“You found the caf!”
“Shut up about the stupid caf,” Thorn said. “My System… it’s different now. I can level it!”
“That’s… strange. I mean, that’s good, of course, if it’s real. And not a hallucination. Are you hallucinating? Am I?”
“All my contracts are gone. Almost all of the quints. And it says my System is ‘offline’?”
“Interesting. Yes, for that part, my System is the same. Offline. I’m fairly confident it means we are separated from the shared System network because of the dead zone we’re in.”
“It’s only nineteen units to get to level one,” Thorn continued, excitement rising in his voice. He’d been level one before, and had been given that level when he’d received his System. But he’d never leveled up on his own before.
“And I have nine quints. Wait. Ten now!”
Wait a moment. How did he have ten quints? He should have lost all of them passing through the dead zone.
“How do you have any quints at all?” Lief asked. “You should only have maybe a few, from that snack we just had.”
Lief took a moment to look at his own status.
“How do I have that many quints,” Lief muttered. “Something isn’t adding up.”
“Is the quintessence… thicker? Somehow? Inside of the ‘egg’ we’re in?”
Lief nodded. “Yes, but… it shouldn’t be so many… Gimme another one of those meat sticks.”
Thorn obliged, and then began chewing one of his own, while watching his status.
He took another bite and swallowed.
As soon as the amount of free quintessence hit nineteen units, he sent his System a message.
He couldn’t help himself. He was curious about why he was gathering significantly more quintessence, sure, but that didn’t matter near as much as the almost primal need to do what he’d dreamed about for most of his life.
When he’d first gotten his System, the initial process had knocked him unconscious immediately, so he wasn’t sure what to expect. He’d asked others, of course, but it was considered a rather rude and personal question.
The first thing he felt was a coldness, a cool, flowing liquid moving from between his shoulders and out through his chest. It continued into his arms and legs, then circled back. An icy chill spread into his brain, concentrating at his temples, behind his ears, and in the center of his forehead.
A large knot began gathering in his stomach, above his belly button. The sensation wasn’t painful, only slightly uncomfortable.
And then, like a switch turning on the sun, fire erupted throughout his entire body.
Thorn screamed, a hoarse, choking noise as his muscles convulsed in agony. He had no idea how long it lasted: a few short seconds, or an eternity, it was all the same.
The pain was gone, but phantom echoes still flashed through his limbs. He opened his eyes and glanced over at Lief, who was still chewing on his meat stick and shaking his head at him.
Thorn felt the strangest sensation. It was as if his body became impossibly tiny, and everything else around him, the rocks, the sand, the water in the lake, and the massive solidity of the rocks above and below him became impossibly large. He felt all of those impossibly large things at the same time, as if the stones were his arms and legs and the sand his hands, the lake his feet.
The strange feeling passed, and his eyes fluttered in his head as he “remembered” a tremendous amount of information all at once. It wasn’t remembering, because he knew he had never known anything about meditating before, but now, he had crisp, clear images and feelings of how to perform the skill, like he had been doing it for years.
“Looks like that one was a doozy,” Lief commented dryly, when Thorn finally came to again.
“That… that was not what I expected,” Thorn replied. He had expected to feel great; to feel his power growing euphorically. To feel the strength enter his muscles and his bones.
“Lots of Systems are different.” Lief shrugged. “Some people say it’s the best high in the world. Others say it’s moderately painful; still others say it’s more like a spiritual experience. Maybe a mixture of all three.
“And things can change between levels too. I was going to tell you why bother with binding the quints when we’re just waiting to die, but hey, who am I to stop you from having a good time.”
He finished the last bite of his Q-Stix and shook his head.
“Anyways, what core attributes did you advance?” Lief asked. “And did you unlock any Skills? Those levels tend to be the worst, from my own experience.”
1.02>
“On the core attributes, like a 41% improvement to Body, 21% to Mind, and 2% on Proprioception.”
Lief nodded appreciatively. “Very nice. That gives you a clue about your System, since you can likely expect the same weighting of advancement moving forward. It’s a bit of an odd weighting. At least it’s out of fashion right now, from what I know.”
“How so?”
“Proprioception is the bottleneck on effective machine integration. With such low scores there, but high scores on Body, you’re going to be one tanky bastard, but without any force multipliers from your tech. But who knows at this point. Maybe your System will solve that problem for you later.”
Thorn felt a momentary pang of loss at his low advancement in Proprioception, but that was gone almost immediately, caught up in the excitement of having actually leveled up. How long had he been waiting for this?
He hadn’t been told much when he’d been integrated into his current System. It hadn’t yielded any upgrades to his core attributes at the time, nor come with any Skills. It had only come with the base communication packages almost all Systems had, and the annoying tendency to provide bad advice at the wrong times.
He had always wondered what it was supposed to do; the name “Integrator” was not very helpful. In any case, the relief from finally levelling up a System, just like everyone else he’d every met, was almost palpable. He didn’t care that he was stuck inside a dead zone. He was ready to die in peace.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“I also got a skill. It’s called ‘Meditate,’” Thorn said.
