One Inch Tall, One Power a Day - Looting the Dead
They were blowflies, but at five centimeters tall, Wren saw them as iridescent, green-armored gunships with wings that beat the heavy morning air into a thrum. Two of them circled the clearing, drawn by the smell of Mark Gidley’s perforated skull, their hairy jointed legs dangling as they hovered three feet above the weeds.
Wren wiped the back of her glove across her mouth, dragging in a ragged breath that tasted of bile and battery acid. Her ribs ached from the violent retching, a deep muscular knot clenching right beneath the breastbone. The sourness dragged something up from the floor of her memory she hadn’t thought about in years—her daddy, face lit blue by the carbide lamp on his cap, slumped at the kitchen table after a double shift at the Number Nine drift, the same wet, coppery stink of sick riding off him then as now. She shoved it down. The suit couldn’t be peeled, and the smell wasn’t coming out before she found soap and a gallon of water, so she made herself stop smelling it.
A high, clean chime rang behind her ears, cutting through the droning insects.
Player-on-Player First Blood confirmed.
Combat Evaluation: Decisive lethal neutralization of a hostile survivor unit.
Regional Broadcast Option: Suppressed by default protocol.
Claim bounty rewards now?
“Claim it,” she rasped, her voice rough as gravel. “Hurry up before the smell brings every beetle in the county.” Somewhere in District 6699 a handle would go quiet tonight—Mark Gidley had bragged about running with a Cabell County crew before the Shrink. Whoever was still alive on that end would notice the silence eventually. Wren filed the thought under ‘problems for later’ and turned back to the crate.
A velvet-wrapped crate dropped onto the trampled clover beside her boots, unrolling to reveal three distinct items: a heavy Two-Star iron box stamped with twin polished bronze stars, a slender glass vial filled with emerald syrup, and a clear ampoule of colorless liquid.
Two-Star Supply Cache x1
Stature Expansion Elixir (+5.0 mm) x1
Random Attribute Elixir x1
Wren didn’t wait to inspect the crate. She uncorked the colorless ampoule with her teeth, spat the wax plug into the dirt, and tossed the liquid straight down her throat. It felt like swallowing cold well water mixed with crushed ice.
A subtle, electric twitch rippled through the tendons in her calves and forearms. She checked her status screen:
Endurance: 0.5 → 0.7 (+0.2 Gain). Rating: you can walk a full day now without wanting to sit down and die.
She downed the emerald syrup immediately after. That familiar, dull heat prickled along the long bones of her legs and down her spine, stretching muscle fibers with an ache that made her joints pop like dry twigs.
Current Stature: 70.0 mm (7.0 cm / +5.0 mm gain).
Seven centimeters. She was still a dwarf compared to a dandelion stalk, but the extra halfcentimeter gave her arms a fraction more leverage and pushed her eye level slightly higher over the clover canopy.
She set the Two-Star Cache flat on the loam, stepped back two paces, and wedged the tip of her five-inch carbon needle into the front latch.
Snap.
The lid flew open, and something green, wet, and heavy launched straight out of the dark interior directly at her visor.
Her newly boosted agility kicked in before her conscious brain could panic. Wren’s left foot planted, her hips twisted forty-five degrees, and the flying mass whistled past her left ear, close enough that a drop of cold, slimy mucus slapped against the side of her hood.
She pivoted on her heel, bringing the hand-crossbow up in a single fluid motion.
A green leopard frog, roughly three inches from snout to vent, hit the mud, turned its bulging golden eyes toward her, and coiled its thick hind legs to jump again.
Thwip.
The micro-bolt left the rail with a crisp pneumatic snap. At four feet, the guidance matrix took over, driving the steel-tipped shaft straight through the frog’s wide mouth and pinning its lower jaw into the damp soil. The amphibian kicked violently twice, its pale belly flashing in the sun, and then went limp.
Wren stepped over, pulled her cleaver, and chopped through the spine behind the skull just to be sure. She wiped the blade on a broad leaf, touched the dead frog, and sent the carcass straight into slot eight of her haversack. Meat was meat, and frog legs were clean protein if you skinned them right and salted the muscle.
