Cleaning up the rest of the monster swarm was as uneventful as blood and death could be. Jill went back into the turret first, but made a point to switch out immediately after she levelled. Ras stuck to driving on the road while Jill shot, the monsters running behind in a futile and predictable chase. When it came her turn to drive again the monsters were over half depleted, and Jill decided to experiment. With the ability to go off road with no fear of rolling she drove a wide loop around the group, corralling the monsters into one place. The only tricky bit was that some of the slower monsters that had fallen behind began to catch up as the truck circled in place, so Jill had to dodge the occasional lunging creature whenever she was in the western edge of her circle.

Babu described the process as ‘kiting’; to Jill it was making your own barrel to shoot the fish in. The monsterized animals might be strong and have deadly magic powers, but they were also rabid and single minded in their suicidal pursuit. Jill might have expected that from the prey animals turned monster: after all, their killer instincts were brand new. But the wolves were similarly impared, their naturally sophisticated pack hunting strategies completely absent.

Just like before, Jill gained a portion of the experience from the others’ kills. It seemed that the System recognized that Bertha and the gun were hers, that the others were benefiting from her resources. The experience wasn’t nearly as much as getting the kills herself, but it still added up to enough to push her to level nine. She didn’t know what level Babu and Ras had gotten up to, but by Babu’s several whoops of glee he at least had levelled up a few times. Or he really liked shooting things.

The monster corpses piled up inside the loop, the world’s most bloody and macabre crop circle, but it didn’t take long for the last stragglers to catch up and be gunned down. While Ras stood guard in Bertha’s turret, Jill and Babu spent half an hour Looting and carrying their gains back to the truck, pulses of gold Mana lighting up the now silent night. Most of the loot was animal parts - hides, teeth, antlers, etc - but there were also more glowing gems like Jill had gotten from the Lesser Firewolf what seemed like a week before but had been scant hours. Despite the possible value, they decided not to retrace their path west. The trail of blood was many miles long and they all wanted to keep moving east. rather than spend hours picking up more of the same in the wrong direction.

They hit the road again, Babu sleeping in the back on the still recessed bed and Ras drifting off in the passenger seat. Jill was exhausted as well, but she was also very used to long nights on the lonely road. Without any new crises to deal with, the events of the past few hours kept running through her mind on repeat, every close call making her hands shake when they popped back into her mind’s eye. There had been more danger and blood in that time than in the past several years combined, and Jill longed for a few quiet hours to think about anything else, but her brain wouldn’t cooperate. A question kept poking her, making her more and more worried as time went on.

Where was everyone? Jill knew that for a major highway like I-90, even in a sparsely populated state, even so late into the night that it's early instead, there should always be people driving on it. Whether truckers like Jill, shift workers commuting at terrible hours, or just extreme early birds going about their business, it was rare to go more than ten minutes without seeing another vehicle. Other than the brothers, the road had been deserted. The only thing she could think of was that everyone else’s cars must have acted like the Bati’s U-Haul and died immediately. Could they have been so fixated on the monsters chasing them that they’d passed a broken down car in the dead of the night? The thought chilled Jill to the core. If so, they had left people to die.

Bertha rounded a bend and the question of a few people maybe having died suddenly seemed like a small concern.

“Babu! Ras! Wake the fuck up!” Jill said, leaning over to punch Ras on the shoulder.

“Waa?”

“We just hit Bozeman and well… look.”

Technically they had just entered the outskirts of Belgrade, but it was close enough. The plains and hills surrounding the highway had given way to parking lots and single story businesses, many of which were on fire. Jill was already slowing the big rig down to get a better look when a suburb came into view next to them. She could only see a few homes from the highway, but half were on fire, and others had great holes in them where some monstrosity had forced their way in. Cars sat crushed in driveways, gasoline pooling under the wrecks and flowing into the street. A herd of deer ran past them, their over-large teeth piercing through their own lips and leaving a spattered trail of blood behind them.

