B4 Ch47: Life In The Past 3/3 (Patreon)

Note: These last few long chapters have all been leading up to this... 

A few days later, Arthur found himself in the unique opportunity to be a civilian executive assistant to the general.

Thanks to other jobs before, he had a keyboard touch typing skill which would be useless outside the dark heart, but allowed him, along with his Acting skill, to blend in.

The whole underground base now had a grim air around it. There were more and more emergency alarms as scourgelings found a way to dig in through any soft spot in the base. Arthur felt on edge, and he couldn't shake the feeling of impending doom.

On his way to the general's office, which would be his workspace for the day, his Tidying skill twinged at him. He looked up and saw that someone had missed a bit of lichen growing on one of the granite rock walls that was here and there in the underground mountain. He rubbed his hand over it, and saw it crumble away. The lichen had been killed, just like the garden beds had been killed... and just like how people were starting to sicken from the rot.

When he got into the office, he saw the general working at his own desk, a grim expression on his face as he looked at maps. Arthur couldn't take any more. He didn't care if this broke his character.

"General, how bad is it?" he demanded more than asked.

The general looked up, surprised, and pursed his lips. But, instead of telling him off, he just sighed. "Arthur, we’ve worked together for how long? Twenty years? Trust me when I say, you don't want to know."

Arthur flinched in surprise. For the first time, the name of the person who’s life he’d assumed shared his own. Though the general still said it in that twangy Texan way.

Arthur swallowed. "I heard rumors up above that all the trees are dying, and even the soil... We won't be able to grow anything down here."

The general looked at him for a moment, as if wondering if he should give him the bad news. "Yes,” he said slowly. “Whatever these things, these scourgelings, emit from their bodies, it's toxic to everything. It’s not radiation, not poison… the damned egg-heads in the labs can’t figure out what it is. And slowly but surely, it's seeping down to us. I'm sure you've heard rumors of the last stand?"

He hadn't, but Arthur nodded anyway.

"It's coming soon," the general said, "so prepare yourself. But," he smiled suddenly, and it was unexpectedly boyish, "don't worry, not all hope is lost. These things use card powers on us, and now we can use card powers on them. And I, personally, just got something fun up my sleeve. It’s the highest rank of cards we’ve seen so far."

With a sense of dread, Arthur knew exactly what he was going to say.

Sure enough, thinking he was confiding in a long-time friend, the general said, “It’s called Master of Cards, and I don’t mind saying… it’s got a hell of a kick to it.”

This was it. This was why he had been brought here. Arthur had experienced things and situations he had never imagined existed, upgraded and fleshed out varieties of skills in almost all areas, and perhaps learned a bit about the first days of cards.

But this was the real prize, and it was in the heart of the man sitting behind a desk in front of him.

Arthur was linked to Brixaby’s Call of the Void. He could rush over and snatch the card from the general's heart. With his strength attributes, Arthur was almost certainly stronger than him. And by wearing the body of his trusted assistant and friend, the general wouldn't see it coming.

There was even a sharp knife, called a letter opener, laying out on Arthur’s own desk waiting for him to grab.

The general would be maybe even briefly incapacitated after Arthur took the card. It hadn’t been in his heart for long, so he would recover quickly. Arthur would have to finish him off, add the card to his own deck as a three-of-a-kind, and run.

This is a challenge. It's a fake world. He's not real. It wouldn’t be murder.

But Arthur had been a part of this community for weeks. And this man was everyone's leader. The one with the vision, who kept everybody – civilian and soldier alike—calm. He was the parental figure people railed at when things didn’t go their way, and the benevolent giver who awarded cards.

If he died, if he were murdered, what would happen to the rest of the people here?

Perhaps sensing that he’d given Arthur something to think about, the general turned his back to walk back around his desk.

The time to act was now. Arthur had a letter opener he’d use with his nice shot card and his body enhancements. That card was calling to him.

The people here need their leader.

Arthur closed his eyes, sick that he had thought seriously of doing it, and equally sick that he wasn't going to do it.

I can't, he told himself and the dark heart. Whether this challenge is full of real people or not... I can't do that to these people.

And suddenly, pressure that he had not been aware of before passed. Or maybe, he was literally sensing his moment of opportunity fly by.

