Chapter 83 Big Loots

Chapter 83 Big Loots
The next ten days were the slowest I had moved since the Veilfall. Not by choice. The ribs made everything that involved torso rotation a negotiation. The hand was worse — even with Jade's ability cycling every few hours and the Vitality allocation doing its quiet work, bone was bone, and bone took time. I lay in the side room and I slept and I ate what people brought me and I ran the next phase of planning in my head because that was the one thing I could do without moving. Kira recovered faster than I did. That wasn't surprising. She had been building her biokinesis through the Spirit allocation and whatever the Gene-Seed was doing at her level — the system was amplifying her body's repair processes the same way it amplified everything else. By day three she was sitting up and running her own assessments on the others. By day five she was moving around the base with her arm in a sling and a look on her face that dared anyone to comment on it. Ryan was slower. The ribs on his left side had been worse than they looked initially — Elena had confirmed two full fractures on day two — and he wasn't the type to push through damage on pride. He rested because he understood rest was a tactical decision, and he came back from it properly. Nathan was fine. He had come through the Hunter fight without serious injury, which I suspected had more to do with instinct than luck. He had made good choices under pressure. That was worth remembering. --- Jade kept coming. Every cycle of the healing ability, every time it reset, she was back. She didn't make it a production. She just sat beside me and worked and left when it was done. By the third day my hand had gone from completely wrong to merely very wrong. By the sixth day I could close the fingers, slowly, enough to grip something light. On the eighth day I could hold a pistol. I tested it in the small room while everyone else was doing the morning leveling run on the cleared block two streets over. Light grip, no sustained pressure, but functional. I set it down carefully and lay back. Progress. --- On the second day of the recovery, I pulled the pack to me. Kira had kept it. When the trucks came back and the chaos of getting the injured settled and Elena was moving between people with her kit, Kira had quietly taken my pack from the truck and put it beside me in the side room. She hadn't said anything about it. That was Kira. She tracked the things that mattered without being asked to. I opened it with my left hand and went through what we had taken from the Hunter bodies. Two skill books. Two Orbs — one Yellow, one Orange. The System Coins I had already counted. I laid the skill books flat on the sleeping bag and read them. The first: Weapon Enhancement — Level 3. Active skill. Consumed MP and Stamina to sharpen a blade, increase its penetration. The upper ceiling on it was significant — at high enough physical fitness, according to the description, the skill could make almost any object a functional weapon. That was a long-term asset. Worth keeping for someone who committed to close-quarters combat. The second: Body Enhancement — Level 3. Passive. Permanent Strength and Vitality increase on acquisition, with additional gains on job class transfer. Straightforward. Strong. The kind of skill that was unremarkable in description and significant in practice. I set both aside and looked at the Orbs. The Yellow one first — standard protocol, lower grade before higher. I cracked it and the light resolved into two spare submachine gun magazines, sealed, full. Useful but not spectacular. The Orange Orb. I held it for a moment. Orange Orbs had appeared in my previous timelines at six weeks minimum. We were at eleven days. What came out of an Orange Orb at the current stage of world development was going to be calibrated to that acceleration. I opened it. The light was brighter than the Yellow's. It took longer to resolve — two, three seconds — and what condensed from it was a pistol. Not a standard issue police pistol. Not the submachine guns from the armory. A revolver, thick-barreled, heavy, with a caliber that was visibly wrong for anything I had held before. The grip was ergonomic, the finish was something between metal and ceramic, and the barrel had a slight bioluminescent pulse to it that said the system had influenced the manufacturing in ways that current Earth technology hadn't reached yet. I turned it over. The system's description appeared at the edge of my awareness — not text, exactly, more like knowledge that arrived without the reading: Third-degree item. 17.5mm caliber. Self-generates ammunition daily. Penetration rated for Tier 2 organisms. Recoil significant. I looked at it for a long time. A weapon that could penetrate Hunter-class biology. That could auto-generate its own ammunition on a daily cycle. That was currently the most powerful single firearm in the possession of anyone in our group. I set it down carefully and opened the second Orb — the other Orange, from the second Hunter. A ring. Blue metal, or something that looked like metal, engraved with geometric patterns that the system had built rather than human hands. The description arrived the same way: Third-degree item. Equip for +6 Spirit. Supplementary Skill: Thorn. Raise a spike from any ground surface, up to three meters. Range fifty meters. Twenty-four hour cooldown. +6 Spirit. I looked at that for a moment. Jade was at Spirit 14. Kira was at Spirit 11. Sophie was lower but climbing. The ring on any of them would push their healing and support output significantly. But the Thorn skill was offensive. Useful in the kind of fight we had just been in — where close range combat was too dangerous but the target needed something other than bullets. I put both items aside.