1.08 Call Me Death Mommy

Chapter 8

“Good to meet you,” I said, shaking Barry’s hand, at this point in time not knowing I would be forming a friendship with him shortly down the line.

Nor that I would be murdering him in the future, after having gained his full trust and helping him in trying to achieve his own dreams of a better humanity. All that, with a rug pulled out from underneath the feet of his heart.

But that’s not until later, we will get to that.

“Nice meeting you. You said you were a Shade Knight?” Barry continued to smile, looking at me with enthusiastic curiosity. I later understood that he was just excited to learn about other skills and classes, but at the time it felt like he was fishing for information.

“Uh, yeah. It’s only an Epic ranked class though,” I said with a wave. “Nothing like Legendary Tier. What can you do?”

“I got a magical attack skill that puts holy energy into my sword. Oh, and a shield bubble thing!” He seemed to activate his inventory, as a longsword with a golden hilt and glimmering clean blade appeared in his hand.

“Check it out,” he said as his sword’s blade began to glow a faint yellowish gold.

It died away after a second or two, and I could see a bead of sweat on his forehead. Apparently it took a lot out of him to use the skill. Which was true of all of us at that time. Lower level Rift Hunters just weren’t used to mana and the System back then.

“What do you got?”

“Oh nothing as cool as that.” I pulled out my own weapon, showing Barry the rune etched in the metal. “But it’s pretty sweet, right? And I have a skill to target enemies for extra damage.”

“Wow, my sword isn’t magic like that. You must have gotten lucky on the rewards.” He tapped my weapon’s blade with his fingernail and the metal rang faintly.

I stashed it back into my inventory before he could look at it further. If he didn’t get a magic weapon even from having done well enough to get a Legendary Class, then showing it off might have been a little too much. Maybe I shouldn’t have revealed it to Lucilla either? I didn’t know, but hopefully that wouldn’t come back to bite me.

“Wanna try sparring sometime? I think that will help me get better at using my sword.” He was walking back toward the couches now, and I found myself following him.

The guy’s easy going sort of attitude was charming, magnetic even. A guy like myself, admittedly extra paranoid and massively motivated to stay off all radars, was still pulled towards having Barry like me.

“Yeah that’d be fun. I noticed the System was helping me learn to use a sword while I was in the tutorial. Must be some kind of extra feature, to help us adapt to the dungeons?” I took a seat on one of the couches as Barry had also sat down on the other.

He nodded and tilted his head in thought. “Must be. You think that—”

“Attention, all personnel to the main lobby immediately. No exceptions.” Sinclair’s voice suddenly blared into the room from the intercoms that hung near the ceiling at random intervals.

“Looks like the day isn’t over after all,” I groaned.

“They gonna have us do some kind of group test?” Barry asked.

“No idea. But let’s go find out.”

“That one is definitely different than the tutorial portal!” I yelled out over the whirring helicopter blades as we were flown into the rolling, craggy hillside.

From hundreds of feet up, we could already see the glittering portal that hovered in the area. Unlike the previous rift I had gone into—which was white—this rift looked like it was a dark blue, nearly cobalt.

The strange obsidian platform underneath it was also a bit larger than the white portal from the forest. It was maybe ten feet in diameter instead of seven or eight from the previous. Besides those two facts, this rift was the same, even if it felt far different.

The little gathering that Lucilla announced, once everyone had been gathered back at the facility, was for this new dungeon rift that had been discovered. Up until that point, only the white tutorial rifts had been found, excluding the giant red one out over the Atlantic which the world’s governments had so far failed to begin fucking around with. This was the first non-tutorial rift that the government had stumbled across.

And now, they wanted myself and a few other lab rats from the cheese-cave crew to go in.

We weren’t the first people they had tried sending through, of course. The military had tried throwing a sacrificial military squad inside before they ever called Lucilla and her experiment group. But surprise, fucking surprise, the System had stopped them from going in.

The blue portals couldn’t be entered by people who didn’t already have classes. In other words; only people who had already gone through a tutorial dungeon. Thus, why they had called on us.

“It says only six people can go in,” Nieve said to Lucilla with a clipped tone.

I had been surprised to see the burly colonel at the location. I had figured after the incident at the first white tutorial rift, he would have been canned, or pulled back to administration duty.

So I didn’t know who’s butthole he had to lick, or whose balls he had in a vice in the military chain of command to be still jumping around in charge of finding more rifts. Whatever the answer was, as my status of Private Lab-rat, I wouldn’t be told the details anyway.

“Only six?” Lucilla repeated and looked over at us. She had brought twelve of us, and now was told that was double what the rift would accept. Her eyes roamed over the ground and I could see her brain clicking away to decide who went in from the light in her eyes.

“Schilling, Dupree, Pierce, Vasquez, Norton, Huwett, you six will go in,” she called out.

We all stepped forward and looked over at each other. Schilling and Dupree made sense to me as people to pick. Barry was the only one with a Legendary Class, and Francis Dupree was the most experienced in practicing his skills, other than myself.

Vasquez was a rather skinny man in his thirties, and his class was some sort of magic caster class that focused on elemental skills and spells. I didn’t know all the details, as I wasn’t really a part of the magic testing.

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Norton was a bit of a fake-out in terms of appearance. He was a big guy, wide at the shoulders and six foot four, making him look like a serious melee tank.

He was a healer class, Devote Channeler, or something like that.

Huwett was a ranged fighter, the only one in the six of us that were picked. She used some kind of bow, but it looked oddly constructed, angled in a way that when she held it up it appeared to be a sick love child between a short bow and a crossbow. Whatever the fuck it was, I had seen her nail a target with it from fifty feet away without much effort on a daily basis back in the testing facility.

I wasn’t worried that she’d end up accidentally shooting me in the back, at the very least.

So a Paladin, a Rage Warrior, a Ranged DPS, a Healer, and a Caster. Lucilla was building up the roster like a videogame party, which was rather smart on her part. I hadn’t gauged how much of the situation she was grasping during our small “talks” the last few days.

Now, I started to realize that the woman was picking up the System and its intentions rather aptly.

But that still left the question; why did she pick me?

I wasn’t complaining, let’s be real. I actually wanted inside that Dungeon Rift, for a long laundry list of reasons that I won’t bother throwing at you right now.

But they were reasons that I don’t think Lucilla herself was considering, because almost all of them were selfish on my part. Including things like loot, titles and experience progression that I had my eyes on.

No, she wasn’t doing me a favor and putting me on the team because she was my friend. So why was she?