Suddenly, the door burst open as a guard, red-faced and sweaty, his eyes wild, burst in. "General! We have a scourgeling breach on sub-level three. It’s a bad one, sir."

Sub-level three. That was where most of the civilians were housed.

The general whipped back around, "Then why haven't the alarms—"

Immediately, the entire base was plunged into red emergency lights as the emergency sirens began to wail. Overhead, a calm voice of another guard in charge rang out, "Breach: sub-level three. I repeat, there has been a breach on sub-level three. Civilians, please report to your assigned safe-stations. All combat teams to muster on sub-level two."

They would gather at sub-level two to engage the enemy on three.

A queasy feeling tightened Arthur's stomach. He knew—he knew that he had just failed this challenge, and this was the dark heart’s way of shutting things down.

Last time, the world had gently come apart around him. This time… well, he’d thrown in his lot with the people here. Now he was to share their fate.

If that was the case, he didn’t intend to go down without a fight.

Meanwhile, the guard continued talking. "The scourgelings have taken on some sort of earthworm type variant shape. The front line managed to burrow right in through the walls. The ones coming in behind are all sorts of beetles or bugs. It's a massacre out there."

All the faces that Arthur had come to know over the last few weeks in this challenge flashed to his mind. Arthur ignored the grief that threatened to swamp over him. Standing from his desk, Arthur said, "How can I help?"

The general turned and looked at him, hard. "We don't need a non-combatant mucking things up for the rest of us. You're to evac to your safety station."

"General, I can do more," he said, and then grabbed for a letter opener, fully intending to use his Nice Shot to at least demonstrate—

Then the general's expression changed, perhaps seeing his certainty. "On second thought…" he strode to a wall, pushed aside a painting, and opened up a concealed area that Arthur had no idea had been there.

Behind sat what looked like a lock box, only without any runes. Like everything else in this world, the locking was done through electricity. The general tapped in a combination on a keypad and then opened up the box.

He grabbed a slim wooden box that sat within and held it out Arthur. It was made in the exact dimensions of a card. "If you want to help, run these to the doctors on duty. You know where the medical bay is? Sublevel two?"

Of course he did. Arthur nodded.

Without waiting for a further answer, the general turned to the guard to start barking additional orders. Arthur was as good as excused.

Taking the box, Arthur ran out the door. Only when he turned the corner down the hall did he stop. Then, plastering himself against the wall so he wouldn't be in the way of people running back and forth, he opened the box.

There were three cards stacked on one another. All were Rare-Ranked and medical.

Moderate Heal External Wound.

Moderate Strength Illness diagnosis.

Moderate Body Polish.

Judging by the similar names and the looks of the cards, they were from the same deck.

His first instinct, of course, was to hide the cards away in his Personal Space. But his soul flinched at that. He had done a good amount of healing from his fractured card anchor, but he wasn't sure he was up to adding that sort of magical weight. At least not without good reason.

After that, of course, he felt a moment of shame.

He had just told himself that he wasn't willing to kill the general to harvest his cards, real person or no. Now he was seriously thinking of stealing from healers who could help people recover from this breach.

Then again…had killing the general been part of the challenge after all?

After all, the guard that had burst into the room had been armed. All the guards were. If he had walked in to see Arthur hovering over the man's body... he would have shot Arthur, or used a combat card on him. And that was that.

If I die here, is that real?

He didn't want to find out.

He couldn’t let himself think of that too closely. Now he had a decision to make about three very valuable cards. Not personally to him, but to Marion.

One thing was for sure, he wasn't going to run through this base with an obvious card-shaped box.

So, he slipped them into the wide leg pocket on his calf, thanking whoever created pants for these people that they made the pockets so ridiculously oversized.

Then, he ran to the medical.

It wasn't easy. People were in a full panic. This was a serious breach. The moment he got down to level two, he heard the whistling of scourgelings from just below his feet as well as the shouting from guards, occasional firing of weapons, and the phroomph of fire, and the gurgle of water as people used elemental weapons against the scourgelings.

He hoped it would be enough.

The medical bay was even worse as people were being dragged in, and anyone who could help was in a full rush. Arthur couldn’t even spot the doctor in the crowd.

And what was worse, was over it all, he could smell the scent of scourge rot.

It was coming through the vents. Soon, anybody without a card in their heart would be infected.

