After the extreme reaction to the catatonic Skulker, I was a little hesitant to return to Racoon City. If anything would get the Withered to alter their actions, to go from the casual swipes the Hunters took at us to a concentrated and utterly overwhelming effort to exterminate us, it might be what I had done the previous night. Was it brave to head back into an area where the creatures might suddenly be much more motivated to murder you, or was it foolishness? I wasn’t quite sure on that front, nor was I certain whether the benefit of having a seemingly limitless supply of enemies outweighed the danger of getting murdered.

And yet, I was certain that the Withered were the only area that would provide a constant challenge to my group, at least in this area. There was no other game in town, as some would say, but was it worth playing with the risks involved?

Maybe the best play to make was to take a break, to stay away from the Withered for a night or three, get some extra rest, and maybe make up a few emergency tools that could get us out of trouble if we got caught. The flashbang Alex had used during the night was one such tool but there were many more that could be made. Maybe find some new cloth that I could embroider with Runes to make it somewhat magical or improve our equipment in some other way, there were numerous ways that could improve our chances of survival, if we only took the time to explore them.

And if the Withered didn’t continue to grow stronger at the rate they had, there had to be a limit to their growth, or at least I hoped there was. Otherwise, the entire world wasn’t safe from them. If we failed to contain their spread and their individual strength kept increasing at the same rate, alongside their seemingly unlimited number, I doubted anything could contain them. No, the best chance to contain this infection was to cut it off at the source, in the park I had noticed with my scrying.

Ultimately, I decided that rushing ahead would be foolish but waiting too long would be just as dangerous. Instead, we would wait for two days, use that time to collect some additional supplies, relax and maybe make some fun things to get us out of a bind.

The collection of supplies was our primary purpose. By now, almost two months since the change had happened and about a month since the dead had risen in the streets, finding stores that hadn’t been destroyed in some way was starting to get challenging. Our best bet was to find places that were out of the way or otherwise inaccessible, places like cellars beneath collapsed buildings that I could vaguely feel with my Earth Magic, or stores with high-end security measures like the tea store we had raided a while back. Those places were the only locations that hadn’t been picked clear and it was in one of those places we came across something truly fascinating.

Once upon a time, the store we had discovered, sheltered behind sturdy shutters and thick, locked doors, was a hunting goods store. Rifles, large pistols to defend against dangerous game, knives, bows and all such good stuff. Sadly, none of the goods were considered weapons by the system, they were just as useless as the Butterfly Blades I had taken from my own home, unable to adapt unless they were adapted in some way by a craftsperson. Which was something I should start trying out, now that I was able to perform some Crystal Magic, allowing me to manipulate metal in simple ways. If I was careful and kept my manipulations relatively simple and contained, I might be able to alter the weapons in a fundamental enough way to make the system consider them weapons and not junk.

If that was possible, I suddenly would have a vastly increased value to everyone we came across, as it would make me not only a teacher in an incredibly valuable subject, namely the fundamentals of magic, but it would also allow me to act as a craftsperson, creating suitable weapons for others to fight with.

But that was something to experiment with later, though I made sure to remind Lia to grab herself some suitable blades, just in case I could alter them. Sadly, the bows were predominately made from compound materials, meaning there was no way I would be able to alter them and the same went for the crossbows.

Though the alterations only mattered if the projectile and its impact were supposed to be the dangerous part. An explosion didn’t care how it was brought to its target, it just went boom. Alex must have realised that before me, for they were quickly looking through the various tools to deliver death at a distance, checking which of them could be used by a child, or a large racoon. To my endless amusement, the one they eventually settled on was, for some unknown reason, a decidedly eye-searing shade of hot pink. Whoever had the idea that a potentially deadly weapon had to be in that shade, they were either an utter genius or utterly insane, possibly both.

Judging by the low draw weight, the way it was designed around the lever cock and the general aesthetic, I was relatively certain it was supposed to be used by some young teenager with a princess obsession, though how such an obsession fit with deadly weaponry, I wasn’t quite sure. Whatever the case, the thing would easily be able to lob some of Alex’s simpler projectiles quite some distance and we might be able to modify it somewhat, so it could send them even further.

We definitely took a ton of supplies from the store so we could tinker with the crossbow, and maybe even make a few more weapons that could be used in some indirect fashion. If we managed to figure out the rules governing the way the system calculated damage, how that whole shebang with HP and wounds worked, we might be able to circumvent some of the disadvantages we had with the pre-change gear.

And it was a rather fascinating question. What constituted damage, according to the system? There were the obvious things, if you stabbed somebody in the heart, they died, unless they were of a species that had multiple hearts or lacked a circulatory system in the first place, but if you critically damaged a vital organ, no matter how you created that damage, they died. End of story.

But what about lesser wounds? Why was the cut of a pre-change knife less impactful than the cut of a Frozen Shuttle, if both cuts were the same size? Why were two cuts, both the same size and location, both made by the same Frozen Shuttle, different in their impact if the wielder of the Shuttle had a different Ice Magic skill for one of them?

It felt completely nonsensical but somehow, those were the rules we lived under, the rules the system imposed. For the big stuff, it didn’t matter.

But for the lesser wounds, it most certainly did.

Experimentation was needed, a whole lot of careful experimentation. Maybe we should consider catching some Withered Husks and get cutting, there had to be knowledge to be won that way. We just had to keep cutting, until we got to the heart of the matter.

Another thing we liberated from the store was gunpowder. Just holding the shells was a fascinating experience, I could feel the power contained within. The gunpowder had clearly been affected by the change and now, it was for Alex, Lia and me to figure out in what way and what could be done to avoid those regrettable scenarios Mrs Wu had described to us.

But if we managed to make it reliably go boom, we could be onto something, especially with the way the Withered had swarmed the Withered Skulker I had rendered catatonic.

Maybe, if I couldn’t create a big-enough ritual to scour the Withered off the face of Terra with magic, we would be able to craft some bombs that could thin their numbers. We didn’t have to be stronger than them, in that case, we just had to be smarter. And I was confident that we could be smarter than a bunch of fungus-infected giant cats and trash pandas.

Walking out of the hunting store, all of us weighed down with the collected loot we had found was curiously liberating. New weapons, new ideas, the combination had somehow lifted quite a few worries of my shoulders.

It was liberating enough that I even noticed the barred high-end jewellery store across the road, still completely shuttered and protected.

Who knew what fun stuff could be found there, how the various precious gems and metals had reacted to the change? I couldn’t wait to break in and find out.