Chapter 113: Interlude Clusterfuck
The situation could hardly have been any worse if someone had deliberately engineered it to be as bad as possible.
It had been a tense couple of hours after the Event had appeared and the first bits of information had become available. Living fields out for blood, vine monsters with scythe blades for hands that could ignore armor piercing bullets, nasty Jack O’Lanterns that spat fire ... real nightmare fodder right there. But nothing bad had happened, not then.
Just the five members of a rural town’s police force sitting in their meeting room/kitchen, twiddling their thumbs, with Polieziobermeister Lehman cracking stupid jokes that no one laughed at, not even a pity chuckle for their boss.
Then, the phone had started ringing off the hook. At first, it had been panicked voices on the other end, then it had been just screams.
Lehman had prepared for any potential monsters by telling everyone to have the heaviest ordinance in the station available to grab at a moment’s notice, and this had proved prescient.
They’d charged out of the station, with the single machine pistol they’d been allowed to have in his hands, everyone else wielding their service weapons, which were mere pistols.
And that was when they’d seen the first monster. It looked like a Goblin at first glance, but when a half-dozen bullets had torn through the thing, it had turned out to be some kind of scarecrow beast made from random plant materials.
Now, if the situation had stayed at just one monster, things would have been perfectly fine. Hell, even ten wouldn’t have been a problem. But there were far more than ten, so many more.
“Everyone, come this way!” Lehman roared [Loud Voice] amplifying the shout to window-rattling levels of noise, then snapped off orders at a more reasonable volume “Move those cars into a barrier, make sure you have a good shot before firing, conserve your ammunition.”
One good thing about the [System] was that smashing windows, unlocking the handbrake and pushing the vehicles into position could not only be done in under thirty seconds, but it only took a single person.
Suddenly, Lehman’s radio crackled to life “Reinforcements incoming, GSG-13 officer will be there in five minutes, jets from the Luftwaffe will be overhead in two minutes. If you have any areas clear of civilians, call it out. Furthermore, I need your exact GPS coordinates.”
That had been something included in the pre-Event briefings, so Lehman had packed a basic GPS device that would give him his exact coordinates as precisely as was possible and quickly passed that along.
Even in the brief time required to do that, almost a dozen shots rang out, and people screamed as the bullets whizzed past them, each taking down a monster.
The flow of people swiftly tapered off another couple minute later, leaving maybe two thousand people running into the night behind the barricade. Said barricade had grown more and more, with cars thrown onto the top to create something the monsters would have to climb.
A motorcycle roared in the distance, coming to a screeching halt next to Lehman a moment later. It was a police issue motorcycle and the man who leaped off like some kind of action hero was dressed in full tactical gear.
“Where do you need me?” he asked in a gruff voice.
“Can you look for civilians out there?” Lehman asked.
“Sure, hold the line here.” The man grunted and cleared the barricade in a single leap. A batton appeared from empty air and whipped around to smack a ‘goblin’ in the head, the beast promptly exploding.
Two more monsters came apart as he struck them, while another four were dropped by bullets fired through the barricade.
The sound of monsters getting torn apart echoed in the distance for another minute, then the ‘reinforcements’ came sprinting back at speeds that would have been record breaking a few months ago, spraying a literal horde of beasts with bullets from his machine pistol.
Monster after monster dropped as the officers manning the barricade joined in, and by the time the monsters were in melee range, there were only three left, enough to handle.
That was when they got their first injury, a set of nasty claws marks that shredded through Lehman’s uniform as if it were made of tissue paper.
For five minutes, nothing much happened. The occasional monster showed its face, got lit on fire or shot, and that was that.
Then swordsman returned, a thunderous expression on his face. The sword was nowhere to be seen, instead, he was cradling a black, malevolent looking book in his right hand while dragging along a twisted, gooey mass of vines with his left hand, leaving behind a trail of ... things Lehman didn’t even want to think about.
“What were these things called, Raul?” he asked.
“Stalks of Death, with a tag that said ‘minion’.” The Hispanic man said “And that mess is to wrecked to be identified.”
“Still, I’m pretty sure this is the Tier 6 ‘Field of Death’, but none of these things were that strong individually.” The swordsman grimaced “The circle back in that basement was definitely Tier 6, but overall, the designation should be Pseudo Tier 6, as these things are definitely that strong, collectively.”
He paused, looking around “I’m guessing you don’t just have bare earth lining the sidewalks in this town?”
Lehman blinked in surprise, then likewise looked around. Now that the man had mentioned it, all of the plant life in the area seemed to have disappeared.
“Nope.”
“Sounds like that thing sucked up all of that biomass to form these minions.” The swordsman followed that statement up with a couple of muttered curses.
“And what’s up with that book?” Lehman asked.
“The loot drop, a spellbook for [Des Gevatter’s Umarmung].”
“What does ‘Gefatter’ mean?” the other newcomer asked.
“Very old-fashioned way to say ‘Godfather’, almost exclusively used as an epithet for the embodiment of death. Roughly translated, it means [Death’s Embrace]. Unless someone disagrees, I’ll be learning it. Now, there are no monsters left here, I’ll take some pictures and head back to continue research and be ready for the next incident.”
“Dr. Thoma, what did the summoning area look like?” the GSG-13 officer asked. Clearly, he knew the swordsman.
“A bloody ruin. I saw a few pamphlets about how ‘the [System] belongs to everyone’ and crap like that.” Thoma replied.
“Crap. More Children of the [System]?”
“I hope not. But that’s for someone with a skillset I don’t have to determine.”
“I suppose. Good luck with the rest of today, you’ll need it.”
“Thanks.” Thoma sighed, pulling a camera out of thin air and snaping a few pictures.
“Are you really going to post those?” Lehman asked “These are people’s lives, their deaths you’d be publishing.”
“That depends on everyone else involved in this. But if the powers that be do decide the publish at least some of these pictures, then they’ll serve to remind people how dangerous this Event is. ‘A picture is worth a thousand word’ and it might be what gets through the thick skulls of idiots like the one who caused this mess.”
And with that, Thoma leaped up and into the portal, vanishing inside. The other man followed, then the dragon flew through, and then they were gone.
Lehman slumped, his gun clattering to the ground as it fell from nerveless fingers. He stared around the ruin that had been his home for going on fifteen years a mere ... had it really been less than an hour ago?
