Arcane Apocalypse

14 – (Metal) Duck Hunting

“You know about it?” Mia asked in surprise.

“Yes,” Jeff nodded. “A few of them got in through the windows on the ground floor. They were a pain to hunt down, but there shouldn’t be any more of them in the building. I don’t think they can jump high enough to get in through the first floor windows either, or if they can, none managed it yet.”

“Rabbit monsters,” Mia mumbled, still bewildered. 

“And squirrels, foxes, rats, mice and just about every damned forest critter,” Jeff shrugged. “We suspect one of the Rifts spits them out, like we are rather sure one is the origin of the goblins and another the bird’s.”

“There were four rifts? Five?” Mia whispered, wracking her brain to remember their names as she followed a step behind Jeff.

“Five. Skypeaks, Earthen Burrows and Swarming Sewers are the level five ones and then there are the two level ten ones: Greentide Fortress and Forest of the Wolf King.” Jeff listed the names like they were common knowledge. Either he had stupid high Memory, or he wrote them down somewhere. “I believe we only have to worry about three. The goblin rift, the bird rift and the burrows with all the critters. The other two should be somewhere on the other side of the city.”

“I … see,” Mia grimaced. Rifts. The Realm Event wanted them to close as many as possible at the threat of … what? Blowing up the planet? That seemed a bit harsh for not destroying a magical rabbit factory or two.

But they could be closed. Destroyed. Someone just had to murder their way through the city and into the rift where they would probably have to fight a boss monster or something.

Maybe, if all the rifts in the city got destroyed, it would be safe to go out again. Mia could only hope there would be someone stupid and brave enough to go out there and do it. She sure as hell won’t go jumping into a fortress full of goblins, even at the threat of blowing up along with the planet.

There were worse ways to die than instant incineration.

Like being torn apart and eaten alive by a bunch of goblins, for example.

The rest of the walk was spent in silence, with Mia stewing over what she’d learned while Jeff’s natural state seemed to be stoic silence.

Mia took the opportunity to glance at one notification she’d been ignoring so far. It appeared a minute or so after she’d lost track of the rabbit, but she didn’t pay it much mind till now.

[Congratulations on prevailing over a superior and overwhelming number of foes]

[Do you wish to view Combat Logs?]

[Yes / No]

With a mental shrug, she clicked yes.

***

[You have killed: Goblin Raider - lvl 4]

[You have killed: Goblin Raider - lvl 3]

[You have killed: Goblin Raider - lvl 5]

[You have killed: Goblin Raider - lvl 4]

[You have killed: Juvenile Goblin Raider - lvl 2]

[You have killed: Juvenile Goblin Raider - lvl 2]

[You have killed: Juvenile Goblin Raider - lvl 1]

[You have killed: Juvenile Goblin Raider - lvl 1]

[You have killed: Juvenile Goblin Raider - lvl 2]

***

Juvenile. Mia grimaced as she thought back to the second group of surprisingly brainless goblins. Even if they were monsters, there was an innate repulsed shock to Mia as she realised she’d killed their young. Possibly children.

She shook her head with a slight frown. That group of goblins wouldn’t have cared if their meal was a still living human child and not their own dead kin. 

Don’t be stupid. She chastised herself. Don’t feel bad for the baby man-eating monsters. Who knows how many people they killed before I killed them? Good riddance.

Mia couldn't quite shake the last vestiges of discomfort, even if she knew what she’d done was both entirely justified and a good thing for every human with a heartbeat. I’ll get used to it. If we want to feel safe walking down the streets of the city, every single monster will need to be eradicated.

She distracted herself with something else instead. Experience. Or, XP points, rather. There were none. 

Bringing up her Interface and glaring at it didn’t reveal any hidden counters either, not even a progress bar or any other indication of who close she was to Levelling Up at any one time.

Annoying. Is the System just going all gung-ho and slaps me with a ‘level up’ whenever it feels like I deserve it or does it have an XP counter hidden away from me somewhere beneath its surface layers?

