“So let me get this straight. Your grave robber, can steal from the dead 5 times a day only, because he doesn’t have enough mana to cast it more than the free uses?”

  I had just finished explaining a whole bunch of things to Colonel Kent while we in the back of his mobile command truck. Nora was with me, as she was way smarter than I could ever hope to be. Lt. Moss and 3 people in constant communication were back there as well. We were all a bit crammed into this giant moving communications center. Our 3 SUVs were only a few vehicles back, so I had my friends still somewhat close at hand. “Yes, sadly he needs 13 mana to cast it. Only Nora here has that much capacity. For the moment, mana is very stat dependent. There aren’t any people with enough stats to really dominate mana capacity. We hope that at some point in the next several months that people will emerge with classes that will have more mana, as well as, people will level into classes that give mana every few levels.”

  “We need a whole lot more Dennises to equip the military with these new abilities. Do you have ideas on that?”

  I looked to Nora, hoping she had ideas. Fortunately, she bailed me out, “Start with people that deal with the dead. Morticians, medical examiners, and the like. For large scale ability tokens, we need people who can duplicate them, as there is no way that Dennis and company will provide enough for large groups. I would go with Kinkos actually. Most people will end up with a scribing skill, but with what little the system has shown us, that someone in such a field will have a copy ability for actual abilities.”

  Colonel Kent looked at Nora with angry face for a moment, before it went into more of a grumpy one. “Lt. Moss, did you catch that? We need to find people that handle dead bodies among civilians. We need to scour copy shops as well. Also, work with civilian authorities to scour prisons for abilities.”

  I hadn’t considered prisons yet. General was paying attention. “Neal, what do you think our biggest bottleneck is right now?”

  “I’d say it is a tie between our need for abilities and gaining levels. Dennis alone is not a solution for the first, and the second is going to require soldiers to do a lot of fighting. We should have civilian authorities and the newly activated unorganized militias help pull civilians back to give room for soldiers to fight. We can’t have our soldiers worried about hitting civilians. Our working theory is that the portals can’t stay open for too long, maybe a few days or a week at tops. The amount of mana these devices or creatures require is staggering when you think about it. I have no clue what specifically is causing the portals, but it must be finite in nature, and probably has a massive recharge once spent.”

  “A week! We can’t keep firing rockets and missiles through those barriers to the other side for that long. We will run out of missiles before then. To my knowledge we’ve already spent a significant portion of our nuclear capacity to shoot those through the portals in many places. Nothing has come through those portals since.”

  “Nuking the abyss was not on my list of ideas. Interesting concept. I do worry about radiation seeping back through the portals though. Hopefully the missiles are detonating far enough into the abyss to prevent most of that.”

  “That isn’t my concern just yet. My main concern is getting to our staging area at the western edge of St. Louis city.”

  He was about to say more when one of the people with a headset shouted, “contact in Hermanville.” The Colonel, Nora, and I all turned to the corporal in question.

  “Well Corporal, what is going on exactly?”

  “Sir, it’s sounds like it is a few dozen orcs slaughtering civilians across several intersections and store fronts. We have civilian casualties fleeing past the convoy. No reports of portals though.”

  “Then stop us before the intersections start. Get us off to the side of the road. Move First Company to the first left ward intersection, Second Company to the right. Bring up two armored bulldozers and flank them with two more companies in a two trailing columns down the main thoroughfare. Then start building by building sweeps. Be on the lookout for that animal skin with the symbol on it.” He turned to me, “what did the symbol look like?”

  “It was a pentacle: a star inside of a circle; It’s basic satanic symbols.”

  “Corporal, pass on the message about it being satanic symbols. Lt. Cassland, you aren’t in my chain of command, but if you want to pick up that experience you keep talking about, then you had better get yourself out there to help civilians and kill a few orcs.”

  I smiled while getting up to open the back door out of this rolling monstrosity, “You just want Dennis to level up so that by tomorrow he can start getting abilities to your top squads.” The Colonel just smiled.

  Nora and I exited the command center and got in the SUVs. I got on the walkie talkie, “Drivers, we are headed to the left when we get to the first intersection. We are falling in behind their First Company. We’ll mostly help civilians, but be prepared for demon shit.” After two affirmatives over radio and a third directly from Billy driving the SUV I had gotten into.

  After the radios went silent Billy asked, “Why aren’t we just going down the main thoroughfare to get onto the highway? At this rate we won’t make it to Fenton for a week.”

  “He is having armoured bulldozers push debris and vehicles out of the way down main street so that the column can proceed towards the highway to secure both Hermanville and the onramp to the interstate. We just need to get experience and level up a bit.”

  “I’m leveling fine. Already level 2, though Joe is lapping us as he is level 3.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Wait, what?”

  “Joe mentioned it to Brett, who told everyone else.” Joe reached level 3 already! That is more than I could hope for one of us.

  “We need to get ourselves, and more importantly Dennis, to level 3. When he gets that refresh after midnight, I want him to be able to be at least level 3. I know that it is a lot to expect us to all reach level 5 in the next few days, but I am getting experience from all the social things I do. I imagine that at some point the xp from those social things is going to become a drop in the bucket.”

  “Are you entirely certain that it will stop having an impact on leveling?”

  “Absolutely! Do you honestly expect to see bureaucrats hitting level 100, or local politicians. Heck, do you expect any politician to reach that kind of level. I imagine it’s highly unlikely we’ll see a level 25 civilian class.” I honestly don’t see most people exceeding level 15 in fact, but I’m not going to bother Billy or anyone else with that. I just don’t see any system rewarding significant xp to normal tasks and social encounters. I’m most likely getting a boost from it being the first time the system has recorded my use of these skills. It will be diminishing results from here on out.

