I walked more confidently down the empty streets now, but my eyes and ears still paid close attention to every detail around me, my hand twitching and ready to draw my revolver if anything approached. This time, though, I wasn’t trying to hide from the monsters that lurked around the city during the day. Now I was paying attention to every detail around me so I could find the monsters. This time, I was the hunter, not the hunted.

  It wasn’t long before I heard the faintest of sounds from a building near me. I crossed the street silently, crouching near the building to gather more information. The building itself was another apartment complex, but as I listened closely, it appeared that this one was infested with monsters. I could hear monsters on multiple floors; the sounds of scuttling, digging, and faint grunts were clear to my ears through the weathered wood the building was made of. I circled the building until I found the main entrance, another archway that led into a central courtyard in the middle of the apartment. The front gate was torn down, so I walked as silently as I could into the central courtyard, looking around cautiously at the various apartment windows that lined the inside of the building.

  Inside the courtyard, I saw several of the apes I had managed to avoid the other day. The three that I could see in the courtyard itself were lying in the shade cast by the apartment building, lazily picking at themselves or sleeping flat on their backs without a care in the world. I counted the ones I could see in the courtyard, finding four of the beasts. My ears told me several more were in the building all around me.

  I debated whether to attack or not, but I felt an urge to truly test my new weapon, a surprisingly reckless urge that I found hard to ignore. I didn’t know if it was my own mind, eager to test my revolver, or something biological from my young, powerful body, but I decided not to ignore the urge. I stepped out into the courtyard boldly, my hand reaching under my modified cloak to draw my revolver. Two of the apes in the courtyard hadn’t been sleeping and noticed me immediately. As they leapt up in alarm, screeching angrily at my intrusion, I felt a grim smile stretch across my face.

  The two sleeping apes shot upward at the cry from their companions. I heard the others in the building around me begin to hoot and screech in reply, immediately alerted that I was intruding on their territory. The four in front of me bared their oversized teeth and began to pound the courtyard with their fists, posturing aggressively toward me.

  “You settled down in the wrong part of town,” I said to the beasts, my smile stretching even wider in anticipation of a real fight. Part of me was surprised at my recklessness, but another was confident I could handle such mindless animals now. I trusted my new body, and I especially trusted my new weapon. It was time to see how effective the combination of the two truly was.

  The apes in front of me didn’t understand my words, but my obvious lack of fear sent them into an even greater rage. They screamed at me and leapt forward to attack.

  I aimed and shot the nearest ape. My bullet struck it in the chest, blowing the ape backward, sending it spinning to the ground in a split second. The other apes didn’t even notice what happened to their companion, racing toward me on all fours, focused solely on killing me as rapidly as possible. I strafed around some of the pillars in the courtyard, putting more room between me and them, and hastily aimed at another of the beasts. I timed my second shot carefully, hitting one of the apes as another one was behind it in perfect alignment. My bullet tore through the first ape and struck the second one with nearly the same amount of force as the first, sending them both flying backward violently. Blood sprayed behind them as my bullet tore through them, painting the courtyard red with their blood.

  The fourth ape was close to me now. Instead of wasting a bullet, I drew my knife with my left hand and threw it with a sideways flick of my arm. My throw was perfect, the knife penetrating deep into the ape’s left eye. It stumbled, continuing forward until it crashed to the ground in front of me. I sidestepped nimbly, dodging the body as it tumbled toward me across the courtyard.

  I reloaded my revolver, eyeing the body next to me, but it didn’t stir. I had managed to kill it with a single throw of my knife. I checked the other apes, but none of them were getting up either. More of the apes began to climb out of the windows above me, screaming in rage as they saw the wounded apes. I moved to the center of the courtyard and began firing at the beasts where they stood, aggressively screaming and waving their fists at me from the apartment windows. Each shot sent an ape slamming backward. It either flew back into the window it had climbed out of or clipped the windowsill and fell to the courtyard, unmoving.

