The day after that exciting night, I met back up with my squad.
Of course, seeing Umara again was fun. It was like I was teasing her with every glance I gave her, just the two of us aware of what was different.
I had a smile on my face all day while she tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible. Part of me just wanted to go up and give her a kiss on the cheek, just to embarrass her. But I held myself back.
Although I hadn’t grown up in this world, enough time and interaction had made me understand that social customs weren’t the same as America on Earth.
Everyone was generally more reserved and modest, more so resembling 20th century America rather than the 21st century.
This meant that there wouldn’t be any sex after the third date. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if we barely started kissing by that point.
I understood that everything would move slower. Not that this changed the way I thought about things. From my experience, I was used to things moving much faster. While I was willing to wait for things like sex, I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to do something like wait until marriage, even though according to my own religious belief system, that was the standard.
At the very least, I would be pushing our intimacy forward as best I could. That was simply the way I did things.
Before all that though, we would need to have our first date. Which, considering the circumstances, wouldn’t be easy.
There really wasn’t much to do on this military base, especially not alone. The recreation room always had people in it and I wasn’t interested in having our date in a room full of sweaty knights.
There weren’t any restaurants, clubs, or any other fun places to go either. In fact, the best candidate for a date given the bare requirements was probably the chapel.
So unless we went AWOL, sneaking onto the Rail and going back to the city, having a date would be close to impossible.
However, after some thinking, I realized that not all hope would be lost. There was still one activity that could give us both alone time and a good location.
Missions.
After the sudden siege, a few days were spent simply recuperating. Shockingly, there were zero deaths during that time, though there were a few critical injuries like some severed limbs.
But it ended very well, all things considered. And afterward, the cleanup was taken care of swiftly.
So I spent most of my free time with my squad, all of us just hanging out and having fun. We would also find other squads to play games with, and on the training grounds there was frequent sparing ongoing. I also spent a lot of time studying my formation. That alone took up 3-5 hours of my day since I would get so engrossed.
But eventually we were put to work. When the second week of our stay started, there was a large list of missions suddenly posted.
Like that, all the Elite squads were called to report early in the morning. So the night before, we all went to bed eagerly.
……
“You have your armor prepared?”
Feiden asked from across our room. I could see him preparing all his own gear with familiarity.
Feiden wore a full set of armor, but he also had some special items like recovery pills similar to what I used to carry.
Since I had very little to prepare, I just nodded.
“Yea, I’m good.”
“Do you even have armor?”
“Yea, it’s my coat.”
“That thing?”
He looked at the coat hanging on the corner of my bed with curiosity.
It looked like a normal black coat unless you inspected it closely and found the purple lines. So to most people, I just really liked the coat and wore it all the time. Not that it was a false assumption, but the main reason I wore it was for its protection.
But I didn’t need people knowing how amazing it was. Even I didn’t completely understand how high quality it was. So I gave him a succinct answer.
“I can’t wear heavy armor like you guys, so that coat acts as light armor.”
“I see. What about your feet and head?”
“I have boots. As for my head, I can’t say I really have anything for it. Plus, I need my eyes for my weapons, so no helmets.”
“Makes sense.”
Feiden nodded. He had seen my weapons, so he generally knew that my sight was important when working with them.
After that, Feiden went back to preparing his gear. I, on the other hand, started messing with my Aerial.
Before leaving, Sawn had given me some special instructions. First, I needed to access the Web. And second, I needed to test out the local communication functions.
The second part was easy. With a press of the button I could turn my Aerial into a local Node and allow anybody nearby to share communications with each other. Under normal circumstances you had to be connected to a city’s Node in order to send messages, but since my Aerial became that, I could act as the server for everyone in my group.
It would be great for our mission. Not only that, but I could contact someone back at base if we were ever in trouble since my Aerial had a much longer range than normal one.
It was the first part, accessing the Web, that proved to be more difficult.
Simply getting there was easy. There was the equivalent of an App on the Aerial that brought me to a rudimentary browser. I could search for and access Nodes from there. The issue was actually finding a Node to connect to.
There wasn’t much of a search engine yet, so sifting through Nodes was like looking through a phone book.
I had actually started going through them during my free time. While doing so I saw many interesting Nodes. Most of them required some kind of authorization to access.
But shockingly, this didn’t prevent me from accessing them. I could only assume that my Aerial had some advanced permissions because I directly bypassed the authorization process every time.
