Chapter Eight: Survive First, Specialize Later

  I set my hand on Zelda’s Bag o’ Treats, the canvas a comforting feel under my fingers. I had everything I needed. Warden’s Edge, my water bottle, some snacks with actual calories, just in case.

  But I didn’t step into the hole in my backyard. Instead, I glanced over my shoulder. From the sunroom window next to the couch, Zelda barked at me.

  I was leaving the dogs behind and I didn’t feel good about it. Neither did she. But I was pretty sure it was the safest option. I didn’t think the System would yank her out of my arms if I carried her with me into the Rift Management Interface, but I couldn’t carry all three of the dogs, even with my System-enhanced strength.

  And as ridiculous as it felt to say this, Zelda was the toughest of them. If mana-crazed beasts attacked while I was gone, she’d be needed here.

  “Guard the den,” I called to her. “It’s your job right now. Guard the den.”

  Bear’s head popped up next to her. Her ear flick conveyed her scoffing. Guard den. I guard den.

  I kept my laugh internal, so Bear wouldn’t see it, nodded at both dogs, then turned and stepped into the rift.

  The moment of disorientation from the darkness was brief this time. Apparently, I was getting used to magically transporting between dimensions. The coffee shop looked exactly the same as when I left it, up to and including System Chelsea cleaning up the coffee cup I’d left behind.

  “Welcome back,” she said easily. “Another coffee?”

  “Does time not pass in here when I’m not here?” I asked, surprised to see her still standing in the same position I’d left her a full day ago.

  Chelsea tipped her head, as if the question was confusing. “Your RMI is a localized spatial zone, with standard temporal flow unless adjusted. It exists whether you’re present or not. Despite its oddities, it’s a place.”

  She glanced down at the cup in her hand, and then nodded. “Ah, I see. I’m not part of your RMI. I’m a personalized interface construct attuned to you. I’m only here when you’re here. When you’re not here…” She shrugged.

  That was so weird. She felt so much like a person. But if she only existed when I was interacting with her—the thought was making my head hurt, and I had too much else to worry about. I was not going to get invested in whether the System’s avatar, personalized or not, was having a quality life.

  “Okay, I’m here to take this tutorial. Can we get it started?”

  Chelsea made an open-handed gesture at the window. “You might want to get comfortable. This will take a while.”

  She was not wrong, but it wasn’t nearly as useful as I’d anticipated. I’d already sort of skipped two of the major sections. My RMI was what it was, so the entire section on visualizing and forming your interface controls was wasted on me. It seemed as if most Class One Rift Keepers had to work a lot harder to create an interface and make it usable.

  The second section was even worse. I paused it five minutes in and said to System Chelsea, somewhat accusingly, “How come you didn’t recommend any of these abilities?”

  The abilities in question were the so-called introductory rift management abilities. Not [Invisible Armor], [Analyze], or [Animal Communication], but stuff like [Breach Relocation], [Gate Formation], and [Rift Insight]. I hadn’t seen any of them in the pastry case when I’d been looking at abilities.

  “Most Rift Keepers already have the abilities they need to stay alive in a rift. They become Rift Keepers as an advanced class choice after they’ve demonstrated success at managing wild rifts or keeping controlled rifts in balance. You’re beginning at a much lower level, so you need to start with the basics. You don’t even have a weapon skill.”

  “You told me to pick Animal Communication for my skill,” I objected.

  “Yes, because you’ve effectively used your bond to defeat monsters, and your weapon is not one that a traditional weapon skill will benefit. You could use Improvised Weapons, but your skill would take years to catch up to the strength of your shovel.”

  “I didn’t use my bond,” I muttered, feeling sulky. That sounded terrible. Zelda fought because… well, instinct, maybe? The instinct to defend herself and her person?

  “You need a healing ability, a mapping ability, danger sense or something similar, a movement or stealth ability—so many options. Rift management abilities are far less important. Survive first, specialize later.”

