The fifth day after the second wave was when I knew my decisions were correct. The auction house, which had 0 items besides our own, suddenly had a new listing. It wasn’t anything special, just a second piece of rotting flesh.
Lucas was the first to be skeptical, and after making sure no one here was trying to play a joke or be funny, we confirmed it wasn’t something any of us had listed. The item was unimportant, it was what the event signified: we were connected.
The auction house, in some capacity, had the ability to connect to other abodes. While they couldn’t be here in person to fight by our side, the extra items we didn’t need could be used to trade for things we did need. A network of trade… suddenly this made the whole ordeal seem much more manageable.
Our biggest issue, though, was the currency. Items needed to be traded with currency that could be turned in to the quartermaster. Currently that was a finite number, there was only so much currency circulating, and only so many demon waves had come. With two weeks or so to the third, there would be quite some time before we could acquire more.
Time was the bottleneck here. I found myself wanting the demon wave to come sooner, and have more enemies. It was a crazy thought to have, but in the context of the world we found ourselves in, was it so crazy?
We needed more enemies, more battles, more everything. More more more, and that was what was needed to survive. It was becoming clear that those who became complacent would most likely not go much further. Even scarier was the realization that everything was happening by design. My thoughts and actions were being carefully molded into a direction that steered the surviving humans towards levelling and improving our skills and gear.
We were all sitting in the living room of our abode discussing the future. “If things are going to become more accessible, it’s fair to assume survival will become more difficult,” Rebekah said.
“How much more difficult?” Marcus asked. He was the main tank of our third group to arrive, a warrior. “Gear is only one part, levels are another.”
“The demons provide a lot of experience,” I said. In fact, I was very, very close to leveling again. When it was just our group, a single demon gave about five-percent experience. “If you participate, you’ll gain levels.”
Marcus shrugged, “That was just your group, with all of us involved, there might not be enough to go around. We might stagnate.”
This wasn’t something I could argue against with confidence. The waves could continue to be manageable and no one could say for certain, but I doubted it would stay the same, and it seemed Lucas agreed.
“They’re trying to kill us.” Lucas said. “The challenge level will scale up. Maybe not this wave, or the next, but it will grow worse, surely.” Which left a heavy damper on the mood. The end goal was to kill us, or harden us into a fighting force that were ruthless.
“There’s not much else to do around here, though.” Bethany pitched in. “We can’t really improve much outside of the demon waves, and that worries me.”
“Use the time to rest and consider your builds further,” I said, “after the next wave, we should be able to see a meaningful improvement to the quartermaster. I’m going to focus my attention there. The auction house is merely a means to that end.” Which was to say, the currency gained from the auction house was used to buy things we needed from the quartermaster.
Until items we needed started to appear on the auction house, we couldn’t do much with it. Selling our spare skills for the measly price of the current amount of coins available wasn’t wise. Waiting another wave would have more people discovering the auction house, and more coins in circulation.
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Everyone dispersed as the meeting was basically over. There had been no change to the outside world, and besides the auction house and quartermaster discoveries, nothing of note was happening.
It felt like this was the calm before the storm, and while some people handled it well, others did not. Maria, particularly, had a terrible time suffering from boredom, becoming even much more of a moody menace than before.
Even me, who was a homebody before the apocalypse, who didn’t care much for adventure, found myself feeling uneasy. My Sixth Sense was calm, and yet I knew the way things always went. There was never anything good waiting for us, and if there was, something worse always waited behind that.
One week after the quartermaster had been added there was a new development. The NPCbegan to offer quests, multiple quests. A little exclamation floated above his head indicating this. Overnight the world seemed to have changed in some secretive way. I gathered my friends and we went to find out more.
I had heard nothing, seen nothing, felt nothing. The quartermaster looked the same, but according to the quests he now provided, there were enemies to slay, a boss to defeat, and goods to acquire. There was also a new tab in our character sheets: Reputation.
The world around us suddenly had tasks for us to complete, and the boss kill was the most enticing as the reward was a new skill book.
“A skill book of our choosing?” Richard asked. “Do you think that’s any skill book at all?”
“Who knows?” Jessica shrugged.
I was interested, though. I had an open skill slot, and up till now was greedily holding out for a new ability, a useful ability. The reward for defeating the boss and bringing back his head was just ‘a skill book’. It didn’t specify how it was chosen, or if it was chosen for you, but it was likely to be a good one.
The boss quest was marked as a RAID quest, which meant we would need help from our new comrades. There was no guarantee they would be interested in doing so. The description left me feeling a bit uneasy as well.
“That description implies the greater demon resides in a castle not far from here,” Lucas said.
“I don’t know of any castles around here.” Maria joked, which got a few death stares from the group. She was the one most likely to give people shit, so when she tried to mess around she often got a good brunt of it back.
“We’ll have to convince the others to join in the raid,” I said.
“What of the other quests?” Jessica asked before we asked the other two groups, “there’s one that just wants us to kill some enemies around five miles east.”
“That’s towards the location of the demon wave arrivals,” Alan observed.
“It says it’s just a party quest, and if it’s singular or a few demons, we’d have no issue doing this one to start,” I agreed.
“Do you think they’re repeatable?” Anna asked.
“We’ll have to find out,” I said “I like the look of the reward. EXP and… currency.” And it was double the currency we’d gotten from the second demon wave. “We should tell the others,” I added.
That morning we called another emergency meeting that was met with mixed emotions. Those that were bored seemed excited to have something to do. The issue with leveling and EXP seemed to be patched up just a bit as well. The ones that had seemed fine with just relaxing and idling were mostly filled with worry.
As the other two groups were a bit lower level, we convinced them to fight as one unit, for safety. We traveled as two groups, ours slightly ahead, and made our way towards the horizon. There was a small hill there, and once we had climbed it, I anticipated mostly open farm land, with the occasional small forest.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t what I saw when I surmounted that crest. “That... Was that always there?” Maria spoke up first.
“I don’t think so…” Marcus said.
I couldn’t find the words; most of us couldn’t find the words. I looked towards Jessica, the nape of my neck tingling from Sixth Sense. A considerable distance away, maybe even hundreds of miles, was a monolithic city. The sky around it swirled red, and atop a tower that could have been twenty feet tall, or maybe one-thousand feet tall, was a yellow demonic eye peering into the distance.
“The demons… they’re on earth now?” someone mumbled out.
