Chapter 29:
The squad leader drove fast, which told Clark everything he needed to know about the man's state of mind. Fear made people do stupid things, he thought, ducking under a branch, one eye on the road, and the other on his surroundings. The man behind the wheel was shitting himself and driving fast, as if he had a death wish. Clark had let him go because he wanted him to lead him to Terminus's base.
But the way the cannibal was driving, Clark doubted that they'd reach the base without any accidents. Clark followed at a distance; the hybrid mode's stride covered ground almost as fast as the car on the road, and he could go even faster. The tree line gave him plenty of cover, but he would sometimes purposely show himself to freak the man out.
After about 15 minutes of freaking the man out, Clark was starting to see boards with writing on trees and road signs, calling out to those who read it to follow the directions, and they'd come to a safe haven, a sanctuary for survivors. Clark's mood darkened; the fun part of the chase was now over. It was time to put the prey out of its misery.
He closed the distance as the SUV turned off the road and onto the gravel track that led toward the train station. The fence line appeared on the horizon first, chain-link with reinforcement welded in sections. There were still a few minutes of driving left, but the mouse had led the cat to its home. The rest of the way, Clark could handle it himself.
He came out of the treelines in a full sprint, shoulder aimed at the driver's door, and tackled with all his strength that cat hybrid had boosted by SuperHuman.
As it turned out, it was much more than an armored SUV was designed to absorb.
The vehicle went sideways.
The driver overcorrected, or at least tried, and the tree arrived at the wrong moment in the wrong direction, and the front end crumbled completely. Unmovable object met momentum. The tree won.
Clark stopped, listened, and heard the crack of the neck bone under the settling groan of metal.
He stood in the wreckage for a moment. The crash had been loud, but the base was at least a kilometer away, and between him and it, there was an ambient sound that had gone silent around him.
Nothing moved from the direction of the fence line that suggested a response. But there were figures that had woken up by the sound of the crash, a variant of a ghoul that Half Light was silent against.
He looked at the signs nailed to the nearest tree.
SANCTUARY FOR ALL.
COMMUNITY FOR ALL.
THOSE WHO ARRIVE-
SURVIVE.
The lettering was neat. Someone had taken time with it. Someone had understood that the message needed to look like a promise rather than a trap. And those who were despairing and desperate, probably believed the promise, not knowing that they were going to be turned into dinner.
With a sigh, he activated Cat Form, his naked figure getting smaller and smaller, until he was just a little bit bigger than a teenage cat.
It was time to scout the train station, which had been somebody's end of the line before it became everyone else's end of the line.
He sat in the shadow of a pine tree, maybe thirty meters from the perimeter, his cat form pressed flat against the root system, his tail curled against his flank. The ambient noise of the forest had changed in the last ten minutes.
It wasn't dramatic or noticeable to a normal human, but enough for his sharpened senses to notice, which told him something large and directionless was moving somewhere from the south. A horde. It wasn't close yet, but it had intention.
Meaning, the mass movement of dead bodies had caught the sound of shotouts from inside the compound and was following it toward the source. Given the gunshots that had started up inside the fence, maybe five minutes ago, hadn't stopped- oh, it finally stopped.
His cat ears moved around to pick up other things instinctively, and feeling safe, he moved.
Not toward the fence. Around it, low and flat, paws finding the ground without sound, using the covers of grass and trunks to not get hit by any surprises. The perimeter fence had been reinforced in sections with welded scrap, newer than the chain-link beneath it-
His ears twitched, hearing the distinct sound of people talking, away from the Terminus base. He went to ignore it, only to hear more voices. Clark couldn't pick up on the words from a distance, but his sharp hearing then heard something else, an uncomfortable cry that called out to him. That of a baby.
Immediately, his priority shifted, and Clark ran towards the voices, his cat form low and flat, in a hunting mode. A minute of quick walk in the cat form had Clark come out to a big wooden shed out in the forest, the wood rotted along the base, and the roof sagged at one corner.
