Broken System Ch. 51-52 (Patreon)

Well - now to be the most unpopular man of the year. Broken System has slowed down to 2 chapters a week on RR so it will be here as well. Baring unforeseen circumstances that means this story will finish the second book sometime early next year and the third book... next fall-ish.

Will the story end at book 3? I'm not sure. I don't think so. I'm kind of falling in love with the world I'm building here, but if I do decide to sign Broken System to a publisher, they will want at least a trilogy, and in a reasonably timely manner. So maybe two trilogies? I dunno. The story I'm telling now can be wrapped up in 3 books, but I don't think the world can be wrapped up in a neat little bow so easily. 

Ch. 51 - Hunter or Prey

When his laughter stopped, and his pain started, Matt was kind enough to heal Benjamin of the hit points he’d lost in the fall while he lay there with one of his lesser heal spells.

“You see anything else out there, Raj?” Matt asked.

‘No.’ came the flat answer back across their vision.

Eight wasn’t exactly a lot of damage, but since it was almost a third of his hit points, it was kind of a big deal. While he watched the number go up, he idly wondered what exactly had been so damaged that it had moved the needle so much, but he wasn’t sure. His spleen didn’t feel ruptured, and he didn’t think he’d cracked any vertebrae.

“Good,” Matt grunted. “Well, you keep an eye out, and when Ben is feeling better, we can—”

“I think it was him,” Benjamin said, moving his gaze from the wispy clouds drifting across the sky far above them to his friend’s face. “I think this was a trap, and I’m pretty sure Ethan did it.”

Benjamin went on to explain the burst of smoke, the positioning of the car, and all the other details that didn’t make sense while he lay there.

“Well, if he’s trying to kill us with tricks like this, then he knows that there’s no way he can take us in person,” Matt said with a smile. “That’s good news.”

“How in the hell is that good news?” Benjamin asked as he levered himself up into a sitting position.

“Well, if someone could take you on, they would, but if it really is Ethan - well, he’s avoided us twice now and tried to use a stampede to murder us. Sounds like weakness to me,” Matt said, actually sounding like a shadow of his old self for once, “I mean, he might not have any way to heal himself. He might be bleeding out.”

Benjamin wished he’d been able to pay attention more to the moment, but as he moved, he looked past Matt’s face and saw something shimmer or flicker in the air above them. It was a small movement and much too little to determine the height of the thing, but with some effort, he tore his eyes away and turned to face Matt.

“Uh-huh,” he agreed, nodding. He wasn’t paying attention, though. Instead, he was typing on the heads-up display so everyone could see it on their interface. ‘Being watched. Act natural.’

“So we…” Matt stiffened, but after a short delay, he kept going. Emma looked around a little more than before, but she didn’t look up at least so that probably still counted as natural. “...we just gotta lure him out of his hole, and then we can wring his scrawny little neck for some answers.”

‘Raja, above us. Something basically invisible. No idea what it is. Probably won’t get more than one shot,’ Benjamin spent precious seconds typing it in a slow retina cursor action that made the interface utterly unwieldy. He wished he could just make it type what he was thinking, but he had no idea how to do that.

When he hit send, Raja didn’t do anything for a moment. None of them did. Benjamin was just grateful that everyone didn’t look up at once.

Then, in a flash, that changed. Raja nocked, drew, and fired an arrow in a single shot that split and split again as it raced skyward. What had been a single arrow when it left the bow was a dozen as they soared upward, trailing little green streaks of light.

Only one of the projectiles hit the invisible target that began to flicker into existence, but then only one needed to. All the rest of the arrows flickered out of existence as the magic that created them burned out, but even as that happened, the object fell from the sky with a wet splat several feet from the now-crumpled hood of the car.

Everyone moved to look at it, except for Raja, who was scanning the sky now as well as the distant grasses for signs of another surprise.

“Gross,” Nicole uttered as she approached it.

“Double gross,” Emma agreed as Matt nudged the ball of slime with the toe of his shoe. It didn’t move.

“Is it a jellyfish or what?” Matt asked as he stepped back from the black ooze that was starting to spread now that the arrow that had pierced it had vanished.

That’s what Benjamin had thought of the pale, violet-veined tentacles, too, at first. That it was some kind of sea creature, but as soon as he poked it with a stick hard enough to make it twitch, the answer revealed itself. It was an eyeball. A giant, floating eyeball, and the membranes and tentacles seemed to be somewhere between eyelids and a tail. It was a disgusting mess, but as it slowly deflated and blinked sightlessly twice more, it began to smolder.

