120: Snap Count (Patreon)

Note: Tomorrow marks the end of Book Two (Reaper's Crawl). It may be one or two chapter long, but if so I'll post them both tomorrow. Still checking to see if I can keep the book on the paid section without violating Amazon TOS. If so, I'll leave it in, otherwise most of Reaper's Crawl will be removed by March 29.

“Road trip!” Raven said from the back seat, startling Roland.

“Bloody,” Bloodykee greeted the bird. The Fiend had been hidden under a blanket right next to where the bird had appeared.

“Where have you been? It’s been two days.”

I’ve been putting out fires. This Crucible World is attracting undue levels of interest. Some undesirable entities were trying to sneak in. I had to convince them to cease and desist.

“Sounds serious.”

It was.

“What’s he saying?” Dahlia asked. “I still think it’s unfair that he can talk to you, but he nearly kills me when he talks to me.”

You are eighth level now, lass. I think you can withstand my voice.

“Still hurts a little,” she said. “But I can take it. A little pain never hurt anybody.”

“Raven was threatening or beating up some invaders,” Roland said “That’s what he was telling me.”

<Who in particular?> Trixie asked. The Guide was still withdrawn, but Raven’s appearance had perked her interest, although she remained wary of the bird.

The kind of entities whose names have too much power to utter safely.

<They were here?>

They were trying to come in. Fortunately, I made some calls and put a stop to it. The System did most of the heavy lifting, but without our help, there would have been collateral damage.

“So, this isn’t something we need to worry about in the short term, right?” Roland asked. “Which means we can dispense with the mysterious, non-name-dropping game and worry about the urgent stuff.”

He felt that he already had more than enough on his plate. Worrying about an averted catastrophe was beyond his ability to give a damn.

<Thank you,> Trixie told Raven without a trace of sarcasm. That worried Roland a bit.

My pleasure. Anyways. Where are we going?

“New Haven. Picking up some strays and bringing them back.”

<An unnecessary risk, for little to no reward.>

Neither Trixie nor Gorman had been happy about him leaving the zone even for a three-hour round trip. Well, it was going to be closer to five hours, given the number of stops he was planning to make.

Gorman had been mollified after Roland offered to go into Fred’s pawn store and clean the place out of anything useful. There hadn’t been time to detail a moving truck for that, and Roland could stuff a dozen big boxes in his inventory easily enough.

Of course, each addition to the mission increased the time it would take. Roland checked the timer where he’d placed it, on the upper right side of his field of vision:

Time to Integration (Phase One): 91 hours (plus or minus 12 hours).

We’re still good, he thought. Even if we’ve only got seventy-nine hours, we’ll make it back with three days to spare.

Things had slowed down a bit. Maybe enough Exemplars had gotten the message that their activities could leave them in a bad position if Integration arrived ahead of schedule. The margin of error had shrunk down to twelve hours instead of the previous seventy-two, which he took as a good sign.

They were fifteen minutes away from the first exit to New Haven when his phone rang. It was Darwin Ishamel, surprisingly. He hadn’t talked to the big Cultivator since leaving the Chapel. He put the call on speaker.

“Darwin.”

“Bro. How goes?”

“Putting things together. You?”

“Had it all under control, until last night,” Darwin said. “Figured I’d give you a heads up.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Met another Exemplar. Classer. Out of Chicago. Thought he was cool at first, but he’s lost his goddam mind and gone rogue.”

“Okay. How much damage can he do?”

“Enough that he might move up the end times. Maybe by a lot.”

“Crap. All right, thanks for the warning. I’m glad I set up a Safe Zone already.”

“Me too. Twenty-three tokens so far.”

“Good. How many Ascendants? I’m at about thirty. Forty by the end of today.”

“Damn, bro. You move fast. Only got a dozen. It’s hard to find people you can trust. And the other asshole Exemplar didn’t recruit any. More interested in settling scores than helping Chicago.”

“Crap again. All right, man, best of luck. I think comms are going to go down when the balloon goes up, but if they don’t, I’ll be in touch.”

“Same here, Roland. Stay frosty. It’s going to be raining all kinds of shit soon.”

Roland hung up and turned to Trixie.

“The System needs a better HR department,” he told her. “I thought Exemplars were supposed to help.”

<The System isn’t truly omniscient. It doesn’t know exactly how people will behave after becoming Exemplars. Power corrupts even the saintly.>

“Yeah, you got a point.”

He glanced back at the timer.

Time to Integration (Phase One): 71 hours (plus or minus 12 hours).

“Son of a bitch.”

“Cynthia and Ben are headed to Elle’s place,” Dahlia said, looking up from her phone. “So they’ll all get there just as we arrive, hopefully.”