Because of that, I actually managed to view the Magisterium’s Node that held hundreds of research documents and information. I didn’t go through it all but did indeed stash the name of the Node for later.
There were many others just like it including some shady private Nodes that I didn’t care to stick around in. But above all these, I kept an eye out for my main target.
And while Feiden went to bed, I actually found it.
“Black Spider Repository…”
I mumbled while clicking to access the Node, and without delay, I was allowed access.
A website appeared in front of my eyes, one with several different pages that ranged from forums to the big list of bounties.
I went straight to look at the bounties, and sure enough, I found myself on there.
Below my portrait was the 40,000 coin bounty as well as my personal details. But below that was a page dedicated to information on my whereabouts.
There wasn’t much on that page other than the fact that I had left the Magisterium for a trip. Beyond that, it was blank.
It felt weird looking at a bounty for myself. Part of me was fearful, remembering just how dangerous my time in the city would be. I really couldn't let my guard down, but I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to be eternally vigilant.
Thankfully there wouldn’t be much attention on me when I went back since I would have been gone for so long. I couldn’t imagine that someone would risk their life to kill a supposed Authority 5 for a mere 40 Gold Bullion.
With a sigh, I scrolled past my portrait. There was no use worrying about that stuff now.
I looked at the others, primarily the bounties with the highest payouts listed at the top.
And I saw some interesting names.
“Anderson, an Authority 11 Paladin of the Church. Luna, the Head of the Polaris Family, Authority 10+. Gunsen, Headmaster of the Clockwork Association, Authority 9+. Patriarch Tavera too? Seems everyone famous has a bounty.”
I chuckled as I saw a name I knew. The topmost bounties had rewards of billions of coin. It was enough to live the rest of your life lavishly, but it was arguable that there was no amount of money in this world that could buy the death of some of these people.
How many people could kill an Authority 11? There were probably a handful of people within the kingdom, and even less who would be willing. So basically, these rewards were just trophies that those people could flaunt, like an ego boost.
People like myself would be in far more danger since we could actually be killed.
After scrolling for a while, I no longer saw any names that I recognized. While I got a good read on some faces, some of which were very pretty women, I mainly just snooped around for the hell of it.
However, when going through some of the other pages, I saw another interesting list.
It was a bounty list, but instead of for humans, it was for Scourge beasts.
I looked at the link to the page for a bit before clicking it. I was morbidly curious, so I didn’t hesitate to find the top of the list.
And the number one spot made me confused.
“The Four Kings…”
I was a single bounty for four individuals. I scrolled through the details and saw their names.
King of Anarchy
King of Despair
King of The Brood
King of Unholy Light
These were the titles of the four strongest beings of the Scourge. Each of them stood at the pinnacle of power, Authority 12, and had lived for hundreds of years.
They were each terrifying existences. There were no pictures of them, and there wasn’t even a bounty posted. But there were some details about their power, or at least the consequences of their presence.
The most eye catching was the King of Unholy Light.
It was said that all who stood within the light emitted by this King would be melted where they stood and turn into an unrecognizable monster known as a fleshbug. These fleshbugs would then seek out the nearest human, and upon contact would melt the victim and turn it into an identical fleshbug.
The most horrifying part about this wasn’t the transformation though. It was the fact that, when a fleshbug would seek out a human target, it would mysteriously acquire the memories of that human and begin speaking with the voices of those its target knew and loved.
It would come to you with the voice of your lover, child, or best friend. And with your memories it would try and tempt you toward it while hunting you from the dark.
Because of this, there were accounts of soldiers going insane from the horror and trauma of encountering these fleshbugs. And it was said that a siege of these monsters would hail a unholy symphony of screams that drowned out entire valleys.
Simply reading about this beast made me shiver, and I quickly remembered that this was just one of the four Kings.
I didn’t end up reading any information about the other three, forcing myself to scroll past the bounty before staring up at the ceiling with my eyes wide open.
To say that I wasn’t scared was a lie. But I found comfort in the fact that the Kingdom of Dragon Tongue was able to hold its ground against these horrifying creatures and survive till this day.
There were people out there so powerful that they could fight on the same level as those Kings. They were keeping us safe.
This was all I could tell myself to try and drown out the horror from those stories. Because I knew that, if anything, those stories were watered down from reality.
After several minutes, I finally regained myself. But I found that I wasn’t able to close my eyes, so I pulled back up the site and started scrolling further down the list.