Everyone stepped back then, fearful that it might explode, but it didn’t. Instead, it began to shrivel and dissolve until it was nothing but a foul-smelling soup of inhuman body parts.

“What in the fuck was that thing,” Matt asked.

“I think it’s a demon,” Benjamin said, “Or at least it was one.”

He didn’t say that because he thought it might have been summoned by Ethan, though. He said it because some part of it felt unclean, and those little demon bugs that Miku had told him to summon had made him feel the same way. The magic involved pulled them from someplace that was just wrong, and that gave them a distinctive vibe.

He spent the next few minutes explaining this to everyone. After that, there wasn’t much in the way of disagreement. Ethan was out there, he was trying to kill them, and he had lots of strange little beasties to help him.

“Can’t you just look through your spell list and give us some idea of what he might have?” Emma asked as they moved toward the nearest wall of grass that was still standing to their east so that they’d feel less exposed.

“I mean, I wish I could,” Benjamin said as they walked, “But… It’s like the further you walk along a path, the fewer options are open to you. The spell list I have access to used to have over ten thousand options on it, but there are less than 6,000 now.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen similar things,” Matt agreed. “The more combat options I select, the more healing spells disappear. It has something to do with the shape of your soul, or whatever - like those mages were talking about when we first got here.”

“Right,” Benjamin agreed. He was more than a little surprised that Matt had explained that so clearly or that he’d even noticed if he was being honest. He hadn’t expected him to spend so much time reflecting on his system with the way he acted sometimes.

The girls reported similar experiences, and Raja agreed with them, though he hadn’t really given it much thought. That discussion did little to blot out the fear they all felt. Even after they were behind the flimsy cover of a dozen feet of tall grass, they didn’t feel safe.

Why should they? Their stalker had the ability to teleport and summon strange monsters. If he’d spent the winter leveling up like the rest of them had, who knew what he might be capable of.

Eventually, Matt decided the best course of action was to keep moving and try to find somewhere where they might have the advantage in a fight. Raja agreed with that mostly, but it took a long game of charades as they walked to find the crucial difference in the plan.

As the best hunter they had, he thought they should set a trap for their hunter, and after a little discussion, Benjamin was inclined to agree. They still kept walking and looking out for a defensible place to camp for a day or two, but they also discussed how you would go about entrapping a mage that didn’t want to be found.

Only nothing happened. That first night, all of them lay nervously in their bedrolls except for Raja, even though no one slept. His was stuffed with a backpack, and he’d slunk off to a nearby tree to give him a commanding view of the area.

Nothing happened, though. The night passed without issue.

The next day, they repeated the experiment. They did so the day after, too. Sometimes, they left Raja sitting by the fire, in clear view, and had Emma slink off to patrol the shadows, but there was nothing there to find.

It was frustrating, and after almost a week of sleepless nights, they’d begun to argue about it.

“He clearly can’t be everywhere, or he would have killed us the first night we came back to the campsite,” Nicole argued.

“He didn’t know we were there yet, sweetie,” Emma said, condescending, “But now that he does, who knows what that prick’s game is.”

“He’s probably already dead,” Matt said, stating the position he’d held for the last three days. He was the only one sleeping soundly now. He claimed that the position of the arrow they’d found implied that their friend’s liver had been pierced and that there was no way that he’d survive without magic or surgery.

Everyone else was less sure about that, and though Benjamin agreed, he’d been trying to figure out how Raja might be able to tame one of these hawks and use it as a spy so they could unobtrusively see if they were being followed. Sadly he still hadn’t been able to make the code work so far, and it unraveled for reasons he didn’t fully understand.

All of those disagreements and complications mattered a lot less when they topped another rise on their increasingly hilly trek and saw a farming community in the distance. It was more of a village than a town, but Benjamin had never seen a village with stone walls before. Earlier, he’d wondered what you’d have to keep the weird megafauna of the plains at bay, and the answer turned out to be six-foot high, two-foot thick stone walls that must have encompassed dozens of square miles.

It was a huge undertaking, and there was no way that it made sense in any reasonable world. Here, though, with magic, even the unreasonable was doable, and the way the jagged-topped stone walls jutted up from the land made it very clear that this wasn’t a natural process. Something had forced the stone up like it was some kind of fault line, and the result had been continuous but highly irregular. It was enough to keep the animals at bay, though.

Beyond the wall were pastures and irrigated fields filled with corn, wheat, and other vegetables. There were even a few rice paddies. More important than all that, though, was the final detail. There were people. There were actual honest-to-God humans slaving away to grow more food than they’d ever need, and that was a sight for sore eyes.

