Amazon Apocalypse: Chapter 38 (Patreon)

As we continued driving towards Crownhill, the landscape around us transformed from dense forests to a mix of rolling hills and patches of woodland. The road was rough and uneven, making the ride bumpier than usual, but our trusty old jeep held up.

As we navigated the terrain, we made a wide detour to avoid the Lava Elemental's territory. Sakura glanced in its direction, saying, "The trip between the farm and Crownhill will be so much faster when we don't have to avoid that fiery beast."

Before reaching Crownhill, we stopped by the farmhouse to pick up some supplies and check in on Gobgob and the rest of the goblins. We found them busy with their foraging duties, scavenging for food and useful materials.

As we approached the farmhouse, Gobgob greeted us with a nervous expression. Her eyes darted back and forth between Sakura and me as she mumbled some frightened goblin words. "Gobgob not steal anything! Goblins be very good! Promise!"

I laughed and reassured her, "Okay, Gobgob. I need you to keep being good and keep an eye on things a bit. It seems Sakura and I are going to be exploring the area outside the valley all day."

Gobgob looked around in confusion, scratching her head. "We in a valley? But we were in a forest..."

I nodded, chuckling at her puzzled expression. "Yes, Gobgob, the forest is part of the valley. Don't worry about it. Just make sure everything stays safe and sound here, alright?"

She hesitated for a moment before nodding, her eyes still filled with uncertainty. "Okay, Chief. Gobgob keep an eye on goblins and forest-valley."

Sakura grinned, patting Gobgob on the head. "That's the spirit, Gobgob. We're counting on you!"

***

With the farm well taken care of, we finally arrived at Crownhill. We expected a warm welcome, a chance to catch up with friends and share our recent adventures. Instead, we were met with chaos. The town was in disarray, even from a distance we could see people running around in a frenzy, shouting orders and warnings. Smoke rose from a few buildings, hinting at a recent attack or accident.

Sakura and I exchanged concerned glances, immediately realizing that something had gone horribly wrong. As we parked the jeep and stepped out into the chaotic scene, we knew that our plans to warn Crownhill would have to take a backseat to dealing with whatever disaster had befallen the town.

As we parked and jumped out of the jeep to stand before the chaotic scene, Sakura and I tried to make sense of what was going on. We scanned the area for any signs of the attackers, desperately seeking clues about who or what had caused this disaster.

That's when we spotted one of them—a hulking, brown-furred humanoid lurking near a burning building. It snarled, revealing sharp teeth and predatory eyes that sent shivers down my spine. The creature moved with a grace and agility that belied its size, reminding me of a wolf.

I quickly activated my Examine skill to learn more about our adversary. The System responded, providing me with information about the creature.

Wolfman (Level 13)

"Looks like we're dealing with Wolfmen," I muttered to Sakura, who had also locked her gaze on the beast. Was this another species? From their level and stature, they seemed to be somewhere between humans and ogres on the sliding scale of base stats. I spotted no weapons on the creature though, just teeth and claws. These Wolfmen looked to be even more primitive than the ogres.

Sakura clenched her fists, gripping her spiked club tightly. "We saved this city once! We're not going to let some feral dogs take it over after what we went through. You hear that, Wolfman?"

The Wolfman spat and snarled, lowering himself onto his haunches and growling at the two of us.

"Talking food. Tasty food..." the Wolfman slavered and licked sharp canine teeth.

We exchanged a determined nod. With adrenaline surging through our veins, Sakura charged the Wolfman just as he did the same to her.

The Wolfman snarled at us, lunging forward with incredible speed. Sakura met it head-on, swinging her club in a wide arc and landing a solid blow on its side. The creature yelped in pain, but quickly retaliated, swiping a massive, clawed hand at her.

I provided support from a distance, hurling Mana Bolts and Eldritch Blasts at the Wolfman, while also keeping an eye out for survivors. I spotted a few humans scurrying around, frightened by the very creature we were fighting.

I did my best to stay nimble as well. Sakura could handle this, and I didn't want to expend all my mana until we knew the scope of the threat. Still, I was liberal with Mana Bolts and Eldrich Blasts to give Sakura a helping hand as she fought. The air crackled with energy as my spells found their marks, searing the fur and flesh of our foe.

If the Wolfman was smart, he would have ignored Sakura. Though my oni berserker was right in his face, I was the higher leveled foe. A clever combatant would have ignored the tanky warrioress and gone straight for the squishy magic caster behind her. But my standards for sapience must have been higher than the System's.

The Wolfman growled, and Sakura bellowed in reply. Tooth and claw gave way to club and nails as Sakura bashed the Wolfman's questing limbs aside to deal one heavy blow after another.

