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Max scrunched his still-closed eyes and rolled over onto this side as the noise of metal tapping against metal invaded his sleepy brain, letting out a small groan of annoyance. It was only a moment later when a hand was placed on his shoulder, shaking him slightly, that he opened one eye…
And then promptly shot straight upright, darting back from the hand faster than he could even react himself. How did this person get in his apartment?! Wait…
Blinking, he glanced around, the surrounding area, a clearing in the bush, making it clear that he was outside. And with that realisation, his memories of the day before came flooding back to him.
Glancing back towards where he had been sitting, he saw a worried-looking Dorothy with her hands up in a non-threatening manner, as her eyes were glued to his own. Feeling bad for startling her, Max gave her a small wave.
“Sorry about that. Good Morning, Dorothy. It seems that I’m a bit jumpier in my sleep than I had thought.”
The older woman’s expression shifted into a smile, her eyes closing as her hands lowered into her lap before she stood up, dusting off her pants. “That's alright, dear. The last little while has been rather stressful for all of us.”
That got a snort out of Max as he pushed himself off the ground and to his feet, glancing around the campsite. The portal to the TEST FRACTURE still glowed with purple light and hummed with a low, bass-y tone, but he could tell that it was slightly smaller than it had been the day before.
A quick check of his SYSTEM showed why.
TEST FRACTURE Completed
Time Remaining until closure: 14 Hours, 45 Minutes, 23 Seconds
With the time he had spent travelling to the TEST FRACTURE, completing the TEST FRACTURE, waiting for Damian to complete it as well, and then also sleeping, most of the time that the TEST FRACTURE’s were going to exist in their weakened states was already almost over.
There was still today, however, and as Max approached the spot where the bonfire had been the night before, and joined the people who were awake around the smoldering embers, he heard Damian cough slightly.
“Max, good morning. We were actually just talking about you, wanted to ask you something.”
Raising his eyebrow, Max motioned for Damian to continue, grabbing onto a muesli bar that one of the people of the group passed his way and chomping down on it. “Go ahead, mate. What’s up?”
Damian glanced over to the TEST FRACTURE, and then back at him, but if he even realised it, it didn’t show on his face. “Last night, you and I proved that the TEST FRACTUREs are legitimate and that everything the ‘SYSTEM screens’ were saying was true.”
He continued after eating the last of his own muesli bar. “There’s only until about sundown before the TEST FRACTUREs close down, or revert into regular FRACTUREs, or whatever is going to happen to them. Before that happens-”
“You want me to stay here a little while longer, keep an eye on camp, while you help some of the others get through their own TEST FRACTUREs, right?”
Damian paused as Max interrupted him, but chuckled softly, nodding his head. “Yeah, that's exactly it. Well, I was gonna ask you to either do that, or escort them and I’ll stay outside, but we can do it the first way if you want.”
Max glanced around the group, noting their lack of… any sort of weaponry. That would be a problem, as especially a couple of the much older people would need assistance against the Skeletons.
He glanced back to where he had been sleeping, spotting his own cricket bat. He didn’t want to give it to any of them to borrow, but he didn’t have anything else on him… hmm. “How about, before we start, I go out and try to find some branches or rocks or something, so that these guys can have some sort of weapon when they go through.”
Damian nodded, his hand coming to rest on one of his holsters, and Max would bet that he had just had a similar thought to his own about his weapon. “I think that's a good idea, kid. Just don't go hurting yourself, alright? I saw how much faster you are now. Just make sure to practise before you tumble.”
Max just laughed at that before chomping down the last of his muesli bar, and then darting back over to his bag to skull some of his water. He grabbed his cricket bat and helmet, putting the helmet on and stuffing his cricket bat in between his pants and belt, as he was leaving his backpack at the campsite.
Once that was done, he walked back over to Damian, who had lined up rocks of various sizes and was seemingly trying to see what the heaviest he was able to lift was. Max watched for a moment, before unclipping the mouthguard of his helmet and grinning.
“Alright, mate. I’ll be back within the hour, promise. Just gonna find some big sticks these guys can whack the skeletons with, cause not all of them have the strength to break those things bare-handed.”
Damian just grunted at him in acknowledgement as he deadlifted a boulder almost the same size as himself, not having the ability to multitask just yet it seemed. Clipping his mouthguard back on, he hopped on one foot, before swapping feet, and then darted out of the clearing.
The wind hit him like a wall as he accelerated faster than he had ever gone before when not on a motorbike, his extra [Strength] and [Dexterity] seemingly putting in some serious work.
After about five minutes, he reached the thicker bush woodland, and the trees became more tightly packed. He slowed down to a light jog at that point and smiled to himself as he realised that he wasn’t even sweating from that run.
As he grinned to himself, he scanned the ground, spotting a couple of large, long branches that had fallen to the ground when the entire world seemed to have been blown apart and put back together the morning prior.
Scooping them up, he propped them over his shoulder as he continued jogging, and for the next maybe 10 to 15 minutes, he darted around the bushland, collecting sticks of all sizes and shapes as if he were a bird building a nest.
