14 – Strange creatures

Julian reemerged from the saloon with a large barrel he took from a room in the back. He rolled it out the swinging doors and onto the street, where he asked Cal to help him move it all the way to the church.

“What’s inside?” Cal asked.

“Black powder. You’ll see.” Julian said. “I have this idea that there’s more than a way to complete system quests. Here, against the wall.” He said, pointing at the church’s back wall.

They took a dozen steps back, away from the barrel, and Julian unholstered the two pistols hanging from his hips. He smirked. “Showtime. Cal, you have a fireball spell, right?”

Cal nodded slowly.

“Then shoot it at the barrel, please. And get ready to kill anything that comes out.”

“I don’t like this.” Cal said.

“Would you rather go inside? I can do it.”

“No, no.”

“Alright then! Come on! Don’t worry too much. Everything is going to be a-ok. Just shoot the damn fireball.”

He cast the spell in less than a second, and as soon as the tip of his staff came alight with magic the ball sped through the air and towards the gunpowder barrel. When it collided with it, it created a large explosion that sent shockwaves through the loose dirt and lifted a small fog of particles into the air. A cloud of dust rose from where the church’s wall was, and by the time the dust settled there was only a large hole.

+1922 Runes.

A few bricks fell from the damaged wall, and through the 2-meter wide hole they could see strange glints moving around in the darkness. There was a moment of silence, the only sounds being the still tumbling bricks and the sound of dust and small rocks falling from the damaged structure. Then all hell seemed to break loose, and the plethora of screams and guttural noises erupted from the inside of the church where the light did not reach. Things began to rush out of the hole, and people.

Cal and Julian were ready. As the crowd of people and strange bipedal creatures emerged from the church, they were mowed down with methodical precision. Julian aimed his two scavenged revolvers at the runners, and shot them down with the deadly precision of his artificially implanted  military skills, while beside him Cal bombard the hole with magic using fireballs and wind blades to kill everything that came out of the church. Julian only stopped when he needed to reload, but quickly caught up with the few strugglers who managed to run farther away than the others and swiftly shot them down.

After the last one dropped dead, Julian decided to carefully approach the hole to check inside. He did not go inside the dark church, only peering through the opening to see if there were any more creatures coming out from it. Cal looked over the bodies, crouching down to see them from up close. Some of them were human, wearing the same clothes that were so strange to him as the other people in town. They even had guns like those Julian had used, but they never even took them out of their holsters, instead choosing to madly run out into the combined firepower of the two adventurers.

There were other things mixed in. The humans were already a revolting sight, full of abscesses and growths that deformed their bodies, but the other things were worse. He frowned, white eyes focusing on the alien creatures. Their skin was similar to his own, just much lighter in color, almost pearly white. Their eyes were a solid black, like his, but had no iris nor pupil. They had no hair either, but their body was covered in growths much like the humans, just bigger and more twisted, forming horns and eyes at random places, or teeth.

Cal kicked one of the bodies lightly with his foot, ready to jump away if it even so much as jerked. It didn’t move, and he just walked over it with a complex expression on his face. Julian was done checking if there were any more things coming out of the church, and the two regrouped a small distance away from the building.

“Alright, let’s loot this town for everything it has to offer and meet back here in an hour. Do not go in the church. And please if you see a trapdoor to a basement please tell me before going in and disappearing on me.”

Cal laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll never see me going into either of those places of my own free will.”

Julian snorted. They split up. Julian decided to check out the mansion, one of the bigger houses that faced the square, opposite to the saloon where he had found the black powder barrel. On the way there he considered that he had enough runes to level up again, but decided against doing so now. It would take too much time. Besides, his latest experience using the guns gave him a lot to think about regarding how to build his stats. He needed to ponder the matter carefully.

The house was a two-story suburb style villa, with a style that didn’t quite match the rest of the village’s aesthetics. Crossing the wide open door, Julian found himself in a living room straight out of the Sixties, with a plush sofa and a small fireplace. The large windows overlooked a small garden, but all plants were withered and dead, and the wooden fence was smashed in a few places revealing the desert and the mesa outside.

There were a few books neatly stacked above the bricks of the fireplace, under a mechanical clock. The kitchen was furnished, and a few apples still rested in a bowl swarming with flies. A partially set table caught the light of the afternoon sun coming from the windows. There were no bodies that Julian could see, and the only smell of decay came from the kitchen. There was no damage either, save for the smashed fence and the broken entrance door.

