Slumrat Rising

“Truth’s back!” Harmony shouted. “I think he died. Bro, did you die?”

“I swear I was delivering a package all day. Yes, I think I died. Bury me somewhere nice.”

“Sorry, Bro. Student budget. Best I can do is a coffee can urn and a quick trip to the storm drain.” Harmony tossed him a can of cold tea from the fridge, which Truth pressed to his neck. His neck ached from leaning up against a wall for sixteen hours.

“Who are we burying?” Sophie yelled from the room she shared with Vigor. And Harmony, when Truth was in town.

“Truth!”

“Save his body for science, I need materials!”

“Sorry, Bro. Maybe we can still do the coffee can thing with the bits she doesn’t use?”

“I appreciate you doing your best.” Truth tried to remember how to open a can. He thought he remembered, but his fingers were suddenly incompetent. He got it eventually. “What time is it?”

“Too late for dinner.” Harmony smiled slightly. “There’s some leftover chicken I can throw in the hot box.”

“Yeah.”

“Hurray, I have dinner.”

Harmony threw everything together in the hot box. While things were heating up, he set out a bottle of hot sauce and a shaker of Adlom Seasoning™ next to Truth. Truth stared at the shaker. It was one of the bits of the slums he couldn’t shake. Food- the nice, good quality food they ate now tasted wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was for a while. It just tasted off. Like green beans weren’t supposed to taste that way, and the texture was all wrong.

It took Truth weeks to realize that in the slums, he rarely ate a vegetable that didn't come from a can. Everything came already salted, already cooked to near mush. Real food was an unpleasant surprise. He was trying to train his taste buds to adapt, but it was slow going. The compromise solution? Adlom Seasoning™. When you can’t make the food taste good, make it taste like Adlom Seasoning™.

He chuckled darkly. Friends and family points. Elixirs. He was already sitting on unimaginable wealth compared to a year ago. Making people beg to hire the sibs. That tickled a bone he didn’t want to acknowledge. But he still couldn’t shake the taste of poverty. Couldn’t shake the fact that his tongue was still in the slums.

Starting today, he was going to learn to eat good food. Fancy food. Harmony dropped the plate in front of Truth. He had to make sure the sibs forgot the taste of the slums too. Yeah, the System was right. Getting out physically was only the first step. He had to get their minds out too. Starting today. Truth had a bite of the chicken and rice, then dosed it with the hot sauce and the seasoning. Tomorrow. Starting tomorrow. After a good night’s sleep, to gather his strength.

“Morning, Sergeant! Might I say you are looking extremely fit today!” Truth did his best to sound upbeat. Sergeant Murthey looked at him with horror.

“How many dead?”

“Hahah. You sure are a kidder, Sergeant Murthey. Hahahaha.” Truth desperately tried to hang on to a sunny, positive vibe.

“HOW MANY DEAD, CORPORAL?! ARE WE AT WAR?” Murthey bellowed.

“I don’t know, Sarge! I didn’t kill anyone, and I don’t remember seeing anyone killed in the last day or so.” Truth gave up. He had tried his best.

“Prager’s sweaty sack be praised. I always assume anyone cheerful first thing in the morning is welcoming the end of the world.”

“Just… trying to work on being a people person, Sarge.” A cheerful attitude is always welcome, right?

That seemed to flummox the older man for a minute. He started talking a few times but stopped before the first word got out. Eventually, with a delicate air, he said, “Corporal, that is a… good thing. You should definitely work on being a people person. Bond with the people around you, and come to value their lives highly. Just. Baby steps. Right?”

“Right. Will do, Sarge!”

“Good. Good. Is there something you actually want, Medici?”

“Work that doesn’t pay an insulting amount of credits and offer “bonus” eyedrops I can buy in economy bottles if I wanted them. Actual, real, good money jobs.”

The Sergeant went back to staring at Truth for a while. “You got out of the hospital, what? Seventy-two hours ago? And you broke through to Level Two sometime in the last week or so?”

“Right.”

“You haven’t even tried running two spells simultaneously.”

“Err. Not yet, Sarge.”

“But you want me to get you more serious, dangerous work.”

“Well… yes?”

“Medici.”

“Yes, Sarge?”

“Shut the fuck up. Go to the range. Start a Level Two training Routine and learn how to fight your level. I will let you know when you can be trusted with more than gopher work. Now scram, and let me enjoy my goddamn coffee in peace.”

“Yes, Sarge.”

Truth went to the range. He wanted to sulk, but the Sergeant was right, so what was the point of sulking? He checked in with the range master, drew an Army standard issue needler, and checked if the clip was fully loaded. It wasn’t. What a joy it was loading a couple of hundred needles into the magazine. The fact that it was supposed to be unloaded for safety did not help his mood. Loading needles was boring.

TRAINING MISSION: Clear the targets using appropriate combinations of spells from the following list: Shockwave, Pierce, Acid Bolt, Graeme’s Arrow, Plutonian Chains, Sharp, Enlarge, Shrink, Fire Bolt, Silence, Screaming Blades, Visla’s Torrent…

There were about thirty in total. Truth was familiar with them by name at least, but some were too strong for a level one aperture to endure. Burnout was no joke. Everyone got that drilled into their head. Just because you could theoretically cast a spell does not mean you should cast the spell.

