Chapter 25

Chapter 25

Saturday and Sunday flew by as a blur to Drew, as everyone continued to prepare for The Descent. Early Saturday morning, the group had gone to the second rental property to continue hunting wild hogs. Drew managed to hit level six, and everyone else hit level five. When he had hit level six in his class, his race also hit level three at the same time, which gave him a nice boost to his stat points and ended up boosting his vitality and intelligence both to twenty points.

Drew had also managed to acquire an upgraded title, [Hunter II], which, according to Spock was just a direct upgrade over the original. The title itself was bland, as he had earned it from killing seventy-five animals. Still, he wasn't going to complain, he'd gotten another twelve Free points from it as a reward. He used the Free points he'd gained from his class level and the title to round out the rest of his stats to twenty points, and he threw the last point into intelligence to give himself a bit more mana, and a slight boost to the damage he did with his spells. He was very impressed with his Status when he had pulled it up Sunday evening.

Status

Name: Drew Wright

Race: Dhampir (Grade - F) - lvl 3

Class: [Caster] – lvl 6

Profession: None

Health Points (HP): 200/200

Mana Points (MP): 210/210

Stamina: 200/200

Stats (Attributes)

Strength: 21

Vitality: 20

Endurance: 20

Toughness: 20

Agility: 20

Perception: 21

Intelligence: 21

Wisdom: 24

Willpower: 20

Free Points: 0

Titles
[Progenitor], [Forebearer of The Descent], [The First Necromancer], [Curiosity of the Divine], [Hunter II]

If he said that he felt extremely powerful, it would be a vast understatement. He was at, or above the absolute pinnacle of human attribute points prior to The System integration. Even Olympic athletes would be hard pressed to compete against him at this point, and he felt confident that he could break several world records if he chose to. Not that it would matter for long, as The Descent was due to happen sometime on Monday. which technically was only hours away at this point.

Most of Saturday was spent working on the fallback wall with the rest of the group, while the local workers that he'd employed, finished up the ten-foot chain-link fence. Drew had to take several breaks throughout the day though, as his mana regeneration was much quicker and he needed to raise more undead minions. Once raised, he'd sent them out into the forested area to hang out with the rest of his miniature army of bones. His original minion, the first coyote that he'd raised had changed however.

He hadn't noticed it before, but it had gained several levels from helping him kill the wild hogs that he and Mark had run into. After consulting with Spock, he'd learned how to check the Status of his minions, and he had found out that the Coyote was level three now. It now stood a good six or eight inches higher than it's peers, and the bones seemed...more dense? He wasn't sure how to describe it, but when he looked at the calcium, it just looked a lot more solid, and less brittle.

He'd grown attached to that minion, and finally decided to name it. Drew had asked for suggestions from the group as he was absolutely terrible at naming things, and would have ended up calling it something dumb like ripper or reaper. Spock's suggestion had won him over though, he'd recommend naming his boney companion Scolder, after a coyote in the Navajo mythology. The technical translation was First Scolder, but Drew decided to shorten it for ease of use. The name didn't actually do anything for the minion, but it still felt nice to have a connection to the first creature he had raised, and honestly, its body deserved the respect.

Amber's sister, Lacy, plus her husband and two kiddos arrived very early on Sunday morning. The group really didn't require more than five hours of sleep anymore due to their bodies having increased in attribute points so much, so Amber had been the one to have "The Talk" with them. It went about as well as anyone would expect, but she'd learned from Drew, and showed them her magic arrow conjuring prior to explaining the new realities of life. The kiddos were super excited of course, as they wanted magic powers, and her husband's eyes gleamed and sparkled almost as much as the children's did. But Lacy herself has having a bit of a harder time accepting the facts. Her sister's house hadn't arrived yet, so they ended up sleeping in an outbuilding for the night.

The group finished the sandbag portion of the fallback wall on Sunday, and had begun construction of the rebar reinforced concrete wall that would sit ten feet behind the burlap sacks filled with sand. Robert had insisted on joining the group to help out, and had said nothing about the weirdly colored and shaped people that were part of the group. Drew was pretty surprised by that fact, he'd expected some kind of remark, but it turned out that either Robert was very accepting of other people, or he was too grateful for the roof over his head to question the strangeness of the situation. The only questions he'd asked were related to the construction of the wall itself.

Mark had been successful in finding several hunting blinds for the property. So, the group finished off the day by assembling and placing them strategically. The three elevated box blinds were spaced around the fallback wall, and the remaining five tower blinds were set up at various points behind the secondary chain-link fence. The tower blinds were excellent because Drew would be able to station his pets in them and they'd have an unobstructed view of the area. He planned to visit the local cemetery Sunday night with a couple of group members to help him out, as he really needed some human skeleton minions to start training with bows, but they'd been so busy that he just hadn't gotten to it yet.

The data extraction demons had been given the boot by Drew when he'd found the little bastards surfing porn websites. According to the demons, it was for strictly scientific purposes so their own entertainment could expand in new directions. Not that he personally had an issue with porn in the first place, but it somehow felt really wrong for the tiny little devils to be looking at humans doing the deed. He did not want to be the cause for pirated human porn surfacing all over the demon internet or whatever they used. Beefcake had accepted Drew's argument, and the little guys were sent packing. Even though the Earth was doomed, and the internet was going to crash soon, he went ahead and cleared his history and ran a virus scan. Why? It definitely wasn't a habit or anything.

