Amazon Apocalypse 5: Chapter 57

My tour took Sakura and Bridget around the shard, where I took in new things as quickly as they did. Both of them were B-Grades now, thanks to the campaign, which was also very pleasing to me. The System wouldn’t let them leave for a bit, so while they’d hate to see me go, I could leave trusting Crownhill was in good hands.

“Reluna certainly got a bit carried away making herself at home. Don’t worry, I will reign her in,” Sakura said as we walked through Crownhill.

“I think people actually like the cobblestone streets and stuff,” I said, gesturing to the ground beneath us.

“Don’t worry your head. We’ll take care of everything,” Sakura promised me.

I had hoped to show the council that Sakura and Bridget had returned and were more powerful than ever. Unfortunately, most of the council was out of town at the moment. I hadn’t been the only one worried about the latest stage of the integration and a despire to do some scouting.

Margaret was the only one in residence, and Sakura and Bridget spoke with her briefly before I took them both around the rest of the Shard, first circling the areas under our control and settling down in the Omykir villages, where Bridget dropped off some of her food.

“You know, I have been a bit worried about my health. I’m afraid these medieval folk are going to start dropping if we don’t cut back on the free burgers and fries we’re giving them,” I said to Bridget under my breath.

“Don’t worry, that is easily solved. I heard this might be an issue, so one of the things I’ve been baking are inverse cakes.”

“Inverse cakes?” I asked skeptically.

Bridget nodded. “You eat them, and they taste like cake, but you get thinner as you eat them instead of fatter. It’s a rather interesting principle in high-level baking.”

I chuckled. “That would have made you the richest woman in the world before the integration.”

Bridget blushed at the praise.

We greeted Mayor Wiglaf, fed him a dozen of Bridget's inverse cakes, and departed. We couldn’t stay among the Omikyr for long. Our tour took us to the dragon shard. We didn’t see Ben and his new siblings, but they had probably just hatched and would be swimming around the shard.

We checked some of the other locations where I’d tucked away other dragon eggs, and a few were active already. In just a few years, there were going to be an awful lot of dragons around these parts.

Eventually, our trip through the air and shadowrealm took us beyond the bounds of our previous territory and into unknown lands.

We took a sharp right turn between the Torchdragon’s shard and the golem’s shard. I wasn’t sure how volcanic wasteland transitioned to temperate forest, and now that the barriers between shards were down, I was curious at what we might find.

The answer ended up being rather boring, at least at first. Fire-scorched wastes turned into sparse grass, then to dense grass, and finally to tree cover. There was nothing interesting right up until the moment I spotted a chimney spewing out a small cloud’s worth of smoke.

“Looks like somebody was living there. Want to check it out?” I asked.

Bridget and Sakura agreed, and we touched down in front of the house. Bridget produced a pie from one of her bags of holding. It was hot and still steaming like it was freshly baked, and I knocked on the door.

“Howdy neighbor. We just wanted to introduce ourselves,” I said as I knocked.

The door crept open, revealing a rough-looking older man wielding a shotgun. I scanned him quickly with examine.

Human Rancher (Level 18)

“Huh? Whaddya want?” the farmer asked, speaking in a thick drawl.

“Just to say hello,” I said.

The rancher peered around behind us, but he seemed to calm down as he took in the three of us.

“Look, son, I don’t know if your car broke down or something, but this here is a dangerous country. Some foreigners moved in recently from who knows where and are tearin’ up the place,” the rancher said.

“There are other people here?” I asked.

The rancher nodded. “Big guys. Love eating my cows raw. Damn thieves!”

“Do you know where they’re from?” I asked curiously.

“We’ll look out for them. Anything else we should know?” I asked.

The angry rancher didn’t seem entirely in his right mind, so after asking him a few questions Bridget gave him the pie, along with a few other snacks, and we left.

“I think he’s been living off expired canned beans and wild mushrooms. That’s all I could see in his pantry,” Bridget explained.