The other rooms were the same. It was as if the inhabitants of this house just left, or disappeared, leaving everything behind in an eerie state of day to day normalcy. At least the other houses had dead bodies, people caught unaware as they went on with their lives. This one… nothing.

Julian found the small study room. There were small notes scattered across the large wooden table, and the electric light beside it was still turned on despite the sunlight shining into the room through the tall window. He sat on the comfortable office chair and looked at the notes. They were all signed by a certain Alfred Clarke. He mulled about the name for a bit, trying to remember if the signature he saw in the Bunker had the same name on it, but he wasn’t sure.

Julian only came out after almost the full hour, quickly going over the rest of the houses he wanted to check before meeting up with Cal, who could immediately tell that something was off.

“What did you find?” he asked.

“Notes.” Julian said, placing a makeshift bag with all the stuff he looted on the ground and taking the slips of papers out. “There were some people who didn’t belong to the village here, in that house.” Julian pointed at the house he was in. “One was a researcher. Does Alfred Clarke ring any bells?”

Cal thought about it. “Maybe.”

“In any case. He was doing… experiments.”

“On the people of the village?”

“They were collaterals. What he was looking for was beneath the church, or at least he thought it was, according to his notes. But I didn’t see anyone dressed differently coming from the church when we blew it open. I wonder where he is.” Julian said.

Cal didn’t have a good feeling about this. “Maybe he ran? That wouldn’t be a bad idea for us either. We got supplies and stuff, let’s go.”

“No,” Julian shot him down. “Want to take a guess what those notes I found mentioned?” he said and took out a note from his pocket.

Julian took it gingerly, carefully reading through it.

“M-field reversal.” He whispered.

“Yeah,” Julian snapped back, “Fucking M-field. And that’s not the worst part. Keep going.”

“They mention a ritual of some sort?”

“M-field and rituals. What could go wrong?” he asked, then noticed that Cal didn’t have anything on him. His eyes went to a new ring on his finger, that wasn’t there before.

“Where’s your stuff?”

“I had to buy a storage ring to fit it, here,” he said and materialized the loot next to Julian’s.

“What happened to waiting to buy it at an outpost?”

“I needed it.” Cal shot back.

“Might as well buy them for me too. How big can we get with 4500 runes?”

“There’s a cubic meter one for 2000.”

“Buy me two.” He said, and seeing the questioning gaze he added: “trust me, that’s going to save me a headache down the line.”

After having put his share of stuff in the rings, plus the crystals he looted from the monsters on the way here equally split so that both rings had the necessary weapons, rations and munitions, Julian approached the hole in the church’s back wall. The altar was smashed to pieces, as were the first few rows of seats that could be seen from outside. A few candles still burned on the side walls, where the tinted glass of the windows scattered the sunlight into a myriad of colored light shafts that disappeared in a monotone darkness.

“I need to investigate this.” He said, crossing the threshold.

Cal sighed and followed, gripping the staff with one hand and the dagger Julian gave him with the other. He even had a gun strapped to his robe, just in case. He slowly explored the place, keeping his back to the wall and circling the around. The seats were all smashed to splinters, even those close to the front door, and streaks of milky white fluid stained the walls next to stacks of discarded clothes.

“Over here!” Julian called from the other side.

He approached with large steps, closing the gap in mere moments, and stared down into the darkness where Julian was holding a trapdoor open with his arm. A claustrophobic winding staircase, with metal steps barely tall to fit him if he crouched, reached down into the very earth and led to a hand dug tunnel below the village. The air was moist and stale, smelling of mold. A few candles burned at uneven distance, providing a faint light and the scent of wax and smoke. At the end of the tunnel were two doors: a large one that was closed shut and a smaller one that led to a dark room.

Julian dislodged a candle from its molten and solidified wax cradle on the wall and went in, immediately starting to rummage through the many books and scrolls scattered everywhere. Suddenly he looked up from the dusty pages, making eye contact with Cal for a few long seconds without saying anything before going back to his reading.

“They tried to apply quantized time to the M-field theory?” he stammered. “It… doesn’t make any sense! It was just a speculation I wrote down on a napkin at a dinner, it was never supposed to… shit, the collateral effects must have turned all those people insane, or into monsters.” He said, and thought about the strangely dead back garden at the mansion. Everything else was green and alive in the Mesa Village, but not that. Was it an experiment?

“Uhm… Julian?” Cal interrupted his thoughts.

“Yes?”

“I just got a quest update: defeat the guardian of the church. And the reward is 8000 runes.”

“Well, shit.”