Fragged

by Zachariah Dracoulis

  So, if someone, Freddie for instance, were to start stumbling about, it stands to reason that he may find one of those claymores with a misstep and… well…

  FrederickTheMasterful has been slain (World).

  Now, me being me, I was excited about that, until the explosions started to rack up, a mix of the initial blast and Freddie's gibs firing every which way setting off the rest of the claymores.

  “Run!” I bellowed as I made a mad scramble for the nearest cover, making a mental note to reduce the amount of times I said that. With a cacophonous blast that sounded like a tornado got it on with an atom bomb, the rig exploded.

  I didn’t have a scratch on me, and a quick look around indicated that no one was seriously injured by the explosion, but I was stopped just short of breathing a sigh of a relief as something dawned on me.

  “Oh… tits…” I muttered as I watched the building that Pete and Bo had been camped up on collapsed in the middle, falling in on itself like a house of cards and kicking up so much dust and dirt that all I could see through the cloud were two little notifications.

  GeriatricSuperHero has been slain (World).

  Bo has been slain (World).

  We’d lost Pete.

  Our eyes in the sky, our sniper, gone because some shit stain had decided he wanted to try and take what we had.

  I was stunned to say the least, and that feeling didn’t go away as the dust settled and the true extent of the demolishment became clear.

  There was concrete everywhere, along with glass and no small amount of twisted metal and splintered wood.

  “Shit…” Chad breathed as we all slowly made our way over to the collapsed building, “That crate must’ve had one Hell of a payload, hey? Heh… Is-is there anything we can do?”

  Paul shook his head sorrowfully, “No, no, he’s…” he trailed off as he slowly grew a curious expression.

  At first I didn’t understand it, but then I looked over to the chuckling Miles, then at the slightly amused Brendo, and finally at the smirking Chad and the little synapses in my head started to switch and fire as a realisation dawned on me.

  “He’s gonna respawn.” I sighed with relief, “This is a video game… He’s gonna respawn.”

  Alright, alright, so maybe that was a pretty good indication that I needed to take a good long break from the brilliant world of Thren, but in all fairness we’d just come out of one Hell of a battle and I was tired, something that was only accentuated by the fact that as I looked around it became clear that we had a lot of utterly mundane and incredibly slow work to do.

  But hey, Zoey’s Fighters ain’t nothing if not hard-working, and there wasn’t a chance in Hell that we were going to let a little thing like the complete and utter demolition of most of our key defences and structures get us down.

  We had a massive influx of new folk, including a lot of NPCs that I was going to put to good use, and there wasn’t a single group with enough power left in Thren to stop us.

  We’d done it.

  We’d peaked.

  Funny thing about peaking though…

  FRAGGED 11

  Chapter One

  Okay, so I’m going to go ahead and speed-run this for you as best as I can for the simple reason that I’m lazy as fuck, and as much as I’m sure you think you want to hear all about the numerous bored spells I went through and the building of everything, I assure you that you don’t.

  Seriously, if we can get through this rundown without me getting bored and trailing off halfway through I will be shocked, shocked I tells you.

  Anyway, first things first, immediately following Freddie’s assault we were left with a lot of people, and I mean a lot, and what that meant was that we were in a uniquely complicated situation.

  Brendo’s men were quick to switch over to Zoey’s Fighters, but most of the others were hesitant to say the least.

  There were groups of five or six people who had no problem joining us, but there were also groups where it was one guy running a bunch of Freemen and barely controlled Rabids, and they were the ones that were proving to be the biggest problem.

  Rabids and Freemen are disposable after all, and when I made it clear that we’d be executing the Rabids that made them even antsier.

  With all that being said, everyone eventually fell in line, accepting that it was in their best interests to join us rather than try and go against us, especially considering they were in our compound and we could easily just start shooting at them while our dinos went to work trampling the stragglers.

  Oh, and I suppose I should quickly add that in, our rex died. It was all very sad, but I can honestly say that I was a little bit glad that I didn’t have to worry about it turning on the rest of our dinos.

  Anyway, because I’m only one person we decided it’d be for the best if we divided up the labour of leadership.

  Chad, with a few of Brendo’s men to help out, took back his position as our NPC handler with a newfound vigour, and even managed to set up a little breeding program for the dinos.

  That went supremely, especially seeing as the Js kept trying to get their steggies to mate with the trikes.

  Have to admit though, it was funny as shit.

  Chad ended up fixing the problem by constantly sending them on little recon missions, which mostly entailed them going as far as they could in one direction, coming back, then updating all our maps.

  He also did a really good job of getting our resources back up to where they needed to be.

  Then there was Brendo, he took over human operations, mostly because he had the most experience with that sort of thing outside of Pete, and he did a really good job of it too.

  Brendo also did a really good job on getting us some new uniforms. They were similar to his and Freddie’s troop’s old armour but with a purple, gold, and white colour scheme.

  I really liked them, made us feel a bit more legitimate in the grand scale of Thren groups.

  Oh, Pete! I almost forgot about Pete, he came back, safe and sound, and even seemed a little bit happy to restart after he got over his initial shit fit.