Arthur was at the point of grabbing one of the nurses—it was one that he might have shared the body of a few weeks ago—and just pushed the cards onto him, when there came a scream from the back med-bay room.

Pushing through the crowd in the waiting room, Arthur went to go see.

The brickwork on the far wall was starting to bulge out. It was exactly as if something from the other side was digging its way in.

Oh no.

Summoning his inner Brixaby, Arthur roared at the top of his voice. “Everyone! They’re about to come through the walls. Evacuate the patients out of this room! Go back into the hallways."

"They're starting to come up from the third floor," someone else yelled. "They're going to be in the halls soon!”

Arthur yelled back. "They're going to be in this room in a minute."

A brick fell down off the wall as if to punctuate his statement. Behind it, the tip of a giant beetle leg poked out. That got everyone moving.

Everything was falling apart. There would be no last grandstand the general had envisioned. Just a desperate fight for survival.

But I'm not going down without trying, he thought, and stepped to the nearest counter where fresh trays of instruments were set out. That was one good thing about being in a medical room.

There were lots of sharp objects.

On the tray lay scissors, needles for suturing, and several scalpels. These were the ones that were meant to be washed—or sanitized, as these people called it. Now, it and the contents of the rest of the trays were Arthur's weapons.

This was going to be difficult, but he had stretched the bounds of his Knife Work and Butchering skills before. Namely, in his Legendary recruit sparring. He told himself this would be no different.

With a light touch on his Meditation skill, Arthur blocked out the chaos around him—crying, screaming people, patients who were complaining about being moved again, and the horrified shouts as the wall bulged further. This medical facility was at the edge of the base, against what should have been only rock and earth. Now it bulged as if something alive pulsed from behind the wall. Dust drifted through cracks in the cinderblock.

Arthur concentrated, accessing his Nice Shot card, his Butchering and Knife Work skills that had been enhanced with telekinesis. He put his hand over the medical instruments. They rose into the air. Then, at a thought, they began to orbit him from shoulder to waist diagonally like he was wearing bandoliers.

"What the hell is he doing?" someone gasped.

"Got a combat card," Arthur said through gritted teeth. Using separate skills for things they were not meant for wasn’t as easy as he made it look. "Get out of here, I'll keep them back, give you time."

He heard, "Bless you!” and “Thank you!”s from the men and women as they rushed the last of the patients out.

Then the brickwork that made the back wall fell in, and an earthworm longer than Arthur's forearm--but with teeth sticking out of an unnatural jaw--crawled in. 

Arthur shot the scalpels forward, using his Nice Shot card. The small blades still cleaved the worm in two. . It flopped around, still biting madly.

So Arthur pulled out metal shrapnel from his Personal Space. He had piles of it. All razor sharp. Like with the metal instruments, they circled in a tight whirlwind, an inch away from his body. The shrapnel he shot out peppered the scourgeling until it was cut into chunks.

But more earth was being pushed forward from behind it. A wave of soft soil buried the closest empty beds.

Arthur stepped back, and then a scourgeling shaped like a beetle, brown and ugly, and shielded from the front of its horned head to its sore-pitted back scuttled in.

It didn't have armor on its legs, so Arthur aimed carefully for that. He lost contact with the knives and scalpels once they were a few feet away from his body, which was better than a few inches, like with the Nice Shot card. But using his Throwing Accuracy, all of his shots hit home.

He cut the legs out from under the beetle. It fell, clacking mandibles that could have snapped a man’s leg in two. It was followed by more scourgelings that looked like ants, termites, and other small burrowing creatures.

It was obvious how they had found their way down here. He suspected that the earthworms had chewed their way through rock somehow, maybe with some earth capabilities. The others had tunneled afterward. 

He was lucky in some ways. There were wolves or those terrible birds with teeth that got him before.

They pushed more and more of the brickwork out, but he was able to slaughter them as they emerged. He had more than enough shrapnel to protect the sick and injured who were evacuating behind him.

Meanwhile, there were renewed problems from there, too. The chaos from that quarter, too. He heard scourgelings whistles from the direction of the hallway. A glance told him the last of the patients were being dragged by grim-faced volunteers out the waiting room, which adjoined the med-bay.

He only needed to hold the line for a few more moments. Arthur started to back up, still firing.

Then he heard someone yell, "Is that it, is everybody out?"