He heard the voices before he reached it.
Two of them. One tense and on guard, the other one lower and carefree. And underneath both voices, a sound that didn't belong anywhere near this place, soft and intermittent, the sound of something very small and very new trying to express itself in the only language it had.
A baby.
Clark stopped outside the shed door, his ears working. The lower voice was asking questions. Not aggressively, but with the controlled care of someone who understood that the wrong tone in the wrong moment could go very badly for him and was choosing his words accordingly, yet poking at the other man's mindset and luck so far. The tense voice was answering in short, clipped sentences, not wanting to continue the conversation at all.
He listened for another thirty seconds to understand the shape of what was happening inside.
Then the explosion happened.
Inside the shed, both voices went silent.
The baby made a sharp sound and then began crying, frightened by the explosion, while outside, Clark pressed himself flat against the wooden porch of the shed, calming down his startled heart.
Then, gunfire inside the compound began to be louder, with no sign of slowing down. It meant a group had attacked Terminus, as the cry of the baby inside got louder.
Clark made a decision.
He shifted.
It took three seconds, the fur receding, his frame growing bigger from that of a cat, and then he was standing upright against the shed wall in the remains of what had once been pants, bare-chested, back and torso filled with black and blue bruises that were getting extremely annoying to deal with.
He reached for the shed door and opened it.
Just like he heard, there were two men. One sitting against the right wall with his wrists bound in front of him and legs tied as well, dried blood at his temple, his clothes dirty from days rather than hours. The other standing near the door Clark had just come through, a pistol at his hip that his hand had gone to and stopped.
Both of them were looking at Clark, stilling.
Clark looked back.
The standing one was broad-shouldered, dark-skinned, with stillness of surprise and shock as his brain was going through possibilities so fast that it froze the body. Clark's eyes moved to him for a second, hoping that his traits would work well; otherwise, the man would snap him with his bare hands due to all the muscles he had on his body, even months after the outbreak.
The bound one was white, mid-thirties, holding surprise, and then turned to cunning. His eyes went to Clark's figure, the bruising, the state of his pants, and then his face.
"Help-"
"I mean no harm." Clark interrupted, raising his hands to show the muscled man that he meant what he said, a glance sent to the bound man again to study him, and then the baby that was in a makeshift cradle, bawling her eyes out.
"I'm here to ask just one question of that man. Then I'll be out of your hair." Clark calmly spoke, Comforting Presence and Larger than Life traits pulling their weight as the man gulped in nervousness, but nodded anyway.
Getting the permission, Clark slowly put his hands down and faced the man. "Are you Terminus or Save-Lots?" Clark asked.
"What?" The man's expression changed once more to confusion, cunning eyes faded into something else for a moment.
"Terminus. He's from Terminus. They have a few friend of ours captured, and someone went to save them." The black man answered for him, sending a glance at his capture, then to the kid in front of him. Clark didn't say anything, but nodded.
His expression is going firm. The man felt something was wrong, and before he could open his mouth, Clark moved, traveling two meters in a moment, claws turned to a firm grip against the shocked man's head-
SNAP
The scum's stiff body jolted, then fell lifelessly on the cabin floor.
"What-"
Clark looked back. He was aware of how he appeared- bare-chested, bruised from collar to waist in black and blue that had no business being that color on a living person, pants destroyed below the knee due to hybrid form, standing in a rotted shed over a freshly dead body with his hands at his sides.
"I said I meant no harm," Clark said. "To you."
The man's jaw worked. His eyes moved to the baby, instinctively checking, his body ready for a fight, and then back to Clark.
"Stay here," Clark told him. "Away from the windows. Keep the baby quiet if you can." He looked at the makeshift cradle where the infant had gone from crying to the hiccupping silence of a baby who had used up all its immediate volume. He couldn't help but relax his body, and his neutral expression turned soft, sticking his tongue out to her playfully.
