First Line of Defence: Chapter 10 (Patreon)

Chapter 10

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

I was lying on the couch in my apartment, trying to hide from reporters. They’d found out where I lived and were hounding me for interviews. Yesterday, one of them put a ladder against the side of the building to reach my third-floor window. I’d had to save her when her ladder slipped, leaving her hanging from my windowsill, screaming for help. The moment I got her to safety, she’d tried to get me to give a comment, pretending like she hadn’t almost died.

The reporters were a pain but better than the crazies. There were a bunch of religious nuts calling me Saint Morgan. They’d built a shrine below my window and were going through my trash to eat my leftovers.

I needed to find a new apartment.

Somewhere off the grid.

On the screen of my phone, Harriet shook her head. “As far as we can tell, each station has unique expansion quests with equally unique methods of success. This is irrelevant of whether or not they share factions. The cultural information package always appears. And the liaison has appeared several times for special clearance rewards. We think it has something to do with our species compatibility, that the species’ way of life might be compatible with our own. Let me pull up the file.” she looked off-screen. “Here it is. There are eight stations connected to the Kilocksin sectors. Four of the station masters have launched expansion quests. All of them have received Kilocksin as their first hurdle. One of them cleared it by sharing a meal with them. He also received a liaison as his special clearance reward. He’s the only one that has cleared it with the special clearance other than you.”

“Has anyone cleared the Horde in a special way?”

“Let me check.” She typed something into her computer. “Yes. They received a cultural information package.”

“Is there a recurring theme for how the quests are cleared? Tee told me that there are social indicators, but I more or less fluked mine.”

“There is currently a theory that the most repeated word between encounters is a clue for what your unique quest is about. It’s going to be tested during the next Cycle.”

My gut told me her answer might be right. “Give me a second. I need to ask Tee a question.”

I added Tee to the call. Almost half a minute passed before he answered. His face appeared in the middle of a crowd.

“That’s him!” shouted a man behind Tee.

“I’m looking at his holiness,” shrieked a woman.

“Yes, that’s Saint Morgan,” Tee said, grinning at me. “Honestly, he’s ever holier than they say. He might be the second coming. I remember watching him pick up what I assumed was a dead bird, but then it flew away. At the time, I thought I must have been wrong, but who knows, maybe it really was a dead bird, and he healed it. I mean, our pets can’t die or get sick anymore.”

Tee cut the call.

“Ah, what’s he doing?” Harriet asked concerned.

“I have absolutely no idea. And he just hung up on me, so I’ll have to ask him my question later. Let’s move on to something else.”

“The last thing I have to mention is the design team wants to talk to you about your station. As they told you, they recreated the designs they’d already given you in the Game and used the AIs to tweak it. They found information that tells them their current design is extremely flawed. They want me to schedule a call with them to talk about it.”

That was more concerning than what Tee was up to. “How soon can you schedule it?”

“Give me two hours.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

Harriet hung up and I turned on the TV to kill time.

Every second channel had something to do with me. If they weren’t sharing heartwarming stories on the people that were healed days from death’s door, they were talking about how many serial killers I’d been friends with over the years, which was eight. They were also debating what it meant for a new country to appear or whether or not my ownership of Mars should be recognized.

Earlier, I’d watched a reporter interview a rabbi who’d escaped a concentration camp and spent the late stages of World War II in an extremely active civilian resistance unit. They weren’t interviewing him because I’d healed his terminal cancer or given him back his youth. They’d been interviewing him because he had one of the highest kill counts of anyone who survived the cull and wanted to know why he had lived when others died.

Fifteen minutes later, I still hadn’t found anything to watch, but Tee unlocked my front door and walked in with Buster giving me the distraction I needed. Tee was wearing designer clothing, sunglasses, shoes, and jewellery that cost more than some sports cars. His fashion sense had dramatically improved, but so had the amount he was spending. My credit card bill had already surpassed my old annual income and was growing by the day. I also had bills from all sorts of weird places. I wasn’t sure if Tee was messing with me or if he’d taken up ballet and pottery.

Buster let out a happy, “woof,” and dashed over to lick my face.

I patted him enthusiastically to show him I was happy to see him too. It sucked that I couldn’t walk him. He had so much energy now that I wanted to take him to the park and watch him run around. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed that until he could do it again. But I couldn’t leave the apartment building without being mobbed.

I glared at Tee while I patted Buster. “What the hell were you doing with the crazies?”