"Hyaaa!" Sakura yelled as she dodged streaks of crimson claws and ignored the three faint red lines they left on her cheek. Taking the scratches gave her the opportunity to deal a devastating blow against the side of the Woflman's head, bashing in his teeth and sending him stumbling to the ground in a pile of fur and blood.

Before the Wolfman could get up, Sakura dealt the killing blow, and it died with a whimper beneath her club.

“I don’t think this was the only one of these things we have to worry about,” Sakura said, voice nervous as she looked around and wiped her bloody cheek on the fabric of her shoulder.

I looked to the rest of Crownhill. No. All this chaos wasn’t caused by one level thirteen Wolfman.

A grim thought crossed my mind, and I spoke it aloud. “Wolves travel in packs.”

***

Sure enough, as we headed deeper into Crownhill we started encountering Wolfmen left and right. We took my jeep and ran right over two of them, both only level nine. These Wolfmen were far more numerous than either the goblins or the ogres, and they spread throughout the city like a plague.

I used Examine on every one we found in an attempt to get a feel for their average level. Most were around level ten, which meant they had a advantage over the humans of Crownhill. After Sakura and I cleared the streets of monsters and made them safe to walk, the people here had focused on rebuilding some semblance of order. I saw signs of new construction built from the crumbled ruins of old buildings, and people made habitable places from decaying wrecks.

Human instincts told us to secure shelter, and resources. Only then did we have the ability to care about other things. But these Wolfmen were different. They were feral, brutal, and violent. They wore no clothes and likely had no need for shelter. For all I knew, they were a roving pack of hungry mouths that could speak no more than a few words at a time. Raiding and pillaging like they were was likely their natural state, which had given them a decisive advantage over us humans for gaining early levels after the integration.

And they had leveraged that small advantage to devastating effect. More than once I saw a human body lying on the ground, throat torn out by sharp teeth and intestines scattered in all directions. They lay looking up at the sky with sightless eyes, body ravaged as though by wild dogs. These Wolfmen had no mercy for humanity. So I would show them none in return.

"Sakura?" I asked.

She didn't look at me. Her eyes were fixed on the latest victim, a girl no older than twelve.

"Let's put these animals down," Sakura growled.

And so Sakura and I began our reign of destruction. With an average level between ten and fifteen, Sakura was stronger than all those we encountered on the outskirts of the city. As for me, I was head and shoulders above them. My spells cut through the Wolfmen with devastating effect, and most fell before Sakura and I could approach close enough for a more hands-on approach.

The only thing that proved to me that these were really sapients and not just monsters who could mutter a few words was the fact that my curse didn't block my experience gain. I gained my first level from battle in a while, likely thanks to all the experience I got when we killed that ogre.

Your race, Human, has advanced to level 24!

I revised my opinion of our opponent's intelligence upward a little as we fought them. Most of the Wolfmen were feral and savage, that was true. But it seemed the bulk of the intelligence among their kind was concentrated in a handful of individuals.

"That one has a dagger," Sakura whispered, shaking blood and fur from her club.

I spotted the one she gestured to from afar. The wolf did indeed wear a crude leather belt. Hitched into one side was a stone dagger. While not quite as imposing as his more feral kin, he seemed to carry some measure of authority among them. He kicked a few Wolfmen feasting on the body of a woman torn into quarters by feral Wolfmen and snarled.

"Need sacrifices. Quench hunger later," the Wolfman growled.

Sakura and I exchanged a pointed look. There was more to these Wolfmen than a mindless urge to attack and devour. And I planned to find out what.

Sakura, on the other hand, planned to pulverize them with their club, intelligent or not.

"Hey, furballs! Pick on a girl your own level!" Sakura charged forward, moving in great leaping strides that cracked the pavement beneath her. With all the monster's we'd slain as of late, she was just shy of level twenty, and would cross that threshold soon. In short, she was more than a match for any three of these wolves on her own. With me providing backup, even this group of five wouldn't survive much longer.

"Attack!" the smart one among the wolves shouted. And, show that he was just as selfish as he was clever, he tried to slip away while his feral kin distracted Sakura and I.

But I guessed he might do as much, so I used Warp Step to cut across his path before he could escape. The Woflman growled at me, barring saliva covered teeth.

"Flee, human!" the Wolfman growled.

I curled my hand into a finger gun and pointed at the Wolfman before giving him my reply.

"Bang," I said, and a Mana Bolt shot from my pointed finger to strike the Wolfman in the jaw.

He didn't go down from that, and he reached for the dagger at his belt while lunging forward with preturnatural speed. I slipped aside, activating Exploit Weakness. The weak points on these Wolfmen was about where I expected. Bellies, throats, and knees. The underlying structure beneath all the claws, teeth, and fur was surprisingly human. Almost like these Wolfmen had been made from a race similar to humans before diverting in a distinctly more canine direction.

