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

by Craig Hamilton

  Now that I looked like Pearce, I faked my leg injury when I came into view of the courthouse parking lot and staggered toward the gate. I couldn’t tell if the guard towers were even still manned, with the number of officers I had seen back at the ongoing fight, but no one seemed alarmed by my approach. The heavy gate doors retracted when I reached them, so no one had removed my access yet. I quickly limped over to the courthouse entrance and stepped inside.

  “Pearce, is everything all right?”

  Brian, the guard at the front desk, pushed himself up from his seat behind the counter, and I waved him back without speaking. The man paused, still behind the counter, and looked at me in confusion.

  If I spoke, my voice would not sound like Pearce’s and would give away my illusion. I hoped that the officer would stay behind the desk. I had no desire to kill the man just because he was in my way.

  A scream echoed down the hallway, and we both turned toward the sound.

  A black robed figure stalked down the hall toward the lobby, face twisted in an expression of rage. The judge clutched the upper arm of a young blond-haired girl in one hand. Tears ran down the girl's face as she was practically dragged behind the man, and my blood ran cold at the sight.

  “Why is my son dead, Pearce?” Beatty shouted. “I felt the link break. Why are you here and not my son?”

  The judge pulled a recognizable handgun, another of the ubiquitous pistols that almost all of the cops carried, from under his robes as he stopped less than a dozen paces from me and pressed the muzzle to the side of the little girl’s head.

  “Judge Beatty, what are you doing?” Brian said in horror.

  “I’ve lost my son, and now Pearce here is going to feel what it’s like to lose a child too,” the man snarled at the officer.

  “There’s just one problem with that,” I said.

  Brian’s head snapped toward me, clearly recognizing now that my voice was not Pearce’s.

  Before the officer could react, I stretched a hand toward the black-robed judge and cast Frostbolt. The shard of ice flew across the short distance and stabbed into the man’s shoulder. The impact knocked the gun forward, out of line with the girl’s head, and forced the judge backward a step.

  That step put space between the judge and his hostage, though he still held her firmly. I activated Hinder to slow the man and lunged across the distance between us as I drew my melee weapons.

  By the time the man had recovered his balance, my axe swung down into the space between the pair. I carefully angled the blade of the weapon just above his wrist to avoid the hostage, but the blow still sliced deep enough to chop into the bones of the forearm, and I heard an audible crack as both the radius and ulna shattered beneath the force of the strike.

  The judge instantly lost his grip on the girl, and she stumbled away with a shriek as blood spattered her face from the nearly severed arm. I pivoted and stepped around the judge to place my body between him and the child. I dropped the spell that disguised my appearance, since this conflict would ruin my cover however it turned out.

  Pain warred with hate on the man’s face as my appearance shifted, and he tried to swing his gun toward me, but I was inside his reach. The firearm discharged from the jarring impact as I batted the weapon aside with the knife held in my offhand. The shot was nowhere near me, and I grinned beneath the visor. That single shot was the only one he would manage.

  My next attack sliced the blade of my knife through the tendons of the judge’s wrist. The hand that held the gun flopped limp, the weapon falling to the floor before he could threaten to hurt anyone else.

  Despite the fact that the man was disarmed, I continued my attacks to keep him from activating any of his abilities. I certainly did not want to end up cursed with a judgment like the one on his son that reduced experience gains, so I could not afford mercy.

  When the judge only had a sliver of health remaining, I knelt over the gasping ruin of a man and leaned down beside his ear. My final attack had sliced the man’s throat and blood spurted as it pumped out of his body with each heartbeat. A tide of blood covered the floor beneath him. The man had only seconds left to live.

  “Pearce didn’t kill your son,” I whispered so quietly that only the dying man could hear me. “I did.”

  The man blinked and breathed his final breath before his body went still.

  I wiped my weapons on a mostly bloodless section of the man’s robes and sheathed them as I stood to face Brian, who still stood behind the desk with a shocked expression.

