Chapter 35: Emergency Response (Patreon)

When Hugo reflected on the last three weeks of work, it was with a mixture of self loathing and relief. It wasn’t as hard as he had expected, which of course made him feel bad about himself. He hated that he was a criminal. That feeling was fading though.

The first week they had given him a key to copy, which he had easily done. Then they sent him in alone to steal. It had been tough, very tough, to convince himself to go through with the robbery. Eventually he convinced himself to go through with it because the target was a noble. They could afford to lose the money, and the fox gang would spend it in the poorest neighborhoods. It was almost like the old Earth hero that stole from the rich and gave to the poor. That sheirrif of notingham guy. He couldn’t remember that guy’s name for sure, but he thought it was Zorro.

Convincing himself to go through with it was the hardest part of the job. The rest came easy. His extra stats and Hanna’s training meant that he could easily infiltrate the compound, and the key he had created fit perfectly. He couldn’t help but be proud of his high level Fabricate skill that let him work in such detail.

Another one of his skills came in handy that night, his Mana Sight. One of the glass cases had been alarmed, a tendril of mana coursing through the runed case tipped him off. He left it alone and stole everything else in that room.

The boss had been rather pleased with his haul. Hugo had been less than pleased when he learned that two gang members had been waiting in the shadows with poisoned darts in case he got caught.

That was his only assignment for the first week. The second week had a similar assignment. This one was easier still. He was robbing a noble again, and instead of breaking into a compound, he just had to climb up a tower in the middle of the city. He used Oskar’s climbing gauntlets and easily made it to the third story window. Strangely, the fear of getting caught overrode his fear of heights. It still left him shaking and puking when he was done though.

The third assignment helped him realize why they had recruited him in the first place. The lock on this door required a mana key. Not just a runed key, but one that he had to inject with his mana to make the key turn. Stealing from that safe was easiest of all, the jewelry store owner having trusted too much in the rarity of soulmarked thieves. After that successful haul, the fox boss said he had passed his trial period and they would pay his debt off for him.

It was so easy that Hugo didn’t believe that the boss would follow through on his word. However, two days before the first fifteen gold was due, Hugo was given a sack of gold with twenty coins in it. He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but he was able to pay his monthly installment of debt and still had five gold left over. It was surreal.

He didn’t even need to spend that money on rent, he had been given his own small apartment. It wasn’t much, but it was his own. Hugo was glad that he didn’t need to live with his mother. Partly because he considered himself an adult now, and partly because he knew that she would rat him out to the corps if she knew what he was doing.

Since he had only worked two nights out of the last sixteen days, he had plenty of time to himself. He tried to keep to himself, but he found himself spending plenty of time with other gang members. A few of them even tried to teach him how to disarm mana alarms. He was very interested in how to accomplish that feat, but the safecracking instructors didn’t have Mana Sight. It was a bit like the blind leading the dumb, and he didn’t plan on testing out their theories anytime soon.

On the first day of the new month, Hugo was slowly walking back to his apartment. He had just had a wonderful meal and was enjoying the evening. Then he started to feel a little wobbly. At first he thought he had too much wine with dinner, but the wobbling increased, turning into shaking.

It was an earthquake.

Standing in the middle of the road, Hugo was struck with indecision. He hadn’t ever been in an earthquake before, and didn’t know if he should stay in the middle of the road or run to a doorway. A few bricks falling to the pavement convinced him to seek shelter. As soon as he got to a nearby doorway, the earthquake stopped. Then the lights went out.

It was a power outage. It didn’t affect every building in town, but most of the city was dark. Even though most neighborhoods had independent power, it looked like the earthquake had taken out about ninety percent of the city’s lights.

Hugo walked out to the middle of the darkened road, and tried to get his bearings. Everything felt so different. It wasn’t quite pitch black, the stars above still shone. But as a few people ran past him on the street, he grew unnerved. They were little more than silhouettes in the darkness.

He heard a wailing from a half a block away. Against his better judgment, he went to investigate. As he drew near, he could see the problem. Unlike most of the surrounding buildings that only took small damage, this building had lost a wall. The debris had someone trapped inside.

Without even thinking about it first, Hugo started moving the stone and wood to rescue whoever was trapped inside. At this point his strength was at twenty-five points, more than enough to clear out a few hundred pounds of rubble. He lifted out the woman that had been trapped underneath.

Her leg was broken and her shoulder had a long gash. Hugo laid her on the paving stone road and stepped back to focus. He didn’t have any first aid kit with him. Would it be better to run for help or to tear off his shirt and stop the bleeding now?

