Chapter 26 - Tier Six

  We reached my apartment without any issues. There’d been ten men down in the lobby, standing guard with a stack of improvised weapons. All of them looked more scared than anything else, but one of the guys who worked the front desk recognized me and let us in. We took the stairs to my apartment, which was still the same as I’d left it. I carried my bike up and stashed it beside the door, and we both went inside.

  The place was dark and overly warm, but the windows let in enough moonlight to see. I gave Alex the sofa and went into my bedroom, sacking out on the bed. I figured the odds of something coming in through the windows when we were that high up wasn’t super high, and I’d wake up if I heard smashing glass.

  I still slept with the spear in my bed beside me, anyway. Just to be sure.

  We both woke with the dawn, and I busted into the fridge for anything that was still going to be edible. The milk was too warm to risk, but the bag of apples was still good. I yanked them out and tossed one to Alex.

  He caught it. “Thanks.”

  “Won’t stay good for too much longer, so we might as well eat it while we can.”

  “Food’s going to be a major problem, soon.”

  “Yup.” I remembered reading somewhere that grocery stores had maybe two or three days of food, and that was assuming they weren’t already being looted. I figured most homes had that much, at most. Maybe less, with the power being out and everything refrigerated going bad quickly. “Water’s going to be a problem first, though.”

  “Not for us,” Alex replied with a grin, creating a small globe of water in the air. He moved it to his lips and slurped it down.

  “That is going to come in handy, I’m sure,” I replied with a chuckle. “Hopefully those stones aren’t too rare. We should look into trying to find more of them.”

  “You want to head back out there, get into the mix of things,” Alex said. It was a statement, not a question. He was already getting to know me.

  “Yeah, I do. People are going to be scared. The monsters don’t seem to be vanishing at all,” I said. When I looked out through the windows after first waking, I’d seen a few of those massive bird-monsters flying between the buildings. “A lot of people are going to die if people who can step up don’t.”

  “I think a lot of people are going to die either way, but you’re right. We should go out, help who we can, and get ourselves stronger at the same time,” Alex said. “First, though, why don’t we look at all those stones we got last night?”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  I grabbed a couple of the bottles I’d filled with water the other day and passed one to Alex. He drank some, then refilled it with his power, and did the same for the empty bottle I’d carried the day before.

  As we sat, we both fished every crystal we’d gathered out of the pockets where we’d stuffed the things. It turned out we’d killed a whole lot of ants. When they were all laid out, there were forty-six tier one stones and eighteen tier two. Better still, I could see what each one did, and there were a lot of crystals that I’d never seen before in our pile.

  “We’ve got a good variety here,” I said.

  “How can you tell?” Alex asked.

  “As soon as I hit tier five, I got the power to identify crystals, and I can see what tier rank a person or monster is,” I explained. “Like Tom, last night? He’s tier two. That’s how I knew I didn’t need to be worried about facing off with him,”

  I’d been bothered by it, for sure, but not scared of the man. He didn’t have the Strength to stand against me. I’d been more worried I might have to hurt him than anything else.

  “That’s a very useful skill.”

  “You bet. Here, I’ll break these into piles by type,” I said.

  The tier one stones were mostly clear, but there were also eight grey ones and four green ones mixed in there. “Three green ones are something called Entangle, and the fourth is Move Earth. Not sure what that does. Maybe it’s like your Control Water, but for dirt?”

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  We decided that made sense, and moved on. Six of the grey stones were Natural Armor, and I wanted those something fierce, although I figured it might be good to give Alex some protection, too. The other two were Regeneration, which also sounded like a great thing to have.

  The clear stones were more complex. There were thirty-four of them, and they were divided almost equally into six types: Strength, Stamina, Dexterity, Intellect, Will, and Charisma. At that point, I definitely felt like I’d been dropped into someone’s weird role-playing game.

  For the tier two stones, five were grey, and all of those were Natural Armor. I was starting to think that one was pretty common, but maybe only for insect type monsters. The other thirteen were tier two clear stones, again all for those six stats.

  “From what you told me earlier, you have Strength, Stamina, Agility, and Natural Armor, right?” Alex said.

  I nodded.