  A healing ability sounded like an excellent idea. I’d be a lot happier about letting the dogs come into the rift with me if I knew I could help them if they got hurt. Leveling up to heal was nice, but probably not a great long-term strategy since each level took so much longer to get as we advanced.

  But I took System Chelsea’s point. The rift management abilities and skills weren’t my priority.

  After those two sections the tutorial got even more confusing, because it assumed I knew a lot more than I actually did. Obviously, it was aimed at the experts who’d already leveled up all those basic skills, and who’d been working in rifts for years. Probably they’d been integrated into the multiverse forever, too. Maybe they’d even grown up with the System.

  In other words, they spoke the language. I did not.

  Despite my missing background in multiverse terminology, I managed to pick up some of the basics. The bureaucrats who wrote quests with phrases like “emergency atmospheric enhancement protocols” called the thing in my backyard an “access point.”

  Less wordy types referred to such openings as breaches, but if earth hit a point where people wandered through access points as if they were toll booths on the highway, we’d probably start referring to them as gates.

  Essentially “breach” implied that the rift beyond the access point would be wild, unmonitored, and potentially unstable, while “gate” implied the exact opposite. Or, to look at it another way, every access point began as a breach, but could become a gate someday.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The rift itself was the interstitial space between breaches, a no man’s land between planets. Sorta like the DMZ between North and South Korea. Like the DMZ, said space could be extremely dangerous, although not usually because it was full of literal landmines.

  Rifts were formed by rift cores, some sort of solidification of mana and nearby essences which then shaped the rift, creating an environment and populating it with resources and creatures. The tutorial referred to that as a Tier One Rift Event. It didn’t talk about Earth specifically, but I understood enough to realize that Tier One Rift Events were what was happening all over the planet.

  Rift assessment was one of the rift managers’ responsibilities. Some of the jargon in this section flew straight over my head, but the gist of it was that rifts were rated across standard categories: their level, occupants, environment, resources, mana flow, breach destinations, stability, progress, and so on.

  A rift summary just gave the tier of the rift, a number from one to ten, followed by a letter that looked completely random to me. The letters, though, were a compiled rating, based on a monster score that was numerical, an environmental score that varied based on the recipient, a resource score that was a multiversal letter grade, a mana flow rating that was a percentage… you know, let’s just say it was complicated and leave it at that.

  Someday I’d be expected to provide these ratings, but I truly hoped the System in my head would give me some kind of cheat sheet when I did.

  Fundamentally, though, the multiverse considered some rift events to be positive, or at least net good. The rift might contain valuable resources, and the breaches might lead to interesting, even friendly places. If a rift was stable, easy to control, and filled with useful items, locals would often protect the breach. Sometimes, no surprise, a good rift could become a prized possession or a bone of contention.

  Other rift events, though, were nightmares. The rift could be filled with plague-ridden zombies or swarming killer bees, occupants rated D for Deadly. (Not really, but their base monster score was much higher than a base goblin’s score.) Or an access point could lead to worlds graded Incompatible, meaning no stable cooperation was possible with the inhabitants.

  I paused on that info and then grimaced when the tutorial went more in-depth. The tutorial was a lot like the System, where if your eyes rested for a while on a single term, tooltips would start popping up. Turns out Incompatible covered a lot of ground, but sometimes it meant sapient beings who thought enslaving people and using smallpox as a weapon were good ideas. People like the worst of us, basically, except probably with new-and-improved smallpox blankets and bigger guns.

  The tutorial didn’t answer specific questions—I’d already tried back in the abilities section—or I would have asked whether Earth was currently rated Incompatible. I suspected it might be.

  Fortunately, breaches could be permanently closed. You just had to destroy the rift core. Easier said than done, of course.

  And the longer a rift stayed wild, the bigger and stronger it grew. If the rift wasn’t “harvested”—the multiversal’s cheery euphemism for killing all the monsters inside—it would hit full capacity and overflow, spilling monsters out through the breaches. In the tutorial’s terms, the progress would reach 100%.

