Chapter 42

  Eli staggered out of his bedroom mostly naked even as the swat team burst into the house and began shooting bean bag rounds. They’d been ordered to rely on non-lethal force for this encounter.

  The defenders hadn’t gotten the message that this was a non-lethal take-down. They found themselves pumped with adrenaline and grabbing for weapons that they had just spent a week learning how to use.

  Not only that, but the SWAT weapons designed for use against non-system integrated humans had rather less effective than advertised against the high-leveled party members.

  In a few moments, half of the SWAT team was dead. Eli was blinking to clear his eyes, surprised that he could breath again already. He’d been pepper sprayed once as a ‘prank’ by an asshole at school and had thought that tear gas would be just as bad. Instead, he found that he was quickly recovering.

  “Don’t kill them all,” Eli said, even as he reached for a weapon to defend himself with one hand and held his towel in place with the other. “We might need to question them.”

  “This isn’t a dungeon,” Jose said. “If they’re the government—”

  “They didn’t knock,” Erik said.

  “We’re the FBI,” one of the survivors said, retreating even as he shot beanbags at the men and women who just … stood there and took the blows. “You’re going to fry for killing federal agents! Just wait—”

  A gunshot took him in the chest, causing him to gasp out in pain. He was wearing a bulletproof vest, but he was still knocked to the ground. A third force, if you count the party of dungeon delvers and the attackers as the first two forces, was suddenly piling out of a set of black vans that had just pulled in.

  It had been spotting them that had caused the attackers to spring their attack early in the first place; they’d been intending to wait until dark, but the helicopter had gotten sight of obvious reinforcements arriving. The call had come down to secure the targets before they arrived, not anticipating the resistance.

  Nor the fact that the call would come too late and the cavalry would arrive mere moments after the violence began.

  “Runekeeper, we’re with the Webmaster,” came a call from a man using one of the vans as cover as he shot at a target who was out in the woods, and Eli realized suddenly that they were surrounded. The force that had broken into the house had been meant to subdue them, but they were only part of the equation. “Come with us, let us get you out of here.”

  “I have a better idea,” Mattie said, turning to the rest of the party. “Castle Doctrine.”

  Not every party member nodded. Jose in particular looked pale, and John Sr. shook his head, bowing out of the violence that would come. Elaine looked at her pistol for a long moment before sighing. Her eyes suddenly sharpened as she abandoned long held principles.

  “They’re brigands with a badge,” she said, “I doubt they have a warrant for any of this, and if they do they should have knocked and presented it instead of leading with guns blazing. Yes. We fight.”

  Eli watched as he party members exited the house. He went to pull on his dirty jeans and his jacket, enhancing them as he did with his magic and spreading it out to everyone. He wasn’t certain if enhancing the clothes of his allies would make them bulletproof or not, but he had to do something.

  Even as he grabbed his machete and ran outside, the screams filled the forest as the party counter-ambushed the force that had been sent against them. It didn’t take very long.

  While the forces in the woods were equipped with real firearms instead of the less-than-lethal weapons that the SWAT team invading the house had used, they were little more effective. One agent shot the crazy bitch who was running about with sword in the head and watched as a chunk of meat was ripped away from her skull. She turned to look at him and grinned. He shot again, aiming for center mass.

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  She crossed the distance between them in an instant. His world spun, and suddenly he was looking up at the sky. He couldn’t feel anything below his neck, and he understood a second later as he saw his body slumping over on top of him. His light faded a few seconds later.

  Mattie shoved the chunk of flesh that had come loose from her forehead back into place and felt as her regeneration clicked into place. She looked around for another threat, but only saw the guys in the vans. Everyone else was either one of her friends or dead. She wasn’t certain about the guys in the van yet, but so far they had only been shooting at the other assholes so she was willing to talk things out with them.

  She grinned, reflecting on how much she’d changed. Then she frowned, remembering that it wasn’t just because of the system releasing her pent up violent urges, as much as she wanted to pretend otherwise.

  She had seen her son die. She had believed for almost a week that Eli was gone. That she would never see his smile again, or hear him tell a stupid joke or talk about astronomy.

  She had vented her anger and pain upon the Trojans, and had been ready to vent it on another two floors of dungeon monsters. But then Eli had come back to life. She was grateful, of course, that he had survived.

  But she had seen a part of herself in that time that she couldn’t unsee.

  She hadn’t talked to him about it yet, but she wasn’t the woman she’d been before. A beast had been unleashed in her. And it wasn’t one that she even wanted to contain.

  When the gunshots faded, she returned to the others and compared injuries. Surprisingly, nobody had much trouble with the fact that they’d just killed real people. Not just dungeon monsters, but government agents. Presumably.

  Maybe she wasn’t the only one who had changed.

  Alaina had gotten good at healing in the past week, and within a few moments she had the gunshot wounds … not perfectly healed, she couldn’t do that. The party’s clothes had protected them; Eli had risen to the point where he could protect all of the combatants at once and his enchantments really had stopped bullets. It was wounds like the open flaps on Mattie’s forehead and Peter’s scalp which required most of her attention.

  “You know,” Eli said once they had finished, “The stupid thing is that if the government had actually just walked up and asked me what I knew I’d tell them everything.”

  “Really?” Peter asked, trying to wash the blood off of his face with a paper towel.

  “Yeah. There’s no reason to keep things secret, in my opinion. But I really don’t know much more than the system is already spreading or is already known on the internet,” Eli said.

  “We should get moving,” the leader of the security force said. “We’ve set up a secure location in the city. We’ll—’

  “We’re not going to hide,” Eli said. He turned to his party. “One of the rewards we got for clearing the tenth floor is a Greater Haven Creation Token. I have’t heard of anyone else getting a ‘greater’ version of this stone, but we know what the lesser versions of it do. They make a place monster free and pump it full of mana. I’ve made a few unilateral decisions I need to talk with everyone about, but this isn’t going to be one of them. Where should we make our Haven?”

  The others turned to each other, some of them expressing concern on their faces, likely over Eli’s admission, then they began discussing the topic in depth.

  Ten minutes later, they got into their vehicles and drove into town, stopping three times on the way.

  The goblins had learned to set up roadblocks, but it was the matter of a few moments for the party to clear them.

  The security force wondered exactly what it was that they were there for, since they’d almost killed themselves fighting against a goblin force half the size that the mage had obliterated with a single spell.

  Then they were in the city, and they were forced to abandon their vehicles altogether and go on foot, as the density of goblins and human resistance was too great for anyone to drive safely.

  Even so, their destination was close at hand.

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