,” Meg said with a shrug. “It's really not that different from Derrick’s own story. Just better publicized. If he'd been smart enough, he could have done the same thing. We could all be serving under the Savior of West Hills. Derrick the Red. Friend of Crusaders and enemy of the Grey Legion. Might even have been easier, the Legion is a more photogenic enemy.”
Meg shot him a mocking smile.
Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!
The leader of Breakneck seemed to be doing well for herself. Her skin was still healthily tanned and her hair was in an almost casual ponytail. It she found leading the biker gang turned pseudo military high speed attack force stressful, it didn't show.
The slightly stocky woman was wearing the same armor he'd seen on the rest of her group, a tight fitting black outfit with heavy padding and a black jacket thrown over it. The Users of Red Works wore customized masks with hoods, but unsurprisingly, the Users of Breakneck preferred full helmets. Each jacket and helmet had the Breakneck symbol blazoned on at least one spot, a stylized knight made from horizontal lines white background, lance down and charging.
“I like the logo,” Blake said, his thoughts apparently echoing Derrick's own. “You managed to convince your people that flaming or winged skulls were overdone?”
“Just barely,” Meg said with a snort. “Almost had a rebellion on my hands. Worth it though. I felt it would be better to leave the more obvious biker paraphernalia behind though. Do some re-branding. At this point, we have three times the number of recruits as old hands anyway.”
“Probably wise, cavalry and knights are very inspiring images. Not to mention you’re much less likely to cause a panic than with the flaming skulls.” Derrick agreed, picturing an army of armed and faceless black bikers covered in flaming skulls pulling into a town to 'save' it.
“What news from Flint Creek? I'm anxious to know what's lurking up there. Any luck clearing the roads?”
According to Mathew, they should a nightmare of roots thanks to the Inoculation mutating the trees.
“No,” The older woman said. She took a swig and shook her head.
“The roots are that tough?” Derrick asked. “Or is some Scourge giving you trouble.”
“Neither,” she replied, unhappily. “At least not yet. We didn't have to clear the roads. Someone already did that. That was suspicious enough I didn’t want to check it out until you arrived.”
“Users?” Derrick asked, surprised. “The people from Dewport?”
Had the User he killed been part of an attempt to spy on them or prevent them from heading to Flint Creek? But why? Maybe...
“No,” the biker chick interrupted and shook her head again. “Something has torn right through the roadblocks. Shredded them and actually patched the roads up. It's a Scourge as far as we can tell. The patches aren’t asphalt or anything the System makes and it seems to lead outwards in every direction from somewhere near Flint Creek.. The problem is that the System is being even less helpful than normal. We’ve gotten no missions or even hints to what we might be up against. It’s enough to make a girl nervous.”
“I'm not sure how reliable The System will be for this mission,” Derrick admitted, thinking of the Hollow Majesties. “The mission was to investigate tampering, not someone forcing their way into the bunkers. There are Scourges that can trick the System, to a degree and this sounds like their work.”
Derrick saw Blake push his chair back and rise to his feet. He wasn't surprised, his second in command tended to avoid conversation about the Hollow Majesties. The blond User hadn’t been visibly upset or even surprised when Kate had turned out to be under the influence of a Scourge, but he also wasn’t OK with it. Derrick assumed he had clued in to Kate’s predicament before Derrick himself and was simply aware of how little could be done about it.
Neither of them wanted to talk about it and so they didn’t.
“I'm going to take off,” the blond User said. He smiled at Meg and walked away. Meg gave him a nod and then turned to Derrick with a serious look.
“I don't suppose you've got more for me than just that?” Meg asked darkly.
“Not really,” Derrick said, unwilling to talk about Hollow Majesties. It wasn't like he knew much anyway. “Just secure buildings being less secure than they should be. Stealth and dagger Scourges.”
“How do they fight though?” Meg pressed. Derrick could tell he wouldn't be able to wave this away. He knew personally how annoying vague and ominous statements could be. The problem was that he didn’t really know all that much.
“Fancy toys powered by manna,” he answered. “This is all guesswork, but I think they like to use the System's own manna and resources. I really don't know that much about it, I’ve only encountered them once. I spend all my time punching Grey Legion and stepping on Spore Tyrant nodes.”
“Fair enough,” she said and leaned back into her seat. “I was hoping at least one of us was good at subtle. It would be hard to be worse than me.”
