Without Lucinda around I had no way to properly measure my own MP, the device she used was designed to low or no MP users. However, after being accepted for a mission I would be reviewed on the sight by a medical team. Today, before the day of the first assignment, I simply pulled out an old treadmill to jog three miles in the morning and in the afternoon.
With the evening and all night to heal, I felt like I had not done anything at all when I woke up and got suited up for the portal. In E grade, the contribution points for goblins went up to around twenty-five apiece because their bodies were usually stronger resources as well as their cores. Even though I got paid overtime for working in E, the contribution remained the same as the portal grade no matter where I was dumb enough to go.
Hoping to make up for the loss in materials by bringing home a piece of the troll from this dungeon, I broke off the other portions of my spider carapace and shoved the rest into a large pocket covering the inside of the back of my coat. Considering the sheer numbers of improperly armed enemies I would be facing, having a temporary armor plating watching my back could only benefit me. The remaining facial plate and head fragments could still be used for MP basking.
Suited up and armed with all of my equipment new and old alike, I simply sat out on the front patio wand waited for my ride to show up. This time, and next time, a large unmarked white van with Bureau plates on it was sent to discreetly pick me up and drop me off to and from home and portals. Next time, though, I would probably need to be picked up on the next street.
When I got dropped off at the portal location, a shopping plaza whose stores had all been shut down, I was quickly greeted by several doctor coated Bureau agents and the clean up crew who would be watching over the portal. After taking my coat off to be examined and measured, my MP rating was exactly fifty-seven. I could not help but smile.
Not only had my MP gone up several points from yesterday's meditations but a cute nurse was checking me out while I was being scanned.
Only moments later I was meeting my team for the first time. I was already vaguely familiar with the names of Jack and his crew of front liners but I was actually surprised both pleasantly and personally by the other members of the team.
One was an older but pretty black haired lady wearing a leather padded and strapped cloak of some quilted material over her proto-suits. She had fair skin despite being in her upper thirties and carried a familiar agate topped fire element wand alongside a basic set of standard issue saber and revolver. On the inside of one cloak flap, not unlike my own coat, were a few rows of several carefully contained glass vials and bottles.
The 'alchemy' goods available to someone like me were basically stun and smoke grenades in a vial for three hundred contribution points. From the amount and variations, I could see she had not only two of both cheap alchemy bombs but also several higher grade creations. She was probably a craftsman and made them herself.
The next figure was a younger girl around my age who used a large mechanical bow as her main weapon, which I could only assume was her main weapon from the large quiver of around thirty arrows she wore on her back. Unlike the mage and myself, she wore an upscale 'combat suit' version of the proto-suit as her main equipment. Unlike our impact absorbent suits, hers came with the additions of body conformity and extra rubber padding faced with half-inch thick MP plates.
Polymer armor plating synthesized from portal resources. The half-inch thick plates topping each of the pectoral, abdominal, oblique, back, upper arm, and upper leg padding on her suit could each stop one or two of my .300 rifle rounds. The rubber of the suit itself was also more expensively designed in both combs and material.
Despite the face that this one-thousand-point combat suit came with a concussion grenade PROOF helmet that could also deflect small arms fire, this young lady was proudly carrying it on the back of her quiver while her dark reddish auburn hair was divided into twin tails around the sides of her quiver. Like the mage, though, this archer who was at least as young as I was- to be in the field- carried the standard issue single revolver and saber set.
Unlike both of these nice ladies, the last member of the team was an aloof looking Emilia off to the side.
When I was done being introduced to the others and everyone was called to do an equipment check, I took the opportunity to be near Emilia and ask, "Where are your other swords? I did not expect to see you somewhere without them."
"They've been taking time off this month to 'take care of themselves'," she replies with a shrug. "You'll see them again at the end of the week, though, when we do another one of these portals. I did not expect to see someone your age so frequently, though," she adds with a slight smirk on one side. Then, to change the subject, "I see you're suddenly copying me, now?"
"Only in the dual sidearms," I reply with proud honesty. "I originally intended to get one of these rifles, you just helped me to decide on the lighter model because of the rest of my carrying load. However, the rest of my load was decided by watching how much prettier two sets of barrels were when shattering layers of carapace. I'm still working on matching your grade of ammo, though. Another month or so of sneaking side jobs like this one, though, and that won't be a problem."
