Excise: A Post-Apocalyptic LitRPG (Ether Collapse Book 2) Page 2

  As he spun, he felt his cloak turn into a bit of a sail and arrest his circular momentum. It helped enough that his crash landing was a bit easier to turn into a roll. He heard a shocked mental sound from Azoth as he went to right himself and saw the Chimera get half bucked, half pulled off of the three-legged alpha lizard as it took off at a blistering sprint away from the group after severing its own tail as a defense mechanism. The acceleration of the massive beast forced Azoth’s wings fully open, and the wind caught them, turning him into a paraglider which ripped his claws through the tough skin and forced him up into the air.

  The other two injured creatures saw the alpha flee and literally dropped their tails entirely off their bodies and opened up their throttles following after the largest lizard. The one who had attacked Rocky with its head attempted to whip around to follow, but the tree limb skewered into the ground and brought the creature up short.

  The jarring motion was enough of a delay that the rest of the group adjusted their original targets to the final remaining creature. It was gargantuan, and once it was fixed between the hammer and anvil, its eyes went wild. Its lizard brain now clearly in fight mode; it went on the offensive and would have chomped Rocky in two if not for a hastily erected shield by Zippo.

  Rocky saw the air in front of him crack like a pane of glass and knew the young man had just saved his life. A single, massive vine with a circumference as wide as he was shot out of the ground and wrapped around a leg of the creature.

  That would be Sela’s newest skill.

  A plasma bolt of what looked to be red hot magma claimed a bulbous eye, bringing forth a wailing, dinosaur-esque roar as Joe engaged one of his shooting skills. Zippo flung a few Fireballs once he conjured them, ensuring he stayed away from the side Sela was constricting with her vines.

  Rocky smiled seeing the group’s easy flow in a dire situation. His Shadow Clone flashed into the beast’s side and sunk his two daggers into the creature’s other eye, disabling that orb as well. It was his turn now, as the creature reared back from the mounting damage, exposing its throat to him like a pig to slaughter. He used five charges of Dark Blade to ensure the beast would die, then released them horizontally.

  The skill distorted the air between the five long, black claws as they flew towards the exposed throat, and the group held their breath. The blades screeched on the white scales of the exposed neck, but thankfully, the softer underside scales relinquished the fight quickly. The blades sank through, nearly severing the whole head in a spray of lime-green blood.

  He felt a moment of jubilation before he was sobered by the distant sight of the other three tailless lizards escaping. Azoth was above them, and so Rocky mentally called him. While that fight had seemed somewhat easy, he had nearly died. If it hadn’t been for Zippo…

  Not to mention the fact that they were all injured before we even engaged, and we only killed one.

  Sela walked up beside him and exclaimed, “Well, this one and the three tails will be enough food to feed everyone for a few days.” Rocky froze, remembering the last time he had looked at Sela and hallucinated a rather embarrassing moment.

  He coughed to cover his embarrassment and looked at the lizards without looking at Sela. “Yeah—umm— the food is going to be great. Better get back in the air. I will leave skinning and butchering to you!”

  He jumped on Azoth’s back and told him to take off. Azoth wasn’t happy, though. Whenever they were forced to leave a meal behind, Rocky would hear about it, and this time was no different.

  “That perfectly succulent, crispy piece. Zippo cook especially for Azoth. Azoth just takes one bite. Pleeeassse.”

  Please was his newest word, and he used it far too frequently in an attempt to get his way, playing on Sela’s and his softer nature. However, Rocky couldn’t let the beast go eat his fill. If he did that, then there would be no one on the lookout for other danger. Sela would butcher the tails and lizard before storing it in Rocky’s bag of holding for the massive Chimera to eat when she took her shift as the lookout.

  Sela, as a druid, could transform between different animal forms, one of which was a massive raven. This was helpful as it gave Azoth a break for a few hours every day, which the Chimera used to eat and then sleep atop a moving tank. The reason Sela wasn’t often up in the air scouting was that she lacked any way of communicating effectively in bird form.