“He did seem a little out of it. Let’s look around for these foreigners who apparently ate the rancher’s cows raw.”

A brief exploration of the area revealed a tribe of ogres, just like the kind we’d faced early in Crownhill. They were sitting in a big, heaping pile of broken timber and makeshift shelters. I spotted the remains of more than one cow, and from the pile of bones, they’d probably eaten at least a hundred of them.

“He thought the ogres were foreigners?” Sakura asked, eyebrow raised.

I shrugged and made a note of the ogres. They weren’t particularly high level, so somebody else could deal with them. There weren’t nearly as many as there had been on the shard we faced, and there were enough cattle here to keep them from developing a taste for human flesh, which was the only reason the farmer was still alive.

We found a few other smaller conflicts like that in between our integrated territories. Some were humans, and some were unfamiliar races that I knew nothing of. None were particularly high-level conflicts, though, and an average adventuring team from Crownhill could clean up most issues in an afternoon.

The real things we were interested in were further away from our borders. Somewhere in those vast expanses around us, the real enemies lay.

If past patterns held true, there would be four of them, just as before. And each of them would have proven victorious over just as many enemies as we had.

Until recently, we’d fought many Stone Age tribals or scattered bands of savage warriors. But the Omikyr were something of a wake-up call. While Earth had been technologically advanced by the System’s standards, there were other societies that had advanced in their own ways. Who knew what other secrets were out there? And I already knew from experience that encountering other humans didn’t guarantee those humans would be friendly.

***

It was half a day before somebody caught sight of strangers. It had been one of Frank’s groups that found them. I was the first on the scene and had raced to his location. Frank had radioed in the sighting just as the sun was close to setting.

“How’d you spot them?” I asked curiously.

“It’s hard to miss a helicopter.” Frank pointed up above the treeline.

I took to the air, quickly gaining altitude until I could scan the whole horizon. Sure enough, there was a helicopter vanishing into the distance.

There was another human faction, from the looks of things. And a clever one at that, if they were able to get a helicopter up and running.

One of the problems we’d had with advanced technology during the early stages of the integration was that the System didn’t recognize them until we took them apart and reassembled them. That was the trick to getting our guns working again, and it was the secret Craig had lucked into that let him get enough early levels to become a problem for us.

I watched the helicopter circle in the distance in a clear grid pattern. They were scouting the new areas, just as we were. I dropped back down to ground level.

“There’s a clearing not far from here that’s large enough for a helicopter to touch down. Let’s meet them there. Does anybody have one of those flare guns?” I asked.

Frank had one, and as soon as we got to the empty clearing, I gave him the nod to fire the gun.

The bright orange light shooting into the sky was impossible to miss. It stayed suspended for nearly a minute as the parachute slowly guided the flare to the ground.

Taking to the air again, I soon saw the helicopter changing directions toward the clearing we’d chosen. We all cleared a space for them to land and waved them down, which they did.

As the helicopter approached, I saw this wasn’t some recreational transport vehicle or a helicopter meant to monitor traffic. This was a military vehicle. The fact that these people had it told me a lot about who we were about to meet.

We gathered and waited, hands folded patiently, as the engines spun down. A dozen men in military uniforms jumped clear of the helicopter before the prop even started to slow, and they fanned out and scanned the area. Half of them shined bright floodlights into the trees surrounding our chosen clearing, and the other half ran up to us, machine guns at the ready.

I felt my eyebrows rising at the sight. Mundane guns? Really?

Most guns fell off at D-Grade unless they were bolstered by unique abilities. At B-Grade, a regular machine gun wouldn’t do much more than tickle. Heck, I was pretty sure I’d be fine even if they tried to shoot me with the main guns on the helicopter.

A few of my people were a bit annoyed at the obvious show of force, but before it could become overbearing, a commanding officer from the helicopter stepped out.

“Stand down, men. Can’t you see these are civilians?” the officer said.

“Sir!” the soldiers lowered their weapons and formed a line like they were an honor guard for their commander. But more than one of them eyed Frank’s handgun with a wary expression.

