Book 2 - Chapter 18: Melting Points

“So what you are telling me,” Brett said while filing away at the last remnants of the steel block. “Is that he was pretty much like every other offworlder ever.”

Sean had slept longer than he meant to, but being clean, dry, and rested felt much better than the inverse.

“I mean, I’m not sure. I think I’ve met five offworlders now. That’s a pretty small sample size.”

Brett set down his file. “Listen, Sean. I can’t say there aren’t good offworlders, somewhere, hanging out on planets living normal lives and being decent. But the kind of guys who make it here? I’ve never met a good one.”

“You haven’t met all of them, either.”

“Nope. But I’ve been around a long time, and I got tired of waiting for a decent offworlder to prove me wrong.” Brett started scooping the various piles of metal powder he had produced into gallon milk jugs he had cut in half. “The best of them aren’t out-and-out malicious, but still are so insanely driven that they don’t see anything but their goals.”

Sean wanted to disagree, but to some extent Brett had just described both Sean’s old swordsman nemesis Eike and the squid. They both felt like very different people, but both were willing to put him down without a second thought the moment he got in between them and what they wanted to achieve.

He’d take both above an absolute psychopath like Breca, for whom trying to kill Sean was a goal all of its own. But Brett had a point.

“And it’s not only that.” Brett finished organizing his work and clapped the metal powder off his clothes and arms as best he could, making the entire room stink of iron dust. “Near as I can tell, in your time, there was hardly ever any reason to want to kill someone, at all. The only people who would even feel tempted to do it were psychopaths.”

“Basically, yeah.”

“This world hasn’t been like yours for a while. You know that old joke about two guys running from a bear? Where the first guy doesn’t have to outrun the bear?”

Sean nodded. “He just has to outrun the second guy. I’ve heard that one.”

“There are a lot of situations like that in this world, where the circumstances offer will some advantage to letting someone else die, or causing it. Not everybody takes the world up on that. I don’t. Estesia doesn’t.”

“But a lot of people do?” Sean could see it. It’s the reason you needed law and order in the first place. If people knew they couldn’t get away with murder, most of them wouldn’t get around to thinking about resorting to it as an option at all. If they knew that it was a possibility, that it was in their arsenal? Then, there was a problem.

“Yup. So even with other humans, other Earth folks, you need to watch your back. They aren’t going to all be like you. They aren’t even going to be like me or Estesia.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to get that,” Sean said. “But this particular one isn’t going to be a problem anymore, anyway. I’m a little bit surprised I didn’t get any achievements for it. He seemed to think he’d get one for killing me.”

“It’s not always immediate like that. Sometimes, people don’t see the achievements until they reach a milestone of some kind and then get them all at once.” Brett pointed over at his containers of powder. “I might get something for using a file so much, or for destroying so much metal so thoroughly. But maybe not until the project itself is done.”

“Got it. And that project?”

“It’s a surprise. But it should be done by the time you finish hunting today, if it works at all.”

“You can’t tell me now?”

“Let me have my fun, Sean. I need something to look forward to after all this filing.”

Sean shrugged. It wasn’t like he could use whatever Brett was up to at the moment anyways.

—

Sean had managed to recover all his weapons from yesterday, despite being unbelievably wiped from the fight. His shield was pretty much trashed, not that it wasn’t in a different sense before. He and Brett could put together another later.

That said, he hadn’t got any system notifications today, and with the numbers of enemies he had left to kill low enough, he could take out what was left by himself. The small changes to his stats aside, he had gotten better at killing most of the enemies over his time with the squid, and there were some possible combos of boxers and archers he didn’t think he’d have much trouble with at all.

With a few creative sports drinks in his pack and the Trash Compactor in his hand, Sean opened the door to the Shanktuary, poked his head out, and knew he was absolutely fucked even before the apples flew and the system notifications popped.

Surprise!

You get the bit where you are sharing enemies with the squid, or at least were before you shanked him rightly and put an end to his squidly plans. But although I said that I had mushed together your spaces, you probably didn’t really think of yourself as sharing space with him in the literal sense.

You’re seeing this message because you’ve just seen the undeniable truth of the implications of today’s space-shrinking and the squid’s death. Between both, you are down to what’s considered the minimum size of this area. If it wasn’t for the trees, you would be able to see each and every one of the remaining enemies on the field. And they’d be able to see you as well.

Every competitor who survives this warm-up phase emerges at the same relative time, but that doesn’t mean everyone gets out, or that your own personal timeline doesn’t come with some complexities just to keep things interesting.

Things just got pretty cramped. Good luck!

