Chương 106: 97. Eremia

"Forty kilometres of the richest coast in Attica, and at night not one fire on the water. The pools have gone green. A few months ago I would have revelled in the emptiness." — The Ether Atlas: Field Notes of Steven Parr, the Attica coast road Arthur was feeling the distinct discomfort of moving in plate armour, and the chafing had only become worse since they passed Voula. He rolled his shoulders, shifting the load forward off the top of his back. The raw mass of the iron was not the problem.

With his enhanced strength, he could carry the weight all day without tiring. The real issue was that his body was still mechanically adjusted to the old torn vest, which had weighed almost nothing and stopped just about as much. The maul rode in a custom sling across his chest with the heavy wedge head hanging downward, while the round face of the Ironhold shield lay flat against his spine.

Anyone watching the four of them come down the coastal road would have seen people carrying far more military equipment than regular travellers, but there had been absolutely nobody around to watch them for two hours. The sea was flat and blindingly bright on their right. The road took them past one shuttered villa after another, where some properties had their gates thrown open and others did not have gates left at all.

This had been the rich part of the coast before the change, and through the few open entrances they passed, they could see luxury swimming pools that had gone stagnant and green.

"Vouliagmeni," Sarah said, speaking up when the road bent past a small, abandoned marina.

"There was a thermal lake here you could pay to swim in. People used to come all the way from the city centre for it." About a kilometre past the old lake, which probably did not charge an entrance fee anymore, they came across two creatures. The beasts trotted out onto the cracked concrete forecourt of a burned-out hotel. They were stray dogs that had grown significantly larger under the system, their skulls warped to accommodate a much too large jaw. They froze the moment they spotted the party.

Arthur's hand went straight to the sling of the maul out of an old survival reflex and stayed there. The things stared at the four of them for a long, quiet moment, then decided against the whole proposition and slunk back into the dark of the ruined lobby.

"A month ago, that would have been an entire afternoon," Steve said, watching the empty doorway where the shadows had swallowed the shapes. He sounded almost wistful about it.

"We would have planned the encounter. Set Donna up for the flank, argued about the tactical angles for twenty minutes."

"They knew better," Donna said, her pace never slowing as she walked right past the entrance.

"Those were the clever ones."

"Hey, Archie," Steve said, looking up at the floating construct.

"If a creature's cognitive abilities improve over time, then given enough time, will they rival humans?" It is a spectrum, Archie replied, rotating slowly as he drifted ahead of the party. I would venture that some local creatures are already cognitively superior compared to certain specimens from your own species.

"You know what I mean. I meant as an average." Cognitive abilities in creatures will continue rising, but so will the cognitive abilities in humans, Archie replied. However, there remains an upper ceiling for non-sentient species.

"So soon we might have a cat beating Teddy in The Chase," Steve said, grinning.

"Teddy from the pub?" Arthur asked, adjusting his pack strap.

"Yeah."

"I suspect a cat could beat Teddy right now, if it could speak." They stopped to eat where the road ran close to the water and the level ground gave them open sightlines on three sides. Arthur tore into the dark country bread first, because Eleni's instructions on the exact order in which they were to consume the kitchen rations had been explicit.

"She gave us enough food for at least ten days," Steve said, working a hard heel of bread against the round of cheese.

"You would think so, but when we have eaten all of it in five days, she will be proved right that we never carry enough," Sarah said, her voice dry.

"That is a very efficient kind of love."

"It is the only kind she does." Arthur ate his share in silence, watching the open road and letting the group's conversation drift around him. Archie hung low at his right shoulder in his low-daylight configuration, his sharp geometry turning in slow, rhythmic revolutions, saying absolutely nothing about anything. They walked on into the late afternoon, and the long coast grew steadily emptier as the luxury villas finally began to thin.

* The pack came out of a sprawling garden past Varkiza, where the grounds of a long white house had gone entirely back to wild shrubs. There was a loud, tearing crash as a bent wire fence was trampled flat, and Arthur had his maul and shield ready before the first boar had even broken through the foliage. It was bigger than the mutated boars they had encountered in Marseille by a massive margin.

The creature's shoulders had built up into a heavy hump of dark muscle that forced its skull low, and the curved tusks were cruel and huge. Arthur could see a distinct blue sheen rippling under the thick bristles when the muscles moved. Four more animals surged out of the scrub right behind the leader. They were smaller than the first, which only meant they were roughly twice the size of any normal wild boar.

"Five," Donna said, her voice a flat snap as she immediately moved off the asphalt to take the flank angle.

"Steve, take the fast one on the left." Steve set his feet into the dirt and brought his focus rod up. A column of violently distorted air crossed the gap toward the charging beast, and the animal pitched forward hard as the concentrated lance of fire blasted a clean hole through its chest, exiting out the back. The afternoon air filled instantly with the smell of scorched hide and roasted pork. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Donna sidestepped a second charge with fluid precision, bringing the Ravener up in a smooth arc. For an imperceptible fraction of a second, she felt the slight pull of the angle the axe wanted to take, and she followed the instinct without question. As the boar crossed her path, the blade met the animal from underneath the neck, found absolutely no resistance from the thick hide, and exited out the top in a massive shower of dark blood.

The creature collapsed into the dirt with half its neck torn away, and Donna shifted her weight toward another target without breaking stride. The massive lead boar came straight for Arthur, the largest beast in the pack identifying the largest obstacle on the road. Arthur dropped his centre of gravity, planting his weight and locking the round face of the Ironhold shield across the line of the charge. He activated Counterforce Plant a single second before the moment of impact.