"I'm still here," Arthur called, and kept backing. The scourgelings coming in used the opportunity to rush forward, but he cut them down with a wave of razer death.

A few rooms away, in the main hallway, he heard more screaming and then, "Shit! They’re here! They’re coming down the hall. Blast the charges!”

Arthur didn’t know what that was, but he got the context.

“We can’t!” he heard. “There are people—"

“That’s an order!”

Arthur turned to run. He made it to the waiting room before a small explosion took out the ceiling of the hallway beyond. Arthur was thrown back a few feet and rolled. The only thing that kept him alive was that the scourgelings had been knocked back, too.

For a dazed second, Arthur couldn’t hear anything but a high whine. He sat up to his knees, saw scourgelings, and started firing shrapnel. There was no art to it, and many pieces flat-out missed. But it finished off the half-stunned scourgelings and allowed Arthur to wobble back to his feet and take on ones that had started to charge from behind.

Only when he had created a little breathing room did he cast a glance back over his shoulder.

The waiting room was half filled with rock and soil, all brought in from the hallway. He guessed that the scourgelings had made it to the second floor and someone had collapsed the hall to seal it shut.

He'd saved them, and in return, they had trapped him.

He had no time to be indignant. There were more scourgelings coming. With grit teeth, Arthur turned back to the rear wall and sent a flying wave of razor shrapnel outward.

The only thing that he had going for him was that the lights stayed steady. He could at least see.

He didn't know how long he kept killing for. He just shot shrapnel at anything that moved, and though some scourgelings took longer to emerge from the rear wall than others – like the earthworms-- he wasn't in any danger. Though he couldn’t feel a rank from them, they fought like Commons.

There were so many that they had to crawl on top of one another to try to get to him. He caught glimpses of tunnels with even more scourgelings behind. But when they crowded close, Arthur backed up a step and kept firing.

Finally, the flow of scourgelings slowed until, eventually, they stopped.

His breath was heaving, and he pulled out a skin from his Personal Space, and greedily drank water, wiping his forehead afterwards.

Overhead, the lights flickered. Nothing more emerged from the tunnels.

"What do I do now?" Arthur asked aloud. But he already knew.

He stepped forward, and slowly, methodically, collected the pieces of shrapnel. That was easy, it just took a wave, and his Knife Work Telekinesis lifted them and brought them close so he could store the pieces back into his Personal Space. And, of course, he harvested the scourgelings.

He had a vague hope that maybe he could find an earth-type card in the pile, but all he came up with were shards…. A variable mountain of shards and were blank.

"I can put them together, hope for an earth card, or something to get me out of here. A portal would be great."

Where would he put the card? In his heart?

Arthur shook his head and reached to pat his leg pocket. He still had his medical cards.

"Marion will love these, if I can get out of here..." He turned again toward the sealed waiting room and hallway. It was entirely blocked from floor to ceiling with tons of debris. No way he could dig himself out.

Then his gaze turned back to the tunnels the scourgelings had come out of. Arthur instinctively winced away from that thought. Surely, this was just a pause between waves and more scourgelings would be coming through...

But they had come from the surface, right? What if he could follow the tunnels and find his way up and out? Surely there'd be more scourgelings on the way, but maybe survivors from the bunker had made their way to the surface too. This may be their last stand, and Arthur could help. 

Maybe that was the point of this challenge.

A moment later, he felt like a complete idiot. He could use his Call of the Heart. If there was any way out, the Legendary-ranked seeking card would find it.

Ah, but the Call of the Heart needed to know what to look for as specifically as possible. What did he want the most? 

Perhaps it was that he’d used his Meditation skill so freely during the fight, but when Arthur searched his heart he found he really didn’t want to continue this fight with the survivors. He wanted the rewards of this challenge. Yes, he had gotten three medical cards, but he’d been here for weeks. Surely, there were more, greater rewards.

Maybe he could get a second crack at the Master of Cards in a way that wouldn’t make him lose sleep at night.

Arthur closed his eyes and concentrated on the card.

He didn’t receive a map. To his shock, he felt like the reward was close. He knew he needed to go into the tunnels. 

The surface was the answer then. Maybe he'd be able to find the general's body and harvest Master of Cards.

With that thought in mind, he took a breath, and moved forward. 