Sean barred the door, then waited a bit for the arrow-strikes to stop hitting the door. He was suddenly thankful he had spent the points to re-reinforce the sucker. At least for the moment, it was holding up just fine.

He ran back down the hallway and burst into the workshop.

“Bad News?” Brett looked up.

“Bad News. All the enemies are bunched up right outside the door.”

“All of them? How’s that even possible?”

Sean sat down and took a deep breath. “I don’t think there’s anywhere else for them to be. The system scrunched up the edges of this place. I’m pretty stuck in here for the moment.”

“They are all close together, though? Do you think they’d chase you if you popped your head out?”

“The boxers would, for sure. I’m not entirely sure about the archers. The only time I’ve seen them move much is if they can’t see me.”

“Hmm.” Brett looked thoughtful. “That’s interesting, actually.”

Brett went to the recycling bin and started pulling various things out. With the most recent load-up of trash-based-fuel for the thing, he and Sean had discovered it wouldn’t actually overflow with trash. If it had taken in more than it could output into the bin, it would just hold back whatever potential was left until there was room in the out-box.

Brett started preferentially pulling big stuff out, like yard-waste trash bags, milk jugs, and anything else of significant size.

“You have an idea, I take it?” Sean said from across the room. Brett snapped out of his project-focused haze.

“Oh, yeah, sorry. So I probably have a way to deal with this, but it’s going to hinge on getting some timing stuff just right. Do we have any way to look outside? Without opening the door, I mean.”

“No. I think we have just a few points left, though. I was going to try to buy you a radio with them, or something.”

Brett shook his head. “Thanks, but this is more important. See if you can get any way to safely look outside, at all. Doesn’t matter what it is.”

Sean jumped into the menu. There were a lot of surveillance options, ranging from cameras to magic eyes that would perpetrate some level of system-assisted sneaking. Out of all of them, there was really only one he could afford at the moment.

Single-use Periscope (20 points)

Ever wish you could look outside your house, but haven’t saved up even of a fraction of the points for what that actually costs? Then, this item is for you and the poorly planned out mess you’ve made of your life.

Upon use, the single-use periscope drops down from your ceiling and lets you get a no-nonsense, foot-level view of the surroundings of your base. It doesn’t scry, transmit system descriptions, reveal concealed objects, illuminate the surroundings, or any of a dozen other features you might want.

What it does do is give you a two-hour timeframe in which you can gather the  most basic details about the outside of your home. The only upside is that there is no visible sign of the periscope outside your home. Even the most basic of am-I-being-watched anti-surveillance skills will notice it, but absent that, it won’t be obvious you’re taking a look.

“That will work,” Brett said, creating more and more piles of garbage.

“Work for what, though?” Sean asked.

For the first time since Sean had known Brett, he was able to see actual visual evidence of the sheer, manic enjoyment the man got out of making cool things. He wasn’t just smiling. He was grinning like someone who was about to play with a new toy.

“How much,” Brett asked, “do you really know about stored chemical energy?”

—

An hour later, Sean popped out of the hole, absolutely wrapped in wall after wall of garbage.

Brett’s plan hinged on several things. The first was that the weird boxer and archer constructs in this forest were almost entirely mindless. If they knew Sean was there, they’d try to get him. For the boxers, that meant taking the shortest clear route into punching range, and for the archers it meant trying to get line of sight on him.

Brett’s fix for that was to make a kind of flexible spiral maze out of trash, one just deep enough that Sean could duck into it and be out of sight. He would also maybe get a tiny bit of cover from apples and arrows in the few parts of the structure that were sturdier than big plastic tarps, sheets of trash bag, and un-crumpled paper towels.

Even if the boxers tried to bash through it, which they might, the archers would almost definitely have to approach closer to fulfill their purpose of making Sean into a very dead pincushion. It was janky and might not work, but it was the best they could do for now.

As Sean popped out, he got to work spreading out the structure. The next steps hinged on him doing this part quickly enough, and Brett had made him drill it over and over again in the storage room before he deemed Sean fast enough. Sean pushed out with his arms, forcing the structure to uncoil as he moved through the two turns of spiraling trash hallways Brett had wired together.

With the structure spread out over the Shanktuary’s door, the hope was that Sean could escape back down into the safety of the base if things went wrong. Neither he nor Brett were sure that was the best plan, given that they were almost out of garbage and Sean wouldn’t get any stronger within the safety of their temporary home.

If it came down to it, he might just have to fight it out.

But for now, with the structure spread out, Sean hoisted his giant tub of metal dust onto his shoulder. Brett’s second assumption was that the monsters didn’t have a melting temperature higher than elemental iron. That, at least, seemed to be a safe enough assumption.