[CYA] Chapter 109: Wave 1, Begin

NOTE:
Patreon does not like formatting/different 'alignments' of paragraphs that help make this fiction what it is.

Because of that, I will always be providing a link the google doc for each chapter where you can see it properly formatted. Elsewise, feel free to read the chapter here, if that is your preference.

I am sorry for the limitations of this platform.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X4_EMJSkRPMouy2oloV1RobXlcwW9b77BuT-smvcNTY/edit?usp=drivesdk

Previous__________ToC__________Next

<Kaylee, Real - Endure, High School Classroom>

Kaylee jerked awake, pulling her head off the notebook that was laid out on her desk in a claimed classroom.

She didn’t actually need a desk given all her administrative work was done within the System menus and in a single, spiral-bound notebook, but a desk helped her to feel like she was working… unless she fell asleep on it of course.

What time is it…? She rubbed at her eyes, pulling out her phone and looking. Midnight… exactly? …That’s odd.

What had woken her?

Her fuzzy mind swept around, finding an odd rushing, flowing sound. Rain? It’s raining?

Sure enough—for the first time since the Tutorial had started—it was raining and seemingly raining hard.

But that shouldn’t have been enough to wake her. She was a country girl at heart, and she’d slept through worse storms than this.

Then, her thoughts turned to the system and a notification came into her view, causing all the blood to drain from her face.

Courtesy Notice to Base Administrator:
Inviolable defenses are down for a pre-scheduled wave assault.

Good Luck.

There was nothing else, but she was already sprinting, through the door and striving for what she needed, sliding on the clean, slick floor in her socks.

Why had she taken off her thrice-cursed shoes?

She scrambled and scrabbled, her hands practically clawing at the floor to turn her trajectory and help her lunge at her target.

Her hand came down on the fire-alarm—so like those on Earth—and she pulled.

Immediately, alarms triggered all over the school.

She didn’t know exactly what was happening, but they needed everyone to be awake for it.

She needed to find others and organize a defense, but she had one task to accomplish first. She would not face a horde of slavering undead in socks.

The second notification came less than a minute later, even as she fought to get her shoes on properly.

<James, Real - Endure, High School Gymnasium Roof>

James regretted volunteering for the night shift. Though, to be fair, he had no reason to expect it to start raining while he was on duty, watching the skies.

There had been larger creatures occasionally spotted by various watchers—both initiates and non, making it unlikely that it was just tricks of imagination—and he wanted to see one for himself if at all possible.

Not that anything will be clearly visible in this gloom. He held a heavy raincoat wrapped around himself and a transparent umbrella over his head, having pilfered the latter from the school’s lost and found.

It was closing in on midnight, if not just past, and he only had another hour before he’d be relieved.

It couldn’t come soon enough.

Honestly, he was just grateful to the system and his own foresight that he’d grabbed a night vision skill.

It wasn’t perfect—a bit like actual night vision actually—but it was a good sight better than either being blind or having to carry a lightsource to highlight himself like a lighthouse in this gloom.

He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but he would swear that something had changed.

As if in confirmation, the sound of faint ringing suddenly began from below him… no, not just below him. It was coming from all around below. That was the school bell…? The alarm?

They hadn’t tested it, but if he remembered right, the fire alarm in the school was mostly just the period bell, let off its chain and commanded to go nuts.

He felt a shiver pass through him, and he spun around, dodging and lashing out just in time to move out of the way of something strafing past him, his blade cutting a line in it.

He’d had his undead-distrupting knife in hand, and it proved as effective as always.

A great, seemingly patchy-furred bat-thing slammed into the roof ten feet past him, dead. It hadn’t even slid to a stop before the sound of of the rain changed, being overcome by the sound of uncounted, small wings

The kill notification resounded, calling it an ‘Undead Vespe-Muta (Uncommon)’, but James was already sprinting toward the exit from the roof.

He didn’t know exactly what was coming—and he prayed that most of whatever it was would be classified as vermin to be drawn toward their prepared response to undead of that type—but he wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

The door was unlocked for him and barely two dozen yards away when he started his mad sprint.

As it turned out, two dozen yards was about six yards too far.

<Alex, Real - Endure, High School Classroom>

Alex groaned, grimacing as he rolled over, trying to slap at his alarm…

As his hand slapped a cold linoleum floor, he grimaced. Hmmm… What? I don’t have a ringing bell as an alarm clock.

His eyes snapped open, and he instantly took in where he was—sleeping in a random classroom—and what was happening—the school alarm had been triggered.

If this had been Earth, he might have suspected shenanigans, but he knew for a fact that Kaylee had altered the Base’s settings so that only initiates could get a response from pulling alarm triggers, with rare exceptions.

This was a genuine alarm, even if he didn’t know why.

His pillow and blanket were gone before he regained full consciousness—whisked into his Inventory even as he moved—and he hopped up, pulling his shoes straight onto his feet even while his great coat settled onto his shoulders.

This wasn’t a time for half-measures.

The next moment, he pulsed out his overlapping Detect spells and staggered at the influx of information.

Clouds of undead were swirling through his detection range, and the living he could sense were all moving about frantically.

Even as he watched—somehow horribly lining up with his one second of detection—the singular life source up on the gymnasium’s roof winked out, completely overtaken and overwhelmed by undead signals.

If the information had been coming from a single spell, he would have assumed that the cloud of undead simply overroad the signal of the one living being, hiding it, but the two streams of information were distinct, and the life was now gone.