The Wolfman drew the dagger and lunged for me, and we played a game of cat and mouse. I kept my distance, striking him with a dozen Mana Bolts and Eldrich Blasts while he tried to use his speed to catch me off guard. If our levels had been equal this would have been a tougher match up, but my stats were just plain higher than his, especially with my class Aberration stat adding to my human strength and agility. The Wolfman just couldn't keep up.

"I will... sacrifice you... to the dark one... human..." the Wolfman panted.

I shook my head. "No you won't. You're already dead."

I snapped my fingers, activating my Corrupting Marks to deal a devastating burst of damage on the Wolfman. He collapsed in an instant as the last of his health points evaporated. I snatched the stone dagger from his limp hands and rushed over to help Sakura deal with the others.

We took care of the remaining Wolfmen in short order, and I examined the dagger I'd looted. By human standards, it was a crude thing sharpened through countless hours of grinding against another rock rather than a quicker skillfull napping process that stone age humans practiced.

The rock itself was relatively ordinary. Hard, but that was to be expected for something that would be a dagger. No, what was of greater interest to me was the magic coursing through it. I wouldn't have noticed the subtle currents of power if not for my Arcanist class, but they were there. Just not flowing in patterns I recognized from my own studies.

The only way to describe the magic in the dagger was as something more... organic. Whereas my enchantment work was more like cogs and gears, this had a much more natural and flowing feeling to it, like it had been enchanted at the hands of another enchantment. One far more complex than any I could create.

In the end, I wasn't able to learn anything from the dagger, though I did tuck it into my pocket for further study later just in case.

Shortly after that encounter we found the front lines, where humanity and the Wolfmen battled across the city streets in scattered bands.

"Evacuate! Everyone, fall back to the police station!" A woman yelled, voice amplified by a megaphone until it rang throughout the entire city. The voice sounded familiar through the crackly electronics.

Gunfire rang in the air, and I was starting to see dead Wolfmen as frequently as I saw dead humans. Though lower leveled, once people got organized they could put up a good fight against these monstrous foes, fast and strong as they were. Wolves were pack hunters, and that mentality showed in the bands of Wolfmen, fighting in small groups of somewhere from a couple to a dozen.

In contrast, humanity had long since mastered the art of armies, formations, and fortifications. People seized control of buildings, barricaded the entrance, and then had clear lines of sight from the upper floor windows where they could pick off Wolfmen right and left.

The Wolfmen had impressive regeneration and could shrug off a bullet or two, but the defenders were throwing as much lead as they could their way. From the buzzing sound of fully automatic rifle fire, I was pretty sure someone had shared the trick our office had discovered to get guns operational with the local police department and rallied however many of them survived the initial monster attacks following the integration.

"Fall back to the police station! Come to my voice!" The woman on the microphone continued to call people to her, and it wasn't until I heard her speak again that I recognized who it was. That was Margaret on the megaphone.

I would have to find her and figure out what was going on after we chased these Wolfmen out of town. I suspected that at the moment she had more important things on her mind than catching up with me.

"That woman's going the wrong way," Sakura gestured one street over with her bat. There was a woman in ragged and dirty business attire running back the way we came with a frantic look in her eyes. A group of three Wolfmen had already spotted her, and moments later they would be on top of her.

I started running, and Sakura followed close behind me. The Wolfmen were about to pounce on the terrified woman when we pounced on them instead.

"When will you furballs learn!" Sakura yelled as she ducked beneath an overprojected swing, crouched low, and aimed right for a Wolfman's knees. They snapped with a sickly crackling pop, disabling the Wolfman while Sakura herself dodged and weaved between his fellows.

The other two were easy pickings after that. None of them were particularly high level, and I hit one with Mana Bolt and one with Eldrich Blast, firing a spell with either hand. Though neither spell killed their targets, they left the two Wolfmen with such low health that one swift blow from Sakura's club finished each of them.

While Sakura mercilessly put down the surviving Wolfman, I turned to the woman we'd just saved. "Hey, miss. You're running in the wrong direction."

She grabbed my leg. "They took my son! He's just a boy. I don't know what they want with him, but the ones with the daggers took him this way! Please, you have to help me find him."

My eyes sharpened. "Which way?"

The woman pointed.

Sakura and I shared a glance again, and she shook the blood from her club. Crimson light coursed through it once more as she reinforced it with her skill, and I could have sworn the club looked a little sturdier than it had when she'd made it the day prior.

"We'll look for your son, but you have to run to safety. Hear the woman on the megaphone? Her name is Margaret, and she'll help keep you safe. I'll find you at her side when we find your son," I told the woman.

She reluctantly nodded, and a moment later Sakura and I were off.

<Author's Note>

I'm guessing another 10-15 chapters for this novel.