  “Daddy?”

  I glanced to the side and saw the tearful young girl cowering at the side of the hall. She looked around for her father with a confused expression. My disguise spell had faded, but she deserved to know I wasn’t her father. I pulled off the helmet.

  The little girl stared at me, and I saw fear fill her eyes once again.

  “Your dad isn’t here. Go find your mother,” I commanded softly, my eyes back on the officer in front of me.

  Tiny footsteps pattered away down the hall as the girl fled, and I continued my staredown with Brian.

  “You killed him,” the officer said.

  “Some people just need killing.” I shrugged. “It was him or the girl, so don’t pretend he didn’t deserve it. He was an even bigger piece of garbage than his son.”

  The man looked conflicted, and I saw the truth of my words hit home.

  “What do you want here?” Brian finally asked.

  “The Krym’parke,” I replied.

  The officer went pale and looked away nervously.

  “You knew,” I said after I saw the officer’s reaction. “You knew what they were and what they did to the prisoners.”

  The man seemed to deflate before my eyes.

  “We suspected,” Brian said hoarsely, but he refused to meet my gaze. “We didn’t know for sure. We had our families to look out for. They were more important.”

  “It was only a matter of time before they turned on you.” I shook my head. “They would have come for your families as soon as you couldn’t meet their demand for the flesh of others.”

  I turned away from the officer and put the helmet back on as I left the courthouse entrance. I wasn’t worried about Brian following. He might not have stood up for anything right, but he wouldn’t stop me now either.

  The halls were quiet, and I encountered no one as I followed the passages that led from the courthouse to the jail. Once in the prison complex, I took the same route I’d used when Pearce had led me through the building to the cafeteria.

  I froze in the middle of the hallway as a door swung open in front of me, and the alien butcher stepped out of the converted slaughterhouse room, a full platter of monster filets in one hand. The other hand held a keycard that the alien swiped over the lock beside the door, which flashed red.

  The Krym’parke paused when it saw me, then gave me a closer look. The alien’s yellow eyes narrowed, and it snarled. The alien dropped both the keycard and the platter as it lunged toward me, a knife suddenly appearing in hand. The wide blade looked like a thick butcher’s knife, but it extended to a sharp pointed tip.

  The platter bounced off the floor and scattered filets across the hall as the butcher reached me, but I had activated Hinder as soon as it lunged. The Class Skill slowed the alien just enough that I could draw my own weapons in time to parry the assault.

  The alien slashed at me with the butcher knife, and I hooked the alien’s wrist with the bottom of my axe blade as the knife slashed past. I tried to use the alien’s momentum to spin it around, but the Krym’parke nimbly twisted its arm and disengaged before I could apply any force.

  Side to side movement within the hallway was limited, so we could really only advance and retreat to control the space of the fight.

  I managed a slash across the alien’s tricep before it stepped back out of range and considered me. I’d triggered Rend, so the wound on its arm dripped blood. The cut was so minor that the butcher’s health bar
had barely dropped from the attack, even with my Class Skill active.

  The alien nodded to me and grinned menacingly before it launched back onto the offensive. Blades flashed between us, and we were soon covered in minor nicks that bled through the slashed fabric that had once covered our arms and torsos. The flurry of attacks slowed, and we broke apart, both breathing heavily.

  The pair of us were almost evenly matched on speed, and while I had an advantage in overall strength, the Krym’parke showed a raw mastery over the blade that I lacked. If I hadn’t kept Hinder activated on the alien, I would have been sliced apart already.

  With a moment of reflection afforded by the break in combat, I noticed that my wounds were bloodier than I would have expected for such shallow cuts. Clearly, my Rend was not the only bleed effect Class Skill in use here; the alien had used something similar on me. I cast Minor Healing on myself, and the bleed effect dissipated. Though the majority of my wounds remained, my health no longer continued to drop.

