LTSV - Harbingers of Change - 11 (Patreon)

Once everyone was up, Bryn took up position at the door with Andrei and Randall for support and the spellcasters in the middle with Alan at the back, holding two wicked-looking daggers.

If there was any doubt that they were an artificial environment, it was dispelled when Bryn pushed the Safe Room door open and revealed that the light had not changed outside at all during their eight hour rest. It had been an overcast mid-morning when they went into the safe room and it had not changed outside in all that time.

“I’m not seeing any enemies on my HUD,” Randall reported. He’d discovered the System Map while Mira was asleep and thankfully got to miss the announcement. He got advanced enemy detection as a passive skill for a reward, so now he was responsible for scoping out any new area they entered.

The Safe Room door slammed shut behind them as soon as the last person exited and then started to glow red with a one hour timer, counting down.

“Okay, this map has got a fog of war thing going on,” Randall reported. “It looks like I won’t lose the areas we’re moving out of, though. It’s not staying in a perfect circle.”

“The Screamwood Grove was across the courtyard and the street past the buildings,” Mira told him.

“Understood,” he murmured. “OK, team, let’s move out.”

They got to the Screamwood Grove unmolested and the spellcasters kept watch while the fighters felled trees and those who had ‘Disassemble’ broke up the lumber. Mira was keeping her attention on the perimeter with Penny so she missed what led up to the argument, but in retrospect she could guess what happened.

“Hey, man, put some of that back,” Alan whisper-shouted. When she turned to look, she saw he’d gotten in Andrei’s face. “I’ve been watching you and you’ve taken over half of what we’ve gotten so far. The girls and Will haven’t gotten any materials yet.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault they’re not picking stuff up,” Andrei hissed back. Still, he dumped some branches out of his inventory. “Fine.”

“They’re watching your ass while you're looting,” Alan didn’t back down and just leaned in so they were almost forehead to forehead. “Drop the trunks too. After this, you don’t pick up anything else either. You understand me?”

Andrei made a face, but dropped ten trunks on the ground before stomping off. There were still trees to fell, but he went over to Cece and jerked his chin at the fallen lumber. “I’ll take over watch. Go get some stuff.”

“Mira, I’ll grab your share and then transfer it to you through the Social tab,” she called out. “I saw an item transfer function when I was in there earlier.”

Mira nodded and kept her attention on the crumbling neighborhood around them. She was starting to get a feeling, like she was being watched, and Penny was also becoming tense. “I think we should get ready for company.”

For a second, she thought he might disagree, but then he gave their surroundings a sour look. “Something’s up, anyway,” he muttered and adjusted his grip on his sword.

“Nothing’s on the HUD yet,” Randall reported. “Who knows what that—wait, I see red dots coming.” He hissed between his teeth. “It’s a lot of them. Let’s get out of the open.”

Mira could hear something now; lots of little feet and hissing noises like snakes giggling.

Randall sucked in his breath and he kept watching the HUD. “Shit, guys, they’re moving real fast and heading towards us!”

There wasn’t really time to react, in the end. A swarm of little spindly creatures with long, disproportionate claw fingers came swarming around one of the semi-collapsed brick buildings that blocked a nearby intersection from view. They spilled into view, scrabbling across the ground and climbing up the wall at an angle. The creatures had enormous wet-looking yellow-green eyes with slit pupils that expanded into perfectly round black orbs the second they spotted Mira’s group.

Identify tagged them with an unhelpful call out that blocked her vision when she focused on the creatures for a second too long and too hard.

[Goblins: Pack hunters and scavengers. Goblins move in groups of no less than ten. Having little in the way of natural armor or HP reservoirs, they often appear as a common enemy or as Adds during Boss Encounters in low level Dungeons. They have sharp, filthy claws and teeth. They will sometimes carry rudimentary weapons. Wounds inflicted by their teeth and claws have a 0.5% chance to receive the Septic condition and must be purified immediately with Bless or Cure Illness. They are known to occasionally carry common poisons and other reagents. Their bodies are not known to have any valuable components aside from their manacores and their claws, which can sell for 1 CP per dozen.]

