For the first few hours of the day, Tsubaki ran around, scouting the area and the nearby survivors. Unfortunately, there was no way to specifically identify the differences between a normal survivor and a Stalker, so she had to treat all of them as if they were Stalkers. She watched parties walking through the cities from distant rooftops, using a pair of binoculars that she looted from an abandoned sporting goods store.

Whenever she found a small group of people, she would begin tracking them. Naturally, a group that emerged at a time like this would either be scavengers or looking for other survivors. Given that, she ended up following the same group for more than three hours before they returned to their base, an old elementary school.

Tsubaki observed the school cautiously from a rooftop more than a hundred meters away. The windows are all boarded. Given the size of the building, this could be a group of more than a hundred. However, it’s impossible to know the exact numbers. What is clear is that they have the firepower to defend the school.

It was this firepower that Tsubaki needed. Additionally, the school would be a far more defensible area than the house that she was currently using as her base. When she scanned the area, she saw that cars had been flipped over to cover all of the nearby manholes. They’ve either got at least twenty people, or heavy machinery. There shouldn’t be anything like a forklift in a school, so I should be able to rule that out.

Just to be safe, Tsubaki waited on the rooftop for another three hours, until the sun had started to set. During that time, she saw another group of four survivors returning, one of them carrying what Tsubaki could recognize as a small caliber rifle. Not big enough to hunt her main targets, and not even comparable to the weapons Tsubaki still had back at her safehouse.

Seeing the sun starting to go down, Tsubaki didn’t try to make a mad dash for her place. Instead, she entered the building she had been spying from, made her way to an interior room, and closed herself in the closet. She didn’t have any difficulties when it came to sleeping in an uncomfortable position, and so she patiently waited for another night to pass while considering her options.

Because she was planning this as a hunting operation, she had brought her regular assortment of stealth weapons. On her lower back, she had a pair of kukri sheathed, and on each hip she had a pair of throwing daggers. Finally, she had a silenced pistol strapped to her chest, with three magazines of spare ammunition.

When Tsubaki awoke, she peered out of the closet, just to make sure any unwelcome guests didn’t decide to occupy her temporary lodging during the night. Once she found that the location was safe, she quickly vacated the building and began to scout the school itself. The purpose of her scouting today was to find security cameras.

A base of this size was bound to have its own generator, so she was confident that the cameras would still be operational. Especially because she hadn’t seen anyone patrolling the rooftops or along the grounds the day before.

In the end, she managed to identify several cameras, and found the blind spot that she would be using to raid the base. While she finalized her plan, she let the day slowly pass, briefly returning to her home to grab a bit of extra equipment. Once the sun was just starting to descend to the horizon, she made her move.

Along the rear wall of the school building, one of the cameras had previously been broken, which Tsubaki assumed was the result of either a beast attack or a failed raid. Using that to her advantage, she began to scale the wall, climbing up along pipes and using the windowsills for support. Thankfully, the windows were all blocked to protect those inside from the crow, so she wasn’t afraid of being spotted.

Once she made it to the roof, she walked over to the door, testing it briefly. She wasn’t surprised to find that the door was locked, and fished a lockpicking set out of the bag she brought with her. She took a deep breath, focusing on the task at hand. She had given herself ample time to get into the building before the crow appeared, and soon heard the satisfying click of the lock.

Inside, she closed and relocked the door, scanning the hallway to make sure that there weren’t any cameras watching the door itself. Once she had confirmed this, she closed her eyes, listening close to any noises within the building. She could hear a few rattling cans and footsteps, as well as distant voices.

As she expected, these noises abruptly stopped once the crow declared its presence in the city. Tsubaki was certain that other survivors, like herself, had grown accustomed to using that sound as an alert that it was time to sleep. At most, there might be one or two people watching the security cameras, but even that was only a slim chance.

Almost as soon as the noise rang out, Tsubaki grabbed the other item from her bag, slipping it over her head. A pair of night vision goggles activated with a soft hum, and the dark passageway was lit up in a green light in her vision.

Tsubaki wasn’t sure what the sleeping patterns were for Stalkers, but she assumed that they would match humans to a degree. As long as that was the case, she wasn’t concerned.

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The first thing that she did after she exited the stairway was to look for a map. It was a common practice for most schools to post maps at regular points along their interiors, so students would be able to find their way if they got lost. When she found one such map, she looked through it to identify the security room, and immediately began to make her way there.

