Chapter 96: Alone Against the Storm

I’m finishing this book for him. I just read it, and I can tell he wanted it to be a longer thing. A chronicle of our adventures. He wanted it to be a better story. And now it can never be that.

Brett made me a shield, some armor, and a few other things. That might not seem like a lot, but how many times have I lived through things that I shouldn’t have since I met him? Tons. He wasn’t a fighting class, but he kept fighting classes alive. He kept me alive. And now he’s gone because I wanted to take a stupid nap.

Well, here’s me finishing Brett’s story. He was a good guy, and he got killed by assholes. And now I’m going to kill the assholes who killed him. Every single one of them. And I’m going to do it using things he taught me.

The Big Book of Brett, Page 105

—

Back in town, Sean sprinted past Eike’s people before they could try anything. As far as he knew, there wasn’t a loophole they could exploit to try something inside the town. But until recently, he also didn’t know that the system allowed them to lure people out of town with the end goal of murder.

I need to find the others. Now. Eike and his people can wait.

It was the better part of ten minutes before he found them. Jason, Brady, and Brendan were all sitting around the food plaza, apparently having just eaten together. They were happy, or at least as happy as he usually got to see them. If there was a time for laughing and joking together, it was after a meal in the open in a place they probably thought was good protection against the various less-known threats that the other contestants posed.

The town was safe, after all.

Now Sean had to ruin that. He felt like he was going to vomit.

“Guys. I need to talk to you all,” Sean said. Something must have been weird with his voice. The mood changed from laughter and fun to a sort of thick, tense thing almost immediately. “Now.”

“It’s bad?” Brady asked, frowning as she did.

“It’s really bad. But we can’t talk about it here. Come on. I have a place.”

Sean led them back to the Shanktuary. He imagined they knew he had some kind of secret base, since he and Brett consistently disappeared but weren’t staying in any of the town’s hotels. He had never so much as hinted at it using words, and to their credit, they had never asked about it. The plan had been to keep up that pattern forever, unless a good need presented itself.

Without Brett to protect, he found he didn’t care nearly as much about keeping it a secret, now.

“This is a good place,” Jason said. “I’ve seen you duck into the alley before, but I would have never imagined this.”

“Pretty barebones,” Brady said, sitting down on one of the beds. “You and Brett both stay here.”

“Yeah. Stayed.” Sean looked through his mind for softer ways to tell them what had happened and came up blank. “One of Eike’s people could apparently shape-shift. I woke up and Brett wasn’t here and went looking for him. He was outside of town with Spike and someone who had changed themselves to look just like me.”

Everyone looked a bit more like him now. Paler. Spike and Brett weren’t there, after all. They knew what was coming.

“Gone?” Jason asked, quietly. Sean’s throat felt thick. He had to force the next words out.

“Gone.”

“How?” Brendan said. “Spike was strong. Maybe stronger than you, against a normal opponent.”

“This was some kind of assassin class. They hit him hard before he could get his spear out. They saw me coming. I couldn’t get to them in time.”

Sean pulled Brett’s bag and Spike’s spear out of his storage bag, laying them on the floor between them. Jason looked absolutely sick. Without a word, Brady knelt down, picked up the spear, and looked at it for a bit, apparently satisfying herself that it was real.

“Well, it’s been real,” Brady said. “Thanks for convincing me to stay, guys. But fuck this.”

And then she was gone, too. Whatever restrictions on leaving the competition the System had, they apparently didn’t care about split-second decisions or activation in a secret base. The spear clattered to the floor. Nobody moved to pick it up, and for a few minutes there was silence in the room as the remaining three of them sat around.

“That’s three of us dead in a few days,” Brendan said. “We don’t know what got Scott and Hayden, right?”

“Probably a normal ambush for Hayden, and the same kind of luring tactics for Scott. But no, we don’t really know,” Jason said. “And that’s if we’re all telling the truth. Which, Sean, I’m sorry, I believe you to the extent I can. But nobody was there to see what went down.”

Sean nodded. He didn’t like it. The idea that he would work with Eike’s people would have made him furious, usually. Now it just made him feel even number.

“Yeah. I thought so,” Brendan said. “Sorry, guys.”

And then he was gone too. Sean’s arm shot out uselessly as he disappeared. He had expected Brady to leave, no matter what. But there had been some hope he’d have a moment to convince Brendan. Apparently the man had done the math, and found that three people was enough less than whatever army Eike had paid for that he didn’t like the odds of staying.

“So what are you going to do, Sean?” Jason, as ever, was the kind of guy who had gotten a class built around planning, hiding, and striking at the right moment. He was at least willing to talk things out.

