Respawn: Lives 1-5 (Respawn LitRPG series Book 1)

by Arthur Stone

  He lowered Kitty to the ground, trying to dislodge her without troubling her leg. The quest failed. She dropped to the earth biting her lip hard in pain.

  “Does it hurt?” A sorry rhetorical attempt at sympathy.

  “No, of course not. I love getting sliced up by bullets!” Kitty began to re-wrap the split they had hurriedly patched together out of a few branches.

  “You need to see a doctor or something,” Rocky insisted.

  “Forget about doctors. Only healers are good here.”

  “You need a healer, then.”

  “If I remember the area correctly, the nearest decent stable is about two hundred miles away. Something close to that, anyway.”

  “What’s this ‘stable’ you’re always talking about?”

  “Not all clusters go through constant resets. It varies. Stables don’t reset at all, or at least very rarely, so settlements crop up inside them. The better stables almost always have a healer, and the best even have buildings similar to our old hospitals. But I’ll just have to wait until this heals by itself.”

  Rocky shook his head.

  “I hate to upset you, babe...”

  “Call me ‘babe’ one more time and you’ll have two broken legs,” Kitty snapped, her lips pursed, not maliciously but somehow quite persuasively.

  “Sheesh. Ungrateful girl. I carry her and she threatens to break my legs.”

  “You can leave me, if you want. I didn’t ask for this.”

  “Well, keep behaving yourself badly and I will. Look, there’s no way this is going away on its own. You have a hole straight through your leg filled with splinters of bone. Splinters of your bone. I know. I had to bind it up. It’s in bad shape.”

  “You think I’m ungrateful?” Kitty sounded almost offended.

  “Of course. I’m carrying you, I courageously saved you from that helicopter, and here you are saying you’ll break my legs. What does that make you?”

  “Just don’t get too friendly with me and your legs will be fine. Back to the helicopter, though. What did you do? And how?”

  “Nothing special, like I said. I picked up the rifle and fired five shots as quick as I could.”

  “Why as quick as you could?”

  “What point was there in delaying?”

  “Usually people aim, you know, not shoot the next bullet while the last is still in the air.”

  “I was in a hurry, Kitty. If he had gotten closer, we would have both been dead.”

  “I saw it all, Rocky. You shot at him like a madman. That rifle worked at near-automatic speed when you wielded it. And one round after the other punched straight through the glass into his chest and head. You started shooting when the chopper was about five hundred feet away and stopped when it was at two hundred. Not a single miss, and you weren’t even aiming. Nobody shoots like that.”

  “How could you see where the bullets were hitting?” Rocky wondered.

  “I’m all pumped, not a near-sighted invalid like you. My body just works better, and I lucked out with a good pair of eyes, anyway. You know that no one can be that accurate, right?”

  “It must be compensation for my knee, like you said. Remember that I had a shooting club receipt in my pocket.”

  “No one gets compensated that much. Compensation is just a small bump in something, like my increased flexibility. But your ‘compensation’ let you shoot down a helicopter with a rifle. No one will believe it! What’s your Accuracy at, by the way?”

  “What?”

  “Shit, there I go forgetting that you’re a total moron. How high have you pumped your Accuracy? What’s it at? Come on, I don’t know how to make this any clearer.”

  “OK, OK, just keep your calm. Your leg needs it.”

  “Then stop driving me up the wall! How much?”

  “My Accuracy is at five, with thirty-two progress points to the next level. If I have this right, I need twenty-eight more to hit six.”

  “Five is nothing. My Accuracy is twenty-six. That’s decent, but I could never pull off something like that. There’s something more serious here.”

  “Now you get it,” nodded Rocky. He pointed to his knee. “This is my problem. Our problem. I’d rather be an amputee.”

  “It’s that bad, huh?”

  “I can stumble along, but that’s just thanks to the adrenaline. I have plenty of it after the string of action sequences we just played through.” Rocky gestured back behind him with his thumb, towards the pillar of smoke rising from the crash site. “As soon as that adrenaline comes down, I’ll start limping like a half-midget. And that’s without a load on my back.”

  “Then lose the load,” said Kitty, her face hard.

  “Quick saying stupid things like that or I’ll start calling you ‘babe’ again,” sneered Rocky. He was not about to leave her.

  “OK, sure. Just say sorry to your legs in advance, since they’re about to split up in several places.”

  “Not that it’ll make a difference. I’ll collapse soon enough, anyway. Come on, Kitty, think. I’m no good with figuring out what to do in this world, but we’re clearly fucked here.”

  She nodded. “You’re right. I need to think. Give me a little lifejuice—my balance is starting to drop. Stress and trauma make it fall faster. Uh-oh. What’s that look for?”

  “We left the bottle in the car.”

  “In the car?” Kitty nearly leaped to her foot.

  “Right. No, don’t twitch like that.”

  “I’m twitching because our car burnt to a crisp!” The girl’s tone lowered. When she was this upset, her voice got as quiet as someone pretending to be dead.

  “That’s what happened.”

  “Wonderful. Now we have a real problem, Rocky.”

  “We’re not far from the city. I could be there and back in a couple of hours.”

