Amazon Apocalypse 4: Chapter 4

I spent the next week catching up with all the projects I’d put off because of the end of the world. The necromancers had done a lackluster repair job after their failed ambush, so I set about preparing for some renovation work.

I walked down to my gaming PC in the basement, which was still running the copy of the medieval kingdom builder controlling hundreds of mannequin puppets and remotely controlled construction equipment that was only now finishing their wall-building project.

Since they’d be done soon, I figured now was as good a time as any to recall them. Perhaps I could have walled off the Naga and undead shards as well, but doing so would have invited attack. While I could replace the puppet mannequins, the construction equipment was one of a kind until we stumbled onto a shard with more.

I figured pulling back and building defenses closer to home would be better. I went back and forth between starting with the farmhouse and starting with Crownhill. Eventually, I worked on the farmhouse first. The defenses here didn’t need to be nearly as extensive, and I hadn’t figured out how dangerous having all this fully automated equipment was to have around. By keeping them close at hand, I could debug any errors before I had these things crawling all over the city.

Also, Bridget, Sakura, and Myrina had been living with quite a mess in the house. Even with the telekinetic powers provided by Master Artificer, fixing the place up would take a lot of work. It’d be better to get them something workable sooner rather than later.

I used the cottage I promised Reluna as the prototype. To do it, I fired up another game loaded on my computer, this one with a more modern theme. I didn’t need it as much as the assets, and I ported them over to the kingdom building I kept running in the background. Between the two games, I was able to design a simple cottage, one-bedroom cottage.

It was only a little larger than the apartment my companions and I had been living out of while all the construction was underway, but it was larger than the shop Galbatorix lived and worked out of. Most of the time went to figuring out how to get the plumbing and electricity working. Neither game supported that kind of thing in the detail I needed, so I had to add those features myself. It was worth the effort, though. I really needed to expand both systems, considering I had far more people here than I initially thought when I outfitted my survival shelter to keep me alive through an apocalypse.

It took a bit of work, but when I saw the army of automaton-like magical puppets running around getting the project started while an excavator dug out a basement, it was all worth it. I kicked back on my porch, racking up Master Artificer experience while my creations did all the work.

With abundant heavy equipment and hundreds of workers, the cottage was finished in just a few hours. After that, I had them tear down the misshapen barns the System had scattered everywhere and use it to assemble a massive multi-story workshop. This one was even larger and more impressive than the ones I had in Shadefall. It followed the same general design, save for the fact that it had electricity and plumbing.

There were also a few rows of beds for Gobgob and the others. As far as I knew, they were still sleeping in the woods in their old mud huts. Considering how much bigger Gobgob was, those things had to be getting cramped. Eventually, I’d build them real houses, but these would do for now.

There were a few incidents in which the excavator swatted a mannequin puppet in the head and one more in which a bulldozer tried to run over the wrong building. Those were both bugs that would need to be ironed out before I set these things loose in Crownhill. But I handled them, and by the time they’d finished the cottage and the workshop, I figured they were ready to build something for me.

I settled on a medieval aesthetic on the outside, with modern luxuries inside. We’d made a lot of good memories in Myrina’s family castle and a few more in Cyra’s fortified manor in Shadefall. This place would be more like the latter, but it would feel familiar to Myrina and Reluna. And to Cyra as well, if she ever came for a visit.

Laying the foundation took a while, since I had three layers of basement. We could use the dirt for the earthen wall I wanted nearby anyway, so I might as well make myself a basement simultaneously. All was going well until we started running out of concrete. At that point, I turned to the many magical reference books and blueprints I had at my disposal.

Magical construction was a common enough problem artificers dealt with, and some in the past had come up with a type of wand that would harden dirt in place into a sedimentary rock akin to sandstone. To them, it served the same function as concrete, and it was far easier to produce on-site, though it required a constant supply of monster cores.

I built one in an afternoon, improved the design several times with a modern understanding of material science, and then manufactured a dozen of them for the construction mannequins. Work soon resumed as normal, and the brief diversion would even make building the walls much easier. If I’d thought of this before I sent the construction equipment out to build the walls for the Dragon and Golem shards, they would have been done days ago.

Once the equipment was safe, I scheduled earthen walls, towers, and other odds and ends surrounding the farmhouse. Pretty soon, this place would look less like a farm and more the private estate Reluna had taken it to be. Eventually I’d wall off the whole mountaintop valley. Still, right now I wanted to keep Gobgob and the goblins safe from any attacks like the one we just went through.

It was also well past time that I secure the teleportation array. I’d already promised to move it out of the house, and the recent attack was the perfect excuse to do so. It would get its own fortress patterned after the one in Valkyrie’s Watch. It would be well defended to take out anyone using the array to invade, but I installed a few tricks in the defenses so they couldn’t be used against me if somebody wanted to ambush me again.

The dozen floor-mounted Rods of Annihilation would look like the perfect tool to ambush me on my way home. If anyone tried that, though, they’d be in for a surprise. A hidden switch was buried in the floor but accessible through telekinesis to those who knew how to look. It would trigger the Rods of Annihilation to suddenly flip around and fire on the people trying to use them against me.

