Adrien moved with a grim, hurried efficiency; the light from his pressure lamp cut through the dark, bouncing off the faces of the volunteers as they dragged bandit corpses into a heap.
"Check the bodies!" Adrien barked. "Anything for the healers, poultices, clean rags, strip it and get it to them. Now!"
He paused for a second, wiping sweat and grime from his forehead.
'Eighteen of them,' he thought, looking at the carnage, 'they did a number on us.'
"I found their horses, and they are loaded."
Adrien turned toward the source of the shout, but his main focus remained on someone else nearby.
"Grandpa Bojak, are you alright? Do you need any treatment?"
Bojak looked at Adrien with his eyes filled with sadness, as he spoke, "We lost seventeen of us, including Vladislav, and now we are trapped. If we try to walk to town through these woods, we won't make it."
Adrien's eyes widened in shock as he spoke, "Uncle Vladislav, when and how?"
"A trap," Bojak rasped. "They dropped a big tree in front of him, and Vladi was forced to break the crawler to avoid getting damaged, and he was shot during the fight."
"Without him, no one can drive this crawler. We're stranded."
Adrien leaned in. "Grandpa Bojak, Vladislav taught Vera and me the crawler."
Bojak was stunned before hope sprouted again in his heart."You are telling the truth, right? Not just trying to console this old man."
"I'm serious. We know the basics. It won't be a smooth ride, and we'll need someone to navigate, but we can move it."
"You're sure?" Bojak grabbed Adrien's arm, his grip surprisingly tight.
"Yes. But we'll need others to help with the heavy lifting."
"You'll have whatever you need," Bojak said, looking taller, as he looked toward the wounded, his voice heavy. "Just get us moving, or we die here."
Adrien nodded, but he winced inwardly as the number of survivors in his quest went down to a hundred and sixty-nine.
'One more passed away.'
"The body of the crawler needs to be fixed, and the tree needs to be removed."
"Don't worry, the tree will be removed, and as for the walls," Bojak said with an uneasy look, "We will see what we can do; these woods are dangerous, especially when so much blood has been spilt. We have to hurry."
"Adrien, you go and start preparing for the journey, and leave the rest to us. The faster we move, the better, as for the wall, the best we can do is patchwork, and we will do it on the way."
Adrien climbed on the land crawler as he made his way towards the engine. On his way towards the engine, he saw many instances of heartbreak, as some lay dead and some were on the verge of dying.
Adrien soon found Vera on her knees, pulling a bandage tight over a woman's thigh.
"What's the word?" she asked without looking up.
"Bad," Adrien whispered, leaning down close to her ear. "Vladislav didn't make it."
Vera's hands faltered for a fraction of a second; she didn't look up, but her jaw set tight. "Then we're stuck."
"No. We're driving."
Vera snapped her head around, her eyes wide and furious. "Are you insane? This isn't a cart, Adrien. It takes monstrous strength to operate."
"Do we have a choice? We've lost eighteen already. If we wait for morning, that number doubles."
"No."
"Eighteen, we have lost eighteen, and as time passes, we will lose even more."
Vera finished the knot on the bandage and stood up, wiping her blood-stained hands on her apron. "Fine. We wing it, or fail."
"Yes, also Vera, that rousing speech was fire."
Vera let out a sharp, dry snort, "Spend enough time around politicians, and you learn something. Go, get to the engine, while I'll finish up here."
"Well, I won't take much of your time. I will go and see what I can do."
Under Bojak's guidance, they had already finished piling up the bandit corpses, cut the large tree trunk and made the way clear for them to move.
Adrien took a deep breath as he ran a mental check on everything that Vladislav had taught him.
He reached for the brass communication tube. "Uncle Stanislav, are you ready?"
A long silence followed, then a voice cracked through the tube, hoarse, thick with a grief that sounded like grinding stones.
"...Ready."
Adrien dropped into the pilot's chair and felt a sharp jolt through his tailbone. The seat was a jagged piece of engineering that seemed designed to punish the spine.
'If I'm in this chair for a long time, my stat is going to take a permanent hit,' he thought, adjusting his grip on the cold iron controls.
He didn't have Vladislav over his shoulder this time, but the memory of the tutorial sequence flickered in his mind like a quest log. He ran a quick inventory of the dashboard. The needles on the pressure gauges were dancing near the red line, dangerously high, but enough to move.
He reached for the overhead cord and gave it three sharp tugs.
Toot.
TooooT...
Toot..
The whistle's scream cut through the forest, a signal to the survivors that the "escort" was officially back in motion.
He braced his boots against the floorboards and grabbed the primary brake lever. It felt like it had been welded shut. Adrien hauled back, his biceps tensing and his knuckles turning white as he fought the rusted mechanism. 'The maintenance on this thing is a joke,' he hissed, feeling the vibration of metal-on-metal grinding deep in his shoulders. 'No wonder the Strength requirement for this role is so high.'