  I killed six of the beasts and then reloaded, snapping out the wheel of the revolver with a flick of my wrist. There were no shell casings, so it was easier to reload than a traditional revolver. As I drew a handful of bullets from my satchel and began to reload, a significantly larger ape, glowing with a blue light, stepped out of a doorway on the ground floor near where I stood. It glared at me with slightly more intelligence than the other apes. Some of the smaller apes seemed to have realized how easily I could kill them and had ducked back into the building to hide from me. Others weren’t as smart and were in the process of climbing down the side of the building to try to get to me. I finished reloading and shot an ape that was swinging from one open window to a ledge beneath it, throwing the descending ape against the wall, where it lost its grip and fell to the courtyard with a soft thud.

  At the sight of its minion dying, the blue sub-boss charged me, slamming its massive fists into the courtyard and kicking up dust as it sped forward. The roar of the blue ape echoed around the courtyard, and I felt a strange pressure from the cry. It pressed down on me mentally in a way I had never experienced before, as if I was suddenly underwater and the pressure of an entire ocean was trying to crush me. The smaller apes climbing down the building began to grow larger, visibly swelling in size, and they gave up on their careful climb downward, leaping to the courtyard in a rage, no longer caring about injuring themselves from the fall.

  I took careful aim and shot the blue ape in the head, right between its two angry, bloodshot eyes. My bullet tore through its head, blowing the back of its skull out in a spray of blood and gore. The sub-boss continued forward for several more steps until its body realized what had happened and its arms and legs failed, causing the ape to collapse to the courtyard with a crash. The blue ape’s momentum caused its body to slide forward, kicking up even more dust and coming to rest just a handful of feet away from where I stood. The apes that had been charging me in a rage lost whatever enhancement the blue ape had given them, immediately shrinking in size. As they slowed down and looked around the courtyard, visibly confused, I aimed and shot one after another before they could recover.

  I reloaded again as the remaining apes realized what was happening and continued their charge toward me. The last two uninjured apes charged from two different directions as I reloaded. I waited carefully, timing my movements precisely, and then ducked down and rolled out of the way as the apes tried to snag me in their long, hairy arms. The momentum of their charge caused them to crash into each other as I rolled past them both. They slammed into each other in an almost comical collision, and both stumbled to the ground, intertwined with each other. Not wanting to waste any more bullets than I had to, I walked around them until I had the perfect angle and then shot them both with a single bullet. The acceleration of the bullet was so powerful it blew through the first ape’s back and continued through the second one’s chest, only stopping when it impacted the ground beneath them both.

  I waited, listening closely to see if anything else was going to attack me, but I didn’t hear any other movement nearby. The only sounds were the occasional grunts and whines of the wounded beasts spread around the courtyard. I replaced the bullet I had used to kill the last two apes and then holstered my gun, very satisfied with how effective the weapon had turned out. With only my knife, these beasts would have killed me easily. Even with a weapon from this world such as a sword or bow, I doubted I could have handled so many of the beasts without being overwhelmed and killed, unless I had some class to help make the weapon more effective.

  I waited patiently until the last of the apes finally died, keeping a careful eye on the apartment windows around me in case any of the beasts that had fled tried to return.

  Weak primatus defeated—1 experience awarded.

  The experience announcements for killing fifteen of the “weak primatus” monsters repeated in my head over and over. The feeling was uncomfortable but I did my best to endure it.

  Weak primatus sub-boss defeated—5 experience awarded.

  No class detected. Experience pooled for future use.

  The fifteen weaker monsters and the one sub-boss gave me a total of twenty more experience. I was now up to sixty-two experience points, but I still had no class to put them toward.

  I gathered the blue orb from the sub-boss and then wrangled my knife from the ape I had killed with it. I cleaned and re-sheathed my knife, then surveyed the courtyard to figure out how to gather as many of my bullets as I could. A very annoying hour and a half later, I had collected ten of the thirteen bullets I had used. The rest were lost somewhere in the city around me, having blown through the beasts and the wooden walls around me without stopping.

  The fight with the apes had been enjoyable, a true test of my weapon and body. It felt good to experience the unity of my mind and body that came with combat. Outside of fighting, I still struggled to unify my mind and body, but when I was fighting for my life, I experienced true unity. It was an exhilarating feeling.

  Unlike the fight, though, the search for the bullets afterward was a frustrating use of my time. While the holes in the wooden walls around me made it easy to track where my bullets had gone, they often traveled through several walls before being stopped, so I was forced to climb in and out of nearby buildings in search of them.

