Warbreaker's Risk: A LitRPG Apocalypse Adventure (The Connected System Book 2), page 28
Getting it slid apart about a half inch. Pushing his fingers all the way through, one hand over the other, facing apart, he curled his fingers around the jamb. Shifting his feet for a better stance, Loch started pulling, thinking he should have probably traded places with Brian. The other man was probably stronger, even being at a lower Level. He’d started off with a higher Strength stat than Loch had.
Or was Loch stronger because of his higher Level?
“How does Strength work,” he asked, glancing over his shoulder as he worked to push the doors another inch apart.
“What do you mean?” Cerie asked, knowing the question was directed at her.
She was sitting on the railing in front of the doors, Piper off to the side, working in her sketchbook. It had looked like some kind of weird robot of some kind. The sketch was done in her normal pencils and book, not the magical ones connected to her Class. She was spending a lot of time erasing and redrawing.
“What effect does Levels have on the stat, or is it just the stat number itself that matters? Like if Brian has a higher Strength stat than I do, but I’m higher Level, how does that work?”
Cerie’s eyes glowed green as she accessed her data. She shifted position, crossing her legs under her on the railing that was barely wider than she was. Piper had stopped sketching, turning to look at the fairy. Even Jenny, who had been walking the parking lot again, looking for signs of activity, stopped to listen.
“The value of the Stat determines overall power of that Attribute if comparing in a pure use of that Attribute.”
Her face scrunched up in annoyance at Loch’s confused glare.
“If you and Brian, or anyone else with a higher Strength Stat, engaged in an arm-wrestling competition or lifting a bale of hay, the person with the higher Stat would win. But if you or Brian were to fight, your Strength would end up being greater because it is also fueled by your Spirit.”
Loch leaned against the door jamb, taking a break. He’d managed to open a space of about nine inches. Not that many more to go.
He tried to work out what Cerie was saying. It danced around as Loch tried to grasp an understanding. It almost seemed like there were two sides to a Stat and their Adapted bodies. That idea made some sense, and the overall idea Cerie was talking about started to come together.
“So if I understand you right, each Attribute has two aspects? There’s the normal use and then there’s the Spirit-assisted?”
“Yes. Once Spirit is infused into the body from your Core, the Attribute becomes something more.”
“Are there two values to an Attribute?” Loch asked, understanding the basics, but the higher parts of the concept were escaping him still. “Is the Stat shown in our Status the Spirit-infused one?”
“In a way,” Cerie said, head tilting, fingers tapping on the railing as she thought. “That is a simplified way of looking at it.”
She started to say more, but Loch held up a hand, stopping her. His head was starting to hurt from trying to decipher the idea. All he really needed was the basics. Stats were one thing with Spirit and something more normal, like he was used to, without Spirit infusion.
All it meant was that he really should have had Brian open the doors.
He heard a snapping noise from the door jamb, something important breaking. No matter how hard he pushed, able to put his entire body and weight into pushing the leaf, he couldn’t get it to budge. The right-side door was stuck. Grumbling, Loch pushed the left side a few more inches, creating an opening wide enough to walk sideways through.
It was good enough.
“Pipes, stay out here.”
“Sure,” she said, not looking up from her sketchbook.
He looked at Cerie, who nodded, not needing to be told to keep an eye on Piper.
“Jenny?”
“Coming,” she called, running to join him at the door.
“We’re going in,” he called out to Brian.
The big man didn’t turn, just raised his hand, giving a thumbs up.
Loch entered first, lifting Onyx as soon as he was inside, sending a bit of Spirit into the weapon. The head started to glow, casting a soft orange light over the interior. This close to the door, there was some sun shining in. Not much, the doors had been tinted. He paused just inside, eyes searching the shadowed corners, waiting for a notification to pop up.
None did. This store wasn’t like the Grandfords.
Satisfied there wasn’t going to be an Event or Quest, he moved aside to give Jenny space to enter.
It was as he had remembered it. A small hardware store, he only ever went when ran out of something in the middle of a project. Nails, paint brushes, and gas mixes. The bigger stores in Concord were easier to get large quantities at. As he looked around, Loch wondered what was worth getting from the store.
All the building supplies at some point. But did they really need paint? No. Plumbing pipes? Mechanical ductwork and grilles? No. That stuff wouldn’t be needed for years, maybe decades.
The Connection had come because Earth had reached a specific technological level. The MARS space mission, putting the first people on the surface of MARS, had been the tipping point. It would be centuries before they’d rebuilt to that level, but would the Connection even allow it?
From what Cerie said, it seemed the other Connected Races remained at a tech level similar to the medieval times, or more accurately, like the fantasy games and books. They’d never need mechanical duct work again.
Copper piping? Yes.
But not now.
Runes and enchantments seemed to take the place of technology.
Gas or oil? No.
Nails and screws? Those kinds of building supplies? Hammers, screwdrivers, levels? Tools. They would need all that.
Homes would need to be built. Fences. Walls.
Carpenter was a Profession Class. Tinkerer. Both of those would require tools.