The baby giggled, her tears immediately forgotten.
"Don't come out until it's quiet. And I do not mean gun-quiet. Actually quiet." He told him, finally breaking his watch from the giggling baby, and to the man standing where he was when he entered the room.
"Who are you?" The man's voice was steadier than Clark expected, given the circumstances. He had the composure of someone who had already been through enough, but no more than what his group had gone through. From what Clark could see from his posture and mindset, which was bleeding into the very being of him, the baby and the man had been safe for a long time behind a wall.
"Someone who needs to finish something," Clark said. "What's your name?"
A pause. "Tyreese."
Clark nodded. He looked at the baby once more, the small face scrunched up. The eighteen-year-old really wanted to mess around with her for a moment. He had heard someone say that babies were pure things and could lighten your dark heart just by being close to them.
But it wasn't time as more gunshots echoed out in the distance.
"Protect her," he said. Not a request.
Then he stepped back out through the shed door and pulled it shut behind him.
He looked toward the black smoke rising above the treeline.
He started moving. The cat form took him three seconds, the familiar compression of the world as everything grew larger around him, paws finding the pine needle floor without sound. He moved fast, low, through the undergrowth, going to the sound. Until he saw it.
Someone had blown a hole in the Terminus fence.
Through the gaps in the trees, he could see dead shapes, the horde flowing through the breach the explosion had opened, filling the compound the way water filled a low place, slow and then all at once.
And among them, people were running around, panicking and crying out, until a ghoul took hold of them and bit them through their flesh.
Clark stopped at the tree line, his cat eyes picking them apart. A large group- more than a dozen- moving in rough formation toward one of the far fence sections, none of them wounded, all of them armed with things they'd picked up rather than brought, the improvised weapons of people who'd been stripped on arrival, but at least two or three of them had guns, firing at anything that got too close to them. Even other living people.
Clark frowned, trying to focus his eyes more. He saw shapes on the roof, alive men with sniper rifles or something, go towards the larger group, only to be gunned down by the supposed leader.
And behind them, the horde was finding its footing in the compound, circling the survivor's group and the Terminus group.
Clark made a decision.
He shifted.
It was faster this time, the hybrid rising like something that had been waiting rather than being built. The fur first, then the frame, then the height, until he was ten feet of bruised muscle and barely intact pants standing at the tree line with his tail moving once behind him in the slow, deliberate sweep that meant the cat had found what it was looking at.
He stepped out of the trees.
He didn't run toward the group. He ran toward the dead that was about to circle them, yet the group hadn't seen it because buildings were hiding them.
It took Clark maybe a minute max to reach the end of the horde and massacre his way silently. As soon as he heard them get close, Clark shifted back to human form, meeting them halfway, with a path to a fence wall cleared, but more ghouls slowly replacing the slain ones. His hands didn't need the Leaf Blade for this. His superhuman body was enough.
He was aware, at the edges of his attention, of the group ahead stopping.
Of the sound of movement behind him going quiet.
He turned around.
The group was maybe thirty feet away.
They were looking at him. All of them. The weapons they'd been carrying were up, not all of them aimed at him, but not all of them not aimed at him either. The man at the front, the one with the close-cropped hair, had a machete in one hand
He looked at the man in front.
"Fence," Clark said. He tilted his head at the path he cleared for them.
Nobody moved immediately. He counted two seconds, watching the man's eyes do the rapid calculation, trying to decide whether he was a threat or an asset, with others behind him having the same face.
"Go," Clark said again. Quieter this time, which somehow carried more weight. "The horde's going to consolidate in the next few minutes. You want to be on the other side of that fence before it does."
The man looked at him for one more second.
Then he turned to the group. "Move."
They moved.
Clark fell in at the back, not because anyone had asked him to, but because the back was where the stragglers were, and the stragglers were easy targets. He kept pace easily, one eye on the group and one eye on the compound behind them, tracking the horde's movement with Half Light, counting the variants if there were any.