“Don’t let them scratch you!” Mira called out to the others and raised her hands to start casting. The more she could thin out their numbers, the better. Penny charged in to meet the oncoming tide of flimsy bodies and sliced the leading edge of the enemy forces into pieces.

[Cecelia Newman has invited you to join her Party. Will you accept? Yes | No]

“Yes!!” Mira shouted, trying to dodge the window so she could see around it. She fired a Blue Firedart at the nearest goblin and hit it square in the face. Its head burst like a fallen melon and it fell backwards to be trampled underfoot by its brethren.

“COVER!” Bryn shouted from behind her and the air pressure around her changed as he practically teleported in front of her and met the oncoming goblins with a shield bash to force them backwards.

Penny was a bright slash of arterial red as she cut through the goblins from the center of their grouping. Mira used Bryn as cover to dart out, shoot a few more goblins, and then retreat back under cover.

“Bless!” Cece called out one of her skills and Bryn began to glow with golden light that seemed to hurt the goblins if they got too close to him, although that didn’t seem to dim their enthusiasm by very much.

Will, who was further back and getting cover from Alan, pulled a huge glowing tome out of nowhere and it fanned open in front of him. He scanned his fingertip down the length of one page and light gathered around his hand. Then he pointed at a clump of goblins not being engaged by anyone else and the goblins, for lack of a better word, exploded.

Andrei and Randall had a bit of a delay since they weren’t able to use a teammate’s position to teleport to them and thus had to run at the goblins, which wasn’t easy when it was your first fight—or at least, that was the case for one of them. Mira could see the fear on Randall’s face when he went past her, but he was still moving and grimly determined as he hacked and cut with his short sword.

“WOOHOO!” Andrei whooped as he charged in, swinging his blade in front of him with way more enthusiasm than skill and doing a pretty decent impersonation of Leeroy Jenkins, if that meme existed in this world. Granted, his approach was working just fine against the goblins who were fighting the same exact way, except they were less tough.

Once the warriors waded into the fight, it was over pretty quickly. When Mira counted bodies afterwards, she found twelve; near to the minimum number they could potentially encounter at one time. She shared that with the rest, including what she’d read about their components.

Cece sent over Mira’s share of the trees while they started picking through the corpses. Mira went back to watching the perimeter. That seemed to have worked out last time and she had learned the hard way that getting loot acted as a countermeasure to the inherent trauma of this kind of situation, so she wasn’t about to tell the kids they shouldn’t be doing it. Plus, Randall wasn’t wrong that there was a good chance that they’d need to walk out of here with every GP they could scrape together. She’d yet to encounter a System Invasion that wasn’t a capitalism nightmare in one way or another.

She ended up hanging out next to Bran, who was also keeping a watchful eye on the others. Alan was also nearby, checking the goblins’ pockets for loot.

“Good job tanking,” she told Bran, when the quiet got to be a bit too much, even for her.

“Oh,” he said, looking down. “Thanks.”

Alan looked up from his looting to grin at her, but didn’t say anything before he moved on to check the goblins near Andrei. Predictably, they started fighting again within five minutes.

“Hey!” Alan was pointing at Andrei when she looked over to see what the fuss was. “I saw you stash that staff in your inventory! We agreed to split the gear according to need. One of the casters could use it.”

“This is my loot, asshole,” Andrei replied flatly. He’d folded earlier, but giving in twice seemed like it might be a bridge too far. “I killed the one that dropped it. It’s mine.”

Mira saw Randall taking a deep breath and looking at the sky for guidance before he waded in. “Hey, we all agreed on ‘need before greed’, remember? Neither of the girls have weapons yet. At least, let’s check to see if they can use it before making a decision.”

Andrei scowled at both the other boys before he came stomping over to Cece. “Here, you take it,” he said before stomping over to the perimeter opposite from Mira was still on watch.