I sensed attempts to scan me one after another, but I shrugged off the low-leveled examines. I didn’t want anybody to see my level quite this soon. If these guys were bad news, I wanted my level to be a surprise.

When they scanned me, I returned the favor and examined them in return.

Human Soldier (Level 43)

Human Soldier (Level 51)

Human Soldier (Level 54)

Human General (Level 140)

These soldiers had pretty decent levels, as far as I was concerned. Using examine on them, most were somewhere around the high D-Grade. And their leader was well into C-Grade at level 140.

I took a step forward, hands visible and clearly nowhere near a gun. Not that a firearm was as dangerous as my empty hands. Quite the opposite.

I held out an empty and open hand. “I’m Carter, something of a leader among our band of survivors. Where are you folks from?”

The commander reached out a hand and shook mine firmly. Not just firmly, but the kind of firm that would set a normal person’s knuckles grinding against one another. Naturally, it didn’t do anything to me.

He had probably tried to find my level, but couldn't thanks to my high examine resistance. I preferred leaving my power secret for the time being, so I pretended to be hurt by the handshake. He'd reveal his intentions sooner if he thought he was in full control of the situation.

“The name’s General Marshall. Where are you lot from?” the general asked.

“Our main settlement came from the east coast of the US, but we have people here from all over. Greece, Canada, Poland, India, and bits and pieces from other places,” I replied. “And yourselves?”

“That’s classified, son. But rest assured, we’re honest, hardworking fellow Americans. You can trust us,” General Marshall said.

“Marshall, you said?” asked Frank. “Any relation to General George Marshall? Like from the Second World War?”

“Yes, something like that. I’m... distant cousin. Anyway, I’m greatly relieved to encounter friendlies for once. Do you folks have a two-way radio? If not, we might be able to spare one. It’s important to establish a line of communication.”

I saw no reason not to agree to radio communications, though we had better options these days.

“We can make arrangements over the radio, but I could also give you a few cellphone numbers. Our cell towers were down for a while, but they’re up now, thanks to the guys back in town. We’ve got a miniature version of the internet up and running that we could hook you up with.”

General Marshall’s eyes widened. “You civilians got the internet and cell phones back up and running already? Well damn! My soldiers have been slacking, it seems.”

I chuckled. “We have some IT guys to spare. In fact, I might be able to see where your people are going wrong, if you’ll take me back to your base. It’ll also give me the chance to chat with you about how the integration has been from our side of things.

Some of the soldiers looked interested at the offer of getting cell phones and the internet back, but General Marshall’s expression froze for a moment before he shook his head.

“Maybe some other time. If it’s all the same, I think my troopers can make it happen, maybe with a little radio assistance. But we’ll save all that for later. How are you folks doing on supplies? We have some rations we could spare. My people can deliver them in a day or two. Just let us know when and where.”

“We’re actually doing quite well on food, thank you for the offer. Truthfully, I was about to make a similar offer to you.” I shrugged. Thanks to all our off-world trade, we had plenty of food to spare.

The general and I stared at one another for a moment.

“Huh. Well, seems like you civilians are doing alright for yourselves. My troopers and I will keep scouting the area. Keep your ears open for our messages on the radio. I wouldn’t want your people to have a bad run-in with our scouting parties.”

“We have our own scouting parties. We’ll coordinate and share information,” I said.

Just as quickly as they arrived, the soldiers departed.

“That was odd, wasn’t it?” I asked Frank when they were out of sight.

“They seemed friendly enough, didn’t they?” Frank shrugged. “After they stopped waving guns in our faces, I mean.”

I stroked my chin. If I’d been a military man, I suspected I would have been able to put a finger on what was bothering me. Having never served, I couldn’t really comment on the little details of their uniforms. They didn’t seem quite like the movies, but nothing ever was.

Maybe it was just my nerves. I could be pretty cynical from time to time, and I often expected the worse. Finding a group of heavily armed fellow humans eager to cooperate with us just felt a little too good to be true.