238: Border Clash (Patreon)

“I am the Scourge of God! If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me among you.”

- Genghis Khan

“You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk?

- Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry

Byram, Connecticut Refuge:

Hugh Ricardo loved his new job. Except for the monsters. And the dead bodies. And the violence. Well, nothing was perfect in this vale of tears.

He looked at the big semi lying on its side in the middle of I-95. On Integration Day – all of eighteen days ago – the driver must have freaked out, swerved uncontrollably, and wiped out three cars before toppling over.

The cleaning crew had found four bodies among the wreckage. Before the System, it would have been a lot more. As they respectfully removed the human remains and stored them in the Jackie’s enhanced Inventory for a proper burial later, they had discovered places where people inside crumpled vehicles had clawed their way free like low-rent superheroes. Even a first-level Classer who put his points in the right stats could do some amazing things.

Removing the bodies was only a secondary part of the job. Recovering the tons of metal, glass and plastic inside those vehicles was.

Hugh was a level nine Material Reclaimer. The Rare Class and his Metal Affinity made sense, given his twenty years working in one junkyard or another. There was a lot of demand for that specialty in the Connecticut Refuge.

Now that large-scale crafting was taking off, getting raw materials had become a priority. Sure, you could buy them from the System, but there were always better uses for gold, let alone Essence. Better to take what was literally lying on the ground, begging to be looted.

It was way cheaper to create a System building from a pre-existing one; same with metal and other resources. There were a few Miner Classers running around, but they went after rare stuff found only in Dungeons. For high-quality steel, all you had to do was grab one of the hundreds of thousands of vehicles clogging up every road in the state.

Your typical four-door sedan had a ton of steel in its body structure, and another three-hundred-plus pounds of aluminum. Of course, getting it out of the vehicle and then working it into something useful ranged from the labor-intensive but doable to just plain impossible without the proper facilities.

That was without System fuckery, however.

Extract Steel Ingots.

Some people liked to shout out their Skills, which Hugh found downright annoying. He just activated it by thought as he visualized the process – energy flowed from his outstretched hand into the semi’s cab and began touching the steel components. The tough alloys began to flow like water under his Skill, joining into neat 500-pound metal bricks that then stored themselves in his 60-slot inventory, up to a hundred bricks per slot.

The fact that he was currently lugging around over a hundred tons of steel (and another sixty tons of aluminum, copper, lead and other material) never ceased to amaze him. Yeah, the stuff was in some kind of pocket dimension he could access, not on his back or his pocket. Still, it was insane.

The semi deflated like a leaky balloon, until only a pile of paint and useless slag remained.

“Ain’t that some shit,” Dan Fletcher said.

The head of the salvage crew’s security detail was ninety years old, a Vietnam War vet who didn’t look a day over forty after becoming an Airborne Ranger (E).

“Neat, isn’t it?” Hugh agreed. “Mana intensive, though.”

He checked his Mana – pulling all the metal from the semi had brought him down from 317 to 130. Since Mana potions didn’t grow on trees, he was going to find a place to sit down and meditate – Meditation was taught for free to anyone in the Refuge willing to put in the skull sweat.

With the Skill, his level, and his stats it would take him a bit over ten minutes to get back to full.

“You’ve earned it,” Dan agreed.

Even as he spoke, the Airborne Ranger kept his head on a swivel and both hands over the Uncommon AR-15 hanging from a two-point tactical sling.

They were on the far southeastern end of the Connecticut Refuge, a few miles away from Port Chester and the New York Territory – a Territory that had closed its borders with System-enforced restrictions. People could enter and leave New York, but with difficulty and not without alerting the authorities, such as they were.

Monsters, on the other hand, could roam freely, and the hold on new Dungeons had expired the day before. Hugh’s team hadn’t encountered anything yet, but they were being careful.

The salvage crew had twelve people – five Extractors like Hugh, although he had the highest Skills and level of the bunch, a security detail of four, and three Porters – Classers who started out with a 100-slot Inventory and could turn backpacks into 200-slot containers. Their combined efforts had stripped a ten-mile stretch of highway of anything useful, while not damaging the road itself. Lord Webb had plans to turn I-95 into a System-friendly highway, with lots of useful perks.

Lord Webb, Hugh thought. I never thought I’d be working for some Lord, like something out of a Ren Faire.

To be fair, Webb hadn’t claimed the title. That was what the System named anyone who held a Territory. Big on medieval concepts, the System was. Hugh didn’t like it one bit, but he hadn’t cared much for politics under the red-white-and-blue, and he didn’t want to care now that he paid taxes under the Connecticut State Flag, which had been adopted as the Territory’s national symbol.

Hugh was happy with his job; he had daily quests to provide certain amounts of material to any of the dozens of crafters and builders  operating in western Connecticut, or directly to the government.

The daily quests got him gold and Essence, and the buyers paid him in more gold on top of that. The prices per ton of steel were ridiculously low, but the System set it by the quest rewards, which buyers typically matched. The economy was still sorting itself out.

For all that, Hugh was making a good living, enough to let him splurge on luxuries like food from before the System, served hot and ready to eat, or music and movies for his IPhone.

