Chapter Fourteen: Midnight Shopping Spree

  The results showed up on the chalkboard immediately. The indecipherable text shifted, blurred, rearranged itself, and a new entry appeared beneath Thorn’s Edge:

  Unnamed Rift N5W12S#486—Tier One. Includes an Earth breach, but unknown others. Brackish swamp environment. Denizens include basic slimes, other inhabitants unknown.

  Tier One Progress: 16%

  Current Instances: 3

  Instance 1 Occupant: Unknown

  Instance 2 Occupant: Unknown

  Instance 3 Occupant: Jerrold Jessup

  “Tier One,” I said, scanning the occupant list. “That means monsters up to Level 10, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “And the unknown occupants—they’re unknown because they’re Level 0? The System hasn’t…” I let the sentence trail off.

  Taken over their bodies? Eaten their brains? Possessed their souls? I wasn’t sure which phrase I wanted to fill in the blank.

  Chelsea huffed, a sound halfway between amused and indignant, but all she said was, “Also correct.”

  “Is it the middle of the night in the rift, too?”

  She made an equivocal gesture with her hand. “Rifts tend to take on characteristics of the environments outside the breaches. Without knowing what other breaches exist in this one and where they lead, it’s impossible to say.”

  But it might be. And it was definitely full dark outside. Were the monsters worse at night? The squirrels had attacked in broad daylight, so it might not matter, but a mana-crazed raccoon or owl sounded like a nightmare. Just reaching the rift entrance was going to be a challenge.

  “What?” Chelsea’s tone held surprise.

  I looked at her, confused by the question.

  She gestured toward the door, answering my thought. “Your RMI leads to any of your rifts. Either the ones that you’ve claimed, where you’re the official keeper, or ones that you’ve been granted access to in order to claim or eliminate.”

  I blinked at her, feeling stupid. That was so… obvious. I hadn’t considered it before she said so, though.

  “Does that mean you’ve moved the rift entrance here?” I asked. Two rifts potentially spilling monsters into my backyard sounded like a fine reason to stop collecting them, no matter how advantageous they might be.

  “No.” Chelsea shook her head. “I brought the first one to you, after you declined an enclave, but relocating rifts isn’t done casually. It has the potential to cause uneven mana distribution, which might slow or even impede the planetary integration. Plus, pockets of high mana density can cause leveling bursts in mana-crazed beasts. That risks the monsters out-leveling the sophonts, which is not a situation conducive to positive integration outcomes.”

  One of my dad’s good friends was a tax attorney. Sometimes talking to Chelsea reminded me of talking to him.

  “Conducive to positive integration outcomes?” I repeated after her.

  She shrugged. “Yeah, okay, fine. Excessive mana concentration means big monsters.”

  She spread her fingers wide on both hands, flashing them open and closed a few times as she added, “Destroying-cities big. Eating-people-like popcorn bad. No-survivors, extinction-level monsters. We prefer to avoid that when possible.”

  “No moving rifts, got it,” I replied, trying to shake off the cold that spread through me at her descriptions.

  But I frowned, still puzzled by how the rift breaches worked. “If I go into the rift and find the people inside, maybe Jerrold, maybe one of the unknowns, how do I get them back to where they belong? I don’t want to bring them here.”

  Okay, maybe if they were badly injured and it was the only way to save a life, I would. But I didn’t want to start accumulating a pack of strangers in my house.

  “Your intention will determine your destination when you step through a breach. You can choose whether or not your RMI appears. Your RMI is—”

  She hesitated, then nodded toward the pouch I hadn’t taken off all day. “—technically, it’s a space similar to the one in Zelda’s Bag o’ Treats. Your ability to access it is intrinsic to the role of Rift Keeper, and not tied to a single rift access point.”

  “Got it.” I folded my arms, kicking myself just a little. I should have asked more questions before making my completely arbitrary decision to select the nearby yellow pin. I’d been thinking of rifts as monster nests, but they were so much more than that.

  But then I lifted my eyes to the chalkboard and let go of the regret. Maybe I could have done better, but Jerrold Jessup and two unknowns were currently stuck in some dismal swamp, maybe in trouble, maybe trapped. It made sense to clear out the nearest monster infestations, especially if they were affecting my neighbors.

  Well, okay, people in my vicinity. I’m not sure the RV park’s inhabitants could be considered neighbors, exactly.

  I’d just leveled up, a whole bunch of times, so I had plenty of energy. And the highest-level critter in the swamp was no more than Level 10, so nothing in there would be a serious threat to me. [Body in Balance] meant slimes Level 6 or below couldn’t even damage me.