He was spared the decision when a neighbor carrying a candle ran up to her and started bandaging up her wounds. Two more neighbors joined the first and the three of them worked to stabilize her. Hugo stepped back out of their way. He looked around the dark night. He couldn’t do first aid, but he could rescue trapped people. He needed to go do that. The idea gripped him, he wanted to do some good, to fight against the night.

He ran along the dark street, only seeing his way by starlight. Most buildings were still standing, many seemed undamaged. But some buildings were unlucky, or just poorly constructed and they had fallen. He helped out where he could.

An hour later he was working on his fifth building, tossing the rubble aside to get to someone in the basement of a former three story building. He was temporarily stymied by a beam that he couldn’t lift. He was strong, but most of the collapsed building was resting on it.

He stepped back. He needed to work smarter, not harder. With a thought, he created a crowbar out of his strongest aluminum magnesium alloy. He jammed the leading edge into the wall, trying to pry it off.

It still didn’t work.

“Hey. Do you mind if I use that?” an older man said and pointed at the crowbar in Hugo’s hand.

He handed it over. The old man placed it in a better spot and working together they got the wooden beam out of the way. A mother and her son scrambled out from underneath the debris. Hugo had the man keep the crowbar in case he needed it later.

He chuckled to himself. He was a gang member now, and he was going around trying to help people, like a corpsman. Maybe he should try out again when they held auditions in a few weeks. The fox gang probably wouldn’t let him go like that, but it was fun to think about.

Most of the buildings around here were cleared, so Hugo decided to head home. He diverted when he heard some shouting. It was a man yelling at a small crowd. They were mostly human, but a few nox stood at the back. As he got closer he saw that the man was standing in front of a shop with working lights, probably defending it from looters, based on the vitriol he was screaming.

To his surprise, he recognised the shimmer corpsman threatening the civilians. It was Kristofer, the man that took his spot on admissions day.

Both men looked at each other, the shock of recognition stopping the argument. He called out, “Hugo! Thank the eight. Do you live around here? You gotta tell them all to leave.”

Tired and wanting to avoid more deaths, Hugo shot mana darts at the feet of several of the people in the crowd. The explosions of blue convinced everyone that they were out of their depth and the street quickly cleared. As he walked closer he saw why his presence was needed in the first place, Kristofer’s shimmer was out. He wouldn’t be able to create shields or use his shimmer caster until he got it refilled. He had been defending the store with a long dagger.

Hugo walked over to the crumbled storefront and sat down on a piece of rubble. It had been a long night. He looked inside, and saw an array of runed weapons. No wonder they were trying to loot the store. That was a small fortune behind some broken glass.

Still. It seemed extreme. He turned back to Kristofer, “You doing alright, man? I know security is your job, but this is a bit much, right? You seemed kind of bloodthirsty back there.”

“They killed her,” Kristofer said and slumped to the ground next to Hugo.

“Who?” Hugo said.

Kristofer just gestured inside the store. Hugo had to get back up and walk into the store to see what he was talking about. It was the body of a woman, a shimmer corps squire.

The shock of recognition ran through Hugo like lightning. It was Sofia. His one-time girlfriend and the one that had gotten him his pass to go get soulmarked. The looters must have killed her.

Hugo stood there and swore, tears starting to roll down his cheeks.

“It was my fault. I shouldn’t have left her,” Kristofer said morosely.

“You left her?”

“It was supposed to be safe. They gave us the easy job because we were just two squires. There was fighting down by the docks and they sent the knights down there to deal with it. They sent us up here to cover the store. It was just supposed to get us out of the way, it wasn’t supposed to be dangerous.”

“So you left her here alone? Why?”

“There was some yelling on the street over. I went to check it out. I know they tell us to stay together. But. I just. I just couldn’t be around her after what she did.”

“Did you guys break up? Is that why you left her here alone to die?”

“No! I didn’t know it would be dangerous! There was no one here when I left!”

“So, what then?”

“A few days ago, I found out why Sofia was with me. My father had been paying her, paying her family really, so she would be with me. He wanted to control me, get me to come back home instead of working. She was supposed to sleep with me and then make me go back home.” He took a shuddering breath and then continued, “When I confronted her, she didn’t even deny it. She just talked about how her family needed the money, like it was my fault that her dad was a bad businessman or something. She asked me not to tell my father I had found out.”

Kristofer looked up into the sky. It was still dark out, just a little past midnight, “I didn’t tell my father, but I couldn’t look at her anymore. I avoided her for a few days, but then they sent us away together. Sofia wanted to talk. She said she still wanted to be friends. She didn’t even lie and tell me she still loved me. I had to take a break, I couldn’t just stand there. I was only gone for twenty minutes, but by the time I came back there was this crowd, and she was dead.”