Which was all a phone was good for, nowadays. Nobody could call anybody. The only way to know what was going on outside a Territory was to go there and take a look or wait for someone from there to come over and tell them.

Even within the Territory, only a few people with the proper authority could send messages via the Territory Interface. Peons like Hugh had to make do with gossip and rumor.

Take Roland Webb, who wasn’t just the Lord of the Refuge but also the number one Ascendant on the planet. Hugh had never laid an eye on the guy but he had heard so many stories about him it almost felt like he knew him.

People said he’d been in the Army, Special Forces, maybe a Green Beret or something fancy like that. That he’d had a hundred confirmed kills before the System arrived, which is why the Grim Reaper himself favored him. That he had over ten thousand hit points, an impossibly high number that explained how he could solo a World Boss and clear entire Dungeons by himself.

Hugh figured at least half the stories were bullshit, but he’d seen the Pale Riders – the biker gang he’d founded after he left the Army, people said – and they were scary dudes. Working at a junkyard – not one of the ones owned by the Acosta family from Roland’s mother’s side, unfortunately – he met his share of rough customers, but these bikers were something else.

Just about everyone who didn’t spend their days cowering behind the walls of a Zone had seen some hard fighting over the previous days. Hugh himself packed a Common Colt .45 loaded with Uncommon rounds for a little extra punch, and he’d trained his Mana Shield into something that would have made him nearly bulletproof before the System. And a couple of Extractor Skills had combat applications. Just a few days ago, he’d stood atop a wall in Stamford and helped protect the Zone from the monster surge that ended when Webb killed a World Boss.

He’d seen – and done – some shit. But he’d also seen a team of Pale Riders wipe out a tribe of Goblins near Norwalk, and the bikers had moved like the hounds of hell.

They all had Death-related abilities – that Affinity was surprisingly common for some reason – and Hugh had watched them kill Goblins just by standing near them with their killing auras on. Scary dudes, all with Rare or Epic Classes. Normal Ascendants just couldn’t compete.

Some of their younger members had started putting skull tattoos on their faces and other Santa Muerte stuff Mexican drug cartels liked to use. It was rumored that the leadership didn’t approve but hadn’t stopped it, either. Hugh sure as hell wasn’t about to ask a biker anything about the rumors; when the Riders were around he was just polite and quiet.

Scary, but they were on their side, and nobody had heard of the bikers abusing civilians. People said the few who tried came to very bad ends. The Pale Riders had a zero-tolerance policy and they enforced it with the same ruthless brutality they used on the enemies of the Refuge.

Strange times, Hugh reflected as he meditated and watched his Mana tick upwards. Soon he’d get back to work. They were going to clear the place all the way to Exit 2 and then spend the night in Byram, a small town turned border fortress and Pale Rider station.

It was funny, how quickly people had started rebuilding. Byram had been a small, crowded Safe Zone as the Integration phase ended, full of traumatized people amidst the ruins of their former homes and places of business. Now it was a smaller but heavily fortified village with facilities to repair and enhance vehicles a small tavern-slash-hotel, and three bars, one catering to the locals, another to work crews like Hugh’s, and the last one – Dead Man’s Hand, it was called – to the Pale Riders and those brave enough to go rub shoulders with them.

Hugh would definitely spend his quality time at O’Reilly’s Pub, a far less rowdy establishment where you could drink without feeling like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

“Hear that?” Dan Fletcher said, snapping Hugh from his thoughts of quiet drinking evenings.

“Hear what?”

He was paying attention now, and although his Perception was on the low side – his Class only gave him one point per level and there never were enough freebies to go around – he heard it now. Gunshots. Sounds that everyone still living had become uncomfortably familiar with.

“Getting closer,” Dan said, taking a position behind a minivan that hadn’t had its metal components extracted and using its hood to support his rifle. “We’ve got a running gunfight moving towards us from I-95.”

“Everyone, we’ve got trouble here!” Hugh shouted as he moved next to the Ranger. “Shouldn’t we, uh, run for Byram?”

“You probably should,” Dan agreed. “But someone needs to see what’s going on. And to slow down any pursuit. Lots of things can outrun our trucks if nothing gets in their way.”

Hard on the rear guard if it’s more than they can handle, Hugh thought.

He understood why the guard teams’ quest rewards were higher than the extraction crews, although they didn’t get extra gold from selling the materials, so it kinda evened out.

“Your guys could use some backup,” Hugh found himself saying. Weird the kind of shit that comes out of your mouth sometimes.

Dan looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “You sure? Things might get a mite heated here.”

“I’ll tell you if I’m sure when I see what’s coming this way. I’ve got a few tricks with metal that can be useful in a fight.”

“All right, then. We’ve got the Cybertruck if we need to beat a hasty retreat, and you’ll fit.”

Hugh nodded and turned to his fellow civilians. “Get in the trucks and head straight for Byram! Let them know there’s fighting on I-95.”

Nobody argued or asked questions. People who did either usually ended up as monster lunch or got booted before they got other people killed. They ran to their vehicles and took off, leaving the Cybertruck, the four-man security detail, and one Hugh Ricardo, wondering if he’d just gotten himself killed.

