Carnival - A LitRPG Apocalypse

Ryn split up from her friends after they shared a knowing look between them. As they emerged from the Wayfaire Academy they set off separately to their agreed meeting point. At fourteen she was still too young for an Essence which was, as far she was concerned, utterly unfair. Her big sister Evie had gotten hers when she was eleven!

She had changed out of her uniform before she left school and was wearing jeans and a flowing loose shirt. She drifted down New Main Street and stopped at a few stalls to examine the goods and food but she wasn’t buying. She couldn’t anyway, she didn’t have any Essence. The shopkeepers eyed her distrustfully. A lot of the kids had become a little more sticky fingered than was healthy and one of the more common crimes in Wayfaire was juvenile theft along the ranks of shops near the Academy.

She made her way down towards Blue Street where her father's portals cast an eerie light at this time of day. The sun was going to set in the next hour and her dad would be looking for her shortly afterwards, assuming he wasn’t nuking monsters or something fun. Growing up with some of the most powerful people in the world was a lot less fun than most would think. The towering building of the outer boroughs of Wayfaire loomed in the distance but the centre had retained the low buildings the Normanby survivors had preferred when they got back from the waves all those years ago.

She had no shortage of people looking to be her friends in school, despite her mum being a combat instructor and the headmaster being a friend of the family. So many crawlers were trying to get into her good books so their parents could get to meet Ryn’s parents or to boost the prestige of whatever faction they were from.

She had to maintain the pretence she gave a damn about those people but she only really trusted three of her classmates. Sally was small and fast for her age, Ryn was pretty confident her mousy brown friend would get some kind of speedster class. Bahadur, or Bad as he was affectionately known, was a classic bruiser. Not stupid by any means but his talents definitely lay in up close fighting. Kev was big, he was nearly six feet tall despite his age but he was thin as a whip and hardly a fighter. She was absolutely convinced he’d get a caster class like her.

Knowing she would inherit her mum’s power kind of sucked. Sure it was powerful and when her mum went all out it looked awesome but there was no mystery for her like the other kids. They could all guess and hope and dream, she just knew and had known since she was old enough to understand.

Her dad had told her inheriting her mum’s power had worried them both, they’d thought she’d be born with it unlocked and they’d have a baby and toddler that could start fires with her mind. Mention was made of asbestos nappies. Her dad was a weirdo.

They had been surprised when they discovered she was already immune to hot or cold after several years of being a normal child. She had been toddling about when she was five or six at one of the regular barbecues her family held for the other members of the Accordance and had seen a sausage had fallen into the coals. Naturally to her mind this was not acceptable so she had reached in and pulled it out before sitting down to eat it. Bob had pointed out to her dad what had happened and there had been a long talk that had been very boring to her at the time.

Bob was one of her main problems now. The school itself was one of the most secure places on the planet after the Bunker or her home. To get any more security you needed to go offworld to Unity or Moonbase Alpha. That bloody drone swarm was always keeping an eye on her, probably as a favour to her dad, so giving the drones the slip was top of her list before she attempted her mission this evening.

She moved through the stalls and as she did she found moments of seclusion where she was surrounded by people. She’d quickly slip an item of clothing from her bag, a hat, a jacket, a quick change of shoes, slip ons were very handy in that regard, until she finally emerged at the edge of Blue Street looking completely different from how she had looked when she left school.

This was the most dangerous part. Bob wasn’t stupid. He’d realise she’d left her Bphone in her locker and had switched her clothes really quickly so she needed to be fast as well. She saw Kev, poking up above the crowd like a copper wire with his tanned skin and auburn hair ducking through a nearby portal. She headed in a different direction and moved through to Tokyo.

The sudden early morning sun blinded her for a moment before she hurried off to one side and moved down the row of portals to another. She didn’t even spare a moment to appreciate the ornate Japanese architecture all the buildings lining their portals had. She ducked back through a portal further along and emerged in a different part of Blue Street, bouncing off someone who appeared to be a werewolf judging from the shaggy fur and long snout who snarled a curse at her in a language she didn’t recognise. It sounded like Spanish but different maybe?

