by Ryan DeBruyn
With a burst of body clenching fear, Rocky noticed what he had mistaken for shrinking was actually sinking. In mere moments, half of the giant cat was submerged under the solid earth. Rocky cried out and tried to pull her back above the surface without success. A few agonizing moments later, Sela was gone.
Rocky frantically dug at the ground, tears streaming down his cheeks, for an undetermined amount of time before he realized the futility of his actions.
Well shit.
Chapter Seventeen
The shock of losing his friend and guide wiped Rocky’s mind, and he sat there staring at torn up earth, hands covered in the ground he had attempted to dig through. Had someone just taken his Territory? What else could that have been?
His mind was chasing its tail again until one of the kids began shaking him desperately, trying to get his attention. The child's eyes had tears threatening, and he hissed, “Hunters would have heard your cat, sir! We need to move. They are probably already on their way or reporting to the men with guns.”
The boy was desperately looking over his shoulder and tugging on Rocky who was finally pulled out of his despondency. The other two boys also looked terrified but joined the first and tried to drag him from the spot. Unable to do anything for his short time friend and companion, Rocky slowly got to his feet and allowed them to succeed.
Before they left the area, Rocky did his best to try to erase their presence. Luckily, Sela was a ghost cat and had left no paw marks on the dirt leading to the solitary tree but she had left massive furrows where she had sunk. Frowning and looking at the fire pit, Rocky nodded to the children to mollify them and then lead them out of the valley.
His quick attempt to cover their tracks was probably pointless, but he managed to make it harder to tell how many of them there were.
Congratulations! You have earned a new skill Camouflage!
Current skill Weak-Camouflage Level 1
You have started on the path of covering your tracks and avoiding notice. True masters prevent making tracks in the first place.
Thanks, yeah because I should expect my giant cat companion to get sucked into the ground. In the future, I will put down a Puppy Potty Trainer. Fudge puddle notification, really.
Rocky silently led the three boys at his walking speed but their jogging speed into the forest to look for a hiding spot that would accommodate the group.
After an hour of searching, he found a cave that wasn’t too far from a lake. Figuring this would be a pretty safe place, they set up a camp. Doing some quick mental math, Rocky thought the cave was about an hour run outside of what used to be downtown Ottawa. That was at his current running speed, which would have been something akin to that of a full sprint for anyone pre-apocalypse.
The group began setting up the cooking area of the camp, and Rocky forced his mind to think of nothing else but the work. He knew he was attempting to avoid thinking about his loss, but he now had three young children to take care of, so each task that he went about seemed to be exaggerated, and the boys all chose to keep an awkward silence.
Each time Rocky had a moment’s break, he could feel his brain slide into a place he knew too well. He had been in that place before his trip to Algonquin, but he couldn’t go back. His family and these kids needed him. He wiped what few tears had leaked down his cheeks and continued to work.
Once the fire pit was ringed and they had some wood ready, Rocky took out one of his torches. Instead of lighting it or the fire right away, he grabbed a handful of stones and started tossing them one by one into the cave, waiting a random amount of time between each. After he had exhausted the handful of rocks and heard nothing, he took out his hatchet and sparked it off a stone wall to light the torch.
Face hardening and preparing for a fight, Rocky told the kids to stay put outside and went into the cave, taking it slowly. He hoped he would see any danger before it saw him. He also took every opportunity to burn any and all spider webs he came across. He wasn’t exactly afraid of spiders before this whole Ether Apocalypse, but he felt like meeting an arachnid after the turn would leave him feeling quite a bit differently.
Examining the entirety of the cave, he was unable to find anything that appeared overtly dangerous, so he went back outside to join the children, deciding it was past time he learned their names. He used the torch to light the fire. Then Rocky used Analyze on each in turn, but when he considered the action, he wondered if it was polite or not.
Jason Jackson
Apprentice-Fire Mage
Level 1
Oliver Grees
Apprentice-Ranger
Level 1
Alex Watt
Apprentice-Thief
Level 1
A sardonic smile came on to his face as Rocky realized he would never forget another person’s name ever again. He felt a moment of jubilance which was quickly brought back to earth by Jason informing him that his name was Jay and that no one called him Jason but his parents. This comment made the three children start crying again.
Smooth move, idiot!
Leaving the sobbing children, Rocky made a quick jaunt to the water to fill up water bottles. He was actually worried that they would dehydrate with the amount of crying they had been doing all day. When he returned and they were still crying, he sighed.
Rocky tried to keep busy and began cooking lunch for the group. Now that he had an excuse in the kids, he needed to track down some vegetables or vitamins for their growing bodies.
Problem is, I know very little about plants!
As he cooked, he considered his options; he clearly couldn’t make a jaunt all the way back to the Territory and pass this buck on to someone else—if he still had a Territory! He also couldn’t just leave the level one children alone in the woods, or he would come back to corpses.