His enhanced [Strength] actually made it so that the various branches, even packed together, weren’t even a strain for him to carry, but her did have a different issue; the size of his hands and arms.
He was only so big, and there was a natural limit to the amount he could carry before he became ungainly simply because of how unbalanced the branches were, no matter how strong he was.
Once he had reached that point, though, he had collected more than enough branches for the others, especially if some of them could be shared. He’d even found one super cool stick that had a legitimate handguard and hilt, looking the closest to a shortsword than he had ever seen a stick look.
A part of him almost wished he was planning on keeping it, to be honest. But alas, his cricket bat reigned supreme, so far!
With his arms bundling all of the branches into a comfortable hold, he started a fairly quick jog back towards the campsite. The way back was fairly simple, as he just had to go back towards the TEST FRACTURE’s light, but as he travelled, he couldn’t help but feel like something was watching him.
His free hand rested on the ‘handle’ of his cricket bat as he ran and he glanced around… but he couldn’t actually spot anything, which was… actually more worrying than if he had spotted something.
He stayed on alert until he entered the confines of the campsite itself, which, at least so far, seemed to keep the newly mutated animals and monsters away from the TEST FRACTURE. Maybe some sort of magical barrier, to stop ‘spawn-camping’ from the monsters?
Whatever it was, Max was thankful for it, as the crawling sensation he felt prickling at his neck the whole trip back faded over a little while, before disappearing completely as he started talking to the others.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Hey! Damian! All of you guys! I’m back!”
Damian, who had taken the outer layer of his torso armour off, rose from where he was sitting and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Alright, everyone that wants to go through the TEST FRACTURE! Come over here, and we’ll figure out an order for how we’re going to do this!”
Max dumped the pile of sticks at Damian’s feet and stuck around for Damian to start talking to the group, but he wasn’t really listening to the man, instead looking back outside the clearing from where he had come from, trying to spot the thing that had been watching him, to no avail once again.
His mouth pressed into a frown as he failed to find it, and he huffed, pacing over to a nearby rock, which from the cracks along the bottom, was one of the ones Damian had moved during his testing, and plopped down on top of it, once again placing his cricket bat over his crossed legs.
It looked like he was going to be on guard duty again… not that he really minded. He didn’t really want to stick around other people for the near future, but making sure that a group of people way out of their depth were able to get their feet under themselves?
That, he had no problems sticking around for. It would be a horrible thing if he just let them get injured, or worse, all because he was antsy to get exploring. A couple of minutes after he sat down, a group of people, all equipped with various branch weapons, started towards the TEST FRACTURE, Damian following them, giving encouragement to them, especially the ones who seemed to get cold feet the closer they got to the Portal.
Eventually, the group started vanishing one by one, as Damian answered questions and reassured them of what to do once they were inside. The man was astoundingly patient, more so than anybody he had met before, especially when it came to police officers.
They were never usually the patient sort.
Still, it was impressive, and Max was very glad that everyone in the group saw Damian as the de facto leader/font of information as they peppered the man with questions, and he only just kept up. He wasn’t the type to be a leader of a group like this, at least in his opinion he wasn’t.
Eventually, all of the group members that had volunteered to go through the Portal had gone through, including Damian, leaving the camp with about a third of its members and himself. He was interested in the fact that Damian could enter the Portal again, but hopefully, he had gone along with one of the weaker group members, instead of sending him into his own instance again.
Among the others remaining in the camp alongside him was an old couple, who looked maybe 70-75 years old, Sarah the cranky old lady, a middle-aged man with only one leg, a young woman with a large stomach, and Dorothy.
They were gathered around the smouldering bonfire, having not really moved since they had ‘breakfast’. Max jogged over to his bag for a moment, grabbing one of the unopened bottles of water, and then back to the bonfire, placing the bottle down next to the pregnant woman, giving her a smile.
The woman just smiled softly back, nodding deeply as she grabbed the bottle and tucked it into a pocket, and Max nodded back, before taking a seat next to Dorothy. The woman startled slightly as he plopped down next to her, but calmed after glancing his way.
It seemed that she was pretty out of it.
“Are you alright?”
The words escaped him before his brain could stop himself, and she huffed, turning to look at him, before her head leaned back, her eyes looking up at the early morning clouds. “I would say yes, try to not worry you, but… I don’t really want to. No, I am not alright..”
Max expected to feel awkward as she answered his question honestly when most people would just give him a ‘yea, I’m good’, but he didn’t. He felt a sad smile appear on his face as he nodded.
He might be excited about having literal superpowers now, but this world was still very new, and the danger he would eventually be facing was a constant stress in the back of his mind. Dorothy hummed as she placed her cheek into her left palm.
“But there is nothing I can do at the moment. I’ve got a cast on my right wrist because I fractured it a couple of weeks ago, so I can’t fight, which means I can’t do the TEST FRACTURE, which means I won't get my [Class] as you and Damian did, and the others will.”
