Fist Full of Credits: A New Apocalyptic LitRPG Series (System Apocalypse - Relentless Book 1)

by Craig Hamilton

  I stored my weapons into my Inventory and rotated midair so that I impacted feet-first into the daggermaw without a limb stuck into the turret.

  My kick launched the creature into the air, and it flipped twice before I lost sight of it on the other side of the vehicle. The monster with a claw stuck into the turret swung its head toward me, and I swung my boot into the side of its snout before it could take a bite at me. The attack knocked the creature’s head against the turret, and I spun around as I rebounded from the blow. I flipped onto my stomach and crawled onto the monster, pulling my knife once again. It weakly tried to throw me off, but with one limb still reaching into the turret, it failed to do much more than arch its back beneath me. I wrapped my legs around the creature to hold myself firmly onto its back while I plunged the knife into it repeatedly.

  The monster went limp eventually, and I pushed myself off of it to stand on top of the vehicle. I looked over the turret just in time to watch as Pearce crushed the skull of the lizard I had kicked off the vehicle with a devastating swing of his shock baton. Blood dripped from a number of wounds all over the sergeant’s lower legs and forearms, but nothing looked critical. The bracer that had generated his energy shield in the elemental fight sparked and trailed a faint haze of smoke as if shorted out.

  Zoey still stood on the hood, and her hands shook as she tried to awkwardly reload a pistol magazine while also holding the box of ammunition. Rounds pinged off the hood as her shaking hands dropped more than she managed to successfully load into the magazine. The officer’s pistol lay empty at her feet with the slide locked back. Now that I finally had a good look at the weapon, I noted that it definitely matched the firearm the goblins had asked me to track down.

  I glanced around to confirm that none of the daggermaws remained a threat. I saw only corpses. I wiped the blade of my knife on the scaly underside of the dead creature slumped beside me on the roof of the vehicle before I sheathed the weapon and tugged the dead monster’s front limb free from the turret’s bent armor. I ignored the faint sobs that babbled from within the turret as I kicked the carcass to the ground and jumped down from the vehicle to loot.

  “Is he okay?” Pearce asked me with a nod toward the vehicle.

  I shrugged. “Sounds like he’s still alive.”

  I returned to looting the monster carcasses, and it took me a few minutes to puzzle out my indifference to the young man’s survival.

  Besides the couple of daggermaws Kevin had taken out in his initial barrage, the youth had been relatively useless in the fight, especially once the Wolverine had crashed through the guardrail. While I understood that the sergeant had had the young man foisted on him by his superiors, Kevin was clearly not cut out for combat. I understood that sticking him in the turret was meant to offset his relatively low level with the turret’s firepower, but he lacked the skill to use the weapons effectively.

  The fight would have been much easier on all of us if the turret had adequately whittled down the lizards before they had surrounded us.

  The loot from the fight turned out to be fairly generous with a number of high-quality reptile skins, claws, and teeth. Even with the materials split four ways, I had enough for a good return on my next trip to the Shop. I also dropped a trio of the least damaged carcasses into Meat Locker for a donation to the kitchens back at the jail.

  By the time I finished looting, Kevin had emerged from the shelter of the Wolverine. His eyes were red, and tears streaked his face. Ugly red slashes covered his hands and forearms—defensive wounds from his attempts to fend off the daggermaw that had reached inside the turret. The sidearm remained holstered in his belt, not even drawn to be fired in his own defense.

  “Thank you, thank you,” Kevin babbled and stepped toward me, his arms wide for a hug.

  I pulled a weak health potion from my Inventory and pushed it into the young man’s hands to fend off his attempted hug. “Here, drink this. You’ll feel better.”

  Kevin blinked at me without understanding for a moment, then stared at the bottle of red liquid in his hand.