  “Why?”

  “For booze.”

  “Oh, because that’s what we need right now.”

  “Look, I just want to make lifejuice.”

  “Forget it. It’ll take you forever to get to town on that leg, and the alcohol won’t help, anyway. The most important part of lifejuice is spores.”

  “You don’t have any spores left?”

  “I’m not a vending machine. And my Strength sucks. If that isn’t obvious. I can only bring tiny things with me when I respawn. One spore and the crystal.”

  “What about that secret box?”

  “You can’t send spores there. The only way to keep trophies from infecteds is in your hand, and even the strongest of us can’t take more than a dozen. The System limits us. So we’re without lifejuice. Which is what we both need most. And we’re both crippled, so we need a lot of it. Otherwise regeneration goes out the window.”

  “Come on, it can’t be that bad.”

  “No, it’s worse. But at least we managed to top off our meters. It will take about twenty-four hours for it to drop to harmful levels. Giving us one day to find shelter, food, water, and spores. As long as we have that, we can wait it out for a few days. Your leg will heal, no doubt about that, and I’ll at least be able to limp around on my own.”

  “No way. That bone has to be set and everything. It was blown to pieces!”

  “This world sets its own bones, and you don’t even notice it happening. As long as you have spores. Look, Rocky, I’m not good for anything right now, but I know this world, and you don’t. You won’t make it without me.”

  “I don’t think you know it that well at all.”

  “And what do you mean by that?”

  “I mean that you have no idea how I took down that helicopter. And you get other things confused here and there, too. But don’t worry. Even if half your head were missing, I would never leave you.”

  “I would certainly leave you. Why would anyone risk their life for a corpse?”

  “Look, Kitty, that’s your business, but I’ll do this my way. Of all the people here, you’re the first who has actually tried to help me. That is worth
something. I’ll never forget it. I don’t know how I’ll get you out of this, but I will. Just figure out where we should go! I doubt this spot is the best we have. What’s in the area?”

  “Nothing good.”

  “I should have guessed.”

  “The infecteds get smarter as they develop. They have some way of detecting a reset before it hits, so they leave the cluster. And the less developed beasts follow the big ones. But not for long. They know a new meal is about to arrive, so they return.”

  “I figured.”

  “Right, I guess you’ve seen it. If we end up in their path, it’s to respawn for us. The closer we are to a fresh cluster, the more dangerous our situation. That’s a universal rule in this world. So we need to push north.”

  “What’s north?”

  “How the hell should I know? I just explained. It’s away from the city. Best case scenario, we find a lonely building. Some kind of farm or forest cottage, something like that. Then we have to get spores. That will fall entirely to you. I’m not going to be any use there.”

  Kitty winced as she finished her sentence.

  “Does it hurt bad?”

  “No, like I said, I enjoy it.” The girl chuckled unhealthily, tears dripping from her eyes. “Why do you ask so many stupid questions? I’m fed up with all of this nonsense. Look, grab the gun and carry it on your shoulder. At all times. If we’re attacked, drop me. Immediately. Don’t worry about me hitting my leg as I fall or anything like that. Just drop me and fight back with all you’ve got, or it’s back to stupid town for us both. Try not to shoot the smaller ones. You can take them down without all the noise, since the big beasts like to run towards gunfire. And if they come for us, you’ll be dead before you can scream for mommy. They’re called elites because, well, they’re elite.”

  “I know.”

  “You know about elites? Have you seen one?”

  “Maybe I have. I’ve seen all kinds of monsters. Let’s get out of here, Kitty. I think I heard something. Grumbling, maybe.”

  “That’s your stomach growling. But fine, you’re right, let me back up. We don’t have time to chat here.”

  * * *

  Rocky sighed as he turned. “Another customer. With a wallet as empty as the last.”

  This ghoul looked pitiful. He wore a crumpled business suit, his left foot still sporting a patent leather shoe, while the right only had a lumpy, ugly sock. In life the man had been too embarrassed to let his bald spot show. Now his half-town wig flopped around on the side of his head. But this strange traveling couple excited him. He forgot everything else and headed for them, his badly sagging face gnawing and gnashing.

  Rocky had to give it to Kitty: Even though she had a crippling wound, she wasn’t letting herself become a whining wreck. She clung to his back, feeding him with all kinds of information as they walked. Despite her total failure at communicating these things systematically, Rocky managed to pick up a lot.

  For one thing, he was starting to understand how to classify the infecteds by their level of development and their age, if you could still refer to them in such human terms.

  The early levels were called “zeroes,” much like he had been. These infecteds just moped around slowly. Sometimes they could surge forward in jolts. If they went without food for too long, their strength waned and they were reduced to crawling. Their bodies were just beginning to reshape themselves, and many motor functions from their human lives remained unchanged. But each of their habits, their preferences, their behavior, their tastes, they were all gone. All their hygiene habits went out the window, too.

  The sluggish ghouls never washed or changed their clothes. When nature came calling, they didn’t look for a toilet. They didn’t even drop their pants. So the longer they lived, the dirtier their lower garments became. A ghoul who had lived long enough acquired an intensely repulsive smell and looked something like a poor village idiot who had suffered a catastrophic bowel disaster. The dirtier the creature, the higher your chances of finding a sporesac formed on the back of its head. It might even have a spore or two inside.

