Titus and I had an argument today. It was about how to name everything and organize the community in this post governmental time. He wants to use ranks and acronyms like the military. I think we are passing up a golden opportunity to get my age group involves. So we tested it, he was quite smug at first.

  Both names were put forward. Titus, Jay, and Mayor Harold want the security force to be called the TDS or Threat Defense Service. To me that sounds like a disease one would pick up in high school at a party. I asked polled the people, would they rather be called TDS or Adventurers. It came as a shock to Titus when I dropped the results on his metaphorical desk. The old farmers and veterans will participate regardless of the name. My generation dreams of being an S ranked adventurer.

  Day 12, Owen Landers

  Silas eyed the new objective and the reward. If he had more information on what capacity was, he would find a different way. Unfortunately, he only had guesses as to what capacity meant. He needed certainty, this was a guaranteed shot at it. His eyes drifted back to the adult dragonkin, he would need to kill that. Probably several creatures with similar capabilities. Silas clenched his fists, he would do what he had to, at least he had a path now.

  The dragonkin pinned the last werewolf to the ground and had his students finish it off. Silas waited to see if they would tear the portal open, then was confused when the dragonkin simply gestured to the corpses. Didn’t they want to invade Earth? Silas’s respect for the creatures went up another notch. Entering a new world, blind with an injured ally was foolish. He had been hoping that their bloodlust would force them to make foolish decisions.

  Instead, they started butchering the werewolves. They left the skulls, and legs past the elbow joints and dumped the organs. Everything else was taken. Silas could have done better, but he also wasn’t using his fingernails as blades. Each dragonkin hefted a corpse on their back, including the injured one before jogging off. More than half the bodies had been left behind, it was likely that the dragonkin would be back.

  “Better hurry then,” Silas muttered.

  As soon as the dragonkin had disappeared behind a rock formation, Silas made a beeline for the closed portal. He skidded to a stop before the crackling line of purple energy. What now? The werewolves, beholder, and dragon had wrenched it apart with their bare claws, or tentacles. He didn’t want to risk his hands, but it was unlikely that he would get another opportunity like this.

  “Here goes,” Silas bounced a few times to hype himself up then grabbed the crackling line of energy.

  Notice: develop a connection with your spirit to interact with this portal.

  His hands passed right through it as if it were a static filled illusion. After several more attempts, Silas had to come to terms with the fact that he was not going home today. If he had been in a safe location, he would have started yelling at the stupid passageway. As it was he grabbed a piece of gore and flung it at the purple energy. It didn’t interact, because obviously dead bodies didn’t have spirits.

  Needing an outlet for his frustration, Silas kicked a corpse. He chose poorly, stubbing his toe on the metal carapace of the mantis. Another font of rage was about to open up when his eyes landed on the mantis’s claws. That was bone, right? The body was junk, the antlers of the werewolves had torn them up pretty well. While bone was putty, exoskeletons were more like aluminum, he couldn’t kneed them back into shape like bread dough. Thankfully, the scythe like forearms were undamaged. Actually, on second inspection all four arms were fine up to the shoulder.

  Looking around for danger, Silas knelt and tapped the exoskeleton with his butcher’s knife. It rang like metal. Was this some kind of iron based life form? Silas knew that carbon was the basis upon which earth's life was built, but why would a foreign world have to follow that rule when it broke so many others?

  It was a difference he intended to take full advantage of. Using his knife, Silas started cutting through the tendons at the shoulder joint. The joint was tough and his meat cleaver only managed to cut through after repeated hacking. Silas ran a finger across the blade. Dull, his repeated abuse of the tool had degraded it to little more than a square sheet of metal attached to a handle.

  He started to work on the other forearm when a noise caught his attention. Silas froze, looking in the direction he heard it. Several footsteps faintly echoed off the ravine walls. For some reason, he had assumed that the dragonkin nest was a good distance away. Looking unhappily at the supplies he had to abandon, Silas grabbed the one limb he had managed to remove before skulking into the shadows.

  On the off chance that the approaching creatures weren’t the dragonkin, Silas stayed to watch. He was disappointed when seven of them came strolling out of a ravine. The two injured juveniles were present, though Silas could only identify them by their injuries. Aside from that, there was no discernible difference between any individuals in the group.