  My search, of course, didn’t go unnoticed either. I disrupted several armored tusk-rats that were nesting in the nearby buildings, making me use more bullets and then forcing me to track down those bullets as well. Overall, it cooled quite a lot of my satisfaction from defeating the apes.

  Now that I knew my revolver was a success, my next priority was to gather more iron to turn into steel bullets so I didn’t have to worry about running out as much. Now that I had another blue orb, I could charge thirty-five more bullets, if the number of bullets I could charge last time stayed true. I was a bit concerned about what might happen if someone found a bullet of mine. I wasn’t sure if someone could reverse-engineer the bullet and begin to puzzle out the weapon that might have fired it. That might not be a bad thing, considering how tenuous the survival of the humans on this world seemed to be, but I wasn’t quite ready for such knowledge to spread if I could help avoid it. For now, me having the exclusive knowledge of firearms gave me the significant edge I needed to guarantee my survival. And despite meeting one semi-friendly merchant, I had no idea how the other people I met would react to me. Maybe someday I would be willing to share more, but for now, it was best if I kept things as secret as I could.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Of course, the chances of someone finding a bullet of mine were extremely slim here in the ruins of the city that very few people even entered, but I decided that I would continue to recover as many of my bullets as I could for now, even though it was extremely aggravating.

  I spent the rest of the day hunting monsters and then inevitably spending even longer hunting down my bullets afterward. I also hunted for more iron and bits of low-quality steel, if I could find it. The low-level creatures that inhabited the city during the day turned out to be no match for my revolver, thankfully. I hunted down several packs of dire rats and even took care of a few hellhounds, but I didn’t run into another sub-boss for the rest of the day.

  Instead of returning to the apartment I had been camping out in, I found a mostly intact villa with stone walls that stretched four stories tall. It had a well in the center, and the walls and villa didn’t seem to have sustained much damage at all from monsters, so I was pretty sure that it would be safe at night. I holed up in a small study on the top floor and spent the night crafting more bullets. I also practiced drawing and firing the revolver until I actually began to feel tired.

  The next week passed in a similar fashion. I returned to the villa at night after a busy day of hunting. By the end of the week, I had accrued 187 experience points and had a satchel full of enchanted bullets from all the iron I had collected. I had also killed fifteen sub-bosses, gathering their blue orbs to trade, although I planned to keep two of them for myself and my crafting.

  I had encountered a wide array of monsters, but all of them were labeled as weak by the announcements I received for killing them. I never stayed out too late, still afraid of the monsters that came out during the night. The only things I avoided during my hunts were the sounds of larger beasts. I could hear them from several blocks away, their steps so loud that I didn’t dare to even sneak a look at them in case they were too powerful for me to survive. I had gained confidence with my new weapon, but I wasn’t suicidal.

  I also encountered an apartment building that was covered in spiderwebs that I avoided thoroughly. I had no interest in fighting monstrous spiders.

  After my week of hunting, I returned to the street Asylaion’s caravan traveled on and waited for it to pass by. When I heard the caravan coming, I stood and waited patiently. The guards eyed me suspiciously as usual, but after a moment, several of them seemed to recognize me. They relaxed and returned to their duties, scanning the buildings and rooftops around them.

  When Asylaion saw me, he jumped down from the wagon he was riding in and approached me.

  “My friend!” he yelled as he approached. “I thought for sure you had been claimed by the city! How nice to see you still alive!”

  I smiled at his kind reaction to the sight of me, even though I was sure it was partly just for show.

  “I’m still around,” I said, shaking his hand. He slapped me on the shoulder as we shook, his strength enough to knock me forward slightly. I tried not to react but was momentarily surprised that he was strong enough to move my enhanced body so easily.

  “And you look good!” he said, eyeing my modified cloak. My firearm was hidden under the left side of the cloak, so all he could see was my small knife and the pouches on my belt, but I supposed I did look more like a real scavenger this time.

  “Thank you,” I told him. “Your guidance and trade has been helpful for my survival. It has been a productive week since we last spoke.”

