Chapter 08 - Squad Goals

Current Region: Verisimilar Veldt

“So what you’re telling me is that you’ve been reading these books-”

“They’re called light novels, or web novels I guess, since most of them are online.”

“-These novels that just so happen to be all about someone getting transported to another world, that work on video game mechanics.”

“Isekais, yeah.”

“And this made you such an expert on the subject that one of the first things you do if you wake up somewhere unfamiliar is to try saying some command words out loud like ‘Status’ to open up the video game menus. Which is how you know that they actually work here?”

“...yup.” Brent finished.

“Jesus.” Ray rubbed his temples. “It’s almost like you were made for this.”

“I mean, there’s a lot here in this world that is completely different from what I’ve read about. There’s no swords or magic, for instance.”

“Status. Status. Sta-tus. Staaahhhhh… tus,” Harry said, while gesturing at the unseen window before him. He had been practicing saying the command words for the interface in a variety of different tones and accents, testing for any quirks or limitations in the system.

And what a variety was at his disposal! By now they had left the town and been walking west through the savanna for some time, and Brent hadn’t heard him speak the same way twice.

“That’s some pretty wide range you have there,” Karisma commented. “Do you do any singing?”

Harry beamed. “A wee bit. I’m an actor by trade. Started in theater but my passion’s always been to be on the big screen.“

“Wow, that’s pretty cool. What movies were you in?”

“Ehe, I’ve been in quite a few, but only as an extra. Still waiting for my big break, but I did play the leading role in… you ever see those commercials for Crescent toothpaste? Where there’s a giant toothbrush that falls over and squishes the germs?”

“Uh… no?”

“I don’t really watch TV but I’ve seen that ‘9 out of 10 dentists recommend’ meme,” Brent said. Ray snorted at that.

Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “Damn. Well, I’m in those, and I’d say I’m pretty great in them too.”

“Aw, I’m sure they’re good,” Karisma said, “Maybe someone recorded them and they’re on the Internet somewhere.”

“Oh, true. You guys could check it out, when we get back home.”

“Yeah…” Would it be when? Or would it be if? Only time would tell.

While the others continued the conversation, Brent surveyed the landscape. Since they had left the town it was back to just more hills, grass, a couple of wide trees here and there…

A flash of movement caught his eye from some distance away. He followed the waving of the grass until the source of the movement emerged, turning out to be a small, furry rabbit-like animal loping along. As it didn’t seem immediately dangerous, he relaxed. Harry, on the other hand, got excited.

“Crikey, but is that a wallaby?!”

“Huh, where?”

“Over there!” He pointed. “It’s not a crazed gunman, that’s for sure.”

It was definitely something. Brent hadn’t seen any wild animals since he got here, so this was a first. Seeing one made the area seem more natural.

The wallaby stopped for a moment, raising its head to look around.

“Ooh, it’s stopped. Let me see if I can get it from here.” Harry raised his gun and fired.

Brrrrt! Harry’s automatic spray shredded the grass around the animal, but the creature itself appeared unharmed. It started bounding away.

“Damn it Holmes, you spooked it.”

The wallaby wasn’t the only one spooked. Brent had nearly jumped out of his skin, and Karisma was similarly surprised.

“Hm, this might still be salvageable.” Ray unslung a slim scoped rifle, and took a few shots himself.

Crack! The sound of his shots were spaced farther out and were softer, though they still echoed through the hills. They also all missed.

Brrt! Harry fired again.

“Wait, stop shooting guys!” Brent hissed. “You’re making a ton of noise!”

“Aw come on mate, we’re just having a little fun,” Harry said.

“Do you want everyone in a two mile radius to know we’re here?”

“Well, no-”

“Brent’s right,” Karisma chimed in. ”Were you guys thinking about that at all?”

By this time the wallaby had scampered out of view behind a hill.

Ray sighed and re-holstered his weapon. “No, I guess not. I don’t like it, but the kid’s right, Holmes.”

“Aww.” Harry put his own gun away.

“It’s a bit late for that now. But why did you want to shoot that poor creature anyway? It wasn’t trying to attack us.”

“Eh, just trying to let off some steam,” Harry looked away bashfully. “It’s getting kind of boring.”

“Actually, if there are more of these things we can hunt them down and skin them for their meat,” Ray suggested, “We might be here for a while so we’ll need some source of food.”