The massive kinetic force of the ram transferred through the shield into his forearms as the blue Etheric lattice flared to life. The giant boar rocked backward onto its haunches, completely stunned by a wall that had refused to give a single centimetre. Before the beast could recover, Arthur brought the Skullcleft maul down onto its skull, releasing every ounce of the banked kinetic energy. The next thing Arthur knew was gore.

It was absolutely everywhere, covering his plates, his hands, his face, and filling his mouth. The animal's skull had exploded from the concentrated force of the impact, taking a significant chunk of the neck with it.

"Bloody hell," Arthur cursed, as he spat onto the dirt. The last two boars were already dead by the time he looked up. Donna had taken the fourth, and Steve had driven a second lance of heat clean through the ribs of the fifth. The overgrown garden went quiet again, save for the wet sound of Arthur dragging the back of his wrist across his tongue.

ETHER ABSORBED: +600 (5 KILLS) INTEGRATION: 2, 914 / 2, 944 SARAH INTEGRATION: 2, 376 / 2, 688"Eleven seconds," Donna said, her eyes reading the immediate carnage around the road. She looked down at the ruined, headless shape of the alpha, and then up at Arthur, who was currently wearing most of it.

"What an absolute waste of good bacon."

"I have it in my teeth, Donna," Arthur said, his voice thick with disgust.

"Goddammit."

"There is an old stone well by that house," Sarah said, wrinkling her nose as she stepped carefully around a puddle of blood.

"Go and be disgusting over there, Arthur, far away from the rations." The kill was highly inefficient, Archie observed in Arthur's ear while Arthur worked the stiff iron handle of the well, throwing handfuls of cold water over his face and armour to wash himself clean. You applied a kinetic force sufficient to disable a guardian to an ordinary animal that masses at most three hundred kilograms. The surplus energy accomplished nothing but redecorating you.

"Yes, I noticed, since most of it is still in my mouth," Arthur muttered, scrubbing a wet palm through his beard. By the time he walked back to the road, Sarah had managed to cut two clean cores out of the dead boars. They were larger than the fox core they had traded in the market, but significantly smaller than the ones they had harvested from the werewolves.

"That was rather anticlimactic," Steve said, watching the empty road.

"The entire fight, I mean."

"Archie, what level were they?" Arthur asked, resetting the sling of his maul. Between level twelve and level fourteen, Archie replied. Donna was still looking down at the black sheen of her axe head with what looked remarkably like genuine fondness.

"These weapons pack a serious punch," she said, shifting her grip on the pale hornbeam haft.

"If you ever gave that exact look to one of your boyfriends, we might have had a fifth party member," Steve said, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"Wouldn't have mattered," Donna replied, her eyes never leaving the blade as she wiped a stray drop of dark blood from the bevel.

"The bloke would have thrown himself to the nearest pack of monsters after suffering through one of your lectures." * They made camp at the very edge of the empty stretch, where the last of the coastal villas finally gave out and the map showed nothing but rugged coastline for a long way south. Donna picked an abandoned stone pump house that offered solid walls on three sides and a clear view of the open sea on the fourth. Steve had his leather ledger out again, frowning down at the lines in the dying light.

"Well, we now know anything below level fifteen won't be much of a bother," he said, tapping his pencil against the paper.

"There are worse problems to have, mate," Arthur said. He had managed to get the worst of the boar blood off his armour and out of his teeth, though Sarah still refused to sit anywhere downwind of him.

"I am not complaining, I am observing." Steve closed the ledger over his finger to keep his place.

"The werewolves were about four hundred experience points each. These boars were only about one-twenty. When your rewards drop like that, it means the system expects you to move on to bigger things."

"The system can manage its own expectations," Donna said. She was cleaning her axe again, her eyes fixed on the darkening coastline outside the stone frame.

"We are going to look at this temple, and then we are going straight home."

"Yeah, with our luck, I highly doubt it is going to be that simple," Arthur said, cracking his back with a heavy groan.

"Your luck, you mean," Donna countered with a dry smirk.

"You are the candidate here. The rest of us just got roped into the tour."

"Fair," Arthur said, a quiet smile touching his face.

"Hey, Archie, how long until we are actually done with this test?" Steve asked, looking up at the dim outline of the floating construct. I am not authorised to answer that, Archie replied, his voice dropping into its standard clinical register.

"Yeah, it was worth a try though." I think I preferred the tomato arrangement, Archie said. Ever since we marched out of Athens, your questions have multiplied exponentially.

"Just making conversation, Archie." I watched this planet in absolute silence for over thirty-five millennia, Archie said. I do not particularly require conversation. Steve grumbled something under his breath at that, while Donna barked a laugh and went right back to wiping down the black sheen of her blade. The sea shifted from bright turquoise to a dull grey, then finally to an absolute black, and the entire coast darkened with it.

It was Steve who brought it up much later, when the casual banter had finally run down and they were sitting in the dark, settling the night watches.

"Has anyone else noticed," he said, his voice dropping, "that we haven't seen a single fire tonight?" No one answered immediately. The dark water lapped rhythmically against the rocks below the pump house.

"This is forty kilometres of the most valuable coast in the country," Steve went on, gesturing out into the empty night.

"There is a luxury house every hundred metres. Wells in half of them. People could survive out here easily. At least a few hundred survivors." He looked back into the darkness.

"And there isn't one light on it. Not one fire. We have walked all day through the absolute best place in Attica to be alive in, and there is nobody in it."

"He is right," Donna said.

"The houses next to the sea are naturally defensive positions. Many of the gardens we passed had fresh fruit hanging from the branches. I am surprised we haven't come across a single scavenged site or local group so far."

"Where did they all go?" Steve asked no one in particular.