If I spent all but a couple thousand dollars from this job alone, as if to make the job disappear like the money itself, I could supply several trigger happy missions.
"I bet you're saving up to get a battle suit so you match your other new future ex wife," Emilia retorts with a full smirk this time, nodding her chin up in the direction of the now helmeted archer ready in front of the seven-foot tall white portal. "She's cute, the suit has all the right sizes, and best of all… she's still seventeen for another couple of months. Do both of you a favor and settle her down before she starts acting a fool."
You just introduced this girl as somebody who was only questionably my type, my type at all just because she was cute, and then tell me to date them for the reason they are questionable? You have to try a lot harder if you want to distract me. THAT is only even considering IF I am actually interested in you at all!
I was actually a little upset just about the fact that one girl told me to date another as we all finally gathered to enter formation. I had walked up to talk to her because she was a familiar face, there was no reason for her to try crushing a crush on me. However, when I walked through the portal, I quickly forgot all about those things.
Inside the portal the time went from bright and sunny late morning to darkening early evening. The sky was thinly veiled in clouds without rain, making the world even darker than it normally would be. The air, though, was crisp and satisfying despite only a slight change in temperature difference.
The air was simply cleaner here than in the city and the immediate change from one atmosphere to another showed it.
The ground all around was a shallow decline of hillside along a few short miles of mountainous ridge. We were already nearly the bottom foothills where greenery began growing outside of the broken rocky hillside. The greenery, though, was only a few sparse trees and a thin carpet of waist high shrubbery.
Most of which was a black barked and leafless version of mesquite, baring long and narrow needles.
The ground itself was a white brown and orange combination of slate, lime, and clay in both rocks and soil. It was not unlike what one would see in much of a state like Arizona. If not for the air itself and some of the coloring on the plant life, I would have believed if someone told me this was a place on Earth.
After a minute or two of everybody getting their bearings, an aerial view map of the surrounding region from our position was brought out. These were taken from almost exactly a mile overhead using a low-tech drone and panoramic camera. Back on our side, a few programs rendered an almost perfect scale map.
The only thing worth noting during the initial review and scouting was a settlement four miles south and down the mountainside from our location. The settlement came with its own map, since it showed up as a small cluster on the main map. On the village map, the village looked like an antiquated European or even some old fashioned western settlements.
There were a few large communal type buildings scattered around the outer middle of the circular village. Within the middle of the village were about a dozen orderly homes around a large fountain well and a couple dozen others more disorderly spread out through the surrounding margins. The village was borders with two ten-foot curving stone walls that were left open at the north and south for transport and travel.
From the surrounding terrain and presence of a broad highway, this village obviously was not new. From the lack of gates and proper defenses, they were probably peaceful and a common travel point for trade. In a place where money and goods once passed through like migrating birds in the sky were now an image of goblins camping in the inner homes surrounded by outer ruins.
The lack of damage to the walls told us that the original goblin hoard had walked right on in. a large charred area off to one side of the village was probably where they took care of their own dead and any excess not used as food. The grounds no longer looked disturbed except for some dark discoloration in the pack clay of the well area. Whoever lived here before the goblins probably did not even last as long as the goblins who died.
Now, though, this giant raiding part of troll-positive goblins was living just a hunting trip away from Earth's front door. The goal here was to raid the raided settlement and hope the portal closed. If it did not close, the surrounding metropolitan area would need to be temporarily relocated. Temporary was in the best case scenario.
We could already see about a dozen plumes of smoke rising high into the air from where we were, giving us the proper direction of our goal. Even though the destination was about four miles away, even in full gear I could walk a casual mile in around ten minutes.
Less than an hour after setting off, we found ourselves on a hillside outcropping of boulders half a mile away from the village. The sun was sinking and the thin veil of clouds already filtered at least thirty percent on the remaining sunlight. Even if there was enough special ops gear for everyone, it was best to catch a larger number of enemies unaware and unprepared by waking them up ourselves.
