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

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The Primeval Apocalypse by Robert Keene and Alex Raizman

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Strangely, James’s sentence hurt my feelings more than I expected. For my whole life, I had always focused on helping people, and being expelled from the largest settlement I’d heard of since the apocalypse began was a crushing defeat.

But James was right. Some people were never going to be okay with me again after this. If Richard really hated my guts, making sure he didn’t have a voice here was my best chance of being treated fairly.

And nobody would be able to argue that it wasn’t a severe punishment. I’d spent so much time helping Jamestown stockpile food, and now I was turned out to the wilderness. With how precious food was in the apocalypse, being sent out without the support of the rest of the town was a dangerous prospect. Going back to the way it was before joining the town was sentencing me to starvation if I couldn’t adapt very quickly.

But nobody knew about the extent of my new abilities yet.

Beast Hunter would make me an incomparable tracker, letting me use persistence predator tactics to keep hunting for things that might be able to evade normal folks. And with creative use of Charming and Wild Empathy, I might be able to negotiate with the wildlife for help finding edible vegetation. I could adapt.

Still. Even though this was obviously my best chance at seeing another sunrise, it wasn’t how I wanted this day to go.

“And I mean now,” James said firmly, returning his voice to a more normal volume, so that the mob would hear. He turned his back and crossed his arms. “If I ever see you again, it’ll be the last time. Go. Before I change my mind.”

That complicated things. Being reduced to the clothes on my back was a dramatic decrease for my odds of survival. Or, at least, it would be in the eyes of anyone who would be calling for execution. Richard might be satisfied with the image of me starving to death in the woods.

“Let’s go,” I said to Noaich. I shot a look at the mob of armed townsfolk. Some of them were already dispersing to help the wounded, but there were more than a few that seemed ready to jump me at James’s command if I was too slow to abide by his order. “Quickly.”

It sucked to know that I was leaving behind everything I didn’t have on my body. Having the case of smoked fish still in my possession was a small consolation, but I wasn’t happy to leave behind my bed, my tent, and my other armor, weapons, and clothing.

The worst realizations didn’t strike until I was crawling through the passage through the bramble wall.

I never got to say goodbye to my friends.

It felt rough that I was forced to part with James on such rough terms, but there were others that were more important to me than him and they weren’t even going to find out I was leaving until they heard it second- or third-hand. How was Jenna going to react? What was Rebecca going to think?

What was worse was that I didn’t know who was alive or dead. Who had been caught in the monster’s meteor strike? Who had fallen in battle before I arrived?

Was I actually leaving anyone behind? Or were they already gone?

I would never know.

“This is fine,” I said to Noaich as we emerged into the forest. I tried not to think about it being the last time I would leave Jamestown. “We’re going to be all right.”

Will interfere? Noaich asked. He paused for a moment, trying to think of a clearer way to convey what he meant. Must grow stronger. Will growth be harder now?

“No,” I lied, “we’re still perfectly on track. We can still get you there, buddy; I don’t make a promise when I don’t mean it.”

That set his mind at ease, but now I was the one worried about it. I always tried to keep my promises, although making my little lizard friend into a demigod was one of the more outlandish ones I’d ever made. According to his stat readout, I needed to unlock an achievement that probably involved capping out our friendship level, feed him a peppered steak which probably required the cooking skill, and then keep him fed and happy to fill his growth stat. I wasn’t afraid of achieving the first one. But the other two? Those were going to be much harder without Jamestown’s resources.

But the little guy didn’t need to worry about that for right now. This was my problem, and I would cross that bridge when I came to it.

When we had gone to rest outside of town, it was close to the entrance. I hadn’t considered the possibility of anyone else being crazy enough to leave town at night, and the consequences of running into someone there was minimal. Now, though, if someone saw me here, there was no way of knowing if I would survive the encounter. And unless I’d misjudged James the whole time I was living here, there was a very high chance that he was about to march out to try and claim the Mandrill town to take control of their farms.

So my exile began with a hike.