The beasts lower down weren’t nearly as terrifying. They had pictures and there was much more detailed information.
I read intently, compiling information on dozens of different beasts of different types and levels before coming to a conclusion.
There were in fact intelligent beasts among the Scourge, and those beasts didn’t come from infecting humans.
There were bloodlines within the Scourge, and there were different levels for these bloodlines.
The ones most prevalent were the Royal bloodlines. There were four of them, and each descended from the Four Kings.
In fact, those with these bloodlines weren’t really beasts. They were humanoid creatures with intelligence and special powers. They could cultivate power just like humans, but in general were more powerful at the same Authority. An Authority 6 Royal wouldn’t lose to an Authority 6 human, regardless of type.
It took very talented humans to fight on par with Royals, and the only saving grace was that there weren’t many Royals.
At least, there weren’t many worth concerning over. The limits of a Royal was purely dictated by their bloodline density, which fell off with each generation. This meant there was a strict hierarchy that frequently cycled itself at the lower levels and almost never changed at the higher levels.
Other than that, there were Unique beasts. These were creatures without a royal bloodline that ascended beyond standard limits to attain both intelligence and strong powers. Some of them even birthed their own families and bloodlines.
I saw many of both types of these creatures on the bounty list. Because of that, I now knew the identifying features of a Royal and what to look out for with a Unique beast.
At some point, I logged out of the Node and shut down my Aerial.
In the darkness I stewed in my own thoughts, thinking about what I learned. It was a shock to know that there were obscenely powerful beasts out there, ones that could annihilate entire cities simply by being there.
And then there were the Royals and Unique beasts, enemies that I would probably end up facing sometime in the future.
Looking at them and hearing about their powers had me fearful. It was difficult to believe that I could actually rise to their level, let alone kill them.
But my own powers gave me confidence. And when I thought about the threat they posed and the devastation they’ve caused, I became more angry than cowardly.
They needed to be eradicated. Every last one of them were monsters undeserving of their life on this world.
I was already sure before, but it seemed that with everything I learned, I was only becoming more certain of my conviction to fight these monsters.
So for a while I laid on my bed, smoldering in hate that drowned out any fear I had for the Scourge. And it was only late in the night when I finally managed to fall asleep.
The day after that exciting night, I met back up with my squad.
Of course, seeing Umara again was fun. It was like I was teasing her with every glance I gave her, just the two of us aware of what was different.
I had a smile on my face all day while she tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible. Part of me just wanted to go up and give her a kiss on the cheek, just to embarrass her. But I held myself back.
Although I hadn’t grown up in this world, enough time and interaction had made me understand that social customs weren’t the same as America on Earth.
Everyone was generally more reserved and modest, more so resembling 20th century America rather than the 21st century.
This meant that there wouldn’t be any sex after the third date. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if we barely started kissing by that point.
I understood that everything would move slower. Not that this changed the way I thought about things. From my experience, I was used to things moving much faster. While I was willing to wait for things like sex, I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to do something like wait until marriage, even though according to my own religious belief system, that was the standard.
At the very least, I would be pushing our intimacy forward as best I could. That was simply the way I did things.
Before all that though, we would need to have our first date. Which, considering the circumstances, wouldn’t be easy.
There really wasn’t much to do on this military base, especially not alone. The recreation room always had people in it and I wasn’t interested in having our date in a room full of sweaty knights.
There weren’t any restaurants, clubs, or any other fun places to go either. In fact, the best candidate for a date given the bare requirements was probably the chapel.
So unless we went AWOL, sneaking onto the Rail and going back to the city, having a date would be close to impossible.
However, after some thinking, I realized that not all hope would be lost. There was still one activity that could give us both alone time and a good location.
Missions.
After the sudden siege, a few days were spent simply recuperating. Shockingly, there were zero deaths during that time, though there were a few critical injuries like some severed limbs.
But it ended very well, all things considered. And afterward, the cleanup was taken care of swiftly.
So I spent most of my free time with my squad, all of us just hanging out and having fun. We would also find other squads to play games with, and on the training grounds there was frequent sparing ongoing. I also spent a lot of time studying my formation. That alone took up 3-5 hours of my day since I would get so engrossed.
But eventually we were put to work. When the second week of our stay started, there was a large list of missions suddenly posted.
Like that, all the Elite squads were called to report early in the morning. So the night before, we all went to bed eagerly.
……
“You have your armor prepared?”