  The alien snarled when my wounds glowed slightly from my use of the healing spell.

  With no idea how the battle in the city might be going, I needed to end this fight before it dragged out too much longer.

  The alien obviously felt similarly, and we charged toward each other at the same time. Just before we clashed, I noticed that the alien had equipped a weapon in its offhand. The handle had a ring for the index finger to help secure the weapon in the alien’s grip, and the small blade was held in a reverse grip, curved forward like a claw.

  The alien’s arms blurred with speed as the Krym’parke crossed blades with me once again. The added speed must have been from another Class Skill, and this time I could not keep up. I barely managed to deflect the larger butcher knife with my own weapon, but the curved blade in the alien’s offhand slashed across my torso, ripping completely through my armored jumpsuit and digging through the muscles of my chest.

  I winced as pain tore through me, but I could not let the wound distract me now. Before the alien could follow up from the attack, I kicked the alien square in the chest and used the momentum to flip myself backward down the hall. The alien had been knocked from its feet by the blow and recovered by rolling backward. With both of us backing off, the space between us opened considerably.

  The alien grinned hungrily as blood from my chest wound dripped down my front and spattered onto the floor. The Krym’parke crouched in a ready stance, content to let me continue to bleed while my healing spell remained unavailable due to the length of its cooldown.

  I grinned back at the alien and sheathed my weapons. The alien’s brow furrowed, and its head tipped to the side in confusion.

  Then its yellow eyes grew wide as I flicked my wrist toward it, and my upgraded Frostbolt shot across the space between us to hit the alien in the chest. The Krym’parke staggered backward, rime spreading from the site where the spell had impacted and left a jagged shard of ice implanted in the center of the alien’s torso.

  When the alien recovered, it looked at me with an expression of fear, and I knew the fight was all but over. I opened fire with the pair of projectile pistols I had summoned while the alien took the hit from my spell.

  Slowed by the combined effects of Hinder and Frostbolt, the nimble alien failed to dodge my attacks. I offset my shots so that I alternated between the weapons and kept up a steady barrage of bullets. Each shot hammered into the alien with a deafening roar in the narrow hallway.

  The Krym’parke jerked with each impact even as it attempted to rush me under the fusillade of fire. With each step it took toward me, I backed off down the hallway to keep the range open as it advanced. When a pistol slide locked back with the magazine empty, I swapped it for a loaded spare from my Inventory. When the battered and bloody alien finally toppled to the floor, I poured a few extra shots into it until its health bar completely blacked out.

  Then I stood in the hall and reloaded my emptied weapons with the spare ammunition I carried. Only once I was prepared for another round of combat did I approach the fallen alien and loot the corpse.

  Since the alien’s blades were still clutched in its hands, I pried them free and added them to my Inventory. I noted that the claw-like blade was a karambit, but I would take the time to check out the full stats later.

  Once I had looted the few useful pieces of kit from the alien corpse, I chucked the body into my Meat Locker. It would take far too long to clean up the blood and empty brass that littered the hallway, but at least I wouldn’t leave a body lying around to mark my passage.

  I then scooped up the keycard the alien had dropped before the start of our fight, since I figured it might come in useful.

  Another cast of Minor Healing and a quick potion later, my health was recovering, so I left the area. The banging of pots and pans from the kitchen beyond the cafeteria meant that the non-combat staff still remained in the building, so I would need to avoid them unless I wanted another fight like the one I’d just had with the alien butcher.

  I crouched low and slipped past the cafeteria doors, then I headed up to the next level when I found the forbidden set of stairs just beyond the kitchen.

  I hadn’t been this far into the building previously, so this was new territory and my progress slowed once I reached the next floor. Most of the rooms were empty, but halfway through the floor, I found a locked door that failed to open when I tugged on it.

  When I swiped the butcher’s keycard over the lock plate beside the door, the light flashed green, and I heard a click. This time when I tugged on the door, it swung open, and I whistled in awe when the lights inside the room kicked on automatically.