Gardening supplies were a priority.
He couldn’t remember if the store had carried seeds.
They did carry axes and saws. Some camping supplies.
“We’ll pile everything outside the doors and go through it again, putting what we can in Piper’s bag. Once that is full, we’ll go through what remains to see what is really worth bringing back,” he told Jenny. “Hopefully, we’ll get to come back again sometime soon and get everything else.”
He left unsaid that he hoped it was before anyone else, or anything else, took what they left behind.
Jenny took one side of the store, Loch the other.
They moved quickly, moving from aisle to aisle, shelf to shelf, grabbing what they could, leaving most of it behind. So much was just not useful anymore or at that present time. There weren’t as many camping supplies as Loch had hoped. The survivors’ camp had already discovered that the cans of propane, meant for camp stoves, no longer worked. He left the dozen or so canisters behind. Even the lighters no longer worked. Those were ignored. Ponchos, compasses, matches, water jugs, water filters. All were carried to the door.
Jenny managed to find some vegetable seeds. Bags of loam and soil were stacked near the door. A lot of those. Hoes, trowels, and tomato cages.
Once each had finished on their side, they switched, going over the same areas the other just had—a second set of eyes and opinions. Loch hadn’t given Jenny much in the way of instruction, letting the woman decide on her own what was important. He knew that just using his ideas was limiting. She might come up with a use for something he completely overlooked. And vice versa.
There were plenty of canvas bags. Some still folded up and snapped. Those were piled outside, all of them. Loch didn’t intend to carry bags by the handles on the way back, but they’d find a use for them back at the camp. They’d managed to scavenge a couple of backpacks from the house where they’d spent the night.
He grabbed a couple of boxes of nails and screws. They were small, wouldn’t take up much room in the spatial bag, and would come in handy. They’d need to build walls, most likely out of wood since that was the only material they had access to a lot of. Those walls would need to be held together.
Rope, axes, and chains.
They were finding a lot of stuff. Not as much as Loch had hoped, but it was a good haul.
The pile outside the doors was growing.
It took them a little over two hours to go through the hardware store. Another hour to go through everything they’d grabbed. The majority of it, mostly the bigger and heavier items, went into Piper’s bag. Loch made sure to save some space for the police station.
Everything else fit into the three backpacks they’d found. The zippers strained to close the overfilled bags, and Loch was afraid the seams would rip. They would be cumbersome to take on and off, especially if they had to fight, but Loch felt everything in them was essential to take back to the camps, not wanting to risk losing out on any of it.
Putting the straps over his shoulders, adjusting them so the heavy load sat better, Loch grabbed the second one. Jenny had one already on her back, helping Piper get a second one over the younger girl’s shoulders. It was awkward with the way her dungeon-looted robe sat. Carrying it over to Brian, he handed it to the large man. It was, of course, the heaviest.
“Got it all?” the big man asked.
“Most of it.”
“Good. We going to stick around and look some more?”
Loch was torn.
He wanted to get their loot back to the camp, but he also wanted to find the first group of scavengers. It had taken them longer to get there, he didn’t want to make Harper worry more than she was already. They could spend days exploring the houses, streets, and woods in the surrounding area. Not knowing how deep to go, they could keep going and waste days and days.
If they had found any signs, the decision would have been easier.
He looked up at the sun, noting its position to the west. They had a couple more hours before it got dark. Loch took the pack back from Brian.
“We’ll stash these in the store and camp there tonight. There’s a couple of hours of daylight left, Jenny and Piper will stay here. We’ll search as much as we can before dark.”
“Right,” Brian grunted, following Loch back to the store.
Interlude Three
“Theo? Theo, wake up,” the voice said, breaking through the screams and shouts.
He could feel someone pushing at him, roughly shaking him.
Theodore woke up, sitting up quickly, sweat pouring down his face. He was breathing heavily, chest hurting. Everything was a blur. There were people talking, but he couldn’t understand them. Blurry shapes leaning in close.
Slowly his breathing got under control. Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, Theodore opened them, able to see clearly now.
“You okay?” someone asked in a rough voice, annoyed and rude.
“Yes,” he managed to stammer out, closing his eyes and taking another deep breath.
The speaker was Roger.
Not someone Theodore liked. Called him Teddy, no matter how many times Theodore asked him not to. He barely tolerated Theo. He wouldn’t have, but the voice in his head told him to.
The voice told him many things.
Opening his eyes again, he looked around.
Barely familiar walls with pictures of people he didn’t know. Or care about. Furniture, the couch with Roger’s large frame laying on it. Bookcases, an entertainment center with a useless television. And Jim, the older man, looked down at him.
Jim was in his late fifties, maybe even sixties. Gray hair and wrinkles, but still strong and capable.
He looked concerned.
“You sure? It sounded like quite a nightmare.”
“He gets those a lot,” Roger muttered, turning around to face the back of the couch, pulling his borrowed blanket tighter.
Theodore glanced out the window, seeing that it was the middle of the night.
Roger was right, as much as Theodore didn’t want to admit it. He was getting nightmares often.
