Now We Have to Fight Zombies!?!

The contrast between the flourishing forest biome we started this trip on to Mothborida and The Bad Lands we were journeying through was night and day, almost literally. A seam in the world existed between the two locations along the edges and clearly divided both regions.

The Bad Lands was like a desert with a twilight sky, hot and uninhabitable for almost any form of natural life. Rocks hovered mid air and there were tons of clipping issues and Z-fighting of textures battling for dominance.

Because this region existed between day and night, monsters from both times of the day spawned and had an impossible time coexisting. The fighting between the nocturnal and the day dwelling creatures caused the already desolate looking land to look even more ravaged. The monsters of the night held the edge due to their strength, but those of the day were more plentiful and spawned faster.

We had to watch where we were going, because although the monsters were more distracted with their battles, we didn’t want to agro large amounts of them and turn that aggression our way.

Davy was a clever carriage driver and knew a path through here that was clear enough to vaguely consider ‘safe.’ It was more appropriate to say it was the path of least resistance, but even that wasn’t accurate. All the twists and turns, unnatural caves we had to sneak through, it added an extra few hours to what should have been a twenty minute journey.

Occasionally we had to fight a few monsters we couldn’t get around, and gained a generous amount of XP doing so, but that only added more time to our trip.

Thank goodness Ginger was on our side, because she really put her strength to work and took down monsters fairly easily. Like we made her, she was a great frontliner with good health and damage.

“Nothin’ stand in our way!” she shouted with a maniacal laugh. “I’ll kill all yee monsters with me bear hands!”

She swung her sword haphazardly but missed plenty of shots due to the floating-point precision error moving the hitbox around. Her frustration grew until she decided to throw her sword aside and tackled a werebear, proceeding to beat it with her fist and fake hooked hand.

“Yahaha!” she laughed, enjoying the kill like a psychopath. “Cant dodge this, can yee’?!”

I couldn’t believe it, but her violence triggered a fearful response from the monsters, and they all backed away from her.

“Don’t think yer’ free from me, ya’ wimpy dogs ain’t nothin’ till I turn yee to paste for me pigs!”

-NO MERCY! (ง ' ~ ')ง GET EM GIRL!-

Outside of the occasional brutality, there were a few quiet moments where we did some prep work.

Tensei and I tried to reverse engineer the code to spawn those tier one items. We discovered that to spawn any item in the game from her portable command prompt, we had to input the command ‘D/ Spawn_Item_Teir-?_????_(#)’

The first question mark was the tier of the item. So if we wanted a basic sword, we just needed to put in Teir-1. The better the item, the higher the tier it was in. The second set of question marks had to be replaced with the directory’s name for the item. And the pound sign, (Or hashtag, as the gen-z’s have renamed it) required the amount of that item we wanted to spawn in.

The problem with this command was that we didn’t know the internal name of each item or the tier it came from. I vaguely remembered that a sword in the directory was named Metal Stick, the spear was named Kabab Skewer, and the NPC gardening hoe was named Your Mom.

-LOL were you guys five years olds when you named those things in the files? XD -

“Rose, we all had to keep our spirits up somehow.”

Those weren’t even the worst of it. I was pretty sure we were going to have to rename some items due to them being kind of inappropriate. Believe it or not, the rating companies look through our files to make sure we didn’t have any hidden content that wasn't suitable for the age rating.

“Mr. Roberts, maybe next time you use an access point, we can get the names of each item.” Tensei suggested.

“Yeah, I think that’s what we’ll do,” I nodded. “Just don’t judge me for some of the dumb things the team came up with, alright?”

-I will look at the names very respectfully o_o -

She had a five year old sense of humor too, so I have a feeling that was a blatant lie. But if she wasn’t giggly at something silly like that, I would have asked who swaped bodies with her.

As we experimented with items and potential strategies in case of an emergency, we happened to ride up on a few scattered, aged homesteads that had fallen deep into disrepair and damage. Eyes peered out from the windows to gaze at us as our carriage scooted down the road between each untamed farm.