When they reached the wall, one by one, they hopped to the other side, with Clark being the last alongside the supposed leader of the group and a ginger muscled man.
That's when he heard footsteps running towards them- footsteps that didn't match those of the dead, but of the living. Maybe four pairs.
"Hey!" He tapped the man with the AK-47 rifle next to him and pointed at the rooftop. "Fire there! Now!"
The man was confused, but as soon as he saw the first patch of hair from the corner, he fired. They stopped and took cover, which was all the time the last two from the group needed to get on the other side of the fence.
Some of them were looking at him. Some of them were looking at the compound. Some of them were checking themselves, checking the people next to them, counting to make sure no one was left behind.
He looked at the man with the machete.
The man looked back, before Clark turned around and went back to fighting the horde and taking cover from random shots that went to him, keeping his ears open.
[Gold Ticket Acquired.]
|Main Cast II — You have met the group that started the legendary show The Walking Dead.|
Clark frowned at the notification, looking to the group that was disappearing in the trees, but shook his head. They weren't important. What was important was to take care of the cannibals in this place.
He found a couple of people, whom Clark easily dispatched. A hard punch to the gut had them incapacitated. Afterward, he left the cleanup to the ghouls, turning each cannibal into food for the ghouls.
With some gentle questions, some of the Terminus scum were asked the name of the leader of Terminus. Gareth. And after some more convincing arguments, he was given a description, before the man and the woman in front of him were thrown to the sea of ghouls.
Finding Gareth took eleven minutes.
Not because he was hard to find, but because Clark had to move carefully through the compound. The horde was still working through the buildings methodically, the dead finding rooms and corners with the patient thoroughness that they always had, and Clark had no interest in drawing their attention when he didn't have to.
Gareth had taken four people with him. Clark had picked up the trail from the south fence section, where someone had cut a small exit that wasn't part of the main perimeter, the kind of exit that existed specifically for the person who knew about it and nobody else. A private door.
He found them in the tree line, two hundred meters from the compound, moving fast and not quietly enough, the crashing sound of people who were scared and in grief due to losing everything they had, safety, shelter, food, and people they loved.
Clark shifted to cat form, closed the distance in thirty seconds, and shifted back.
He stepped out from behind a pine directly into their path.
All five of them stopped.
The four with Gareth had weapons up immediately, the trained response of people who had been doing this long enough that it was automatic. Gareth himself was behind them, which told Clark everything about the man before he'd said a word.
Clark looked at him past the weapons.
Gareth was younger than he'd expected. Late twenties, maybe thirty. He had the face of someone who had been good-looking before everything and had preserved it carefully since, because it was used to make others trust him and his words. There were some words thrown at him, filled with panic and fear.
But Clark ignored them all until Gareth spoke, looking at his eyes and hair and everything else.
"You're the one from the farm, aren't you?" Gareth said, even though it ended in a question. His voice was steady. Clark gave him credit for that. "Andy's radio. They described you. Especially, your eyes…"
Gareth's eyes moved over him. The bruising, the pants, the bare feet on pine needles. And Clark looked back, his head tilted just a little, trying to figure out how or why the men in front of him had turned that way.
What messed-up situation did they come across that they decided to build a community around eating others?
He could see the man's mouth moving, forming words and sounds, but Clark couldn't hear them, deep in thought- no, more like whatever he was offering or saying didn't matter anymore. They were prey in front of a cat now. His curiosity was simply telling him to satisfy himself and find out the man's biography.
One of the four shifted their aim slightly. Clark didn't look at them. He kept his eyes on Gareth, because Gareth was the one making decisions here, and the other four were only relevant insofar as Gareth decided they were, but that was enough to bring him back to the present. Gareth also seemed to find out that he didn't care.
"What do you want?" Gareth finally asked.
"Nothing," Clark admitted, scratching just under his belly button in a casual way. Gareth and his men tensed, frowning. "There's nothing you can offer me," Clark muttered, and then he moved.