Part of it was to be expected after everything that had happened to humanity. The Connection. Monsters. So many people dead, and so many dying.
But Roger didn’t get nightmares. Neither did Jim. Or any of the other five people that made up their small group of survivors. Or Adapted as the Connected System called them.
Only he got nightmares.
And not for the reasons the others expected.
His nightmares came from the voice living inside his head.
He didn’t remember where the voice came from originally. None of the others had a voice, at least not that he could tell, and it was not something he was going to ask about. All Theodore could remember was that the voice was new. It had not been something he’d dealt with before the Connection. It was definitely part of the Connection.
Most times, he didn’t mind the voice. Most times, it was helpful.
Then there were the times when it bombarded him with horror after horror.
Lots of tentacles, feelings of hopeless dread, feelings of being insignificant.
They all made Theodore feel small.
He hated feeling small.
Taking some more deep breaths, he pushed the thoughts away. The voice didn’t go away. The presence that the voice belonged to didn’t go away. It was always there. Always watching.
“Sorry,” Theodore said.
Not that he really was sorry. It wasn’t something he wanted to say. He said it because the voice prompted him to. It was something that he should have said, so the voice told him to say it, and Theodore did it.
Roger mumbled something incoherent. Probably something insulting.
“It’s fine,” Jim said.
He said it was fine, but Theodore knew it wasn’t. Jim acted like the kindly old man. He wasn’t. No one was that nice. Everyone wore a mask. Jim was hiding something. Theodore didn’t know what, just that he was. He’d find out what it was soon enough.
“I’m up,” Theodore said, again not something he wanted to do, but the voice said it was expected. “Why don’t you get some sleep, and I’ll take your watch.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I was up next anyways, so might as well do it now.”
“Thanks, Theo,” Jim said, and this time Theodore knew he meant it.
Who wouldn’t want to grab an extra hour or two of sleep?
Pulling himself out of the sleeping bag found in a house a couple of days back, Theodore stood up. He carefully walked around Jim, who was crawling into his own bag, making sure to not bump the couch where Roger was, hopefully, back asleep. He was glad they’d moved the coffee table when they’d broken into this house to use for the night. The house hadn’t contained much in the way of supplies, but it was a secure place to spend the night before moving on in the morning.
Moving on to where?
That was the question.
Theodore had met the group of men not that far from the Epsom Circle a few days after it had happened. When he tried to remember what it was, his mind blanked. He knew he’d killed a couple of people that had attacked him. Then he’d chosen to head east toward Dover or Portsmouth instead of the closer, at the time, Concord. He knew there wasn’t a real reason for it, just a direction.
Or was there a reason? Something connected to the thing he couldn’t remember.
The voice had told him to not worry about it, so Theodore didn’t.
He stayed at the circle for a couple of days, scavenging what he needed from the convenience stores around it. He avoided the liquor store.
The group of men, led by Roger, were traveling east. Theodore joined them simply because he was going in the same direction. Six was better than five, especially after they’d been attacked by giant ants and then coyotes later that day.
Surprising even himself, Theodore had done well. He hadn’t killed any of the ants but had killed a coyote. Barely. But he had killed it.
Roger was even close to hitting Level Five.
Or so he said.
Theodore didn’t like the men, not even Jim. But it was safer with them. They would keep him alive, and all he had to do was pretend to like them. And listen to Roger.
Leaning against the window jamb, he looked out into the house’s front yard. Route 4 was about fifty feet away, give or take, the driveway to the side, a couple of trees in the grassy yard. Grass that was already over a foot tall. The owner, who was probably dead, hadn’t cut it in a while before the Connection. No one would probably ever cut it again.
There wasn’t anything that Theodore could see. Not that he could really see anything, the stars and moon barely provided any light. Lots of shadows, the woods thick on the other side of the road. Nothing was moving out in the darkness, at least near the house.
The night watch was mostly for show, to make everyone in the group feel a little safer.
‘Nothing can attack us at night because someone is looking out the window.’
Theodore almost laughed at the thought.
He held it in, though. Waking up Roger, again, would not be a good idea.
It really wasn’t the night that they were worried about. It was the morning when they were ready to leave. If something came in the middle of the night, waiting to ambush them, that was something they should know.
Turning away from the window, Theodore looked around the room.
A living room. Nothing fancy. Lots of memories of the family that had lived there. A picture on the wall had been taken down. Roger was bothered by seeing the pictures of the people that had lived in the homes he ended up breaking into. If he was staying the night, he removed the pictures. He felt bad about stealing from the people.
Theodore did not.
The people in the homes were dead. If they had still been alive, they would have taken all the supplies with them. Everyone would end up leaving their isolated homes. They’d go somewhere to gather, to gain strength and the illusion of safety by being in a crowd with others.
Why feel bad about taking from the dead?
Of course Theodore didn’t say that. The voice, which had told him that it was okay to take from the dead and that it was expected for the survivors to use what the dead left behind, also told him to never say it out loud. Some things were best left unsaid.