She rolled up her long-sleeved jacket, giving him a look at the featureless grey cast that covered her palm and went all the way to her elbow. Max scrunched his brow at that, and Dorothy sighed. “Yeah, I know, it's not great. It should only have a week or two left to be in the cast, but obviously…”
“Obviously it’s very dangerous now, let alone in a week or two.”
Dorothy nodded. “And to make matters worse, we don't even really know where we are. I recognised my house’s area, in the suburbs of Bundanoon, but nothing outside my block. I also have never seen most of the people in this group before, in all my years living there.”
Max tilted his head at that. “Wait, where is Bundanoon again?”
The older woman paused, tapping a finger to her chin for a moment as she thought. “Uh, I think it’s about halfway between Sydney and Canberra. I don’t… well didn’t usually ever leave so it wasn’t really important for me to know exactly, but I think it's about halfway.”
Max frowned at that, and Dorothy noticed her own face dropping. “What? What is that face for?”
Max just huffed, wiping his hands down his face as he leaned his head back. “I’m from Canberra itself, the inner city, actually. I assume it only took you about half a day to get here, to the TEST FRACTURE?”
Seeing Dorothy nod, Max sighed. “That means… well that means that the world has likely been shifted around, scrambled, if at least slightly. Means that even if we find a map to use, it’ll likely be useless…”
Dorothy was silent for a moment before she sat up straight, and she turned to him fully. “Why don't you fix that? Make a map of your own, and start spreading it around once you leave our group and go wandering off?”
Max froze at that. How did she know that he was planning to leave after they were situated and relatively safe? “Wait, huh?”
Dorothy gave him a look. “Please, don't give me that, young man. Any one of us could tell that you’re itching to get away from us and go off on your own. I can see it in your eyes. And while I don’t really get why you would forfeit safety in numbers, you young men always seem to love your grand adventures…”
She trailed off for a moment, and her gaze grew distant for that moment, but then she snapped back, shaking her head softly before she met his eyes again, a smile appearing on her face, and her hands moving as she talked.
“So, while you wander around, doing heavens knows what, why don't you make a map? I’m sure you’ve checked, but the internet isn’t working, and neither is GPS, so if you could make a good one, and start spreading it around, it would help a lot of people, especially when people start to settle into groups and build new houses and settlements.”
Max was about to respond when she seemed to remember something, holding a finger up at him and reaching down into her bag, grabbing out what looked like a sketchbook. “Here, you can have this. I haven’t actually drawn anything, and the pages don't have lines, so it should be perfect for if you want to jot down a map or two, and eventually put them together!”
He reached out and gently took the book out of her hands, inspecting it. A royal blue cover, with a spiral wire as the binding, a pencil stuffed into the empty space inside the spiral. He met Dorothy’s eyes again and paused for a moment as he saw a light in them that she hadn’t had during their talk.
“I think that's a great idea! And it’s not like I’ll really be going out of my way to do it, even. I planned to just wander for a bit anyway, might as well make the wandering useful.”
Shaking his head and smiling to himself. Max stood up, placing a foot on the log they had been sitting on, and held the book over his head. “Alright! Maxwell Clark, [Knight] and Cartographer of the Apocalypse! I think that has quite the ring to it if I do say so myself!”
After a moment, he heard Dorothy let out a small snort, and he found himself laughing as well. He even heard a couple of sounds of laughter from the other group members around them. He stepped down off the log and smiled at Dorothy.
The much-needed laughter loosened some tension from the group, and Max found himself sitting in a comfortable silence for a little while as he kept an eye on the treeline. It was about an hour later that the TEST FRACTURE Portal pulsed for the first time, and a man who looked about 30-something exited it, the ‘spear’ he had been given missing the top section.
As the group members who had stayed outside rushed to congratulate him, the others started to appear as well, with increasing frequency, until finally, about 4 hours after the last person had entered the Portal, Damian stepped out with one of the older men fresh on his heels.
They were greeted by a massive cheer from most of the group, now filled with [Spearmen] and [Brawlers] and even one [Slingshotter]. Max just gave the man a thumbs up, staying on the outside of the group.
As they celebrated, he stealthily grabbed his backpack, placing the sketchbook Dorothy had given him inside the front pocket, and putting it on, tucking his cricket bat into the gap between it and his back.
With a small wave to the group, which only Damian and Dorothy seemed to spot, and return, he darted into the treeline, headed for what he thought was the base of a small mountain he had spotted earlier, aiming to get as high up as possible to start his map. He felt that he was probably going to miss those guys, but Dorothy had given him a very interesting-sounding mission for him to focus on.
Who knows, maybe one day, his map could make him a boatload of money, and he could buy some sick-ass equipment if everything stabilised. No, when everything stabilised. He had faith it would, especially with people like Damian around to lead and protect people.
‘Now… to get somewhere high up, and start sketching out a map of the area. Now that I’ve given myself a stupid nickname based on map-making, I can’t let Dorothy down, now can I?’