Time to give them a try. A wall popped up, and a hostage was shoved around it, silently pleading for help. A fetish was pressed to the back of the dummy’s head. Load pierce, load shockwave. Truth shot through the wall where he reckoned the center mass of the hostage taker would be. The needle punched a neat hole through the wall, which then exploded in a spray of plaster dust. There was a thud, and the target dummy fell over in somewhat more than one piece.

It felt… not bad, exactly? But definitely odd. His body was put under subtly more strain as his Level One and Two apertures refilled their cosmic energy. They did so by drawing in the harsh cosmic rays without the soothing benefits of elixirs or cultivation. It wasn’t painful, really, just a little more pressure than he was used to. He knew his body would adapt to the level, everyone did. But it was… different. A friendly little reminder that burnout can happen at any level, and the more spells you stack, the easier it is to exceed your body’s tolerance.

Truth grunted and looked for the next target. Ah, a whole bunch of baddies rushing him. Load Enlarge, Load Fire Bolt. The dainty little needle transformed into a thumb-sized bolt of plasma that washed the clustered dummies in flames. Ah. Ok. This could be fun. Load Graeme's Arrow. Load Sharp. Faster than Truth's eyes could track, the needle slashed a dummy's chest apart. It was like a game. He had unlocked a new violence puzzle and he could play and play.

Not only were the spells dramatically more powerful, but the combinations also let him create spectacular results. For example, stacking Silence and Acid Bolt guaranteed a covert kill. Some things just didn't work on a needler, like Visla's Torrent and Screaming Blades. Just not the right tool for the job. The load wasn't too much, and his body got used to it quickly. The range officer did not, however, get used to the happy laughter. Two hours later, Truth was evicted from the Range. He had hardly stopped grinning the whole time.

He was then assigned to catch up on all the talisman maintenance he had missed while he was away. The grinning stopped. It was a very dull couple of days.

“Hey, Medici!”

“Yes, Sarge?” Cheerful was no longer a term that could be applied to Truth. He just felt an endless grinding as Harmony’s SAT’s got closer. He might have just enough to get Har into the job he wanted, but that would leave nothing for Sophia and Vig. And it wasn’t all that long until college admissions. And he was used to watching his cultivation shoot up like a rocket thanks to all the elixirs. Feeling it make inchworm progress after a full cultivation session… well, it didn’t feel good.

“You wanted to get back to better-paying jobs, right?”

“You are an exceptionally handsome man, and your wife is very lucky to have you, Sarge.” Truth made a desperate stab towards flattery.

Murthey made some choking noises. “I’m divorced, you little shit! And don’t get your hopes up; it’s another package delivery gig. At least it’s more than your base salary.”

“Yes, Sarge.” Truth said obediently. Right. Baby steps. Flattery was an art. That's what the books said. Not that Murthey had much worth flattering.

“You are thinking something unpleasant, aren’t you, Medici?”

“Never!”

“Uhuh. Here is the order. Get.”

The crate was shuddering and making a sort of high-pitched whining noise. Truth was sitting in the back of the wagon with the crate, a needler, and a heavy-duty fire-bolter fetish. The orders strongly emphasized that if a breakout could not be controlled immediately with the fire bolter, the needler would be employed first upon any nearby civilians and then upon Truth himself. As a humanitarian consideration. No further explanation of the contents of the crate was provided.

They were going up into the mountains, and the roads were poorly maintained. Every pothole or rock in the road made the crate jerk under the cargo net. The whine would momentarily stop… then start again. As though whatever was inside was testing the crate for weaknesses. Over and over again. For six hours. And every time, Truth felt his breath stop, and his hand tighten on the fetish. He tried to distract himself by looking at the Lovers page in the store. Lots of boxes to click. Lots of sliders to move around. Hours of fun, potentially. He couldn't manage five whole seconds before his attention snapped back to the box.

Whatever was in the crate reeked. It stank like rotting meat and fermenting vegetables. You kept praying for your nose to go scent blind, but it seemed to shift subtly. You could never get used to it. It was the distilled essence of the word “filth.” Truth swore the scent was infiltrating him, seeping through the pores of his skin and staining his bone marrow. Making him a carrier of the filth.

For. Six. Hours.

The wagon finally pulled over, and the driver jumped out. Orders were to sit and watch the crate until relieved, so Truth sat where he was.

“Alright, we’re- GOOD GOD! WHERE’S YOUR PPE?”

“My fucking what now?”

An alarm went off, screaming, shrieking the… whoever they were into action. People in slivery full seal suits piled into the back of the wagon and hauled him out, yelling that they had to get him decontaminated. He would have fought them about it, but after six hours with the crate, decontamination sounded like an excellent idea.

He was stripped, scrubbed with long-handled brooms soaked in high foam potions, rinsed under an herbal shower, scrubbed again, and finally given a full body submersion into a tub of consecrated oil. Decent of them to scent the oil with cedar and myrrh, he thought. At the end of it all, he was given a new set of fatigues and a chewing out from the silvery staff of the mountain… wherever they were.

“Why the HELL weren’t you in your gear? What kind of moron-”

“It wasn’t in the order.”

“What?”

“Under ‘gear’ in the order sheet? It listed the fire bolter and the needler, but no PPE.”

There was a pause. “Well, OBVIOUSLY, you should have known….”

Approximately one eternity later, Truth escaped back to Harban. There was no mention of a bonus. He was so ready to spend quality time repairing talismans. But this couldn't go on much longer. The ticking clock got louder and louder.

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