Amazon Apocalypse 6: Chapter 13

I returned home to find several of my quests had triggered. I looked around for Bridget or Sakura and found Bridget in the kitchen.

“There’s my favorite baby-factory!” I said, sweeping Bridget into a kiss and pulling her away from the dough she’d been kneading for a kiss. Bridget returned the gesture, though she had to hold her flour-covered hands awkwardly the entire time.

“Carter! You’re back. I thought I’d have more time to get dinner ready. I’m still working on bread for the needy. Dinner won’t be for a few hours.”

I gave Bridget a pat on the stomach, not caring about getting the flour on her apron near me.

“You’re still doing that? I bought plenty of oats from Themyscira. The needy can make do with extra crunchy oatmeal. I don’t want you exhausting yourself when you’re already dealing with the pregnancy...” I rubbed her stomach fondly.

Bridget rolled her eyes. “I’m barely three months into things, and I’m not a cripple yet. Honestly, I think the racial evolution to B-Grade helped a lot. I haven’t had any morning sickness at all since then.”

I blinked. “B-Grade? Truly? And while I wasn’t here?”

Bridget nudged me aside with her hip. I realized I’d been standing between a chef and the pantry and stepped aside. “Don’t make a bigger deal out of it than it is. You and I both know I was on the edge of it. Sakura, too, though she’s trying to complete a job quest. I just finished mine, so now I’m B-Grade. We all gained a lot of levels during that crusade on Ladwick, so really, it was past time for me.”

I shook my head as I rummaged through my bag of holding and unloaded the part of my shopping trip that had been for Bridget and loaded it into the refrigerator and pantry. “Still, I wish I could have been there to congratulate you. And don’t push yourself too hard. Remember, if you need anything, I’m just a call away.”

Bridget eyed the heaps of sweets I was sneaking into the fridge. I’d asked the clerk for everything I pregnant woman might want and bought everything she said.

“A sweet gesture, love, but if I want a snack, I’ll make it myself. Now, I know you’ve got important things to do, go on and leave me to my cooking.” Bridget plucked the glass bottle of magical Glacian milk I’d been holding from my hands and poured it into a bowl.

“Fine, fine...” I chuckled and made to give her a swat on the rear before dashing out of the kitchen.

Bridget turned just as I had my hand raised. “Oh, before you go, a message came for you through the radio. Margaret mentioned she hasn’t heard from Frank all day, which is odd. He’s never missed a council meeting before.”

I froze. “Wait, Frank’s in danger?”

“She didn’t say that, just that he didn’t show up. He could be--“ Bridget called out to me, but I didn’t hear the rest because I was already out the door.

***

I flew to Crownhill, then to Frank’s guild hall, and then talked with the teleportation array technician on staff there.

“How long has it been since you last saw Frank and the others?” I asked.

“Yesterday, sir!” the nervous technician said. “But I’ve been sending people out all morning to reestablish contact with them. They were supposed to be scouting a new area deep in the wilderness to the North.”

“I see. Send me to Frank’s last known coordinates. I’ll look for him myself.” I stepped on the teleportation pad, and the youthful technician gulped and sent me on my way.

I reappeared in a small cabin. The clearing nearby was hastily fortified with earthen walls, and it looked halfway between a small village and campgrounds.

“Hey, this is an Adventurers Guild outpost, where are you... oh! Carter, sir!” Across from the teleporter, a woman sat with a sword leaning against her desk with a disassembled firearm in front of her next to a pile of paperwork.

She looked halfway between a clerk and an armed guard, and was in early C-Grade. That marked her as one of Crownhill’s elites, though she must have leveled up fairly recently because I didn’t recognize her. We were getting more and more C-Grades by the day, especially from the adventurers who were completing all my quests in the deep wilderness outside of Crownhill.

“Signing in here, I take it?” I grabbed the paper and a pen and scribbled my name down on the paper on the desk along with all the others. I flipped back a few pages and saw the last time Frank entered his name the day prior. He’d signed in at the same time as a few others.

“Who are these people?” I asked the clerk, gesturing to the sign-in sheet.