  Eventually, if the overflow continued, the rift would evolve. Its progress would reset to zero and it would stop leaking monsters. But it would increase in size, at least doubling, and the monsters would level up, usually by a lot. The rewards and resources would get more valuable, too, of course, but they’d be harder to get.

  If that cycle continued, the rift could keep evolving. A rift left untouched could someday become the deadliest spot on a planet, its monsters the apex predators of their environment.

  Was I excited to learn that I could someday have my environment’s apex predators in my back yard?

  No, I was not.

  The answer was obvious: I was going to have to be the apex predator myself. Okay, maybe with some help from the dogs. Bear would probably love it.

  Me, though? I didn’t really see myself as an apex predator type. And yet, if I didn’t take the job, someone—or something—else would. Deciding I’d rather do it myself felt like a no-brainer.

  The only question was: how?

  Killing roaches wasn’t going to get me there. The bugs I’d smashed yesterday had given me a pittance of XP, at best. If I was going to keep leveling, I needed to find toughter monsters to kill. Ugh.

  I closed the rift tutorial windows and for just a moment, rested my head on my folded arms on the table before me, like a kid putting their head down on the desk for quiet time.

  There’d been so many times in my life when the world felt overwhelming to me, and all of them paled before this one. Maybe they’d been practice. Maybe years of learning to persist in the face of mental illness and trauma and grief had actually just been training for this moment, this time when despite everything happening, I would just keep going.

  Or not.

  I wasn’t actually egocentric enough to think that somehow the universe had been preparing me to survive the apocalypse. The world felt a lot more random than that.

  And yet I was going to keep going.

  I sat back upright and turned to Chelsea. She was still standing behind the counter, wiping down the glass with a cloth towel like any normal barista pretending to keep busy.

  “Can I ask you questions?”

  “You may. As I mentioned before, I’m not omniscient so I may not be able to answer them, but I’ll do my best.”

  I wasn’t sure where to begin. I should have been taking notes. I felt like I had so many questions piled up and yet now, of course, I couldn’t remember any of them. I started with the easiest. “The stuff in the rift was weird. Is it real?”

  “Yes and no.” Chelsea gestured around her at the coffee shop. “Everything in here is real in the sense that you can see it, touch it, feel it, smell it, taste it. But it’s created by mana.” She picked up a carton of milk. “No cow was involved in the production of this milk. But it’ll taste like milk and it’ll make a good latte. Speaking of which?” She waggled the carton at me in invitation.

  “Yes, please.” I could use a good coffee to get me through this day, regardless of whether it was made of mana instead of real coffee beans.

  As Chelsea started making my coffee, she continued, “Everything in a rift is real, but mana-based. I selected your rift quite carefully in order to—”

  “Wait, wait.” I interrupted her, putting my hand up, fingers wide to say stop.

  She’d given me roaches on purpose? Deliberate roaches? Intentional roaches?

  “You selected my rift?”

  Chelsea nodded. “There was a bit of an uproar happening about the concession granted to your dog. By comparison, moving a rift from a few hundred miles away instead of simply re-locating the closest rift was relatively trivial.” She sounded almost smug, definitely pleased with herself.

  “You gave me roaches?”

  It was probably not the right question. Maybe the nearest rift was populated by those plague-ridden zombies or something. But even so, roaches couldn’t possibly be the best of all monsters to have in your backyard. If I ignored the rift, I could someday get killed by an apex predator cockroach. How disgusting would that be?

  “Roaches?” I repeated.

  Chelsea came out from behind the counter, coffee cup in hand, and sat down across from me. She set the cup on the table, pushed it toward me, and folded her arms across her chest. “I gave you gasoline. I gave you ice. I gave you—”

  She unfolded her arms and started ticking items off on her fingers. “—first aid supplies, groceries, dog food, bottled water. Diapers, for heaven’s sake. Do you know how many mothers are going to be desperate for diapers in the near future? Donuts!”

  She leaned across the table and glared at me. “I gave you donuts. You should be thanking me, not complaining.”