-It looks like a war came through here.-

“This is what happens to area’s where the corruption is very strong,” Tensei said. “The village here used to look just like any other in the game, but because The Virus got so bad, it all fell apart.”

“How long is it before everywhere ends up like this?” I asked.

“Depends on how fast we can get to them. Everything gets more terrible by the day, and the outer edges of the map are even worse than this.”

I could only imagine how hellish things got out there.

-Guy’s! Someone’s chasing us!-

Rose turned me around to look at a man sprinting out from one of the houses at full speed. His clothes were raggedy and tattered, his skin was full of welts and discoloration.

“Spare some food, strangers!” he shouted. “I’m getting hungry over here!”

That voiceline sounded uncharacteristic of a man booking it like a pro runner, especially one in such terrible condition as him.

“Yeep!” Tensei flew behind me and hid. “He’s one of the Glitched who wanted to eat me!”

So, what we were looking at was a bonafide zombie. His awful appearance sure fit the bill, but it really reminded me a lot of the ones in our undead survival game. They weren’t the slow and shuffling type of zombie either. They were fast paced and bolting like they had a purpose.

To make matters worse, dozens of other Glitched like him joined in on the marathon sprint.

“I’m hungry too!” another man shouted. “Bar maid! Another round of skewers for the boys!”

“Yeah!” all the Glitched villagers shouted together.

“I love food!”

They were really trying to pull whatever voice lines they could to make sense of the unnatural hunger they had.

“Davy! Do yee’ minds’  hoisten' the sails of this carriage?” Ginger asked.

“Any faster and wer’ gonna’ catch a lot of the monster's eyes,” Davy argued.

“I gave yee’ an order, now follow it!”

“Aye, Cap’n.”

He whipped the reigns and kicked up Ruth’s galloping speed. As expected, monsters grazing the lands caught wind of our motion and joined in on the horde. And because they were agroed on us, they weren’t going to be fighting the Glitched.

-Ray, why don’t we just use your new magic and take out some of them?-

“Well, we have to ask the question…” I took a deep breath. “Do we cook ‘em, or freeze ‘em?”

I had a fireball spell that could easily take out that crowd of glitched, especially since zombies were obviously weak to heat. But if I used a freeze spell, we could potentially save these glitched later.

-We have to get rid of them. What happens if someone else comes through here, or what if something goes wrong and they catch up? They’re too far gone to fix, but we can respawn them later-

“Matey, she’s got a point,” Ginger said. “I don’ have much an idea what yee’s spitten on abou’, but yee’s gotta’ think in the short run when fightin’ in a place like this.’ Do whatever it takes to keep yer’ family alive. And yee’s got’s a lil’ gal and lass to thinks’ about, aye?”

-What am I doing here, Ray? You make the call.-

I looked down to see Tensei was wrapped around my leg, fear flooded over her face as she gazed up at me with the eyes of someone who needed to be protected.

“Cook ‘em!” I shouted. “I can respawn them when this mess is over!”

-So a fireball? Got it!-

This would be the first time I ever used a proper spell, so I was in for an experience.

A tingle of energy gathered at my fingertips and slowly released outward in the form of an orb of churning fire. The sphere of flames pulsed once and increased in size. From there it continued to swell until it had taken a nice amount of my magic points for itself.

Rose took aim at the gathering of zombies chasing just behind. They’re speed had picked up enough that they were gaining ground on us. Ruth couldn’t go any faster or we’d risk hurting her HP, so it was now or never.

“Fire!”

Rose released the hotbar button and launched the ball of flame at the zombies.

*BOOM!*

Dozens of them went flying all over from the blast, like pins getting knocked over in a strike. The AOE damage really kicked in and took them out. Once I saw how individually weak they were, it was pretty easy to deal with the rest.

Those zombies weren’t the last we had to face, and the monsters here were still an issue. It was a busy time, but Rose, I and the rest managed to protect the carriage long enough to make it through The Bad Lands.