Broken System Ch. 55-56 (Patreon)

Ch. 55 - When Night Falls

They didn’t leave immediately because Raja pointed out that the carrion birds that gathered for that feast would have certainly alerted their enemy of the massacre. It was a good point. If they wanted to try to save as many people as possible, the element of surprise was crucial. So, instead, Benjamin used earth works to dig a shallow grave for the bodies after they’d stripped them of anything useful as they discussed what had to be done and how it had to be done tonight.

“They’ll be expecting these guys back, of course, so we’ll wear as much of their clothes as we can so no one thinks to stop us until we’re close to the barracks,” Matt explained as they buried the corpses, “or wherever it is they sleep, and then you can cast your spell and take control of the whole group. After that - well, we’ll be the ones with an army, won’t we.”

“Wait, you think I should take control of them, not set them free?” he asked. The guilt associated with Vermistian’s needless death still weighed on him, and it took an insane statement like that to bring him back to earth.

“Well, we kinda have to,” Matt continued. “You saw how this woman behaved. People simply aren’t controllable until they’ve had some time to, ummm, process, and they’d be as likely to hurt themselves or someone else if you just set them all free at once. Trust me. I know.”

Benjamin said nothing. He couldn’t deny the wisdom of his friend’s words, but the idea of keeping anyone in the grip of this spell a moment longer than he had to felt disgusting to him. Still - it raised all sorts of questions that he brooded on even after his friends started trying on the clothes of deadmen and replacing their weapons with better versions made of bronze.

If Benjamin used his magic to steal all of the passwords, then he could definitely control all the poor bastards that had been enslaved down there, but as soon as the mages noticed what he’d done, they would try to wrest control again. While he very much doubted they had the skills to change the password back, their own evil spells would still work, and unless he hardened everyone’s systems and closed all the vital ports with a few scripts, they would just reclaim or kill everyone that he and his friends had worked so hard to free.

Of course, doing that would limit his control over them as well, which was just fine by Benjamin. He didn’t want that kind of power over anyone again. Still, it made for an impossible decision, and as they walked back into the high grasses to a hill that was tall enough that they could watch for any changes in the activity of the little village.

Part of him expected to see an army that had been roused by the violence heading toward them, but instead, it was another day like any other. As far as towns went, he supposed it wasn’t so bad. The large bunkhouses and the common buildings were made of simple beam and timber construction, while the granaries and a few of the smaller buildings were made with the same stone that had been forced to rise from the earth via magic. There was also a stone plaza right in the center that might have a purpose based on the way the paving stones resembled certain rune combinations.

On the whole, it was a lovely effect that screamed quiet pastoral life in a fantasy world. Animals were being tended to, rows were being weeded, and grain was being harvested as the circle of life continued at its unnaturally high pace. It would have been a vision of wonder if the whole thing had been tended to by robotic automation, agricultural golems, or whatever the equivalent would have been for the metaphor to work. Instead, it was a slave-driven horror show, and that knowledge stole whatever beauty might have been there.

Even the damage it seemed to be doing to the land outside the stone wall didn’t look as severe as what he’d seen the runoff from industrial agriculture do in documentaries back on Earth. All of this was probably fixable, but the people in charge saw no reason to fix it. After all, it wasn’t them who were being enslaved, and it wasn’t their world being destroyed.

Benjamin spent the next few minutes explaining to his friends that this was just some sort of alien invasion, but with magic instead of UFOs, but no one seemed to care about his insights, and in the end, they silently watched the day pass while they weighed the pros and cons of walking right in the front door versus sneaking around.

“There isn’t much in the way of guards either way,” Nicole said quietly. “I don’t really think that it matters too much.”

“Well, thanks to my melons, we know there’s some sort of alarm,” Emma said with a smirk. “I think we should just take our chances through the front door.”

“I don’t care which one we do as long as we go there first,” Matt said, pointing to the nicest and most defensible building in the compound. “We need to kill those mages in their bed before they can sound the alarm or do anything diabolical.”

Benjamin didn’t necessarily disagree, but he was certain that was going to be a tall order. The more they learned about these Rhulvins, the more they seemed like paranoid freaks. They relied on mind-control magics that they themselves were immune to, they had self-destruct switches built into the systems they used to ensure their control, and they had invisible tripwires built into their fences. There was no way there wasn’t some kind of alarm system or booby trap built into the place they went to bed every night.

“You know, if we could lure them out into the open, Raj could probably put at least one of them down before they knew what was going on,” Benjamin volunteered. He takes out one, I handle the people they’ve enslaved, and that leaves three of you to tag team the last one. You think that’s doable?”