  Silas frowned as he watched them. The juveniles were collecting the corpses, but the others ignored them, instead, they circled the portal. Were they going to open it? A thrill of excitement coursed through Silas. This could be his chance. He crouched, getting ready to move at the slightest opportunity.

  Then they formed a ring around the portal and then started dancing. Silas blinked as he watched what he could only call a tribal ritual commence. He doubted that a dance off with a hole in reality would accomplish anything. This continued for an hour. Silas was starting to get bored with the proceeding, his legs were starting to cramp from being held at the ready for so long. At least everyone who saw the portal appear from the other side would have time to escape.

  Silas had no idea how long he waited and watched. The concept of time was fluid when there was no sun to keep track of it. He would have compared it to Native American dancing, but all the grace was missing. They were synchronized, but the movements were jagged their heads whipped back and forth while they clawed at the air. It was unsettling in the extreme.

  When hunger started to creep in, Silas decided that it was about time to leave. Watching the dragonkin gyrate was not productive and he needed to make plans to fight a whole hive of these creatures. Before he could turn away, something changed.

  One of the dragonkin stepped forward. Despite watching them for the last few hours, Silas still couldn’t tell them apart. He stepped up to the portal and knelt. Silas had no idea what was happening, but he prepared himself to rush through the aperture at the first opportunity.

  Instead of peeling the hole in space open, the electricity crackling off of it started bending toward the dragonkin. Silas frowned, what was going on? The line of purple energy bled from purple to black, like the reverse of the smoke during purification. When the energy touched the dragonkin’s skin, he arched his back in pain, though he did not make a sound.

  It was at that moment all the other dragonkin stopped dancing and breathed fire on both the portal and their kneeling comrade. Silas was shocked at the apparent betrayal. The ring of dragonkin turned the portal into a bonfire. Fire that was sucked into the portal and the kneeling dragonkin.

  Silas watched with wide eyes as the burning dragonkin rose to its feet, still covered in flames. It reached out and plunged both hands into the black line floating in the air. With a roar of either exertion or pain, Silas was not sure which, the dragonkin wrenched the portal open. The view of Earth that Silas expected was absent, instead, a ring of smokey darkness filled with an oily looking substance hung in the air.

  The changes did not stop there. While the portal had turned a corrupted black color, the fire covering the dragonkin bled into a sickly purple. It was different from the portal, despite it clearly being the source of the change. The flames slowly die down, until they leave the burned dragonkin standing before a black gate.

  There was a silver lining, at least Silas could tell this one apart from the others. That was about it as far as good news went. The dragonkin quickly healed from his injuries, though Silas was unsure if that was the remnant energy of the portal or a natural trait that did the healing. As the juveniles were still sporting wounds, he assumed it to be the remnant energies.

  He healed differently, for starters, his scales were a mottled black and purple, like the flames. His eyes also glowed, like they were backlit by the same fire. Silas briefly wondered how that worked. Eyes weren’t something that one could simply plug a light source into, there were nerves, fluid, and a protective bone plate in the way. That didn’t matter, however, what did matter was the fact that Silas was pretty sure he was looking at the final boss of the dragonkin hive.

  Now that the ritual was over, more dragonkin started trickling into the ravine. There weren’t enough to quite call a city, but Silas would estimate there to be nearly a hundred by the time he left. Just because he was hidden from one did not mean that he was hidden from one hundred. He wasn’t confident in defeating a single dragonkin yet, he wasn’t sure a hundred was even a possibility worth considering.

  He backed away from the concealing shadows as quietly as he could manage in bone armor. Fortunately, one hundred some feral monsters were not the quietest bunch. Silas made his escape back into the maze of stone formations, following his markings back to his watering hole. It was uncomfortably close to this new civilization of monsters.

  While walking he started thinking, would he be trapped here? His only way of getting out was a portal, he couldn’t open one without spirit. He couldn’t get spirit without capacity, whatever the hell that was. The only surefire way to get capacity was to wipe out a tribe of dragonkin monsters.

  He almost screamed at the absurdity of it all, he couldn’t even be sure of that last part. It would be taking the word of a operating system created by a corrupt corporation that was no longer supported by said corporation. There were no other options, not real ones. He was weak, here that meant death.

  Silas growled, the panic was gone, it had been suspiciously absent over the last few days. It was instead replaced with the anger he normally struggled with. With a yell, Silas punched the stone next to him. He paused for a second, mind computing what he had just done.