She pulled the brim of her broad sunhat down low over her eyes and scurried through a portal to Paris. Humanity had made a sport of reclaiming their fallen capitals where they could and rebuilding them. Ryn repeated the process four more times, briefly passing through every continent humanity still controlled, until she could make a short dash through the final portal she needed to reach her destination.

She emerged in a small town called Schiltach, just inside the Black Forest in southern Germany. Kev waved at her and she scurried away from the portal and out of sight of any patrolling drones. Bad and Sally were waiting for them and they took off into the woods.

“Thought you weren’t going to make it!” muttered Bad in his refined British accent. Bad’s father had been a Gurkha that had switched sides to Wayfaire during the assault on London before she was born. They shared the bond of each having a parent that taught kids at their school how to fight. Bad’s dad Amit was a close quarters instructor whereas her mum taught elemental attack strategies to casters but it was enough of a similarity that they had a shared sense of dread when they walked around school.

“The fuzzer in your bag should have made you harder to track. I need that back! If mum finds out I’ve -uh- borrowed it I’ll be in big trouble!” said Sally in a cheerful voice. Ryn swung her bag over her shoulder and pulled out the clamshell shaped device. She passed it back to her friend who smiled and tucked it into a baggy pocket on her cargo trousers as they both kept running.

“We don’t have long. We’re nearly to the stash then it’s just a case of finding a few level one monsters,” panted Kev, who was having to duck under tree branches the others just flew under and who was by far the least athletic of Ryn’s close friends.

A few more minutes of steady loping left Ryn glad for all the physical training the Academy tortured the students with. She was nicely warmed up, if a little out of breath when Kev ducked to the side and slid to a halt. He began brushing at the leaf mould and muttering to himself as he looked for the gear the rest had quietly stolen and secreted here over the last few months.

Essing-up, which is how the kids referred to going out and getting your Essence before your sixteenth birthday, was something of a risky sport for kids in Ryn’s year. Half a dozen had already managed it and had gotten to start doing the advanced classes you were only supposed to start after the system gave you your ability on your sixteenth birthday. There were ever present tales of kids who died trying to ess-up though, enough of them that it wasn't something to take lightly.

“Gotcha!” exclaimed Kev as he began hauling out long duffel bags that clanked from where he had partially buried them.

“Thanks guys. This would be so much easier for all of you if you weren’t bringing me along. I really appreciate it,” said Ryn as she took the body armour she had been passed and began putting it on.

“This will be an essing-up for the history books!” Sally joked. “Princess Borrows managing to sneak out and kill some monsters without being caught! We’ll be legends I tell you!”

“Just don’t let your dad know it was us that helped you ok?” asked Bad in a worried voice. “If my old man finds out I’ll be doing nothing but route marches for weeks!” He slid a knife into a hook on his armour and pulled out the bundle of short spears they’d each be fighting with, passing them around as his friends finished sealing up their chest armour.

“Dad will be fine. It’s kind of accepted that as long as you don’t die trying, this is part of growing up these days,” Ryn replied, checking over the fit of Bad’s armour before turning to let him do the same for her.

Once they were equipped they began to move more carefully through the towering trees, slipping from shade to shade and moving as a combat team. They each monitored a separate direction. Bad led the way and watched the front, Kev watched left and Ryn watched right. Sally brought up the rear and kept spinning around to check behind when she wasn’t double checking everyone else's section.

This part of the Black Forest had been carefully chosen by the team. Even talking about this mission had been difficult to arrange. The dead were always watching in Wayfaire and they would tell the Headmaster anything of importance. Finding moments to secretly pass notes that could only be opened away from the centre of Wayfaire hadn’t been too difficult but it had caused a lot of communications delays that had set their plan back weeks.

The monsters here were called Lahanakutres. Long snake-like mammals that resembled six foot long sausage dogs. They had a dozen legs running the length of their bodies and while they were as aggressive as any untamed monster they were relatively slow and easy to kill even without an ability unlocked. They slithered along close to the ground and, as far as monsters went, were relatively non threatening.