It was sound reasoning, but Brent had a good feeling he had come up with it after the fact to justify their trigger-happiness.

Karisma waggled a finger. “…You know what, that’s fair. But we have plenty of food right now, and we’re on a mission, remember? Unless you want to drop that to go hunting instead.”

“Nah love, we’re still good for that,” Harry waved it off, “Let us continue the search. The search... for Snello! Heh, that sounds like the name of an old movie.”

Nobody responded.

“Star Trek? Anyone? Eh, whatever…”

They continued walking in awkward silence. Harry’s comment had lightened the mood a little from the argument, but it was still awkward nonetheless.

Brent checked his target status:

Assassinating: Snello

Distance: Far

Oh boy.

--break--

In the end, it was actually Brent who broke the silence first.

“So I’ve told you my story, what about yours? How did you guys meet up?” Brent asked.

“Ah, story time. Me, I landed in this suburb area near the slanted skyscrapers, had a bunch of parks in it,” Harry answered, “It was pretty quiet at first, so I was just wandering around, seeing what was going on and picking stuff up. But then after a little while the place suddenly started going off! There was a ton of fighting. Bullets were flying everywhere, things were crazy, so I was looking for a place to hole up. Found this ruined building, must have been a church before, but there were some doors in the side that led into the cellar which looked pretty solid. I went down there only to find this sheila had already claimed it.” He pointed at Karisma, who frowned.

“What did you just call me?”

“Oh, that’s just our word for girl, lady, woman, whatever. I mean no offense. Although you did scream pretty loud when you saw me.”

“Yeah, that was before I knew there weren’t any cops or anything in this place.”

Harry nodded. “Right, anyways, we waited in that cellar until things started to quiet down. Peeked out through the door, didn’t see anyone, so we booked it straight out of town. Almost made it out when we ran into Ray here. The bloke almost shot us on sight!“

Ray held his hands up. “I was on edge, okay? Like I said, the skyscraper area was a war zone. I’d already been in a couple fights and I had to assume everyone was out to get me. The only reason I didn’t shoot was that Holmes instantly threw himself in front of my gun barrel with his arms out trying to block the shots for Karisma. It threw me for a loop, I hadn’t seen anyone protecting someone else since I landed. He asked me to spare them, or at least the girl, then gave me the same speech about friendship as Brent, and I thought hey, even if the plan doesn’t work out I could use some allies like that.”

“And he was just standing there the whole time?” Brent asked.

“Yeah, it was crazy.” Karisma confirmed Ray’s part of the story.

“Wow.” Brent couldn’t imagine himself ever doing something like that, especially for someone he’d just met. He looked at Harry with newfound awe.

Harry blushed, looking away. “It was a spur of the moment thought. You can call it chivalry or protecting the lady, but I’d like to think I would have done it for anyone.”

“Please don’t do it again though,” Karisma said. “If you got hurt or killed I’d feel totally responsible, even if you told me otherwise.”

“If you asked me Holmes, I would call it stupid, because it wouldn’t have worked,” Ray said, “You didn’t have any armor on, and unless they use a really small caliber or something most guns will over penetrate at point blank range. So if I had been like one of those psychos and decided to just ignore what you said and shoot you anyway, the bullets would go right through you and hit whoever you were trying to protect. Your body would barely slow them down.”

Brent grimaced at the mental image, and recalled how yesterday he had gotten hit through what he had thought was a solid wall and nearly died. Modern guns were scary.

“Yeah, I admit it wasn’t the best idea.”

“By the way, what does your arrow indicator say about the distance, Brent?” Karisma asked.

“It’s still far.” There were groans all around at this. “Hey, I said it was far from the beginning.”

They crested a hill, and beheld in the distance another line of gigantic metal stitches, the far end of the Verisimilar Veldt. Beyond it was a land of snow covered pines, and a cool breeze greeted them from that direction.

“A tundra? Man, this makes no sense. This island is basically just like one of those example map things you see in geography textbooks to show every possible biome on the planet.”

The surrounding area looked clear, so they approached the border. The air had begun to feel a little cooler since they reached the hill, and continued to gradually drop.

“Are you sure that’s where the arrow points?” Harry asked.

“Yup.” Brent nodded grimly.

“I’m starting to think this mission wasn’t such a good idea,” Ray remarked, “How about we drop it here and turn back?”

“But we’ve already come so far, we can’t stop now.”

