Apocalypse: Fairy System, Macronomicon [ebook offline .TXT] 📗

a wreck. Parts of the mansion were burned out and still smoldering, and dead bodies littered the grounds. Some of them had tiny holes through the top of their heads, while others were simply cleaved into chunks.

None of them were children.

Mr. Sophistication must have been trying to ‘take care’ of the kids while he knew Jeb and Zlesk were away, but it had turned out very poorly for them. It wasn’t just old men and women guarding the mansion, after all.

“Good job, Buck, Legolas,” Jeb said, patting the powerful stag’s furry shoulder as he limped through the courtyard. The death-deer stamped a foot and snorted proudly above an annihilated corpse. Legolas the drone hovered silently above them, the Annihilation lens pointed toward the ground.

Jeb put his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Everybody who’s still alive, gather ‘round, I need to sign your slave release forms!”

Mr. and Mrs. Lang, as well as the Everetts, popped their heads above a windowsill, followed by several hundred children and Colt.

“Where the hell have you been, pops?” Colt shouted from behind a half-burned windowsill.

Is that a rhetorical question? Jeb thought, frowning. They must’ve seen him shake hands with the emperor with his dick hanging out.

“He was shaking hands with Big Bird with his dick hanging out, that’s where he was!”

“I think you go to jail for that!”

Colt high-fived a couple nearby boys of a similar age.

Jeb’s eyes narrowed as he wondered why he’d saved these brats in the first place.

He was contemplating infanticide when he felt someone tug the corner of his jacket. He glanced down and spotted Nancy. The dark-haired little girl had to crane her neck to look up at him, and she was holding a blood-soaked spear to her chest.

“Thanks for saving us,” she said, her head bobbing with childish sincerity.

***3 days later***

The bruises were starting to die down, and Jeb could drink without aggravating his split lip, so he figured it was the right time to catch up with Brett and Amanda over a beer.

Ron sat in the booth beside them, grateful to be able to drink alcohol by himself again since Amanda patched him up. The necromancer had been carried in on a walking undead bed, fully expecting to have one of his zombies feed him.

The conversation covered just about every subject, from what they’d been doing since the Tutorial ended, to money, the weather, real estate, the law, and how their lives were going.

Of course, the Courvars—sellouts that they were—were doing fine, having brokered a deal with the emperor. In all likelihood, they would be the first human king and queen of a new territory, and masters of T.V.

Jeb posed to them the question of whether television was viable in a society where everyone had to go out and physically work long shifts every day rather than a more modern approach with machinery and 8-hour shifts.

“They had radio in the forties,” Brett responded with a shrug.

“That’s true.”

“So Ron’s got a farm, you guys are going for royalty,” Jeb said, ticking off his fingers, “and Jess is a reaper-reaper,” Jeb said, making sure to flex his stiff finger as he did.

“Who am I missing? Casey, right? What happened to her?”

“Last I checked, she had, like a Denny’s or something. She brought the whole thing with her wherever she went,” Brett said.

“That’s what Ron told me,” Jeb said, nodding. “So you guys don’t know any more than that?”

“I think she didn’t want anything more than a manageable slice of property,” Amanda said. “A girl that age would probably be intimidated by much more than that. She didn’t strike me as a particularly aggressive type, either.”

Click.

Everyone at the table blinked as the magical empire-wide transmitter interrupted their conversation, making the surface of the table into a live feed.

There was a bit of fumbling with the camera and some soft cursing before the person stepped back and into focus. Jeb’s eyebrows rose as he recognized Casey’s slender figure.

“Greetings Citizens, this is Imperial Enforcer Casey Thompson, dispatched to the southern reaches of the empire upon reports of a reaper.”

She took a deep breath and continued. “Reaping is defined as the systematic murder of sapient individuals in order to gain levels at an accelerated pace. It is an intolerable cancer on our society, a direct violation of the Sacarus Accord, and the punishment is death.”

In front of Jeb’s eyes, steel puppets dragged a flailing man into frame and flayed him alive.

Casey’s complexion grew gradually more and more green, until the teen mom doubled over off-screen, retching violently.

The feed cut off a moment after that.

The members of Jeb’s team, every one of them older and wiser than Casey, sat and stared at the empty table, wondering how the hell that came about.

“There’s an explanation for that,” Jeb said, tapping at the table. “And I’m pretty sure it’s not a pleasant one.”

“If she’s working as an enforcer, there’s gotta be a reason,” Ron said, frowning.

“I’ll give you one guess as to what it is,” Jeb said, scowling. Moms in general have one unifying reason why they do insanely dangerous things they would rather not do: their babies.

“She wanted to travel?”

Brett reached over and smacked Ron in the back of the head.

Amanda took a deep breath and found the positive. “We know she’s alive, and if baby Casey weren’t alive, she wouldn’t be working as an enforcer. It’s good to know they’re both breathing, anyway.”

She took a deep swig of her drink and turned to Jeb, leaning over to glance at his prosthetic.

“I passed level fifty recently and my Class has an Ability that can boost my healing with the right preparation. I still feel like I owe you a foot. You wanna give it a shot?”

Jeb was stunned for a moment, his