“Newb. I arrived three days in on a convergence event that should have been handled by then. If I had been here running logistics for the two other Custodians assigned to this bumfuck nowhere place, I dare say we would have been done with it all already. But Bowling Bill got drafted to Madagascar, and E-liz-abeth is still stuck in a hospital on her last life ever since her left leg got dissolved by acid. So, instead of two level forties, I have you two schmucks.”
I raised my hand. “I think I did pretty well, all things considered. I leveled a bunch.”
“Which, if all things had gone right, you would have done over a longer period of time, in a safe environment, where neither yours nor anyone else’s life is at stake. And then there is of course the Ur-mimic — not a real one, just a clone. A clone of the primogenitor of all mimic-related issues on earth is still a massive problem. Alas,” she tapped the map, “That is too much for us to handle. We have to hope whatever escape plan it has cooked up is still raw. In the meantime, we deal with its mooks. Anything I should be aware of?”
“Well, we’re surrounded already, for one,” I said. “There may be the slight possibility that the enemy has control over about… two elder vampires?”
Medusahead stared at me as if I’d just called her mother a hamster. Moe meanwhile had clambered out of my backpack and did what he did best: reloading, cleaning, polishing weapons. She didn’t spare him a second glance.
“I see. Well.” She looked back at her map then, with a slightly desperate grin, back at us. “I hope your baggage does not only consist of problems for me to solve.”
Moe and I shared a knowing look.
“I can deal with the elder vampire, maybe. I already took out one.”
Medusahead squinted. “How?”
It had only one arm and no legs.
“They’re being controlled by deathworm mimics. They’re much, much weaker than an elder vampire is supposed to be, or so I’ve been told.”
“And the deathworm in their abdomens are an obvious weak spot." She cupped her chin, thinking. “Can they still use their spells?”
Like the stamina drain, or the freaking shadow armor? Yes. “Gotta be careful of that. But I can kill them with a direct bazooka hit, or stun them with an indirect one if I use pinecone rockets.”
“Pinecone… rockets?”
“Easiest way to stake a vampire from afar is shrapnel.”
Medusahead hummed, shifting around a few more things on her map. “There are still some major problems that will have to be dealt with.”
“Such as?”
She gestured to her map. “Our defenses are paper-thin and skin-deep. Ideally, we would have multiple forward positions, plus at least three defensive lines to fall back to. That way we have more time to react when one flank looks like it is going to give, more time for the hostile energy to peter out. Like the crumple zone on modern cars. You know what a crumple zone is?”
“I’m intimately familiar,” I shot back. One of her camera-snake-eyes stared at me for an uncomfortable moment. “Big fan of the concept.”
“... as is anyone who’s ever had any semblance of military tactics and strategy.”
She drew a big circle around the position to our north. “The mall is not a viable point of defense — too many points of entry, and not cleared of enemies. I had it demolished, so now it’s a big pile of rubble that will slow the invaders down. All we have besides that are the outer barricades, and then some sandbags and stuff around the command tent, the one we are in right now. That means every breach needs to be plugged, every issue addressed immediately before it turns into a full-on catastrophe. We cannot afford a rout, we cannot afford a retreat, because there is no place to retreat to. Either we bleed the mimics of all of their remaining forces, or everyone dies, and you get to become familiar with what we call a death spiral.”
“Ah.”
Because the system couldn’t revive us outside of the barrier because it needed us inside to keep it charged. On return, the rest of the mimics would definitely be guarding our corpses and gear. Without a place to safely rest, all they’d have to do is keep us from sleeping. Even with extra stats, exhaustion would take over after a few days. And then, rinse and repeat.
Or they could just kill me while I was waiting on a gun or ammo to fall from the sky. Either or. Not that I was particularly worried about that either way. If it came to that, we were screwed anyways.
I tuned back in to Medusahead explaining that both me and her personal security squad would have to play firefighters, i.e. running around and dealing with big bad mimics wherever they popped up before they popped a hole in our defenses. She would play overwatch and keep us apprised of the situation, maybe drop some spells here or there. Supposedly, that was enough to earn her a share of the soulcoins and experience.
I wasn’t bothered by sharing with her as much as I thought I’d be. There were easily over two thousand coins of mimics to go around, probably closer to three.
“They are already probing our outer defenses. That means the real fight starts whenever they think they are ready.” There was an audible beep. All of her mechanical snake heads stood on end. “That means now. Squadlead, mall; Newb, southside. What are you waiting for? Go, go, go!”
Medusahead’s lieutenant nodded curtly and hurried out past the tent flaps. I went to go right after.
“And Custodian Sam.”
Oh my god she called me a Custodian, I’m part of the cool kids now, aaah!