  Currently, her best option was to screech and circle the area of danger, but that left the group rather uninformed of the opponents’ strength, numbers, and overall threat level. Frequently, she would come and land with them and transform into a human to give the details, but that meant that she might use as many as three transformations in one fight. Considering that she had a maximum of four per day before she was stuck in the form she inhabited until midnight, that was a huge problem. The other option of relaying information through Azoth had been dismissed due to his numerous errors in translating.

  That was precisely what Rocky reminded Azoth of as he tied himself into the saddle on the pet’s back, “You will get to eat in a few hours, buddy. Sela will take over soon!”

  He managed a half-circle of the caravan before the landscape blurred beneath him. He blinked rapidly and shook his head to clear his eyes. This roused him for another minute before weights dragged his eyelids down. He felt his head droop, and his chin hit his chest.

  His eyes flashed back open, and the fuzzy landscape came back into view. He just needed to close his eyes and allow his body to rehydrate them so he could see properly, just for a moment. With that iota of permission, his heavy eyelids locked down, and his brain hit the snooze, which allowed his mind to replay one of his worst days since the Apocalypse.

  ***

  “My name is Zippo! Not Jason or Jay. Only my parents called me Jay, and they’re dead!” Zippo raged at Rocky. “Stop treating me like a child or your younger brother!” His shouts were punctuated by the fire flaring up, producing waves of intense heat.

  After his pronouncement, he stormed away from the fire, finally allowing it to begin burning languidly again. Rocky felt his skin slick with sweat, and as a cooling breeze blew over him, he felt goosebumps rise and his body shiver. To distract himself, he looked into the diminished pyre, noticing that the wood was nearly entirely consumed, so he threw on a few fresh logs as he considered Jason’s—no—Zippo’s position. Sela and Frankie also remained silent for long moments, emotions vibrating inside of all of them as they each thought over the young man’s words.

  “I think he wants his name to be different because it somehow disassociates him from the losses he has suffered,” Frankie contemplated into the poignant hush after a solemn pause.

  Before the emotional explosion, Rocky, Sela, Zippo, and Frankie had been sitting around the fire eating and talking about the arduous first day of the journey. Rocky couldn’t deny they had been lucky. They had managed to kill three elephantine-sized monsters that had attacked the caravan. The three kills were a boon for the survivors’ food supply. However, the seven other attacks they had barely repelled were the real problem. That thirty percent success statistics kept him apprehensive, but he pulled his mind back on to topic finally and glanced at the man who had spoken.

  Frankie Cocozza, the well-dressed, efficient military man, was one of the survivors from the militia group, and Joe had promoted his rank as soon as they began the hike earlier that day. Unfortunately, Joe’s promotions weren’t system-recognized and didn’t impart stat points like Rocky’s would be able to when they got back to the Territory.

  Regardless, when they returned, he would consult Joe about who to promote, but in the unofficial military hierarchy, Frankie was now in charge of the troops’ therapy and mental management. While it seemed like a hasty promotion to Rocky, Frank’s class was that of a psychologist after all, so it made logical sense.

  Rocky pursed his lips, considering Frankie’s opinion on Zippo, but remained silent. He knew that Zippo preferred not to be called Jay. On that first
day after saving Jason, Alex, and Oliver, he had accidentally upset the young man in the same way. He wished he had a good excuse for the slip-up, but he could only blame his social awkwardness. He operated under an athlete’s assumption, which dictated shortened names gave a level of comradery. That closeness was often superficial and fleeting, but in that moment, you were brothers fighting for the same cause. Maybe he could shorten Zippo to Zip, but that sounded derogatory or condescending—like Dip.

  With her mouth full of meat, Sela was next to break the silence as she shrugged, “He is still a kid. He will grow out of it… probably.”

  Frankie rolled his eyes while throwing both hands into the air, showing he strongly disagreed with Sela’s rather casual dismissal of the problem.