“Why would I need anyone’s help to take out someone as weak as a mage?” Emma asked, full of bravado.

“So you’re thinking what? We ambush them during dinner,” Matt asked, ignoring her backhanded insult.

“Something like that,” Benjamin said. “We can pick our moment. It just shouldn’t be when they are in their lairs because that could make it impossible to dislodge them.”

. . .

Over the course of the day, they rehashed that conversation another half a dozen times, and Benjamin picked out most of his upgrades from his level up but didn’t have enough time to decide whether he should choose a new ability now that it was finally an option. By the time the sun was low in the sky, not much had really changed, and as soon as the light started to dim, they set off toward the front gate, making no efforts to hide themselves.

NAME: Benjamin Newsome

RACE: Human

CLASS: Mage(Blood Mage)

LVL: 5

EXP: 4,256/6,000

BPs: 8

Mind

INTELLECT

13

WILL

11

MANIPULATE

4

Body

AGILITY

6

STRENGTH

11

APPEARANCE

5

Soul

ANIMA

7

SPIRIT

12

CHARM

6

RESOLVE:  55/55

HEALTH: 55/55

MANA: 15/15

STATUS EFFECTS:

Soul Scar (major): -5 to all actions,-50% mana, No natural recovery of health or mana.

SKILLS

Knowledge (academics): 35

Craft (programming): 50

Knowledge (internet): 25

Magic (Runic): 65

Dodge: 25

Team Work: 30

Diplomacy 35

Leadership: 10

Awareness: 35

Resist (Social): 25

Survival: 20

Athletics: 15

Craft (primitive): 10

ABILITIES

Obstinate: +20% resistance to social attacks and charm magics

Blood Mage: Reduce Mana by half. Mana may be freely refilled at the cost of one health per mana. Immunity to life drain effects.

Optimized Mage: All spells cost 1 less mana

EQUIPMENT:

Main Hand: Crude Spear

+6 Physical Damage, Reach

INVENTORY:

Hiking clothes, backpack, canteen, sleeping bag, lighter, compass, pocket knife, fishing line, duct tape, spare clothes, fishing hooks,

Well, the main group of them didn’t. Raja, however, skulked off toward the closest hill with a good vantage to give him the best possible chance of sniping someone important.

After that, everything proceeded as planned until they were practically at the front gate. People came and went from the kitchen that smelled of stew and the bunkhouses, and one of the mages was standing out on the plaza talking to several people, but no one was paying them any mind.

At least not until Benjamin put a ripple in the pond. Part of him knew it was going to happen. That was why he waited until literally the last moment. It was only when he saw the spark of recognition in the eyes of one of the laborers that walked in front of them, followed by the man leveling his sickle at them like a weapon, that Benjamin cast data leak. Both mages turned together at that and instantly looked toward him once that happened, and the casting and recasting chain reactions occurred.

Everything happened at once after that.

“Sound the Al—” The first one called out, only to be silenced immediately by an arrow through the eye that dropped him like a sack of rice.

Matt, Emma, and Nicole started running toward their quarry while Benjamin stood there in the relative safety of the empty area by the gate and focused on making sure that the passcodes he was getting were triggering the macros he’d set up.

As much as he’d love an army of people springing into action to help his friends, though, that wasn’t going to work. If he left their systems open enough for them to take more commands, then these assholes could immediately wipe them out to a man. Better a dead minion than a free one.

Instead, as soon as the password was sent to Benjamin, it automatically triggered a macro that altered the password, locked down their system to prevent further intrusion, and issued one final command before it removed the bound to serve debuff. The final command was a simple one, displayed on their interface: sleep.

And that’s exactly what happened. Everywhere he could see, the men and women who were getting dinner or running to aid their masters collapsed. Right where they were in an irregular wave that expanded outward from Benjamin.

He caught the flash of a second arcane shot as Raj tried to kill the other mage before Emma could reach him. It failed to penetrate the shroud that had erupted out of the man, though and hung there in midair for a few seconds while a collection of shadows and heat shimmers resolved into a monster twice the height of a man, with a sinuous body that seemed to be made of little more than bones.

“Leave one alive. After this, I’ll have questions that need answering,” the mage barked before turning his back on the warriors charging toward him as he tried to help the man on the ground next to him who was struggling to breathe.

It seemed awfully cocky for the man to just ignore imminent danger like that, but even as Benjamin started to cast a spell to do his part, the monstrosity shrugged forward like a shockwave and made him think twice about that.