  He was also more than happy to take over a small sort of spec-ops group which I’d initially devised as a way to help him get back up to full strength, but he ended up doing so much more with it.

  Miles and Paul were in charge of making sure everything with the bunker went off without a hitch.

  Paul provided the design and near-insane dedication to making it perfect while Miles’ focus was ensuring that Paul didn’t extend beyond our property limits, which apparently the Metois had done a few times and ended up getting absolutely barraged by the various creatures of Thren.

  That leads me onto the next big development for Zoey’s Fighters.

  We did it.

  We actually fucking did it.

  Seriously, after all that trouble, after witnessing and directly contributing to the collapse of the Metois, after taking hit after hit, after digging in and claiming what we wanted, we’d finally fucking done it.

  We’d built the bunker.

  Tons upon tons of concrete poured down into a hole that stretched down thirty floors with each one having enough standing room to hold a couple hundred people.

  We’d managed to mine so many different precious metals and minerals, ranging from salt to pure titanium, which we used to make the wire fence that surrounded the compound’s land above ground.

  Titanium, not salt.

  Anyway, yeah, I suppose I should tell you what happened above ground, which is where I spent most of my time despite how much I wanted to watch the development of the bunker.

  Most of my time was spent just organising shit, which I didn’t hate nearly as much as I thought I would, and I think that that comes down to the fact that I could actually see where we were going and could picture the end goal.

  I spent the rest of what little time I had trying to get my skills up, but I never actually managed to get a single freaking point what with the constant distraction
s of leadership and shit.

  Hell, I didn’t even find time to sort out the level up I’d gotten at the end of the battle with Freddie, which gets me over to the subject of what happened with the original compound.

  Unsurprisingly, fuck all was actually salvageable, especially the structures, so we ended up just levelling the whole thing, including the walls, which, as I mentioned, we replaced with this sort of twin titanium wire fence.

  Paul got the idea from The Walking Dead, but the end result looked less ‘barricaded prison’ and more ‘weird running track’, if that makes any sense.

  The initial idea was to hold off players, but after what we’d done with… well, everything, the players weren’t exactly throwing themselves at us.

  Thren didn’t like that so much.

  Seriously, the amount of ‘random’ rex herds that had passed by was ridiculous.

  Yeah, you read that right, rex herds.

  Each one had four or five of the large carnivores, but not a single one of them had managed to breach the fence, and as long as everyone got within the perimeter they were safe.

  It wasn’t overly realistic, but I didn’t mind all that much, wasn’t like I was dying to have everything taken away from me.

  Muties and Bearies you ask? Well, that’s why we started having patrols instead of us all just staying down in the bunker all night.

  The Bearies weren’t so much of an issue, what with the fact that they weren’t exactly nimble, but one night a group of Muties had managed to, by some stroke of luck, climb the fences, crossed over to the hatch on the ground that opened into our twenty-person elevator, opened that, and got all the way to the bottom floor.

  We lost roughly a quarter of our Freemen before we managed to get downstairs and clear out the Muties, but that wasn’t so much of a problem considering how much those horny little bastards liked to breed with their high female-to-male ratio.

  I must’ve walked in on five separate orgies where there was one guy and anywhere up to ten women, and they were never doing it in their sleeping quarters. It was always in either the armoury or our little underground garden.

  Oh yeah, we had a subterranean garden.

  It was pretty fucking cool, and I can honestly say that I think it was one of the best ideas Paul had ever had.

  Want to know the craziest part of all that though?

  We managed to get it all done in less than a week.

  Seriously, took us around six days to get to the point where we were happy with what we had, and what’s more, we were actually growing in that time.

  Throughout the construction of the bunker we had more people requesting to join than we could process.

  By the end of it all Zoey’s Fighters population was at 461/550, and while a lot of those guys were basically reserves and spent most of their time wandering around Thren, it still made us one Hell of a force to be reckoned with.

  I think that pretty much gets you completely up to speed, and, to my grand surprise, I didn’t even fall asleep once.

  What? Fuck you, it was boring for me.

  Do you know how much of that was simply spent wandering around for me?

  Six days of epicness, and you want to hear about the time I accidentally dislodged part of the fence and had to put it together before anyone noticed?

  Seriously, it took me this long to speed-run.

  Get out of here, go on, it’s time for you to hear the rest of the real story.

  Chapter Two

  Special Trait Point used to purchase the Absolutely Savage perk.

  Ah, I see that you’ve gone ahead and decided to revert back to your childhood, you know, when you were raised by barn animals with your father, Jerry the Pig Fuc-armer… Anyway, enjoy your newfound ability to become exceptionally strong when you’re close to death, and eat human defecate to heal yourself. I’m serious, go eat some poop.

  “There, you happy?” I asked Paul as we made our third lap around the base’s fenced circuit.

  “Hey, I’m just sayin’ shit all else is happening,” Paul chuckled in response, adjusting his brand new uniform and shiny gun, “may as well finally use that point.”

