Chapter 14

At the end of a set of nights you usually crash right away; but set an alarm to wake you in 3-4 hours. If you don’t, then you just sleep right through and will never turn back around to be on days with the rest of the world.

It’s a drag, and you’re a zombie until the next morning after a proper sleep. (well, not an actual zombie, I guess I need to clarify that these days).

I lay in bed after shutting the alarm off. Staying up for those hours after the nightshift with Leslie, The Bitch, and The Scumbag had made for a long day. I glanced at the silver lockbox and key. They were out of my inventory though I couldn’t recall removing them. Turning my bleary focus inwards, I checked my own inventory. Everything was accounted for, especially the special stolen weapons.

Thank Christ, I didn’t want to have to explain that one to Rodrigues again. I gotta dump these things somehow.

Sitting up, I recalled stealing the box from her before leaving. I’d been hurt, angry and embarrassed even though it was all my own doing. Hell, I’d even kept it to myself and there wasn’t anyone else to know.

Still, it hurt.

I picked up the box and key, unexpectedly came the giggles as I realized the symbolism of slowly sliding the key into the lock.

Being dopy after night shifts makes everything hilarious. Honestly, if you have a pile of silly or stupid jokes, drop them at 4am on a group of shift workers. They’ll go over like bombs.

The key turned and then stuck in the lock, but I was able to open the small box. All my silliest giggles died away at the sight of these three items. First up was a large yellow gem. It was faceted in a way I hadn’t seen ever before and was possibly the size of my thumb. The note box below it said $30,000 or 300 Silver. I thought that the Silver to Dollar exchange rate was screwy, but it’d be worth two health potions and still leave 50 Silver leftover.

Next up was a stone arrowhead, black with ripples and shining in the light with an edge that was nearly transparent. The title of it was ‘Puncture’: Piercing effect of bladed weapon +10%. Restriction: Non-melee weapon only. Not sure who would benefit from this besides archers. Definitely not Leslie.

Last up was a small brass scale. It looked like it was old and was built to be held up by hand. The title was “The Beam”. 2/3 that was all it said. Holding it in my hand felt ... odd like I was holding something valuable but incomplete. The sensation was vague but real to me. I was keeping this.

The other two items had value, but it was The Beam that captured my attention. Leslie could keep the damn ring; these scales were mine.

That said, I decided that enough of today was already wasted. You only get 72 hours off between a set of nights and the next set of days, and my first 24 was already half gone. Spending the first hour packing up boxes and the next one sorting out what I was going to keep was a quick way to make it to ‘training time’. I inhaled a pair of pizza pops, burning the roof of my mouth in the process and grabbed my gear before I hustled my ass to George’s ‘training camp’.

A special type of luck must have been with me, since class was cancelled because the team had a dive scheduled. One of their ‘Frontliners’ had gotten into a fender bender on the way over and couldn’t join (in fact, I’d driven past her on the way here). It was to be the second time this group was headed through Level 2. ‘Hey Albio, do you want to fill in?’

Hell yes.

Since I was leaving the area soon, I thought I’d poke around everyone’s inventory on the way. Nothing jumped out at me but a small wood hammer. It looked like something a Judge would bang, and in fact it came with what looked like a fancy wooden hockey puck to bang it on. I contemplated stealing it, but my requirement to steal something was filled for today already.

I climbed into my gear (I really had to get some specialist body armour soon; it was still pretty rare though) like everyone else was doing and looked about. Me with a large knife and small shield (as far as anyone else here knew) and a fella named Andrew (who called himself ‘Crush’) had a medium sized kite shield and a large black club. They both looked like wood, but I’d seen sharp axes just bounce off of both of them at one time or another.

The two ‘Midfielders’ had polearms. One was only about 9 feet long and had a large fan-shaped blade, she called herself ‘Rink’ oddly. The other guy had a traditional Pike of about 14 feet in length and unimaginatively named himself ‘Pike’.

The ‘Backfielders’ were ‘River’ who had a long slender bow, and ‘Iroquois’ who had a shorter, but wider one. Both ladies seemed more confident with their weapons than ‘O’ had ever been, and I wondered if Bows were more often given to women or if it was just a local coincidence.

We linked up, three guys and three girls. George had given us a short pep-talk after setting some rules of operation and engagement. It was pretty generic stuff, and we’d all heard it half a dozen times before.

We paused in the Start room, I took this chance to sell (for one lousy Silver each) the weapons I’d taken from Rodrigues’ perps. I was sad to get rid of that cleaver and the crossbow, but they were only taking up space in my inventory. If I’d ever let either of them go again, some criminal bastard could find himself armed and dangerous in a courtroom or patrol car, or an interview room.

That could get messy in a hurry.

Passing through the portal at the bottom of the stairs with the rest of the team, I was expecting another birch forest, but the trees were larger, and conifers. The smell was awesome.

“This forest is Larch, and the leaves hold back a little bit more daylight than what you see on level one. If you take too long in here, you either have to fight the damn Coyotes in the dark or find a tall tree and hide up there until dawn. They howl all fuckin’ night so let’s hope we can clear this place in less than four hours eh?” Crush joked. He was a lefty, and we were trying out putting our shields on the outside (which put me on the left) for the initial formation today. “Four hours, 30 coyotes, six Weapons. What could go wrong?”

I realized that because of the smaller number of times I’d been in the Portals, they had way more experience than I did, but I had way more stuff than others did. The one healing potion I still had in my inventory was one more than the rest of the team had. I’d never considered it, but we were woefully exposed to injury without a Healer.

The Coyotes in here met us in groups of four. With the archers help, we often thinned that to three quickly. Their preferred method of attack was to have two or three of them sneak from tree to tree (or rock to rock) right in front of us, keeping our attention forward while the other one (or sometimes two) circled to attack from the rear or the sides at which point the ones from the front would charge in. Without a group of at least 4 fighters you’d be hard pressed to fight off the whole pack of four, let alone the six (with one being the Boss) that came at us at the end.

With shields on the outside, coyotes were either funneled to middle where Crush and I cut ‘em down and broke ‘em up. It was that or they went wide and were easy targets for the polearms just behind us. The fan shaped blade that ‘Rink’ wielded never killed a coyote outright, but she never missed either and always supplied a deep gash that slowed it down considerably.

After six repetitions of largely the same fight, (four of the groups we found in the deep forest, one we came across in a meadow, and the last group jumped us from either side of a dry riverbed) we entered a small clearing where the Boss was supposed to be.

It would be hard to know if they just magically appeared, or if they were really that silent moving through the forest that ringed us but we eventually realized that they had surrounded us and were just keeping inside the tree line.

The howling started in unison, and it was deeply unsettling (for me at least). Cutting off the noise a few seconds later at the same time was a neat trick, and probably scarier than howling had been. Moments later they charged us out of the shadows.

I wound up being singled out by the big guy for some special attention, but each of the archers had managed to quickly kill one of the smaller ones at a distance and that freed up Pike who skewered the monster as he was charging in. I managed to bat his muzzle away and stick his neck a few times, but I think it was probably Pike who really finished him off. Our archers were in a holding pattern at the rear with Rink holding off the charges of the remainder of the pack while the arrows found any exposed flank or neck. They didn’t need the help, but I stood off to the side ‘on watch’ and tried to keep my eyes mostly on the forest and not the falling coyotes. I’d hate to be ambushed by a surprise reserve coyote that we hadn’t expected.