James! Even if that young man wasn’t the one on the roof, whoever had been up there had been attacked and likely turned by whatever was swarming around them. If there was a new undead signature, he couldn’t pick it out.

Whatever that had been was already sweeping toward the closest of the bait and anti-vermin towers that Kaylee had placed at the four corners of the high school when his detection magic ran out.

Jacob burst into the room, looking around frantically, and letting in the alarm more loudly from the hallway. “Alex! Come on. We have to connect with the others.”

Alex shook his head. “No, we have to get to the roof. Whatever this is, something just overcame the person up there.”

Jacob looked about to argue, but then the notification arrived, causing them both to hesitate.

Courtesy Notice: Wave Time
The wave has begun. Your base, abilities, and resolve will be tested for the next:

1hr 59min 20sec

Jacob seemed to finish with the notice faster—a bit ironic given Alex’s speed reading skill—and his eyes clearly focused past Alex, widening in horrified shock.

At the same time, Alex’s so meticulously honed Danger Sense screamed at him to move, and he dismissed the notification even as he dove to the side.

The window behind him exploded inward, sending a shower of rain and glass spraying through the room, even as it let in an unholy screech that utterly overshadowed the school’s frantic bell.

The glass had been tempered, and there was a wire mesh woven through to give strength and security. Together, that resulted in the glass chunks being mostly harmless to everything but their eyes. In that, they were lucky, Alex facing away, and Jacob closing his in time.

The wires sheared outward, actually more dangerous than the glass, one cutting a line of fire across the back of Alex’s head that immediately began healing.

Seven others hit hard enough to be felt through the greatcoat across his back, legs, and arms but none did more than that, the magics in the coat allowing it to hold up to sprung wires.

As to what had come in? Alex got a vague view of it as he tried to come back to his feet.

Pale flesh hung in ragged chunks beneath bone-white fur. Organs seemed to either be little more than set dressing or else pulsed with putrid unlife. The face was something between a bat and a… gorilla?

It had massive wings on its back—that were already folding up—and two arms already reaching for him with clawed fingers.

All told, there is nothing about this thing that should have been able to fly.

Oh! It looks like a gargoyle…ish. Alex’s slightly shocked mind latched onto that of all things, even as he backpeddled to get away from the thing.

In truth, his days of fighting had made him a bit… lax in his response. This was nothing he couldn’t handle, and he should be handling it.

He pulled himself forcefully from his shock and acted.

His back foot planted on a solid surface—his shoe giving him supernatural traction—and Alex launched forward, his dadao coming to hand from his Inventory mid-swing.

He twisted around the thing’s strikes even as he sliced deeply into it, a Multi-Strike allowing him to cut it and slap it with a Life Transfusion from his off-hand, sending over just HP for the moment.

The creature didn’t ash, but it did die, all cohesion lost. Oh, its bones turned to dust and all the squishy bits splatted across the floor.

“Gah! Why is this one different?” He stopped his movement when his back was to the wall, regarding the oddity of the partially obliterated creature. Though, the rain now striking him and being held off by his coat meant that he was actually backed up to the open window.

His Danger Sense triggered again with just enough time for him to jerk forward, starting to pull away from whatever was outside. It wasn’t fast enough.

Powerful arms and legs wrapped around him from behind.

The arms pinned his own outward, and the legs snaked around his waist, cinching tight.

The sound of a heavy wing-beat—accompanied by swirling magic and a spray of water—was all he had time to register before he was jerked up and back.

Oh, spicy twinkies…

That might have been it for Alex, who knows how he could have survived in the black, rainfilled skies, but in the last instant, a spear lanced out, threading under his armpit and into the center of the creature trying to snatch him.

The accompanying shout sounded like it might have torn Jacob’s throat, but the spear wielder didn’t seem to care.

Mana shot down the spearshaft before blossoming behind Alex, hard to perceive but still in his awareness.

A vortex of air exploded outward around the spearhead, embedded as it was within the enemy, creating a cavitation and internal pressure that tore the thing apart.

Alex flailed his arms, feet off the ground and still tipping out the window due to momentum, but Jacob snatched the front of his coat, pulling him back in, and the two took quick steps away from the window, turning to face it as they both gasped, breathing hard.

They weren’t strained, not really. Both had been fighting for hours a day for days now, and this was nothing. Even so, the suddenness and panic of the situation—added to by that stupid bell that just wouldn’t stop—had their adrenaline pumping furiously.

They watched a flurry of shapes whip by over the next five seconds or so, but no others tried to come in.

Finally, they looked toward one another almost as one, speaking in tandem. “The roof!”

Jacob was closer to the door into the hall, so he was the first one through. Their shoes slid and screeched as they made the turn… well, Jacob’s did, Alex’s Shoes of the Traveler maintained perfect traction, allowing him to actually pass the smaller man as they raced toward the roof access.

Whoever you are, hold on. If they were turned, he could unturn them. He didn’t think he could bring back the dead, but the undead were strangely within his purview.

Who knows, maybe we can restart their heart if they’re just dead-dead. His eyes saw what he needed on the way. He pointed to the AED box on the wall. “Grab that! Bring it.”

Jacob squealed to a halt and began accessing the equipment inside while Alex continued his headlong run.

Door, stairs, landing, stairs, landing, stairs, landing, stairs, landing, door, and he burst out into the rain and chaos.

 Wave Time
1hr 54min 49sec

Previous__________ToC__________Next