  Pearce arrived and took the young man by the shoulder. The sergeant helped Kevin drink the potion before escorting him over to the side of the road for a chat. I walked over to Zoey, who had finished her reload and gathered up all of the dropped rounds. The officer rubbed the back of her neck and holstered her pistol as she peered at the front of the Wolverine where it stuck through the guardrail and hung out over open air.

  “That looked like a nice pistol.” I nodded toward the weapon secured in the officer’s holster.

  “This?” Zoey asked and pulled the weapon back out.

  She ejected the magazine and cleared the chamber before handing it to me. I hefted it experimentally, as if for the first time, but now that I had my hands on it, I was confident it was an exact match for the weapons the goblins had wanted me to find.

  I just had to get the information I now possessed back to the casino to get paid for the quest.

  “It feels good in the hand,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

  I released the action and aimed it over the river, then nodded in satisfaction and cleared the weapon before I returned it to Zoey.

  “We’ve got an armory back at the jail on the second level. It’s got a bunch of System variants of traditional firearms that the warden’s benefactors have helped construct. Though we can only go up there with an escort. I’ll have to show you when we get back.” Zoey reloaded the pistol and holstered it once again. “How are we going to get this thing out?”

  “Pull on it?” I suggested.

  Zoey blinked.

  “With increased stats, we have superhuman strength, right?” I asked.

  “Right,” she replied.

  I could tell she was unconvinced, so I walked to the back of the Wolverine and tugged on the rear bumper. It seemed solid enough despite the claw marks gouged into the surface. I squatted and wrapped my hands around the underside of the bumper. A lip on the bottom of the fender made for a comfortable grip, and I heaved backward. The vehicle swayed toward me.

  Zoey stood alongside the vehicle watching, and I realized I had an opportunity. With my hands hidden beneath the vehicle, I pulled a translucent wafer the size of my thumbnail from my equipment storage and pressed it on the top side of the lip on the backside of the bumper.

  Ixodada Nanopatch

  This tracking device fuses with a target surface when applied and takes on both the surface appearance and texture of the target. The nanopatch uses ambient Mana to report the target’s location and movements, remaining in place until receiving a self-destruct command—after which the patch will disintegrate and leave no trace of its placement.

  Duration: 7 Galactic standard days

  “Come on,” I told Zoey once I no longer felt the wafer beneath my fingers, nodding to the space on the bumper beside me.

  The officer shook her head but joined me anyway.

  Together we pulled and felt the vehicle rock back noticeably. Pearce saw our attempt and joined us with Kevin. The four of us pulled on the rear of the vehicle, and it slowly scraped backward onto the street.

  Finally, after much sweating and a not-insignificant amount of cursing, the group of us managed to get all four tires of the Wolverine back onto the road. Pearce climbed into the driver's seat and started the vehicle.

  “I think we’re good,” the sergeant called.

  The rest of us boarded the vehicle, but once inside, I saw that Kevin stared at the turret with fear and reluctance. He was clearly unwilling to take his previous position in the gunner’s seat. Pearce looked back and saw the look on Kevin’s face. The sergeant frowned and looked at me. We needed someone up there, so I shrugged and crawled from my seat up into the turret housing.

  Daylight shone into the turret through the gaps between the armor plates. Those plates were twisted and slashed in places, but most of the armor remained in good shape. The weapons barrels protruded from the armored housing, but I had access to
their bodies inside the turret, and I quickly went through the process to clear the weapons for action. I was a little surprised by how much of the checklist remained muscle memory as I checked the ammunition feeds and chambered rounds in the pair of belt-fed weapons.

  Once I felt confident that the weapons had taken no damage from the fight, I settled into place. A pair of clips held a hammock-like sling attached to the inside rim of the turret, and I repositioned them slightly to hold myself comfortably in position at the weapon controls.

  A joystick on the rim beneath the weapons controlled the rotation of the turret, and I experimentally twisted it in either direction to get a sense for how the weapons would move.

  “Are you all good up there?” Pearce called from below.

  “Yep,” I replied. “I can handle this.”