  “Okay, so it seems like it would make the most sense to focus on giving you those,” he went on. “I’ll take some, if there are extras, but getting you ranked higher just makes sense. You got bonuses at tier five. Maybe there are other bonus effects at higher tiers, too. So we should focus on maxing out your strong points.”

  “I’m the designated tank, got it,” I replied. “If you’re sure, anyway. I don’t want you to be stuck playing glass cannon.”

  All the old terms from gaming were coming back to me quick enough, but not so much for Alex. I could tell from the quizzical look he shot me that he’d never played RPG games, so with a laugh I explained what the terms meant.

  He nodded when I was done. “I can see the similarities. Interesting. I wonder why these changes resemble games?”

  “Yeah. Was it something that humans did, to mimic games?” I asked.

  “Or something we remembered, in legends and myths, that happened long ago, so we made our games to mimic that reality,” he replied.

  That was interesting food for thought.

  We started breaking up the crystals. I ended up with both Regeneration stones, all the tier two Natural Armor stones, and four of the tier one Natural Armor stones. Alex took all the green stones and two of the tier one Natural Armor stones.

  Splitting up the rest of it was trickier, but we worked it out. Alex got tier one stones: five Charisma, five Intellect, seven Will. I got some, too: five for Strength and Stamina, plus seven for Agility. For the tier two clear stones, I got two for Strength, two for Stamina, and one for Agility. Alex got all the rest, which gave us an even split.

  Then we broke apart and started trying to organize what we had.

  We made a few major discoveries as we were messing around. My first one was that when I held enough stones to turn my tier four stones into a tier five, if I already had another tier five, the entire mess snapped together, to make a tier six stone. That was incredibly useful.

  Then Alex hit a game-changer. He found that he could remove one of his stones. He took the Control Water stone out. His Create Water was tier two, but his Control Water was just tier one. With an effort of will, he simply…popped it out. The blue stone appeared in his palm. After that, he was able to use a few stones he’d picked up before we met and socket a fully tier five Will stone in place, and then use up most of his Intellect stones to boost himself further.

  Will gave him more mana to cast more spells, he told me, and Intellect made the spells he cast stronger, along with just making him smarter than he already was.

  Once I knew stones could be removed, I had to wonder if they could just be moved, without removing them entirely. When I went to play around with it, sure enough, I could move a stone from one socket into another appropriate one. I couldn’t move a grey stone into a socket that was being used for clear stones, or vice versa. Once the first point was designated to a color, that seemed to be set, unless we removed that first stone.

  But I could adjust them, shift them around, and make the whole thing a little better organized. What I ended up with after all of it was pretty impressive, at least from my perspective.

  Magical Stones

  Point 1: Clear Stone (Tier 6) - Strength

  Point 1, Second Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 6) - Stamina

  Point 1, Second Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 5) - Agility

  Point 1, Third Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 3) - Stamina

  +

  Point 2: Clear Stone (Tier 2) - Agility

  +

  Point 3: Grey Stone (Tier 6) - Natural Armor

  Point 3, Outer Ring: Grey Stone (Tier 2) - Regeneration

  +

  Point 4: Grey Stone (Tier 4) - Natural Armor

  +

  Point 5: Clear Stone (Tier 3) - Strength

  Spare Stones

  Strength x3

  I didn’t have a lot of crystals left over, but I’d hit tier six in not one but three different stones. I was seriously kicking butt with this power set. I was strong, fast, agile, very hard to hurt, and now I’d heal quicker, too.

  “I think we’re ready,” I said, standing to stretch.

  “I agree,” Alex replied. “What do you have in mind?”

  “I dunno.” I thought about it a moment. “Being honest, I think the city is probably going to be a madhouse today. People are going to start panicking, what with the power still being out and monsters being outside. Why don’t we go see if we can help stop some of that panic? Help a few people?”

  “And collect a few stones while we’re at it,” Alex added, standing up too. I saw it there in his eyes—he was excited about the prospect of gaining more of those crystals, and I couldn’t blame him. I wanted more of them, too. The stronger we got, the better prepared we’d be for everything unfolding around us.

  We repacked our backpacks, adding some more portable food and an extra water bottle each, then set out toward the stairwell and whatever adventures lay ahead of us.