She turned back to the open Two-Star box. Inside lay two crisp, wax-sealed parchment documents:
Shelter Structural Evolution Matrix (Tier-2 Expansion Card) x1
Schematic: Primary Multi-Function Workstation
Wren tapped the upgrade card first.
Item: Tier-2 Shelter Evolution Matrix. Usage: Apply to any fully enclosed Level-1 shelter once baseline material thresholds are satisfied. Increases internal square footage, reinforces wall integrity against kinetic ballistics, and unlocks secondary structural tiers.
She learned the workstation schematic on the spot:
Schematic: Primary Multi-Function Workstation. Requirements: Steel File x2, Utility Razor
Blades x4, Structural Iron Ingot x20, Polymer Rubber x5, Empty One-Star Cache x1. Function:
Deconstructs Tier-1 through Tier-3 cache containers into foundational building materials. Repairs low-grade metallic armaments and reshapes raw iron into wire brads, sheet plating, and fasteners.
“A scrapper,” Wren muttered, a cold wave of relief settling into her chest. “That’s how you get the nails.”
She packed the blueprints away and turned toward Gidley’s corpse. The flies were landing on his denim shirt now, crawling over the dark grease stains. Wren knelt beside the body, grabbed the nylon haul loop of his canvas pack, and dragged it free from his dead weight.
She unzipped the main compartment and dumped everything out onto a dry patch of moss:
Stamped Copper Currency x20
Foil Bag of Barbecue Potato Chips x1
Raw Mini Sweet Potatoes x3
Modular Camping Spice Kit (Salt, Pepper, Chili Powder) x1
Stainless Paring Knives x2
Cream Sandwich Cookies x3 Packs
Dog-Eared Comic Book Volume x1
Integrated Modular Ceramic Toilet Unit x1
Cotton Crewneck Sweatshirt x1
Plastic Washbasins x2
Moisturizing Baby Cream x2
Hotel-Sized Shampoo Bottles x1
Wren picked through the haul with methodical fingers.
The potato chips were crushed into thumbnail-sized crisps, but the foil bag was airtight, smelling of onion powder and fried fat. The raw sweet potatoes were tiny—stolen from some home garden before the shrinkage, each about the size of a pecan—but they were dense and wouldn’t rot for a week.
The prize, however, was the toilet unit and the gas-powered pruning saw.
She retrieved the mini-chainsaw from the tall weeds where she’d kicked it.
One-Star Gas-Powered Pruning Saw: Base Attack: +4.0. Fuel Type: Standard Gasoline/TwoStroke Oil Blend (Tank Capacity: 15ml). Condition: 88% (Chain teeth fouled with clay).
Four points of base attack. That was four times the kinetic output of her crude cleaver, enough to slice through a grasshopper’s thorax like warm butter.
She picked up Gidley’s boots, checked the treads, and threw them into a utility slot along with his spare sweatshirt. She wasn’t going to wear clothes stripped off a dead mugger, but someone on the regional radio would trade wood or iron for clean cotton before the night freeze hit.
She pulled out her micro-bolts, wiped the blood off the steel tips using Gidley’s pant leg, and slotted them back into her quiver.
She checked the upper corner of her vision: 9:30 AM. The twenty-four-hour cycle on her Auditory Oracle trait had just expired. The little metallic voice in her ear faded into silence. “Time to roll,” she hissed under her breath.She summoned the daily trait interface. The three mechanical tumblers dropped into view, spinning with a heavy rattle.
Click. Click. Click.
Three black artillery bomb icons locked into place.
Anomaly confirmed: [Double Impact]. Duration: 24 Hours.
Operational Parameter: All physical resource caches unboxed during this operational window will trigger a 100% duplicate yield. What the iron gives, reality doubles.