  “Damnable sin!” He shouted before pulling his throbbing fist to his chest.

  Punching rock formations hurt a fair bit more than a punching bag. Looking at his hand, he grimaced. From the swelling, he had fractured something. Experimentally, he opened and closed his fist, it hurt, but it wasn’t something he couldn’t manage.

  “Get control of yourself, stupid,” Silas muttered. It was fine to be angry, the emotion made a great motivator. However, he had almost crippled himself.

  With a grunt, he hefted his mantis arm and moved back to camp. He had some work to do. For starters, he wanted to turn the forearm into a sword of some kind. It was long, nearly three feet long and quite heavy. Silas had no real comparison for how heavy a sword should be, but fifteen pounds seemed a bit high.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  There were also two other sections of the arm he wanted to use to protect his neck. He couldn’t pack as much material in the neck guard and still move his head. From what he knew of predictors, they commonly went for the throat, this would stop that.

  Sitting on a chair sized rock, he removed the blade at the final joint. To his surprise, the appendage was hollow. Well not hollow, but the exoskeleton was packed with muscle. This thing could pack quite the punch when it was alive. Was it still a punch if it had sword arms?

  He would need to remove it and pack it with bone because the mantis blade did not come equipped with a handle. Tentatively, Silas placed a finger on the blade. There was no pain, simply a sliding feeling. When he looked at his finger, there was a thin line of blood running along the pad. It was sharp, but not supernaturally so. He would definitely need to make a handle.

  Getting to work, he started scoop out the flesh from the blade. What did he do with the flesh? Well, Silas had already discovered that spider legs were fine, so why not mantis ones. He chewed on the meat, again it had a similar texture to crab, but with an aftertaste not dissimilar to copper. Maybe that was because it had a metal like exoskeleton?

  After rinsing the hollow out, he made a rod of bone by rolling out a few ribs he had left over. He made the surface of the bone rough and used the makeshift tool to sand all the leftover tendon attachments out. Losing a weapon due to its components rotting was not something he wanted to worry about.

  Once everything was clean, Silas packed the hollow with bone, leaving about two feet poking out as a kind of inverted tang. As a last touch, he chopped into one of the rotting bodies around him, then squeezed his fists. Good knife, axe, and he assumed sword grips were not round, they were oval to assist with aligning the edge. Silas had the advantage of making custom grips simply by deforming the grip to fit his hands.

  There was probably some disadvantage that could be explained by a sword master. Unfortunately, Silas was not a great sword master, he was only lightly trained in hand to hand combat. Give him a familiar firearm and he could take it apart, clean it, then put it back together in less than two minutes. If he could learn that, then a sword would be possible. How hard could hit person with sharp stick be?

  Very hard, evidently. He had been initially excited to swing around his makeshift sword, what male wouldn’t be. Within the first ten minutes, he lost control of the blade and almost chopped a leg off. After he scored his grieve, he decided to take things slower. What did he need? Control. That was a stat he could work on, right?

  He opened his interface and sure enough, control was right below body. Then he moved to his notification history until he found the one he was looking for.

  Notice: You have pushed Flesh Lord to its limits by working to exhaustion. Flesh Lord has advanced to the new baseline you have demonstrated. Your vitality has increased to reflect this.

  These sigils appeared to be somewhat organic in their functionality. Stress them to their limits, and they would adapt to meet those needs. This was by no means conclusive, but the phraseology made sense. He had no idea how to increase control, not with flesh lord. His eyes turned to bone crafter, art was a craft, could fine detail be a way to increase control?

  It would be foolish to bet everything on an assumption. More body might also help. If there was one thing he had learned how to do as a soldier it was push himself to his limits. At least in the beginning. The army demanded a certain standard and once that was met it was simply maintaining that level. However, what would happen if he pushed past that?

  Normally exercise could only go so far. Do too many arm curls and muscle would be lost not gained. Flesh Lord changed that. It would heal him faster so long as he ate food, and lo and behold he could only eat meat. Control was important, but he could live with body. How many points would he need to stop a wolf?

  There was no real way to know. No, Silas paused, there was. Mateo had stopped one, and Silas knew what the man’s capabilities were. If the stat that Pack Guardian initially bumped up was strength, he would have had a starting strength of two. Lesser pack guardian boosted his capability by two hundred percent.