There were maybe two shots that could be fired, both missing, as Leaf Blade cut through their guns and then bodies afterward.
…
…
…
It took him longer to get back than it had taken to find Gareth. He moved carefully, checking his trail, making sure nothing was following him. The horde was occupied with the compound. The running variants he'd been tracking through Half Light were still inside the perimeter. The forest between here and the shed was clear.
He heard them before he reached the shed.
It wasn't just Tyreese's voice, or the baby's, though the baby was there, making the small sounds that babies made when they were content and recently fed from inside. He heard voices he didn't recognize, more than two, the sound of a group that had been through something and was still processing the aftermath, some of them quiet and some of them not.
He stopped at the tree line.
The shed's porch had people on it.
Eight, maybe nine, Clark counted. Several of them had weapons trained on the tree line, which meant they'd heard him coming or had been watching the approach since before he arrived. He recognized the man with the machete from the compound. The man with the AK-47 who had fired at the roof. An old woman with white hair with rifles on her, who hadn't been in the group he'd cleared a path for, which meant she'd come from somewhere else, and had arrived here by a route he hadn't been tracking.
Tyreese was on the porch too, and when Clark stepped out of the tree line, his tight expression turned into relief, which Clark filed as useful information about the man's character.
But that didn't mean it wasn't tense. As soon as he left the tree lines, the weapons- pistols, rifles, and even a crossbow from a long-haired man came up.
Clark stopped walking. He kept his hands visible, arms slightly out from his sides, nothing in them. He stood at the edge of the tree line and waited, letting them look at him, letting the Comforting Presence and Larger than Life do what they did, which was magic… Maybe, Clark wasn't sure.
The machete man was at the front- though now, he had a silver revolver aimed at him. He was looking at Clark with the eyes of a man who looked very similar for some reason, moving over the bruising, the destroyed pants, the bare feet, the blood that wasn't all his own that had dried on his forearms and hadn't been washed off.
"Tyreese said you helped him," the man said. His voice was careful and direct, the voice of someone who had decided that he would not make another risky decision ever again.
"He didn't need help," Clark said.
"And you helped us get out of the compound."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Clark looked at the group. He counted them properly now, taking his time about it. 13 total, including Tyreese and the baby. Some of them were in bad shape, the kind of bad shape that came from seeing something that had broken them, and the others were steadier.
He looked back at the machete man.
"Because you didn't belong there," Clark said. "And because Terminus was a threat to people I care about, and ending it forever required going there anyway."
"You killed their leader?" The machete man- he really needed to know their names- asked, and Clark nodded. "The rest, I made sure the dead filled their bellies," Clark told him.
The machete man looked at the woman beside him, who had a katana in her arms, and a brief exchange of a silent conversation passed between them, before he looked to the man to his right, the man with the crossbow, and then back at Clark.
"Rick Grimes," he said.
Clark nodded. "Clark Rogers."
"You said Terminus was a threat to people you care about," Rick said. "Where are they?"
Clark looked at them all, one by one, and made sure to listen to Half Light. And it did buzz and warn him. But Comforting Presence seemed to be a good job because there was no intention to harm him or his people in their posture, tone, or words. The buzz and alerts were only defensive on their part.
"Farm," Clark said. "About twenty minutes south of here. St. John's." He paused. "They were working with Terminus. The family that ran it is dead."
"How many?"
"I'm not going to tell you that." Clark's tone changed, the softness turning firm and hard. "I've already said enough and done enough for all of you." He began, putting down his hand. His eyes shot to the baby inside the shed and a younger boy, older than Duck but younger than him, who was trying to calm the crying of the baby girl while shushing.
He turned to leave- only for the cries of the baby to increase, stopping him. He pushed past it, another two steps, the cries digging into him and fundamentally disturbing something inside him. Meanwhile, the adults watched as the eighteen-year-old fought against himself-
"FUCK!" He cursed, turning to them violently, with Daryl almost letting go of the trigger. "Do you have a place?!" He waved at them all, making them look around at each other.