  The Wolverine rolled into motion a second later and headed west down the street, in the direction we had been headed before running into the daggermaw lizards. Pearce steered around the worst of the craters that had been blasted into the street, but the vehicle bounced through the ones he couldn’t avoid.

  Beyond the craters, we passed the spot where the lizards had been gathered when we first spotted them. Blood and viscera lay smeared over tattered scraps of fabric on the pavement between the scattered remains of what had once been a person. Below me in the cabin, I heard Kevin retch at the horrific sight.

  “If you puke in here, you get to clean it up,” Pearce yelled. “Open the door.”

  The door cracked open, and Kevin upchucked even as Pearce drove down the street. Despite the vehicle’s movement, the acrid stench of bile filled the cabin and wafted up into the turret. I quickly rotated the turret so that the largest hole the lizards had pried between the armor plates faced forward, and fresh air flowed through to dampen the smell.

  After a few minutes, Kevin managed to get his stomach back under control and shut the door. Silence filled the vehicle after that, broken only by the wind that whistled through the turret as we continued the wrong way down the highway.

  Chapter 25

  We cruised along the empty stretch of highway as the road sloped upward before the lane of traffic curved south to cross over the Fort Pitt Bridge. Instead of following the road and continuing the wrong way, Pearce turned us sharply to the north and took the Liberty Avenue exit ramp that headed back toward the heart of downtown.

  I swung the turret left to see if I could catch a glimpse of Fort Duquesne as we coasted down the ramp, but the trees along the edges of Point State Park were in bloom and obscured the view beyond. I continued the rotation to point behind us to check our backtrail before I swept the turret the rest of the way around to point forward once again.

  With the lack of vehicle traffic throughout most of the city, pedestrians flowed on both the street and sidewalks along Liberty Avenue. The throng slowed us to a crawl as we left the exit ramp. Quite a few bikers pedaled through the crowded streets, but everyone cleared away from our path as we pushed ahead. Even though I made sure to keep the turret weapons pointed upward, we still got plenty of side-eyed glances.

  We had only gone about a block when movement above and to the left caught my eye, and I instinctively swung the turret toward the motion. An orange tentacle descended from a window high on the side of a gray brick tower to grab a woman from the brick pathway next to the building. The woman screamed and batted the fleshy appendage wrapped around her as she was pulled upward.

  “Contact left,” I shouted as I raised my aim to a point on the tentacle well above the struggling woman and squeezed the trigger on the 240G.

  The weapon roared and a stream of tracers punched into the tentacle. The rounds splattered green ichor onto the building, and stray rounds raised clouds of shattered brick around my target. Enough shots landed that the tentacle twitched and released the woman, who fell a story and a half to land heavily on the sidewalk below.

  I had absently noted that the crowd around us had mostly dispersed when I opened fire, so no one was close enough to provide immediate aid when the woman crumpled to the ground and dragged herself away from the building. Since I could do nothing for the woman from here, I kept my attention, and weapons fire, on the tentacle retracting into a window about halfway up the skyscraper. Sporadic attacks from some of the few other people who remained around belatedly joined the stream of fire that spat from the machine gun, but the tentacle retreated before most bystanders reacted into anything beyond immediate flight.

  Once the tentacle had disappeared, I eased up on the trigger. A few more gunshots echoed from others on the street before a ball of fire erupted against the wall next to the window, the detonation blasting out flames that scorched the gray stone of the tower.

  I glanced around and found that the street was almost completely clear, with the exception of the handful of people who had attempted to assist us once we had engaged the threat. A white-haired man in a leather vest hurried over to the injured woman, who had managed to crawl into the street while we had been attacking the monster. The man looked to be performing first aid or healing, but I lost sight of them as Pearce pulled the Wolverine over to the side of the split-lane road next to the building the monster had retreated into.

  “Are we going after it?” I called into the vehicle’s cabin.