“Never heard of it.” Lief shrugged. “Try it out. See what it does. What’s the worst that could happen?”
Lief kept muttering to himself as he pulled open Thorn’s pack and pawed through the contents.
Thorn settled into a lotus pose, instinctively bending his legs and arching his back into the best position. He closed his eyes and focused on a sixth sense, one that he somehow remembered but had never actually used before.
His breathing settled into a basic pattern, breathing in and out slowly but precisely.
He was floating in an ocean. Or he was sitting on an island; perhaps both, at the same time. The strands of the invisible became visible, and they undulated around him and through him in a complex pattern. He pulled those strands closer to him, bringing them inside himself.
The notification shocked Thorn out of his meditative state. He immediately resettled himself and reached for that state of feeling half-asleep, half-awake; of being but being outside of his body, looking at (but not actually seeing with his eyes) the bands of quintessence flowing in and around him.
After an untold passage of time, he lost the focus he needed to maintain the state and he woke up fully. Lief was sitting with his back against one of the rocks. At first Thorn thought he was sleeping, but Lief’s eyes opened when Thorn stretched and cracked his neck.
“Seems like you had a nice nap. Did you get a skill that lets you sleep sitting up?” Lief asked. “Great System you got there.”
Thorn gave Lief an exasperated look.
“It boosts my quintessence absorption rate,” Thorn said. “By almost ten times.”
He checked his status. He’d leveled up, using the free quints he’d had, which had reset him to zero. He now had another couple already… and his normal absorption rate was now ten per day? That was impressive compared to the measly one quint that he’d had before unlocking his System. Had a day passed? No, that didn’t make sense. His System said he’d only been using Meditate for a few hours. The numbers weren’t adding up yet, but at least they were a lot bigger than he was used to.
Maybe this ability wasn’t too exciting, and maybe it wouldn’t help protect him or attack awakened beasts, but who knew what was next.
He could level up now.Excitement coursed through him again. He might be stuck in a hopeless situation where only death awaited them, but he couldn’t feel too down about it. He checked how many quints he needed for the next level up, and his excitement waned.
That mysterious, magical feeling he’d felt while using Meditate now seemed a bit silly. They’d be dead of starvation or worse inside this cavern before he napped his way to his next level.
“So you can sleep and make money at the same time? Now that’s a real skill to have,” Lief said with a smile.
“It’s not too bad, I guess,” Thorn said. “And I’m not complaining, but I seem to be absorbing far more quints here than normal. Is that a side effect of my new skill?”
“No, I’m also seeing a similar boost in passive absorption,” Lief said. “I was thinking about it while you were using your new Skil, and here’s what I think is going on.
“I’d always wondered about beasts, and how they formed their cores,” he began. “Research on beast cores, the animals likely to form them, etc. All of that is closely guarded information by the guilds. The kind of detail people kill for.
“I didn’t stick my neck out too much, but in my work managing a natural reserve, it would come up on occasion.”
Thorn perked up at the mention of Lief’s past work. He’d never talked about it much, always saying things like “water under the bridge,” or “best let dead things die,” or “ask me again and I’ll beat you up the side of the head.”
“The amount of quintessence that a beast had absorbed to add to their cores was something I could roughly measure,” he continued. “Basically it has to do with one of my skills, the one that allows me to transfer quintessence into surrounding life. It lets me know how much quintessence is flowing, so that I can judge appropriately how much to add.
“Well, when I absorbed beast cores for the quints, adding it to my System repository… I know, I know, how wasteful… better to use the cores as currency. But hey, I wasn’t always as wise as I am now.
“The thing was… the intuitive sense I got from the skill always seemed to imply that the amount of quints flowing out of the core and into my System was more than the quints that I got. Like a lot more.
“I always chalked it up to inefficiencies in the System transfer, but now, I’m not so sure. I think…”
Lief paused.
“Eh, we’re dead anyways, but if what I’m thinking is true… maybe no one ever lives through dead zones because they are killed afterwards.”
“What do you mean?” Thorn asked.
“So I think… we are being taxed,” Lief said. “Or rather, were being taxed.”
“Taxed?”
“Yeah. Skimmed. Leveraged. Charged a service fee,” Lief continued. He held up his remaining hand, all five fingers outstretched.
“If our Systems absorbed five units, we got to keep one unit for ourselves,” Lief put four fingers down, leaving one up. “But our Systems didn’t tell us that, so it always looked like we only absorbed one.”
“So when we get cut off from the System network, the one that can transfer the quints between Systems… it can’t tax us. And we keep all five.”
He held up his four fingers again. “So that begs the question: where did the other four units go?”
“Where?” Thorn asked, playing along.
“To the top. To the people running the Systems and the Guild contracts.”
“Four parts in five?” Thorn asked. That seemed excessive… and rage-inducing, if true.
