Knives & Levels - Chapter 70

Colt sat in a pancake booth with three cops, a girl with bright blue hair, and a steaming mug of coffee, which Julia refused to touch. Buttery maple syrup wafted through the air, which made Colt’s stomach rumble. He settled back in the dinner chair; the three cops looked over his map and added their own notes.

In the kitchen of this place, he heard the faint laughter of children playing.

“How exactly are we going to take down his pet?” One of the cops asked his gruff demeanor and skepticism the most out of all of them.

“I think we’ll see that he unleashed it into the city; otherwise, I don’t think its level makes much sense,” Colt answered, hot coffee mug in hand. Having that warm, steaming mug under his grasp felt like a security blanket; the way it sat in his hand was near divine.

“Experience potions,” The cop said, rubbing at his beard.

Colt stared at him.

Another one of them snorted, “Even if they had the whole town funneling their points to buying those damn things, they start slowing down after level fifty. He said the bull was level 76. Here’s a quick question: where are they getting the building materials for the town growing from.” The second cop said, this one with short blond hair and glasses.

“They just appear overnight.” Julia chirped, her nose sniffing, “Can I get a waffle?”

“No.” The gruff cop answered.

The one with blond hair glared at him—raised a hand, and barked out an order, to which someone in the kitchen responded with an affirmative. In five minutes, there would be a waffle on the table for the eating. Colt felt his stomach rumble but resisted the urge to tag along with Julia’s request. Restraint and professionalism were what he needed to project here.

“So he’s using some of those points on building materials, which confirms this guy’s theory—the bull has to be getting experience from somewhere. Unless mass sacrifices are going on in that city, he’s letting it loose on the street.” The blond cop continued and took a large sip of his coffee.

“What do you mean by points?” Colt asked.

“Faction points. They’re awarded from clearing a dungeon—shouldn’t you—oh.” He paused and then looked at his coffee, “Denny probably wouldn’t wanna spill that secret, and you were in his faction. Right. So, owning a faction: You need a base of operations. Certain cleared dungeons will offer them, and then you claim them as your faction’s. From there, you get access to Faction Points and the Faction Store—mostly, it offers resources, training places, buildings… But there’s an item in there that can help you level. Up to level fifty.”

Colt felt both pissed and intrigued beyond belief; to think there had been something like that all along. It also made sense why he kept targeting the dungeons, aside from trying to clean up the monsters.

Denny’s level, too, started to track—of course, he would spend the faction points on himself. This absolved him of the danger of having to go into a dungeon but rewarded him with the resulting strength.

Overall, the revelation changed everything, the implications of it were astounding, and how it worked… Well, that now needed to be accounted in to the planning. It was a resource Denny had up his sleeve and had hidden well.

“Up to fifty?” Colt asked for confirmation.

“Drinking it past then will improve your power, but that’s what it says. Not sure, since we’re not keen on wasting all of our faction points, and we’re not clearing dungeons that frequently, but I bet he is,” he turned toward the kitchen, where there was now a sizzling pan and the smell of wafting pancake batter amidst where the children were gathered and playing. “…After we lost five of our people to a New Nashville attack. Bastard killed my partner, our friend. We haven’t been very up for risks since then.” He folded his arms and looked at Colt, “This whole mission sounds like a risk.”

Colt nodded slowly, took in the waffle house—they’d cordoned off sections of it to make dorms for sleep, piled things in corners, and turned the place into a safe house.

“How long until he comes and finds this place?” Colt asked, “Are you planning to leave Nashville.”

The cops looked at each other, and the gruff one let out a swear, to which the blond one told him to watch his mouth—since children were running around.

The one who hadn’t spoken much, a middle-aged guy with dark black hair, finally spoke, “No. We weren’t we’ve been biding time. Trying to see the way things were going in that city. Wondering if we should surrender for the kids. Don’t think they’ll live a good life there, now. With what you and others have been saying… So, no, I’m not sure what we’ll do. I can tell you what, I’m sick of being here, sick of waiting for the other shoe to drop. What you’re suggesting here reeks of danger, but what isn’t now and days?”

Colt cleared his throat, “I’ve given you our plan. I’ll also say thanks for the information about the Faction store, but it hasn’t changed much. Think it over. We’re stronger together than apart; together, we can deliver the justice that Denny deserves.”

The three cops shared a look. One of them made an excuse to go; the other two waited around for a while until the sweet-syrupy waffles Julia ordered arrived. Colt looked on with envy as she devoured the thing, jealousy burning him up inside as they made small talk and exchanged some more practical advice about the new state of Nashville.

The cops also gave him a list of some monsters troubling them lately. Colt noted it down on the map—not asking them directly in return to join his quest for him slaying some monsters, but he figured if he might earn some goodwill and grind out some more experience with Julia, then they were in a fine place.

About an hour later, in which Colt asked many questions about the faction store, and the cops asked more about him and his group, they bid goodbye, leaving to hunt down the monsters and then returning to Nick and Sarah to catch up with the other half of their party. With them, he could go over the map and divide and conquer the rest of the groups, working them over as much as possible and bringing in who he could to their plan.