  But would I be able to damage them? My mental imagery of slimes leaned heavily on the glowy green ectoplasm blobs from Ghostbusters, and I didn’t have a ghost-proof vacuum cleaner available. And Warden’s Edge—while clearly the best weapon in the multiverse—was probably not the right tool to use on monsters that could ooze their way around a heavy impact.

  Maybe I could throw dirt on them? Bury them? Set traps?

  Jack had killed slimes, hadn’t he? That was how he’d leveled up before getting into the challenge scenario.

  “I think I need to go shopping,” I said, glancing at Zelda. “You up for it?”

  She stood, stretched, and wagged her tail a few times. No Bear. Squeaky balls? she suggested.

  I chuckled. “Nope, just the Dollar General. And maybe the donut shop.” I frowned, thinking back, trying to remember what I’d seen where. “And maybe the gas station, too.”

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  The first change came when I put my hand on the door. A dialog box popped up in my HUD, offering me my choice of rifts. I selected Thorn’s Edge, and only then did the door open.

  The second change was way weirder. I fully expected it to be dark in the rift and it was, but everything—the trees, the brush, the road, the dirt, even the buildings in the distance—glowed.

  It wasn’t glowing like glow-in-the-dark stickers, and it definitely wasn’t a glow like the radiant allure advertised by fancy skincare products. But it wasn’t glowing like normal light, either.

  It was like one of those filters on a social media app had been layered over my actual vision, painting a misty luminescent fog over everything around me.

  “What the what?” I was tempted to turn around and go straight back to Chelsea to ask what the hell was going on with my eyes, but instead I took a few tentative steps forward, and then began walking with more confidence, and finally some speed.

  I wanted to get in and out of here as quickly as possible. We’d dash into the stores, grab the things I thought I could use, then get back to the RMI as soon as we could. I’d ask my questions then.

  Meanwhile, I wondered. Was it some kind of night vision? It didn’t have the eerie green tint of night-vision goggles. But those were human-made. Maybe the System did night vision differently. That green was phosphorescence, I thought, so maybe the System used some other kind of luminescence to create a night-vision skill.

  Sure, that sounded reasonable. Except I didn’t have a night-vision skill. I hadn’t chosen one, and none of the ridiculous number of randomly assigned traits had mentioned anything of the sort.

  Could it be my new Perception trait, [Senses Beyond Sight]? Except that trait’s description had specifically said smell, touch, and hearing, and this was very definitely something wrong with my sight.

  Okay, not wrong. Under the circumstances, while hurrying through a dark forested rift in the middle of the night, it was quite helpful. But it wasn’t normal.

  It couldn’t be [Uncanny Insight]. I’d had that trait since the challenge scenario and I would definitely have noticed if it had given me night vision. It would have made our goblin killing so much easier.

  Was something wrong with the rift? Maybe claiming it had turned it toxic, and it was now filled with poison gas that would kill both Zelda and me any minute. Or maybe my depression’s propensity for catastrophizing was working overtime in a really, really stupid way.

  Of course the rift wasn’t filled with poison.

  Oh!

  Duh.

  It was filled with mana.

  I stopped my hurried walking in the parking lot at the Dollar General and took a long, slow look around me.

  At my side, Zelda gave a low, questioning woof. Big bugs? No smell. What is it?

  What I saw was that everything in the rift was infused with mana. Mana permeated the air, the ground, and the objects, both living and not.

  The [Mana Absorption] ability must have come bundled with [Mana Sight]. It made sense, I supposed. It would be easier to absorb something I could see. It just hadn’t expected it.

  “We’re good,” I said to Zelda, a little absently. In the parking lot, with the light from the store behind me, the mana glows were much less obvious. In full daylight, I would probably have thought my vision was getting blurry and I needed glasses. Given my points in Perception, I would have been seriously annoyed at the System for screwing up my eyesight. Would it have occurred to me that I was seeing mana? Maybe eventually. Not easily, though.

  I might have noticed that the colors in the environment weren’t quite right. The blurriness around the tree trunks had a faint green tint, but the ground looked browner, even in the parking lot. It was almost like a layer of dirt overlaying the pavement. And not Oklahoma red dirt, the way it ought to be, or even Florida gray sandy dirt, but a golden beige dust.

  Earth mana? Is that what I was seeing? And the trees would have life mana or plant mana, and the almost invisible pale mist in the air would be some kind of neutral mana. Or maybe atmospheric mana?

  I was tempted to try [Mana Absorption], just to see how it worked, but the description made me nervous. I didn’t want to be “weakened” or “altered,” and if changing the environment might make it worse… well, maybe I’d practice in a place that wasn’t where I fully expected to be doing my grocery shopping for the indefinite future. I bet no one would care if I messed up the environment of the brackish swamp where Jerrold Jessup was currently hanging out.