This set off a set of realizations in Hugo, hitting him one after another. She broke up with him and got Kristofer to take his place so she could save her family. She had been telling the truth when she said he didn’t know everything. They really did need him to pay back the pass for transit up shimmer mountain. Perhaps his refusal to pay her back is what convinced her to stay with Kristofer.

Hugo didn’t want to be here anymore. He got up and left without a word. He headed back to his apartment. He didn’t check and see if anyone needed any help on the way. He just wanted to be alone.

There was a kid waiting on his doorstep when he got home.

“Took you long enough. I thought you died in the mess out there. The boss said for you to go meet him right away. You should know where,” the kid said and ran off.

With a big sigh, Hugo turned around. He just wanted this night to end but he knew he couldn’t afford to anger the boss.

The restaurant was lit with candles and packed with people rushing back and forth. Apparently a blackout was the busy time for a criminal organization.

When the boss saw him he jumped up and said, “Did you get held up? Why are you so late?”

“I didn’t get the message until just now, I was helping people before...” Hugo said before he was interrupted.

“Don’t care. Listen. I have an important job for you and our lanky friend here. You and Sebastian here are going to the west side, north of the docks. There is a warehouse there, with a mana core hidden inside. You are going to steal it.”

Hugo was more than a little shocked. This was the big time. He had only stolen from minor nobles so far. This was a huge leap up. Things like this normally took months to plan. Something must have happened to change their plans. He looked over at Sebastian, a tall lanky man, he had a mean look and a pair of wicked looking daggers strapped to his lower back.

The boss continued, “Those shimmer snots think we are idiots and they set up a trap for us there. They actually set it up four months ago, and have had corpsmen watching it ever since. We aren’t stupid, so no one has tried to steal it just yet.

“But tonight a window of opportunity opened up. Some of their security got knocked out with the rest of the power in town, and we think all of their guards have left to quell the riot the hedge mages started on the docks.”

“Surely you have someone more experienced that could take this job instead? I may be soulmarked, but it’s not like I really know what I am doing,” Hugo said.

The boss shrugged his shoulders and said, “It might still be a trap, I can’t afford to send anyone important. If you get caught just pretend to be a looter and we will pay your fine. Since you two don’t have a rap sheet, it will be small.”

Hugo felt like that made perfect sense. He nodded and turned to Sebastian and said, “I assume you know where we are going?”

Sebastian nodded and said, “Yeah, I know all the details. And now that you are finally here, we can go.”

The two of them jogged out of the restaurant, and headed west. They kept out of the pockets of light and avoided groups of people. They didn’t want any witnesses if they were actually able to pull this off.

Hugo waited in an alley while Sebastian did a sweep of the area, double checking that the shimmer corpsmen had all left. With a spare moment to think, he realized that he had been duped again. The boss’s charisma had convinced him to agree to a job that he knew was a trap. That’s probably why Sebastian was there in the first place, as muscle to convince Hugo to do the job anyway when the charisma wore off.

When Sebastian was sure the coast was clear, they snuck closer to the warehouse. Sebasian led the way to a side door completely shrouded in darkness. Hugo didn’t have much practice picking locks, but he had been learning the last few weeks. Being able to create his own tools to order made it easier for him than most.

Sebastian held out a mana stone, which gave off enough light for him to see the keyhole. Before he created his tools, he thought to check for traps, and turned on his Mana Sight. He was immediately relieved that he had thought to check.

The door was trapped. A tendril of mana surrounded the doorknob and snaked down the edge of the door frame before it went into the building. There must be an alarm runed into the door.

He immediately stepped back from the door and said, “We can’t get in this way.”

Sebastian nodded, almost like he expected that answer. He led Hugo to a window, fifteen feet off the ground. “What about this one?”

There was no sign of mana covering the window, but he was hesitant to try it. Anyone walking by would be able to see them climb into the building. But the streets were deserted, and it was still very dark out. He accepted a boost from Sebastian and caught himself on the edge of the windowsill by his fingertips. He silently thanked Hanna for the training.

The window was locked from the inside, but that didn’t stop Hugo. It was easy to create a thin strip of metal to slide under the latch. Then he was in, thankful for the dexterity that made the whole maneuver possible. He let down a thin aluminum cord to bring Sebastian in with him. Once they were both inside, he quietly shut the window behind him. They looked around the warehouse from the second story catwalk.