For Sunday evening, his mom had made her secret family recipe of spicy spaghetti, along with a side of garlic and cheese French bread. The group sat down and enjoyed the nice family style meal; however, everyone was glued to their cellphones. It was hard on everyone, knowing that the technology they'd lived with since they were fifteen would be disappearing within twenty-four hours. To make the most out of it, folks were replaying some their favorite YouTube videos, printing out Wikipedia articles, and listening to music.

After dinner, Drew gathered Beefcake and Mark to join him in robbing the local cemetery. Was it morbid and wrong? Well, maybe yeah, but at this point he needed bodies, and he wasn't going to bring poor Spock along and taint his innocence too much. Beefcake was basically a walking slaughterhouse, and Mark... well Mark was just unlucky and Drew wanted him to join in on the suffering that he was going to endure by digging up some old, decrepit grannies. They hopped in the nice truck once it was dark, and drove to the graveyard. Well, everyone except Beefcake, he was around eight feet tall, and even in the super modern and roomie pickup, he was hunched up like he was stuck in a clown car. Which, both Mark and Drew found hilarious.

The real question was, which bodies should they dig up when they arrived? If they went too far back, there might not even be bones left, or they'd be super brittle. But, at the same time, he didn't want anything too recent, because that would mean he would need to cast corruption to get all the...meat off the bones. Sure, Spock had mentioned he could raise fresh corpses as zombies instead of skeletons, but somehow the thought of that made Drew feel worse. He did not want to see the body of the old sweet lady that used to live down the road standing atop his watch towers every day, and he definitely didn't want that super overweight guy that had just died of a stroke.

Zombie movies were bad enough, but he just couldn't get over the thought of having human bodies, still looking human while also being his minions. Did it make any logical sense? No, not at all. In practical terms, zombies would be harder to kill, even if they were slower and less agile. So maybe it was the emotional part of him that didn't like the idea. Animal zombies? Totally fine. No issues. Human zombies? Nope, no way. Not happening. With that in mind, he began to pick out gravesites whose tombstones read that the person in question had died between fifteen and twenty years ago. He wasn't sure how long it would take a body to fully decay while buried, but he assumed they should be skeletons within that length of time.

The graveyard was pretty close to the small town of three hundred people, and while he and the rest of the grave robbing crew shoveled through the dirt and clay, he found his gaze pulled in the direction of the town's outskirts. It was dark out, so even without his dark vision, he would have been able to see the glowing lights from the houses from where he stood working. Within only a few hours, many of the folks living there would be in for the shock of their lives. He wasn't sure how long it would take for the wild animals to mutate into beasts, nor how long it would take for monsters to spawn, but he knew many innocent people would end up dying.

He wanted to blame The System, he really did, but he just couldn't find it within himself to shift the blame onto the obvious target. If The System hadn't intervened, all of humanity on Earth might have gone extinct within his, or his children's generation. The greed, and corruption of his race had stifled all real technological process. The world was too divided to ever work together for the betterment of the planet or their species. Hell, even in his own country people were becoming more violent and aggressive in their interactions with other people who held different opinions.

Nowadays, everyone had a label, a title, a political identity, or a cause that set them against everyone else they perceived as being the opposition or the enemy. The only time people now came together in unity was during tragedies, or when another country did or said something aggressive towards his own. It was bullshit. Unity was no longer the current and ongoing theme of civilization, rather it was the extremely rare gift that everyone took for granted. Every day in the news, it was this race against that race, this culture vs that culture, this country invading that country.  It was sickening.

So, he really couldn't blame the circumstances on The System, as much as he really wanted to due to the huge amount of death that was soon to come. He didn't know how The System would change society, or even if it would be better, but at least it was a change. Even if the change didn't end up being helpful, at least it was different.

All in all, the crew had dug up sixteen caskets within the preferred year range, and luckily when they cracked open the lids, all they found were bones and some remnants of old clothing. Drew put all the remains in his spatial inventory so he could begin raising his new minions when they got back to the house. The drive back was quiet, with no one saying anything. Mark seemed to be heavy in thought, just like Drew was. Beefcake... well Drew really couldn't tell what the giant demon was doing or thinking, his existence was still very alien to him, and he honestly hadn't taken the time to try to get to know him yet.

They made it back to the house and Drew went ahead and raised some of the human bodies. His mana was a bit higher now, and he could just barely squeeze three minions out before completely draining his mana pool, which he went ahead and did as he really needed them to start practicing with ranged weapons. He'd collapsed from dumping all his mana, just like he had when he summoned Scolder, but Mark was there to bring him inside and set him down on the couch. He went ahead and ordered the skeletons to grab a low draw strength recurve bow each, along with ten arrows with target points. He sent them out to the few mesquite trees left on the property and had them begin practicing. The orders he gave them were simple, practice using the bows with the trees as targets, collect the arrows when they were all used, rinse and repeat.

With his mana empty, and an hour and a half left before it was officially Monday, he decided to rest his eyes and try to relax. Given the time constraints, he felt like they'd done everything they could to prepare. He'd gotten everything completed that he wanted to, but was it really going to be enough? He hoped it would be, but at this point there was truly nothing left that could be done to prepare. His body relaxed, he slowly drifted off to a restful bliss.

*******************************************************

Drew was shaken awake, he'd opened his eyes to see Amber standing over him while he laid on the couch, her eyes were wide, and something seemed to be going on.

"It's time, it's happening. Check your notifications."

System initializing
System initialization complete
Integration protocol initializing

Integration initialization complete