The same went for her Attribute points too, by the way. No percentile progress or any other identifier of how much more training the next point would take.

It was honestly shit game design. Overtly annoying and needlessly mysterious. If there were other physics bending Systems around on the market and this one didn’t have an absolute monopoly, she’d have considered switching over to another one.

Unfortunately, she’d have to deal with it. Whatever. At least she had rather sick gains for the insignificant quantity of mana she’d spent sniping.

Two levels, 6 stat points and an extra point in Manifestation. 

A grin tugged at the edge of her lips. Manifestation was an awesome stat, it already did wonders to how easily she could cast spells. Though probably Arcane Bolt’s simplicity and cheapness also played a part in its ease of use. 

She’d have to check whether Blast had gotten any less demanding to cast. She hoped it did. That spell was a veritable migraine factory. 

“In here,” Jeff said as he pushed the door of an apartment open. 

Mia followed after him just in time to see a young woman hop off the kitchen table where she sat a moment before. 

“Lina, this is Maria,” Jeff said as he came to a stop at the centre of the room and spun around to face the two girls. “Maria, this is Lina. I believe it would be for the best if the two of you worked together as a pair for this task.”

Mia turned to the young woman. She looked human for the most part, the only giveaway that she was a bit more were those wispy white eyes that looked like a mass of swirling clouds on a sunny day.

“Understood,” said Lina, turning to Mia with a determined expression. “Nice to meet you, I hope you don’t mind working together?”

Mia got distracted for a moment as the woman tilted her head and her sunny blonde locks danced through the air. 

Wait. Mia shook off her silliness. She was here to fight monstrous birds and protect the people who were going to make sure she didn’t starve to death. Not to make pretty girls awkward by staring at them like a loon. Her voice sounds a bit familiar. Where did I hear her before? Did we speak before?

“Uh, hi,” Mia said lamely. “Sure, I guess. But why do you think we’d be better off working together, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The question wasn’t directed at the pretty blonde, but at the perpetually stone faced landlord.

“From what I know of both of your abilities,” Jeff started to explain with his arms crossed. “Lina has the skills, or ‘Skill’ to stop the birds and throw them around, but not to finish them off. While you, Maria, have just the opposite. If I've assumed wrong, now is the time to speak up.”

Mia frowned, her gaze snapping back at those swirly white-grey eyes with a frown. The fact that barely anyone knew the extent of her magical abilities gave a non-insignificant measure of confidence to the young mage. Surprising someone with a Blast to the face was much more viable if they didn’t know you could shoot exploding arcane bolts. 

Still, she knew this reluctance to share or even show her magic was stupid and would be more detrimental than anything in both the short- and long run.

“I suppose,” Mia shrugged. “I was honestly a bit worried about actually hitting the birds with my spells, so if you can help me with that, I think we’ll be fine.”

“That I can do,” the girl grinned. “I stop them and you blast them to hell?”

“Sounds good to me,” Mia allowed herself a smile. Her smiles had been often described as ‘scheming’ or ‘venomous’, even when she was genuinely happy about something. She wiped it off of her face before the girl though Mia was planning to blast her head off instead of a monster’s.

“If there is a problem just shout or scream,” Jeff said as he strode past them towards the door. “I, or someone else will always be on standby on this floor in case anything gets closer than you are comfortable with.”

“Alright,” Mia said distractedly, much more interested in paying attention to her new partner’s expressions.

“Understood, sir,” the girl gave a sloppy salute. She didn’t seem to have noticed Mia’s strange smile, or just didn’t care. Once the door snapped shut behind Jeff, the blonde returned her attention to Mia. “Soooo, what sort of an attack do you have that can kill those birds? I can barely scratch their feathers even with my strongest Wind Blades.”

“Uhhh,” Mia stared awkwardly as Lina pushed into her personal space. She took a step back and held up a hand, which was thankfully enough to stop the blonde from closing the distance again. “First off, space. Second, you’ll see either way.”