She glanced down at the paper and read the names. “Those are rookies, sir. The Guildmaster was assessing them for promotion from Copper to Bronze. They have the levels, but he wanted to see how they’d do in a first-contact situation with a newly discovered survivor group. They all went together with gifts from Crownhill to say hello.”

I felt my spine tingle. That icy feeling was my bloodline acting up, and suddenly, I had the hunch that the survivor group Frank and his friends had gone to make first contact with was the cause of his disappearance.

I thanked the clerk, got directions, and took to the air again. An earlier expedition followed an obvious hunting trail back to a settlement, thinking it was another group of human survivors who were defeated but survived a previous stage of the integration. That was a common enough tale that it didn’t bear any special consideration, and I was lucky that Frank’s guild was meticulous enough to even log the location. It must have been a more promising settlement than most.

I looked around for a trail, but there were too many to pick just one. Frank’s guild must have been clearing monsters in this area for at least a few weeks. I recognized it as one of the teleportation arrays I’d laid down and foisted off on them, but I hadn’t scouted the place more than that.

I’d been covering a lot of ground during that trip, but perhaps I should have stayed and examined this area more carefully. What I first took to be pine and oak, like most of the temperate forests around Crownhill, turned out to be something else.

I was no tree expert, but I was pretty sure a tree could have either pine needles or big leaves, not both. The trees around me were proof otherwise. This was uncharted territory from a shard foreign to Earth, and part of neither Crownhill, nor New Kyoto.

That on its own wasn’t too alarming. The five new shards joined during this stage would each bring with them dozens of plots of land from the worlds they’d defeated. There might even be trees like this somewhere in Crownhill that I never noticed. But these unfamiliar woods set my heart beating faster regardless.

There was a certain bulky sturdiness to them that I wasn’t used to seeing, at least on Earth. Perhaps on Themyscira or Glacia, but not back home or on other newly integrated shards. The tree was dense with mana, and much like the exotic magical alloys I’d been crafting, it was far stronger and larger for it.

My fate bloodline was growing increasingly anxious, though I didn’t know what was wrong yet. I decided to trust my gut and hope it would lead me to a clue. I wandered in a winding pattern, my stomach tightening all the while until I stumbled across a clearing stained red with blood. Around me, the branches had been trampled under boots in a haphazard, disorganized way that suggested it had been accidental.

There had been a fight here. I looked around for clues to see who died, but there were no bodies. I searched the area until I came up with a knife of unfamiliar design. It had likely been lost at some point during the battle.

I hefted it, balanced it on my finger, and examined it under what sunlight slipped between the trees overhead. The knife was well balanced, and there were Damascus-like striations suggesting folded steel. Some of those layers looked a lot like my most recent attempts at adamantium, and the System agreed when I analyzed the weapon.

Adamantium-Steel dagger (Epic)

This weapon was crafted by a master smith, well practiced in the creation of magical alloys. It has been imbued with mana in a style similar to cultivator weaponry.

I frowned at the description. Cultivators? Here? Surely not. Judging by Mimiko’s reaction, they would never willingly allow themselves to be integrated.

But if some were...

I grimaced at the thought. Their advanced magic would give them as much of an advantage during the integration as Earth’s technology had given us. Perhaps more, since the System was perfectly fine integrating magical artifacts, but made us reassemble and analyze our machines to make them work again.

I pocketed the dagger but found no more clues. Whoever had won the fight had started dragging the bodies somewhere. If there had been a blood trail, I would have followed it, but it seemed to me that the bodies of the fallen had been placed in bags of holding.

Had I not discovered the dagger, I would have thought that a sure sign Frank and his adventurers had won. But now I was even more nervous than before.

One trail led to another. A dead horse-like creature lay on the ground. Its belly was torn open by scavengers, and the birds had already gotten to its eyes. It still bore a leather harness on its back, but the saddle bag was empty.

Further away from the clearing where I found the dagger, there were fewer signs of a fight but more signs of hunting trails. My bloodline was guiding me to a settlement. No doubt this was where they would have taken Frank and his guildmates, assuming any of them were still alive. If they weren’t, I’d at least make sure to bring the bodies back. They might be dead, but I knew a trick for bringing the dead back to life as long as it hadn’t been too long and the System let me do it.

I burst from the woods to a clearing, and once through, I immediately heard the sound of distant voices. Even a few steps back into the woods, I’d heard nothing, but now I stood before the walls of a city.