“Y-yes?”
“Your life is worth more than a hundred people’s lives. Don't waste it.”
I froze.
She thinks I’m the type who’ll sacrifice myself for just about anyone.
Slowly, I took a few steps, then a few more.
I wouldn’t do that. Would I?
Flashback. Me in Clems car. The smell of oil, smoke in my lungs, and a huntsman’s limb speared through my chest. Then the mall, the caster mimic, all for people I didn’t know, all for my cat. And then, just recently, the vampires, the ur-mimic… all for Addy.
I shivered. Crap, that was not a good track record. Maybe she was just telling me to be careful. Maybe in spite of her evident distrust of my skills, she was empathetic enough that she didn’t want to see another Custodian die. Maybe that was the bare minimum necessary to be accepted as a Custodian candidate.
I gunned down the roads past hastily erected tents and haphazardly strewn trash. The distant cracks of gunfire had slowly grown in scale and frequency. Now, it sounded like there was fighting in every direction.
“System, which way is south?”
[Would you like to buy: HUD compass + Waypointer add-on? Price: 25 Soulcoins]
“Yes, friggin’, how is this not part of the standard catalogue!?”
[The system-approved PBC-HUD? is fully moddable, customizable, and expandable, all for an affordable price.]
“Goddamn capitalism!”
I bought the damn thing, the modification applying instantly, telling me that it was probably already installed in my brain, it was just turned off because I hadn’t paid for it. Of course.
But hey, at least now I had a couple glowing yellow arrows pointing me in the right direction. They were plastered onto walls and the ground — on any flat surface really — showing the ideal path to my target.
It led right past a plastic table in front of a toppled tent. The table had an ‘I luv u’ mug on it.
I kicked the mug. It shattered like a mug. Great. Now there was coffee on my shoes.
An ill omen, if ever there was one.
The section of the barricade under attack was easy to spot. It was where the crack-a-lack of gunfire was loudest.
A group of twelve or so people were holding a section of a road flanked by two flat-topped buildings. They had a pair of marksmen on the top of either of them, covering the roofside approaches and opening up new angles to shoot at the mimics pouring down the road from. Six of the remaining eight were holed up behind a pair of trashed cars, sandbags piled on top of and wedged underneath their carriages, creating a solid wall of defense. The youngest was purely dedicated to hauling ammo, and a wiry old man was on a walky-talky, calling out targets with his binoculars. All in all, a good position, if only we had enough people to hold it.
We didn’t.
A swarm of pink and black streamed down the road, discarding all pretenses of stealth and subterfuge for a quick, blunt swing to the face. Sharpened limbs clicked and clattered along the pavement and discarded cars.
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I arrived just as one of the six failed to bat a 1.5 kilo mimic away with the butt of his rifle, and it jumped on his face. Spiky, sharp-bladed limbs went to work, and did to him what they’d once done to me.
I slashed two of its legs off with a knife, tossed it in the air, and blasted it with a Toothpick. Black mimic blood sprinkled down on us as I gave the guy a once-over. Mid forties, caucasian, bad teeth. Also, his carotid artery was spurting blood like a firehose.
A woman roughly of the same age was trying and failing to keep it in. “Oh god, Hewie, don’t die, don’t—”
I picked her up and moved her to the side. She was in the way.
“One moment.” I slapped a time bandaid on him. He was still coughing like a motherfluffer. “There. That’ll do it. Make sure he coughs all the blood out of his lungs so he doesn’t suffocate. He’ll live. Better get him to the medical tent though.”
The woman just looked at me with a rigid face.
“That’s a bandaid,” she said.
“It’s also magic, so yeah.” I shrugged. “If it works, it works.”
I heard another yelp from the barricade. With two quick lopes I was up right next to the four people remaining on the ground floor. With two people down, they had no chance of stemming the tide of 1.5, 3, and 9 kilo mimics chittering and slithering towards them.
“Fuck, they hurt to look at!” someone yelled.
“They’re too friggin small!”
Are they? I can hit them just fine though. There are quite a lot though.
“[Arms & Arms proficiency],” I yelled.
I started sweeping the streets left to right. Leaper spines whizzed through the air. Combat quickly turned into a blur.
Toothpicks. Shoot. Left. Right. Duck. Right again. Full-auto blast with the Spab-4. Toss a battery, boom, move along cover, never stop, never doubt, never look back.
Someone got hit again. I tore the leaper needle and the twitching venom sac out of his stomach, slapped another time bandaid on, and sent a request to have this sector reinforced.
And then it was back to the shooting gallery. Snapshots, potshots, headshots, I was dealing in all of them and more. I fell into a rhythm. Idly, I noticed that the four people next to me had stopped shooting to stare at me.