"What's it to you-?"
"Nothing!" Clark turned back to walk away, the baby's cries in the background punishing him, before he stopped again, which seemed to clue in some people as to why he offered an invitation.
"Can someone, one of you, please, go check on her?" Clark begged, not seeing the oldest woman, Carol, smile as he covered his ears, but not continuing his walk. Michone and Maggie from Rick's initial group got a nod from Rick as they went inside to calm the crying baby girl.
And after a few minutes, she finally calmed down.
For almost a minute, the group and Clark were in a stare match, and if Clark made any attempt to leave, the baby girl would cry. With a defeated sigh, Clark asked them again.
"Do you have a place to settle down?"
But he already knew the answer. They headed to Terminus and got caught in their trap and were almost turned into dinner for cannibals. Only the most desperate, stupid people would ever believe the boards that Gareth and his men had put up and fall into the trap.
Which they had. Which meant they had no place. With a baby.
"No, we don't." Rick Grimms told him, seeing the last strain of trust he would ever have in strangers in the form of the kid in front of him, and Clark sank into the forest floor.
"Fucking great."
Another silence.
Daryl shifted behind Rick's shoulder, lowering his crossbow just a little.
"Eugene has information," said a voice from the back of the group. A large man with a notable mustache that Clark had noted and quietly set aside in the compound was stepping forward now with the posture of someone who had rehearsed what they were about to say. "About the origin of the outbreak. About a potential cure. It's critical that he reaches Washington, D.C. as soon as possible."
"And that is?" Clark asked, raising an eyebrow.
"He knows a cure." The people amongst them didn't seem to react much but nod firmly, though Rick and Daryl weren't among them.
"And what's the cure?" Rick asked.
"It's classified." A man joined them from inside, with chubby cheeks, but tall. He looked, in every sense of the word, weak and a dead weight. Clark scowled, his previous mode gone.
"How is that important now?" He asked them, even though he himself had a cure in the form of Purification. But they didn't need to know that right now. Right now, he needed to listen to Half Light to clear up what the man, Eugene, seemed so nervous about.
When others turned towards him, "Why it being-" he quoted with his fingers, "'Classified' important right now? After everything that happened?"
"Leave him be." The ginger man, who didn't introduce himself, told him, and Clark looked at him, moving up one of the destroyed legs of his pants, showing bite scars on the side of his thigh and legs.
"I don't think so." The mood instantly shifted once more. "You're bit?" The Korean dude asked him, and Clark confirmed. "Two or three days ago. The days are getting blurry with each other. But no, I'd like to know what the cure is." Clark answered, hiding the fact that he's not turning to himself for now, seeing as the scientist was getting even more nervous and pale.
"That's not possible," Eugene said.
"And yet," Clark said.
"The infection doesn't-" Eugene stopped. Started again. "The progression doesn't arrest. Not naturally. Not without-" He stopped again, his eyes still on the scars, moving from one to the next. "How long ago did you say?"
"Two or three days. Maybe four." Clark looked down at his own leg with the detachment of someone examining someone else's damages, while Rick's group, the ones who had gone to CDC, watched the healing scars and the normal face of Clark.
The doctor had told him that those who were bitten would turn within hours, a day or two at best. But the person in front of him was alive, not even showing a sign of the symptoms that people show when bitten.
"And you haven't turned."
"Clearly."
"And you're not symptomatic."
"I feel fine."
Eugene's mouth had opened slightly. Not in the way of someone about to speak. In the way of someone whose brain had outpaced their face.
"Eugene." Rick's voice. A warning and a question at the same time.
"I need a minute," Eugene said. Not to Rick. To the general vicinity. His eyes hadn't left Clark's legs. "I need- give me a minute."