There was a pause in the conversation.
“So, I have to ask.” Meg said. “Why are you here anyway? What dire need brings Derrick the Red to my rescue? DOon’t get me wrong, I like you, but we don't need you here. This is the kind of mission we’re good at. Go places and get things done.”
Another pause. Derrick was not great at putting his thoughts into words. Why had he ran up here so fast anyway? To save people? To make those damn aliens pay?
“Things out west have gotten a little stale. It’s all just mopping up tiny node’s and Grey Agent cells,” he informed her truthfully. “Not that I'm here because I'm bored. That would be stupid. I'm fine with safe and boring.”
Perhaps he should have thought his actions out better if he had charged here without even knowing why.
“It's... I smell secrets in Flint Creek. This seems important,” he stated. “And if the human race is going to survive, we need to be informed. We can't just fight the obvious enemies. I've had a few peeks behind the curtain of the System and I saw very few real allies back there. All I want is to know is the names and nature of my enemies so that I can confront them and make them bleed.”
Grey Legion, Hollow Majesties, Feral Artisans, Spore Tyrants and even System Authorities. Gods and Monsters. So many enemies and so many mysteries. Creatures beyond the understanding of a small little human no one, never mind that no one's judgment. The Hollow Majesties were the least of his enemies and they were still so out of his reach it was comical.
“This feels like an opportunity for growth,” he explained with a wry grin and scratched at a small scar on his chin. “That’s what I'm all about.”
Meg gave him an inscrutable look and took another drink from her flask. Hmmm. Perhaps he'd said too much. He'd gotten a little carried away. Meg and he were allies, it was true. But mostly of convenience. He didn’t really know her that well.
“What brings Breakneck up north?” Derrick asked over the silence his answer had spawned.
“We’re here because we can be, and the world has gotten too damn small for my liking,” Meg said without a second of hesitation, as if the thought was always on the tip of her tongue. “I want the open roads back. I want the night back. I want to go where I please and I will crush everything that gets between me and what I want.”
The leader of Breakneck's mouth was a grim line as she spoke and there was a dangerous glint in her eyes. She was, Derrick knew, being absolutely sincere.
Their eyes met and Derrick flashed teeth. He had no problem with her goals. In fact, he wholeheartedly approved of them.
All of a sudden, Meg began laughing. This caught Derrick off guard. It must have shown.
“I'm sorry,” Meg said, slapped her knee and took a second to collect herself. She failed, let out a snicker and then finally calmed down.
Derrick was somewhat offended. Had he been the victim of some elaborate prank?
“I've seen the videos, but it catches you by surprise. I can see how you ended up on the top of the heap,” Meg said. “You definitely have a way of bringing out the best and worst of people. At the same time even.”
He was confused. What was she talking about?
“The hilarious part though, is that you have no idea what I'm talking about do you? If you keep it up, I might just change my mind about you being my type.”
“You're giving me too much credit,” Derrick said carefully. Did she think he had manipulated her? Huh, it might an auril thing though. Better to change the subject, he really didn’t want to talk about auril and any mind control powers it may or may not have. .
“It doesn't seem like there's any reason we can't do this mission together,” he said.
Meg grinned at him toothily.
“Nope, doesn't seem like there is.” She replied. “Our styles aren't exactly complimentary though. I'm not sure how you can help us get to Flint Creek faster. I don't think either of us wants to take the time to scout the area out on foot.”
Derrick shrugged.
“You've got twice the Users I do here,” he said. “They're much more heavily armed too. We'll do this your way, me and mine will just hang back until you need us.”
“Really?” Meg asked, seemingly skeptical. “You came all this way to ride bitch? You don't have any demands or suggestions? No deep insights or expectations?”
That amused Derrick. As if he cared about authority or rank beyond its usefulness. He knew he wasn't the best to lead here, so he would let the more qualified person take care of it for him. She'd proven her qualifications by the merit of still being alive. She was right when she said they didn't have time to do things his way.
“Not a single one. If everything goes perfectly,” he confirmed with a smile. “It will be like we're not even here. Until we get to Flint Creek anyway. But what are the chances of something going wrong?”
“Fair fucking enough,” Meg admitted and stood up. “No point in delaying anymore. I'll give your little convoy a couple escorts and we can set out right away. Let's saddle up and ride out.”