We passed by a restaurant area that also had a killer view of the valley from the side windows. An empty buffet waited for food that would likely never arrive, and the bar was well stocked with full bottles of liquor. I quickly ducked in and did a little experiment. I disassembled a couple of the bottles of alcohol and received two reagents: alcohol and glass. Both reagents stacked in my inventory, so I broke down bottles of booze and slipped the component parts into my inventory until I hit the limit. Both reagents stacked to a maximum of 10.

“What are you doing?” Naginata asked.

“You know how you see people in movies sticking a sock into a bottle of whiskey to make a Molotov cocktail?” I asked.

Naginata nodded.

“Well that doesn’t really work all that well in real life. Real Molotov cocktails are made from gasoline or kerosene. Sometimes mixing it all in with motor oil will do the trick as well.”

The look Naginata gave me was sceptical. Like I was a home grown terrorist or something.

“It’s nothing like that. Although I’m sure I’m on a dozen government watch lists because of my search history. I write horror novels back in the real world, okay? Figuring out how to kill people in interesting ways is literally my job. Anyway, liquor usually either has too much water content for it to be effective, or if the alcohol content is too high, it burns too quickly without causing enough damage. So I’m breaking these down into alcohol and glass components, then reforming them back into something that I hope will be a little more effective.”

I combined the two reagents together again, which made a brand new item called Hatchet’s Moonshine.

The bottle appeared on my crafting bench in front of me in a clear glass bottle with a screw-on lid. Despite breaking down whiskeys and bourbons, the alcohol in the moonshine bottle was completely clear. If my guess was right…

I uncapped the bottle, took a swig, and screwed my face up at the immediate overpowering burning sensation. There was no taste, because pure alcohol has no taste, which confirmed my suspicions.

The EDGE Force augment had just converted a 40% alcohol bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey into a 100% alcohol moonshine.

I explained this all to Naginata and gave five of the completed bottles of moonshine to her, while keeping five for myself.

“Anything made of flesh burns,” I said. “It’s a natural instinct to stay away from things that are going to kill you. I just hope that enough of that base instinct is left in these infected for this moonshine to work. We might be able to scare them off, even control them with fire.”

“Just remember that this entire lodge is made of wood,” Naginata said. “We must be careful.”

“These are only for Hail Mary kinds of scenarios,” I said.

We headed back into the hallway and checked each of the rooms as we went. There was a tiny library next to the restaurant with a fire burning in the hearth. I managed to read some of the spines of the books in the shelves before moving on, and was comforted that a lot of the books there had English spines. Lots of folks would come here for holidays from all over the place, and it looked like English speakers made up a fair share of those.

As comforting as the library was, the rest of the floor was disturbing in equal measure. The rooms were empty, but clearly had people in them not long before we arrived. A small conference room had a projector faced at a whiteboard. The projector had no power, but some of the laptops and tablet computers that sat on the table were open and powered on, like they’d been abandoned.

Soon we came to the stairs that led down into the basement. Naginata led the way, while Kaiser and I followed. From the ground floor up the lodge was made of grand old hardwood, the basement was made of stone.

“If there are nemorti here, they can’t bury themselves in stone,” Naginata said.

“No, they’d have to go outside to sink into the earth,” I agreed.

We continued on with trepidation. The hallway down here followed the boundary wall of the lodge. If my bearings held true, the wall would be against slope that led down into the valley. The rooms off to our left would be the only place we might be surprised as we forged ahead. We flicked on our torches as we moved.

“Can you smell anything out of the ordinary?” I asked Kaiser.

Two barks. No.

He’d been good at sniffing out the infected back in the other village, but it seemed like this place might really be deserted. The first room contained an ancient looking boiler that sent hot water all through the lodge. The room also held janitorial and maintenance supplies. Nothing shined red in the darkness, and nothing darted out of the way of our torch beams as we surveyed the room.

The other rooms we passed also held no other threats. I was on edge, waiting for something to jump out of the darkness at me, but it never came. We found an old diesel generator in the very last room we came to. Our torch beams illuminated it from outside the door and we all rushed in.

That was a mistake.

The room looked clear, but the moment I passed through the door’s threshold something slammed into my back and drove me to the ground.

“Hatchet!” Naginata roared as Kaiser barked at whatever had me pinned.

White hot pain erupted in my shoulders as the thing drained my anima. I could feel it being sucked out of me like you can feel your strength draining as the cold saps your energy when you’ve been out in it for a while.

The thing shrieked in pain and surprise as it went rolling off me. Torch light bounced over the monster as it got back to its feet. Its arms were completely white, ending in claws made of bone. It had pulsating bulbous growths concentrated around the shoulders and neck. The red light on those growths glowed brighter as my anima travelled up its arms.

Is that what these things did? Used pure anima as a power source? Were those growths like camel humps, storing anima for later use?

There was a gash on the monster’s side, probably from where Naginata struck it. The injury healed over as I watched, like Wolverine or Deadpool’s healing factor from the X-Men movies.

“This boneclaw’s got accelerated healing or something,” I said. “Probably thanks to all the anima it just sucked out of me.”

Kaiser howled, granting both Naginata and myself a 5% damage boost for 10 seconds.

Naginata and I opened a can of whoop arse on this bastard. Gravedigger boomed, which drove the monster back. The holes that opened on its mottled white and pink skin closed again seconds later, leaving fading echoes of red anima.

I activated my class skill, which buffed Kaiser and sent him on the attack. Kaiser leapt at the boneclaw’s throat, but the growths protected it. Kaiser bit into one of these growths, then suddenly a massive explosion rocked the room around us.

Kaiser was thrown into the wall and slammed into it with a sickening crunch.