I’m not weird, you are.
“[Illusory double],” I yelled, partly because I didn’t want to catch any leaper spines, partly because I had the charge and was looking to get some more soon enough.
My double ran forward, a heroic if foolhardy charge. The mimics close by swerved to attack the fake Spider-Sam, clumping up real nice and close together.
“Summon: Bazooka!” Aim. Trigger. Explosion.
A rain of gore descended, announcing a lull in the battle.
A car was on fire. My hands were shaking. But that was fine, because finally, a group of six people led by one of Medusahead’s mooks arrived to seal the deal on this issue.
“Get the two wounded to the back,” I yelled at the ammo carrier, then turned back towards the front. The mimics were slowing their push here for now. Too much resistance for their taste.
There. Fire put out. Bask in the joy of a job well done. Channel some joy. You won’t have much chance to.
I was sweating, smelling of gunsmoke and barely done containing the fire when my system pinged me with another message from Medusahead. This time, there was a problem one block over to my left.
I set off running, Moe handing me reloaded weapons and a dogwater bottle. “System, set up an auto buy for time bandaids. Ensure that I always have at least five in my backpack.”
[Setting up this trade order will cost (150) Soulcoins. Proceed with this action?]
“As long as that’s not the friggin broker’s fee then yes.”
[Trade order set up]
[Buying (5) Chrono Bandages]
[Soulcoins: 244->94]
Watching my soulcoins drop precipitously made my heart clench. But watching people bleed out hurt my soul. I was not going to let anyone die, not if I could save them. Because what was magic good for if not that?
“Also, do the same for all of my ammo,” I added. I really should have done that earlier.
I arrived at the next point of conflict. I made some coins. I lost some coins saving lives. One person, a woman maybe ten years older than me, didn’t let go of her rifle in time when a tumbleweed wrapped around it, yoinking her off a ten foot barricade with barely a yelp.
I didn’t manage to save her. And the more I ran from place to place, the more I understood the reality of what it meant to fight for your life.
And through it all, her freckled face didn’t leave my mind. Just, the face, the look of surprise and short ‘ah’. And then she was dead. A whole life, a whole person, just gone like that.
Small tragedies repeated over and over with small variations here and there. An unlucky leaper spine through the eye. A 1.5 kilo mimic sneaking up at just the wrong time, cutting just the wrong arteries. A sniper being knocked off their perch and hitting their head on asphalt.
I should’ve been glad that they were only individual tragedies. If there had been any number of larger mimics left, we would’ve been talking about entire groups wiped out, maybe even entire fronts. It only took one road to fall for the mimics to gain an avenue to flank the next position already struggling to keep just one direction of assault contained. And then they would fold, and so they would get another, and another. That was the threat of losing just a single of the forty-eight designated critical positions. And thank god that we were holding for the moment, even as the medical tents filled and then spilled out into the open.
On and on it went. For six hours. The sun was starting to set. The system gave an approximate two more hours at the current rate of attrition until the mimics were no longer a cohesive fighting force. The estimate fluctuated whenever they found a weak sector and pushed hard, or when they completely ignored a strong point that had just been reinforced.
But hey, at least I got some levels.
[Level up! You’ve reached level 24]
[Level up! You’ve reached level 25]
[Level up! You’ve reached level 26]
[+12 Body, +6 Sense, +6 Mind, +3 Spirit, +3 Free stat point]
I put the free stat points into Mind, because I could feel that if I made a terrible mistake, it would be because of my mental fatigue, not my physical one.
<
“Ungf,” I groaned, chugging a thermos of coffee and washing it down with dogwater.
I’d just sat down. My legs were shaking. My arms were too. I’d been casting as many spells as I could, sometimes with optimal charge, sometimes with less optimal ones. My ears couldn’t quite decide whether they were deaf or whether they were constantly ringing from the persistent gunfire. I must've made an absolutely huge amount of coins. I never bothered to check. No time.
[Soulcoins: 491]
Wow, that is… a lot less than I expected.
Time bandaids were expensive. But they were an expense well worth making.
My knees popped as I got up. If the mimics had attacked us at night, we’d have been royally screwed. We wouldn’t have given them that time though. Within six hours Addy and I would have definitely hunted down the Ur-mimic, confined within the great barrier as it was.
I arrived at sector nine, a place I hadn’t even seen once over the course of the assault. Medusahead’s squad of specialists had been assigned to the south-eastern third of the front, which they had held stubbornly. After I’d proven that I wasn’t going to fold like wet tissue paper, Medusahead had steadily given me more of their workload. So yeah, this place was new.