“But we should know what the other can do to work better together … I think?” Lian tapped her cheek as a pensive look overtook her features, then shook away the uncertainty. “Yeah. Even if you don’t want to share, I’ll tell you what I can do at least. That should help a bit. I can manipulate the air, one of my Skills lets me crush the air into a single point, which can stop even those metal birds for a few seconds.”

“Crush the air?” Mia asked, then coloured a bit as she realised she was being a hypocritical bitch by asking about the girl’s powers after refusing to do so herself. She let out a sigh and decided to share just a bit about her own Skills, just to reciprocate Lina’s gesture, nothing more. “Fine. I’ll share the basics. The spell I’m going to use shoots off a projectile that explodes on impact. I’m not sure whether it’ll kill the bird outright, but it’ll melt and scrap its feathers around where it’s hit.”

With that said Mia strode past the taller girl before she could be pushed into a corner — either metaphorically or quite literally with how the blonde moved to step closer again just before Mia slid past her.

The flat itself was rather basic, similar to her and Mark’s but much less lived-in. Two small bedrooms, a bathroom and the rest shoved into a single space that served as the kitchen / living room / pantry. 

Mia walked over to one of the two barred windows overlooking the garden and peered out. 

Honestly, she never liked the place. There was nothing wrong with the garden itself, fashioned into a tiny park and a playground as it was, but holy hell were the walls surrounding it atrocious.

Three or maybe even four metres tall thick brick walls with only a single door on them which wouldn’t have looked out of place as the main gate of some mediaeval castle.

What were they called? Portcullis? Mia stared at the abomination a moment longer before her gaze snapped over to an even worse offender: the barbed wire running along the top of the walls.

All in all, the place was unnerving and always managed to make Mia feel like she was an inmate in a maximum security prison.

Now, those high walls, the thick iron door and the barbed wire were their first line of defence against the scavenging goblins and murderous critters on the other side of it.

“So, how did you get roped into bird-watching duty?” Lina asked, having joined Mia in surveying the walled garden. “I don’t remember seeing you among Jeff’s original fighters and neither do I remember seeing you after the meeting today.”

Mia glanced at the overly curious woman, ready to tell her to mind her own business. Not only was Mia stressed up to all hell, she also just had to sit around for hours watching distant goblins fuck around without being able to hit them with her spells. But then she played out the words once more and finally remembered why Lina sounded so familiar.

She was that girl that stepped up to ask Jeff to become a fighter. Mia felt a strange mix of envy for the other woman’s boldness and a fair bit of admiration. It banished most of her original annoyance, though it gave birth to a new wave of it right after.

“Beats me,” Mia murmured. “I suppose Jeff bullied me into coming.”

Meanwhile, she forced herself to do her actual job and squinted up at the sky for the glinting of metal under the sunlight.

“So you didn’t want to fight?” Lina asked. 

“Who wants to fight?” Mia grumbled. “I would have enlisted if I enjoyed fighting for my life.”

“Fair enough,” Lina said somberly.

Mia ignored her. Her eyesight was far from as formidable as her hearing, but her days of wearing glasses were officially over.

She had been short-sighted, not too badly, but she’d have had to wear glasses to drive since she couldn’t read even colossal letters on traffic signs if they were more than ten metres away from her.

Now, though, she spotted metallic monster after metallic monster. They were little more than blurry spots in the sky, hundreds of metres above ground, but she could see them even with the sun doing its best to blind her again.

Every now and then the birds dove like silver bullets, wings tucked in as they plummeted faster than Mia could track. 

One moment she saw a spit hundreds of metres away, then a few seconds later she’d see a bird rising from between lines of houses with a goblin held in its talons.

“Can you really track them?” Mia asked dubiously, worry starting to worm its way into her heart. “I can barely see them when they fly straight, and I’d have no hope of hitting them mid-dive.”

“Want to do a test run?” Lina asked. 

“What?” Mia gave the girl a side-glance, then leaned on the window sill to get a better view of the sky above. “There are no birds close by … I hope you aren’t planning on using someone as bait?”