“Um,” Cece said, sounding startled. She looked around and then came over to Mira. “Can you Identify this for me? I tried using my Apothecary Appraisal on it, but it just says it’s not a potion or a reagent, and my Identify just says it's a Goblin Hedgewitch Staff.”

“Well, that’s rude,” Mira commented. “I suppose that’s why there's Appraisal and Identify skills.”

The staff was top heavy with a few oversized rat skulls bound to the top in a rough sort of morningstar shape and the bottom had been capped in uneven, jagged aluminum. The core was an uneven length of Screamwood that was stained with water and other darker fluids.

[Goblin Hedgewitch Staff: a crude spellcasting aid made by a goblin out of garbage and bones. Will perform the minimal functions of a staff by amplifying offensive spells, but not as well as a Novice Staff or Wand. This specimen has a metal cap on the ends made from scavenged soft metals. Can be used as a martial weapon, in a pinch. Value: 15 CP for the components. Basically Worthless.]

“The System says it’s trash, but better than nothing,” Mira reported. “It will amplify offensive spells a little bit.”

Cece seemed to lose interest in it, hearing that. “Oh, then you’d better use it. I don’t have any offensive skills or spells.”

“Will might want it too,” Mira agreed and called him over in the spirit of ‘need before greed.’ “This increases spell damage. Do you need it? I am already getting an edge from Penny.”

Will came over and looked the staff over. “I don’t think I can use a weapon at all,” he said after thinking about it. “My grimoire takes up both my hands. You’d better use it until we get out and then you can sell the bits.”

Mira swung it around a few times and the weight felt alright. It would do for if she needed to hit something rather than fry it from range—so long as her enemy had no armor whatsoever. “Alright, I can work with this.”

They split up the monster cores and drops under Alan’s gimlet eyes. Andrei didn’t try to hold back loot again, but you could feel the irritation pouring off him as he had to wait his turn to accept two little cores and a bag of bitter healing herbs.

Mira gave her herbs over to Cece, since she had the skill to use them and got extra Inventory storage for potion components. Cece handed over her monster cores in return, since the value was about equal when you took into account Cece’s ability to turn them into bitter potions with some water and they’d decided that it made more sense to only commit one inventory slot each to goblin parts rather than waste slots between them on identical items.

The best part of Randall’s advanced map was that it had the exit marked on it. Presumably, the Boss would be near there. None of them thought they were ready to try to kill it. They were only just starting to get comfortable with fighting goblins, but Mira and Randall wanted to at least lay eyes on it from a distance so they could start workshopping ideas.

Over the course of the afternoon, they encountered two more small roaming packs of goblins. One of them dropped an ordinary cudgel, which Cecily accepted as a melee weapon. They heard howling from a distance a few more times, but had yet to encounter the things making the noise. Alan kept a vulture’s watch on Andrei all while they went through looting the bodies. Apparently, Andrei had used up all his strikes with their Rogue and now Alan didn’t trust him not to pocket anything while they were collecting drops.

They took a break for crispbread sandwiches and water. Mira, Cece, and Will took a power nap in the shelter of a cinderblock carport to recover their expended stamina while the fighters kept watch. The air was still tense between Alan and Andrei. Neither seemed willing to extend an olive branch to each other and Mira wondered how long this could go on for. She was hoping that if they did end up in a fight then it would be a shonen-anime style fight where they ended up as friends, but the longer they gave each other the cold shoulder, the less she believed that was going to be an option.

Was her presence affecting the team’s dynamic? Or had Peleon been acting like this the entire time and she just hadn’t been close enough to them to see it?

Mira ate her sandwich and moodily missed her husband. She was certain, by now, that he would not be joining her on this adventure. He was immortal and unkillable, insofar as she knew, but she also would have said there was no one who could keep him out of a place he wanted to get into before now.

She knew she had to focus on getting out of the dungeon before she could afford to worry about him, but that was turning out to be easier said than done.