“We may have to pick them up, swing by Javier’s, grab him, and skedaddle back to Salisbury. No pawn store detours. People are more important than stuff.”

Roland called Javier to give him a heads up. Time was running out.

Cousin Bob:

“This is Drone News Y, live from Chicago, where a running battle is being fought between the police, including SWAT units, and the strange vigilante who has been terrorizing the South Side over the past few days. The man some in the press have called the South Side Butcher.”

“Shit,” Bob said, sending the link to the video feed to the big screen on the wall in Gorman’s living room.

‘Drone News Y’ was an amateur reporter from Chicago who used a small fleet of camera-equipped quadcopters to video events as they happened. He had twenty-million-plus followers on X and made more money than a real news anchor.

And now his newsfeed was showing the world an Exemplar in action.

The view from the high-flying drone was confusing at first: people ran through the streets as police cars tried to make their way past milling crowds.

The location was in a residential area, and not a high-class one, if the burned-out home visible in one corner and the graffiti elsewhere were any indication. Bob hadn’t been to Chicago, but he’d heard about the South Side. It made his neighborhood look tame by comparison.

A different drone cut in, this one much closer to the street. It unveiled the South Side Butcher.

He was a tall man with the build and size of a linebacker, wearing some kind of makeshift body armor, helmet, and goggles, all painted black. He had a sawed-off shotgun with a pistol grip in one hand and a fireman’s axe on the other.

Bob grunted when a stat box appeared over the big guy’s head, despite being on a TV screen, not to mention halfway across the country:

Wendell Jackson (Human Ascendant, F-Grade)

Level 10 Dreadnought (Might, Vigor, Wrath)

Health 389/558 Endurance 252/408 Mana 259/402

Wendell’s shotgun came up, and the drone pulled up as the armored guy fired into the crowd, a long lance of fire erupting from the barrel. The widening view as the drone rose showed a man dropping limply to the ground.

Dead or out cold, Bob thought, feeling sick. People didn’t faceplant like that if they had any life left in them.

The crowd stampeded. Some people fell and were trampled. The Butcher fired again, but Bob didn’t see if he hit anybody. Probably did; Ascendants were natural sharpshooters if they put any points at all into Perception and Dexterity.

Wendell’s stat box had a blue outline around it, indicating an Epic Class. Lots of hit points, too, although it looked like he’d taken a lot of damage already. There weren’t any obvious wounds on him, but the military fatigues Wendell wore under his armor had plenty of suspicious dark stains that could be his blood.

As he watched the guy awkwardly work the pump action with the hand holding the axe, his hit point counter went up from 389 to 409. A second later, it had risen to 429.

Twenty hit points per second, Bob figured. That’s a better regen rate than when I use my OMP Skill.

The feed changed to another drone’s, showing cop cars blocking the road, police officers waving the fleeing civilians through gaps between the cars and the sidewalks. A couple of cops were shooting already.

There were no demands to surrender, no warnings; Chicago’s finest took aim with pistols and shotguns and opened up on the South Side Butcher. The drone circled the scene like an impartial god, recording the carnage for posterity.

“What the hell is this bastard thinking?” Bob hissed at the screen as Barton walked in, looking at his phone until he turned to the big screen.

“You watching this too?”

Bob nodded absently, watching little sparks flare up a few inches in front of the Butcher. A Nimbus Skill was stopping some of the bullets. Not all of them, though.

Wendell’s hit points began to drop – 412, 406, then jump back to 426, then down to 386 as his head rocked back from a hit to the forehead.

“Holy crap, you can see his level on the screen,” Barton said, eyes glued to the big screen. “I couldn’t see it on my phone.”

“Maybe the phone screen is too small to show it,” Bob said.

He texted Gorman; his uncle needed to see this.

A lot of the shots missed – marksmanship was seldom a priority for police departments – but enough hit to whittle down the Butcher’s hit points despite his shielding and regeneration Skills.

Problem was, he started to return fire, and his sawed-off shotgun proved to be impossibly accurate and lethal. It had a purple glow: a Legendary weapon. His first shot made an officer’s head explode. Wendell scored that hit from fifty yards, wielding a twelve-gauge with one hand.

The Butcher kept going, walking through a hail of gunfire, calmly racking up the shotgun and shooting back. Buckshot tore a hole through a patrol car’s door and cut down the man behind it. Another blast struck a random civilian and sent him tumbling to the ground in three separate pieces.

“Holy shit!” Barton said.

It was one thing to kill inhuman monsters in a Dungeon. Another to watch people – real people, humans – die on a TV screen. Bob felt a little queasy watching the carnage.

A couple of cops turned tail and ran, understandably enough. The others kept shooting, perhaps expecting the nutjob to drop dead at any second. Except he didn’t.