Ras pointed not at them, but at where they were heading. “There!” he said. A few hundred meters off the highway, barely visible beyond the houses, was a larger two story building. There were rapid flashes from its upper windows as people opened fire. “Babu, get up top!” Ras said, grabbing the shotgun for himself as he turned to Jill. “Please, we have to-”

“Way ahead of you hero boy!” Jill pulled the wheel over, a sense of purpose, of doing in the now, driving away her doubts. There was only a thin slat fence between the highway and the surrounding suburban road, one that Bertha crashed through with ease. Slats were thrown into the air all around them as Jill pulled on the horn, Bertha’s roar announcing their dominance to all around. She aimed for the herd of deer, and something of their base animal must have remained for they froze where they stood as the headlights washed over them.

Bertha’s new off road capabilities left her going more than fast enough to crush deer, even if they weren’t at full highway speeds. Monster bones cracked and blood sprayed as the big rig hit the herd like a spiked bowling ball into pins of flesh, then drove right over the remains. Jill felt through her connection to Bertha that the truck hadn’t gone unscathed: the grille was almost certainly smashed, and a test swerve on the wheel showed that something in the steering wasn’t right, though sharp pops and pings sounded from the front of the cab as the damage started to repair itself.

Jill spared a thought for the armor module that was available; she had the points, and she sure as shooting wasn’t going to stop ramming into monsters, if this one cursed night was any indication for the future. She almost bought it, but her attention was broken by the residential street ending suddenly in a T intersection. Jill whipped the truck to the right, Torque Converter glowing as it prevented a rollover. Babu started firing in the turret, though Jill couldn’t see what at. She also couldn’t see a clear way forward and fought to keep the truck on the road, the typical maze of suburban streets never designed for the speeds that she was going.

“Left, go left!” Ras said as they approached another intersection.

Jill followed his directions, then had to fight the urge to stomp on the brakes. “Oh shit out of your mouth you’ve got to be kidding!” She yelled at no one in particular as an absolutely giant spider came into view. It was squatting over a wrecked house, dozens of giant eyes glinting in the headlights, a human corpse wrapped in webbing held to its fangs. It started to raise a fifteen foot long leg, covered in hairs each wicked and sharp as a knife. Jill purchased the armor module with a thought.

Armor module added! 3 Class Power points remaining.

Prepare for integration.

Reflective fractals raced across the windshield as layers of crystals grew on top of the glass. At the same time, Bertha’s outer surface cracked and tilted as overlapping bands of shining grey armor slid out from nothing. The process hadn’t quite finished as the spider struck, the blow from a single leg powerful enough to send the big rig screeching sideways, a meter-deep dent pounded into the trailer. But the armor had held enough that the truck hadn’t been skewered, and with a skid and a few ineffectual panic fired bullets they were past the arachnid.

Armor

‘Bertha’ has an armored exterior. 14% increase in durability as armor; damage to this additional durability does not damage interior systems. Incoming damage is reduced by 14%. Mass increased by 10,000 kg, modified by external dimensions.

Includes: Transparent Aluminum Viewports

Addons (0/1): None

Armor Upgrades:

Ablative Armor (0/1): When faced with continuous damage sources, incoming damage is reduced by damage taken in the last 1.4 seconds.

Face Hardening (0/3): Incoming damage reduced by 14 after other reductions.

Bulwark (0/5): Further 14% increase in armor durability and incoming damage reduction. Mass increased by 10,000 kg modified by external dimensions.

“Sugar, its level thirty seven!” Ras said, his knuckles white from his deathgrip on the shotgun.

“We’re not sticking around, point me to that gunfire!” Jill said, pulling the wheel over hard yet again as another street ended too soon. The additional weight of the armor immediately made itself known as Bertha took the corner wider than she expected. Jill managed to mostly correct, but the cab went up onto someone’s front lawn and the trailer lost traction for a moment, whipping out to sideswipe the house. It said a lot about the new power of the big rig that the impact didn’t even slow them down that much, but left the entire front of the house caved in.

“Aaaahhhhh!!!!” Babu started screaming. But he didn’t stop shooting, so Jill gave him a pass.

“Right, then a jog, then left.” Ras said.