  I couldn’t help myself.

  “Guns, lots of guns,” I said in my best movie quote voice despite my situation.

  I stepped through the door and into what had to be the armory mentioned by Zoey after the lizard fight.

  Racks of firearms behind clear glass doors ran along either side of the room. A futuristic but recognizable milling machine took up most of one corner, next to a similarly sleek drill press, and a massive Mana battery sat on the floor between them with connections running to both pieces of equipment. Next to the drill press sat a workbench that took up the rest of the rear wall. Above the workbench, a pegboard held a variety of differently sized hammers, screwdrivers, punches, calipers, and assorted other hand tools.

  Two tall tables filled the center of the room with just enough space around them for a half dozen or so people to clean their weapons at the same time. The center of each table held a caddy filled with bore snakes, solvents, oils, stacks of square cotton patches, and a variety of other gun cleaning supplies. The table’s surfaces were spotless and reflected the bright overhead lights.

  The neatly organized cleaning supplies and the pristine tables were in sharp contrast to the clutter that covered the workbench at the back of the room. When I walked over, I found pieces of metal scattered over the open work surface. A partially assembled weapon rested in a vise attached to the end of the worktable.

  I recognized the weapon as the standard sidearm used by the officers out on patrol, but this one was in poor condition. Pitted spots all over the weapon marred its surface, and there were a few areas of rust along the edges of the slide. The cracked grips made it almost look as though the weapon was about to fall apart.

  On the floor beneath the vise holding the ruined weapon sat an opened crate. I lifted the lid and peered inside to find it half filled with identical firearms in similar condition, all wrapped in thick, filmy waxed paper.

  I closed the lid and noticed the circular logo on the top of the crate. The emblem consisted of an eagle clutching a sheaf of arrows in its claws with a shield in the foreground. The circle around the eagle read “Civilian Marksmanship Program.”

  The CMP Sales program distributed government surplus firearms that had been in storage for decades, most commonly M1 Garand rifles. From the crate at my feet, I guessed the crate had come from a looted government storage depot.


  My eyes flicked from the crate, to the weapon in the vise, to the components on the workbench, and the puzzle pieces fell into place.

  The weapons started in a ruined condition and were disassembled. Someone with a System ability or Class Skill restored the individual components before everything was put back together as a functional System weapon.

  I admired the ingenuity.

  So much so that I would show my appreciation by liberating some of their work. From the collection around the room, someone had looted a government depot or a private collection. More than likely both.

  I turned to the racks and swiped a handful of the restored pistols for myself. Next to the pistols, the most common firearm in the glass cases were police issue AR-15 rifles. I grabbed a couple and added them to my weapon storage. The Right Tool for the Job Class Skill really paid for itself here, though I took the time to load each of the new weapons before I stored them away.

  Fortunately, beneath the weapons were shelves of ammunition in neatly stacked boxes that corresponded to the calibers fired by the weapons above them, which helped me ensure I had enough to fully load all of my loot. Then I pretty much cleaned out the rest of the supply.

  Ammo that didn’t cost me Credits? Score.

  When I reached the end of the rack, I found that the CMP depot wasn’t the only unusual source of weapons here.

  At the very end were a number of guns I had seen only in movies. I scooped up a pair of machine pistols, a couple Uzis, and even a massive hand cannon that was the largest revolver I had ever seen. I didn’t recognize the model by sight, since revolvers weren’t in use by the military and I hadn’t trained with anything that massive. The boxes of ammunition underneath the rack for the hand cannon were labeled as “.44 Magnum,” and I grabbed them all.

  My extra equipment storage provided by Right Tool for the Job was nearly full by the time I finished my looting spree through the armory. There were noticeable gaps in the shelves that marked where I had liberated either weapons or ammunition, but I hoped to be long gone before anyone noticed.