“What are we going to do?” Emma asked, turning to Matt for some kind of answer.

He surprisingly turned to Benjamin and said, “Well, Benjamin is the mage expert.”

“I am?” he laughed. “Well, then I say we’re going to take a note from Ethan’s playbook.”

“Sneak around and murder them all?” Emma asked with a growing smile.

“No,” Benjamin corrected her. “We’re going to watch and learn, and then when we know how we can do the most damage, then we’ll strike.”

Ch. 52 - Just like Home

It was a fine plan in theory. They spent the next few days lingering as closely as they could manage to the walls of the place while they stayed hidden and tried to learn all they could. They kept to heavy cover, lit no fires, and only made substantial movements once darkness had fallen.

However, all of those things couldn’t save them from the most dangerous hazard of all: the smell of freshly baked bread. It taunted them every morning, and the heavily salted meat gave them only two terrible choices: gamey venison or tough rabbit. Either choice only made them hungrier by comparison to the unimagined luxuries that awaited on the far side of the wall.

For almost half a year, they had subsisted on food that put them one rung above starvation. Now, real food was practically within reach, and all that Benjamin and his friends could do was skulk around so quietly they could hear their stomachs growl.

Despite that, it was time well spent, and they learned a lot of things. They learned that there were few guards and that there was only one road in or out of the place, though the gate itself was not manned during the day. Benjamin was fairly sure that it led toward the river, even if none of them were entirely sure if this was the spot on the map that they’d been aiming for on their walk here.

It didn’t matter, of course. One summoner village was as good as another, and this one was hardly fortified, making it ideal for their purposes.

All that mattered was that they’d found some actual living, breathing human beings to study and hopefully rescue, even if they weren’t in the best shape. One of the first things that Raja had noticed with his eagle eye ability was just how used up the farm hands were.

Eagle Eye (1 mana/minute): See distant things with up to ten times magnification. Gain sensitivity to movement. +30% to hit with next shot or for search or survival checks.

It made a grim sort of sense to Benjamin. If the Rhulvinarians were so hard up on manpower that they were stealing people from campgrounds on Earth, then they certainly kept the best people for fighting the monsters that the forest was capable of unleashing.

Those who tended the fields weren’t the people that Benjamin would have expected to see out on the farm somewhere in the Midwest. Here, they were a mixture of people missing eyes or limbs and had obviously been crippled by warfare or those that were too old to do much else anymore.

Despite that, the whole place was incredibly productive. As they looped around to the far side, they watched a harvest of wheat take place. After three days, the entire field was scythed and stripped, and after four more, the freshly plowed fields once again showed signs of sprouting as another crop started.

It was impossible, of course, but no more impossible than anything else they’d grown used to in their time in this strange world. That strange sight explained another one, at least, though. Until now, Matt and Raja had attributed the blasted landscape just on the outside of the wall to signs of battle and defense, while Benjamin and the girls had associated it with some kind of burn zone to keep the parameter defensible.

They’d both been wrong, but Benjamin hadn’t known it until he and Emma had crawled forward to the edge of the grass wall that surrounded the ugly clearing for a closer look on the same day that a mage in gray had decided to work a little agricultural magic of his own. As he’d caused whole creeping vines to swell with life and make melons appear practically instantaneously, the surrounding grass had suddenly wilted in large patches. In some places, it hadn’t just wilted. It had withered and died completely.

To their great surprise, that had left them completely exposed less than a hundred yards from the wall, and the two of them had been forced to lay there until sunset before darkness made it safe to move around again. Emma had spent her time berating Benjamin in whispers for failing to see this coming, but he took it in stride. He was far more concerned about what would happen if the mage that seemed to be in charge or any of his underlings were to sound the alarm.

They didn’t, though, and more than half an hour after the fields were finally empty and the world was only lit by starlight, they finally rose together.

“Man - talk about days that were never going to end,” Benjamin said, well aware of how ironic it was that he’d been forced to spend the whole day with Emma, and all it had done was make him like her slightly less after hours of badgering and complaint. “At least now we can… Wait, Emma - where are you going?”

As soon as she got up and dusted herself off, she started walking toward the imposing stone barrier and not away from it, taking Benjamin completely by surprise. He followed her, but only to try to get her to turn around, which didn’t seem to be happening.

“Emma, stop!” he hissed a little louder this time, but when he put his hand on her arm as she started climbing the stone wall.

“You know if I cut that hand off, Matt’s magic can’t actually heal it, right?” she asked, shaking free as she shook free of his grip.

