12. The Woes of Leadership

Spur sighed, not even bothering to look up from the dozens of sheets of paper he had spread out across one of the many foldable tables they’d assembled in their temporary command center. He’d been busy trying to determine if it was smarter for them to prioritize being closer to a water source versus setting up their permanent camp in a more defensible location when one of his men poked their head into the tent.

“Repeat that again Thomas,” Spur said, closing his eyes and praying the man’s words changed the second time around. “I’m not sure I heard you right.”

“Sir. Two civvies tried eating some strange fruits they found growing from a nearby tree. They’ve broken out in hives and are having some trouble breathing.”

“That’s what I thought you said.” Spur rubbed the bridge of his nose, wondering if the System was testing him or something. “Pray tell, did they not receive their meal rations for the day or something?”

“They did sir. From what we can gather, they seemed to think the alien fruit would give them… superpowers? Or something along those lines. They were hard to understand through all the wheezing, but it sounded like they were looking for ‘some piece’ of something.”

Sighing, Spur waved a hand, not even bothering to look up. “We don’t have any sort of med bay set up yet; the doctors were slated to come over in the second wave. Send them over to Frank for now, he was a field medic back in the day. Should be good enough for those idiots.”

“Sir!” Thomas saluted, leaving the tent. As soon as he was alone, Spur’s hand twitched toward his personal pack he kept close by at all times. Unbeknownst to his superiors, he’d smuggled a little something special into this new world just for himself. He’d been planning to crack it open in celebration of surviving one year on this new world, but it had barely been more than a day and he was already fighting the urge to down the bottle. Steeling his resolve, he looked back to the reports he’d collected with the help of Myers. He had a lot of decisions to make, and not a lot of time.

While things weren’t progressing quite as smoothly as he’d hoped, in the last twenty-four hours they’d at least managed to take care of all their critical tasks. They’d located a nearby source of water, determined that there weren’t any serious threats in their immediate surroundings, and began cataloging nearby resources they could utilize to construct a real base of operations. From an outsider's perspective, things would have seemed to be going well.

Spur picked up the report Myers had collected from one of the captains put in charge of a group of civvies. According to the report, they’d been hunting for potential sources of food when they ended up encountering some sort of monster. The captain had described it as ‘a small bear with four arms and the snout of a wolf.’ Thankfully the group had a few people with combat classes, and they’d even managed to take down the monster he’d already heard a few soldiers dub the Big Bad Bear.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t managed to put it down before it killed three of their people.

All three of which were civilians.

After that incident, unrest between the camp had escalated. Most of the civilians were questioning orders they didn’t like the sound of, and a good handful were refusing to follow them outright. The worst part was that Spur couldn’t exactly blame them. Unlike the soldiers, these people had been living totally normal lives just a few days ago. They hadn’t been trained to follow orders. They hadn’t been broken down and reconstructed in good old Uncle Sam’s vision. Hell, they hadn’t even gone through any serious training, unless you counted that ridiculous excuse for a boot camp his superiors had thrown together. And now, all of a sudden, these people were thrust into an entirely different world with nothing more than a few days of scattered training to fall back on?

Forget dissent, it was a miracle half of them weren’t experiencing panic attacks.

Putting down the report on the monster attack, Spur picked up another one he’d received from Captain Hills. On top of being a crack shot with a rifle, Hills had a degree in psychology. Because of that, Spur had given him the task of watching over the camp as a whole, informing him of any serious concerns that required his attention. He’d expected this report to come sooner or later, but he couldn’t believe it had taken only a single day.

According to Hills, a good chunk of the civvies were starting to rally around a woman named Patricia Miles. Patricia, or Patty, as she asked everyone to call her, was a very sociable woman who had been CEO of a nonprofit before receiving the message from the System. Hills’ report explained how Patty had been witnessed going around to disgruntled members of the civilian half of the camp, consoling them and earning their trust. She could just be trying to make friends…

Or she could be laying the groundwork for some form of coup.

Grumbling to himself, Spur dug through a stack of papers and found the information Myers had collected on the woman. According to her report, Patty had claimed to have taken the Bard support class, which came with a free point of dexterity with every level and a passive that gave proficiency with a musical instrument of their choice. On a hunch, Spur took a glance at the sorting of the reports. Myers, bless her overachieving heart, had categorized the reports alphabetically for his perusal. But she had also made a note of the order of the people she’d spoken with. Looking for one report in particular, Spur finally found it.

