One thing I noticed, health regen was a lot quicker when we were sat eating a meal. We’d need to test if it was the sitting, the eating, or the combination of the two which achieved the effect. I dropped a message to the group chat, seeing if anyone had noticed something similar. When our health bars were nearly full we got up and made our way back down the middle stairs to the lecture theatre building.

  We quickly checked two more school buildings, multiple rooms of desks, displays and chairs. Compared to what we had faced in the pool, the fights with a couple of rats, a pair of spiders in their webs, and another boar seemed almost trivial. Sam claimed their corpses.

  We found another library which had been cleaned out, though in one of the back rooms there were some colour coded terminals with the words ‘Secure Access only’ written on them, which stood out to me as interesting and something to consider once we powered up this place.

  The next building was entitled ‘South Harmony Institute of Further Technology and Engineering Museum.’ It had been sealed by a heavy metal grate and we could find no way in. Its neighbour was an office block, with a number of common seating areas, meeting rooms, and a staff room, where I found another key. I took it, in the hopes it might be something useful.

  The second to last building was a club. There was a large bar covering one side of the building, and the dance floor covered most of the rest of the ground floor. Stairs going up to an extensive seating area with a balcony overlooking the dance floor below, and at the top another bar, and what I assume was the VIP area. Doors on each floor led to the back area, which, due to a lack of windows and no power, was pitched in total darkness.

  “This feels like a student union bar…” Sam thought out loud.

  “Social hub maybe?” I considered. “I haven’t seen many social gathering places, they could have done different nights for different tastes…”

  “Leave the heavy dance music until late…” Sam tried pulling on the beer tap, unsurprisingly nothing came out.

  “That’s lucky.” I said.

  “Oh?” he looked at me in confusion

  “If that had any beer in it, you would have caused ‘spillage’. The unforgivable crime.”

  The final building was ‘Da Vinci Hall’ and was the mirror image of ‘Lovelace hall’ at the other end of the tier.

  “Men’s dorm?” Sam asks, eyeing the style of decoration.

  “With Lovelace being the ladies?” I asked, in comparison it had felt more feminine.

  “Possible…” I don’t think either of us was convinced, it just felt right.

  The next tier seemed to be a commercial district, and after finding the first building to be largely empty of anything of value, I strongly suspect both of us were getting angsty. Our searching became a little more cursory, especially after the third building with a locked door we couldn’t open. Maybe once power was restored we would be able to search the dark places and get into these back rooms.

  When we hit the mid way point with its stairs heading down to tier two, all it took was me to nod at them to get a nod from Sam, we turned towards them and headed down.

  It was clear to me at this point, when whoever built this place left, they did so with intent and no hurry as most of the buildings were mothballed, the few we had seen with anything left in them were from the Explorators.

  Tier two was the home of the industrial sector of the town. There was a pair of tracks built into the road, with sidings leading into some of the buildings, and a pair of lifts leading down to the docks.

  The first building we came to at the bottom of the stairs was signposted ‘The Foundry.’ Through the open door, I could see industrial sized metal smelting equipment, ceiling tracks with stone crucibles hanging from them helped to transport molten metal to different parts of the building.

  Entering the building we saw rollers and various other industrial metal working equipment, looking like they were just one big overhaul away from being ready to work once more. Time hadn’t been completely kind here though, some of the chains had rusted away, dropping the crucibles to smash on the ground below and there were clear signs rust had started in on a few of the machines. There was also the remains of a chain, each link almost half as tall as I was, it must have been half finished when they shut this place down.

  In the next building we found Francis’ Forge. The door opened easily to our touch, this one had been repaired and maintained, not a squeak or ounce of resistance. I’m sure the room had once been used to teach black smithing, there were ten stations around the room consisting of almost identical setup of power hammer, a press, a forge, an anvil, and few other things I couldn’t identify. The exception was the station closest to the door, someone had built up a coal forge, with a foot powered bellows to add to the unpowered induction and gas forges each station already had. There were trolleys holding tools and two different anvils. It looked like it had been left ready to be used as soon as you got the forge hot enough. The linkage was also nowhere to be found.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  “We definitely need to clear the town then…” I said, after we had made doubly sure nothing was here.

  “Aye. Finish this side off, go down to the docks and then come back from the other side? Save us going over tread ground…” he suggested.

  “Sounds like a plan.” I confirmed. After spending the last hour exploring mostly empty buildings part of me was ready to move on to something interesting.

  Maybe my thoughts triggered a flag in the system, as the next building had a bear.