  “Six, I need a six in body to fight a werewolf,” Silas muttered while looking at his pathetic one.

  Silas thought for a moment, he would need a routine. He wasn’t going to get far in a day, or even in a month. Destroying the dragonkin nest and claiming their portal might take a year or more. He might even find another exit before then. Reframing this goal as a long term commitment was depressing.

  Abby would think he was dead. Would she move on? A part of him was terrified of that, it was a common enough fate for those in the military. The thing was, Silas would want her to move on in the event of his death. Haste might make that desire a reality, but it was also true that the sooner he started, the sooner he would return.

  So with no further hesitation, he started his routine. He started his morning, or at least what passed for morning in hell, with an intensive workout. The goal was not to make himself stronger, he wanted to wear his body down to the point where his hands shook and moving was difficult. Then he would work on his bone crafting for a few hours. He hoped that a tired body would be the perfect environment to cultivate control with bone crafter. Then he would sleep, only to wake up and start all over.

  For the first week of picking up dumbbells made of bone coated rocks, Silas pushed. Sure his body ached, and it was hard to walk from the cramps that plagued him, but he had a goal and he was working towards it. When the second week rolled around and no notification appeared he started doubting himself. The first one had only taken four days.

  Four days where he worked nonstop. He had almost killed himself. Was that what he needed to do, kill himself every time? That didn’t seem prudent, but if that's what he needed to do. When week three rolled around, Silas made a change partially because he needed to, partially because if danger was what he needed, then he needed to find something dangerous. He was in luck this whole world was exactly that.

  Another issue that cropped up was his food supply Several animals showed up extending his supplies. One was one of the winged reptiles and the other was a small pack of three of what Silas could only call a rubber monkey. Their fur was stretchy like nylon, a fact that did not save them from his sword. Most likely assuming their padding would protect them from Silas‘s club, they had stood there and taken the strike.

  Still despite these visits, Silas lacked refrigeration. The food quickly spoiled, and while flesh lord would protect him from the health hazards of eating rotten flesh, it did nothing for the taste. He had to leave and hunt fresh creatures down. He focused on the bone squirrels at first, they were a meal and a few bones, with little waste. Soon he started running out of squirrels willing to get near him.

  Normally he would have climbed for them, but he was too tired and they were too fast. He would have been more concerned if he was not fully armored by this point. Three weeks had been enough time for him to make himself a full set of protection.

  He had started trying to add designs to it in the form of vine filigree. It looked like a toddler had drawn it. Despite sculpting supposedly being a talent, he was terrible at it. It did show constant progress, and as much as Silas didn’t want to admit it, improvement. The vines at the beginning were little more than squiggles and the ones finished recently were discernible as an attempt at a plant.

  Silas was entering week four when something strange happened. He was in the process of going to sleep when he got a notification. His life had been bone numbingly boring for the last month, so a notification was pleasant. His smile faded when he saw that it wasn’t a sigil advancement.

  .Objective: Connor Baker is injured, stop him from dying/ Reward: A companion

  Silas blinked when he saw the message. Was this how the emergency service call worked now? Would it send a distress signal to everyone in range? Was it everyone, or just those able to handle themselves? Regardless, if Silas couldn’t raise his stats, then bolstering his numbers in a different way might help.

  He scrambled outside, only to realize, he had no idea where the hell he was supposed to go. It was not as if he had a portal locator. He decided to narrow down his options through deductive reasoning. Without satellite connections, the range on the bio tech was small, only about three miles. Normally that was close enough to someone else who would bounce the signal to a satellite. Here, that meant somewhere within three miles was an injured man.

  Silas had no proof, but he had to assume portals had to form a certain distance from each other. Also, he wasn’t going to be able to rescue Connor from the dragonkin. That left him with a three-hundred-and-forty-degree search area a mile in every direction. Still, too much space to search before Connor died.

  That was when Silas remembered the beasts, they could sense portals. The bone squirrels were out of reach, but there was another type that he could readily get his hands on. For weeks he had been hauling rotting bodies away from his campsite. Just because he was resistant to the plague didn’t mean he wanted to share a bunk with it.

  Those corpses piled up and attracted scavengers. Silas made his way over to the cockroach covered mound of flesh. Supposedly it was all purified, he even had a stash of sigils to prove it. Instead, it looked like an insane scientist's trash pile of failed experiments. The cockroaches were mostly docile if they were left alone, however, kill one and the swarm would attack.

