Respawn: Lovers Lost Read online

  Arthur Stone

  Respawn 2: Lovers Lost

  Text Copyright © 2018 Arthur Stone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Contents

  Chapter 1 Life Six: Paper Thoughts

  Chapter 2 Life Six: Pursuit

  Chapter 3 Life Six: E. E. Cheater

  Chapter 4 Life Six: On the Road Again

  Chapter 5 Life Six: On the Housetops Again

  Chapter 6 Life Six: Roadside Village

  Chapter 7 Life Six: Highwayman

  Chapter 8 Life Six: Home Advantage

  Chapter 9 Life Six: Person or Persons Unknown

  Chapter 10 Life Six: March

  Chapter 11 Life Six: Veteran Companion

  Chapter 12 Life Six: Grain in the Elevator, Grain in the Glass

  Chapter 13 Life Six: Land of Death

  Chapter 14 Life Six: Touring the Lake

  Chapter 15 Life Six: Truth for a Lie

  Chapter 16 Life Six: Stable Border

  Chapter 17 Life Six: Spec, Healer, Scrap

  Chapter 18 Life Six: Quick on the Draw

  Chapter 19 Life Six: Inebriation and Information

  Chapter 20 Life Six: Preparations

  Chapter 21 Life Six: Chronic Moronic

  Chapter 22 Life Six: The Man with the Ax

  Chapter 23 Life Six: A Good Shot

  Chapter 24 Life Six: Shinies

  Chapter 25 Life Six: Fool Me Twice

  Chapter 26 Life Six: Fool Me Thrice

  Chapter 27 Life Six: Accuracy, Sledgehammers, Chemistry

  Chapter 28 Life Six: At Last

  Chapter 29 Life Six: All You Need is Luck

  Chapter 1

  Life Six: Paper Thoughts

  Newcomer, you’ve spent your first 5 lives in a very short time. Perhaps the region you began in was too difficult for you.

  Relocation procedure initiated…

  Relocation procedure complete. Former region: West Coast. Current region: Interfluvial Steppe. Region relocation complete.

  “Dammit!”

  The impassionate System, of course, did not react to its captive’s negative reaction. It just continued feeding him lines of bright, unbending red text.

  Welcome, Novice. You are joining the Continent. Revive location: Cluster 361-55-77. Region: Interfluvial Steppe. Current revives remaining: 94 lives (initial value minus 5). Active quests: Survive, Search, Learn Secret, Help, Ask Correct Question, Find the Player Kitty. Current status: Game Start.

  The cluster will reboot in 96 seconds. Hint: carefully evaluate your strength and your opponent’s strength. Otherwise, you risk imminent death.

  Personal victory: immune Romeo destroyed. Level 58, eminent villain, Humanity: profoundly negative. Personal victory: immune Globes destroyed. Level 49, Humanity: high negative. During battle, you displayed high speed, accuracy, agility, and reaction time. Luck also played an important role, and you successfully hid your abilities and intentions from high-level opponents until the final moment, displaying skill at a kind of stealth.

  +233 progress points to Agility. +77 progress points to Speed. +654 progress points to Accuracy. +62 progress points to Reaction. +773 progress points to Luck. +494 progress points to Stealth. +1442 Humanity points. Level up! Current level: 4.

  Remember that leveling up unlocks additional benefits. That was a superb battle. You, a weak newcomer, defeated a powerful villain, and in so doing proved yourself a first-class hero. This has unlocked new opportunities for you.

  Please choose a reward. You have three attempts to choose a valid reward.

  After all the traumatic adventures he had just survived, Rocky—Cheater, rather—did not at first notice that this resurrection was different from the times before. Apparently even smart people who came to the Continent failed to act intelligently until they adapted, until they leveled up a few times. It was no surprise that he was confused. The “normal” resurrection sequence had been replaced with something different, something unique. It was a miracle. The inscrutable, merciless System had decided to reward him and was even letting him choose his reward.

  His choice didn’t take him long.

  “As my reward, I choose to resurrect in the miserable cluster where they killed me. As close as possible to Kitty, if that’s an option.”

  Denied. Invalid parameter.

  Too bad, but he still had two more chances.

  “As my reward, I choose to resurrect in a cluster bordering that cluster.”

  Denied. Invalid parameter.

  “Oh, come on! What do you care what region I die in next? Alright, then let’s do this: resurrect me in that cluster lining the West Coast. Or any cluster bordering that one. Something in the area. Or something close to something in the area. Make sense?”

  Denied. Invalid parameter.

  You have used all three attempts. You will now be presented with two options for your reward.

  The first option is 500 distributable points for your auxiliary stats.

  The second option is one cell of personal inventory, capable of holding up to three items, with a total weight of no more than thirty-five grams. This cell is not bound to your stats and cannot be lost. Its existence does not affect your inventory maximum, and the weight of these items is not included in your total carry weight. You will not feel it, and it will not affect your fatigue. Items placed in the cell are not lost at death and appear with you immediately upon respawn. They do not have to be extracted from a remote personal cache.

