[The Primeval Apocalypse] - Chapter Four (collaboration with u/hydrael)

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The Primeval Apocalypse by Robert Keene and Alex Raizman

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The final minutes of my escape would have been harrowing if I hadn’t done it a dozen times before. The Mandrill’s calls—shrieks and hoots and inhuman shouts—filled the forest, bouncing off of the trees from every direction. There was an occasional outcry near at hand as one of them laid eyes on me briefly, but this was far from my first rodeo.

My movements through the forest were erratic and random. I felt the mental pressure of constant use of the Intuit North skill, but it was a necessary cost. There would be no escape if I got turned around and blundered back into the oncoming primates.

At the same time, I also had to be sure that I wasn’t making a big circle back towards our settlement.

A large part of our continued survival was in our hidden camp. The Mandrills couldn’t counterattack against us if they couldn’t find us.

After a few minutes of sprinting around through the giant old growth trees the sounds behind me died down, becoming more distant. They were certainly still searching, but my zig-zagging path had spread them thin, and they were slower runners than me. I was finally able to ease up a bit, which stopped me from leaving giant darkened footprints of disturbed forest detritus behind me. I maintained my erratic route through the forest for a few more minutes before finding a spot to settle.

I didn’t need to stop.

My stamina had been drained from the run, but I could keep going just fine, so long as I didn’t need to make any Athletics skill checks. But I’d made this escape so many times, I had faith in my abilities. I’d gone far enough, and just needed to wait until the shrieks and hoots echoing through the trees died down.

They would give up the chase soon enough.

Closing my eyes, focusing on my other senses, I could tell when a group of three Mandrills entered my detection radius. They were on the distant edge of what I could hear, and they weren’t even coming directly towards me. They were moving northeast, searching in the wrong direction. As long as I was quiet and still, their Detection skills were unlikely to pick me out of the background.

They left my detection radius after a moment, going too far north for me to still sense them.

No other Mandrills ever got that close.

After about twenty minutes of hiding out, the hoots and shrieks changed in pitch, and about a minute later, they went silent entirely. The hunt was over, and I had escaped.

Even though I wanted to get moving as fast as possible, I stayed where I was a moment longer. As the Mandrills stopped filling the area with shrieking, the normal forest creatures started to pick up their own parts of the background noise. Birdsong came first, and then after that, the rustling and chattering of other forest animals began again.

Obviously, I couldn’t just sit and listen to the woods all afternoon. Nightfall came quick in the deep woods, and my detection skill could only do so much in the pitch-black night. Not to mention the inherent risk of getting caught out here by the wildlife. I could outrun a Mandrill. I couldn’t outrun a territorial Daeodon—a forest-dwelling omnivore that was like some primal fusion of a boar, a wolf, and a woodchipper.

Before I started moving, I cautiously activated Hide In Plain Sight again. It was unlikely that I’d need it, but doing so was just the safest practice.

Even though the Mandrills had given up the hunt as a group, it was possible that the alpha was out here somewhere looking for revenge. And I knew for certain his Detection would find me even with Hide In Plain Sight active. But I’d also get the warning.

Not to mention there was always a chance the queen had called an end to the audible hunt in order to try and catch me unaware.

It was also possible that I might blunder into the detection radius of an arboreal predator. The last thing I needed was something falling from the forest canopy and landing on my head claws-first.

Heading south to circle wide of the Mandrill camp, I knew it was time to change directions and head west once the thick canopy above thinned enough for some greenery to cover the forest floor. It was just moss at first, but sprouts of fern jutted up here and there. My Survival skill started telling me which mosses and shoots of greenery were edible, and I even recognized a few as alchemical ingredients. While none of it was of tremendous value, or in large quantities, I still ventured a few yards out of my way to scoop up some useful bits.

The first I checked was a blue-green moss.

Datura Barbieri
Reagent, Ingredient
Reagent Properties: Hit point recovery. Requires grinding.
Ingredient Properties: Zesty flavor increases food effect potency. Requires drying.

The moss was potentially very valuable as a recovery tool, if I could find the time to process it. And while my cooking skill wasn’t high enough to make food with effects that could benefit from the potency increase, the flavoring might help us keep sane if our diet grew stagnant.

The next thing I collected was a more familiar target. A stubby greenish fern that I’d collected in the past.

Disporum Polypody
Reagent, Ingredient
Reagent Properties: When added to an ingredient that boosts stats, increase the potency of the effect. Requires grinding. Potency increase amplified by distillation.
Ingredient Properties: Nutrient-rich. Increases food effect duration. Duration increase amplified by roasting or frying.

I knew from experience that the stubby green fern had to be harvested from shoots before reaching maturity. When fully mature it would be too tough and fibrous to eat comfortably. But the nutrient-rich nature had been tremendously valuable for survival in Jamestown’s early weeks. I was obviously interested in experimenting with the stat boost effects, but the nature of its edible properties made it too expensive of a resource to waste.

A few handfuls here and there went into my pack. I couldn’t afford to weigh myself down while I was alone, so I left a good amount of both moss and fern sprouts behind. I could have tried to gather fifty pounds of the stuff myself in case my friends had somehow been unsuccessful, but I trusted them. Just a few pounds to either supplement our stockpile, or to work on my Alchemy skill if we were fine for food.

Once I was satisfied, I cut back to the west, traveling along the line of greenery. After a time, the greenery angled farther south, and I broke away from it to continue west, back into the more uniform brown of the deep woods. A few minutes later there was a gentle warm sensation, and one of the quests in my journal was marked as complete.

I tried not to grumble. My friends were supposed to rendezvous with me at the same spot where we’d split up. I was only a few minutes late, but they were already back at Jamestown turning in the quest.

At least I still got credit from sharing it with them earlier.

