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Arcane Apocalypse ~ 38
🕑 Added 2024-09-20 16:00:06 +0000 UTC*******************************************************************************************************************************************************************
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iE3A_E9mOQ32Qc0f6MhNHDoUW7gnXHyYOZNmw2EO1l4/edit?usp=sharing
*****
“Well, hi honey. Take a seat next to the other two?”
Mia just nodded, accepting her mother’s request and flopping down next to Lina and Mark on the sofa while Carmilla fluttered over to the counter to get some fresh lemonade.
Both of the others looked similarly tired, sitting bonelessly on the soft pillows like a pair of corpses. Only their eyes moved around. Mia felt them, though she couldn’t help but feel a little proud that she lasted the five whole hours while these two bowed out after the first one.
Mark had actually fainted mid running, while Lina just stumbled away on wobbly legs not long after.
Carmilla came back soon after with four glasses of nice, cold lemonade that she handed out to the three while sipping on the last one. She was humming as she hopped onto the other sofa, her gaze distant.
Mia forced herself to move and grabbed her own glass, the first sip by itself made it all worth it. Even if she could keep herself at a liveable temperature with her Skill, feeling the minty ice cold water slide down her throat and cool her from the inside out was heavenly.
“I’ve been thinking,” the dwarf said, taking a deep gulp of his own lemonade. “What if … that was it? What if the soldiers leave us alone, what if they actually win and destroy the rifts, kill all monsters and protect us from the ones outside. What if … we won? We survived the apocalypse. What if that was it?”
“What if that was it?” Mia repeated, forcing her brain into some semblance of activity. “Happyness?”
“That’s just wishful thinking,” Lina said. “And even if it’s true, the world will never be the same. We can’t just go back to living our lives as we were … Well, you can try but I won’t let myself be powerless. If the army destroys the rifts I’ll have to find monsters to hunt elsewhere.”
“Huh,” Mia provided helpfully, staring up at the ceiling. ‘What if’ indeed. It was a treacherous line of thought, she realised even before starting down the path, knowing it would end with her spiralling once more.
She’d just resolved herself to help Brent in his quest to close the Rifts and protect the survivors of the city. She didn’t want to do it, she was afraid, scared of dying and would much rather go about ‘getting stronger’ in a much more leisurely manner. Which was why thinking of a possible future where the army took that weight off her shoulder and let her just exist in peace without rifts bursting atop her head was so seductive.
Mia didn’t like pressure, never did. She truly, wholeheartedly loathed it even. The weight of responsibilities was something she’d been weaselling out of for the better part of two decades now. But it was different now … wasn’t it? She really was going to go along and willingly shoulder the greatest responsibility there was: protecting human lives.
No. I’m still going to! Stop thinking about this! Mia groaned, massaging her temples. Stupid Mark, we already established that the army will fail. There is no use in thinking about ‘what if’s.
It would have been so easy to step back and let others take up her slack. So, so very easy. But no. Lina was right, stepping back and letting others protect you was effectively giving them power over yourself. They could only be truly free in this new world if they could protect themselves from whatever came their way.
[Base Will: 3 -> 4]
The fact that saving lives and getting strong enough to protect themselves went hand in hand in this particular situation was just a happy coincidence. In essence, what they were intending on doing was mainly saving themselves and the other survivors were only the beneficiaries of that.
“I believe Lina is right,” Helene said as the trio fell into silence. “They do say that power corrupts, and the System is offering power unlike any other to every single person. Whether they deserve it or not. Being strong enough to protect ourselves is important, especially since we aren’t part of any larger faction.”
“Right!” Lina said, nodding.
“But I would be relieved if we could do so at our own pace,” Helene said. “Rushing it could easily prove fatal. If we have the leeway to do so carefully, we should.”
“ … right,” Lina said, sighing as even she couldn’t refute those words.
“I forgot to ask this before, but do any of you have any family in the city we should check up on? Mark, Lina, Ca-“
“None,” the vampiress cut in, her cheerful smile faltering for a moment.
“Same with me.” Lina shrugged. “I have a brother in Vienna, but … yeah. We aren’t really on speaking terms.”
“Not in the city,” Mark said, shaking his head. His gaze looked lost for a moment. “Mom and dad went camping a day before the System came … they were probably out somewhere in the Alps when it happened. I wouldn’t even know where to start searching for them.”
“I could fly their way if you know where they camped?” Helene offered up as Mia pulled in the dwarf for a comforting hug.
“I don’t,” he said weakly, taking in a trembling breath. “I didn’t even ask. They could be anywhere from here to Salzburg.”