From what we had watched so far, the settlement had two dozen or so goblins manning the walls, another dozen on the roads, and the rest were busy in the settlement working the village's resources. One group of goblins had even been confirmed making spears from metal tableware. It might seem absurd at first, but our side desired that same metal tableware to make weapons out of.
One pound of naturally rich MP alloy material of at least one hundred MP mixed with four pounds of scrap steel made five pounds of twenty-MP steel. That was the same quality of my sabers if not the same alloy materials. Contribution points for this mission will include the amount of otherworldly commodities we can claim.
Aside from these forms of loot came textiles and the like which had survived the goblins which naturally had F and even E level MP ratings this would all be reworked into F grade textiles for military and some commercial purposes. In environments that promoted more trees closer to the portal, logging even took place within the surrounding mile.
Wood of any kind was as desirable as the bodies of what we killed. Not only because wood commonly started at E and D grades which helped for making weapons and equipment but also because even its saw dust was made use of. The biomass from otherworldly logging and even the friggin' lawn trimmings of the area surrounding portals was put to use in manufacturing E and higher grade steels.
Creatures like goblins were had absurdly high levels of certain metal content in their bodies. Iron, aluminum, and lead were present in their bodies at levels multiple times higher than the lethal limits for people. Where it would take dozens human bodies to essentially synthesize a pound of iron, a dozen goblin bodies not only contained half a pound of iron but also an ounce of lead per body and enough aluminum overall to make a soda can.
In territories where goblin gates fully opened or other gates opened on top of them, large areas of land were dead and barren from the spilling of goblin blood in large numbers. They were a literal plague on any world. How they lived with organ systems not unlike our own was beyond the explanation capacity of modern science.
From my position at the back of the outcropping manning a small gas grill and cooking food provided by the team, I could not really even see most of the settlement but I was not too worried. Early as hell in the morning, I and the 'ground team' of Jack and his front line crew would sneak up to the village and wait for the guards to change shifts. At that time, whether we could make it to the wall or not was all that mattered.
Right now, what mattered was making sure I did a good job cooking because I had rushed my entire life and forgot to bring any of my own food.
The beef sausages and patties currently lightly but steadily sizzling on the grill in front of me had no seasonings but some salt the leader brought but their natural smells of burning beef fats were making more than just my mouth water. If I was brave enough I would have tried to claim a sausage by forking the end of one off. However, all eyes were on both the food and the cook.
I had no choice but to watch the food cook and flip as little as possible while turning in microscopic proportions every twenty seconds from start to finish. By the time the patties were done, they had deep but only light charred impressions from the hot bars of the grill with a nicely browned but still soft surface. The patties were minced and string-cut beef rump that had been cut and tossed into careful patties.
The sausages, however, had broken spirals of naked impressions from the skin that had tightened around both the bars and the meat again and again and again as it was dried out from the heat. Only in a few lines in different areas did I allow the sausages to rest in different spots and developed charring. This charring, though, was more from rendering fat trapped between the skin of the sausage and the bars of the grill more than from the darkening of the reddened sausage skin itself.
My sausages took about ten minutes longer than the fifteen-minute patties but the wait and effort was worth it. For everybody else. All that was left was enough meat scraps left to roll up a meatball and one sausage. The only thing to drink anybody had, though, was the water we brought with us so at least we were all equal in that regard.
I, like a smart person, made a disproportionate meatball and started carefully rolling it around.
To ensure the quality of my meatball, I started rolling it around in the area the previous beef sausages Emilia provided were cooked. Then, I gradually began following my own sausage with the meatball to soak up and cook in all the sausage's spices and seasoning. Even if it was not infamous pork fat, the juices and remains of the sausages were still good.
'Dressing and curing' my meatball ended when the sausage was finished cooking, leading me to turn off the grill and use the solid metal spatula I was given as a plate for my sausage and meatball. Once the meatball was cooled enough, I took a bite and enjoyed the extra salted flavor of the sausage. After my second bite, though, I quickly realized I did not have enough sausage juices to work with and the flavor was only there superficially.
The vague spice and flavor besides salt that I was seeking only made it skin deep on the meatball. Even though the inside was thoroughly cooked, the very middle that remained at the end was almost dry and tasteless in my mouth. The sausage itself, though, was saved for last and I slowly enjoyed the rest of my meat-only dinner in the field.
*