Wren froze. She looked down at the empty Two-Star box sitting open in the mud, then at the Two-Star blueprints already learned in her interface.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she groaned, burying her face in both hands. “Thirty minutes. I missed doubling the workstation blueprint and the shelter upgrade card by thirty goddamn minutes.”
She stood there in the humid heat, swearing softly under her breath for ten straight seconds.
Regret was a useless emotion in a coal mine, and it was twice as useless in a weed patch. She grabbed the kick-scooter by the crossbar, stood it upright, and strapped the gas chainsaw across the rear cargo footplate with a length of spider silk.
“Fine,” she said, kicking off into the clay path. “Then I’m opening every box between here and the creek.”
Without the Oracle’s voice guiding her turns, her progress slowed down. She had to rely on visual sweeps, cutting through dense thickets of wild mustard and tracking the faint rectangular silhouettes of iron caches half-buried in the humus.
By noon, the sun was a white hammer beating down on the crabgrass canopy.
Even with the hazard suit’s internal membrane, sweat ran down Wren’s ribs in continuous streams, pooling in the cuffs of her boots. Her satiety had plunged from six down to two; a dull lightheadedness made the edges of her vision swim whenever she leaned over the handlebars.
She dragged the scooter into the shade beneath a massive three-leaf clover, dropped onto her rear, and pulled out the three One-Star Caches she’d managed to find over the last two hours. She popped the latches one after another.
Cache One Opened: Wool Thermal Socks x1, Random Attribute Elixir x1, Powdered Whole Milk (100g) x1, Polymer Rubber Sheet x5.Double Impact Trait Triggered! All yields multiplied by two.
Cache Two Opened: Fresh Cavendish Bananas x5, Carbonated Cola (50ml) x2, Portable Quartz Electric Space Heater x1.Double Impact Trait Triggered! All yields multiplied by two.
Cache Three Opened: Compressed High-Density Iron Ingot x20, Box of Safety Matches x1.Double Impact Trait Triggered! All yields multiplied by two.
The ground around Wren’s knees vanished beneath an avalanche of supplies: Two pairs of thick gray wool socks. Two glass ampoules of attribute elixir. Two sealed silver tins of whole milk powder. Ten thick sheets of industrial rubber. Ten fresh bananas, perfectly yellow, each as large as a full-sized canoe relative to her body. Four miniature aluminum cans of cold cola. Two lowdraw electric space heaters with quartz heating elements. Forty iron ingots. Two red boxes of strike-anywhere matches.
Wren picked up the two attribute vials and popped the corks without hesitation.
Gulp. Gulp.
Endurance: +0.3 (Total: 1.0)
Defense: +0.3 (Total: 0.3)
A solid firmness settled into her core and the small of her back. The fatigue that had been turning her knees into jelly receded, replaced by physical stability.
She cracked a foil self-heating hotpot, poured in half a cup of water from her tap to activate the calcium lime heater, and watched steam billow from the vents.
While the beef and lotus root simmered, she used her paring knife to slice off a chunk of fresh banana. The fruit was sweet, dense, and tasted intensely of potassium and sugar. She popped the tab on a mini can of cola, listening to the sharp, carbonated pssshh , and took a long, stinging gulp.The cold bubbles burned her throat, washing away the lingering taste of vomit and copper.
“Not bad,” she whispered, leaning back against the clover stem with a paper bowl of spicy beef balanced on her lap. “Not bad at all.”
A hundred yards away, through the gaps in the ryegrass, she saw movement.
A column of massive black meat-ants, each nearly half an inch long with shiny segmented thoraxes and heavy mandibles, had found Mark Gidley’s body. They were working with mechanical efficiency, slicing through the denim fabric of his jeans, stripping the flesh from his limbs in neat rectangular ribbons, and marching back into their subterranean tunnels with the harvest.
Wren watched them for five minutes while she finished her noodles.
The sickness hadn’t come this time. In its place sat a quiet realization: out here, death wasn’t a tragedy; it was just a transfer of calories from one organism to another.
She finished the broth, packed her doubled supplies into her haversack, stepped onto the scooter, and kicked off toward the south.