Ruthless: Path of Conquest

As Moishe walked around the park, speaking to the gathered people there, he realized that many of them were not from Cyrus’s Orientation.

It shouldn’t have surprised him; once he, Cyrus, and Christopher Smith had made their way through the buildings and gotten a better look at the crowd, Moishe could see there were hundreds of people milling about.

What united these people, instead of a shared Orientation experience, was the fact that they had all been in town for an international interfaith conference.

When the System had appeared, it had shocked these people to their core. Some of them were clergy, some theologians, some authors, and some self-taught scholars of religion like Cyrus.

They all took their religions seriously. And they had agreed, thanks to the guidance of the man running the meeting, Cardinal Milos, to meet back up in this place.

Aside from that, there was little that bound them together. Moishe found that, besides two dozen people who had been in Cyrus’s Orientation and were committed to following where he led, and another ten who were similarly committed to Christopher and had been in his Orientation, people did not seem to share a common vision on future plans.

A part of Moishe wanted to try and sway these people toward joining James’s camp, but the more sensible part of his brain—which remained aware that he was a relative outsider to this group, and that it would be a massive thing to suddenly drop hundreds of random people into James’s lap—prevailed.

Moishe stayed out of the way while people in their various groups decided which way they would go. Most of the people here knew each other, and none of them knew him, and Moishe kept moving, hovering around the periphery of different groups without inserting himself into them, all artfully done so that no one approached him.

The discussion probably only lasted twenty minutes or so, but it felt like forever, as the Assassin couldn’t help but keep looking back to the city and wondering when some disaster might befall the group. Monsters of all stripes could be seen in the distance, from giant lizards to cockroaches longer than seven feet. They were all claiming bits and pieces of the city, and they seemed to have arrived at the same time as the humans.

Fortunately, none of the creatures dared to approach the large group of humans that had taken over part of the park just yet.

But Moishe knew that this safety would be temporary.

He occasionally saw small groups of humans sneaking around the city, most of them fleeing the ruins, but some scavenging or looking for a place to hole up and hide. He considered trying to insert himself into one of those groups—he wasn’t particularly fond of the fact that Cyrus and Christopher’s group was all religious—but the fact that the other bunches of people were small and did not look especially strong was a major preventive factor.

Moishe had also observed that the people here were representations of many different religious denominations, which made his personal lack of strong religious convictions less uncomfortable.

Finally, Cyrus tapped him on the shoulder and told him that their group was ready to depart and would follow Moishe’s lead to the next destination.

In the end, Cyrus and Christopher had gathered a total of around eighty people who were willing to follow them, from both those they had gotten to know in their Orientations and those who were persuaded during the intense series of parallel discussions that Moishe had chosen not to participate in.

This is quite a lot of strength in numbers, Moishe thought. It was to the point that he wondered why they would bother following him. Yes, he could lead them to another group where they might be safer—and Moishe assumed that Cyrus had conveyed that opportunity.

But with this many people, they could probably take care of themselves. Right?

Moishe was distracted from this train of thought, as he saw that three other groups had formed and were moving off in their own directions.

I guess there was nothing to keep all these people together, but I wonder what these different groups are going to do…

He looked at Cyrus and thought about asking some of the questions on his mind, but Moishe quickly decided against it. He didn’t want to give the impression that he was unsure of his direction or thinking about shifting to follow one of the other groups.

Moishe already found it slightly strange that all these people he didn’t know had decided to follow him somewhere.

It made sense if they trusted Cyrus, but Moishe still didn’t know why Cyrus trusted him, when he clearly had the respect of all these other people. The whole arrangement felt like a Jenga tower that might collapse if he pulled out the wrong piece, leaving him to navigate the wilderness between Orlando and James’s location on his own.

It was also conceivable that Moishe had walked into some sort of a trap—that despite their apparent religious background, these people had unkind intentions toward him, or they were hoping that they could take control of the group he was leading them towards—but that felt like paranoia. They would have to have made such a plan before they even met Moishe, or they would have to have risked coordinating it within hearing distance of him.

He shook his head and tried to dismiss the strange, bad feeling he suddenly had.

If they had some bad intentions—or if the members of this group were trusting in Moishe, and by extension Cyrus, foolishly—then he was already screwed. There were more people here than he could fight or outrun, and it was too late for him to slip away unnoticed.

In any case, bringing up his bad feelings wasn’t going to help him.

Far better to remain silent.

“I’m ready,” Moishe said, giving Cyrus a nod.

Moishe took the lead with unfeigned confidence—he had his eyes on a creature that could lead him to where he wanted to go, after all—and began mentally preparing to explain to James exactly where these close to a hundred people had come from.

He followed the Skin Balloon’s lead, without telling anyone explicitly that was what he was doing, and it quickly led him out of the city.

He and the crowd that accompanied him managed to leave the ruined buildings in the background without incident.

They walked for a few hours in relative silence—there were some murmurs from those behind Moishe as the group talked amongst themselves, but since they were not talking to him, he ignored them—before Cyrus called a halt.

The group was in a rundown suburban area, near an old church that had somehow, miraculously, survived the cataclysm that had wrecked half of Orlando. Since they were far from the city, Moishe didn’t mind stopping. As he looked around behind him, he could see that some of the older people needed to catch their breath and have a drink or a snack. As for him, he could keep going all day and all night if necessary. Based on its performance so far, Moishe was fairly certain that his body would endure the trip well.