Feiden asked from across our room. I could see him preparing all his own gear with familiarity.
Feiden wore a full set of armor, but he also had some special items like recovery pills similar to what I used to carry.
Since I had very little to prepare, I just nodded.
“Yea, I’m good.”
“Do you even have armor?”
“Yea, it’s my coat.”
“That thing?”
He looked at the coat hanging on the corner of my bed with curiosity.
It looked like a normal black coat unless you inspected it closely and found the purple lines. So to most people, I just really liked the coat and wore it all the time. Not that it was a false assumption, but the main reason I wore it was for its protection.
But I didn’t need people knowing how amazing it was. Even I didn’t completely understand how high quality it was. So I gave him a succinct answer.
“I can’t wear heavy armor like you guys, so that coat acts as light armor.”
“I see. What about your feet and head?”
“I have boots. As for my head, I can’t say I really have anything for it. Plus, I need my eyes for my weapons, so no helmets.”
“Makes sense.”
Feiden nodded. He had seen my weapons, so he generally knew that my sight was important when working with them.
After that, Feiden went back to preparing his gear. I, on the other hand, started messing with my Aerial.
Before leaving, Sawn had given me some special instructions. First, I needed to access the Web. And second, I needed to test out the local communication functions.
The second part was easy. With a press of the button I could turn my Aerial into a local Node and allow anybody nearby to share communications with each other. Under normal circumstances you had to be connected to a city’s Node in order to send messages, but since my Aerial became that, I could act as the server for everyone in my group.
It would be great for our mission. Not only that, but I could contact someone back at base if we were ever in trouble since my Aerial had a much longer range than normal one.
It was the first part, accessing the Web, that proved to be more difficult.
Simply getting there was easy. There was the equivalent of an App on the Aerial that brought me to a rudimentary browser. I could search for and access Nodes from there. The issue was actually finding a Node to connect to.
There wasn’t much of a search engine yet, so sifting through Nodes was like looking through a phone book.
I had actually started going through them during my free time. While doing so I saw many interesting Nodes. Most of them required some kind of authorization to access.
But shockingly, this didn’t prevent me from accessing them. I could only assume that my Aerial had some advanced permissions because I directly bypassed the authorization process every time.
Because of that, I actually managed to view the Magisterium’s Node that held hundreds of research documents and information. I didn’t go through it all but did indeed stash the name of the Node for later.
There were many others just like it including some shady private Nodes that I didn’t care to stick around in. But above all these, I kept an eye out for my main target.
And while Feiden went to bed, I actually found it.
“Black Spider Repository…”
I mumbled while clicking to access the Node, and without delay, I was allowed access.
A website appeared in front of my eyes, one with several different pages that ranged from forums to the big list of bounties.
I went straight to look at the bounties, and sure enough, I found myself on there.
Below my portrait was the 40,000 coin bounty as well as my personal details. But below that was a page dedicated to information on my whereabouts.
There wasn’t much on that page other than the fact that I had left the Magisterium for a trip. Beyond that, it was blank.
It felt weird looking at a bounty for myself. Part of me was fearful, remembering just how dangerous my time in the city would be. I really couldn't let my guard down, but I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to be eternally vigilant.
Thankfully there wouldn’t be much attention on me when I went back since I would have been gone for so long. I couldn’t imagine that someone would risk their life to kill a supposed Authority 5 for a mere 40 Gold Bullion.
With a sigh, I scrolled past my portrait. There was no use worrying about that stuff now.
I looked at the others, primarily the bounties with the highest payouts listed at the top.
And I saw some interesting names.
“Anderson, an Authority 11 Paladin of the Church. Luna, the Head of the Polaris Family, Authority 10+. Gunsen, Headmaster of the Clockwork Association, Authority 9+. Patriarch Tavera too? Seems everyone famous has a bounty.”
I chuckled as I saw a name I knew. The topmost bounties had rewards of billions of coin. It was enough to live the rest of your life lavishly, but it was arguable that there was no amount of money in this world that could buy the death of some of these people.
How many people could kill an Authority 11? There were probably a handful of people within the kingdom, and even less who would be willing. So basically, these rewards were just trophies that those people could flaunt, like an ego boost.
People like myself would be in far more danger since we could actually be killed.
After scrolling for a while, I no longer saw any names that I recognized. While I got a good read on some faces, some of which were very pretty women, I mainly just snooped around for the hell of it.
However, when going through some of the other pages, I saw another interesting list.
