Chapter 67 (Patreon)

Chapter 67

The mission was threefold – figure out what was going on with the city concerning the people he needed to find, find some more food, and find a location that would be suitable Riven to stay in long term… if there even was one.  There hadn’t been any system notifications since leaving dungeon Negrada, but Athela was utterly certain there’d be more to come.

“Each integrating planet has its own unique trials!” Athela said to him, trying and failing to contain a smirk, right before he was to leave.  “Sometimes many of them, sometimes less.  Just depends, but they’re coming!”

Riven frowned at her expression under the shade of the canopy, and that frowned deepened whenever she started to outright snicker while covering up her mouth with her hands.  When Azmoth started to laugh a deep, guttural barking sound, Riven could only cross his arms.  "What's so funny?"

"You just look so handsome!" Athela said between giggles, meanwhile Azmoth continued to cackle.

Riven didn't notice the large red mustache drawn onto his face with Athela's webbing until he put his mask on.  When it stuck and he had a hard time prying the mask off, both demons began to howl with laughter even more loudly.

His eyes narrowed, but an amused grin spread across his lips.  "Ok.  So that's how we're going to play it huh?  I'll have you know I'm a master prankster!  You don't want this kind of war, girl."

***

Keeping his hood down over his eyes, his body moved at superhuman speed - moving three times faster than his outright sprint prior to his ascension into vampirism while utilizing little effort to do it.  The sun was beating down and he had to occasionally stick his hands in his cloak pockets in order not to get a debuff, but overall avoiding the light touching his skin wasn’t too much of a hassle.  Meanwhile the staff was attached to his back with a pair of straps he’d taken off one of the dead goblins that’d likely been meant for keeping prisoners or animals bound.

Trees began to disappear as he made his way into the plains where fields of green grass, buzzing bumblebees and beautiful wildflowers bloomed to life along either side of a long dirt road.  The mountain behind him loomed with frosted peaks and jagged edges, making him feel small whenever he looked back.

The city in front of him was coming closer as the foothills completely gave way to flatter plains, and he began to make out buildings from a little ways off between a trio of lower-lying hills.  Further beyond the town and into the east: the plains led out into a sprawling sea of grasslands and rivers before turning into patches of forests in the furthest reaches of his vision.

It wasn’t but another hundred yards before he slowed his sprint, hardly having broken a sweat despite the long run, as his boots touched down onto a road made of familiar cement.  There was a stark contrast between where the road and dirt path connected, and it looked like they’d almost been taken out of two completely different puzzles and placed alongside one another in cookie-cutter fashion.  Even the grass, which had been a luscious green, was now slightly less vibrant in a noticeable straight line that struck out to his right and left – and beyond it even the trees were different.  The change was subtle, but the leaves were certainly different when Riven looked closely.  The oaks and evergreens that’d been present beyond the plains’s edge and into the forest were now being replaced by small numbers of scattered maple trees, something that hadn’t been present at all up until the city’s border along that perfectly straight line.

How odd.  Perhaps this is what the administrator had been talking about when it’d said his world was being meshed with two others?  It was like two jigsaw puzzle pieces, albeit somewhat similar, had been slapped together.

The paved road led him around the small hill, presenting a main street that led into the heart of the city by a long way before disappearing with a curve about a mile out.  Light poles, store fronts, houses and familiar English lettering on street signs was obviously present with a typical modern American-style architecture.  It was definitely from Earth, and now that he was up close – he still couldn’t decide whether or not it would be classified as a large town or a small city.

The odd part about seeing this was… the street was deserted.

There were broken down cars scattered down the length of the road, two of which had been lit aflame and were smoking as they burned.  A couple dogs barked in the distance, and even a gunshot was heard in the far distance… though nobody immediately presented themselves out in the open.  He briefly remembered how monsters had started spawning all around the world before civilization had turned upside-down with the chaos it brought.  Guess it made sense… seeing this place the way it was.

Surely there would be survivors though…

That’s when he saw the big, blue road sign on the left-hand side.  It Read: ‘Welcome to Brightsburg, Virginia!  Home of the Fighting Prairie Dogs!’ in large yellow letters.

He snickered at the thought of prairie dogs fighting.  Must be a highschool or college, but it wasn’t any college he’d ever heard of.  He’d been too poor to afford a college education anyways and hadn’t really had an interest in them because of that, and even though he’d been smart and gotten good grades in school – he’d dropped out early in order to help take care of his family.

His hand reached over his back to grip the staff strapped there with a tight grip when he caught a brief glimpse of motion within a backyard to his left and pulled it out to hold in front of him.  Turning to the fenced-off area, he squinted.  Nothing presented itself again though, and the heartbeat he’d heard began to fade into the distance.  He shrugged it off and kept moving – wishing he’d still had a belt so that he didn’t have to carry this damn staff everywhere, but he’d rather have it than not even if it did make traveling at high speed a little less fluid.

With a grunt, he casually strolled down the road and down the main street – hoping he’d find some clue as to what was going on here and if there was anybody worth talking to still alive.

He came across a Walmart Supercenter, completely ransacked of all supplies with a couple of fresh bodies along the entrance area where a gunfight had obviously broken out.  He visited a Best Buy, a McDonald’s, and even a Home Depot.  Only the home depot had supplies that were still intact, and even some of those were gone.  In each of these places the electricity wasn’t working, creating dark interiors in each.  Running water wasn’t working properly whenever he came across a drinking fountain or sink, and as Riven continued further into the city’s interior over the next couple hours at a slow walking pace – he began to see more signs of smoke and fire.

