Warbreaker's Rage: A LitRPG Apocalypse Adventure (The Connected System Book 3), page 6
There were cans of fruit and vegetables, spaghetti, bottled water, and even some powdered drink mixes. The bread had molded. They threw that into an empty cabinet to get it out of the way. There were a couple of boxes of granola bars, bagged chips, and cookies.
For a small house, it had turned out to be a pretty good haul. It wouldn’t last the people back at the school a full day, but it would help. Every little bit helped.
Piper moved over to a chair that faced the large picture window that looked out onto the corner. The skinned bodies of the raptors were visible. She looked out the window, saw the bodies, and moved to a different chair.
From the satchel, she pulled out her magical sketchbook and pencil. Looking down at the paper, deep in thought, she started moving the pencil. Loch moved to the large window, searching for the string to close the curtains. Finding it, he struggled to get them closed. Either the curtains had been old and rarely closed, or the Connection had damaged them. He managed to get them closed, hiding the grisly scene outside. Leaning back in the chair, he worked to get comfortable. It had been someone’s favorite chair and carried the imprint of that person.
“Cerie?” he asked.
The fairy had been lying on the back of the couch, watching over Piper’s shoulder as she drew. Cerie sat up.
“Yes, Lord Lochlan?”
“The raptors, will they respawn?”
“I do not believe that area was a spawning field,” she replied.
“So we won’t ever have to deal with them again?”
“Not for this cycle.”
Loch sat up, glaring at the fairy. That was a new term, a new idea she had never mentioned before. She visibly shrank back, realizing she had messed up. They’d had the talk before about Cerie needing to share everything she knew. And yet, she was still holding things back.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“As I had explained, a Spawn Field is an area high in Spirit where the monsters created by the Worldcore will quickly respawn when killed. It could be an hour, or it could be days. But they will respawn. Adapted Beasts have cycles. If you slay every single one, they will no longer spawn in that area. But if you leave some alive, by the next cycle, the Worldcore will not respawn the dead but allow new ones to be born to refill the numbers lost. It will be at least another cycle before they are fully grown.”
“And how long is a cycle?”
“Typically a season.”
“So it’s like an animal’s natural growth pattern?” Harper asked. “Just accelerated?”
“Yes,” the fairy answered.
“Because some of those raptors got away, we’ll have to deal with the pack again?”
“Yes, Lord Lochlan, but I would guess that what we faced was not the whole pack. Some would have been left in their den. The breeding females and young.”
“And we’ll have to deal with that pack of Lynxia again as well,” Loch muttered. “We’ll have to make a rule that when coming across a pack of aggressive creatures, we’ll have to kill them all.”
“Why?” Cerie asked, obviously confused.
“To protect us and clear out a safe area.”
“But you would deny you and your Clan future Resources?”
“If it means keeping the Clan safe? Absolutely.”
“I apologize, Lord Lochlan, but that is short-term thinking,” Cerie said. “Each area of the world will have beasts that do not exist elsewhere or a common beast that has been Adapted for this area. In the future, the Resources from those beasts will be trade material that your Clan will use to get things that they cannot find here or elsewhere in any territory you may have.”
“Those were just raptors. Are you saying there won’t be any other raptors anywhere in the world?”
“No. There will be raptors, but not ones with the localized Adaptation. In this case, it was their lightning resistance.”
Loch leaned back, thinking it over.
Again, like most things in the Connection, it was very similar to how games operated. Each zone had creatures unique to that zone. Even things like orcs that would be common across multiple zones were each of different tribes that dropped different things as loot.
He didn’t like it, knowing that there would always be dangers in the woods around their Clanhold, but what Cerie was saying made sense. It would also be something else they’d have to manage.
Another Resource to cultivate and keep track of population growth. They wouldn’t want to make something extinct and lose the ability to harvest it.
“I hate this,” he muttered, sighing.
Chapter Seven
“Great job, honey,” Loch said, looking over Piper’s shoulder.
She was on the couch, where she had fallen asleep the previous night, finishing up her sketches. Her Class, Ink Summoner, allowed her to create magical creatures from her drawings. They had limited uses, though; the more she used them, the quicker they’d dry up. She had used up the drawings she had in the fight with the raptors, needing to make more.
Loch recognized the sketch she was working on. A Velociraptor. It was pretty detailed, which she had said would make the summon stronger.
Piper looked up at her father, smiling.
“Thanks. I still have some work to do on the others, but I can summon them now if needed.”
“That’s awesome. When we get to the house, you can finish them then.”
“Okay.”
She stood up, putting the sketchbook and pencil back into the magical satchel.
Harper was in the kitchen, going through it one more time.
They’d had a breakfast of bottled water and chips. It wasn’t the greatest, but it was at least filling. Loch wanted bacon and French toast, but it would be a long time until he’d have anything close to that again. Clan Brady needed to start working on farms, raising animals and crops.
They had to find the animals to raise first.
