The Subordinate’s Compass has no physical component at all. Instead, a large red arrow enters her own vision, bright enough to be disruptive and transparent enough that it can’t be blamed if she fails to see something because of it.
Right now what she’s seeing is that the apartment stairs are slippery as hell, which she already knew. This place wasn’t water proof even when the landlord still claimed he was maintaining it.
Also visible is a fun addition she didn’t realize would be a part of the compass. In addition to the arrow, there’s a health percentage of the target subordinate.
It’s barely below 70%. Wow, this person is probably going to survive til morning just fine on their own. She should go back to bed.
Glass crunches beneath her boots as she approaches the front door of the apartment. She hasn’t been down here in over a week; either the storm or something worse has shattered the small window set in the front door.
Zan Xinyi adds nailing some plywood to re-seal the window to her weekly chore list and follows the screams of strings out into the dark.
In her several years of living in this neighborhood, Zan Xinyi never spoke to her neighbors, never explored the streets around her home, and only occasionally ate out around the hospital her girlfriend worked at, which was a 40 minute drive away.
She walked from the apartment to her job, stopped at the convenience store, and then went back home, and she spent that commute on her phone.
So it’s not that her familiar neighborhood turned strange. It’s that she has no memories at all.
As far as she’s concerned, it could have looked this fucked up the whole time.
Tripping over a broken piece of the sidewalk where the root system has won against the cement, she narrowly catches herself before plunging into a giant puddle that has also won against the sidewalk.
In some ways, being in such low visibility is a blessing. The sporadic reports from the radio have conveyed that the Grey Rot’s victims really do rely on the eyes growing out of them to locate prey. Imagine if they had ears growing everywhere instead.
Though they do have at least two.
The music falters and fades before starting again.
The health percentage drops sharply to 50% and begins to blink.
Zan Xinyi hauls herself back up and grimly marches after the red arrow. It only takes a few blocks of crumbling infrastructure before she finally realizes where she’s headed. The ugliest, least desirable place that anyone would ever go to, especially on foot.
The freeway overpass.
The entire neighborhood is cut off from the rest of the city by the freeway on one side and a large river on the other, and has been that way for the past forty years. Inside the area, there’s no hospital, no ER, no fire station, and one grocery store.
Now, the overpass has collapsed into a far more literal wall of rubble.
Zan Xinyi stares up at what’s left of the suspended concrete. Layers and layers are collapsed on top of each other, making it almost impossible to climb in perfect conditions, let alone during a rainstorm at night.
Even the music, which had been easy enough to follow here even without the compass, now seems to bounce and echo from every crevice and corner. Even the rain is crying out in the same tone.
She ducks under the overturned side of a crashed truck, out of the rain, and tries to concentrate. If she had to guess where the sound is coming from, she’d say it’s coming from the rubble itself. A crack of lighting reveals a mound of corpses piled up around the concrete, all with their heads split open. All with marks of the evil eye.
The arrow is pointing towards them.
Zan Xinyi wedges her broom into the rubble and pulls herself up, scaling slippery rock and twisted metal until she hauls herself to the top and sees the final crashed truck, tilting down precariously over the other side of the new “wall”.
And as she can see down, other eyes can look up. So many of them.
So many eyes, but the only important eyes are on the skin of the three zombies who have actually managed to scale all the way up here, the terrain being too much of a barrier for any others drawn by the sounds.
Zan Xinyi curses, slipping and scrambling for better footing as the first zombie unhinges its jaw to reveal another eye on its too long tongue.
“Hey!” she says loudly. “I’ve come to rescue you, whoever you are! Help out a bit!” Though if they could do more than just loudly play the violin, presumably they would have done that already.
All around her, the music changes from violin to a blast of a trumpet, which does fuck all except make the zombies slightly confused.
Nevertheless, a second of hesitation is a second of hesitation.
Zan Xinyi kicks rubble down ahead of her, hearing it thud into the nearest zombie as her broom sweeps down in an arc and connects with a crunch.
The skull is hard and a bad idea to attack, but an open mouth is full of vulnerabilities. The zombie screams, eyes getting redder.
She follows through on her swing, spinning around towards the trumpet noise and running along the top of the wall of rubble towards some promising rusty spikes.
“Wait!” The yell still isn’t coming from anywhere in particular. “Wait, I’m trapped, don’t run past me, please--”
“Can you go back to the trumpets?” Zan Xinyi mutters.
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“They're right behind you!”
Close enough to feel the warmth of their breath against the back of her neck, Zan Xinyi darts to her left and swings at their knees, giving their forward leaning momentum the last push it needs for slick concrete to do the rest.
The hateful eyes on the back of their bodies remain locked on her even as they fall onto the spikes. She kicks and shoves them further and further with the broom until they can’t pull themselves back off, then goes looking for a large rock to throw on each of their heads.
Alright. Hard part’s over.
“Now, where are you?”
“I don’t know.”
Ah, that was her fault for experiencing a moment of hope.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You can see me.” Zan Xinyi turns around and begins following the arrow again.
“I can hear you. I can’t see you because I’m...trapped under the rubble.” Now that there aren't a lot of echoey effects everywhere, the voice sounds a lot like a young woman. “If you keep talking, then maybe... no. Just stay and talk to me out there. Something has started to hurt...pretty bad.”
The health percentage is now down to 40%.