This time they exited the maze of suburbia and got onto a road meant to actually go somewhere. Outside of the housing development the land was flat and mostly bare, so their destination came fully into view: a sprawling two story structure made of brick, surrounded on one side by athletic fields and the other by an expansive parking lot. Both had monster corpses strewn across them, with more abominations on their way from all sides. A cheerful sign, only partially marred by bullet holes and the flayed corpse of a moose, read ‘River Crest Elementary School’.

Silhouettes lined the windows of the second story and muzzle flashes came at regular intervals. Some were the normal flash of a rifle, but others were colored strangely, or lasted too long. Someone inside had gotten neon pink tracer rounds and was firing them at a steady clip too, which was just bizarre. But there was a constant press of monsters, and it was easy to see by the broken windows and blood that any monster that managed to actually reach the school could get inside easily enough.

“South side!” Babu said, the turret swerving around to fire in that direction.

Jill squinted, then frowned. The south side of the school was just a field, though one torn up and muddy in large swathes, with grass rippling in the wind. Then the grass rippled over on top of a muddy patch. Like one of those visual puzzles where once you see the trick you can’t unsee it, what had been grass was now a sea of snakes, the vast majority no longer than a foot. But scattered amongst and camouflaged by their tiny brethren were the enormous exceptions, behemoths as thick around as a tree and dozens of feet long. Jill guided Bertha into a turn and pressed down on the accelerator.

“There’s no way they can kill that many! They’ll be overrun!” Ras said, panic lacing his voice.

“Rantallion!” Jill said, pulling out another swear-a-day entry. “They’re tiny, we’ll run em down.” She eyed the big ones and gulped. “Babu,” she yelled to be heard in the turret above, “shoot the big ones!”

“Roll down a window!” Ras said, hefting the gun up to his shoulder.

“Fuck no, are you insane?!” Jill said. “I’m not letting those little dicks slither in here!” She put a class point into Dakka. “I’m making a new turret, but you better get your ass back down here if something breaks in.”

Turrets (Small Arms) Dakka upgraded to (1/5).

Prepare for integration.

This time as the new turret began to form, Jill tapped into Customization, willing it to guide the process. She felt a massive amount of Mana congeal, what had been raw power dispersed through the truck as a whole gathering into a single place and transforming into something new. It felt a bit like pulling at setting gelatin with her fingers, except nothing like that because it was all in her soul. With a creak and pop that reverberated through the new armor plates, a new turret sprang into existence above the trailer.

“In the back.” Jill said, gesturing with her head. A glance at the mana gauge had her worried: the repeated integrations had lowered it to under six thousand, and she had no idea what would happen if it ran out. Luckily the regeneration rate seemed to have risen with her level, and the driving she was doing towards the snake horde consumed mana well below replenishment. Even though the guns integrated into the turrets drew some mana with every shot, it wasn’t very much compared to the totals.

The noise in the cab increased as Ras opened the door to the trailer, carefully picking his way over Jill’s still sunken bed, then went back to normal. Jill had a moment where she was mostly alone, or at least no one right next to her since Babu was above, to consider the insanity of the situation. Bertha was a magic battle truck tied to her soul and she was driving across a school parking lot into a slithering carpet of killer snakes.

“Weirdest haul of anyone’s damn life.” She muttered. Babu was firing away and the snakes were getting closer by the second.

Integrating addon to ‘Bertha’ small arms turret 2.

Tier 1 shotgun detected. Mana crossfeed enabled. Mana cost per discharge: 3.

Ras was in. The shotgun began to fire, the blast even quieter than those of the rifle with the doors in the way, a faint bass pop every second or so. Babu was screaming again up above, and as one of the monsterized snakes reared up, its head towering over the semi truck, Jill joined in. And since leaving her big girl out would just be rude, she pulled on Bertha’s horn and let it rip just as she plowed straight into the towering scaled creature.

Armor met scales and won, but didn’t survive unscathed. Whole bands of metal sheared off the front as the snake collapsed backward, its center completely incapable of stopping the enhanced mass of an armored big rig truck. The head snapped down like the head of a whip to impact right behind the cab, the impulse enough to drive Bertha down to the point of bottoming out the suspension.