The Cybertruck moved next to the wrecked SUV Dan was using for cover. Unlike the combat models (about sixty of them) the Refuge Militia used, this privately owned truck didn’t have a heavy machine gun mount. But Josephine ‘Josie’ Jackson was on its roof, aiming her .50-caliber sniper rifle.

The other members of Dan’s party were melee types: Will Finn was in a motley mix of chain and plate armor pieces and had a shield and morning-star mace as the team tank. And Serbio Fernandez wielded a spear, with a bucket of lightning-enhanced javelins on his back.

All of them were level 10 or 11, but none had graduated past F-Grade. A good team against wandering monsters or even a lesser Boss. Hopefully they would be enough to stop or at least down whatever was coming down the road.

“I see ‘em,” Josie said, looking through the scope of her big rifle. “Group on foot, chased by folk on horseback.”

“Will they catch them before they cross the border?” Dan said.

“They are both moving at a good clip. Could go either way.”

“Okay,” Dan decided. “We’re private contractors, not the damn Militia. If they stay on their side of the border, we don’t go off starting a fight with another Territory.”

“Specially another Territory that had seven times Connecticut’s population,” Will Finn muttered. “And word is the number three guy on the leaderboard is the ruler there.”

Hugh licked his suddenly very dry lips. He hadn’t known that. That would teach him not to pay attention to politics.

There was also the fact that Hugh hadn’t done any Dungeon crawling. All his levels and Skills came from field work, extracting resources and fighting wandering monsters. People who did crawls had a lot more time to get used to it, since most Dungeons had a time compression thing where you could spend hours or days for every minute that went by on the real world. To Hugh, all this was brand-new, not even month-old developments. Dan had told Hugh he’d spent close to six months running around tunnels for fun and profit.

“I see them,” Dan said, interrupting Hugh’s train of thought. A moment later, Hugh saw them too.

The people on foot looked like escaped slaves, if the shackles still hanging from several of their wrists and ankles were any indication. Few of them had any armor – a demon-faced helmet on one of them was the most noticeable piece. For weapons they had a mix of spears of the same make – stolen, maybe? – except for one guy who had a gosh-darned Plasma Katana, the official weapon of the Star Kensai from the immortal movie series, Lloyd Gorkas’ Galaxy Battle.

“Holy shit, that guy’s a Star Kensai from the movies!” Josie said. “Those are the good guys, Dan!”

“Stow it, Jackson. We don’t know shit.”

Except that the guys on horseback looked like they’d gone out of their way to present themselves as the bad guys.

Their mounts were emaciated-looking horses that had to be undead to look so close to the glue factory while moving faster than most motor vehicles. Their skinny flanks and heads were covered in black leather festooned with wickedly sharp spikes that made Hugh wonder how the riders could stay on the saddle without getting shredded.

Except the riders were as normal as their mounts.

Their armor and weapons screamed ‘minion of an evil overlord,’ except for the guy in the biggest horse, who seemed to be in the running for the evil overlord role. Black leather or lacquered metal, with more impractical spikes all over their joints, shoulders and knees. Their weapons were also bizarre, like something out of bad anime. Swords with oversized hacking blades, tridents instead of spears, and bizarre crossbows that appeared to be made of human bones.

One guy was gigantic, at least nine feet tall if the other riders were normal-sized, and his horse looked more like a bull or maybe a rhino. His helmet looked downright demonic, with huge horns wrapped in barbed wire coming from both sides and a set of tusks from the lower half.

The leader’s stat box popped into view and Hugh grunted.

Desiderio Furioso (Demonic Undead Ascendant, E-Grade)

Level 17 Knight of Wrath (E) 

Health 2,339 Endurance n/a Mana 1,833/2,219

“We’re so fucked,” Will said.

He had a point. The guy with the fancy name and demonic armor could wipe out the party by himself, and he had seven other riders that were maybe two-thirds as tough as he was.

The fleeing refugees, led by the Star Kensai, crossed the border into the Connecticut Refuge. And the bikers followed.

“Oh, shit.”

Hugh’s mouth got moving again. “If we rush toward them on the Cybertruck, I can protect them with a metal wall. Then we load them up and we drive away.”

His work extracting metal had gotten him Metal Control, a Rare Skill, at Beginner 9. And he had literal tons of steel in his inventory that he’d forgotten to hand over to his crew. He could bury the wannabe demons under a small mountain of the stuff. It probably would only slow them down, but might be enough.

“There are five people in the Star Kensai’s group,” Dan said. ‘I don’t think we can fit them all.”

“I’ll make seats,” Hugh offered.

“You’ll get us killed,” Will told him. “We gotta get the hell out of – ”

Music came on behind them. Ghetto blaster loud music that anybody who spent any time with the Pale Riders recognized. Fear the Reaper.

“The Riders are coming!” Jackie shouted, pumping one fist. “It’s on, bitches!”

And that’s how Hugh Ricardo found himself in the middle of a shooting war between Territories.

He loved his job, but not during days like this.