All the levels he had gained had changed him.

I wonder if there are some people who have experienced this transition as a purely good thing, Moishe thought. People who had nothing to lose or who didn’t lose anything. If Isabelle hadn’t died, how would I feel about this?

He was pulled out of his train of thought by Cyrus’s voice. The older man was leading the group in a vague, nondenominational prayer to God. Giving thanks that they had made it so far and asking for his favor as they continued their great journey forward.

Some people had put their hands together and bowed their heads, while the handful of Muslim members of the group were off to the side, praying in their own fashion.

Moishe thought it might make him stand out, to refrain from observing the same rituals as the members of the group. It was hard to make himself care, but then again, it was better not to be perceived as any more of an outsider than necessary.

He forced himself to bow his head and close his eyes along with the majority of the group. When they said “Amen,” he mouthed the word too.

Moishe opened his eyes after a moment, and then he almost jumped out of his skin at the sudden sensation of a hand gently grabbing his shoulder.

“Oh, sorry!” Cyrus’s voice sounded chagrined from Moishe’s side.

“It’s not a problem,” Moishe said. “Just that after all the monsters I saw crawling around the city, I’m still a bit jumpy.”

And I don’t really trust you, he added in his mind. Don’t take that too personally. I don’t trust anyone here. The person I trusted most in the world is dead…

“I thought I might get you to tell me a little about yourself, Moishe,” Cyrus said. “We’re all following you, and I realized as we were walking that I was kind of just going off my intuition about you. You could be an axe murderer or something, and I’m just standing here thinking, ‘Well, he seems trustworthy.’ You know?”

Moishe nodded. I hoped you wouldn’t bring it up, but I have had that general thought.

“I’m sure you can tell most of the group here are a bit religious,” Cyrus added. “I noticed you bowing your head, too. Are you a religious man?”

Moishe instantly felt that a crossroads in the relations between himself and Cyrus had arrived. Should I lie or tell the truth?

After a moment, he shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

Cyrus looked disappointed and tried unsuccessfully to hide it.

“I don’t suppose you’d be interested in exploring this old place with us, then, would you?” He gestured at the old church.

“Exploring?” Moishe raised an eyebrow.

I’m not a child. I don’t really explore anymore, unless it’s to gather information. Why would I give a damn about some old church?

“It’s a brave new world,” Cyrus said. “You never know where you might find something of value. Some extra food, a source of running water that hasn’t been destroyed. Anything we find could be valuable. Christopher and I got some rations back in Orlando, from that ruined building, and other members of the group did their own, um, liberating of unowned goods, but it won’t last forever.”

Moishe found himself nodding. That made sense.

“Who’s going with us?” he asked.

“The people I met in Orientation—we formed quite a close knit group—now that they have reunited with me, I trust them to have my back. That way, we can explore a bit more safely.”

Safety in numbers, I like it, Moishe thought.

“Okay, I’ll be ready when you are,” he said.

I guess he didn’t actually care about knowing anything about me except my religious affiliation. Maybe it’s better if I keep the amount we get to know each other to a minimum.

Cyrus took a minute walking around and explaining the situation to the others. Then two dozen people slowly gathered from where they were standing around or sitting in the grass or asphalt and walked over to where Moishe stood, in front of the church.

“Here goes nothing,” Cyrus said, grinning now.

Moishe had that sense of an intrepid leader again, and he thought again of James. He wondered how James and the Rodriguezes were doing.

Then Cyrus’s group packed themselves into a tight formation around Moishe and Cyrus, and Moishe just focused on keeping pace with them as they marched forward. One of the people in front, though Moishe would never afterward be able to identify who, opened the church double doors.

Moishe got a look between the profiles of those ahead of him in the formation, and he saw what looked like an ordinary church interior. Pews, a pulpit, a very large crucified Christ. It was all very typical.

The whole mass of people began moving across the threshold, and then—then something impossible happened.

The image before Moishe’s eyes flickered and changed. Instead of finding himself inside a plain old church, he and the other members of the formation stood in a valley. Their relative physical positions were also changed. Whatever had teleported them had also organized the group into a straight line.

Moishe ignored the audible gasps from a few around him and focused on scoping out the environment.

It reminded Moishe a bit of a smaller scale version of the Grand Canyon.

There were tall cliff faces on either side of him, he saw immediately.

The dry, sandy ground before him was marred with what appeared to be deep, round pits randomly crisscrossing the ground, leaving the safe part of the path before them narrow and difficult.

Now that he saw restricted the walkway was, the fact that the space had moved them into a straight line felt like a deliberate gesture, in recognition of the fact that they could not all fit if they were placed next to each other. Moishe was somewhere in the middle, as he could see the people in front of him from the formation, and he could feel there were people behind him, as the weight of multiple bodies pressed the nearest one uncomfortably close to Moishe’s back.

But his first concern was not the tight line of humans that he found himself in, nor even the narrow path they would presumably have to continue walking on.

It was the words that had appeared in front of him. A System alert.

[Dungeon entered! You have arrived in Dungeon: Valley of the Shadow of Death!]

[First humans of Earth-73 to enter Dungeon: Valley of the Shadow of Death!]

Moishe groaned quietly to himself.

A religious-themed Dungeon? Shit…