  Once we got ourselves over to the deployment spot, we parked our three vehicles next to each other. I was certain this would all turn into a shit show. Gunfire ripped out loudly ahead, and I was certain I was right. I looked back to make sure my group was with me. Frank was moving to the front with Joe flanking him to the right. Billy tried to slide behind them, but Nora subtly pushed him behind Frank’s left. Nora, Dennis, and the twins formed up behind me with Dennis taking a position behind frank and his riot shield. I decided to verbalize my first concern. “Mana check.”

  “8” Billy intoned first, but we all knew he would have the most mana.

  “1” Frank chimed in.

  “0, 5, 7, 2, 2,” were the responses from Joe, Nora, Dennis, and the twins.

  “3,” I finally said. “Everyone stay aware, and be careful. There is no reason any of us needs to die today.” We moved as a group to down the road towards the gunfire. Things I didn’t think would be my reality 24 hours earlier. We came across several houses with people in them, but no demons. We reminded the folks inside that about the governor activating the citizenry to the militia. We got questions, but I said they needed to speak to their mayor and local representatives. All this reminded me that the sooner we got to my district the better. Eventually we caught up with a squad of soldiers just inside one of the few small office buildings in this tiny town of about 10,000 people. The looked at us funny, and one of them came over to us.

  “Are you the people that the Colonel had us pick up on the way here? Why are you even out here?”

  “Just support. We can help get civilians out while you guys kill the monsters. We’ve already had a few gun fights today, so just happy to help from as close to the front as we can be.”

  “You need to stay back; we don’t need civilians fucking us over.” He sounded agitated. He was clearly annoyed that we were here.

  “We’ll just stay here, outside the building until you clear it, and then we can coordinate the refugees to get away,” I intoned in a polite yet neutral tone.

  He put his hand to his ear and pressed the earpiece closer, “repeat, did you say contact?” He then turned to go back into the building but stopped as all of us looked up to a window on the third floor crashing outwards with a soldiers flailing body mingled with the shattered glass. We heard gunfire break out on every floor at once. This was combined with the roar of some creature from high in the building to create a near deafening cacophony of sound. We covered our heads and ears from the glass and the noise with equal effort. The soldier’s body cleared past the car parked on the road next to the sidewalk to flop onto the blacktopped road beyond.

  Billy whispered a bit too loudly, “Fuck me, he cleared it!”

  Nora sounded like she wanted to punch him, “Not funny Billy.” She then proceeded to run out into the street to check on the soldier.

  We all reacted a little bit differently. Brittney and Billy followed after Nora, though Billy might have been due to guilt. Joe and Frank dropped to their knees and immediately aimed their guns up at the now open window. Dennis, Brett, and I also dropped to a knee, but swivelled our guns in different directions. It was not a cohesive effort at all, but at least we had our guns up.

  The army guy didn’t move, but instead spoke clearly over his mic, “Alvarez down, thrown form third floor south side of the building.” Then he took one look at Nora’s 5 foot frame running to help Alvarez and decided to head into the building.

  “Everyone get to the far side of the car in case anything pokes its head out of the open window.” We had to quickly reposition ourselves tactically, which was a new experience. I kept looking up at the window and then over to the car to take a few steps. I then would look up at the window again. This was not the way to do this. We needed training. It took us half a minute to move the 25 feet, when probably could have done so way more efficiently. I glanced over to Nora as she was feeding him another one of those orc potions. “Nora, where do you keep finding magic items? Oh, and how is your patient?”

  She laughed, “I do what we would in game: loot everything. They are often in metal vials, so they don’t break easily. Our patient is fine, but probably very low on health. Oh, and Dennis has several he looted from the spellcaster back at the Stack Shack when he thought I wasn’t looking.”

  “Dennis when did you find time to do that? Wait, Nevermind. Lay them out on the ground next to us and I will try to identify one. Loot goes to the group’s general wellfair. You don’t get to just claim stuff, especially when you took no part in killing it.”

  “Finders keepers. Besides, you probably can’t use most of them anyways.”

  “You are assuming you can even use the items. Dennis, you are valuable all on your own. I will let you have some of the stuff as you remembered to loot it, but we need to divvy all the loot up between the members of the group to maximum value out of it right now.”

  Dennis had a look that made me think he was dubious of my intentions. He clearly didn’t want to give up his looted belongings. I looked at him straight in the eyes until he looked away, “Fine, but you best give me sumptin’ good out that.”

  “I promise to. It does need to be able to work for you though. I am not giving anybody stuff they can’t even use.”

  “Fair nuff,” and he proceeded to empty out several items: 2 potions, a smooth stone covered in runes that let off a subtle glow, a grimy bronzed ring with set with big topaz in the middle, a dagger with runes up and down both sides of the blade, and 2 wands. Holy crap, this man found the motherload. This was more magic than we have had combined up till now.

  “Fuck! This is a lot. Dennis, what do you want first. Keep in mind that how powerful the item is determines how long identify takes. In casting information says anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes depending on complexity, rarity, and power of the item in question. Personally, this means the ring will likely have to wait. However, it is second in line.”

  “Damn! Wanted that ring, but I’ll settle for one of them wands.”

  We were sadly interrupted Joe, “Incoming Lupin from the flanks.” This was followed by a single shot by Joe. I looked at Joe and followed his eyes to see several lupin coming into our field of vision. Behind the car we were in the middle of the street. On the other side of it, we would at least be less exposed. This is crazy, we are playing hop-a-car. And we weren’t winning.