  “Good!” he said enthusiastically. “Does that mean you have more to trade?”

  I opened one of the pouches on my belt, letting him see how many blue orbs I had to trade this time.

  “Oh ho!” he said, eyeing the orbs I had collected. “You have been busy! How did you manage to collect so many? Are you now a powerful mage or some rogue using that knife of yours to kill from the shadows, eh?”

  “What are you willing to trade me for the answer to that question?” I asked with a smile, trying to make a joke.

  He thought for a moment, taking my poor attempt at a quip seriously. “I will give you your choice of a magical weapon for answers on your methods of survival and where you come from.” He nodded as he spoke, furrowing his brow. “I admit to being very curious about you, my friend. Your survival only makes me want to know more!”

  I hadn’t expected him to actually offer me something; I had just been trying to banter like a normal person might do.

  Seeing my hesitation, he laughed at me and shook his head. “It’s okay, my friend. Come, review my inventory for today and let us walk together. Did you find anything else of value? Perhaps some old magical items or any of the metal I mentioned?”

  I shook my head as I took the scroll he handed me. I opened it and began to scan through the merchandise he had available.

  “Understandable,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “It is rare these days to find anything truly valuable above ground and nobody is willing to risk the dungeons anymore. It is a shame.”

  I wasn’t actually interested in buying anything today, given the effectiveness of my revolver. There wasn’t much that could compare to it from the merchant. I was still curious what he had to sell, though, and wanted to see if I could learn anything more about this world from the items on his scroll. Like last time, he had a large number of weapons and ammunition for sale, as well as salves, food, and other goods. There wasn’t much that was different from the last time I had seen him, except maybe a few different weapons, the other ones having already been sold or traded, presumably.

  After I was done reviewing the scroll, I handed it back to him.

  “I am actually curious about getting into one of the enclaves,” I told him. “Would you let me know how to enter them?”

  Asylaion took the scroll, tucking it back into his belt. “Hmm. Trade me one of your blue orbs and I will give you more rations, a stavrata, and ten copper nummi back for the information. A fair deal, yes?”

  I did the calculations, and it seemed like a bit of a discount compared to his prior price, so I agreed.

  “Good, good,” he said, walking us to the back of his wagon to gather the goods. “My home is the bridge, back behind us. You have seen it, yes?”

  I nodded as he handed me several packages of dried fish and my silver and copper in exchange for one orb.

  “We call it Perama,” he told me. “It isn’t much to look at, but we are hardy folk who have survived where many others have not. We are a bit . . . chaotic, shall we say. Anyone can enter. There are very few rules, but they must be followed or you will be killed. No fire. No matter what. Don’t mess with the walls that protect this side of the bridge. Don’t build any higher or the whole place might collapse. That’s about it. You will find the kindest people and the most ruthless rogues in equal parts. Myself and the guards that protect the caravans and walls are really the only form of order, and everyone contributes to our defense in whatever way they can. Other than protecting the enclave, we don’t really do anything else so everyone is on their own.

  “East of us is the Patriarch’s enclave,” he continued, pointing behind himself. “A Varangian like you would do well to avoid that place. The Patriarch’s priests have become . . . strange over the last hundred years as the city has fallen into more and more ruin. They believe their gods will save us, but the rest of us aren’t waiting around to be saved by some long-dead gods. Rumors are they are turning to darker and darker classes to try to find their gods again. People who wander too close to their part of the city never return, so be careful.”

  I ran through what I knew from my world about the religious ranks in ancient Constantinople. In my world, the Patriarch of Constantinople was a very prominent religious leader, essentially the pope of the Eastern Roman Empire. If there was still someone in this world who claimed that title, they were likely a powerful figure and I did not want to get on the bad side of them if I could avoid it. Especially if they had started to turn to darker powers.

  As we walked, a small disturbance among the guards broke out, but before I could see what was happening, one of the guards on the wagon stood and shot an arrow toward a nearby rooftop. The arrow streaked away with a bright flash of blue. I didn’t see what it hit, but I heard a meaty smack and a sharp cry. Then, suddenly, there was silence. The rest of the guards reached for weapons, but when nothing else appeared, they slowly relaxed again.