He gave a small chuckle as he took of his sunglass and a cleaned away no existent dirt. “You thought it was funny to give me a micropenis. I thought it was funny to tell a bunch of religious fruit cakes that you’re the second coming. I think I can get them to build a church.”

“I don’t want a church!”

Tee smirked. “How will you be the second coming without a church?”

“They crucified Jesus. I don’t want to end up like that.”

“I’m sure they won’t do that to-” Tee stopped to think about what he was saying. “You should probably buy a security bot or a personal shield. Like today. Those guys are nuts. There’s a lady with a ball of your hair.”

“I’ve already ordered both.”

Tee relaxed. “Then there is nothing to worry about. What did you call me for, by the way?”

“What word did Tumpa say to me the most?”

“Good.”

“How is that word related to my quest?”

“I don’t know. Why are you asking such a weird question?”

“The government has an idea that the most repeated word said during the expansion quests is a clue to how to solve the quest’s special clearance.”

Tee put Buster’s leash on the hook, and then went over to the window and waved at the crowd, causing them to cheer. He walked over to the couch and pushing my legs off to take a seat on the other end.

“Okay, that’s more interesting. Kilocksin don’t differentiate between the words good and respect. They use them interchangeably. You cleared the quest by showing him respect and being good, so they might be on to something. The word the Horde repeated the most was territory, and every time you didn’t respect it, they killed you. The quest clearance might be as simple as you talking to them from outside their territory.”

I sat up and leaned against the armrest trying to get comfortable. “How the hell am I going to work out where their territory is?”

“Easy. It’s wherever they don’t kill you for being in it.”

That was a reasonable assumption. “Okay, what do you know about Clack Breeders?”

“They don’t talk. Not in any way you can understand, so the game won’t translate for you. And you know it’s stupid to allow it to lay eggs which is exactly what will happen if you try to communicate.”

Yeah, that did sound stupid. Who would want a bunch of- “Wait, can’t I farm them for experience?” I thought about that for a second longer. “Wait, I think I’m supposed to farm it for the experience.”

“What?”

“Think about it. It lays eggs. The eggs hatch. I kill what comes out and get experience. The moderators got all huffy over me taking advantage of the Wargarg’s infinite regeneration that they sure as hell wouldn’t put it in as a normal function. I think the special clearance for that quest is for me to farm its babies for experience without harming it. At some point, the quest will end.”

“The question then, is when is it the right time to start kill them?”

“I’m guessing there will be a sign.”

***

It turned out the sign was when they attacked the station’s systems. The government guys were definitely on to something with the most common word thing. I’d stopped near the Horde and shouted at them to get their attention. They’d kill me, so I’d gone a little further away and tried again, doing it further and further away until they finally hadn’t killed me.

I’d then asked them what they wanted, and they’d just told me to get as far away from their territory as I could. Clearing their quest had been as easy as walking to the furthest point on the station from their spawn point.

Even though I had cleared the second expansion quest, I’d stopped thinking about eventually building the station. The design team and I had talked for more than a day. They’d found out that the station they designed for me was fundamentally flawed. My view of the station was also flawed. Actually, up until their discovery, everyone’s views of stations were flawed.

The stations weren’t towers.

Well, they were like towers at the early stages, where everything seemed to be built almost instantly. But that was only because everything was so close. When a station got larger, it was more like an RTS than a tower defence, and the distance between structures mattered. If I centralized ammunition storage and my weapons ran out in the middle of a battle, the outer guns might take five minutes to receive a reload. Systems like my sensor array became less effective the bigger the structure was, so they needed to be scale up or upgraded. The whole project had turned into a nightmare, and we had to rethink everything.

So, expansion was currently out of the question, at least for a couple of weeks. They needed to think everything through properly. There was currently a design team of over two hundred working on not just my station but every station our faction had. They were trying to make a template that we could all build from to customize to our needs.

That meant I couldn’t wait to build the D2. I just had to suck up the extra resource cost because the experience loss was too much to accept.

I tried to ignore how many resource points I was wasting, as I put my back against the corridor wall, and prepared myself to turn the corner. The Clack breeder had birthed brood warriors who were tearing their way through the wall outside the main reactor. Their exoskeleton was harder than the laminated titanium walls, making it possible for their claws to peel away layers.

The squad was preparing to hit them from the other side. When they started shooting, I had to help them.

“Tee, where are the other Clack heading?”

“They’re attacking your D2s. You’ve already got three offline. You need to deal with these quickly and move on to the others.”

“Okay, keep me posted.”