“They are hardy people, I’m sure they are out there split-roasting unicorns and riding dragons by now.” Mia rubbed his shoulder. If there was anyone she could imagine surviving in a monster infested mountain range wilderness, it was those two.
“Right.” Mark gave a choked snort, then shook his head. “Thank you.”
Mia just gave him a smile and a last pat on the shoulder before she pulled away. She still stank like a kicked skunk, she was sure Mark would have been kicking her away from himself if he wasn’t busy being emotional.
“Where’s Brent?” Mia asked, slowly pushing herself to her feet. Her legs wobbled, and she would have been forced to sit back down if Carmilla wasn’t there to steady her a moment later.
“He went out,” Helene said, settling down at the kitchen table with a lemonade of her own. “A soldier came around not long ago, Brent went out to talk with him.”
“Wait, shouldn’t we help him then? Back him up or something?” Mia asked, her voice rising in pitch as panic started creeping up on her.
“Relax, honeybun,” Helene said soothingly. “The soldier came alone and unarmed, offering apologies for his comrade’s behaviour. Brent’s fine.”
“Oh,” Mia said, her ears twitching as she focused on trying to listen in on any conversations happening on the front porch of the house.
When she did, she had to resist the urge to facepalm. Brent was listening to the older officer regale him with his amorous troubles with crossdressers in Thailand when he was stationed there.
“Okay, he’s fine,” Mia said, rolling her eyes as Brent provided his two bits about a similar experience he had. Mia rolled her eyes. “Bath?”
“You can wet a towel, get some shampoo and wipe yourself down,” Helene said, pointing a straw at Mia. “But don’t waste our water. We only have that one barrel.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” Mia gave a lazy salute, then shambled away to collect the stuff she needed to clean up with Carmilla’s help.
*****
“What does it feel like?”
“Like the worst brain freeze of my life,” Mia said, frenziedly massaging her temples with a deep grimace on her face. “But somehow it's freezing parts of my brain I didn’t even know I had.”
“How does that work?” Mark asked again.
“I don’t fucking know,” Mia grumbled, hissing as another icy spike of agony hammered into her skull.
Mark mimed zipping his mouth and Mia wondered once again how eating a damned pear could hurt so much. Wasn’t the tree this thing grew on supposed to grant clarity of mind and tranquillity?
Still, seeing the gains Mia would eat another dozen of the things if she could get her hands on them.
[Cognity: 10 -> 12]
[Memory: 6 -> 8]
[Main Mind: 9 -> 11]
Mia experienced every nanosecond of the torturous experience in slow motion. Similar to the Main Spirit stat, reaching ten in her Main Mind stat also came with a … unique experience.
Though instead of getting visions of different worlds, she got to experience slow-mo torture. Her mind nonetheless felt freer than ever, her thoughts forming quicker than ever and with a weight to them that wasn’t there before.
Her mind was also more robust, with icy edges forming to deter any would-be mind mage.
After what felt like hours to Mia, the brainfreeze receded and her cognitive speed slowed back down to what it should be with 12 points in the subattribute.
Mia took a slow breath, still holding her face in her hands as she sat on the sofa. She was going to have to be much more careful with eating weird stuff the System throws her way.
Sure it was worth it, but maybe she should have a nice warm bath next time before she does it, or curl up in a soft bed and then eat the damned fruit.
“Oooookay,” Mia said slowly, waiting a few seconds to see whether the fruit’s attacks on her brain would continue now. “Think it’s over.”
“If you had to do that again, what would you do differently to minimise the discomfort?” Mark asked again, notebook in hand with a pen held at the ready to write down Mia’s answer.
Why? Because he too received the very same pear from the Realm Event’s rewards.
“I’d get myself a regular brain freeze before eating,” Mia answered, keeping as much of the sarcasm out of her tone as possible. “Surely the two brain freezes would negate each other. I think you should try it.”
He put his notebook down, huffed, then turned away to sip sulkily on his lemonade.
Mia just rolled her eyes at him, hearing him mutter about how ‘that brain freeze probably killed her last pair of brain cells’.
The door swung open, and Brent stepped through a moment later with a relieved smile on his face. Mia heard the military officer he’d been talking to slowly walking away and heard a squad of regular soldiers join him up a few houses over and form up around him like a protective detail.
“It seems we won’t have to worry about those army guys kicking down the door,” he announced, and everyone in the room besides Mia let out a relieved sigh. They suspected it already from how long he’d been talking with the officer and how cordial the man looked, but it was still good to hear, it seemed. “For now at least. This part of the city is apparently under the jurisdiction of one Colonel Zeigler while the General is commanding the spearhead aiming for the Rifts at the city centre.”