His own predicament in the forefront of his mind, he thought about trying to distract them. Following that train of thought, Rocky came up with an immediate plan.
“Hey, guys, listen up. I have an essential task for you.” At his words, the three boys actually stopped crying and perked up, so Rocky hoped he was on the right track. “I am going to need to have a safe place to send people I find, and to do that, I am going to need to have some strong guards.”
Pausing for dramatic effect, he continued, “How would you three like to be the strong guards of this camp?”
The children immediately stopped crying and looked at Rocky with hunger in their eyes. In this new world, power was absolute. The fact that these children had just had their entire families destroyed by a group of men who were abusing power made Rocky’s blood boil, and he heard the rattle of a steel cage door inside his mind.
Rocky looked at his hands and noticed dark smoke coiling in and through his fingers. His inner demon was just begging him to release his rage and destroy everything that had harmed these children.
However, if the history of the world was anything to go by, it was probable that even the ‘military’ would be split, most thinking that they were doing everything to protect these people while only a select few were committing the atrocities.
The easiest way to control a person is to let them think they are looking at the entire picture while placing the frame exactly where you choose. If you can do that for each person, doling out only fractions of information and allowing them to pass on even less, then you create a false sense of knowledge, a delusion, perhaps even pride in a system they would normally oppose.
This was going to have to be handled with a finesse Rocky didn’t possess.
Rocky dismissed his anger and put those plans of revenge aside for later. He looked back up at the children who were also watching the dark black, liquid smoke which had just stopped roiling off his hands and collecting around his cross-legged lower body. “If you wish to help me, then we are going to train every day starting now. Can you all do that?”
The children nodded their heads, and so after a lunch of moose steak, the group got to work. Rocky handed two
small, similarly sized sticks to Alex, a large, quarterstaff sized walking stick to Jason, and after ripping up some of his ruined clothing, a very makeshift sling to Oliver.
“This is what we are starting with today. Have you placed your skill and stat points yet?” The children shook their heads, looking at the pitiful weaponry they had been passed. “I can’t teach you how to use most weapons, unfortunately, but I can show you how to stand and hold them. Probably.”
Rocky just shrugged at their wide-eyed looks. He wasn’t being modest in the slightest about his lack of weapon skills. The looks may have been because he had purposefully avoided handing out anything dangerous. Since he knew next to nothing about most weapons, he had given them sticks. Before he gave them real weaponry, he needed to make sure they weren’t going to accidentally stab themselves with it.
Not that stabbing themselves would be as big of a problem as it was before.
Also, Oliver would have to wait until tomorrow to receive a proper ranged weapon, and that was only if Rocky managed to procure one. “Okay, all of you come here. Do you know how to access your skill screens?”
The boys nodded and opened up windows that Rocky couldn’t see at first. His eyebrows raised in remembrance, and a thought later, he had requested access to their interface just as Sela had with him. It was a sobering reminder of Sela, but luckily, the kids were right there and needed his guidance now.
Once the screens were visual, Rocky had another surprise. The first extremely odd part about their skill windows was how much they differed from his and Sela’s. First, they would get a skill at one point in their first-class ability, which was going to increase their initial strength significantly. The second big difference was that the color of the windows each one showed him wasn’t the blue he associated with his own screen. Instead, it was gray, and again, Rocky was left to scratch his head, not understanding the reason.
He immediately knew which skill Jason, the mage, was going to take. It was between a fireball skill and firewall. It was a natural choice, considering he was hoping the kid would be a ranged damage dealer to start. Rocky hoped he wouldn’t need a firewall as a defense with a higher level like himself around.
If Rocky could get the kids close to level ten or possibly level six, then they would hopefully have a second skill.
It does seem a little unfair that I had to wait until level five to get a skill and they get it at level one. I am only now getting skills with one skill point, and I am in tier three of my tree.
The kids babbled as he decided where to place skill points with them. A pang reverberated in his chest when they told him that their parents were hoping they could learn more about the world before the children were forced to choose classes and stats.
They had only finally been allowed to choose a class when the decision to leave had been made. In fact, it was just because of this recent class selection and a hunter taking them out of the camp to level that they had survived.
The group had argued that they couldn’t have deadweight anymore, so despite the parents’ protests, the children had been told to choose a class and go with the hunter after the day’s journey and the camp had been set up. The hunter was to help them hit level five. However, just after the boys and the hunter left the camp, they had heard the military approach and the start of the conversation. They had hidden in the long grass but hadn’t been able to do anything too stunned by the bloody carnage. The stunned hunter they had been accompanying had managed to snap himself out of it a while later and even managed to kill three of the military men who had been left behind to loot the corpses, but a fourth stealthy man had ended him.
The last military man, who was heavily injured, had collected what weapons he could and struggled away towards the city. He had probably already notified the commander of what happened. The kids had waited and once they saw him run away, they had gone to their parents’ bodies and had stayed there the rest of the night until Rocky arrived shortly after as the sun rose.