The three walked out of the house, not bothering to close the door. Loch had smashed the lock to get in. It wouldn’t stay shut. He could wedge it closed, but an open door would be an indication to anyone coming through that the house had been raided already.
Harper and Piper didn’t look down the road, not wanting to see. Loch did, though.
The pavement was covered in dried stains. Black from Piper’s ink summons. Red from the raptors. There was barely anything of the dead bodies left. A few bits of gristle and bone, but everything else was gone. He hadn’t heard the scavengers in the night, but they had done a good job of cleaning up the mess.
The road ran parallel to the power lines for a time, a row of trees between them as they headed downhill. They passed a side street. Loch knew there were a couple dozen houses along that street. Chances were good that it hadn’t been raided yet. He’d have to send some scavenging teams down there when they got back. Loch wanted to but knew he and the girls wouldn’t be doing it.
They only had a limited amount of space to scavenge from their own home, the few on their street, and some of the homes they would now be passing on the way back to the school.
Not that there would be many. It looked like most of the homes along both sides had been taken by the Worldcore and replaced with trees. The forest was thick on either side.
Like the houses on their own street, these houses were surrounded by trees on all sides. Some were set back pretty far from the road. Lots of privacy between them. There were crowded parts of Northwood, where houses were right on top of each other. But large parts were like this area, wooded with space between.
Loch had purposely bought a house with lots of trees between him and the neighbors. It was the major benefit of living in small towns. If he’d wanted to live with houses on top of each other, he’d have lived in a city.
They continued walking down hill, the road pitted and torn, cracked with some parts missing. There were sinkholes in the middle of the road but mostly along the edges where the ground sloped sharply away. The road had broken, a large section falling down. As they walked around the edge, small stones slid down the side of the new slope.
Harper led, Loch in the rear, but they stayed close. He didn’t want them to spread out. He kept his eyes and senses open, reaching out to feel for Presences. Loch still wasn’t sure what he was doing or why. He hadn’t talked with Cerie and hadn’t gotten an Ability.
Was it somehow related to his Unfettered trait or just part of Evaluate’s growth?
So far, it really hadn’t proven useful and didn’t happen all the time. He wondered if it had something to do with later race grades. He was still at Rank F for his race. What all that meant was on his list of stuff to talk to Cerie about.
A very long list.
There were just other things he thought had more priority. Things related to survival.
Maybe he should ask her. But how? He couldn’t think of a way that wouldn’t alert her that he had the Ability or was developing it. Loch wasn’t sure why he didn’t want to tell Cerie; he just felt he shouldn’t.
It wasn’t just that Cerie had her own motivations, parameters hardcoded into the Codex Band that held her consciousness. He pretty much trusted her. Loch just felt it was something she shouldn’t know about yet.
He didn’t feel anything in the woods surrounding them but didn’t completely trust the strange Ability. He kept his traditional, now enhanced, senses alert.
Surprisingly, the trip down to where their street came off the road was uneventful. Loch had expected attacks from the woods. More raptors, Lynxia, or anything. Maybe even giants. He knew there were elves around somewhere, but no one had seen any traces of them. Part of him hoped that both had stayed further away, days away from where he’d encountered them by the car. Miles and miles, even more now that the world was expanding, away from Northwood. He hoped that they’d stay away but knew they wouldn’t.
Like the gaunts, the elves and giants were a future problem. Just a far-future problem. The gaunts were going to be a more immediate issue.
Pre-Connection, walking from the corner down to their street would have taken twenty or thirty minutes. Now, it took over an hour. The road was tougher to walk, but the distance had increased. Loch couldn’t really tell where the expansion took place. He knew it was in the areas where the houses had disappeared, but he couldn’t see or sense how it had happened. He knew the distances and lengths of those properties, he’d driven down the road every day.
But somehow, he couldn’t determine how much longer those properties had gotten. They had gotten longer, but to him, it just felt the same.
He shook his head, not wanting to think about it.
The world was getting bigger; there was evidence of it, even if he couldn’t physically tell. Was it really worth worrying about?
It was just one of the many new things he had to deal with.
And unlike most of those things, this was one he could just accept and move on from.
Loch paused at the intersection. To the left, their road headed down a hill. Straight ahead, the main road continued sloping down. It would go that way for another mile or so until it hit one of the town beaches on Bow Lake. He could see the driveways on either side of their road, the first houses on the street. Set too far from the road, with too many trees and curving drives, to see the houses. There was no way to know if they still existed.
“Dad?” Harper asked.
His daughters stood on either side of him, looking down the road. He smiled at them.
From the very first day of the Connection, this was where Loch had wanted to come. This had been the goal. Get back home.
They were so close.
He missed Kelly.
He’d been missing her since she disappeared. That never went away. But with everything they’d been through, everything they’d faced and all the new challenges and dangers, he was able to push it to the back of his mind.
Now, it rushed forward.
She should be there with them.