  Rocky scratched his messy beard and gracelessly chose to return to the subject before Zippo’s outburst, “Sela, Zippo still did have a point in the conversation we were having before.” Rocky coughed inelegantly. “Why does the system naming convention seem to not specify breeds of creatures we fight? Like it might name a Wolf a Dire Wolf. However, snakes that evolved from a rattlesnake are still just a Terror Snake–”

  Happy for an excuse to talk about something less emotionally charged, Sela, who was currently between bites, cut him off with a gesture of her meat on a stick, “As I was saying,” she glanced after Zippo, clearly indicating why she had stopped, “its name was Dread Snake, and in a way, it does mean something; you just don’t know how to interpret the name.” She paused for a moment and turned her spit, looking at the uncooked center of the red meat before deciding to place it back over the fire for more cooking. “For the most part, Dread signifies that the creature has venom or some other effect that isn’t obvious to you. If the effect is particularly deadly, it will be termed Dread by the system.”

  Rocky raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Well that’s pretty important to know, Sela! Also explains the Dread Chimera for Azoth. However, Azoth is something we would have called a Manticore, which is a type of Chimera, true, but one of the more dangerous breeds.”

  Sela continued to turn her meat over the blazing campfire. “What does the system care about the specific genus? It is of the species Chimera, and it has a deadly poison. Those two things are classified.” She looked at Frankie and Rocky and pointed at herself and then them in turn. “Humans gave these creatures names because they needed to know more and wanted the creatures defined. You have told me about this rattlesnake, for example. It seems that a smart person would have heard about a rattlesnake, and if they were out to catch it, they would approach it a certain way based off of its most common way of reacting to attack. Most others would avoid it because it was considered deadly.”

  She paused again and shrugged, seeming to come to the end of her descriptions. Frankie picked up, stroking his chin, “I see. So we gave it a name to help us better convey information about it to others?” Sela nodded and turned her spitted meat in the fire. Frankie speculated further to himself, “The system doesn’t classify things into the names humans have chosen but, instead, names that fit into categories selected a very long time ago.”

  Frankie continued to talk to himself and even pulled out a little journal, seemingly scrawling his ideas. Rocky wanted to ask Sela more questions before she started eating again. He looked quickly at his own meat over the fire and turned it again before opening his mouth to voice his next query.

  He was brought up short by the earth shaking him around like dice in Yahtzee. A moment later, he was picking himself off of the ground as he spat blood from his bit tongue. “What in the feline diarrhea just happened?”

  Frank gave him a surprised look, but Sela answered quickly, sounding amused despite the seriousness of the situation, “Probably just another tremor, more localized this time. We’ve had them every day since the second wave hit four days ago.”

  This was news to Rocky, who tilted his head and asked, “We have?” Joe, Zippo, and a group of ten other people ran towards his campfire as he looked over the sprawling camp and saw other people picking themselves up off the ground.

  As he got to his feet, he saw that their meat had ended up in the fire. He picked them both out and set the spits back up as he waited for the group of people to make it to them.

  Joe arrived first, and after asking if everyone was ok, he gave a brief report that the people in the caravan were a little shaken, but no one was severely injured. Rocky responded, “Thank Darkwing Duck!”

  Zippo shook his head in clear confusion. “Who’s Darkwing Duck?”

  Rocky’s head jerked back, conveying his surprise at the sudden change in topic. “Huh? Darkwing Duck was a character from the Looney Toons. Why are you bringing him up?” Rocky asked, his voice slow and confused.

  Everyone looked at each other and then at Sela, who had begun silently convulsing in what seemed to be laughter. She was doubled over and waving her hand helplessly at everyone. Rocky, who still didn’t understand why Zippo had brought up Darkwing Duck, asked slowly, “Why did Zippo just bring up Darkwing Duck? Am I missing something?”

  Frankie seemed to gather the situation the fastest. “Actually, you brought it up, Rocky, but by the way you reacted, you don’t recall doing so. Are you feeling okay?”