  “Didn’t think that maybe I was saving it up?”

  “Honestly? No.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” I replied with a smile, not missing a beat, “Alright, so maybe I kinda sorta got distracted. Sue me.”

  “Heh, I’m not blaming you.” Paul clarified, turning a curious eye to the moon before looking back to me, “Still though, this is your fourth patrol in a row.”

  “Better than hangin’ out in the bowels of the base ‘til morning.” I huffed somewhat derisively.

  “True,” Paul admitted with a little nod, “but don’t you think there’s better shit to do?”

  “I reckon there’s a ton of better shit to do,” I said with a nonchalant shrug, “but it ain’t on me. My job is to make sure everyone else is doing their shit, and I’ve been a lot happier since I accepted that. Bored, but happier.”

  “Guess that’s a good thing.” Paul replied before realising what he’d said.

  “You ‘guess’ that’s a good thing?” I chuckled, “Well, I guess you can go fuck yourself.”

  Paul rolled his eyes in response, but clearly couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Didn’t matter though, we’d reached the first of the four gates that marked North, South, East, and West on both of the fences.

  “All good here.” Paul said after opening and closing both the internal and external gates a couple of times, “Anyway, what’s the plan for tomorrow? You wanna make a move for the city yet? Maybe try and take the spire?”

  “You kidding?” I scoffed, “I’m nowhere near doing anything like that yet. For now I think it’s for the best that we just sort of…”

  “Sit and wait?”

  I didn’t quite want to admit that that was my plan, mostly because it made me seem like a really boring leader without any goals, but I honestly couldn’t think of a better way of putting it.

  “You know what? Yeah, for now at least.” I finally replied confidently after a few seconds of failing to open my mouth, “Fact of the matter is I haven’t had a second to get on top of my skills since we started all this. If I’m not at the best point I can be, I’m useless to the lot of you.”

  “No complaints from me.” Paul said, surprising me, “To be perfectly honest, I’ve been getting a little bored myself. I know I’ve been doin’ stuff, but it’s felt so… pedestrian, you know?”

  “I know exactly what you mean, man.”

  Paul’s heart clearly broke a little when I called him ‘man’, but since we’d gotten started with the bunker he’d clearly been doing better with our whole… history.

  “Glad you get it.” Paul sighed with a little half-smile, “It mind sound a bit weird, but I kinda miss struggling.”

  “Me too.” I said, pretending that I didn’t notice Paul’s definite emotional droop, “Remember that shit when we first got Miles in the clan?”

  “Ha! Yes!” Paul laughed, “Man, that pissed him off so bad.”

  “Right? At first I thought I’d have to keep you two separated for the… I don’t know, however long we stuck together.”

  “Yeah, back when I was so sure it was just gonna be us against the world.” Paul replied before noticing the somewhat confused expression on my face, “I meant you, Chad, and I, goofball.”

  “Hey, don’t call me a goofball, goofball.”

  With the brief uncomfortable moment out of the way, I was glad that we could return to patrolling, occasionally checking over our M4s.

  Then we got to the South gates and opened the external one.

  “Leave it open!” I heard a voice shouting through the darkness of the forest.

  “Chad?” I asked with a little laugh as I watched him sprinting towards us, “You’re back a bit early, ain’t you?”

  Chad didn’t respond, instead opting to come running through the gate and opening the internal one, ja
mming the two gates open, before stopping just inside the compound.

  “Dude!” Paul barked as both he and I tried to break apart the sort of diagonal fence that Chad had created, “Shit, even the Freemen know not to do this shit. We’re gonna have to take this entire thing apar-”

  “No!” Chad practically yelped, “No, we gotta go, we gotta go now.”

  “What’re you-” I started then stopped as a Bearie slammed into the gates, its spikes just barely missing Paul and I, “Okay… Shit, um… Okay, were good, it’s trapped in there, and we’re in here. We’ll be fine.”

  Then another three came rolling into the back of the first, each one making the fence shake and damn near stopping my heart, but I still couldn’t help but smile as our defence held up.

  “See?” Paul said proudly, “Bearies can’t do shit against my-oh…”

  It took me a second to realise what had gone wrong, mostly because the Bearie that first started rolling around our circuit was out of view, but I had no problem picking it up when all four of the spikey fuckers started their Sonic-style rolling.

  “Oh, c’mon,” I groaned, “that’s just not fair.”

  “We runnin’?” Paul asked, ignoring the fact that Chad had already bolted for the hatch.

  “Yeah…” I replied with a somewhat dejected sigh, “Guess we’re runnin’.”

  Chapter Three

  “What happened?” I asked as I waited for Paul to slide through the hatch and into the large elevator below, at the same time as watching the Bearies whipping around the circuit towards the breach, “Seriously, how’d you run into four of them, Chad?”

  “I dunno, man,” Chad replied, clearly having calmed down some, “it was like… I don’t know, just a load of random shit kinda pointing me toward them.”

  The Bearies had finally reached the end of their track and were gearing up to attack me, which I probably should’ve expected given that I’d spent the last twenty seconds watching them.