Realistically, there was no difference between this walk and my earlier trip to the Mandrill town. It was the same forest with the same challenges. The same terrain and the same wildlife. But this time, the walk was…depressing. Before, I was riding high off of a level-up, new powers, and with a goal in mind.

Now?

I found myself trudging. Dragging my feet and staring at the ground as I pressed onward. It had only been hours, but the novelty of the new detection radius wasn’t enough to keep my defeat from clouding my mind. I was still paying attention to my surroundings thanks to it, but there was no more sense of wonderment at my supernatural awareness of the old growth forest around me.

Noaich, at least, seemed unaffected by my poor morale. Not only had he been freed from captivity—and presumably a nasty fate of one description or another—but he’d been given his mother’s blessing to go off on an adventure with me. He was growing up and leaving the nest.

In terms of maturity, he seemed to be a little more than a child, but not yet a teenager. I tried to imagine how I would have reacted at age 9 if I met a mystical hero and my mom let me go on a magic adventure with him.

That sounded an awful lot like what I’d answered when asked “what do you want to be when you grow up” at that age. I’d wanted to be important. I’d wanted to matter. And all the stories I’d devoured at that age all leaned on the same Hero’s Journey trope that told me to get there I’d have to answer some mysterious call.

It brightened my mood a little bit to know that my dreams were coming true, even if it was by proxy.

That thought gave me a way out of my growing depression. I’d devoted myself to helping people, and even though I could no longer touch the lives of a whole town, there was still someone I could help. How could I make sure that I was the best possible mentor to my young hero? Preferably without getting ganked halfway through the narrative.

“Priority one is survival,” I said to myself. “And that gives us three things we need to do.”

Food? Noaich asked.

“Yeah, the first priority is to take care of ourselves,” I agreed. “Food and water, shelter, and all the rest of our basic needs. But we need to worry about more than that, obviously.”

Also food?  Noaich asked, clearly puzzled as to what the other priorities could be.

“A good guess,” I said, finding myself grinning despite my dour mood only a moment ago. “The second concern is where we’ll be when we assemble those basic needs. We need to avoid running into folks from Jamestown again, because if we’re close enough for them to blunder into us, they might call it a violation of my exile. There’s no telling what they’ll do to us. Or what we’ll have to do to them to defend ourselves. But that’s an easy fix. We just have to keep moving and they won’t catch up, even if someone is out here already, looking for trouble.” I reached over and tapped the bark of a tree, literally knocking on wood.

Noaich didn’t fully understand what I was talking about. The concept of exile seemed to go over his head a little bit. I could chalk that down to a lack of understanding of the concept of a town. Considering that Baurusuchus appeared to be giant apex predators, they likely had a more isolationist social structure. Regardless, that meant that my final concern would come across very clearly.

“And the final concern is predation,” I concluded. “We have to watch out for big spooky monsters who could kill us because we happen to be made out of meat.” I tapped my temple. “That shouldn’t be a problem as long as I’m paying attention, but there’s still some things that might make themselves threats even against my detection radius.”

Explain? Noaich asked. The message came with a sense of polite curiosity. Becoming my pet had clearly done something for his intelligence, and now he was seeing the system in a new light. Giving him more information could only help, considering he was basically one of my class features now.

“I can sense things within a tremendous range,” I said. “But it’s still based on my Detection skill. If something is actively using its Stealth skill, then I need to beat it to see it. Wandering predators that depend on strength, speed, or pack tactics I’ll keep us well clear of. No wandering ceratosaurs or dire wolves will catch our scent so long as I’m not a total idiot. But an ambush predator?” I gestured with my hands, making one hand pounce on the other like a cat. “Our only defense against that would be—”

Sometimes I wonder if I’m cursed. Would the attack have happened if I wasn’t in the middle of explaining how it was possible? If I’d kept my mouth shut, would the beast have let us pass by?

Curse or no, the creature attacked mid-sentence, suddenly becoming visible in mid-air above me, clawed limbs extending as it descended on me.