The familiar whine of the squad’s automatic weapons filled my corridor as they let loose on the Clack. Their particle rifles looked like oversized assault rifles but were much lighter. The voom voom whine of their weapons lasted for about five seconds and then cut off.

The Clack screeched.

I didn’t know whether that was because they were injured or pissed off. I gave it another second and then turned the corner, raising my particle pistol.

Clack brood warrior stood about ten feet tall. They were insects shaped like centaurs with four legs and a humanoid-shaped upper half. Their head housed a set of large mandibles, a circular tooth filled mouth, and four eyes that looked like they belonged to flies. Their blue grey exoskeleton covered most of their body, with only a few unprotected spots that could be considered a weak point. None of their unprotected areas was an instant kill. Clack were basically walking death machines.

The predators on their planets had to be nightmares for their species to evolve this way.

I saw a dozen injured on the ground. They were barely moving. Eight were racing off towards the other end of the corridor, where the squad had attacked from. Two were tending to the injured. I shot six times, emptying the particle pistol. Every shot was perfect. The two tending to the others fell to the ground, their front knees joints gone. Each one had another shot to the throat. Tee said there was an artery there, so they would bleed out in about ten minutes.

That’s how tough they were.

My particle pistol wasn’t good enough to take them out the easy way at its current level, so I had to do it in steps. My next six shots went in the injured, hastening their demise.

A grenade exploded in the other corridor, concerning me. The squad must have been having trouble.

I stood back and waited for my particle pistol to recharge. Several experts in the military thought that the squad was an example of the perfect unit of soldiers and that if we copied them, we’d end up with the ideal dungeon mob and infantry unit. After learning how to fight, I believed they were right.

The four-man team complemented each other perfectly. Having them had changed my immortal soldiers so that they shared the same equipment loadout. The immortal soldiers were more specialised now. It would be even more effective if I could design other dungeon mobs to work with them, but I was waiting for someone else to take the plunge before I committed. The weapon systems I’d have to design to make another dungeon mob as good as my immortal soldiers were expensive and I didn’t want to be wrong.

When my particle pistol finished reloading, I put another shot in the injured Clack and waited for it to recharge again. The squad showed up before it was ready to fire. The moment they came around the corner, I turned and started heading for the next location. They could finish the Clack off faster than I could.

“The reactor’s cleared,” Tee said when I was halfway to the D2s that were under attack. “You need to get to the sensor array.”

“What happened to the D2s?”

“They're still being attacked, but the sensor array is more important.”

I changed directions. “I’m on it.”

Eight hours later, I was finally proven right. The endless waves were the way to clear the quest correctly. By that time, the Clack had destroyed half the systems on the station.

Quest Completed

Expand Control III

Quest Rewards:

Defence Slots: 80Path Points: 1Tokens: 900

Special Clearance Reward:Clack Cultural Education   Package.

“Just three more to go and you get full control of the station again,” Tee said cheerfully as I trudged back to the command room. “You want me to fire up the next quest?”

I turned a corner into a debris filled corridor where they’d destroyed one of the D2s. Chucks of metal lay everywhere, slowly being dissolved by nanobots to reform the wall and internal systems.

“No. I’m going to get some sleep,” I said. “Two back-to-back expansion quests are enough for one day. I need a break. Also, I need to know if this sort of damage was normal. You told me that better weapon systems would spawn mobs that could damage the station, but you never mentioned they could outright cripple it.”

“Does damaged mean something else to you? Like if your car’s engine is damaged, do you think you should be driving it?”

I stepped into the elevator. The door closed and then opened two second later, dropping me off near the command room. “I thought there would be a few minor issues, but that was complete chaos. How many weapons do we have online?”

“Six. And I believe the difficulty was higher because the reward was greater. You would have gained a bunch of levels from this quest, before you got moderated. It probably would have taken you a couple of days too. I mean, an experienced station master would have walked through that, but you did well enough.”

I passed through the blast doors into my command room. “Gosh, you make me feel all giddy inside with your backhanded compliments.”

“It’s a gift.”

I slumped into my command chair. “We need to research the other species before I take on the next quest. I don’t want to screw this up. I need more advantages.”

“You’re the station master of the most advanced station in your faction; you need to relax.”

“How am I doing on a general scale?”

“You’re in the top 5% for this early.”

“That’s bad,” I said. “Casuals play at this level. The real contenders are all in the top 1%. What do I have to do to reach that level?”

“Spend about 100,000 years doing this,” Tee said. “Or create another set of circumstances similar to your first that doesn’t get removed.”

“I’ve got an idea on how to do that.”

“I’m listening.”