  Silas was not sure if what he intended would qualify as an attack. Striding up to the mound he found what he was looking for, a newborn roach. It was small, about the size of a human infant, still a disgusting size for a bug. He reached out and snatched it up. It thrashed its legs but was unable to free itself. Before it could scream, he sprinted away.

  “Oh the things I do for company,” He muttered as he ran.

  It turned out to be unnecessary. None of the swarm even gave him a second glance. He had assumed that the cockroach’s mother would give chase, but whichever one spawned this little guy lacked any maternal instincts. Quickly sliding the sword into a makeshift scabbard on his back, Silas hesitated for a moment before grabbing the hammer.

  It was a bit lighter than the sword, but it wasn’t feasible to use in two hands. Despite taking a rest, his fatigued muscles trembled at the weight. He couldn’t use it, not as he was now. There was no way he could have guessed the objective would show up, if he had, he would have made sure to be well rested.

  Setting the hammer down, Silas stood and held the cockroach out like a compass. He never thought he would be asking a bug for directions, but he was here, marching through hell holding an insect out like a metal detector. As he wasn’t sure how far out the signal came from, he chose to start a mile and a half away, as near to the dragonkin as he was willing to get.

  Moving in a circle at the mile-and-a-half mark would make his maximum trip around five miles, he hoped it wouldn’t be quite that long. His journey wasn’t perfectly circular, as the rock formations commonly got in his way. It was frustrating, it was slow, but Silas was tired of being alone. It was the wrong reason to save another person’s life, but it was the truth.

  Rounding another formation, the baby cockroach perked up, its antenna went from frantically waving to pointing in a specific direction. Silas rushed in the direction they were pointing. Dodging around the last few rock formation, Silas emerged into the small clearing with an equally small portal. He was just in time to watch a man get gored by bear with a large horn protruding from the top of its skull.

  Objective failed: Connor is dead.

  Silas skidded to a stop, frantically pushing the notification aside. There were monsters around, he couldn’t afford to be blinded. No sooner had he shut one notification down than another popped up.

  Objective: Arabella Baker is injured, stop her from dying/ Reward: A companion and a title

  Then another.

  Objective: Samantha Baker’s guardians are in peril, save a guardian or deliver her to a new one/ Reward: Title one to three

  Silas didn’t have time to process the information, he shunted it aside and surveyed the battle. Calling it one was a bit extreme, three people were currently being mauled by a horned bear. This one looked the same as the one the dragonkin had, though it seemed to lack the fire breath, which was a good thing, considering Silas lacked a realistic way to stop fire.

  Why were they on this side of the portal? That was a question for later, as there was currently an open and unguarded portal sitting in the center of the clearing. For a moment he just stared at it. Then a scream and a crunching sound cut through his thoughts. He looked over to see the bear chewing on Connor’s head.

  Arabella, presumably his wife, was cradling a bloody arm while backing away. She was the one who had screamed. Silas looked between the portal and Arabella. Should he save her? Could he save her? Even if he killed the bear, the portal would close trapping her and her daughter here. They didn’t have Silas’s ability to eat anything, the sheer number of pathogens he had consumed should have killed him. They wouldn’t survive for a week.

  The death would be painful too, as parasites consumed them from the inside out. Disease would turn their own bodies against them, there was nothing that could be done, they were only human after all. Why risk himself for no reason when home was right there?

  “Survive, get home, find Abby,” Silas muttered taking a step towards the portal.

  He did have nearly twenty sigils collecting dust, so they wouldn’t be completely human. Two stats would be superhuman and whatever powers the sigils granted might also change things. Still, it was a long shot even if it wasn’t impossible. Home called to him, it didn’t matter where in the world he landed it would be closer than where he was now. He knew his geography well enough to make it back.

  “Help, please, at least take Sammy with you,” Arabella called out.

  Silas froze, he was less than ten feet from the portal. He looked back at the cowering woman only then did he see the child kneeling behind her mother. If he left this would haunt him for the rest of his life, but he would have a life to haunt. A life with his Abby, an Abby that he would invariably tell about this.

  Did he want a life built on the death of a child? Would Abby accept it? He was a soldier, this was literally his job. Why was it so hard? Silas clenched his fists and screamed his frustrations to the air before turning towards the bear.