  Eventually, the forces of gravity would pull its pants and everything weighing them down off, but the creature’s hygiene would hardly improve otherwise. This stage of infected was quicker, but it couldn’t run yet. It would just move at a brisk walk, and occasionally charge forward about fifteen or thirty feet and then return to its normal speed.

  Rocky squinted at the approaching ghoul, remembering what Kitty had taught him about gathering information.

  Object: infected. Level 0. Chance of valuable loot: 0%. No Continental skills possible.

  His senses had been spot on. Another useless pile of flesh. It was slow, too. If he walked at a decent pace, he wouldn’t even have to fight it. It would just fall behind.

  But he couldn’t walk at a decent pace, so he would have to take it out. Rocky was already regretting his start, which had been too quick. He should have saved more of his strength for situations like this one. He could walk right now, sure, but only with a hobble. Maybe he could win a race against turtles, as long as it wasn’t a world championship or anything.

  “I’m going to let you down, Kitty. Watch your leg,” warned Rocky as he crouched down.

  He remembered the girl’s stern instructions not to warn her, but there was no point in hurling her to the ground when they were only facing a trivial threat. The first two times, his companion had been indignant about his refusal to obey, but by the third time she just waved it off. She had given up.

  With Kitty safely on the ground, Rocky stepped over to a knotted, thin piece of tree trunk that had fallen. It was a little big, but there was nothing more suitable within reach. He broke off a couple of poorly-placed branches, grabbed the trunk, and swung with all his might straight into the head of the filthy ghoul, which was already stretching out its hands towards him.

  A solid hit. The ex-man’s head collapsed inward, the knot jamming itself into a new bloody crevasse in the cranial bone. The foul-smelling freak collapsed and lay crookedly on its back, then stretched out and became motionless apart from its convulsing legs.

  Tossing away the unwieldy weapon, Rocky stepped back and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. Carting a human and guns across rough terrain was bad enough. Now he was swinging tree trunks, too.

  The weather was crap, too. Sticky, stuffy fog crept through the woods.

  Kitty didn’t even watch the fight. She was, as tradition dictated, fiddling with her splint, retying it. Rocky was sure it hadn’t loosened at all, since she hadn’t been putting any weight on it. But the girl noticed his weary look her way. “Time for a rest, maybe? You need it.”

  Rocky wasn’t about to say no to that. He collapsed to the ground, wiped more sweat from his brow, and voiced a concern. “We’re moving too slowly. Probably haven’t even made three miles yet.”

  “You’ll fall if you go any faster. How’s your leg now?”

  “Better than yours. Hey, why are there so many new infecteds in these woods? What are they doing here?”

  Kitty shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been here before. Maybe this cluster rebooted recently. Some digis like to leave their cities when the fun starts happening. They speed off into the wilderness, their thinking goes, they abandon their cars, and they start roaming around, looking for food. Their minds are shot by that point, so they have no idea that they should leave the woods and go back to town.”

  “So maybe we’re going the wrong way here. The further we go this way, the more and more of them we find. Maybe there’s another city cluster ahead of us. Then we’re really screwed.”

  “I doubt it. This is the coast, after all. The regional borders are far from us, and in this area the city clusters are usually pretty far from each other.”

  “With our luck so far, we might just run into the exception.”

  “Don’t panic. We’ll figure it out. Or lose another life. Big deal. Of course that would be bad,
but what can we do? Man, I wish I had some spec.”

  “Spec? What’s that?”

  “A drug. A substance that turns even the smartest man alive into a moron like you. But it can come in handy, as long as you avoid addiction. It is great at countering pain and fatigue, makes you a little stronger, and even boosts your regeneration speed.”

  “Sounds awesome. I didn’t know about it.”

  “Of course not. It’s made from webbing. Only thing the stuff is good for.”

  “Spiderweb?”

  “No, the black threads that sporesacs are packed with. The small infected have about twenty grams of the stuff, and one dose of spec is two kilograms.”

  “Meaning you have to kill a hundred of those things to get one shot of the stuff?” That’s crazy.

  “If we’re talking low-level ghouls. Around level ten, they have double the spec, and the most powerful monsters can have several kilograms. Hmm, have you noticed the weather changing?”

  Rocky lifted his head wearily, looking at the unnatural blue of the sky. Soon it would be covered by the lead-gray cloud crawling in from the northwest.

  “Looks like a storm is coming. Man, is it hot out!”

  “Those are bad clouds.”

  “Yeah, I see that. Like I said, storm.”

  “You see nothing. I’ve seen clouds like those before, many times. They sometimes occur when a large cluster resets nearby. This place has its own weather patterns, after all, caused by the sudden disappearance and appearance of huge masses of land. The new incoming cluster can have a slightly different temperature, for example, and that can have a big difference. And maybe there’s something else involved, too. I don’t really understand it. So the weather is about to begin some catastrophic devilry. We have to take shelter somewhere. I really don’t want that rain to come down on us. And fast. Seriously, those are bad clouds.”