The police officers couldn’t see Wendell’s stat box, couldn’t see the way his Health bar fluctuated as he healed the damage. One of the cops shooting from behind the open door of his cruiser, tried to run when the Butcher reached the vehicle.

Wendell didn’t shoot. Instead, he moved with shocking speed; his axe flashed down and smashed the officer to the ground. The drone mercilessly kept recording as the Butcher stomped on the already dead man’s head with enough force to burst it open like an overripe melon.

“Fuck,” Barton said. “He squashed…”

“He’s going to kill them all,” Bob said. “Maybe if they get a SWAT team, if they get there on time.”

The Butcher set the axe on the hood of the police cruiser and calmly inserted fresh cartridges into the pump shotgun, more sparks appearing around him as bullets were deflected by his nimbus Skill.

A few seconds later, his head moved abruptly to the side, and he went down as limply as his victims. Bob saw Wendell’s hit points zero out on the stat box above his body.

“Hey, what…”

Bob’s question was answered before he could finish asking it when the feed switched to another drone, this one focused on a nearby house. A man in civilian clothes was on the roof. He had a big-ass rifle – a freaking .50 caliber of some kind, one with a blue glow that told Bob it was an Epic weapon. The guy’s stat box confirmed it.

Diego Delgado (Human Ascendant, F-Grade)

Level 8 Marksman (Guns, Life, War)

Health 389 Endurance 382/402 Mana 390/410

Another Exemplar, Bob thought. That’s what it takes to take down an Exemplar. Regular people don’t stand a chance without mil-spec gear.

The guy who had saved the day made the gun disappear into his inventory and leaped off the roof, vanishing from sight. He’d been wearing a face mask, and when the drone tried to follow him, he simply vanished. Good op-sec for him, but now millions would see him go invisible, live on camera.

“X is already going wild,” Bob reported looking down at his phone. “#ChicagoMassacre is trending, #SouthSideButcher, too.”

At least five people were dead just from the video, but Bob feared the final death toll was much higher. An Exemplar had run amok and racked up a body count, out in public. And he had been a fighter type. What kind of damage could a spell-slinger do?

I could do even worse. Never would, of course, but the capability is there.

“They’ll cover it up,” Barton said. “They’ll say the guy was high on bath salts and was wearing military body armor. I mean, people have walked through gunfire in body armor, so it’s not that far-fetched. That should help prevent a panic.”

“Yeah, but a lot of important people will know better. When they panic...”

Gorman arrived, looking harried.

Gorman Acosta (Human Ascendant, F-Grade)

Level 5 Commander (Awareness, Discipline, Guns)

Health 237 Endurance 242 Mana 245

“It’s over,” Bob told him, and started replaying the video on the big screen.

“We’ve got to move up the schedule,” Gorman said after a few minutes. He had his phone out. “I’m sending code Snap Count to everyone. Got to assume we’re on the final stretch. Leave the gear and get their asses up here.”

“London has declared a state of emergency,” Barton announced. “Zombies in the streets.”

“Are you kidding me?”

Barton shrugged. “Could be Dungeon monsters running wild, or an Exemplar or Nemesis going full necromancer. Either way, videos of walking dead eating people are popping up all over the place.”

“Have a dozen people should arriving within the hour, another fifty in three hours, four at the latest,” Gorman said. “That’s how much time we need.”

Bob glanced at the timer.   

Time to Integration (Phase One): 6 hours (plus or minus 2 hours).

“It jumped from three days to six hours. Maybe have them step on the gas.”

Gorman grimaced. “Time to go see to the neighbors. They know something is up. The Cohens are read-in on all of this, so I’m using the latest batch of tokens to extend the Safe Zone to their property. The Richardsons think I’m white trash, so they’ll get a different welcome to the Zone.”

He left.

“Hope Roland gets back in time,” Barton said.

“If he doesn’t, Gorman will be running the show.”

His uncle and Roland had discussed the neighbors and what to do about them, so that wasn’t a big deal. As Viceroy, Gorman controlled token placement when Rolls wasn’t here. But beyond that, if Roland couldn’t stay in touch, all the decisions would be up to him.

Come back, Rolls, or we’re going to find out what life under Gorman is like.

*

The first thing Roland noticed while looking for a parking spot for his Humvee was a guy with an unusual System tag watching Elle and Mandy’s rented house from a car across the street.

Chen Zi Hao (Human Awakened)

Tin 0 Cultivator Equivalent (No Daos or Affinities)

Health 39 Endurance 38 Mana 36

Awakened Human: Secret martial arts techniques developed in XXI-993 grant trainees Awakened Status. Awakened humans have more limitations than Ascendants but outperform normal humans. Chen Zi Hao’s aura bears similarities to Wu Hao’s, indicating a common source, likely an organization such as a secret society.