He turned down a side street into the suburbs, trying to stick to the shadows of the scattered maple trees along the sides of the roads.  Still, there were no cars – no motorcycles – and no signs of any electricity being used.  An hour into casually walking the streets and he was beginning to get discouraged about finding anyone, until he spotted a middle aged man and woman jump a fence to his right and sprint across the road in front of him – stopping only momentarily in shock at seeing him before screaming at him to run.

“GET AWAY!” the brunette woman shrieked.  Her clothes were ripped, bloodied, and she ran with a limp while holding her bleeding side.  “SLAVERS ARE COMING THIS WAY!  GO!”

Riven raised an eyebrow as the skinny man tugged at his companion, whispering frantically at her before they began running again towards the houses on the left.  Slavers?  Here in what was very recently a piece of Virginia?

The man and woman continued onwards down the cement street a bit on Riven’s left, panting at the exertion and fumbling with a pair of keys at a doorway as Riven took the hint and got behind a nearby minivan to hide.  Curiously glancing over the windows and seeing out through the other side, he watched and heard as four bigger men clambered the fence after the duo.  Two bald, muscular white guys with tattoos wore gray wife-beater tank tops and golden chains.  The next guy had a mohawk and a machete while wearing a leather jacket, with another African American guy wielding a shotgun jumping the fence after them.

“Hurry it up!” the guy with the mohawk snarled at his comrades as he tore after the two fleeing people that’d just entered a two-story, boarded up house to slam the door behind them.

The house had a white painted exterior up top with a brick first story.  The glass along some of the windows had been shattered, but each of them on both floors was boarded up with numerous planks nailed into the interior side.  The door itself was wooden with a circular glass window, but the brief glance inside before the two people had slammed it behind them showed Riven that they’d reinforced the door on the interior as well.

Gliding down the street after the four chasing men as they came up to the door, Riven curiously watched to see what would happen.  He had to quickly step to the left, hiding behind a tree when he caught the guy with the shotgun turning in his direction – but successfully avoided detection.  He didn’t think his body would be able to withstand a shotgun blast at close range even with his newfound prowess, so he’d have to be careful here if he wanted to intervene in any way.

Riven peered back around the thick trunk of the maple tree, lips curling as the two men in wife-beaters took turns ramming the front door while the guy with the shotgun kicked open the fence to the backyard and circled the house to make sure they’d not escape.

“WE’RE COMING IN MY PRETTY!” cackled the machete-wielding, leather clad man that Riven designated as ‘Mowhawk’ in his head.

Designating the two wifebeaters as cronie 1 and cronie 2, and the black guy with the shotgun as ‘shottgun guy’, he quickly came to dislike all of them and realized that the woman who’d warned Riven had been absolutely right about their intentions.

“Oh don’t be shy!“ Mohawk crowed while waving around his machete at one of the windows, spitting and working himself into a frenzy: “A life of forced labor isn’t that bad!  Come on and let us in, and we may be a bit nicer when handling you before putting you both on sale!”

Yup.  That’s all Riven needed to hear.

A scream from the other side of the house, the sound of a quickly slamming door, and a follow up blast from a shotgun made Riven scowl.  Lunging across to his left and into the adjacent house’s back fence, he vaulted over the wooden pickets and rushed towards the opposite side.

“Are you going to kill them!?” Athela asked excitedly, appearing out of nowhere to his left and almost causing him to scream in startled surprise.  “How kinky!”

Athela was perched on the balls of her feet with a manic smile, setting herself promptly behind where Riven had been looking at just a moment before.

“Kinky!?” Riven whispered in a snarl before coming to a stop at the edge of the bordering fence between the house at his back-right and the house that was being broken into on his front-right.  “How the fuck is that kinky?  Where the fuck did you even come from and why can’t I hear your heartbeat?!  How’d you sneak up on me like that!”

“It’s an ability I have.  I can silence myself and do all kinds of sneaky things since my evolution!  Though you did actually sense me earlier when you first entered the town… kinda disappointing really.  I’d been doing so good up until then.”

“That was you behind the fence?  And aren’t you supposed to be watching the elves?”

“Nah.  Azmoth has them covered.  Now… How about we capture them for torturing and..."  She abruptly paused like a deer in the headlights.  Her excited grin melted away, and she looked down at the ground with mild amounts of shame.  "Oh, wait.  Sorry, I'd forgotten you asked me to stop that kind of teasing.  Bad habits die hard."

Athela gave him a sheepish smile.  "I'll do better, I promise."

Riven's features softened slightly, and he gave her an appreciative nod.  "Thanks.  For the record though, it isn't that I mind you getting excited about fighting.  I know you enjoy it.  I just don't want you to tease me about killing innocent people.  Regardless, I appreciate the effort."

She beamed at the praise with a warm smile, clasping her hands in front of her and looking like she'd just gotten an A+ on a test in school.

Their hushed whispers came to an end as Riven examined the scene again.  Shotgun guy had blown a small hole through the door halfway up and was kicking at it as screams of pain and fear echoed out from the back.

“LEAVE US ALONE!” the woman’s voice cried out as a pleading, wavering sob amidst the ruckus.  “PLEASE LEAVE!”