“Or more,” Lief said.
“But why so much?”
“Stupid question,” Lief said with a sigh. “Because they can. Anyways, enough talking. I need to rest. Can you keep watch?”
“Of course.”
“I lost my rifle, and it looks like you lost yours too. Drone’s useless unless I get more quints. I still have my machete, for what it’s worth,” Lief said, handing it over. “Out here, on the edge, right next to the quintessence void, seems to be fairly safe. The beasts tend to avoid the edge, like they can sense it. So hopefully we will be fine here.”
And with that, Lief decided he was done talking and laid down. His breathing slowed almost immediately and he was asleep as soon as he closed his eyes.
Thorn felt bad.. Here he was, messing around with his System (which, to be fair, was very exciting for him) while Lief had lost not only a few limbs but also a number of levels and was convinced that they were going to die. His tone had been brittle, and he’d been a bit more snippy than usual. Considering the circumstances, though, he was holding it together quite well.
Thorn thought he was too. What was it Lief had said earlier? Existing out of spite? That resonated with him.
Thorn kept watch for the next few hours, successfully avoiding the temptation to mess with his new skill, as it lowered his sense of time and his awareness of his surroundings.
He heard a scratching sound in the darkness, and he sat up straight. There was another skittering sound, on the rocks closer to the beach. He shook Lief awake and took a tighter grip on the machete.
A small creature, about a foot long and crawling on all fours, appeared out of the gloom. It was a rat, and it was covered in gore. It moved slowly and with a limp, so possibly some of that blood was its own, but almost certainly not all of it.
The rat appeared to be passing them by, when it stopped and sniffed in their direction. Before Thorn could move forward, another rat appeared behind it, running fast. The first stopped sniffing and hobbled past them.
“Rats always know when a ship is sinking,” Lief said, grabbing the elements of their quick camp and stuffing them into Thorn’s pack. “We gotta move.”
Lief pulled Thorn’s pack onto his back and Thorn set the machete down to get Lief onto his back, piggy-back style. Lief’s good arm and leg wrapped around his neck and torso like a vice.
“Where to?” Thorn asked. There was now a growing stream of rats running past and around them. One tripped over Thorn’s boot and he kicked it.
“Run!” Lief ordered, but Thorn was already moving. He ran, crouched low, his legs burning from Lief’s weight on his back, but he felt strong. Possibly a bit stronger than before, but he couldn’t really tell. It could also have to do with the adrenaline coursing through his veins.
Rats scampered alongside him as he rushed forward. Some of the rats looked a normal size, others were larger, and a few were the size of humpers. Clearly awakened beasts.
One of those awakened rats saw them and veered to intercept. Thorn was no pro with the machete, but he’d used a knife before. The rat jumped from Thorn’s right, and with Lief’s awkward weight, Thorn didn’t try to dodge. Instead, he jumped forward, towards the rat, and caught it right as it was leaving the ground.
The machete slashed horizontally, slicing deep into the neck of the awakened rat. Blood, thick red with flecks of gold, splattered all over Thorn’s arm and the right side of his face.
He didn’t stop to see if the rat was dead, just kept running. Only after a few more strides did he risk a quick look back. A mass of other rats had surrounded the injured beast. It was thrashing under the morass of bites, blood and fur flying everywhere.
Thorn turned and ran faster, aiming for some of the slower moving rats in front of him.
He passed a foot-long rat on his left as it was climbing over a rock; his machete came down and scored a brutal slash on its back. He kept running and scored another hit on a medium-sized rat.
He wasn’t aiming to kill, but to provide the hundreds of rats around him with a meal and a distraction from him and Lief.
The shore next to the lake and cavern grew wider and gave way to a sandy section. Thorn hit the hard-packed sand next to the water at a sprint and gained ground on the rats that were now all behind him.
“What’s our plan?” Thorn yelled.
“The plan is to survive! Go right,” Lief ordered, and Thorn turned away from the lake and towards the cavern wall. He saw what Lief had seen: a building. A small greenhouse, its glow lamps dark and unlit.
He ran inside and slammed the door shut behind him.
“Will the dead zone catch us here?” Thorn asked, gasping for air.
“I don’t know. It’s obviously collapsing inwards, but probably not that quickly. You can’t run forever and we need a shelter or we’ll be overrun by the beasts. Let’s be ready to move though if we need to.”
After jamming the door shut against any enterprising rats (but making sure they could easily exit and continue running if they needed to), Thorn turned and examined the interior of the greenhouse.
The plants here were regular herbs and vegetables, not imperial plums. Thorn walked down the rows of plants; they were all wilted and dead from lack of sunlight, but some of the tubers and legumes were still edible.
Something out of the corner of Thorn’s eye moved, and he stopped, raising the machete. In the back of the greenhouse, on the floor and up against the far wall, what he had assumed to be a dark corner of the room began to move.
They were not the only ones who had thought to take shelter in this building.