Congratulations! Master Artificer has reached level 131!

After pushing my job to C-Grade, I’d lost the experience bonus that Homo Acceleratus granted me. It sure didn’t feel like it, though. The scale of my projects had increased dramatically since those days when I was weaving Mana Bombs out of copper wire by hand, and the experience I was getting with each project was increasing accordingly.

The small army of mannequin puppets I’d built was giving me a small but constant trickle of experience points as they did construction work. I could never look at a workbench again and reach the threshold to B-Grade with my job. I felt good about my pending quest, which promised another job upgrade. Master Artificer was far more useful than Artificer had been. What would another upgrade bring?

***

With dozens of jobs in the queue, I returned to Crownhill and wandered the rest of the shard with Myrina, Bridget, and Sakura. We took out the occasional monster and, most importantly, wiped out any group of undead or naga wandering about. We checked in with Dan and the other survivors of San Antonio on the undead shard and even found signs of other survivors we hadn’t met yet.

Crownhill’s main shard was roughly the size of Rhode Island, and the other shards were of equivalent size. I doubted we’d fully explore this place anytime soon, so there were probably all sorts of human enclaves hidden in the wilderness. They were probably hunkered down in the wilderness somewhere, hiding from the nearby monsters, not realizing humanity had already won.

“Hey, these look like tire tracks to me.” Bridget kicked a patch of mud. There were indeed tire tracks there.

Myrina bent low and stared at them with a careful eye.

“They went that way!” Myrina pointed straight ahead in the direction of the tracks.

I rubbed her head as she pointed out the obvious path of broken branches and dirt road.

“What would we do without such a keen-eyed tracker?” I chuckled.

Myrina sensed me teasing, but took the praise at face value.

“Just wait until we see actual footprints!”

There were more signs of human habitation up ahead, and as promised, Myrina was the first to spot boot prints as the path narrowed. We found the truck that made the prints nearby, and the path led to a cave. Several animal hides were outside tanning in the sun, all belonging to those annoying fire-breathing giant squirrels.

Those things had been a constant terror, since they’d light wooden buildings on fire whenever they attacked. They were a major part of why I wanted my next house built entirely out of stone. And in the future, the same would have to be true for all of Crownhill.

Fortunately, they were usually pretty low-level, so they weren’t much trouble to kill once we had strong enough people. From the looks of the scene around us, that was a problem this shelter had only recently solved. The number of dead fire squirrels and the burned husk of a camper nearby told me they had some leftover frustrations to work out.

Near the camper was a cave. It might have been storage originally, but now that the camper was destroyed, whoever had been living out of it would have moved into the cave.

“Hello? Anybody home? We’re here on behalf of the Goddess in Jade to recruit you to a new religion! We even brought a holy saint with us.” Myrina stuck her tongue out at me, and I shook my head.

There was silence from within the cave.

“They’re not going to answer now...” I grumbled to Myrina. “Hey, we’re not actually trying to convert you to our religion. We’re checking in to make sure you’re still alive. The four of us are from the shelter in Crownhill and realized there were survivors out here while hunting monsters. We’re prepared to offer aid if you need it. Tools, food, weapons? We’ve got all sorts of basic supplies.”

Something moved within the cave, and eventually, the darkness parted to reveal a black curtain deep within. An electric lantern illuminated the space just behind it. It looked like a relatively cozy alcove, and the man coming out of it wasn’t the only one who called it home.

Others turned to follow, but a gesture from him kept them back. The man hunched to make his way through the narrow cave entrance, then rose once outside. He wore the tattered remains of a uniform, and to my surprise, I recognized it. This was one of Sheriff Drayton’s officers.

“Carter Smith? The leader of those survivors? You’re still alive?” the former policeman asked, blinking in surprise.

“I’m still alive,” I confirmed.

“You mean to say the werewolves didn’t rip you guys apart?” he asked, eying us all skeptically.

I shook my head. “Nope. Quite the opposite, really. The werewolves are dead.”

“Huh.” The former cop eyed the horizon. “The guys thought the radio show we kept hearing was a trick. We figured whoever was running it had been bitten by one of those werewolves and turned into them.”

“No werewolves here,” I chuckled.

The man’s eyes scanned the four of us. First me, then Sakura, then Myrina, and finally Bridget. His eyes lingered on her for a moment, but moved on quick enough that it couldn’t really be called a stare. Maybe I was overly suspicious, but I caught the look and felt something tighten in my gut. I stepped in front of Bridget and ensured Deflect was active.

“Seems like it. Let me tell the guys the good news.” The former officer turned to the curtain. “Lads, we’ve got guests.”

A gruff voice from inside called out. “The hungry kind?”

Before I could answer, the former officer shouted back. “Yeah. The hungry kind.”

The next thing I heard was the sound of a dozen guns opening fire.

<Author's Note>

Bonus chapter! This will not affect the upcoming weekly chapters.

One of the "benefits" of the slower release rate is that I can give out extra chapters again. When we were doing 7 days a week, I was barely keeping pace, but now I'm back to having a few chapters to spare.