Perhaps the man’s supreme confidence should be treated as a warning rather than a strange sort of insanity, Benjamin realized. When he looked at the scene in that light, well - it changed everything.

Ch. 56 - Leave One Alive

The monster was a storm of bones that floated and glided around in a roughly man-shaped cloud. Sometimes, the patterns were as random as macabre fireworks. Other times, usually just before it moved, the bones would miraculously line up into the shape of a monster, and then it would push off from the ground and leap into the air as it struck or exploded into a whirlwind once more.

Sometimes, it was almost a human skeleton, though the skull seemed to change from moment to moment. Other times, it was something much stranger or more primitive with a hunchback or a serpentine body instead of legs. The number and shape of its limbs shifted with each attack as well.

Its first strike was a storm of death that surged forward toward his friends like a malignant sandstorm. They scattered before it, staying just out of range of the worst of it before they circled around to try to divide its attention. It seemed less concerned about killing them, though, and more concerned about keeping them away from its master.

Its next strike came in the form of a giant claw that dug deep into Matt’s flesh as it batted him aside hard enough to send him toppling end over end into the wall of the nearest building. As powerful as that blow was, though, the attack after that caused dozens of seemingly unrelated bones to fuse together into a barbed whip-like appendage more than a dozen feet long that cracked faster than Benjamin’s eyes could follow.

Emma only just barely managed to avoid getting sliced in half by that, and even then it looked like her body went one way and the tips of her long dark hair went another as she vaulted over the ossified guillotine and only barely avoided losing her head in the process. Benjamin didn’t even see where Nicole went. She literally disappeared. It wasn’t until she reappeared behind the creature that he realized she’d used shadowstep to avoid the attack entirely rather than being reduced to a bloody smear by it.

If the first series of attacks had been too quick to follow, then the next few were a blur. Even while dueling Emma as it oscillated its form between the almost human and the utterly inhuman, the thing still found the time to catch and crush every arrow that Raja lobbed at its master.

In fact, that constant danger might have been the only thing that held it back because even with half of its attention focused on intercepting the next projectile, Nicole and Matt were steadily beaten back. In the end, only Emma could keep up with the abomination, move for move and step for step.

She was an angel of death. Wearing a gleaming, manic smile, she cut a path through every attack, shattering bone after bone, and she made her way to the eye of the storm where the creature’s only true vulnerability seemed to lie.

When she got close enough to her target, the mage’s defender did the only thing it could. It collapsed in on itself. One moment, it was a sinuous, serpentine storm of death, and the next, it was shrinking inwards and solidifying. It was hard to see what it was up to. A moment ago, it had been a crashing wave, but in an instant, it solidified into a hard ivory shell, creating a dome of bone around its master and the downed mage.

Benjamin fired a vampiric bolt at it as his friends charged at it but noticed with annoyance that no health returned to him.

Does that mean it doesn’t have any life to steal? He wondered. What is this thing?

When they arrived, the shadows around the thing erupted, and shadow duplicates of the mortal warriors poured out to meet them. Each of them fell in a single blow, but within seconds, there were a dozen, and all three humans were losing ground against the shadowy duplicates.

Despite the danger and the lack of ways he had to get more mana, Benjamin dashed forward, certain he had the right spell for the job. “Get back!” he cried out. “I’ve got this.”

On the way there, he cast arcane armor on himself just in case, but it was only when he was almost to Matt that he unleashed his flamethrower in the form of fire spray. The flames never reached the doppelgangers. Instead, the flaring brightness was enough to dispel them before they ever felt the heat. Benjamin had figured that it would do that. Light and dark tended to have that sort of relationship, but still - it managed to wipe out three-quarters of the strange shadow creatures.

“Get back!” Matt yelled. “This thing will tear you apart, it’s—”

Benjamin didn’t hear the rest of his friend’s words. They were lost in the roar of the wind as Benjamin cast gale shield because of the way the bones had started to twitch.

He didn’t know for sure what was going to happen next, but the way he saw the jagged pile of bones twitch. At that moment, it started to resemble a hedgehog more than a turtle told his lizard brain all it needed to know: an attack was coming. He needed to dissipate as much of that force as he possibly could.

An instant later, he was proven right when the shell detonated like a bomb, sending a spray of bone fragments and spears in every direction. Even with the sudden winds to counteract it, Benjamin was knocked off his feat by the force of the blast. Despite taking the brunt of it, his arcane armor didn’t actually shatter until he hit the ground.