He had to pull some of the scourgelings out of the half-blocked tunnel—he'd done a thorough job and some of them were in parts. Nothing jumped out behind them, and the tunnel beyond was so small that he had to crawl. It was also pitch black. 

“I really don't like this,” he muttered. Then pulled something else out of his Personal Space. He had been in this base for weeks, and these people had all sorts of interesting tools for him to store. One of the most impressive was called a ‘LED flashlight’.

He grabbed one of the double handful he had stored in his Personal Space and shined it down the tunnel. No movement.

With the flashlight in one hand, he started to crawl forward. The stench in the tunnels reminded him viscerally of the Mind Singer’s hive.

Arthur kept going. Every moment, he expected more scourgelings to arrive and try to swamp him…  but he couldn't even hear a whistle. 

Perhaps the rest had taken other tunnels to flood the rest of the bunker? He certainly hadn't killed all of them.

The soil around him was cracked and gray, not with rock, but with earth that had been desiccated of life.

Even if these survivors got out, they couldn't plant crops here. This whole area was turning into dead land. They'd have to find somewhere else, an oasis of life. Then hold on and try to survive. 

Arthur had never really thought too much about the past, other than in general terms with the Rowantree family, but he suddenly felt more respect for his distant ancestors. 

Some people had lived and went on to build Kingdoms.

Arthur continued on.

The tunnel sometimes grew so wide that he could actually get up and walk for a few dozen feet. Then, it would narrow again, forcing him to crawl, then drag himself forward on his stomach with the earth pressing above and below. 

He had never felt true claustrophobia until now, and he had to fight the urge to go back, or just scream. But he continued, an inch at a time.

After one terribly tight squeeze where it had gotten so narrow he half had to dig forward, he finally was able to rise fully to a stand again. He stood there and breathed and realized he felt slightly different in an indefinable way. 

On a hunch, he turned his flashlight to his own hands. They were his hands again, for the first time in weeks. 

"I'm me again." It was his voice too. 

He checked Call of the Heart periodically. There was no map, just a vague feeling of ‘forward’. So that's where Arthur went, forward, or left or right as the card told him. 

And just when he felt like he would be crawling forever... Arthur fell. 

He yelped, and the flashlight went tumbling out of his hands, casting light in wild directions as it tumbled along with him. He felt wide-open air for a few horrible seconds, then hit the ground hard. Thankfully, his Toughened Skin and Blunt Force impact bodily enhancements meant he didn’t damage himself. 

The flashlight clattered near him, and he quickly scooped it up, swinging it this way and that.

He was in a natural cave complete with stalactites and stalagmites. It was small, and he heard dripping water, but there were no scourgeling whistles. 

And sitting there in the middle were two dragon eggs. 

Arthur stared, thinking perhaps that he had mistaken them for scourgeling ovoids, and that he was in a nest of some sort. That would at least make sense.

He edged forward. 

They were up on a raised flat rock as if someone had put them on display. He reached out and touched one. It was hard. Not like a soft, slick scourgeling’s ovoid.

This was really a dragon egg. Two of them, actually. Each stood about the height of his knee. 

Where was the mother dragon? 

He knew how protective they could be of their eggs, unless she was killed by scourgelings.

What dragon would lay her eggs here, in the deadlands, surrounded by scourgelings? No, it didn't make sense. It must be a reward placed by the dark heart. Or...maybe there was a tie between scourgelings and dragons that had run deep in those early days. Something he wasn't sure he wanted to think too closely about. 

He swept the flashlight over the eggs again, checking them for cracks. The shells were intact. Both were...oddly blank. Not white like a dragon with mind powers. He didn't feel a sense of power from the eggs at all. Though when he rested his hand on them, they were both warm, as if alive. One twitched slightly. 

They were as blank as the shards that he had collected from the scourgelings.

Also, the fact that there were two eggs was a point for this being a dark-heart reward. His team had two dragon-less people.

That decided it. Placing his hands on the eggs, he stored them in his Personal Space.

Arthur winced at the feeling of being stretched. The eggs had no rank, but were definitely heavy with magical weight. He was glad that he carried the medical cards in his pocket.

Then, he continued down through the cave. There was a bend which came to a completely white space beyond. As if this was the place where the world—or this specific challenge-- had ended.

Arthur stepped into it.