"No, Eugene, the scientist. I need you to explain to me why I am immune-" The crowd seemed to finally gulp as if it settled in. Half Life continued to give him all the tell of the man, that he was nothing but a liar. "He's going to tell you," Clark said, "that the cure isn't what he said it was- if he told you anything." He watched Eugene's face, which had gone paler. "Or he isn't going to tell you, and his face is going to do it for him."
The group had gone very still.
The ginger man and those who were closest to him grew very still, watching and staring at the man they were escorting to Washington, D.C., and coming to realize that they were being lied to.
Eugene's mouth closed.
Opened.
"I-" He stopped. His hands, Clark noticed, had gone to his sides and were very still, gripping his own clothes as cold sweat came down his forehead. "The situation is more complex than a single briefing could-"
"Hey."
The ginger man's call stilled him.
"I may have-" Another stop. His jaw set, and something moved through his expression that was, for just a moment, almost dignity. The dignity of a man deciding that the lie had run its course and the truth, ugly as it was, was all that was left. "I'm not a scientist."
The silence that followed was a different shape from all the silences before it. While Clark let out a sigh as Eugene went to explain his situation and why he did what he did, the sacrifice it took, and then finally, the ginger man snapped.
And while that was happening, Clark's attention was on the gold ticket, the D20 landing on 20-
[Adept Total Concentration Breathing]
|Elite Skill|
Demon Slayer - You are an adept in the way of the Total Concentration Breathing technique, a specialized breathing technique that allows you to increase the concentration of oxygen in your blood and activate your muscles better, giving you a superhuman physique as long as you maintain the breathing. As an adept, you can easily maintain the breathing technique during a fight without additional strain and even use it during daily life as long as you are not exhausted or excessively distracted. You can also use this technique to stop your own bleeding and increase your recovery speed.
Immediately, knowledge came to him, and Clark only grunted just a little; a new way to breathe came to him. He wanted to try it right away, but he was extremely exhausted from summoning four golems, purifying Larry, and then everything else that came after.
And it seemed that while he was contemplating that, the group in front of them seemed to finally settle down just a little.
"The invitation stands regardless," he said, as if he wasn't the cause of why the ginger man and some of the others want Eugene dead. "What you do with it is your decision." He looked at the shed again, briefly. "But make it soon. The horde won't stay distracted forever, and the farm is a better place to have that conversation than a porch in the dark." He looked to the sky. The days were getting shorter and shorter; already, it was almost evening.
Rick turned to the woman beside him, then the samurai woman, and then the crossbow man. He talked a little with the members who wanted to kill the liar before turning to him.
"Lead the way," he said.
Clark gave them five minutes to gather whatever they had, and then, they moved. Though Clark was surprised to get two new tickets. For supposedly destroying the plot of the show that Rick and the others were part of. And then he got another one for destroying the plot of the motel group.
Three tickets, but Clark was starting to get annoyed by his powers treating his loved ones, Clementine, Lee, and Carley, even Lilly and Larry, as… characters on a page or show or whatever it was. But for now, he ignored it and pushed it to the side.
The next issue was the Save-Lots bandits that they might encounter on their way back to the farm, which Clark told the group to follow after him. But then, Glenn surprised him by mentioning a group that had settled in a motel by the side of the road.
"Wait, you know Lee?!"
==========================
AN: Yo, a new chapter. enjoy it.
I kinda speed run this one and included a loooot of things instead of taking my time. The reason being, if I focused on each of them, this chapter alone has about 5-6 plot points that I could use in my usual chapters as centerpiece.
I'm still tired from last night's shenanigan. Only could sleep for 2-3 hours. Brain wasn't even working the whole day. This chapter was a strugle.
But anyway, Clark met Rick's group and Abraham's group. He destroyed 2 plot points at the same time.
I decided to give him tickets for that, same for destroying the plot of the game, kinda?
It's up to you guys to come to a rank for the ticket since I can't think much more than that.
I'm gnna go now sleep. Bye.