By the end of the story, Alex, the thief, chose Stealth, and Rocky told him to begin working on sneaking around the campsite while he helped Oliver, the ranger, select his skill. This was a bit harder as it was a choice between speed and accuracy.
Rocky assumed that he could train himself to be more accurate with his shooting. In the long run, Alex would probably prefer the speed, but they needed the immediate protection and aid of skill enhanced accuracy; he told Oliver to pick that one. As for stat points, he was unwilling to have the boys assign them because he wondered if they would naturally be getting stronger as they grew.
Rocky furrowed his brow and tilted his head; he would at least wait until he could get more information on the expected growth of children from somewhere. He didn’t know if assigning stats would hinder the kids’ natural growth. However, he did tell them that if they were in immediate danger where they should put their five starting stat points.
The children began training and showing him notifications as they picked up new skills. Each ability made him feel more at ease with what he was doing as the kids grew increasingly more excited over the next few hours.
Hours later and just before what Rocky’s stomach and the sun were telling him should be dinner time, he gave Alex his hatchet and the survival knife. Unfortunately, he only had promises for the other two that he would find something for them. With that, the group left to hunt for their dinner.
Alex activated Stealth and phased mostly out of vision. However, if Rocky looked carefully, he could make out the boy’s shape and sometimes more. It depended on if he stepped on sticks or leaves that crackled.
Each time he made noise, it seemed that the skill would be disrupted as it siphoned off Ether to muffle the sound of the stick or leaf. As they walked, he gave them a strategy for attacking and told them he would only step in if the creature was above level five or it was getting too close.
In essence, he hoped that Alex could stop right in front between the two ranged dealers, not moving and thus not taxing his Stealth skill. The other two would mainly try to rain blows on the creature from afar.
At that point, the creature would choose one of two options, fight or flight. If it ran, the thief would throw his weapons. However, if the opponent charged the two, they were to maneuver it to pass by Alex who would then attack as it came by. Finally, if the creature was about to die, Alex was to throw his weapons to be included in the kill.
Rocky figured this was the safest and fastest way for the group to level against wildlife. That was if the monsters were low level. If the beasts were high level, they were to join in from range and let Rocky handle the brunt of it.
The best-laid plans are only viable until the first attack. The group came across a lone, level two black worker ant, and Rocky told the boys to get into position. Shortly after, a rock and fireball splashed against the ant’s carapace and elicited a strange, squealing squeak.
Black Worker Ant
Apprentice-Gatherer
Level 2
Once attacked, the lone ant chose to charge the group, but it didn’t make it. As instructed, Alex threw the axe to get included in the fight before it crashed to the ground, twitching in death throes. The three boys were ecstatic, and Alex stepped forward to collect the thrown axe when a noise flash froze the entire group.
The sound of hundreds of chiton legs crashing through the forest and against each other was the only warning they got as the first ant broke into the clearing. “Son of a cricket,” Rocky shouted as he unsheathed his sword.
Should have learned the last time that ants are bad news.
Then he released two single charge dark blade skills into the group of emerging soldier ants who were all level five or above. The waves managed to remove the front legs of many, and they crashed forward wailing, that same insect screech as fireballs and rocks flew at them.
Some of the stones were being thrown by Alex who was not willing to throw away his only remaining sharp weapon and was throwing acquired stones
from the back of the group. Seeing Alex at the back, throwing rocks, Rocky thought the kid was pretty smart, and he put himself in front of them all, between them and the group of charging insects.
The boys handled themselves well, only their eyes showing fear, but every so often, Rocky released a controlled dark blade to stop the advancing front wave. Unfortunately, each dark blade took just over fifteen percent of his personal Ether. While he was regaining it, slowly, he would run out if this fight continued.
Luckily, all the kids were smart, as proven by Jason’s fireballs suddenly increasing in size and Oliver’s strikes becoming more accurate. Smiling, Rocky assumed they had leveled, perhaps even a few times, and were assigning the skill points.
The battle was mostly a massacre from the beginning. This was mainly because any ants that weren’t missing legs and kept charging were individually targeted by Jason, Oliver, and to a much lesser extent, Alex. The ants couldn’t last long under the combined firepower of what Rocky confirmed with Analyze were now level four children.
It was quite intimidating, in fact. Rocky furrowed his brow and considered distractedly how he would fare under the combined fire of a group like this.
Shaking his head and hoping he didn’t have to find out, Rocky realized all that was left was cleanup. Leaving the clean up to the boys in hopes they may get more Etherience, Rocky began looting the corpses and cutting off the chitin and ant meat with practiced motions. While Rocky had no idea if the chitin would be useful, the meat, while a sickly green, would probably be edible, and if it was not palatable he would discard it later.
Rocky didn’t bother skinning and cutting up any more of the ants than what he managed as the boys worked, which was only two. Once the boys were done and all the corpses looted, the group moved on.
