Voices cut through the film of sleep that covered me. Slowly, my mind cleared, and my eyes peeked open to find that I was no longer in the restaurant. I rested on a soft bed in an unfamiliar room. A quick check showed that I had two bandages on me where the cultist’s spine attacks had landed.
When trying to sit up, a wave of nausea hit, and it took all my effort to not retch all over the clean bedding. My gagging alerted someone in the next room, and I heard Marie’s voice as she opened the door. Julio and Samantha were with her, and it looked like the team had come out relatively unscathed.
“What happened?” I asked, the recent events were still a bit muddled.
“What do you remember?” Marie asked.
“That one guy pumped out all that gas and knocked everyone but me out. I fought him and burned up all my minions, but he still beat me. I was about dead and then his head exploded. After that, I woke up here,” I recounted.
“I was the reason for his head exploding,” Samantha said. That was right, she was in the back of the Explorer keeping overwatch on our team.
“You could have done it a bit sooner,” I jokingly complained, pointing toward my bandaged wounds.
“Ha, I would have if you hadn’t kept standing in my line of fire the whole time. It was like every time I shifted positions to get an angle on that creep, you moved just the wrong way. Between that and the gas hampering vision into the restaurant, it was a tough shot,” Samantha replied.
“Well, I’m glad I collapsed to the floor then. Who knew that my passing out was all that I needed to do to stop the guy. What about Tran Nguyen, is he okay?” I asked, remembering our original purpose in going there.
“He’s fine and we’re getting him squared away here in an apartment. Thanks to you, he’s only a bit groggy from the gas the cultist Plague Warrior was spewing out,” Marie added.
“Good, what happens now?” I asked.
“We captured the elderly cultist lady, and with a little help from the Grimslade Group, we’re tracking down the remnants of the cult,” Marie said. I felt a bit of unease at the mention of working with the Grimslade Group, and it must have shown on my face.
“Don’t worry about them, Rico, we’re making sure they don’t do anything we disagree with. What’s more important is that we break up this cult for good. It should be easy enough now that the Plague Warrior is out of the picture. He was a summoned being named Seth Michael, and without him, the rest of cult lost its main leader,” Marie assured me.
The guy sure didn’t sound like an ominous Plague Warrior. Seth Michael was a normal enough name. I couldn’t imagine what would draw someone into a cult like that. Maybe it was the trauma of experiencing the life of a summoned being, or maybe that Bhalkur creature could really communicate with him.
“Do we know what tier and rank he was?” I asked, curious to see since he countered me hard during our fight.
“The other woman we captured said that he boasted at nearly being tier three,” Marie replied.
“What about the aftermath? Everyone in a restaurant was knocked out and someone was shot,” I asked, wondering if the police were out there trying to track us down for terrorist activities.
“We’re good. Our contacts in the police force are framing this as a gas leak. It’ll also explain any oddities that people might have witnessed. Everything will be chalked up to hallucinations from the gas. As for the dead body, we grabbed that before the police arrived, so they don’t know about it,” Julio explained.
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“It’s nice having friends in high places,” I mused. Life wasn’t any less crazy since I’d joined Refuge, but it sure was easier to deal with when you had support.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“The doctor says you’ll need a few days to fully recover, I’m still having issues too and I wasn’t pumped full of all the stuff the Plague Warrior pumped into you. I’m surprised you survived and even remained conscious when the gas appeared,” Marie said.
“I had a bit of help with that, something I should probably document in the database. Back during one of my recent summonings, I was ordered to be a taste tester for some king, making sure that he wasn’t poisoned. As a performance reward, I was granted minor resistance to toxins. It sure wasn’t enough to negate what was happening, but I was able to remain conscious and summon my minions,” I explained.
“Great, any kind of resistance you can get is a much better reward than you’d think. For now, you concentrate on getting better. If you’re lucky, you’ll be summoned again, which should cure everything for you. While you have some down time, it’d be great if you could see about updating anything you can think of in the database,” Marie suggested.
Now that I got a better look at her, I could see that Marie wasn’t doing all that hot either. She had a light sheen of sweat on her face that told me she was feeling the same stomach-churning aftereffects of the Plague Warrior’s gas. I’d had the added joy of being poisoned by the spines he’d shot into me, though he had negated at least some of that before he attempted to sacrifice me.
Janette broke up our little meeting, shooing everyone out as she brought me a plate of breakfast. It turned out that it was her apartment I was in, and one of the people that lived in the complex was a doctor who was also the father of one of the summoned beings. The doctor had promised to check in on both me and Marie later. There wasn’t much he could do, but there was some medicine he was getting to help with the nausea.
I had been knocked out all afternoon and through the night. It was only 9am now, and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before. Thoughts of food made me feel like I was going to lose whatever might be left in my stomach, but as soon as I caught a whiff of the breakfast burrito that Janette had made, everything settled a bit. Her homesteader class ability came through again, and the system-upgraded food she prepared did as much to make me feel better as any drug the doctor could have prescribed.
After eating, I drifted off again, my body healing as I slept away the day. When I woke, I spent time in the database, adding everything I could think of. I had no qualms helping as much as I could. Refuge had done everything I had asked of them, and then some. There was no reason to hold back, and all the information I could add might help someone else out in the future.
It felt good, I finally felt like part of something. There were people I could now call friends, and I liked the fact that they could count on me as well. I had a purpose, and that’s all anyone could really ask for in this life. Sure, my life was a rather bizarre one, but I didn’t have to face it alone any longer.
Who knew what other threats and monsters I would have to deal with, both here on Earth, and in the various worlds I visited. Whatever those threats were, I was ready to face them and was confident that my power would continue to grow. For the first time since all this started, I felt comfortable with my lot as a summoned being. Thoughts of remaining one for a while weren’t as bad as they once were.
Resting and working on the database gave me time to think. The summonings I’d been on had allowed me to save several lives. There was that young child being attacked by the zombies, the man stranded on the snowy mountain, and too many others to count. I’d failed more than a few times, but those failures weren’t due to lack of effort on my part. I still had a lot to learn, and working with others like me, I’d learn quickly.
After a few days, I was feeling better. I’d done all I could for the database, and even began working on some odd jobs around the apartment until the doctor gave his blessing for me to return to full duty. I helped to escort the others while they went about their business away from the apartment, though the threat of the cult had been eliminated. Other dangers were out there, and our people needed protection. I was happy to be the one to provide it.
Julio was true to his word and took me to the gun range every other day. I was horrible at shooting but getting better under his tutelage. He taught me not only how to hit the target I was shooting at, but also how to operate in a combat environment. It was still the early stages of my training, but I could see it paying big dividends down the line.
After shooting, we’d spend time in Julio’s apartment, cleaning the guns and sharing about our lives. He was an interesting dude, a combat veteran who was wounded by an IED and had to leave the Army. His cousin was a summoned being, the young man named Quinn who had gained the class Quest Knight. Before he could get into how he learned about Quinn’s situation as a summoned being, the familiar prompt appeared.
You are Summoned!