“No!” I called out. I wanted to rush over to Kaiser’s side, but that would leave Naginata to deal with this dangerous foe alone. Kaiser weakly tried to get back to his feet. He wasn’t dead, so we’d be able to heal him, but this boneclaw?

It was as good as dead.

One of the growths around its neck was deflated like a sad balloon left out overnight after a kid’s birthday party.

“That collar is explosive,” I said. “We need to find a way to disable this monster without setting any of the others off. If we blow that generator, it’s going to be a very long walk across the valley.”

Naginata nodded.

The boneclaw rushed at us, but Naginata deftly parried its incoming blows. She’d have five seconds of the parry buff from her class skill, so I had to make those seconds count. I slung Gravedigger, pulled out my tactical hatchet, then circled around the back of the boneclaw. The explosive collar was just as thick on the back as the front, so I wouldn’t be chopping off its head that way. But the knees and the elbows? They were vulnerable.

I hacked at the back of the boneclaw’s leg, which sent it down on one knee like it was going to propose to Naginata. She pulled one of her strikes up short, which would have collided with the collar if she let it connect. She flipped her weapon around, then struck the boneclaw in the chest, sending it flying backwards. I used the few seconds it took to flip itself over to hack through the thing’s knee.

It roared in frustration and agony. Stringy bits of red substance reached out from the stump to the disembodied lower leg, trying to reattach it. I couldn’t let that happen. I had one inventory slot free, so I tried to put the leg into my inventory.

To my surprise, the leg disappeared from my hands and into my inventory.

The boneclaw looked at me with confusion in its glowing eyes.

There was something different about this one. The nemorti and the prykolic hadn’t been able to think, to reason, but this one laid in wait for someone to come seeking the back-up generator. It had laid a trap. This one was smarter.

Despite the accelerated healing, the boneclaw couldn’t rebuilt a whole limb. The flesh just grew over the haggard wound, which stemmed the blood flowing out of the stump. It knew it couldn’t get close to Naginata, so it hoisted itself up on its remaining limbs like a spider and crawled at me.

“Ahhhh! What the fuck!” I said as I spun out of the way.

I was normally okay with spiders and snakes and all that kind of thing as long as they didn’t move fast, but the unnatural motion of this thing coming at me kicked my fight or flight reflex into overdrive.

As I turned back towards the boneclaw I grinned as I saw Kaiser back on his feet, stalking over at us.

Did Kaiser get some kind of health regeneration buff or something? Classes that had pets in first-person shooters and looter shooters often had mechanics where a pet might go down and recover over a period of time. Was this Wandering Scribe class like that? Did Kaiser’s health regen like my stamina had back on Mori Island? I’d need to ask Rho once we killed this thing.

“Are you okay buddy?” I called out to Kaiser.

One bark. Yes. Then he growled as he stalked forward toward the boneclaw.

“Okay, let’s finish this. But don’t bite the spicy pillows around his neck, okay? We don’t want to blow the generator.”

Two barks. No.

Man’s Best Friend was ready for use again, so I activated it. Kaiser’s attack and defence doubled as he leapt into battle. This time he chomped down on the boneclaw’s wrist and pulled the arm out from under it.

The boneclaw couldn’t keep its balance, so it went sprawling onto the ground. Naginata and I descended, trying to hack its other limbs off. I hacked at the arm that Kaiser had pinned, and Naginata chopped the other leg off. I threw the severed limb away and Naginata put the other leg into her inventory, just like I had.

The thing flopped around on the ground until it realised its goose was cooked. It sneered up at us as the explosive collar around its head started flashing. It started out dull, but soon grew brighter and brighter.

“It’s going to explode!” I said, realising how damn close it was to the generator.

Naginata must have come to the same conclusion. She wedged the staff-ended tip of her naginata under the flashing monster and flicked it as far away as she could. It slammed into the wall at the other end of the room and exploded with a shocking amount of force, driving all three of us to the ground.

The wall and the roof were obliterated, but the pile of rubble made a makeshift ramp that we could use to get back to the first floor.

We got some experience, which was nice, but even with my anima boost it was nowhere near the amount that the boneclaw had drained from me. I was still at the very beginning of Level 4.

“I’m Level 5 now!” Naginata said with a smile.

I was getting a 25% anima generation boost compared to everyone else on this mission, but I was still at Level 4? I needed to stop letting these monsters drain my experience away.

“Still Level 4 over here,” I said as I headed over to the generator.

I was lucky that this one had all the labels in both English and Romanian, and that the fuel gauge was full to the brim. The start position was clearly marked in my language, so I moved the main control level up to start, then pressed the big red Go button.

The generator roared to life as lights came back on all over the lodge. A quest update flashed up in my view.

Mission Completed: Power up

Objective completed: Power has been restored to the lodge and the cable car

Reward: 750 experience points and a supply drop

The experience reward plus the anima boost was enough to bump me up to Level 5 this time, which calmed my earlier frustration a little.

Xiphos’s voice crackled into my comms. “Well done Hatchet and Naginata. Lights are coming back on all across the lodge.”

“Yo, do you hear that?” Stiletto asked.

“We don’t hear anything over the rumble of the generator down here,” I said with a raised voice.

“We’ve got movement up here. We’re in the atrium right now,” Xiphos said. “Get up here pronto.”

I shot Naginata a worried look, then we headed up the rubble-covered ramp towards the ground floor. While we moved I sunk my next point into the Call Him Spike skill, which increased Kaiser’s armour by 5% and reflected 7% of incoming damage back at the attacker.

Watching him get smashed by the boneclaw was more than I could take.

“If you see any infected with bone-like claws and a fucked up cancer necklace, do not attack the growths. They explode!” I called out into my comms as the sound of gunfire reached us, followed immediately by a deafening explosion.