  It was a large warehouse, the bear was in one corner, muzzle covered with the blood of the four rats that it was in the middle of eating. It looked in our direction when we opened the large sliding door. Roared and then charged. For something so huge, it crossed the space between us like a bat out of hell. I swung my staff up, released a at its face, then started casting a because despite the thirty or so meters between us and where it had been eating, I had no confidence I could get another off in time. I was starting to prepare to thrust the battlestaff forward when I felt something grab the back of my jacket and yank me back.

  I spun back away from the closing door, I fell backwards, the bear collided with door as it slid shut. It let out another roar, its head and left front arm through the gap between the doorframe and the door, with the latter wedged up against the bear's neck, the only thing stopping it from coming out and getting us.

  It seems Sam decided a direct fight wasn’t the best choice, and decided closing the door would buy us time. He used the force of yanking me away to give him the momentum to push the door harder, and then shifted himself near the doors runners to try and wedge it closed. He was fighting a losing battle holding the door in the position it was in. I think his only chance of holding it as long as he had was the bear's poor leverage position. I stood back up, recast my and thrust the end of my battlestaff into its face.

  The bear let out a pained scream, and seemed to shudder. That momentary stun was all Sam needed to get something wedged into the track of the door’s runner. I casted another before using the big swing attack to deliver it as hard as I could. Sam, satisfied whatever he had wedged in would hold the door in that position, moved around, drew a pistol in each hand, took aim, and then fired both, holstered, drew two more, fired, holstered and then finally drew the rapier. My battlestaff came in with a thrust from me to unleash another . Sam waited for the bear to try and lash out with its arm, before he darted in in a fencer's pose to stab the end into one of its eyes.

  There was a loud groan of metal as the bear's bulk finally got the leverage it needed or the sliding door’s upper guide rail finally stopped resisting, the door was lifted up off of the rails and away from what had been used to block it in.

  The bear rose up to its full height, letting out a huge roar. This is one of the scariest creatures in nature, and in that moment, I felt fear, genuine, deep fear. It dropped back down to all fours and let out another loud roar in our faces. I took the opportunity to shove my Battlestaff down its throat and hit it with a from the inside. I was reacting, not acting. If I had thought it through, I certainly wouldn’t have put my primary weapon inside the chompers of something which could probably crush bones with them. If I did think that was a good idea, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have also kept a hold of it…I did try to yank it back out but it was stuck on something.

  It went to stand up to its full 9ft height, but it seemed to think better of it when my weight on my stick dragged its neck and head down. I could feel the vibrations of its jaws through the length of the staff as it gnawed relentlessly. It tried to bat at me, but the five feet of length sitting outside of it was enough to keep me out of range of those huge paws. I almost lost my grip a couple of times when it tried to bat the staff away, but it soon stopped trying that, I assume because it felt bad on my hands and they were nowhere near as soft as its soft inner tissues. The whole time it was doing this, I was panic casting after .

  “Aenara!” a voice commanded near my ear. “Ravenscroft! STOP!” I felt a slap to my face.

  “Huh?” I could feel my hands shaking, a headache growing and my vision tunnelling.

  “We killed it already!” Sam said to me, my panic subsiding, my heart starting to slow down in its heavy pounding. “What happened to you there? You were screaming and constantly casting, even after it went down.”

  “I don’t know…” I admitted. Sam helped me over to a bench to recover from the fight.

  “Do you have any mana left?” he asked, and I checked. I didn’t. I had drained my entire pool. That would explain the headache, the lightheadedness, and the tunnel vision…

  “None.” I admitted.

  “That was a tough fight…” he tried pulling my staff out of the bear's mouth, gave up and used a knife to cut it out. He was checking something on his status as he brought my staff over to me. “Check your status log, I resisted an indirect hit from a fear attack.”

  I brought up HUD, and found the combat log screen. I had previously seen it, but every time I had checked it didn’t really tell me anything useful. I couldn’t see any options in its setting to tell me how much damage I did or received for example. It just listed out the effects on me. Which up until recently was pretty much just [Well Fed]. A time stamp of when it started and wore off might have been useful for calculating how much of a bonus from cooking you got, but didn't help much in actual combat.

  ‘You were hit by a direct fear attack’

  ‘You failed to resist’

  ‘You are panicked (fight mode)’

  “Failed to resist a direct fear attack, panicked - fight mode …that roar in my face? It was looking at me when it did it…and I don’t remember much after that point other than shoving my staff down its throat and casting .”

  “It would make sense to me.” He confirmed as he skinned the bear. “It became obsessed with getting to you or getting your staff out of its mouth after that, so it pretty much ignored me…” he looked up at me. “Fight mode? You suppose there might be a flight mode? You might have ran away?” he grinned.

  “Would make sense” I pondered. “I wonder how it decides what you will do… Not storing the bear for later?” I asked.

  “Can’t…” he sighed. “Turns out [Inventory] has a weight limit.