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Bk 2 Ch. 24
🕑 Added 2024-07-30 03:54:41 +0000 UTC24.
The metal frames of cars were stacked precariously into a wall. The doors, roofs, tires, and anything else of value having been stripped off of them. With everyone’s increases in strength and durability the work of heavy construction equipment was manageable with a relative handful of people.
Santi had been quickly relegated away from the stacking portion of the wall building to the dragging car frames team. His higher strength couldn’t make up for his rather diminutive reach.
Cam, Tank, and a few other of the taller members of the community worked to strap cars together. Ratchet straps, ropes, chains, and even in one case duct tape, bound the bare bodies of the cars together. Repurposed plywood was hammered into the car frames facing the distribution center. They weren’t sturdy and wouldn’t be able to take much abuse, but they were better than nothing.
Santi was in the middle of dragging an SUV across the pavement toward the lifting group. Yesi was standing on the roof of the convenience store, calling out orders to everyone like a general. It suited her, Santi thought.
“Santiago! I know you’re moving slow. Put your back into it!” Yesi yelled down at him, a scowl on her face. Santi retracted every nice thing he thought of the little hag and hunched his shoulders as he drug the SUV slightly faster.
“Come here, Santi. I’ll protect you from the mean little lady,” Cameron crooned. He was shirtless in the sun while a sheen of sweat coated him. He flexed a bicep and adopted an intimidating pose while scowling up at Yesi.
“CAMERON!” Yesi barked out at him and the boy deflated instantly and went back to work without hesitation.
“You’re people are strange,” Grimvr commented off to the side. The dwarf was too weak to be helping with moving all the vehicles, but Santi didn’t want him left alone. So he was sitting in a fold out chair with a wide brimmed floppy hat on his head while he munched on a jar of peanuts.
“We’re family. This is just how we interact. You aren’t like this with your family?” Cam asked. Santi had to refrain from chortling as he knew that answer to that.
“No. If an unwed dwarf male did that to a female dwarf, he’d be taken out of the hall and have his beard shaved for the shame he committed.”
“And if he was married?”
“His wife would bury him in a latrine pit,” Grimvr said, very seriously. Dwarves were serious people. Excellent crafters, premier blacksmiths and engineers. Ferocious fighters.
Santi remembered the fighting over the Rocky mountains.He could still taste the smell of wet earth mingling with sulfur as he visited a conquered dwarven hall. It had been one of the worst campaigns against the invaders they’d had. Belligerent dwarven lords who refused to be peaceful neighbors. He could still feel the heat of a blast from one of their machines, lighting the sky on fire as they flew over the mountain range.
He pulled himself out of the memories and reminded himself it wasn’t Grimvr who had done that. It wasn’t his clans that had pacified the Rocky mountain range.
“Well that’s one way of dealing with wandering eyes,” Cam muttered as he and Tank bent down to grab the bottom of the SUV and start lifting it with two others. The four taller men struggled for a moment, then the truck was up and over their heads and being set down on top of a small sedan.
“Are you betrothed, Grimvr?” Santi asked, watching his friends work.
“No. I am Dothk,” the word didn’t translate and all of the guys looked at Grimvr with a bewildered expressions.
“Ahhh, ummmm, not-established. I have no family or dowry to pay. I am a worker with no master. The second lowest caste.”
“That blows,” Cam said. As always, diplomatic.
“Most of those who went to the moon colony were. We looked to improve our lives. If we could find a rich claim or gather the levels to evolve, we could offer a better life to a prospective bride.”
“Man, you kick-ass. Why are you so low leveled?” Cam seemed the most interested in the dwarf while the rest just rested and let him lead the conversation.
“It is hard to level. Integrated planets are different. It’s why so many will come here. Mana and potential are thick as bread.”
“What you mean, will come here?” Tank asked.
“All integrations follow a script. The world is flooded with mana and potential as it's connected to the wider universe. Rifts are able to connect to the planet, dungeons are formed, ley lines are invigorated. The sudden influx of energy will cause a burst of monsters to materialize and beasts to evolve.” Everyone nodded, having been living that life for most of the last month.
“After that, when the world begins to calm down and stabilize, then the pillars will come. When the pillars arrive, the ways will open and others can come. Limited in number at first, but as the planet is woven into the net of the universe, more and more will come for the opportunity to get rich and level.”
“And the natives?” One of the workers asked. Santi didn’t know his name but recognized him as one of Abraham’s guys.
“Most are integrated into an existing power structure. Others fight the inevitable. Some don’t survive the first round of the integration.” Grimvr was very matter of fact as he talked about the possible extinction of the human race.
“How often do they not survive?”
“I don’t know. I am no scholar of integration worlds, but maybe one in four fail?” Grimvr popped some more honey roasted peanuts into his mouth and happily crushed them down while everyone grew very somber.
They had survived last time. The Apostates had tried to sell out their world, but they had done it. They had survived against the invaders and monsters and beasts and starvation and the wild weather. Santi would have to do it again with the difficulty scaled even harder this time. Santi looked at his sister on the roof, feeling comfortable in her own skin as she ordered everyone about.
His Mom and Dad were making food off to the side for everyone. Tacos and sandwiches being created at breakneck speeds. Bianca was off to the side, her borrowed sledgehammer over her shoulder as she talked to Chloe and Rayleigh.
He would have to do it for them. They still didn’t understand what was coming. They might think they knew, but they didn’t. They couldn’t comprehend what a mana infused storm would do. What bandits and marauders could do. What the invaders would unleash.
It was an unbearable weight that pressed down on him, threatening to drive him through the road and into the depths of the earth. A loneliness unlike any other he had ever felt ate at him. How could they know? How could they understand him and his fears?
Santi marshaled his willpower and pushed it to the side and then buried the despair in the darkest pits of his psyche. For them he could bear any weight and take any responsibility.
“Yo, Santi, we need another car man,” Cam said, slapping him on the shoulder and forcing him out of his own thoughts.
“You guys are fine!” Yesi yelled. Her perception must be high to have heard them.
Santi walked towards the convenience store and scaled the front with a single standing jump, grabbing the lip of the building and throwing his legs up and over the ledge. He landed next to Yesi and looked down at the mass of cars they had built up.
The T-junction had been blocked off by a wall of cars, with the convenience store being at the head of the T and the distribution center at the bottom of the T. Fighters were gathered all around the blockades, armed with a mass assortment of blunt instruments. They had pulled nearly every eligible fighter out of the base for this. Two hundred plus, all of them in the upper teens to low twenties with combat skills to give them an edge in the fight.
Raised platforms were above the blockade and held every ranged fighter they had aside from Chad and Adam. The other Acolyte fighters would be posted on the convenience store roof with him. It wasn’t a bad plan, funnel all of the golems and the cyclops into a kill zone and then kill them.
Santi just worried about if any of the mated pairs came out of the rift to chase after their escaped prisoners. Or Acolytle level golems. He could fight one by himself, but he worried about the others being able to kill them fast enough to prevent a slaughter.
“It looks good, Santi. We do this and we’ll have food for weeks. It’s a good plan,” Yesi said, patting him on his shoulder. She had always been able to read his moods a little too well.
“Well, time to go and free some prisoners. Daniel, get out of my shadow and go and get Hana. We’ve got work to do.”
Comments
Dominick Ruiz
Thanks for that! I worried it might not come as authentic as I want and the validation helps lol
Anthony Sebastian
I'm a sucker for sibling dynamics, and Santi's and Yesi's relationship is spot on