  Cheater wasn’t about to spend his time debating between two measly rewards. Perhaps he had the wrong idea about auxiliary stats, but they seemed like rubbish in comparison with the possibility of bringing something along each time he died.

  “I choose the cell.”

  Accepted. Congratulations! Do great deeds, and you’ll get great rewards. Enjoy your game.

  He had lost a total of five lives but had also made so much progress.

  Cheater opened his eyes and rejected the old impulse to flitter them around like a scared little lamb, examining a near-identical miserable little closet in a near-identical college hostel. Instead, he leaped to his feet and paid no attention to the standard low-IQ pre-zombie nearby. He seized the clothes laid out neatly on a chair and threw them on. The future ghoul, meanwhile, was running his mouth with the standard useless tripe. Cheater ignored him. Empty conversations were painful enough on their own, and worse when the time till monster invasion was ticking down.

  The memories of his last death were, to put it mildly, still fresh, which didn’t have the greatest effect on his peace of mind. A wave of panic struck him as he considered that Kitty remained an unknown distance away, infinitely far away, for all he knew. With a crippled leg and all alone in an extremely unfriendly atmosphere, where suffering a violent death was more common than sneezing. Plus, the villainous System not only took away newcomers’ memories: It also turned them into idiots, returning their intellectual abilities in full, or nearly so, by level ten and not before. Adequately evaluating his situation was too much. Cheater had to make considerable mental effort just to develop a rough draft of a simple plan of action for the near future.

  There was no energy left for what would come after that. First, he had to get out of the city and calm down a bit. Gather his thoughts. If the situation out there allowed, that was.

  He opened the door and nearly bumped himself on the forehead. All of the thoughts he had drafted together vanished. The most important thing to do was to get control of his own mind, by any and all means ne
cessary. Since the System was still suppressing his intellectual capacities, he had to use any crutch he could find.

  Cheater would create one such crutch right now. All he needed was a sheet of paper and a writing utensil. Hopefully his dormmate wasn’t stupid enough to not even have basic school supplies around.

  *

  In the last city, Cheater had started one of his lives in the company of Kitty, and she had things to attend to that prevented them from quickly leaving the rapidly closing trap the System had placed them in. Now he was alone, with no one to distract him, so he could rush right towards the horizon straight from out of the dormitory door.

  Yet experience advised him otherwise. As much as he wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible, he might regret excessive haste later. There were a lot of things he’d like to do. Cheater’s limited finances and time made him keep his plans to four things: a weapon, a map of the city and its immediate vicinity, transportation, and something that would help him cope with the rapidly developing pain in his knee. Somehow, he had to get all of these things in the shortest possible time.

  Getting a firearm was a dangerous affair, one that only someone like Kitty could hope to quickly and effectively deal with. Cheater would content himself with a melee weapon. Not a cudgel made of rebar, nor an ax made from a rock tied to a stick—why would he do that when there were shops all around with more advanced tools? Even his System-crippled mind could read signs. He’d check out the stores he was passing as he headed for the cluster border.

  He reached a suitable place quickly, but he couldn’t deal with the prices. Looking over the many items in the store, he saw dozens that could turn into near-and medium-range weapons with minor tweaks. Sadly, they were all too costly. He sighed and selected the cheapest option, then approached the cashier.

  “So you’ve got crowbars for sale. What kind of shape are they in? All brand new? Or are they second hand?”

  The weak intellect of the digi grappled with the non-standard question for a few seconds, then the young man gave a hesitant reply. “Yes, of course they’re all new, of course.”

  “Alright, go get me one, please,” said Cheater. Then, he made a note on his piece of paper: Remember, you need money when you respawn.

  The boy saw his little note, so Cheater explained, “Very soon, money is going to be flying around this place like worthless garbage, but I want to bring some to the next life.”

  That probably didn’t clear up the digi’s confusion.

  Now, Cheater had his first piece of important advice written down.

  Alert: You are moving an item into your personal inventory cell. Remaining space: two items with a total weight of no more than thirty grams.

  He hadn’t even obtained anything yet, and his cell was one-third full with a near-empty piece of paper. But how else could he hope to jump-start his defective brain?

  And this thing weighs a whole five grams?

  *

  Cheater satisfied his cartographical requirements the usual way: Glancing at a student’s tablet and trying to remember as much of the surrounding area as possible. He tightly tied up his knee with a strip of bandage that he purchased at a pharmacy and pocketed a bottle of painkillers.

  Transportation was the hardest part. He didn’t pass any bike rental outlets, and no one he asked could point him to one. And he definitely didn’t have the money to buy a bike. He ground his teeth and decided to take a taxi, steeling himself for the numerous accidents that might occur along his escape route, with Cheater among the potential victims. But, surprisingly, the trip was fine. Almost boring. The accidents had begun, but they weren’t too bad. If he had stayed a half hour longer, the story would have probably been different, but he had acted quickly and wasted no time on unimportant tasks.

  Outside the city, meanwhile, everything had gone nuts.

  The traffic piled up against an impassibly destroyed bridge. Or half a bridge, which had collapsed into a nearly-dry streambed overgrown with impassable walls of reeds. The other part of the bridge was out of sight, if it had ever even existed. Not a hint of it remained. Across the stream, there was no decent two-lane road, just a narrow street with asphalt that looked like it belonged to a nuclear test site. A site which had been used for testing every month for decades.