Along the way, Tsubaki noticed a few ‘traps’ set up in the hall, though they looked more like alarms than anything else. Empty cans strung up on lengths of rope, designed to cause loud noises if anyone touched it. Given their placement, Tsubaki assumed that they were set up as an early warning alarm against the spiders in the sewers more than other people, as they were not difficult to navigate for someone that knew what they were doing.

When Tsubaki came across the door to the security room, she found it wide open, the camera displays having been turned off for the night. This didn’t particularly reassure her, as it meant that she had lost the chance to take out some of their forces quietly.

Logically, they should have their armory in a room near the security office. That would make it more convenient for the security to respond if a raid were to occur. If it were me, I would place it one or two rooms away, along the path to the front of the school.

Tsubaki already believed that she knew where the bulk of the survivors in the school were sleeping. One of the lines of cans had been tied to a classroom’s doorknob. Given what she heard while waiting for the sun to set, she was almost certain that was where they had settled in for the night.

Thus, she walked down the hall, checking each door that she passed. They won’t lock the armory unless every survivor can have their own key. After all, they’re expecting attacks from the outside, not the inside. It’s more efficient to make the weapons as accessible as possible in an emergency.

With that thought in mind, Tsubaki walked half the hallway before one of the doors opened. She opened it just a crack at first, confirming whether or not there were any traps or alarms, before quietly opening it the rest of the way. Inside, it was just as Tsubaki had expected, with pistols, shotguns, rifles, even a few pipe bombs set out.

Now, Tsubaki had two options. She could take only what she needed and try to leave under the cover of darkness, doing her best to avoid the crow. This was an option that only became available because she had confirmed that the security cameras were offline and hadn’t alerted anyone yet.

Alternatively… if she wanted to take the school for herself, she would need to kill all of its inhabitants. She believed that she was suitably armed to do so, but this would be no less challenging than the first choice. After all, if there were more than three stalkers among the group, they may be able to overpower her.

Tsubaki took a deep breath, looking around at what they had available. There were three high-power sniper rifles like the one that she had broken. Among them, one looked like it had received special modifications, so she ignored it. The modifications may have made the rifle more powerful, but she wasn’t going to risk using a weapon altered by someone other than herself.

The other two rifles, on the other hand… she grabbed both of them, setting them stock-down in a large backpack. She walked around the room, checking the ammunition, and gathered a small box of bullets to put in that same backpack, together with a few of the pipe bombs.

Once she had gathered enough, she zipped up the backpack as tight as it could go to prevent the rifles from shaking around and causing too much noise, and began to make her escape.

Because of the Keeper’s confirmation that the crow had nothing to do with the void, Tsubaki had been able to confirm how its power worked. It should be a psionic ability. She thought to herself as she walked down the hall, carefully avoiding any string alarms along the way. It’s not constant, or else the snake would have died. I’ve never seen it moving around during the day, so it must change its locations at night, while using its camouflage to hide from the crow’s sight.

That means that the crow can only attack creatures that it identifies in its line of sight. I might even require the target itself to look at the crow. As Tsubaki stood in front of the front door of the school, she knew that this was a gamble. One wrong step, and her trial would end here. Still… that was nothing new to her. If she was not always on the verge of death, the trial would have no real meaning.

She took a deep breath, opening the door and sneaking out into the night. She had managed to avoid killing her way through the base, but getting back home would be another problem.

There were no delusions in her mind that she could make the entire trek at night, as the area around her safehouse was far too open to guarantee that she could avoid the crow’s gaze. Instead, her goal was to get one thousand meters from the school itself. If she managed that, she would have enough of a head start in the morning to make it back to her place without the survivors from the school finding her.

The first thing that Tsubaki did outside was to scan the sky. Night had already fallen, so she had to check for the whereabouts of the crow. The fact that she didn’t see it both comforted her and made her nervous. She wasn’t in danger of immediately being seen, but at the same time had no way of knowing when it would appear in this area.

To avoid as much danger as possible, Tsubaki ran to the nearest alley. The bullets and rifles in her backpack jostled together, the noise barely audible within the night. Still, only moments after Tsubaki got to the alley, she heard the fwoosh of air before the crow landed on the street. Tsubaki closed her eyes, pressing herself tight up against the wall of the alley and refusing to move.

Only when she heard a brief cry from the crow and its wings taking flight again did she dare to breathe softly. Now, she had to be even more careful, her goggles showing her the city’s streets far more clearly than she could otherwise notice. Clear enough, even, that she saw a massive thing laying on the street, its body remaining still for several long moments before slowly slithering along.

Interesting… Tsubaki thought to herself, moving in the opposite direction from where she saw the snake going. I might be able to get both of them at once, if I plan it right.