  “No, I said, ‘Thank Chocolate Fudgesickles’!” Rocky spat, and Sela’s laughter grew more audible. Rocky thought back on what he had just uttered. “Not Fudgesickles, Wagyu… What the Pidgeotto!” He was starting to realize that something was drastically wrong with the way he was speaking.

  By that point, Sela was rolling on the ground, which had attracted the attention of everyone for a good distance. Sela was the oddity, as everyone else around was tilting their heads or clenching fists. It was clear that his ancestral companion knew exactly what was happening and was the only one, by the confused looks on everyone else's face.

  It was Frankie again who summed up the situation in a hypothetical sort of way, “It seems that this new system is changing what we say or what others hear.” As he spoke, he fiddled with a red bracelet on his wrist. Bracelet might have been the wrong word; from what Rocky could see, it looked like a glowing string.

  “Wait, are you telling me that the system isn’t allowing me to swear?” Rocky sputtered. Sela’s laughter only grew, and he growled at her in anger.

  This is fluting great! Damn it! It does it in my head too? I don’t even notice it unless I pay attention.

  After realizing it could change his internal thoughts as well, he was well past the point of speaking; all he could think of was that this system had access to his thoughts or somehow could distort what he was saying in some other way. What if it was manipulating all of them in ways they couldn’t see?

  He felt his heart pounding against his ribs, and the looks on everyone’s faces mirrored a horror that was only growing in magnitude. The currents of fear pulsed out from each person who stood around the campfire and began moving throughout the camp.

  Like a sharp knife cutting warm butter, Sela’s voice snapped everyone’s attention to her, “Calm down! In my entire life, I never saw evidence that Gaia or the Atlantian Net was able to control people …” Her face betrayed what little confidence she had managed to instill into those words.

  Surprisingly, the others in the group seemed to calm down at her words, but Rocky, who knew Sela well, saw the small shimmer of fear in her eyes. Perhaps she was just more used to living with the system, so this was an old, uncomfortable companion to her, like an annoying cousin.

  Rocky shook his head, the motion clearly conveying his sentiment that it wasn’t functioning as intended, but he did see the need to placate the situation. Sela forced a smile and returned to a tone of amusement as she teased, “None of you turned off the filter in your interface, so it has been stopping you from swearing since the first trickle of Ether returned.”

  At Rocky’s violently audible growl, she shrugged. “It is in the interface preferences menu.”

  He quickly opened his windows and navigated to
interfaces preferences.

  The filter cannot be removed at this time. You have attempted to curse multiple times through the filter. In addition, you have been reported for poor language on forty-seven occasions. If you go without being reported for swearing for one year and seven days, the block will be able to be removed.

  Shame on you!

  He heard muttered exclamations around the fire, and a few people let out a surprised laugh obviously receiving a similar message. Rocky shook his head, not at all sure how to feel about the situation. What else was he missing in his settings? He and Sela needed to have a very long conversation soon!

  The need to diffuse the situation took precedence. So, he tried to lighten the mood and asked everyone listening, “How long did each of you get? And how many times did you get reported?”

  Sela’s face flushed bright red, and she tried to nonchalantly sit down without drawing attention to her clear attempts at trying not to laugh again. Rocky felt his jaw clench, and he stood up before he thought about it. “What the Oompa-Loompa did you steeling do, Sela!” Rocky shouted.

  Everyone broke into laughter along with Sela, who had tears rolling down her cheeks. She held up two fingers and between gasps choked out, “That’s—two—more!”

  Oh, we are going to be having a discussion about all of this!

  The butt of the joke, Rocky, didn’t feel like it was very funny, but since screaming at the top of his lungs wouldn’t do anything, he forced a smile on to his face. His blood was still pumping in his ears, and the black smoke of his Dark Cloak, triggered by his emotions, curled around his fists. He took a deep breath trying to calm himself. It wasn’t like swearing was necessary, not like that was the only way he could convey emotion.