  “We can’t very well let it continue grabbing people,” Pearce said.

  Unfortunately, the thing had been too far away for me to use Greater Observation on it, so I had no idea what we might be facing. I unhooked myself from the turret and dropped into the main compartment.

  “Oorah.” I grinned and pushed open the door to exit the vehicle.

  After I gave myself a quick once-over, I realized that only Pearce and Zoey were also checking over their gear. Kevin remained inside the Wolverine. I looked at Pearce, who shrugged when he saw me nod questioningly toward the vehicle with a raised eyebrow.

  “Someone’s got to keep an eye on our ride,” Pearce said.

  I shook my head and rolled my eyes. If I was in charge, I would never have let the young man out of my sight. Even beyond his dubious moral character, he had proved decidedly unreliable in a serious fight.

  When the two officers left the vehicle, I followed them across the wide brick sidewalk toward the main entrance to the building. A pair of revolving doors that led into the lobby were the only places where the glass had not been completely shattered. The lobby itself consisted of an arch set between two of the four equally sized wings of the cruciform-shaped building, and it was labeled in silver letters across the rotunda as Three Gateway Center.

  Broken glass crunched underfoot as we stepped inside with weapons drawn. Trash and other debris littered the area, but no immediate signs indicated the presence of any monsters. We passed an empty security desk at the rear of the lobby and passed a bank of elevators which sat with their doors partially pried open. Only one had an elevator car in place. The rest opened into empty shafts filled with darkness. Beyond the elevators, we found two sets of stairs, each set in opposite corners of the central column of the building where the wings of the cross-shaped building intersected.

  Pearce paused before he headed toward the southwestern stair doors, and I took the moment to read the signs by the stairs, noting that there was an underground parking structure beneath us.

  “This is more than a three-person job, but we work with what we have,” the sergeant said over his shoulder, gaze focused on the door in front of him. “We’re going to clear floor by floor. I don’t want anything sneaking up behind us when we get to that tentacle thing.”

  In an ideal world, we would have had at least two much larger teams to clear the building and assault up each stairwell simultaneously in a coordinated fashion. The rearguard from each team would secure each set of stairs so that nothing could slip past while the individual floors were cleared. But as Pearce said, we worked with what we had.

  “Sounds good,” Zoey agreed.

  “I’ll bring up the rear,” I said.

>   It felt odd for a moment, and I only realized why when I had a sudden flashback to before my medical discharge, my last combat operation as a Marine. I had been the tail-end Charlie then too.

  I shook off the feeling as Pearce stepped up next to the door. The sergeant held his wrist out in front of him as he reached the door, then nodded to Zoey. She pulled open the door for Pearce as the energy shield from the sergeant’s bracer snapped into place. Pearce stepped into the dark stairwell, and light flared from his bracer to illuminate the stairs. I held the door open with my foot for Zoey, who followed behind the sergeant, then I pulled my own tactical light as I entered the stairwell and closed the door quietly behind me.

  We climbed two flights of stairs before we reached the door that led to the next level. Pearce and Zoey stacked up on the door while I stepped past them to pull the door open. The two officers led the way, and I flowed through behind them.

  The officers had both turned left after they went through the door, toward the central intersection of the floor, so I went to the right. The hall ended just beyond the stairwell door and opened into a long rectangular space filled with rows of cubicles. Four support columns provided structural support for the wing, and there were no interior walls throughout the wide-open area. Sunshine poured into the space through large, evenly spaced square windows that ran the whole length of the structure’s three walls. With the light provided by the windows, I no longer needed my tac light, so I put the tool away and drew my knife instead. Anything that popped up from within the cubes would need to be dealt with at close range.

  I quickly checked each cube as I swept down one aisle between the rows to the far end, then returned back up the other side. When I got back to the stairs, Pearce and Zoey were just coming back to the main intersection from their checks of two other wings. I gave a quick shake of my head to the two officers. There were no signs of monsters here.