The person Myers had spoken to immediately before Patty, apparently a small-time DJ who had been hoping to make it big before all this went down that called himself Rooty Beard, had also stated they’d selected the Bard class. 

Spur frowned, crunching the numbers in his head. He’d been lucky enough that a good number of people had had the sense to count how many starting class options they’d been offered, even if there had been too many to memorize. Strangely, the number of classes seemed to actually be different for everyone, but most people had somewhere around roughly 400 choices. The odds that Patty just happened to select the same class as the person directly beside her…

“I don’t like it,” he said, staring at the numbers. From what little he knew about the woman, he just couldn’t see her selecting the Bard class when there were so many more appealing options. “But why lie about your class in the first place?” He muttered, trying to wrap his head around the decision.

“Sir!” A familiar voice called out before entering the tent.

“Not the best time Phil, I actually have to think about something, and you know how much I hate thinking,” Spur said, giving a dismissive wave to his third in command. With Myers busy helping him do, well, pretty much everything, Phil had been placed directly in charge of maintaining the perimeter and ensuring no new monsters snuck up on them. The man had already proven himself to be a natural with a longsword, and had recently become the first person in camp to hit level 3 after a number of successful hunts.

“I think this warrants a break from thinking.” Hearing the seriousness in Phil’s tone, Spur looked up, raising an eyebrow at the frown on Phil’s face.

“What’s wrong?” Spur asked, his mind immediately turning to the worst-case scenario. “Did we lose anyone else?”

“Kind of the opposite actually. Remember that civvy you sent out to check out our surroundings that vanished?”

“Yeah, the Explorer. Vin, I think it was.” Spur said, thinking back to the lanky man with unkempt black hair and a seemingly constant layer of dirt on his person. While the poor guy had that wiry, durable look that most of the people he encountered living on the street seemed to have, he didn’t look like he’d be able to fight his way out of a cardboard box. Spur had been hesitant to send him out on his own, but his passive was exactly what they needed with their surveying drones taken, and he at least looked like a fast runner. But when Vin had failed to return before nightfall, they’d assumed he’d run into something like the Big Bad Bear and met his demise. “Did you find his body?”

“Well that’s just it sir,” Phil hesitated. “Turns out he’s not dead. In fact, he’s approaching camp as we speak.”

“What? That’s great news!” Spur said, laughing at something going right for once. The three dead civvies may have been the kindling Patty was using to light a fire under the civilian half of the camp, but Vin’s disappearance that first day technically under his orders had been the spark. His return to camp should help Spur pump the brakes on whatever it was Patty was trying. Despite his excitement, Spur quickly picked up on Phil’s continued uncertainty, and he did his best not to roll his eyes.

It was always something.

“You wanna spit it out man, or do I need to order you to tell me what the problem is?”

Phil slowly shook his head, his frown deepening. “It’s not a problem, per say. In fact, you could argue it’s probably a good thing for us.”

“Phil, I swear to God I’m going to command our crafters to build us a toilet just so I can give you this world’s first swirlie if you don’t come out with it in the next five seconds.”

Luckily for him Phil was used to his dislike of military protocol, and the man didn’t bat an eye at his threat. “You know how I selected the Challenger class?”

“Yeah, because you’re so ridiculously competitive I once watched you practice for ten hours straight just so you could beat someone in a game of darts the next day,” Spur said, thinking back to their time in the barracks together. “So what?”

“Well, my class starting passive is called Challenger’s Intuition. Essentially, I can see a soft aura around anyone or anything I look at that tells me my odds of winning a fight with said target. Your aura for example is a soft green, bordering on yellow, meaning you would be a small challenge, but not really that much of a fight for me.”

“Hey it’s not my fault I’ve been stuck in here reading reports and giving people orders,” Spur said, frowning at the reminder that he had barely hit level 2 despite supposedly being in charge. If he didn’t get experience for running the camp, he’d probably still be level 1 even. He really needed to throw everything over to Myers and get out there sooner than later; his class leveled far faster through combat.

“Anyway, the strongest thing I’ve seen so far was the Big Bad Bear,” Phil said, ignoring his outburst. “Before the three of us took it down, its aura had been a darker yellow, pretty close to turning red. I may have been able to win solo against it, but I probably would have sustained some serious injuries.”

Spur frowned, smart enough to realize where his old friend was going with this. “Go on…”

Taking a deep breath, Phil shook his head, his expression equal parts confused and concerned. “Well… I only caught a quick glimpse of him. But when the civvy was approaching camp, I saw his aura with my passive, Spur.”

“It was blood red.”