It was a bounty list, but instead of for humans, it was for Scourge beasts.
I looked at the link to the page for a bit before clicking it. I was morbidly curious, so I didn’t hesitate to find the top of the list.
And the number one spot made me confused.
“The Four Kings…”
I was a single bounty for four individuals. I scrolled through the details and saw their names.
King of Anarchy
King of Despair
King of The Brood
King of Unholy Light
These were the titles of the four strongest beings of the Scourge. Each of them stood at the pinnacle of power, Authority 12, and had lived for hundreds of years.
They were each terrifying existences. There were no pictures of them, and there wasn’t even a bounty posted. But there were some details about their power, or at least the consequences of their presence.
The most eye catching was the King of Unholy Light.
It was said that all who stood within the light emitted by this King would be melted where they stood and turn into an unrecognizable monster known as a fleshbug. These fleshbugs would then seek out the nearest human, and upon contact would melt the victim and turn it into an identical fleshbug.
The most horrifying part about this wasn’t the transformation though. It was the fact that, when a fleshbug would seek out a human target, it would mysteriously acquire the memories of that human and begin speaking with the voices of those its target knew and loved.
It would come to you with the voice of your lover, child, or best friend. And with your memories it would try and tempt you toward it while hunting you from the dark.
Because of this, there were accounts of soldiers going insane from the horror and trauma of encountering these fleshbugs. And it was said that a siege of these monsters would hail a unholy symphony of screams that drowned out entire valleys.
Simply reading about this beast made me shiver, and I quickly remembered that this was just one of the four Kings.
I didn’t end up reading any information about the other three, forcing myself to scroll past the bounty before staring up at the ceiling with my eyes wide open.
To say that I wasn’t scared was a lie. But I found comfort in the fact that the Kingdom of Dragon Tongue was able to hold its ground against these horrifying creatures and survive till this day.
There were people out there so powerful that they could fight on the same level as those Kings. They were keeping us safe.
This was all I could tell myself to try and drown out the horror from those stories. Because I knew that, if anything, those stories were watered down from reality.
After several minutes, I finally regained myself. But I found that I wasn’t able to close my eyes, so I pulled back up the site and started scrolling further down the list.
The beasts lower down weren’t nearly as terrifying. They had pictures and there was much more detailed information.
I read intently, compiling information on dozens of different beasts of different types and levels before coming to a conclusion.
There were in fact intelligent beasts among the Scourge, and those beasts didn’t come from infecting humans.
There were bloodlines within the Scourge, and there were different levels for these bloodlines.
The ones most prevalent were the Royal bloodlines. There were four of them, and each descended from the Four Kings.
In fact, those with these bloodlines weren’t really beasts. They were humanoid creatures with intelligence and special powers. They could cultivate power just like humans, but in general were more powerful at the same Authority. An Authority 6 Royal wouldn’t lose to an Authority 6 human, regardless of type.
It took very talented humans to fight on par with Royals, and the only saving grace was that there weren’t many Royals.
At least, there weren’t many worth concerning over. The limits of a Royal was purely dictated by their bloodline density, which fell off with each generation. This meant there was a strict hierarchy that frequently cycled itself at the lower levels and almost never changed at the higher levels.
Other than that, there were Unique beasts. These were creatures without a royal bloodline that ascended beyond standard limits to attain both intelligence and strong powers. Some of them even birthed their own families and bloodlines.
I saw many of both types of these creatures on the bounty list. Because of that, I now knew the identifying features of a Royal and what to look out for with a Unique beast.
At some point, I logged out of the Node and shut down my Aerial.
In the darkness I stewed in my own thoughts, thinking about what I learned. It was a shock to know that there were obscenely powerful beasts out there, ones that could annihilate entire cities simply by being there.
And then there were the Royals and Unique beasts, enemies that I would probably end up facing sometime in the future.
Looking at them and hearing about their powers had me fearful. It was difficult to believe that I could actually rise to their level, let alone kill them.
But my own powers gave me confidence. And when I thought about the threat they posed and the devastation they’ve caused, I became more angry than cowardly.
They needed to be eradicated. Every last one of them were monsters undeserving of their life on this world.
I was already sure before, but it seemed that with everything I learned, I was only becoming more certain of my conviction to fight these monsters.
So for a while I laid on my bed, smoldering in hate that drowned out any fear I had for the Scourge. And it was only late in the night when I finally managed to fall asleep.
