It's strange, driving through abandoned houses and spotting the occasional dead and rotting body, the smell carrying through the wind. I know I should feel something for them. Pity. Sympathy. Grief. Something. I don’t though, just this hollow emptiness where the feelings should be. Pushing aside my own emotions over my own loss has left me with this emptiness, this coldness. Why should I cry for someone I didn’t know when I haven’t for those that I do? I can’t change the fact that they are dead, can’t make them come back alive. Dead is dead and there’s no point wasting any further thought on them. It’s cold and heartless, but it’s reality. What is, is.
The only good news I have is that you can flash cook some monster meat with a burst from my rifle. Having forgotten to bring lunch, this was a happy solution, if not particularly tasty. Still, food is food and it means I can move on to phase 2 of the plan.
If everything that is easy to reach by bicycle is taken care of, then I just need to range wider. Until I’m able to find a more general solution to the transportation problem though, closer is better since I can only carry one other with me. That means that the Lorne Mountain Community and eventually Carcross are the way to go. Decision made, I swing back out to Klondike Highway and gun it.
The Klondike has never been very well kept and it’s not much better now. Already, I can see potholes and depressions occurring and I wonder how many years it’ll be before the entire highway is useless, permafrost and lack of maintenance returning the Yukon back to its pristine state. Idle thoughts as I scan the forests on either side, a part of me for the first time really seeing my surroundings again. It’s a beautiful place, but the human can only take wonder for so long before it makes it mundane. Now, having to watch out for monsters that Ali might miss, I see it all again.
Forests that go on for as long as the eye can see, lakes a beautiful glacier green, snow-capped mountains in the backdrop. It’s no wonder we had a constant flow of tourists, a veritable horde of Southerners descending each summer in search of the untouched beauty of nature, that pioneer charm that city life in the south has been stripped of.
It’s all a lie of course. Among the trees are the occasional residence, the lodges and bread-and-breakfasts that catered to the tourists. All nestled away in the forest as they attempted to convince their guests they were part of the wilderness, all the while providing the benefits of electricity, the Internet and running water. Now the lodges and B&B’s lie empty, their occupants either dead or fled. No one wants to return to the pioneer days really, even the First Nation communities demand their rights to modern conveniences like running water, working schools and electricity. It’s no wonder – the wilderness is dirty, smelly and deadly.
Morbid thoughts are pushed aside as Ali bids me to pull over.
“So, remember how you mentioned you wanted to work on some of your skills?” Ali enquires, sweet as can be.
“Yeah…” I reply warily.
“Good. Transform the bike and grab your sword. There’s a nest of ants about 800 meters in. Chop chop time,” Ali grins.
Even as I do as he says, I can’t help but ask, “Why the sword?”
“That’s your personal weapon. And you couldn’t stop talking about how cool the Guard was in your videos.” Ali says.
“Okay,” I nod firmly, not bothering to hide my path through the woods. We still haven’t left the low zones yet, so this should be a good test.
The Erethran Honor Guard are feared for their combat abilities for a number of reasons. To start with, unlike many other groups, they don’t specialise in Tech or Magic, mixing and matching to suit the individual preferences of the Guard members. Unfortunately, I have only a single spell right now and it’s not one that I will likely need to use. The other reason they are feared is due to their Class skill, their ability to enhance their Personal Weapons, transforming even the simplest weapon into something truly deadly. I can’t do that either. To be frank and Ali can be Sally, I wouldn’t even qualify to join them.
However, if I ever want to make full use of my class, I need to start training the way they train. One thing that was very clear from the downloaded footage is that they make use of their personal weapons in a very unique way due to the fact the weapons are Soulbound. It’s entirely different from any fighting technique used by humanity too, which is why all I can do now is experiment.
Of course, first I have to find the damn Ants. “Ali, are you sure its 800 meters?”
I don’t need an answer since the Ants give me one, springing their ambush as I walk blindly into it. The first rushes out from behind a bush, closely followed by another. All around me, I can hear Ants the size of bulldogs come boiling out.
I drop into a reverse lunge, letting the Ant skewer itself on my blade. Instead of taking the time to extract the blade, I let go and I shift to my back-stretched supporting leg, ramming an elbow into the ant behind me. I hear carapace shatter and spot another Ant jump towards my face, its black mandibles nearly on me. I raise my hand in a cut, calling the soulbound sword into my hand. My control is slow, my commands hesitant and the sword appears half-way through the creature in a weird explosion of light, destroying the sword itself and the Ant and pelting me in heat and broken metal. It’s bad enough that I get a small damage alert from Sabre itself as the explosion tears apart some of the armor.
Ooops. Thrown onto my back from the attack, another Ant clamps itself onto my leg and another one attempts to bite through the armor in my torso. The first actually hurts a bit, its mandibles exerting pressure enough that I decide to take care of it with a swift jerking motion of my leg. I ignore the second Ant, its attacks insufficient to penetrate the thicker armor around my torso.
Time to get back to practising. A single failure is no reason to quit. I flip myself back onto my feet, the Ant in my middle dislodged from its futile attempts and I recall the sword to plunge into its back. More and more Ants swarm me and I start moving, lashing out with punches and kicks in my mecha, calling and recalling the sword at intervals. It’s a bit of a curb stomp really. The Ants can barely do any damage to me individually and I never stay still long enough for them to pile on, the added speed and strength that Sabre provides me allowing me to over-power even then five Ant team that had me held down for a moment.
It takes a long time for me to kill them all off though and when I’m done, I must have ranged over a hundred meters, smashing, stabbing and killing. Ali watches, popcorn in hand with an occasional warning or an even rarer useful piece of advice. Once I’ve recovered, I begin the slow process of looting the bodies.
“Any progress?” I grumble, touching another body and flicking the loot into my inventory. There’s got to be an easier way of doing this.
“Of course not. You think it’s that easy to get a new skill? Or increase your current skill level?” Ali snorts, shaking his head. “It takes years for Mastery to occur and you’re on the steepest part of the slope. Gains will take forever. This? This was a warmup.”
I grunt and get back to looting the corpses, each Ant removed of its chitinous outer shell and a slab of meat. Occasionally, I get even some mandibles, though god knows what that’s for. The entire looting process takes longer than the fight and I wonder if it’s even worth bringing the bodies back. Ants, even giant ants, don’t really have a lot of meat on their bodies.
No, better to get the move on if I want to actually make it to Mount Lorne at the very least. The community is isolated enough that I might actually find a survivor or two.