They left distinctive trails as their legs cleared furrows in the ever present fallen leaves which is what Bad was currently hunting for. Bad raised a hand and pointed an open palm back at the rest of them. They stopped and fell into a circle, backs to each other and crouching slightly. Their spears formed a depressingly unimpressive field of points around them as they each fought the urge to check on the others sectors.

“Two trails just ahead, moving to the East, I think. We should follow them, it’s worth a shot!” he whispered. The others nodded and at another hand gesture from Bad they fell back into their formation and moved on more quietly.

As they crept forward Ryn felt a welling sense of anticipation. Soon she’d unlock her power and get to graduate to the proper classes. All the fighting and training was fun but the majority of her schooling still involved languages, maths, history… an endless list of boring that she had to wade through. Evie had said she’d stopped with regular schooling when she was twelve and just done combat training and power stuff! Ryn was once again reminded of the unfairness of the universe, a subject her dad was not averse to waffling about as well.

Bad once again raised a hand but this time he made a fist and Ryn and Kev moved up to flank him. They bent down behind a waist high bush and peered carefully over the top, careful not to disturb the greenery or make any noise. A pair of Lahanakutres were scrabbling and fighting each other. The quiet hisses they made had been smothered by the breeze until they had gotten this close.

Bad was in command for this mission. He was best suited to it, his dad having raised him from birth in the mythology and hardships of the Ghurkha's. Bad made a series of gestures that translated into something along the lines of; me and Ryn take the one on the left, Kev and Sally take the right. Attack in unison and don’t die.

The battle language, essentially sign language for combat, was something Greg, as the Headmaster at the Academy, had demanded be taught to everyone from the time they turned ten. The four kids were entirely proficient in it. Now that they were relying on what had once been a chore to learn for silent communication they began to appreciate the foresight the Faculty put into preparing the children for the coming war with the Void.

Bad and Ryn crept to one side of the tree as Kev and Sally moved the other way. As they moved slowly closer, taking extra care with how and where they placed each step they moved into lunging range without being detected.

Laki’s, as the kids had taken to referring to them, were a well documented species of monster and were kept in this reserve because it was easy to control their levels. Most would never rise past two or perhaps if it was very lucky, level three. They had a critical weakness: their spines were weak. A good blow could snap the creature's backs and leave them paralysed beyond that point. They would usually still have enough legs in front of the break to be mobile but the blow would cripple them, making them even slower than before and allowing for easy kills.

Bad caught Kev's eye and they nodded in unison. Then they leapt forward, bringing their spears down viciously on the middle of the two monsters' backs. The long leaf shaped blades skipped across the metallic fur and didn’t sink in but the force of the heavy spears descending produced a satisfying pair of cracks and the rear ends of the beasts went limp.

Both of the monsters began hissing like boiling kettles and the front ends pivoted towards the teenagers. Ryn had studied these creatures in a lot of detail once the friends had agreed on using them to ess-up. Reading about them and looking at pictures and video hadn’t prepared her to face her first real monster in combat though.

Her blood sang in her veins as adrenaline mixed with fear. The monsters lunged towards Kev and Bad who leapt back out of range. The front halves suddenly came up short as their lower sections refused to respond. The hissing increased in volume.

With her heart in her stomach she lunged forward to stab down into the monster's face. It had opened all three of its jaws open wide to display a terrifying array of dentistry. Her blade slipped past the needle sharp teeth and plunged into the back of its throat. Thick black blood began to drip as Ryn recovered her stance and stepped back.

She threw a quick look over to Kev and Sally who were dancing back and forth trying to bait their creature into giving them a similar opening to the one she had exploited.

“Ryn!” snapped Bad as he threw himself forward spear first to intercept another lunge from the creature that had taken a moment to shuffle close enough that it could strike at her. She leapt backwards and landed on her backside with a thump before scrambling backwards on all fours and pulling herself quickly back to her feet.

Bad had managed to pierce the skin behind the creature's flattened ear and the spear was stuck fast.