But she wasn’t.
If she had been, how much would be different? Would the girls have had to start Leveling so early? Would they even have needed to fight in the dungeons?
Would Loch end up as Clanlord still?
Kelly would have been a better one. She would have been able to be both the strong figurehead and the actual leader. Loch knew he could, but he didn’t want to. Being in charge, that was Kelly. It wasn’t something he had wanted. The strength to protect everyone, that was Loch.
He turned to his girls, smiling at them.
“Let’s go see what the house looks like.”
He took the lead, heading down the street.
The expansion of the world was felt even in their short street. What had only been a couple hundred feet was easily doubled or tripled in length. He couldn’t point out where it happened. Like the main road, he just knew it had happened.
He could see the bridge ahead. A small stream cut through the road, leading to a small pond. A bridge had been built over it. Nothing fancy. Just concrete with a low rail, single lane. The stream was usually shallow, a foot deep at the most, ankle deep for most of its run. In the spring, after the thaws, it would get deeper and a little raging, but for most of the year, it was a calm little bit of water.
The girls had loved playing by it, wading into the water. There had been no fish but plenty of frogs.
“Maybe there’s a troll under the bridge,” Harper joked.
Loch turned sharply to glare at her.
“Sorry,” she said, half smiling.
“That’s not funny, Harper,” Piper said. “Trolls under a bridge are probably a real thing now.”
“I said I was sorry,” Harper grumbled.
“I do not understand,” Cerie said. “What do trolls have to do with bridges?”
“It’s a story,” Loch started explaining. He slowed their pace as they approached the bridge. He knew Harper had been joking, but Piper was also right. “In it, a troll lived under a bridge and would eat anyone that walked over and didn’t pay its toll. The troll under a bridge became a kind of trope, appearing in lots of stories.”
“Ah, I see. That is not something I have heard of,” Cerie said, eyes glowing a brighter green than her normal glow. “Nothing in the codex mentions trolls and bridges being significant.”
“Trolls are real?” Harper asked.
“Of course they are. There are multiple types. Only the Trolls themselves know their history and evolution. There is a large Clan of them, the Zar’Gash. Those tend to prefer warmer jungle climates. Then there are the more monstrous ones that are similar to the hobs. Sentient but not on the Level of Adapted. And there have been instances of ones that are little more than beasts.”
“Do they heal from almost any wound?” Loch asked, holding up a hand to have the girls stop moving.
He walked to the side of the road, where it fell steeply to the elevation of the stream. Walking down the steep bank, he moved into the woods, keeping his eyes on the shadowed area under the bridge. He had pictures from when the girls were younger, both sitting on the concrete walk under the bridge. The cutest trolls he’d ever seen.
Now there might be a real one there.
“Yes,” Cerie answered his question. “That is a common racial Ability for the Trolls.”
Loch wished he had a way to create fire. In all the stories, flames were the best way to stop a troll from healing. Stories were important. There was truth in them.
At least, that was what Cerie had said.
So far, they hadn’t really encountered anything straight out of Earth’s myths. The giant and elf were, but that had been a quick encounter. An important one, but quick. There hadn’t been time to see how both measured up to the stories about them.
Loch was far enough out, along the shore of the stream, that he could see the full length under the bridge. There was nothing. Just the concrete that was now looking pitted and cracked where before it had been old but in good shape. He doubted it would take the weight of a car now.
It was clear. No troll.
He hopped the stream. It was about six feet wide, sometimes thinner, sometimes wider. Before, he never would have attempted to jump it. Now, with his Adapted body and higher stats, it was easy.
“No troll,” he called out to the girls, walking quickly back up to the road.
He met them at the other side of the bridge.
Following a curve in the road, a large field opened up on their right, with a house at the far end and a couple of houses on the left. Loch was happy to see the neighbors' houses still existed. The field was empty, a stone wall bordering it along the road. Woods surrounded the field on the other side, the grass extending around the house. From where they were, he couldn’t see their house, the trees blocking it.
Their pace picked up.
Home was so close.
They passed the first house on the left when Loch felt something odd. His body felt energized, the feeling fading fast. It had been only a moment. He stopped walking, looking back at where they had been.
“What was that?” he asked.
Harper and Piper stopped about ten feet ahead of him.
“What was what?” Harper asked.
“You didn’t feel a strange energy just now?”
“No,” both girls answered.
“We should keep moving,” Cerie said. “I think we are in a Spawn Field.”
“Dad!” Piper yelled. She had turned, looking where Cerie was focused on.
Loch followed his youngest daughter’s gaze, looking into the field, watching a group of large animals making their way from the far edge toward the Bradys. He bit back a laugh. There was just something comical about a flock of turkeys moving slowly toward them.
The birds were larger than normal, maybe two or three times. A couple of male turkeys led the group, the females spread out behind them. The two toms had flared their tail feathers and puffed up their chests.
MUTATED TURKEYS