  Several cars lined the break, and the drivers and passengers had emerged and were staring at the crossing in a daze. Only Cheater seemed unaffected. He paid the taxi driver, paying no heed to his shocked rants, and limped down the collapsed half of the bridge, straight into the stream. Ignoring the dirty water filling his shoes, he crashed through the reeds, spreading them with his hands, and made it to the opposite shore.

  He started walking along the road without looking back.

  Alert: You are leaving cluster 361-55-77. For this revival, this is your cluster of origin. When you leave, your spore meter will become active. Your current spore meter level will decrease at varying rates, depending on your physical exertion, your use of Styx abilities, and the state of your health. Caution: allowing your spore levels to become dangerously low may lead to the loss of a revival.

  Cheater read the familiar warning from the omnipresent System and grinned wickedly. “Don’t leave! Go back, or else you’ll have to suck down some monster juice!” As if it wanted him to stay in the city which was about to become the feasting table for hordes of creatures that made even modern tanks look weaker than a cage of naked babies being lowered into a pit of hungry lions.

  He had to scram, and fast. The map from the anonymous student’s tablet had shown that the city was located in the middle of a flat area, with no large rivers or coasts nearby. Meaning there were no barriers to hinder migrating infecteds. From what Kitty had said, Cheater remembered these kinds of clusters were completely unpredictable. Hordes could rush in from any direction, or even from all directions at once. Resets kept them away, but only briefly, and they knew that acres of food followed them. The faster you got out of a fresh cluster, the lower your risk of being in the way of the hordes of starving monsters.

  Thanks for the lesson, girl.

  …

  How are you doing over there?

  Of course, she didn’t answer. Cheater had tried messaging her two hundred times by now. The chat was now a party of one, and its theme had even changed into a new, depressing grayed-out look.

  Gray as a ghost. Or even a corpse. He hoped that was only because they were far apart.

  Chapter 2

  Life Six: Pursuit

  Cheater had no idea where the System had brought him, and the further he went, the lower his mood sank.

  At first, he planned to walk two or three miles down the road, then veer to the left or right depending on the terrain and continue moving in the same general direction, away from the fresh cluster and its monster bait. But not even ten minutes had passed when far ahead, on a hill that the road ran straight over, he saw several human figures. He couldn’t make out any details, but the people were clearly moving towards him.

  “People” wasn’t a certainty, and one good squint reduced that certainty even further. What would a small crowd of pedestrians be doing in this hellish heat out on the open road, anyway, and far from any signs of civilization? Plus, they were moving straight towards the newly-imported city.

  They’re infecteds rushing to dinner. No doubt about it.

  He turned and headed for a strip of forest between a wheatfield and a cornfield, hid in the bushes, and soon confirmed his conclusions: five infecteds walked down the road, three in front and two trailing behind. From a distance, the whole company could be mistaken for humans: their clothes, though dirty, were partly and sometimes completely intact. Their figures were not yet deformed. Their gait had a strange twitch to it, but it was hardly the gait of a beast. They weren’t newly turned: New monsters wandered like antagonists from a classic zombie movie. As these beasts approached, he saw their transformation had taken them well beyond all accepted definitions of human. Recently-turned
walkers’ sporesacs would be empty. There was no use confronting them. But these passersby might prove profitable kills.

  How had Kitty put it? “Levels two to five have a twenty to forty percent chance of carrying spores in their occipital growths.” Plus a little of that cobwebbing, of course. And about a ten percent chance of a “nut.” It really did look like a nut, and you could only take a maximum of one per hour. If your luck held, a nut would boost one of your base stats by fifty percent for as long as fifteen hours. For example, you could become one-and-a-half times as strong as usual. Which was pretty useful.

  Especially if you had to go hand-to-hand with five runners and nothing but an unimpressive crowbar in your grip.

  But Cheater didn’t need any bonus adventures right now. The need for spores was severe, yes, but he didn’t want to take any big risks. Killing five of them to get one spore wasn’t up his alley. He was too weak for that, and thankfully too smart to take on a fight with a high chance of an unpleasant outcome for himself. The plans he had made weren’t comprehensive, but they definitely didn’t include painful, unnecessary death.

  What did they include, then? Nothing, really. Kitty had explained—and frequently implied—that until they reached level ten, newcomers had significant mental deficiently, so it was accepted etiquette to call them idiots and so on, without malicious intent. And what good could come from the mind of a fool? What brilliant plans could it devise? Likely only plans smart enough to get a laugh, and that was if it was lucky.

  He had to get his brain back online, and fast. Maybe not his full former mental capacity, but at least part of it. Then, he could formulate his long-term plans.

  If he died on this pitiful field road, he would lose some of the progress he needed to level up his stats. Meaning he would be even farther away from the coveted tenth level, and with nothing gained to make up for it. Cheater had to avoid dying.

  Another three appeared in the distance, also rushing towards the city. That settled it. Things were getting too hot for him to leave the bushes.