But that wasn’t what the warm sensation was.

A second quest was marked as completed, too.

I was now level 5, granting me new stat points to spend, more hit points, and increasing my skill caps. Normally I would have gained new abilities, but instead I gained just one.

Choose a Subclass (Single Use)
Upon reaching level 5 in your main class, you may now either specialize or diversify! Activating this ability will access the subclass menu and show you the subclasses available from your main class. You can either focus on a single role of your main class, becoming a pure attacker or a pure defender, you can remain a hybrid, or you can blend your current class by hybridizing with a new role!

That answered a few of my questions about the Choose A Subclass ability mentioned in the quest. I’d heard others discuss their classes offhand, but everyone seemed to treat it as private information. Honestly, it didn’t make sense to me. We should be sharing all the knowledge we could about our roles, capabilities, and limitations. It would make us a stronger team.

But I was late to join the Jamestown crew. Despite all my efforts to help, I still felt like an outsider.

A part of me wanted to make my choice now, activating the ability and exploring the options. But I remembered when I’d chosen my main class. The options had overwhelmed my senses and rendered me nearly defenseless. I felt pretty safe where I was in the forest right now, but that could change in an instant. And I was going to want to sit and think carefully over my choice this time.

Pragmatism won out over curiosity and I left the choice unspent, making my way to the settlement quickly.

***

Jamestown wasn’t really a town. It was a little more than a camp, but a little less than anything else. The system called it a Hamlet when it referred to it, but I wasn’t sure if that was actually the real term or if the system was mocking us somehow. Bramble branches had been gathered from elsewhere in the forest, and piled up as a makeshift barricade that almost looked natural.

There were a number of ways in, and most of the people living there had mobility tools that let them either traverse the dried brambles, or launch themselves over top of them. For my part, I could use my Acrobatics skill to try and do a wall jump off of a tree to clear it, but failing the skill check would have been really embarrassing. Instead, I walked around to the southwest end of the bramble barricade. There was a spot there where someone had cut a low tunnel through the brambles and lined it with wood to keep the thorns at bay. Scrambling through it required me to drop to all fours and crawl, but it didn’t skin me alive or shred my clothing.

Calling the area within the barricade a town was giving it a lot of credit. Most of what we made were either crude cloth or leather tents, or ramshackle wooden lean-tos. A couple of people had cut their way into the ground, chopping apart tree roots and dense soil in order to build burrows for themselves instead of aboveground structures.

Jamestown was only large enough to house about fifty people, and was far from being crowded. Groups were clustered here and there, either sparring together, crafting together, or sharing knowledge of the surroundings.

In the middle of the area was the only thing that could actually be called a building. A rough mud structure that looked more primitive by far than anything the Mandrills had built. Little more than a coarse pyramid, with visible handprints from its construction, it had been the centerpiece around which the settlement had formed. The thick mud had kept the dug-out interior cool, allowing the people who had built it to store food.

Near it was the group I’d ventured out with. They were unloading packs and bags and satchels full of food, handing them over by the armload to someone unseen around the side of the structure. No doubt others enlisted in helping to stow everything they’d gathered.

My irritation at being left to find my own way back started to cool at the sight. A group of eight people, each one carrying their physical capacity of food made for a stockpile that would keep the settlement alive for weeks. They had made the right choice. They couldn’t afford to dawdle in the woods waiting for me with such a bounty at risk.

At the center of the group was the town’s eponymous leader.

James was a natural leader, charismatic and friendly, with a firm voice when it was needed, but a very active sense of humor to keep the mood from becoming too dark. “Just because this is the apocalypse doesn’t mean we can’t have fun” was practically his catchphrase.

He was very easy to fall in line behind. James was tall, dark, and handsome, and combined with his charisma, even his critics couldn’t hold an argument with him. People raising complaints against his decisions naturally found themselves trying to convince him, making themselves into advisors rather than enemies, and his people skills were well-honed enough to deflect even the most direct opposition.

As I approached the group, he was helping the others with their haul, focusing on those who were visibly worn down from the rapid forced march all the way back to town.

“Looks like we did good, huh?” I asked tentatively. Even now, amidst a victory I’d helped earn, I felt awkward trying to initiate conversation.

“Dunno what you did, Colin,” James said, not even turning to look, “but you pissed those monkeys right off.”

“We didn’t even have to run,” Rebecca chirped cheerfully. Her diminutive stature only meant that her incredibly upbeat attitude was more highly concentrated. “We filled every bag we had and just left. They never saw us.”

“They’re not getting wise to us,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “But they’re getting wise to me. The alpha almost got me.”

“We grow stronger by the day,” James said, shooting me a reassuring smile. “More people, more levels, more gear. Soon enough we’ll be able to take them on in a fair fight. Once their farms are ours, we won’t have to scrape by like this anymore.”

“I know, I know,” I said, finding myself eager to agree. “But they had something going on. The alpha sent guards to the south end of their town when he saw me. I think maybe they have something there.”

“The aurochs,” one of the others said. It was Richard, a dour man who was rapidly becoming James’s right hand. “Just one of those massive bastards would feed all of us for a year. They gotta protect them.”

“But we’d never get away with one,” I said quickly. “They have to know that we couldn’t steal something that giant without leaving a big stinky trail right back here.”

“You just said they’re not getting wise to us,” Richard shot back at me. “They’re not that smart.”

“Smart enough to grow their own food.”

James stepped forward, just a single step. “We’re not getting into that again,” he said, ending the conversation with a firm tone. “You guys enjoy today’s victory and let me start planning for tomorrow’s.” He gestured with his chin towards Rebecca, who was struggling with her pack. “Colin, help her out, and we can get this done before it gets too dark to cook properly, alright?”