“You know The Librarian’s idea for an unarmed combat dungeon challenge to attract the Kilocksin?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Well, I think I’ve worked out how to make it viable. I know what to do to attract them to the dungeon.”

A challenge was something you added to the entrance of your dungeon. There was no downside to challengers accepted the challenge, only an upside. The challenge had to be filled with mobs from my dungeon, and everyone they defeated in the challenge meant one less they would have to face in the dungeon. If the challengers died during the challenge, they would immediately respawn at the entrance to the dungeon and wait for their companions to join them.

“What sort of challenge are you considering?”

“A six-room dojo. One of them will have to fight through all six opponents for them to get a chance at winning the big prize, a Kilocksin heavy shield bracer. How much do think the blueprint will cost?”

“I’d guess around 250,000 credits, but you would first have to get your hands on one and break it down to gain access to the blueprint. They won’t go for it, even if you do? It’s a standard-issue military shield bracer. It’s not that interesting.”

I put my feet on the coffee table, to get a little more comfortable. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve got a whole bunch of Kilocksin cultural knowledge bouncing around in my head, and the shield bracer and laser spears hold a prominent place in it. They’re part of their culture and history.”

“They’re not great weapons.”

“But they are dependable. No matter what other equipment their warriors have and fight with, they always carry their shield bracer and laser spear. A warrior is considered naked without them. If everything else is gone, a Kilocksin will fall back to these.”

“So what?”

“So, they are a status symbol as much as they’re weapons. There are only three types of people given heavy shield bracers in their society: the shield guardians, their low-ranked officers, and prominent members of a clan. There is also only one other way to acquire one. And that’s through combat. I want to make an optional six-room dojo inside the dungeon for them to challenge. The reward will be a shield bracer and laser spear, but there will be a 1% chance of gaining a heavy shield bracer instead of a regular one.”

“Why not just offer them the heavy shield bracer?”

“Because in their society, they have to earn it. Giving it to them will make it worthless. Making them fight for it time and again will give them a story that they can take back to their clans to be proud of. It’s something that will be accepted. We’ll have to stamp them with our faction’s mark, but it should work.”

“Who would fall for that?”

I grinned. “Teenagers, I’m going to farm their noobs.”

“Have you thought this through?”

“Completely, The Librarian is right. The Kilocksin can be encouraged to raid the dungeon. There are trillions of them of them in their local sector. All I need to do is convince a fraction of a percent that their time is best spent in our dungeon.”

“You still need to level.”

“I know. Start filling the defence slots with D2. I’ll go level the rats and kill them after I’ve gotten some sleep. Unless anything attacks, I feel like it’s going to be boring around here until I complete the starter quest.”

***

Life was as dull as I predicted. Dad was right. Between battles, this was more like a career than a game. Completing the last three expansion quests hadn’t been difficult. It had taken a fair bit of thinking and study, but it wasn’t difficult.

For the Octorin quest, I had to send their leader components to build a communication drone. They were too nervous and xenophobic to deal with other species directly. Once they had the drone, we began to trade. Eventually, they build a small swarm of combat drones and tried to kill me. I took care of the drones and then killed their leader without harming the others. Then I traded with the new leader, who also tried to kill me. I did this four times, until a leader started building maintenance drones instead of combat drones.

I cleared the quest, gained the cultural knowledge package, and a maintenance drone fabricator system blueprint for my station.

The Udo quest was the simplest, I had to show up and kill one, go away, and then come back and kill another. The quest ended when they released that staying on my station wasn’t worth the trouble. The survivors made their way to an airlock and left.

For the Wargarg, I had to fight their leader for dominance and make him yield. That took a surprising amount of time. The little guy wouldn’t give up even when I beat him to pulp. I had to try dozens of different methods, letting him heal each time, before I finally worked out that I had to pin him, without injuring him to make him yield.

It made me realise dominance and violence were entirely unrelated in their culture.

So, near the end of the 6th Cycle, I finally completed my starter quest and gained full access to my station.

Quest Completed

Control the Station

Quest Rewards:Complete control of your station and its systems:Path Points: 1Tokens: 10,000

Special Clearance Reward:Six Faction Station Master Knowledge package.

I released the Wargarg leader as the notification appeared and stood up. A moment later, he and the other Wargarg crumbled to dust and were quickly absorbed by the station.

This special clearance reward was different to the others. There was no cultural package. I didn’t know what six faction station master knowledge was, but I knew it was going to be good. I dismissed the quest clearance notification and a prompt appeared.

You may now name your station.

“I name this station, The Crucible.”