“No,” Line gave her an angry glare, then huffed and pointed out the window. “Watch. Shoot the bird down if you can once I have them.”

“I’ll try,” Mia said, eyes fixed on the girl’s chest and then slowly, following a strange urge, roamed over her shoulder and then finally stopped on her fingers, which let out a soft whitish blue light. 

Mia blinked, then gasped as a wispy white mist flowed out of the girl's fingers and streaked out the window like an ethereal serpent.

Enthralled by the sight, Mia gaped and then let out a soft shudder. The wispy mist flowed out of her sight, heading straight up right after leaving the window behind, but Mia felt it still for a good few metres as it raced for the sky.

The feeling was familiar, reminiscent of how she could feel the wrongness in the creatures she came to refer to as monsters. But this was the exact opposite. If she had to liken it to something else, she’d say both sensation was a ‘taste’ but one was horrendously sour while the other had a silky smoothness that caressed her skin.

Well, not her skin. The mist didn’t touch her, but Mia could feel it still. It was weird. Very much so. 

“Ready?” Lina asked, brows creased in concentration as a bead of sweat trailed down her cheek. “I found one … I’ll have it in sight from the window in a moment … “

“What?” Mia snapped out of her daze. Replayed the words in her head then pressed her face up against the bars. “Uhh, I am, but my range is a bit limited. A hundred metres at most. Maybe a bit more now.”

Mana flowed from her core and Mia almost lost control of it when with a start she realised what she’d felt from the blonde girl. Mana. Monster mana, her own mana and the … air mage(?)’s mana?

Unfortunately, Mia’s own was a far cry from the comfortable breeze that was Lina’s. If she continued with the taste analogy, Lina’s mana was a soft cream, monster mana was a pile of decomposing fruit while her own was the sort of spicy taste that brought tears to one’s eyes and promised a painful retribution at the toilet the day after.

“Okay,” Lina murmured. “I’ll draw it closer. It should appear in your view in about … now!”

Mia didn’t hesitate. Arcane Blast had been held at her fingertips already, waiting to be let loose. Mia released her hold the moment she saw the glint of steel appear above the garden.

It struck the bird right in what went for its shoulder and with a burst of pink light, melted it to slag and sent the bird blasting towards the ground.

It gave a frantic one-winged attempt at lessening its fall. All in vain. Mia didn’t know how a bird covered in what looked like hundreds of kilos of metal could fly. As it slammed into the dirt, kicking up grass and upending metres of earth, she decided she could cross out some manner of weight reduction.

“Wow,” Lina whispered, then sent Mia a sunny smile. “That was awesome. How many of those can you shoot off? I’m already feeling exhausted.”

“A dozen?” Mia shrugged, squinting at the newly made miniature crater for any sign of the bird crawling out. “Should be more than enough if they don’t swarm us.”

“Great,” Lina hummed, eyes glinting in the sunlight as she joined Mia in eyeing the fallen monster. “Let’s kill as many of those as possible. I think we both need the levels. Plus Jeff offered extra food and water for any half-way intact bird corpse.”

“Huh?” Mia blinked, tilting her head in confusion. “Why?”

“Their feathers apparently make for superb daggers and spear-tips,” Lina shrugged. “Better than any kitchen knife or even combat knife we have. And those monsters grow them by the dozens.”

“I probably melted a good third of that.”

“Anything above zero feathers is better than I could have gotten by myself,” Lina smiled and gave a quick side-hug to Mia before spinning away and draping herself over the sofa like an exhausted cat. “You’re awesome. Let’s stick together, alright? We make a great monster stomping team.”

Mia forcefully relaxed her stiffened body and let out a sigh. When was the last time someone other than her mother hugged her? It was just a brief physical contact, but Mia was left staring out the window to hide her flushed cheeks.

It’s because she’s pretty, isn’t it? Stupid heart of mine? She mused as said idiotic organ continued to race. A deep breath later, when she felt confident her voice wouldn’t betray her, Mia answered.

“Sure,” she said. “I’d like that. I think.”