With the brakes finally disengaged, he threw his weight into the directional wheel. It didn't spin; it resisted every inch of the way. He forced it into the reverse position and eased the throttle open just enough to feel the gears catch.
The crawler shuddered, a massive groan of stressed metal echoing from the hull as it lurched backwards. He felt the heavy impact of the wagons behind him; the physics engine didn't spare any detail on the momentum.
"Now for the real work," Adrien muttered.
He slammed the throttle shut, wrestled the wheel back to the forward position, and then threw the acceleration valve to the halfway point. The engine let out a guttural roar, venting a cloud of scorching steam that obscured the view for a second. Then, with a bone-shaking rumble, the treads bit into the soft earth.
The heavy machine began to crawl forward, leaving the blood-soaked clearing behind. Adrien kept his eyes glued to the path ahead, his hands shaking slightly from the effort of just holding the levers in place.
The external pressure lamps sliced through the pitch-black woods, giving Adrien just enough light to steer the massive machine. It was a punishing environment to pilot; while the biting night air whistled through the vents and froze his face, the massive boiler directly behind his back radiated a blistering, suffocating heat. He was pinned in a narrow gap between the freezing frontier night and a furnace hot enough to sear his skin.
"Excuse me, benefactor, old man Bojak sent me to guide you towards the Ashfall town."
Adrien looked at the rugged youth as he spoke, "I welcome your help, and may I know your name?"
As he spoke, Adrien winced as the crawler went over a bit of a rough patch on the ground.
"My name is Jovan," the person said while holding on to the wall for support.
"Nice to meet you, Jovan. Unfortunately, I do not have an extra seat for you."
"No problem, no problem." Jovan hurriedly spoke."Ah, can you see that silhouette of the large rock?"
Adrien narrowed his eyes as he spoke, "Yes, I can."
"We have to take a left from there, right one can work, but there is a shallow river, and the crawler might get stuck."
"Thanks, by the way, Jakov, have you ever been to Ashfall town?"
"Yes, in fact, I grew up there."
"Oh, really."
"Yes, but I thought if I answered Baroness's decree to join the frontier village, I could have a better future, but everything fell apart."
"I see."
As the mood plummeted, Adrien hastily changed the topic, "So, Jakov, what can you tell me about this town?"
A nostalgic smile broke out on Jakov's face as he began to regale with stories about the town where he was born.
Many hours later, with the sun hanging high in the sky, the battered steam crawler lumbered towards the main entrance of the Ashfall town.
Vera, who was manning the steering, looked exhausted, and so was Adrien, who looked as if he was about to topple over.
Their bodies ached, their hands screamed, but they finally made it to the town, and soon the dreadful quest would be over.
"Adrien, I am not taking any quest where I have to drive this thing."
"Me too, Vera, me too, and with all these shenanigans, I forgot to inform you about something."
"About what?"
"Others, unlike us, have spawned in or near a safe village."
Vera's head slowly turned toward Adrien as she spat out with an unholy flame burning in her eyes, "I am going to sue a certain company."
Adrien opened his stats page as he spoke with a sigh, "At least we got a skill out of it."
━━━━━━━━━━━〔 PLAYER STATUS 〕━━━━━━━━━━━
Name: Adrien
Level:06 (73%)
Race: Unknown
--
〔VITAL STATS〕
HP:175/175
MP:110/110
--
〔ATTRIBUTES 〕
Prowess:1
==> Blades[] Heavy Weapons[] Polearms[]
Precision:1
==> Marksmanship[] Ballistics[] Throwing[]
Endurance: 1
==> Athletics[] Riding[] Fortitude[]
Cunning:1
==> Reconnaissance[] Tactics[] Subterfuge[]
Authority:1
==> Charm[] Command[] Commerce[]
Cognition:1
==> Arcana[] Engineering[] Logistics[]
--
〔Unassigned Points〕
Attribute Points:5
Skill Points:2
--
〔Proficiences〕
1) Tactical Marksman
2) Heavy Vehicle Piloting
--
Adrien focused on his newly acquired skill, 'Heavy Vehicle Piloting', the very skill that both he and Vera had earned with great difficulty.
━━━━━━━━━━━ [ SKILLS ] ━━━━━━━━━━━
Name: Heavy Vehicle Piloting
Type: Technical / Manoeuvre Passive
Rarity: Uncommon
LVL:02/10
Effects:
* Reduces Physical Fatigue from steering heavy controls by 10%.
* Increases Boiler Stability by 6%(reduces [Overheat] build-up during Max Speed)
* Increases the safety threshold of the [Red Line] on pressure gauges by 5%(allowing for longer bursts of power)
* Shortens Braking Distance by 4% through better valve timing.
Note:
Needs to travel 100km to level up. (Current: 77.3km/100km)
'Well, it is going to be a long haul.'