  “To the north across the water,” Asylaion continued as if nothing had happened, “is our sister enclave, Sycae. They are not run by the military or the priests, but the Emperor controls the only bridge between us and them, and so our contact is limited. They are old merchants, dockworkers, and traders that have managed to hold on to the closest thing to civilization left in the world. To enter their enclave, you must have something worth trading or some other way to contribute to their city. If you plan to get there across the only remaining bridge, you must have enough favor or a significant bribe for the Emperor, or they won’t let you cross. Some of the fishermen here could sneak you over, but if you are caught, the Emperor may sentence you to death. He protects his control over our trade jealously.

  “Nobody stays for free in Sycae, and if you can’t afford a place to rest your head, they will kick you out or conscript you into their army until you pay back your debt. Only go there once you have a fair amount of wealth to your name, in my humble opinion.

  “The army controls the walls and the majority of the food the city eats to the west, so we are forced to trade with them every day. That is what I do. We trade our crafts and our fish in return for fresh food grown behind their walls. They refuse to protect us, but they want our goods every day.”

  He turned and spat to the side. “But to be honest,” he continued, turning back to me with a grin, “we wouldn’t want them taking over anyway. They are no fun. To join their enclave, you must be a part of the army and must bow to the Emperor, even though they don’t really obey the Emperor these days, except in name. No exceptions for civilians entering their enclave, though, so be careful. Avoid them as best as you can, in my opinion.”

  “What about across the water to the east?”

  “Ah,” he replied, shaking his head, “nobody lives over there anymore. Nothing but the undead remain. The city has been lost for eighty years, at least. Lost to the defiled corpses of our brethren that have risen again to haunt the remains of our fine civilization on that side of the water. Word is the entire peninsula has been lost to the undead plague, but not many people have returned from there, so we don’t know for sure.

  “The only other surviving enclave is the palace that guards the bridge between here and Sycae, which is where the current emperor, Alexios III, reigns. If you can call what he does reigning. He mostly drinks himself into a stupor, if rumors are true. In his rare moments of lucidity, he tries to order his military to retake the city or conquer Sycae or march out of the city to retake the empire. Most of his orders are ignored these days, although I hear it makes things awkward for the generals when he gets particularly assertive about his ideas. You won’t be accepted into the palace unless you were born to the purple—or if you are actually a Varangian, I suppose. The Varangians guard the walls to this day. They are barbarians but fearsome enough to hold where many others have failed. If you aren’t one of them, I counsel you to watch out because they may not agree. I’d hate to see you conscripted into their forces.”

  “What about other cities? Is it like . . . this . . . everywhere?”

  “Ah, my boy,” the merchant said, a haunted look taking over his face, “we hope that it’s not like this everywhere, but we lose hope as time passes. We used to get ships often. Even just ten or fifteen years ago we would get traders still, but even before that, things were slowing. Many boats full of refugees fled here in years past, hoping to find a place to survive, but even those have stopped now. That is why I am so curious about you, my boy, because it gave me hope that there may be more people out there still doing well enough to produce a strapping young lad like yourself. But the more we talk, the more puzzled I am about where you come from.”

  Changing the subject, I asked him why the world was overrun like this.

  Asylaion forced a smile onto his face, trying to dispel the gloom of our previous topic. “Now that sounds like a different question, eh? You want to make a new bargain with me, then?”

  I couldn’t help but smile back. “No, that is okay. I suspect I will find the answer soon enough.”

  “The fact that you don’t know the answer already is very intriguing to me, my friend! Very intriguing!”

  I packed away the supplies Asylaion had been giving me as we spoke and wished him goodbye. I was getting a better mental image of the fallen city, which helped me get my bearings on what I wanted to do next. Despite a week of exploring and hunting, I had barely seen the smallest part of the sprawling metropolis. I could hunt for a year or more before I saw the majority of the city. And while I was feeling more confident now, I still needed some better answers to my questions, and I needed to see about a class, if getting one was even possible these days. The only place I could find the answers I wanted was in one of the enclaves.

  I decided to find a secure place to spend the night near Perama, the bridge city Asylaion was from, and then try my luck at entering the enclave tomorrow morning. It was time to see what I could find amidst the remnants of humanity.