Someone must have cursed Zan Xinyi at birth. That’s why, looking back on her whole life, she can’t even put this in her top five worst nights. If one of these military vehicles has a shovel, it won’t even make the top ten.
On the third camouflage painted vehicle she checks, she finds one with both a shovel and an axe. Wow, now tonight isn’t even in her top twenty.
“I’ll be able to find you,” Zan Xinyi says, leaving the axe for later.
Following the crimson arrow, she gets to work.
“Can you...tell me your name?”
That’s right. They need to start the job interview process.
“I’m Zan Xinyi,” she says, pausing as she hits a car door. What is that even doing here. “I’m developing a gacha game. What’s your name, and current occupation?”
“I’m Jiang Jin. But you can call me Jinjin!” Zan Xinyi is not calling her by a cutesy nickname. “I’m...I guess my current occupation is bait. I was...with a crew. Out collecting crystals, you know.”
“Crystals?” Zan Xinyi says blankly. “There aren’t any jewelry stores in the neighborhood."
When she’d been thinking of getting a ring--
Nevermind.
“There definitely aren’t any for miles,” she says shortly.
“No, like, monster crystals. The stuff that’s in their heads, the big rocks. The ones that increase your superpowers.”
What.
“You have superpowers?”
“Yeah! I can mimic sounds.”
“So you’d be good at music production.”
Ugh. Zan Xinyi had wanted a second coder. She could’ve just recorded the sound of rain on her phone and uploaded that as the backtrack. There’s no need for someone who’s solely good at making audio.
“Wow, how did you know? I used to be a music tutor before all this happened...though I guess I was lucky, being in my student’s big mansion when everything really fell apart. Otherwise...I live just one stop down the freeway from here. They’ve abandoned that place. The military, I mean. Not the various teams.”
The arrow is getting more and more crimson. Zan Xinyi can’t tell if it’s meant to symbolize closeness to the target or it’s meant to match with the target’s health declining.
“You mentioned you were on a team,” Zan Xinyi says, placing her foot on the shovel to try and get it even deeper. “But there’s no one here. Just a lot of zombie corpses with their heads split open.”
Presumably, they did that to get the crystals out. So they’d come here, taken them, and then left again. Without Jiang Jin.
“....Because I got buried.”
Obviously.
“They didn’t have anyone capable of getting me out. The leader can control wind, but it was raining so hard--”
“There was a shovel right here,” Zan Xinyi says. She swears as a piece of rusted metal she’d just dislodged falls on her foot.
There’s a long silence. The health ticks down to 30%.
“Did you know? I wanted to be a pop star when I was a kid. But this and that and a bunch of things happened, and then...I ended up living a very boring life. Until I began to grow feathers. Lyrebird feathers!”
“Liar bird feathers? Don’t mutations just act without caring about specific species?”
“No, they were definitely lyrebird feathers! Though it’s a bit sad, I really wanted peacock or parrot feathers. Something bright.”
“Only male peacocks have bright feathers.” Actually, this is probably also true of the other bird species Jiang Jin had talked about.
“I would’ve been okay turning into a male bird. If it was a peacock.”
“You have strange priorities.” She’s got to be close by now.
The laughter is layered in with piano.
“I have strange priorities...what about you, Zan Xinyi? You said you’re a game developer. Isn’t that a much stranger thing to define yourself as. You may have been one in the past, but now you’re someone who’s digging up a stranger’s grave.”
So dramatic. Jiang Jin’s not even close to dead yet.
“Not in the past, I’m developing the game currently. And after this, you’ll be working on it too. The game needs audio work, and if it ever runs out of audio work I’ll make you compose marketing jingles. You’ll never have a day off in your life after how hard I’ve had to work tonight.”
More laughter, but this time there’s absolutely no distortion. It’s real, and sounds painful.
In the dark, she’s found a hand, callused from years of playing instruments. A bright nail polish has almost completely chipped off. Rain begins to fall on it, loosening the caked blood and dust.
“Wow! Okay! If I live, I’ll help you make the best game that’s ever existed! We’ll become world famous, and I’ll compose a song purely in your honor!”
Zan Xinyi puts down the shovel and starts pulling the last bits off with her hand.
“You can’t back out now,” she says.
“I won’t.”
>Subtask completed. You gain: 3 spins.
The system starts the spins immediately, as if afraid she’ll do another sacrifice instead. Hey. Jiang Jin didn’t have such a specific request that needs a tag, did she? Would Zan Xinyi sacrifice a spin for no reason?
Jiang Jin coughs up dust as she blinks up at Zan Xinyi, mouth opening and closing. There’s feathers all over her neck and hair, matted and dirty.
Even with everything removed, Jiang Jin struggles to stand. One of her arms seems to be broken, and something has punctured through her side. The water soaking into the wound is probably going to worsen her mutation level, too.
“Wow, you’re so tall! Yiyi-- I can call you that, right, Yiyi. I’m really sorry-- even like this, I don’t think I can come with you.”
Zan Xinyi groans.
“Don’t call me that.”
““I’m-- I’m really sorry--”
The system is generating golden sparkles in front of her eyes. It didn’t do that last time.
“Do you think this is harder than making my stupid game?” Zan Xinyi snaps at her. “This is just a logistical issue, nothing major. Now hold still while I hotwire one of these cars. I haven’t driven anything since I crashed 4 years ago, but it’s probably just like riding a bicycle.”
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