###

Julia held up a pillow—two pillows, really; her weak arms shaky as the other girl, Sarah, pummeled them into oblivion with jabs and the occasional kick. It was all she could do to stay standing as the other girl worked over the pillows with abandon.

They were also awful cushioning against the kind of strength Sarah was tossing around.

In Julia’s eyes, the girl was something of a badass, what with her tattoos, her no-nonsense attitude… Even when she’d been under the impression that all these people were just NPCs, Sarah had been her favorite companion. The one she pictured herself being in the games they played. When Sarah asked her if she wanted to help her train after everyone reunited, she was more then willing to go along.

Sarah let out a warning yell as she launched a roundhouse—this one knocked Julia straight over with a cry of pain.

“Oh, sorry,” Sarah said, rolling her wrists as she looked at Julia on the floor.

“S’okay.” Julia lied and then stood up again, her legs wobbling. Even with the other girl holding back—mostly practicing for what she called ‘form.’ The hits were tough.

“I still don’t have it,” she said, her short blond hair slick with sweat and a look of annoyance on her face. “We’re here making plans to overthrow a dictator, and I still can’t get a damn Edict.”

Julia leaned down to pick up the pillows. They probably weighed about a pound each—right now, it might as well have been a hundred for the effort it took for her to pick them up and lift them. Her whole body was sore. The notification had even told her she’d gained a point in Strength and Endurance in this little sparring session. The moment Sarah saw the pillows lift up again, a gleam came into her eyes, and she advanced.

With a yelp, Julia stepped back, but it wasn’t fast enough.

Sarah’s fist slammed like a thunderbolt, crashing into the pillow harder than before. She followed with another terrifyingly speedy hook, sending Julia stumbling.

“I don’t understand,” Sarah complained, then threw another punch.

Julia didn’t have the time to respond, weaving with the blow, trying her best to shift her momentum to compensate for the hits. Then, she realized… Julia yanked on her Edict, trying to give herself a surge of power to accept a hit.

It kind of worked. Her muscles held up a little better, but Sarah simply drilled a fist through the pillow entirely, stopping an inch from Julia’s face and showering her with fluff and cotton.

“Shit, sorry.”

“S-s’okay,” Julia mumbled, feeling faint as she stared at those knuckles.

“I feel so weak,” Julia said, looking down at her fists, and sighed, “All of this preparation, and I know I won’t amount for much unless I can join everyone else there—what did it feel like when you got your Edict? When Colt talks about this stuff, it feels all mystic mumbo-jumbo.”

Julia collapsed on the ground, trying to steady her breath, both from the nerves of almost taking a punch to the face and from the fact that keeping up with the other woman was a chore in itself. Truth was, Sarah was one of the strongest people she knew. The woman had saved her back in Athena’s dungeon when she’d been stupid and stubborn.

If it weren’t for Sarah, she’d have died.

Sarah crouched in front of her with a frown as she looked her eye to eye.

Concentrate. She wanted to help Sarah. This had been all the other girl talked about since Julia also got hers in the dungeon. ‘Edict, Edict, Edict.’

How did I get mine?

When they’d been staring down death in the form of a million stars converging on their position… She felt regret. Regret as she realized that it was her fault they were all going to die. She didn’t Colt seriously, thinking it was some weird side quest, and didn’t take the dungeon all that seriously either—because really, dinosaurs? At the time, she’d been wondering what kind of weird game this even was to have enemies like that.

Then, in that regret, she found she connected with her water, with the way it moved. It had the strength she needed.

“I understood it, and it understood me,” she said. The words felt natural coming out of her mouth. She’d only reached that after she broke. It was the one piece of reality she could cling back onto. Her surge back into reality.

Sarah glared and sighed, “That’s the same kind of bullshit that Colt and Nate keep saying.”

Julia shook a little. The memories were still dark for her, and the sudden shattering of reality felt like she’d been at the precipice of everything ending—diving back into them was like taking a tour through a bloody vista. Sarah saw her struggle and reached a shoulder out.

“Thank you, though, for your insight. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You’ll get there. You train hard, and I don’t know anyone more deserving of it,” Julia reassured her new friend, who gave her a smile. Sarah returned it, looked at the broken pillow, and sighed. “I think that’s it for tonight. We have to prepare for tomorrow. It’ll be busy again. The next week will be. Ten days, I think—that’s the goal for operation ‘Bull Horns’”

“Ten days,” Julia repeated, rubbing at her eyes.

In ten days, they’d try to capture the minotaur Colt said there was. And to do that, they had a lot of planning to do.

###

Colt prowled outside of New Nashville, jumping from roof to roof with quick bursts of Movement. With the thick vegetation below filled with trees, it was the best way to move at a quick pace. And he needed the visibility. After meeting with the others and setting them up to work, he began his part of the plan that night. Careful to not go too close to the bright lights of the city. It was teeming with guards.

They thought that the Minotaur must make its way out of the city.

But they still needed to confirm how and where. His eyes ran over the streets below, seeing the occasional animal forging through and the occasional monster. In the dark, with his cloak on, he was hidden fairly well up here.

Yet another shadow among hundreds of thousands.

He imagined that somewhere below a minotaur wandered. If he had to sacrifice sleep to find it, then so be it.