Chapter 10- The Plan

  "People say that even the best laid plans fail. To that I say Folly. Only the convuluted plans fail. My plans are simple. Stab the bastards. It's worked so far."

  - The Laughing King, The First Emperor's first vassal.

  "This is not a good idea," Ira wrote down on the piece of paper.

  They had moved everyone down towards the crack. Not too close, keeping a distance of about ten minutes. Solis, Dimitri, and Samir ended up staying at the bottom level of the cave network for a bit longer, looking for any other cracks, entrances, or exits. However, having found none, they brought down Ira and the kids.

  "What are you thinking?" Solis said back. Ira stared at him blankly. She said a word that Solis recognized as "[Translate]", causing him to turn away, a little sheepishly. He kept forgetting about the language thing.

  "I'll write. My bad. I was just saying what do you think could go wrong? The more we plan for what goes wrong, the more safeguards we can put in place."

  Ira seemed taken aback at first, but nodded thoughtfully. She began speaking in Russian. Solis blinked. "Err, sorry. No mana. No [Translate].”

  It wasn't exactly true. He had around fifty mana, but he didn't want to be completely drained. What followed was a chain of Samir using [Translate] to listen to Ira's Russian and relay it to Solis, who would then preface his words with [Translate] to give Ira a heads-up, then his response.

  They ended up having to stop mid-conversation because Ira's mana ran out, being lower level than Samir and having a [Body]-based build. The rest of the talking was done over Ira's notebook, where basic words and stick-figure drawings were the main form of communication.

  The talks ended with Ira and Samir in begrudging agreement to the plan, which consisted of Solis using his mana to construct what amounted to a stone straightjacket around the cricket. Only when it was encased entirely would the children shoot the monster. A bit overkill in Solis's opinion, but he valued caution, especially when it came to monsters, so he was happy to oblige. The only thing is that it would take him basically a whole day to recover the mana he needed for that.

  Solis internally groaned. The MREs were being rationed for everyone, but he could see the writing on the wall. He was not looking forward to eating cricket for the foreseeable future. The others hadn't seemed to have considered that yet, and Solis wasn't about to tell them. Better to let them come to that conclusion themselves tomorrow.

  ---

  Ira found Solis sitting just next to the entrance to the [Nominal] zone, lying on his back and throwing a small rubber ball into the air. Just one more of the many things in his pack.

  The young man was strange – not much older than her own sons. They had been taken, conscripted into the army against their will. Ira was so focused on the monsters that she forgot about the human element of panic. She had thought Siberia would go unchecked, but the government had turned over every rock looking for able-bodied men.

  Dimitri, her dear husband, had taken it the hardest, though he tried not to let it show. He had chosen his class and skills to detect monsters and little else. Fighting wasn’t an option for him before, since an injury years ago had left his hip and arms badly damaged. So, when men came instead of monsters, Dimitri was the last to find out. Inconsolable. That’s how Ira would describe him after the fact. He didn’t cry, yell, shout, or do anything. In fact, he did absolutely nothing, as if waiting to die.

  She shook in fear at the thought. Meaningless now. The System healed it in the teleport. She had never been more glad for such an event. Her husband was alive again with a fire she was afraid had extinguished.

  Pushing the thoughts from her head, she focused on Solis. She walked over and held out a thin brown notebook. He sat up and froze, seeing that it was his.

  She knew why. She hadn't meant to, but when little Ana handed her the notebook, she hadn't known what for. She was looking through the girl's drawings when she flipped to another page and saw writing in English.

  She thought it was Ana’s, and that she could write the entire time, so she had read more, but it wasn’t the girl’s. It was Solis’s and some of the details there… she had needed to make sure that Solis wasn’t crazy, or some kind of monster.

  He wasn’t, which left Ira feeling guilty. Like a snooper.

  She gave the boy a half-smile and pulled out her own notebook, and wrote in it for him to see. "Sorry. Ana gave it to me. Thought it was hers. Didn't mean to snoop."

  The young man reached out hesitantly for the notebook, pausing just before taking it, "May I?" he asked in the worst Russian she had ever heard. She didn't harp on it, choosing to let it slide for now and nod, but by God, she'd have to correct his pronunciation.

  It was appalling.

  He wrote in the notebook, and she could see the apprehension in him, like she had caught him sneaking out at night to go to a party.

  "What did you see?" he wrote.

  She smiled and gestured toward the notebook. He gave it back easily, but his nerves continued to rise. It didn't alarm her. He looked like he'd bolt before he would attack her.

  "I see enough. I no judge. When you have mana.. maybe talk Dimitri, it help you."

  The young man hesitated; he scrawled words across the page. Erased them, then crossed them out, despite having already erased them. Finally, after a good half minute, he turned the page back around, "Is it not a problem?"

  Ira snorted, "You kill man before System? No. Is self-defense. Like I say. Talk Dimitri. Is okay."

  Solis gave the slowest nod Ira had ever seen before looking away and taking the book.

  "Thanks." He said in Russian.

  Ira couldn't help it.

  She spent the next hour correcting his pronunciation.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  —

  Hans found his sister drawing. She did that often, ever since their parents had abandoned them. Funnily enough, it happened the week before the System announcement. It was a normal day, but at the end of it – where usually a beat-up red SUV whose brand mark had long since been scrubbed off would greet them with a honk outside their school – no one came to pick them up.

  Bitterness filled Hans.

  ‘Good riddance. They probably drank themselves to death.’

  "What were they talking about?" Ana asked him, breaking Hans out of his own thoughts.

  "The new guy. Solis, he captured a level nine monster. He convinced Dimitri and Ira and they're going to raise everyone's caps."