“Look, the sun’s getting low, and I don’t want to be caught out in the cold at night.”

“That town we were in is pretty far back,” Karisma commented. “Even if we turn back now I don’t think we’d make it before nightfall.”

Harry nodded. “Yeah, see?”

Karisma shook her head. “I still think we should turn back though. We need to sleep at some point, and I’d feel safer camping out in a building. It’s okay if we get there after nightfall, as long as we get there.”

“Well if that’s okay, why don’t we keep going?”

“The question is, how far do we keep going? When do we call it quits and turn back?”

Brent was troubled, not knowing what to say. He looked out into the expanse of the tundra. There were more trees, but the land was quite flat, so you could see some distance through the gaps between them. In one such gap he spotted something… orange. What was it? It was too small, and too far away for him to make out.

He had an idea of how to fix that, though. He took off his helmet and tote bag, and pulled out the “2-4x variable ACOG” scope he had found earlier. It might not fit on his gun, but would it still work regardless?

The answer turned out to be yes. Brent held the scope up to his eye and found his vision magnified twofold, getting a close up of snow covered ground. He pointed it up towards the gap, and the orange object resolved into a large tent, with the shapes of what looked like other tents around it.

“Wait, guys, I can see something,” Brent called, “There’s some kind of camp up ahead.”

“What, really?” Ray asked.

“Yeah, it’s over there.” Brent pointed. “You can check it out yourself if you have one of those scope attachments.”

Ray peered through his rifle scope. “Oh shit, there is.”

“A camp, huh? Seems like something worth checking out,” Harry said. “Good catch, Brent.”

“Hm, I don’t see any signs of people,” Ray said as he continued to squint through the scope,”Alright, we can head over there then, but if it seems dangerous or the sun sets before we reach that tent, we’re gonna book it back to the town. Is that cool with everyone?”

Harry made a finger gun. “Cool as a cucumber, mate.”

Brent and Karisma were also in agreement, and so the four of them pressed on into this new environment.

Around the stitches Brent saw the snow had melted into slush or just soaked into the ground on the tundra side.

As they crossed over, Brent checked his bounty tracker again:

Assassinating: Snello

Distance: Not Far

Well, at least it was no longer far.

--break--

Brent shivered in the cold of the tundra as the sun began to dip below the horizon. The temperature probably wasn’t that low objectively speaking, but it struck a sharp contrast with the heat of the savanna.

Harry had buttoned up his sleeves. Brent recalled he had a fleece jacket of his own that he had picked up earlier, so he put it on. He also thought of changing back into his jeans but there was nowhere he’d feel comfortable doing so out in the open.

The campsite was partially enclosed in a barbed wire fence, and resembled a scientific research station. The tents were actually large, solid dome like structures that looked quite sturdy. There were five in total lined up side by side, with the orange one being the largest in the middle. Tall industrial flood lamp towers were spaced around them, pointed down as if supervising the area. They weren’t powered, but one of the lamp towers had a loudspeaker mounted up to it, which suddenly blared to life.

Beep boop beep beep boooop. “The second halo is now closing!” sang the voice of Dombey Uno. “And for those of you in the northern area, Circle of Assassins is still on!”

The sound had put everyone on edge, weapons raised, but after realizing it was just another broadcast announcement they relaxed a bit.

“Damn, I’d nearly forgotten about that in all this excitement,” Harry remarked. “Annoying, isn’t it?”

Ray gritted his teeth. “You’re telling me, man. If I ever see that robotic rabbit guy again I’d like to blast it to bits. Or smash him with a hammer.”

“There has to be a real person behind all this,” Karisma said, “Like there’s someone controlling the robot and everything that’s been going on. If we can get a hold of him or her, we might be able to get them to let us go.”

“Or it could just all be automated,” Brent added to the speculation, “I’ve seen a lot more than one robot here and they don’t seem to be actively controlled.”

“Really? What other robots have you seen?”

“I’ll tell you later. Let’s check out these domes first, make sure no one’s hiding in them.”

The station looked undisturbed, lacking any signs of recent activity, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

They went to the orange dome first as it was the largest, about two or three times Brent’s height. Where a smaller camping dome would just have flaps and zippers, this one had something resembling an actual door, held closed by a metal clasp.

They looked at each other. “Well, here goes,” said Harry. He undid the clasp and the door swung open.