After the dust settled, Dawn Station looked like it had been chewed up and spat out by a hurricane. Half the sandbag wall was a heap of trash, the watchtower was leaning at a suicidal angle, and the ballista was hanging on by a couple of frantic wire wraps. Inside, the diner was a graveyard of scorched wood and broken glass. Charred whiskey bottles and snapped arrow shafts littered the floor, and the air held a nauseating cocktail of burnt plastic, copper, and ozone.
I sat on a pile of safety glass by the window, my back against the brick and the tire iron resting across my knees. My HP was crawling back toward the green, but the Internal Injury debuff was still clinging to me like a bad hangover—every movement felt like a dull blade scraping against bone.
[Battle After-Action Report]
Personal Contribution: Highest (+150% XP Bonus)
Territory Durability: 100% → 0% → 42% (Emergency Overload Recovery)
Soul Points: -0 (No Kills Confirmed)
Warning: Hostile Player Party 'Thorn' has marked you as Primary Target. +10% damage taken in future encounters.
Mia crouched next to me, using a clean rag from the kitchen to wrap a graze on my arm. Her fingers were ice-cold and trembling.
"Back there..." she whispered, her voice tight. "I thought we were done. For real."
I forced a dry grin. "Me too. I saw my life flash before my eyes, and honestly? It was mostly just JIRA tickets and cold coffee. Very disappointing."
She looked up, her eyes still rimmed with red. "Why did you jump down? You could have dodged that slash. You could have stayed on the tower."
I shrugged, then hissed as the movement pulled on my stitches. "If I dodged, the Core was gone. If the Core goes, the Territory goes. Then we're all just level-four snacks in the middle of a parking lot. If we lose our walls, we don't survive the next night watch. Simple math."
Mia was silent for a moment, tightening the bandage with a sharp tug. "Were you always like this? Back in the real world? The guy who has to carry the whole server on his back?"
I thought about it. Working until 3 a.m. while the PM shifted the blame, pulling solo shifts while everyone else 'dialed in' from the beach, fixing bugs at dawn until the coffee went cold for the third time.
"Force of habit," I sighed. "Programmer's curse. If the code breaks, it's my fault for not writing it better. If reality breaks... I guess I just try to patch it."
A few feet away, Marcus was propped up against the bar, his shoulder heavily bandaged. He used his axe handle to heave himself up and limped over to Tyler.
The kid was still on the floor. The vine marks on his leg looked like nasty chemical burns. His HP sat at a precarious 12 points, and even breathing seemed to hurt.
Marcus knelt down, his voice a gravelly rumble. "Kid. That bolt you landed saved every single one of us. Stay put. I'm gonna find you some calories."
Tyler managed a weak, shaky smile. "I've got the Bone Fracture debuff. -70% movement. System says it takes 24 hours to clear."
"Twenty-four hours?" Marcus swore. "How the hell are you supposed to guard the door tonight?"
Li Wei emerged from the kitchen carrying a mug of instant coffee he'd scavenged from a back cupboard. He handed it to Tyler. "Drink. The System says it has a minor recovery buff, but honestly, it's mostly for the morale."
Slowly, the group huddled together. Seven people. Six wounded, one barely standing. The Lvl 2 Territory buff was doubling our recovery speed, but the exhaustion was heavy enough to feel like physical weight.
I forced myself to stand. The room spun for a second, then stabilized.
"Listen up," I said. My voice wasn't loud, but everyone went quiet.
"We won, but we got lucky. Thorn's crew has levels, organization, and a healer. We won because of a whiskey bottle and a System exploit. If they come back with more people, or just sit back and snipe us from the dark, we're screwed."
Mia nodded. "They know our layout now. They know exactly where the Core is."
"Right. Which is why we stop playing defense." I pointed toward the resource node outside. "At Level 2, that node spits out ten units of materials an hour. We're going to spend every second of daylight turning this place into a fortress. We加固 the Core room and we build the walls higher."
"Do we have enough scrap?" Marcus asked.
"If we don't, we find it." I gestured toward the gas station ruins down the road. "But we don't go out all at once. Tyler's on the ballista since his leg is trashed. Mia and I go for resources. Marcus, you and Li Wei hold the fort. Build traps. Sharpen everything."
Tyler raised a shaky hand. "I... I can use the workbench. I saw a recipe for bolts. I'll keep us stocked."
"Good." I looked at each of them. "From here on out, we aren't a group of strangers. We're the residents of Dawn Station. If you want to leave, the door is open. If you stay, you fight."
Three seconds of silence. Nobody moved.
Li Wei was the first to speak. "I'm staying. Nothing left for me in the old world anyway."
The others nodded in agreement. I felt a knot of tension loosen in my chest.
"Alright. Let's get to work."
The next few hours were a blur of frantic activity. We reinforced the sandbag wall to six feet high using sheet metal stripped from SUVs, and dug a shallow trench in front of it filled with broken glass and jagged rebar. The System actually recognized it.
[Fortification Recognized: Spiked Trench]
Territory Durability: 42% → 68%
Added Effect: [Caltrop Slow] (-15% Movement and minor Bleed to intruders).
Inside, Mia and I turned the storage closet behind the bar into a reinforced 'bunker' for the Core, bolting iron cabinets to the walls. We left one small slit for a line of sight. The Core floated in the center, pulsing with a faint, fragile blue light. It looked like a beating heart.
As the sun began to dip, we finally hit a stopping point.
Durability was back to 79%. The 'Bunker' was sealed. We had forty units of food—mostly stale chips and bottled water from the nearby wrecks—enough for three days if we rationed.
We sat in a circle in the center of the diner, passing around lukewarm water.
"Will they come back tonight?" Marcus asked.
"Yes," I said firmly. "Thorn isn't the type to take an 'L' and walk away. Plus, we're #47 on the leaderboard now. Our reputation is high enough that other vultures might come circling."
"So what's the move?" Mia asked. "We just sit here and wait to die?"
"No," I said, looking at the watchtower. "We grind. We hit Level 3. Level 3 unlocks auto-turrets and production nodes. Once we have those, we stop being prey."
Tyler gave a weak laugh. "Sounds like you're building an empire, Alex."
"I'll settle for a place where I can sleep without one eye open."
Night fell. In the distance, at the far edge of the parking lot, I saw a brief flicker of light. A cigarette? A flashlight? It vanished instantly, but the air grew heavy with that familiar prickle of unease.
[Analyst's Eye] flickered. Detection: Long-range observation.
Thorn hadn't gone far. He was out there. Waiting for a patch. Waiting for a bug. Waiting for us to slip up.
I gripped my tire iron and turned to the group. "First watch: Me, Marcus, and Mia. Everyone else, get some rack time."
The night was long. The wind howled through the lot, whispering across the scrap metal. I leaned against the window frame, staring into the blackness. My mind kept replaying the fight: the blue light of Thorn's blade, the scream of the energy pulse.
We won. But we all walked away with scars. Next time, there wouldn't be an exploit big enough to save us if we weren't ready.
"Come and get it," I whispered to the dark. "Let's see who crashes first."
In the distance, a low, mechanical chuckle seemed to ripple through the air.
[To be continued...]
Should we move on to the next chapter? We can focus on the Level 3 grind or perhaps a nighttime raid. What's the move, Tech Support?