“Kill it!” he hissed as he wrestled to keep hold of the handle and keep the writhing monster in place. The beast was less than happy with this situation and fought hard. Its long body coiled along the ground as the short legs thrashed trying to free itself.

Ryn moved in more carefully, maintaining her guard and stance. Once she was in position she lunged again, driving the spear deep into the back of the monster's throat before snatching it out and repeating the jab. Soon the Laki was writhing feebly as its lifeblood poured out to form an inky puddle that reached to Bad’s feet.

Seeing their beast was finished Bad plucked his spear free and he and Ryn moved to help their friends who hadn’t managed to land a decisive blow yet. By working together the four of them were able to make short work of the second monster before turning to finish off the mortally wounded one. Ryn was able to get the final blow on both creatures and let out a quiet squeal of delight as the notification she had been waiting for for years came up in her vision.

Team report: 2 Lahanakutres killed (level 3): Essence per kill 4.

Total Essence gained: 8

She quickly offered two Essence to each of her friends and then spent her first Essence.

You have chosen to spend one Essence and advance to level 1. It is not advised to grant Essence to juveniles. Are you sure? Y/N

“Yes,” all four of the teens said as they went the process simultaneously.

You have chosen to spend one Essence and advance to Level one.

New Status:

Name: Kathryn Borrows

Level: 1

Ability: Suntouched Teleporter

Constitution: 100%

Reserves: 100

Suntouched Teleporter: You were destined to inherit your mother's powers but due to feeling the power of the sun while in the womb your body has been changed, incorporating some of your father's power. You can both teleport yourself and summon jets of solar fire. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.

Guidelines:

Teleportation distance: 1km

Maximum Temperature: 5000 degrees

Line of sight required.

No Modifications.

Her friends were whooping and slapping each other on the back and babbling happily about their powers but Ryn was lost in her thoughts. She half heard Sally boasting about her physical enhancement and Bad offered to race her. It seemed they’d both become bruisers. Kev was quietly staring around himself in awe and hadn’t said a word.

“Ah shit,” the tall boy suddenly muttered. “Guys…” he tried futilely to get his friends' attention.

“I think we’ve been made, Traveller,” came a voice from behind the happy quartet. Ah Cringle! thought Ryn, the closest she ever came to swearing.

She turned slowly to face where the voice had come from. It had been Amit, Bad’s dad. The light shimmered and suddenly the four kids were facing five adults. Two of whom were wearing the silver armour and face masks of the Carnival. She couldn’t help but twitch as the masks flowed down their faces and into their collars. Her mother’s green eyes narrowed as she shook out her black hair and gave Ryn a stern look.

Her father’s blue eyes were like chips of ice for a moment. Ryn had those same eyes despite inheriting the rest of her looks from her mother. Next to them was Amit, a wiry Gurkha who wasn’t wearing his olive green version of the Carnival pattern armour, instead he was in the sweats he wore for instructing, then Kev’s dad stood towering over the others. The only difference between father and son that Ryn could make out was the distance between their eyebrows and their hairline. Otherwise they were like peas in a pod. Finally Sally’s mum, a mid level staffer in the Departments Ecological Affairs division, stood with arms crossed under her breasts and a thunderous expression on her face.

“How would you rate them, Bob?” asked John, keeping his gaze locked on his daughter.

“Pretty good. Ryn nearly screwed up by splitting her attention at the start and she got lucky in having a good friend who was focussing on the right thing. Overall I'd say seven out of ten. No where near turning an ess-up into an eff-up at least. I’ve sent the report to Greg so he’ll go over their mistakes with them tomorrow.” The voice of the almost omnipresent tinker came from behind them and the kids spun once more.

Four Scout-Bob’s decloaked around the clearing, rifles slung but with pistols held loosely in hand. When visible they looked like stripped down terminators, all gleaming silver metal and sharp edges.

“You knew the whole time?” Ryn turned back to look at her dad.

“Yep. Good effort though, Kiddo. If you’d half arsed this we’d have stopped you before you went to Tokyo.” The scars on John's right cheek writhed like snakes as he suddenly grinned at his wayward child.