It was a strongpoint located at the corner of our perimeter in the middle of a junction along the main road. Two roads led to safety, two to death. There were secondary positions prepared down the safe roads. If this forward position was breached, maybe those who rallied further back would be able to catch the attackers in a crossfire. Medusahead thought that the attacks to the left and right of this position were feints, and that the real push would happen here. Thus, why she’d ordered me here before any of the action had happened yet.
And that ladies and gentlemen is why you don’t skimp out on Mind.
I arrived, jogging around the corner, and immediately did a double take at the tracked ten-foot monstrosity standing square in the middle of the t-section.
“We have a tank!?” I half-yelled, half groaned in disbelief. “Why does this thing look like it came straight out of a museum?”
The guy sitting in the top hatch waved his chinese takeout box at me. “Prolly ‘cause it did.”
He looked like Santa Clause if Santa wore a steel pot helmet and didn’t mind being a messy eater. His beard was white as snow, speckled with bits of soy sauce.
“Oh. Cool.” I jumped onto its rear part, partly to shake his hand, partly because it was a nice vantage point. “I’m Sam. Custodian.”
“Hank. I own the tank museum down yonder. My wife’s down here clutching the clutches.” A muffled hello came up from the bellows of the tank.
Grinning, he put his food aside and gave the tank an affectionate slap.
“Well? Whaddaya think of her?”
His wife, or his tank?
The tank for one was long, painted brown, and armored from front to back more than the average safe. I’d gotten used to feeling like the biggest girl in town, but this behemoth made even me feel small.
“She’s, uh… kinda chonky?” I paused. “Are tanks supposed to be this long?”
“No they aren’t!” His guffaw reached far. Nervously, I reached for my Toothpick. No mimics in sight for now. “This thing ‘ere is an M6A1 heavy tank. She’s a prototype, only one of her kind. Her coaxial 20mm cannon is nonfunctional — a crack down the barrel — and the .50 cal we put on top jams a lot, but other than that she’s great for technical demonstrations.”
“Uh-huh.” I let my eyes sweep the surrounding area. The streets were filled with black splotches and grizzly bits of mimics half-dissolved into smoke. “You seem to have this area under control.”
“I’m a terrible shot. But my wife on the .30 cals coupled with the fire-rate of the .50 cal makes up for that.”
“Need any ammo?”
“I was about to ask. The stowage is nearly empty. A new box of machinegun ammo would be appreciated, and some 3-inch high explosive.”
I nodded, and bought him his goodies. They were cheap. He looked so happy about getting them, like a kid unboxing presents. He hooked the box of ammo in and stowed some of the shells. Meanwhile, I just stood on the back of the tank, waiting.
Nothing was approaching. Not a single mimic. Nothing.
Did Medusahead make a mistake or—
“Custodian Sam.” I turned around to see Medusahead in the flesh, er, metal, plus about a dozen black-clad and heavily armed mooks following her. “You made it. Your speed and reliability are appreciated as always.”
“I try my best.” Even then, I was sewn over with time bandaids. One of my shoulders was stiff, as was the leg that had gotten pierced earlier this day. My best wasn’t perfect. It hurt having to settle for ‘good enough’.
I swung my legs over the side of the tank and dropped down. “So, you’re bringing in the big guns, huh?”
“Show her,” Medusahead said and a number of snake-drones slithered out of her robo-scalp, projecting a collage of drone footage onto thin air.
My big eyes zoomed all the way in. “Are those caster mimics?”
“Four of them, all smaller than the one you reportedly fought in the mall. Fluctuations in the thaumic load of the surrounding air implies they are casting some sort of mimic-magic spell.”
“How bad is that?”
Medusahead paused. “They are one klick out that way. If they think they can hit us from there, it is going to be a bad time no matter what. Unless you can hit them from nearly a mile away.”
“I mean, maybe?” The bazooka was absolutely not rated for those distances. I’d have to factor in bullet drop, wind currents, the rotation of the earth… “They’re behind a building, so probably not.”
“Knowing your weakness is a strength in itself,” Medusahead said with a nod. Wow. Inspiring. Next she was going to say something like ‘he who sneezes twice need only wipe once’.
She turned on her heels with a metallic whirr and clack. “Alright blackcoats, you know the drill. The tank and Custodian Samantha will spearhead our assault on the mimic casters. We will provide covering fire and support. Ready? G—”
Suddenly, the cameras showed all five casters going splat. Their black, liquid insides were quickly sucked up into a bus-sized ball that warped the space around it. Small, gooey creatures began dripping down from it, then larger ones.
[Warning. Spatial disruption detected.]
[Localized convergence event in: 00:00:00]
[Warning. Hazardous mimic concentration detected. Seek indoor shelter and wait for rescue.]
WAR!