“Do you think they’ll manage to destroy the Rifts?” Mark asked, sounding hopeful, but that was quickly crushed when Brent snorted.
“No,” he shook his head. “Not if they don’t change their game up. I managed to make the officer tell me that almost all of them have some extremely basic ‘Soldier’ class that barely gives any Attribute Points and has subpar Skills too. Apparently, the few of them who got something stronger had been transferred to the main army under the newly named Marshal.”
“We have a Marshal?” Lina asked, face scrunched up in a frown.
“Apparently,” Brent said, shrugging as he pulled out a kitchen chair and plopped down into it. “He is leading a five thousand strong army and is in the process of freeing Vienna from the monster’s grasp. He also holds proverbial command over the entire country at the moment, at least until a new President is elected.”
“WHAT?” Almost everyone shouted, staring at Brent in shock. After all, they had a perfectly alive and well president just a few weeks ago. Why would they need a new one?
“Well … apparently a good tenth of Vienna got swallowed up by a gigantic sinkhole,” Brent said, a frown lining his face. “It also just so happened to take with it the parliament building and most of the inner city. So the vast majority of the government is now somewhere down in that endless chasm.”
“Fuck,” Mia whispered, slumping back against the sofa as she stared up listlessly at the ceiling. They were so fucked. The entire country was in the hands of a newly appointed Marshal. “Do we know anything about this ‘Marshal’?”
It was strange even just saying the rank, the last time anyone held the rank of Fieldmarshal was in the First World War. Hell, the country was called the Austro-Hungarian Empire back then and the man who was named Fieldmarshal was some Archduke or another.
I thought they reworked the military since then too. Mia frowned, trying to work her memory to dig up some deeply buried historical knowledge. Yes. I think the rank should have been abolished when the whole military got reworked after the … Second World War? Maybe? I’m not sure about when exactly, but I’m pretty sure the commander of the army should be the Chief of General Staff and not a ‘Marshal’.
“Nothing beyond his name, that he is collecting everyone in the military with a powerful Class into his personal army and that he is also quite strong himself,” said Brent. “Sebastian Reinhardt, he’s called and if that officer wasn’t talking out of his ass, the Marshal personally dove into one of the Rifts in the capital and came out unharmed and with the crushed Rift Core in his hand.”
That earned a few seconds of shocked silence, with everyone looking at each other to make sure they all heard right. By now, Lina had hammered most of the rules of Rifts into everyone’s heads and they knew diving a Rift was another word for ‘assisted suicide’ under most circumstances.
After all, usually only up to three or five people could enter the Rift and all of them had to be below the Rift Guardian in level. Otherwise, they would just pass through the Rift’s entrance without actually getting teleported into the Rift. This meant even if a full group with everyone being at the highest possible level entered the Rift, it would still be an uphill fight. Especially since the Rift guardian wasn’t the only monster inside, far from it.
“Did you get any other news out of him?” Mia asked, the fact that Brent spoke of things happening in the capital just now sinking in. “Of the wider world I mean? Or even just the country? How’s the rest of the world handling … this?”
“I only heard a little,” Brent said, rubbing his stubbled chin thoughtfully. “A random officer probably didn’t know anything important, and he’d share even less with a civilian like me, but he told me the higher ups in the military have re-established communications between some of the European governments. I know we have communications established with Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Rome. Of the close-by nations, only Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland failed to answer to any hails.”
“Four out of seven is … good?” Mia said, sounding uncertain. She shrugged, deciding that anything above zero was, in fact, good. “At least we know the rest of the world isn’t overrun with monsters quite yet.”
“We have it pretty badly by what I've been told,” Brent said, tapping on the table restlessly. “Most capital cities only had two or three Rifts opening up at most. Vienna has- had, ten.That’s supposedly down to eight by the latest news. Still, even just us here in Graz have five of the damned things.”
“Guess we got pretty unlucky,” Mia said, grimacing.
“I don’t think that’s just it,” Mark said thoughtfully, opening up his notebook and stopping on a page. He tapped it with a finger. “Lina, you said Rifts exist to suck up chaotic ambient mana, and that they should be more numerous above newly created Leylines?”
“Yeah,” the blonde-haired girl bobbed her head in agreement. “Monsters are the same, if the book I got from Mia is right, they are just … waste mana. They are how the world itself disposes of mana. They are practically sweat on the skin of the planet.”
“Waste mana?” Mia frowned.
“Yep,” Line said, tilting her head in thought. “I think it said that … they have decaying souls? So technically they all have a shelf life and will die given enough time. Though that’s not for certain, since they can stabilise themselves by consuming the mana of other living things.”
“Decaying souls?” Mia hummed. “Is that why they feel so … icky?”