While time seemed to freeze in a single, awful moment, though, he felt every impact that shattered against the spell. His chest, kidneys, and spine would have all been pierced if not for his armor, and that was after he’d used gale shield to disrupt the worst of the wall of death that was coming at him.

As the dust cloud cleared, Benjamin didn’t look for his friends. There was no way of knowing what happened to them yet, but they were tough. They would probably be fine. He was looking for the mage that had done this, and before he could even see the man’s silhouette, Benjamin opened fire at the first green rune to appear with a bolt of violent red energy.

Benjamin had never cast a spell at level 5 before. He couldn’t because of his crippling low mana pool. To do it this time, he’d been forced to drain his health bar almost to zero, but even as he tottered on his feet, he knew it was the right decision.

Was that asshole about to escape? Benjamin wondered. Was he about to summon some new horror and kill them all? It didn’t matter.

The last time he’d been put in this situation with Ethan, Benjamin had dropped the rock rather than deliver the killing blow. He’d never make that mistake again. Not when faced with true evil like this.

The bolt struck just as the man’s outline became visible, and he fell over immediately with a gasping death rattle. Benjamin ignored that, though, in the same way, he ignored the lurid and distasteful images of someone else’s life that surged through his head as his health bar refilled and he drew his knife.

He was going to slit both their throats and worry about everything else after that. After all, Matt was basically indestructible, and Nicole and Emma were both faster than he’d ever be by this point.

It turned out that determination was unnecessary. His gale shield had already done the job for him. Not only had it probably saved his life, but it had riddled the two men who it had been protecting with the bone fragments that were meant to rip apart Benjamin and Matt instead. Benjamin looked up, looking for them, and saw Matt and Emma through the haze. Both were bleeding, but both were still alive.

“Not me,” Emma said, pushing Matt away. “Worry about her!”

Emma’s new armor was rent in a dozen places, and Benjamin could see she was bleeding from half of them, including from a pretty severe head wound, but she waved him away and pointed to her right. That was when they saw Nicole’s mangled body.

Until that moment, Benjamin had assumed that it was a corpse belonging to one of the slaves that had died in their sleep from the blast as this monster had come undone. His mind had assured him that he and his friends were invulnerable. They were the heroes of this story, and nothing could hurt them.

He was wrong on all counts.

Nicole had dodged all of the worst attacks almost until the end by using shadowstep to move out of the way. The spell lacked the range to get her far enough away from ground zero, though, and Benjamin somehow felt responsible for that, even though he wasn’t.

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was missing most of her left arm, and her entire left side had been abraded by the bone shrapnel.

To be honest, he was shocked that she was still alive, and all he could do was stand there while Matt rushed to her side and began to do what he could. Saving someone who had been put through a wood chipper didn’t seem possible, though.

Even casting moderate heal at the same time regrowth was already rolling on Nicole wasn’t enough, though. It only briefly brought her back to zero before she started to fall back into the negatives. That wasn’t enough to deter Matt, though.

“More!” he yelled, burning all of his mana in an attempt to stem her draining lifeblood. He was still injured badly enough that he wasn’t going to heal any time soon without stitches or spells. Benjamin could still see one jagged shard of bone sticking out of his friend’s guts, but Matt ignored it as he focused on the dying woman.

His face was pale, and his blood soaked through his clothes, and yet he still fought through the pain with gritted teeth. He should have devoted at least one of his spells to stopping his own bleeding, but he didn’t. It was horrific, and yet he wanted to deplete his own life that much faster just so he could cast another healing spell or two.

Benjamin did what his friend asked and used blood burn again. It was futile, though. There was just too much damage.

The trauma surgeon that his friend had hoped to become couldn’t have saved her. This woman would have been dead before the ambulance had gotten to the hospital in the real world, and no matter how hot Matt burned, and no matter how fast his life bar fell as he literally poured himself into Nicole, Benjamin just didn’t see her surviving this.

That was what Raja finally ran up. The man’s quiver was empty, but there were tears in his eyes as he ran to Nicole and held her one remaining hand. It broke Benjamin’s heart as he watched him hold her there silently, unable to say what might be on his mind. The two of them clearly had some kind of relationship, but unlike Matt and Emma, they’d been very private, so there was no saying how deep that had gotten.

At least not until now. The way he wept while she lay there with a sad, distant smile. Benjamin had often noticed that Matt’s healing had an almost narcotic effect in the short term as it pushed away the pain.

With the amount of magic, he forced into her to regenerate damaged organs and suture ruptured arteries, Benjamin doubted she was feeling anything at all, and when she finally closed her eyes, he doubted that she would ever open them again.