“I’m going to stay. I have some plans for revenge.”

“Good ones? Will they work?”

“They might. They also might not.” Sean said. “I have some system rewards that might help, but I don’t know how much.”

“I need more than that. Give me a percentage, Sean.”

Sean winced. “Thirty. Maybe. I”m strong now, but there’s a lot of them.”

Jason sighed, then bent down to recover Spike’s spear. He sat down on the same bed Brady had, cradling it in his lap.

“Did you know Spike and I were from the same time, about? He was younger than me, by a few years. But we were contemporaries. We had worked together a lot.”

Sean shook his head. He had guessed that, but didn’t know it.

“I hid and killed things, and he mopped them up with his spear. He was always stronger than me. I would have been… like without the apocalypse, I would have been in chess club, or something. He would have been on a sports team. But it didn’t matter. He saved me dozens of times. Hell, I saved him dozens of times, and he saved me more anyway.”

Jason wiped his eyes a bit, pretending he wasn’t crying.

“I should have been there to save him.”

Jason shook his head. “You couldn’t have known. We didn’t. You killed the guy who killed him?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry, then. I just don’t care that much about the others,” Jason said. “Spike had always said, if one of us went down, the other should escape. That was always the plan. We were willing to do this if we had each other’s backs.”

“I could have yours.”

“I know you could. But I wouldn’t have yours, not in the same way. And it’s not what Spike would have wanted.”

Sean sat. He got it, really. At this point, it was insane to stay. All it would take was one battle royale against multiple people, and Eike would get them. He wouldn’t even have to fight. He’d just have to wait until there was a real chance for his numbers to be useful, and he’d have them.

“Can I take the spear?” Jason asked. “I know you looted it, but…”

“No, go ahead,” Sean said. “Take it.”

Jason nodded, holding the spear close as he stood back up.

“Good luck, Sean.”

“Thanks. And good luck out there for you, I hope.”

And then Jason was gone, and Sean was alone.

He got to work.

—

Unlimited trash was, as Brett said, a weird kind of advantage. The Apocalypse System probably didn’t plan on Sean’s class when it made the recycling bin. There was no way it was going to give an alchemist an unlimited source of ingredients for potions, or give a blacksmith unlimited iron. It was too big of an advantage. It wanted people questing. It wanted an economy to be taking place. What it didn’t want was someone doing what Sean was doing now.

There was no way the recycling bin had been designed with his class in mind. All the flavor text for the thing indicated that. It was probably supposed to be some kind of weird choice to flesh out the base menus, the kind of thing you’d see and laugh at but never buy. The material processor was the same way. It was overkill for almost any kind of crafting, a giant box that cost thousands of points to get running that could have been spent on base security or equipment for training. It wasn’t the kind of thing that the Apocalypse System never expected anybody to purchase, or to get good use out of if they did.

But if you put the two of them together with the ability to use them, it made for weird possibilities. Sean now had, for better or worse, unlimited amounts of tin cans. And tin cans, as Brett had taught him, weren’t really tin. They were aluminum. So was the foil you used for food. So were a lot of things. And most other metal things that you didn’t find in electronics were iron. Brake pads were iron, mostly, once you broke the actual stuff that stopped the car off them. Lots of stuff was.

And he had lots of that stuff now. He had made a quick trip back to the sundries store to get the containers Brett had bought. There were a lot of them, which was good. He’d need them. What credits he had left he used to buy more, plus some scrap metal of various kinds from the blacksmith, who sold it to him without any trouble once he told her what it was for.

The rest of his day was exhausting. It was endless trips from the recycling bin to the material processor, making big piles of various metals, then feeding them through to make fine powders. It was filling jug after jug with Plug Mud, and using his Adhesives Mastery to will it not to harden, something it turned out he could do and even got a level for.

Brett hadn’t taught him nearly everything the crafter knew, but he had learned a lot by watching the master work. He could sew now. Not well, but he could do it. He could weave to some extent. He had heard the justification for dozens of design choices, and learned chemical formulas for a lot of things he’d probably never use. There were still years worth of lessons he could have got from the man, but he had picked some stuff up. And this was the one project he was sure he could do by himself. He had done it before, after all.

In the end, what he was doing was probably insane. The system probably wouldn’t allow it. He would probably get caught before he could get the plan into action even if it did. And the amounts of materials he was preparing were truly crazy, overkill by any reasonable standard. The fact that he was past reason on the matter of Eike and his people didn’t fix that. It just made him ignore the sheer silliness of the dozens of gallons of metal powder he had accumulated by the end of the day.

The quantities didn’t bother him that much. For what he was planning, you could never have enough thermite.