Techniques: Strong Punch (Common): Inflicts 12 points of damage. Cost: 5 Endurance.

Guess Father Takeda was right.

The Jesuit had warned him that Wu Hao might send people after him. He wondered what the guy’s orders were. Observe and report, or something more heinous?

I could kill him and not worry about it.

It would be simplicity itself. Just walk up to his car and look him in the eye. Either of his gaze powers would turn him into a corpse in a second. His aura could do the same without activating a Skill. The henchman’s death would be attributed to natural causes, the always convenient ‘heart stoppage’ explanation. Or he could kill him and store his body in his inventory. No body, no crime.

So easy, to kill a person. So damn easy.

Roland decided to let the guy be.

“You see that dude’s stats?” Dahlia asked him as Roland got out of the Humvee.

“Yeah. He’s here for me.”

The guy was looking down and talking softly in Mandarin. Roland heard and understood him perfectly.

“Target is in sight,” Chen Zi Hao said. “Will attempt to follow him but will need additional personnel to maintain surveillance.”

“Do we kill him?” Dahlia asked casually. “Hey, there’s Cynthia!”

“No, we don’t kill him. Yet. Maybe never.”

“Fine,” Dahlia said, waving at her friend, a skinny blonde in a loose purple frock.

“Go talk to her and wait for Ben. I’ll go see Elle inside.”

“Aye aye, Capt’n.”

Roland grinned at her before walking to the front door, his aura senses still keeping the Chinese spy under observation. The same senses extended into Mandy’s place. A hissed conversation was taking place there.

“How many times do I have to say I’m sorry?” a man was saying in a harsh whisper.

“I accept your apology. Now leave.”

“I just want to make sure we’re cool. Just tell me you aren’t going to, you know.”

“I’m not going to call the cops on you, Hugh. But I don’t want to see you. You scared me.”

“I thought we could cuddle and talk before breakfast. I told you I would have taken no for an answer.”

“You. Got. In bed. With me. While I was sleeping!”

Roland quietly used Mandy’s keys to let himself in. His Art had already let him see the interior of the house.

A thin, gangly man in boxer shorts and a T-shirt that read ‘Protecc and Respecc Womyn’ was sitting in front of the bathroom door. Elle was barricaded there.

“You scared me too,” Hugh said, his hands playing with his long beard. He had thick eyeglasses and his hair was arranged in a topknot. “You shrieked like a banshee and locked yourself in the bathroom! I was just trying to show you how I felt about you. Consensually and respectfully.”

I could kill him, drop the body in my inventory, and not worry about any of this. And that’s why they say power corrupts.

Instead of making Hugh disappear, Roland cleared his throat. Hugh finally noticed him.

“Who the fuck are you!” Hugh said in a high voice.

“Mandy’s brother,” he replied, fully restraining his aura. Just a careless fluctuation could strike dead the living stereotype at his feet.

“Roland!” Elle shouted from the bathroom. “Please don’t hurt him!”

She started removing the stuff she’d used to block the door as Hugh struggled to his feet.

“Uh, listen, sir,” Hugh stammered. “I, ah...”

Roland smiled at him. It wasn’t a friendly smile. “Don’t care. Get out.”

“I, uh, my things.”

“I’ll ship them to you. Get out. Now or never.”

Hugh ran out the front door. Roland’s senses tracked the hipster as he ran full tilt down the street. He was still running when he left the Roland’s sensory range.

I restrained my aura, but Charisma still adds a lot of weight to even a suggestion, let alone an order. Got to be more conscientious about it.

Elle came out, wearing a bathrobe. She looked distraught. Like she’d aged ten years since the last time Roland had seen her.

“Hi, Elle.”

“What are you doing here? Did you hurt Hugh?”

“Never laid a finger on him. Asked him to leave. He did.”

She used anger to cover up her fear. “What do you want, Roland?”

“I promised Mandy I’d bring you somewhere safe.”

He glanced at the timer and saw the numbers blur down until they were in the single digits. Six hours. There wasn’t enough time for this. He still needed to go get Javier, who couldn’t get around on his own.

“She wasn’t making any sense over the phone,” Elle said as Roland texted Dahlia.

Go get Javier. Take Humvee and your friends.

“Some crazy stuff about a disaster? Me, going to Salisbury? If I’m going anywhere, it’s to Hartford, to get some answers about my brother.”

“I’ll go to Hartford for you,” he offered. “Let me explain things to you. And prove that I’m not spouting off nonsense.”

His Charisma would make everything he said sound more believable. He hoped that would be enough to convince her before it was too late.

He had a growing feeling that it already was.