  Ana's eyes widened, and she turned to look at her brother.

  "Everyone? Even us?"

  Hans nodded. His sister could be a little intense outwardly, but that didn't mean Hans didn't have that same intensity in him. He just didn't let it show.

  Showing his emotions hadn't gotten him anything but berated, aside from Ana, that was. She was family. She understood.

  "Yeah. Us, too."

  Nodding, Ana started to pace. She dragged her stick along the ground, making random streaks. "I think it's time we use our system question."

  Hans rolled his eyes. He had been saying that for the past week, but NoOOOoOoo, 'we have to wait,' 'we have to be patient,' 'we have to make sure.'

  Sure. Well, what did they learn in that week? Pretty much nothing that they didn't already know.

  He didn't say that. "You make up your mind?" Hans asked instead.

  "Yeah. I want to kill monsters. I want to ask what class will let me do that best."

  Hans sighed. Sometimes Ana was too gung-ho about things.

  "And when the System tells you need to be level 99 with maxed-out stats?"

  Ana blustered, sputtering indignantly, "I wouldn't phrase the question like that!"

  "Yeah?" Hans poked at Ana's side, aiming to irritate her. "Well, what's your phrasing? What were you going to ask?"

  It worked, and Ana batted Hans's finger away. He kept poking, and she turned from batting to snapping her teeth at him.

  Hans decided on a tactical retreat.

  Ana crossed her arms and grumbled, "I'm still thinking about it. Those are details. What do you think about the question?"

  Hans shrugged, "I think we should've asked a week ago. We'll get another question eventually. Unless you’ve thought of a genius two-part question."

  Ana grabbed the stick from the floor, filled with barely suppressed frustration. That had been the original plan, but they had come up with nothing, and they had to keep the fact that they still had their questions a secret at the compound where they had been staying.

  Anyone who had their question still was taken away by the military for questioning and forced to ask a question of the military's choice. Hans wasn't about to give his question to someone else, especially on something stupid like mana conversion rates. That had been an actual question, and it appalled Hans.

  "Well, do you have a genius question?" Ana prodded her brother in turn. She knew just where to jam her fingers into his ribs to make it sting.

  He bristled. "No. I have not. I'm not going to waste it asking about a class. I know what I want. I want to be a sorcerer… Better to ask it where the cool loot is!"

  Ana scoffed at that, "I can tell you where loot is. Through the cave path Solis blocked off. Now that would be a waste of a question."

  The siblings continued bickering between themselves. They had no way of telling time in the caves, but eventually they grew tired and found a nook to sleep in.

  Neither sibling particularly liked contact, but in the uncertainty of the world, they allowed their legs to criss-cross.

  They both slept soundly.

  —

  Samir sat, staring at the mana-constructed wall. The cricket monster was still chirping. He knew what it was saying. [Translate] didn't just work on other humans. It worked on anything that made noise. Hell, it could even translate what a baby wanted.

  Obviously, these didn't translate into full sentences; they were just vague words that captured the full feeling of the targets. It's how he knew that the cricket was trying to call for help. There was no emotion or panic behind the call. Just a general request. It didn't even specify what kind of help was needed.

  This monster wasn't particularly intelligent, but the call told him that the creature didn't typically act entirely alone. They'd need to be careful when they opened the crack up. Level nine would be an improvement for everyone, but he wasn't sure if that would be enough to take on a Nominal zone, and they wouldn’t even be at level nine right away. They still had to kill nineteen more crickets after this one.

  That word stuck in the doctor's head. Nominal. Normal. There was nothing normal about those zones, and if there were, then if anyone survived the System's activation, he'd bite through his own tongue. Nominal zones were hell on earth, and he'd only survived his due to extreme luck.

  A part of him would prefer it if Solis just made a passageway to whatever water source lay beyond so they could safely ferry water. Hell, he might still request that, but he recognized that they couldn't stay in the caves forever.

  There might be other people on or in the mountain, and there was safety in numbers. Also, hiding in a cave was no way to live. He took an oath as a doctor to help as many lives as he could. It was why he joined Doctors Without Borders and why he wouldn’t accept staying in the cave forever.

  As far as he was aware, he was already dead. Every breath he took was borrowed. The world had ended, and everyone had died. Nothing to be done about that, but until everyone actually croaked, he'd do his best to survive, and ensure other people survived, too. If you couldn’t cure someone, you could ease the suffering.

  The older man brought up his [User Sheet], the process of which was still alien and strange to him. Then again, the fancy touch phones had been strange to him, too. He was sure he'd get used to it in time. Level nine wouldn't personally bring him much. Enhancement points only came at even-numbered levels, and he was already level eight.

  He had the option of turning any skill at level ten into a personal skill, returning an enhancement point to be used on something else, but if he did that, the skill would reset to rank one; he had even read online about a case where it reset someone to zero, back when the sattalities were still in the sky.

  Personal skills also had the difficulty of having to be remembered. Usually, the System filled in the details of using [Skills]. You could push mana at it, and the system took care of the rest, but a personal skill required the user to actually know what they were doing. He’d liken it to an automatic vs a stick-shift car.

  If they were going to live and survive for a bit longer, they’d need food and proper nutrition. There was no sunlight, and all they had to eat was the bullet-ridden cricket. At the current rate, malnutrition would kill them all, not monsters. Solis’s MREs that he donated would offset that for a time, but not forever.

  He repeated his mentor's words during his residency in the States. "Start with one decision."

  So he made his decision, he turned [Scan] into a personal skill and selected an additional class. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it would be necessary in the coming days.