  Instead, I turned and entered the Dollar General. To start, I went straight to the school supplies and picked out the biggest backpack they had. Zelda’s treat bag held “eight cubic units.” I had no idea how big a unit was and I hadn’t filled it, not even with all those pieces of bug chitin, but I planned on loading up now, so I’d stash the lightweight stuff in the pack and the heavier things in the treat bag.

  Next I went to cleaning supplies. I grabbed three big jugs of bleach and stuck them in the treat bag. I wanted ammonia, too, but there weren’t any bottles of it on the shelves, so I started reading labels. Pine-sol, no. Mr. Clean, no. Kaboom, no. I didn’t want an aerosol, so the Lysol bathroom cleaner was no good, but I finally found some Windex with ammonia listed as an ingredient. I put two spray-bottles in the backpack.

  Did I think if I put both the bleach and ammonia in the treat bag, that somehow they’d spill and fill it with a deadly cloud of chloramine gas? Yeah, of course I did.

  One of the highlights (lowlights?) of a depression downswing for me was an ability to catastrophize about almost anything. If I put these chemicals in one bag, I’d spend the rest of the night poking at my anxiety about it, twinge, twinge, twinge, telling myself I was stupid to worry and then worrying nonetheless. Keeping them separate might be pointless, but it would let me avoid the misery.

  After cleaning supplies, I went to the food shelves, and cleared out the store’s supply of iodized salt canisters. Sadly, there were only six, but I had high hopes for the salt.

  In cooking, salt tenderizes by breaking down cellular structures. Slimes seemed like the very definition of a cellular organism. I didn’t know whether the salt could actually hurt them, but it might work as a barrier if they wouldn’t touch it.

  Okay, maybe that only works on demons. But if it did work on slimes, I could build pathways, force them into my traps—well, the holes I would dig—and then dump bleach and ammonia on them to poison them.

  Would it work? No idea. But it was the best idea I had.

  Along the way, I passed a hanging display of lighters, the long stick kind. I hesitated for a moment, then took all of them. I put most of them in the backpack, but stuck one in the treat bag. I wasn’t sure how I’d use them, or if I needed them, but it was never going to be a bad idea to have a source of fire readily available. And while I might lose the backpack, I’d never let go of the treat bag.

  I roamed up and down the rest of the aisles, contemplating slimes and what I knew about them. Realistically, almost nothing. Digging holes and throwing dirt on them was probably as practical as any other idea I had.

  But it was a swamp and slimes were, well, slimy. I picked up a few more boxes of kitty litter and the lone container of Damp Rid moisture-absorbing desiccant.

  I finished off my shopping by adding half a dozen bottles of lighter fluid to my bag. The lighters had inspired me, I guess. Fire shouldn’t be effective on slimy, moist, swampy things, but it might work if it was hot enough or if I could build it high enough.

  What I really wanted was fire extinguishers. Jack hadn’t killed his slimes with fire, but with the fire suppression foam from his school’s sprinkler system. Sadly, Dollar General didn’t sell fire extinguishers. But the gas station had two, one by the pumps and another in the back, so after I was done at the dollar store, I headed to the gas station and took both of them.

  I thought about trying to take some gasoline. If I was gonna try burning the slimes—which I was, hence the lighter fluid and lighters—would a gas fire burn hotter? Be more deadly, longer-lasting? Somehow, though, despite my plans to cobble together poison-gas traps, gas felt too messy. And maybe too dangerous.

  It would be great if I could freeze the slimes, but my looting options didn’t include liquid nitrogen, so that idea would have to go on the back burner. Maybe, if I figured out how to absorb mana and then how to use it, I could find an ice spell that would work on slimes. At the moment, though, building traps and squashing them with my shovel was the best I could do.

  In the donut shop, I found the fire extinguisher behind the counter, then considered the oil supply. If the slimes were acidic, could pouring oil on them destroy their ph balance? Would that neutralize them? But was oil really alkaline enough?

  I decided against trying to add any to my supplies, mostly because Zelda’s treat bag felt like it was hitting its limit. Stuffing the last fire extinguisher in had felt more like reaching inside an overflowing suitcase than the empty space it had been before. I did, however, grab the donut shop’s 5lb bag of baking soda and tuck it into the backpack. I didn’t know whether oil was alkaline, but baking soda definitely was.

  As a last step, I opened up a couple of the shop’s cardboard boxes and filled them with donuts. I didn’t like the donuts, but maybe the slimes would. They could be bait for my traps.

  I slid my arms into the backpack’s shoulder straps and shrugged it into position, patted the pouch where it rested on my hip, and picked up the boxes. Looking down at Zelda, I said, “What do you think? Ready to go explore a new rift?”