The walls were as sturdy as those around the city of Mundwise. They were nearly as tall as what I was, having the golems and Governess’ construction equipment build around various chokepoints across the shard.

A large bubble shimmered just faintly out of view, projecting up the city walls and around the city. No doubt the shield would flare to life if I tried to fly through it. Luckily, I was no stranger to bypassing shield wards, and a quick trip through the shadow realm let me pass right through it.

If I hadn’t been worried about Frank, I would have taken some time to admire the design. It was even more robust than the shield enchantments commonly found on Glacia, which was considered a magically advanced world by Arcadia Multiverse standards.

I’d been expecting a medieval city like Shadefall or Mundwise within the city gates walls, but what I saw was more impressive. Most buildings were three or four stories tall, each covered with colorful clay tile roofs instead of thatch. The windows were open shutters, but I sensed enchantments along the wood that would function about as well as glass as long as there was mana to work with.

There were lampposts along the streets as well, though no power cables. As far as I could tell, the crystals hanging on posts would glow when night fell and illuminate the street. Beneath my feet, the cobblestone streets were worn smooth. Those in Crownhill had been laid just recently and were rough underfoot, but these had been worn so smooth they seemed as flat as concrete.

Across from where I wound up just inside the wall, a small river wound through town with stone bridges crossing it in a dozen points. The houses on the other side of the river were even taller and more impressive than the structures closer to me.

But what really drew my attention was the people. At first, I took them for humans. I probably would have assumed they were humans if I hadn’t been familiar with Mimiko and the Goddess in Jade. The refined features and shape of their faces seemed even more human than the humans of Earth I was familiar with.

These were cultivators, of that I was certain... or at least, that was what I thought at first. Their architecture seemed more western than eastern. More importantly, I didn’t sense any cultivation from them at all.

Peering at a nearby fruit seller, I stared at her abdomen, looking for her spiritual roots. Sure enough, they were present. But unlike Mimiko and the other cultivators I’d met, these magical organs were entirely dormant.

“Didn’t your mum ever teach you it’s rude to stare at a woman’s bosom, young man?” the fruit seller crossed her arms and scowled at me.

I realized then what my magical examinations had probably looked like from an outside perspective and was quick to avert my gaze and make some apologies.

“Sorry, ma’am. You... er... have a lovely blouse.” I rubbed the back of my neck sheepishly.

“You’re from out of town, aren’t you? You’re lucky you don’t have to deal with the guards. They’re busy dealing with some other outsiders for lewd conduct. Honestly, the state of the world after the apocalypse! You’d never catch an honest woman wearing whatever those outfits were supposed to be...” the woman shook her head and muttered to herself, and I hastily made my escape before slipping into a nearby ally and putting on the cloak I’d crafted for blending in among the crowds of New Kyoto.

Once I was wearing it, I attracted far less attention while staring at random people on the street. Each time I looked, I confirmed the presence of spiritual roots. These people were definitely descendants of cultivators. I would have to get Mimiko over here to see if she recognized the language they spoke. Without my Forerunner title, it sounded like a bunch of nonsense to me.

The people seemed unhurried as they went about their business. They definitely didn’t have the attitude of a people who’d fought and lost a major conflict. Could this be one of the two remaining factions I’d been looking for?

My instincts were to lie low and gather more information like I had in New Kyoto. But even then, I hadn’t made real progress until Sakura made her move and started asking real questions. With Frank’s life potentially on the line, I decided now was the time for boldness.

Who would I target? And what would I say to them?

I was already thinking about when and where to play my cards when a familiar voice called out to me.

“Oh hey, Carter! Fancy meeting you here.” Frank waved to me while he gnawed on a strange-looking burrito, looking completely unharmed as he stood in the middle of the street. He looked like he’d just been talking to a shopkeeper a moment ago.

“F-Frank? You’re alright?” I asked, unable to keep the surprise from my voice.

“Unfortunately not. The local police guys here have me filling out a truckload of paperwork to get my guys out of prison. Something about lewd conduct.” Frank rolled his eyes as he finished his burrito. “Anyway, what have you been up to?”

I laughed and pulled him into a tight embrace.