“Could be.” Lina shrugged. “The book only gave a short mention of this, saying that leaving a Rift alone is a really bad idea since monsters can actually become regular magical creatures if given enough time and other living things to feed on.”
“If their souls are practically rotting away, that would somewhat explain why they are all such vile creatures,” Helene said, a thoughtful look on her face. “That must hurt.”
”That’d mean if we don’t keep the monsters in check, they’ll overrun us before long.” Mark grimaced. “The Rifts would keep spitting them out and the little shits would keep trying to hunt everything down to survive.”
Mia went to say something, but then stopped as she heard a discharge of artillery far too close for comfort.
Screams, shouts and gunfire soon followed suit and with her increased Cognity, Mia could much more accurately pinpoint their distance.
The closest came from just a few hundred metres away, at most one or two streets down. Mia gulped, standing up and rushing out into the garden to make it easier for her ears to pick up on the distant sounds.
”What is it now?” Mark asked, rushing after Mia, with Carmilla already standing next to her.
“What are they fighting?” The vampiress asked in a whisper, her own slightly pointed ears peeled to listen to it.
”I don’t know,” Mia said. “But they don’t sound like they are winning.”
Sure enough, the sounds of shouts and gunfire were getting closer and closer, as if the soldiers were being pushed back by their silent foes.
Humvees and military trucks rolled down the streets and Mia could hear the sound of Tanks following behind them at a much slower pace.
”Mia, what is going on?” Brent asked, a frown of frustration worn on his face as he watched over the two girls. “Talk to me.”
”The soldiers are fighting something close by,” Mia said, slightly sheepishly as she realised she just ran out and started rambling like a lunatic out of nowhere. “They … sound like they’d been losing until the reinforcements arrived just now. Still, the fight’s sounding to be just down the corner that way.”
Everyone looked in the direction she pointed, frowns, scowls or worried grimaces worn on their faces.
”Are we going to help them?” Lina asked, clearly aching for some action.
”Give me a moment,” Helene said as she stepped out into the open. Her pair of angelic wings unfurled from her back and then she kicked off of the ground, shooting up into the sky like a missile.
”I say we fight,” Brent said. “If whatever it is they are fighting got this close, then it's best to help them at least push it back. We just have to be careful about not getting shot by jumpy soldiers.”
Everyone nodded at that, even Mark seemed resolved to fight despite how he’d been trying to talk himself out of the rift-diving quest just minutes prior.
It wasn’t even a question to Mia, the monsters were coming to kill them and they had the greatest chance at driving them back if they helped the soldiers. It was obvious to her that the only choice was to fight.
Or to run, if the foe proved to be too strong for them, but she doubted that’d be the case.
Helene came diving back down soon after, only spreading her wings to break her fall metres away from the ground. She landed softly, her momentum gone almost entirely by the time her feet touched the dirt.
”It seems that the werewolf up in the hill got tired of sharing his place,” Helene said. “Those green wolves with vines twisting around them I told you about, they are streaming out of the forest and tearing through the soldiers.”
Comments
ZephanyZephZeph
Yeah that's why I added how he is recognizably using a rhetorical device to be in good favor, but without any information to otherwise contest the interpretation that he agrees with those ideas, it can be seen that way. I do like the scene though, as it's really nice at adding the character of the military and Brent in a minor way. Overwhelmingly if Brent is decent about other peoples later it would probably still be expected as this scene is so minor.
P3t1
I see hmmmm. I was intending it to come across as him buddying up to him to get as much information out of him as possible but i see your point …
ZephanyZephZeph
" 'Okay, he’s fine,' Mia said, rolling her eyes as Brent provided his two bits about a similar experience he had" While it may just be Brent doing rhetoric without any reflection on his beliefs, the way this is framed sounds like Brent shares some similarity in perspective with the soldier.
P3t1
When did Brent say that? I don’t remember wanting to convey that.
ZephanyZephZeph
Ah shit, the government is well and truly gone, now begins a Warlord era for many parts of the world. Werewolf packs and Austrian Empire Revivalists are abound. I wonder if we'll get to see a Warlord with an actual ideology going forward though, get some political legitimacy for a monopoly on force rather than just using the system to monopolize force.
ZephanyZephZeph
Ah, good old fashioned orientalist racism and queerphobia. "Thailand Crossdresser" that guy really is a European soldier through and through. Idk what the hell Brent means by having a similar experience.
P3t1
I mean, sure. Some readers are already helping out by making edit suggestions on the gdocs and I appreciate it.
Stephanie Washburn
Also, do you want help catching typos?
Stephanie Washburn
Heyo! Increased based willpower!