Soulbound Modular Vehicle ‘Bertha’

Armor: 4220/5040

Durability: 36,000/36,000

Mana: 7,194/36,000

Nearly twenty percent of her armor, gone in one self-inflicted blow, but the results spoke for themselves.

Battering Boa, Level 22

HP: 47/860

MP: 131/220

Status: Stunned, Crippled

The guns kept popping away and Jill threw the wheel hard over, trying to catch the Boa in the tires. She didn’t know what exactly was responsible for it, but the snake died.

Battering Boa defeated. Bonus experience awarded for: monster kill above your level (+1.3).

Your contribution: 82%

4149 Experience Gained!

You are now Level 10!

In the midst of battle the rush barely registered, unable to compete with the sheer adrenalin running through Jill’s veins. She gunned the accelerator and kept the wheel hard over, putting Bertha into a slide lubricated by pulped snakes. With each kill another little jolt of experience flowed into her, each with its own little box that she by now instinctually willed to not appear and distract her.

For a minute of splattering blood and spines she kept the big rig doing massive donuts in the snake swarm, each rotation bringing them closer to the school and its defenders as its guns on top kept up their fire. Jill tried to avoid the largest of the snakes so that the guns could do their work, but it wasn’t to be: one had been hiding low and letting the smaller snakes flow over it, biding its time in a show of unusual intelligence compared to the previous monsters they’d encountered. As they passed close it sprang its trap, shooting forward and up in an impossible display of agility for such a titanic snake, and it slithered over the top of Bertha and down the far side. Jill was thrown forward in her seat, the belt biting hard against her chest, as the monster somehow managed to slam Bertha to a dead stop.

Elder Battering Boa, Level 29

HP: 1296/1410

MP: 112/320

Status: Giant’s Snare (Active), Constrict

Metal groaned and creaked as the Boa began to constrict, its power enough to slowly overcome the new armor. Babu was swearing now from above as he poured fire into the coil at blank range, but it was obvious that the little bullets weren’t penetrating far enough to do more than superficial damage. Jill stomped on the accelerator, her eyes fixed on the snake and its status box. Its MP ticked down fast, spending its mana to keep the truck still and in its clutches.

The rest of the smaller snakes weren’t idle either. They leapt onto the hood and crawled over the windows, giant fangs that boa’s really shouldn't have attempting and failing to find any purchase. But Bertha’s armor was falling too. Jill’s heart raced and dread pooled in her stomach. They were caught, and should those things break through they would eat her alive. Maybe they would deplete the elder snake’s mana before it was too late. Maybe it wouldn’t even matter if they did, and if they started to move the snakes would just hang on, chipping away until they cracked her truck open like a coconut and burrowed into her flesh fangs first. The only thing Jill could do was press on the accelerator and stare her death in the face.

She was snapped out of her paralysis by the sound of hail slamming into the truck. Armor chipped and shattered with each hit, but the Elder Battering Boa suffered far worse as a solid glowing beam of tracer-laced explosive shells pierced the night, erupting from the roof of the school. Standing there was a woman, dwarfed by the chaingun she barely held onto with a shoulder strap and both hands. The gun sucked down an ammo belt from a crate next to her, huge bullets pulled in at a blinding pace and shot out in a never-ending torrent.

For a few seconds at least, until the ammo ran out. The belt finished, and the woman struggled to get another one out and loaded into the chaingun’s empty receiver. But a few seconds was enough, and the severely wounded snake ran out of mana. Bertha leapt forward and Jill piloted it out of the swarm, or at least tried to: so many had crawled up the sides that it was more like she pulled the swarm apart as it tried to eat through the truck’s sides to get in. Snakes fell as they were unable to find purchase, or as they were blasted off by Ras in his shotgun turret, the pellets scoring lines in the armor that were well worth the cost. The hood cleared in moments under the force of acceleration, Jill’s fears proven wrong.

“How’d she get a chaingun?!” Babu screamed, voice crazed. “And can we please please please get one?!”

Jill pulled the wheel over again hard, so they could keep circling the school. The defenders weren't nearly as defenseless as she’d assumed them to be, but she would be damned if she was going to stop trying to help. At the very least it kept the terror at bay, one moment at a time. She could keep going for just one more moment.