Benjamin followed her over, but her comment was enough to anger him for the first time in a long time. Not only was she constantly bullying him because she knew that no one was going to stop her, but she was going to get them all caught, and there was no possible way that would end well.

By the time Benjamin had made it to the top, still fuming, Emma had already hopped down and was running toward the melon patch they’d watched spring to life earlier that day.

“Stay up there,” she hissed as he started to climb down.

“Why?” he asked louder than he meant to as he kept an uneasy watch. The workers seemed to live in communal bunkhouses toward the center of town, so there was no one about, but even so, he worried.

She didn’t answer, but when she started running back with three large melons that looked like the distant cousin of a cantaloupe, he quickly understood. He caught each of them as she threw them up to him one at a time, but then, instead of climbing up herself, she went back for another three.

“Emma!” he scolded in whispered tones.

He scanned the night again and was relieved that he still saw no indication that their intrusion had been noticed, but that wasn’t the point, and if anything, she seemed to slow down on her second trip back with more of the fruit.

They climbed down and did the same thing in reverse. Soon, they were both running back into the dark with half a dozen melons. It was an insane thing to have done, but for some reason, even though the danger had passed, his anger still didn’t fade. By the time they rejoined their friends at tonight’s camp in the hollow behind a particularly steep hill, he was still furious with her.

Everyone else was relieved that they’d made it back, and as Benjamin set about explaining why they’d been pinned down for so long and where exactly they’d gotten the melons, Emma wasted no time in dumping her load on the ground and choosing the largest to split apart. The thick rind was no match for the steel of her knife, and soon, she’d quartered the thing and handed a slice to everyone except for him.

Benjamin ignored the way the aroma of sweet fruit made his mouth water and continued, “And then when the coast was clear, she decided to jump the wall and grab a snack!” he said in exasperation.

“Well, I’m glad she did,” Matt said, giving Emma the same sort of smile that he had once upon a time.

Back then, she would have returned it, and their cuteness would have turned his stomach, but this time, at least, she rebuffed him and instead offered Benjamin a taunting expression. “You know you can have a taste if you want, Benji - all you have to do is say please…”

The innuendo was the last straw, and he reached for the nearest melon to throw it into the bushes, but Raja intercepted his friend’s hand, forcing half of his quarter of the melon into Benjamin’s hand. When Benjamin met the hunter’s dark eyes, he saw a very serious look there.

It was only then that he realized how high the tension in the group had risen. Emma was glaring at him, but Matt was glaring at him for entirely different reasons. So, reluctantly, he accepted the awkward olive branch and began to devour the fruit. It wasn’t at all what he had expected. It had the flavor of mango with soft flesh that was the consistency of a peach.

On Earth, he hadn’t been much of a fruit guy. At least, he didn’t remember being much of one. He’d preferred candy, and back then, the closest he’d get to something like this would be tropical-flavored fruit chews. Here, though, this was the best thing he’d eaten since the chocolate ornaments they’d stripped bare of the Christmas tree, and he devoured it down to the pale, bitter rind.

Things became somewhat lighter after that. Benjamin was still pissed that she’d risked so much for something so small, but in the grand scheme of things, he supposed starting the battle that night wouldn’t have been so different from starting it any other day. They couldn’t watch forever, after all. One day, they were going to have to go in there and set those people free or die in the attempt. While a little preparation might go a long way, Benjamin thought it would be a good idea if at least all of them were there at the time.

“What were you going to do if they’d sounded an alarm and soldiers had come for us?” Benjamin asked finally when they were on their third melon.

“You could have handled it,” she answered with a wicked smile. “You have that fancy new spell all finished up, right? It would put all of them on outside, no problem.”

That statement made him wince. He still hadn’t finalized his data leak spell, but he certainly needed to. Despite her mockery, he was pretty sure it would work. Probably.

The one thing it wouldn’t do, though, was to make the people it freed join them. That was the wild card. Even if everything worked, and he collected all the passwords, then loaded those into a macro on his terminal and used that to cancel all the debuffs that forced those poor bastards to obey, he had no idea what they would do. They were just as likely to go berserk and try killing everyone as they were to help Benjamin and his friends rise up against the summoner lords that had enslaved them for so long.

That was one of the big reasons why they hadn’t actually done anything so far, even though they’d had their plan pretty well locked in place for days. All they needed to do was sneak in, pretend to be laborers until he’d spread the virus as much as he could, and then hope that got most people before the fighting started. After that, the die was cast.

That’s what Benjamin fell asleep thinking about that night, but even so, he lacked the conviction to hit the button and finalize the spell.