Page 147 of Code Bound
Immune to cold damage for another 2 hours and 13 minutes
+2 to strength while holding the Arctic Smite
Adrenaline rushes through my body as the new stats settle into place. My shirt tightens around my shoulders, as if the muscle there grows with the increased strength. I roll my shoulders, settling into the feeling coursing through them. Yeah. This is fucking good. My body hums with power, strong and sure. And then beneath that, there’s something else. Something . . . hungry. Something I don’t want to look at too closely yet.
I roll my shoulders again and tuck away the Arctic Smite now that the fight is over. My strength falls back to fifteen. I’ll be the protector. I can now. Grinning, I reach over and grab Vesper, lifting her onto my shoulders before she can say anything. It’s as easy as lifting a feather now that my strength is so high.
“Locke! What the hell? I can fucking walk!” she growls, but her fingers dig into my coat, holding on tightly, so she doesn’t fall.
“Let him,” Svetlana declares. “The faster we get out of this frigid hell, the better.”
“I knew those arms were so strong,” Steve coos. “Lockey Poo is such a romantic. Ugh! Look at him! With these big, strong, bulging muscles. Like, pick me up next, Bone Daddy!”
With Vesper settled on my shoulder, and despite her protests, I start to run through the knee-high snow.
It’s easier with every step.
CHAPTER40
VESPER
I’m still firmly a Tier One, with my XP at only five hundred and sixty-two. I have no idea how Locke gained so much XP all at once, but I can only assume that the fight with the abominable yeti gave him so much because of how much more he fought and how many hits he took. There’s no way I could have won that battle, and even with Stevie’s buff we didn’t even know about, it was hard. We won only because Locke had received that loot crate. A loot crate that Cipher had arranged. Cipher has a penchant for not giving Locke much of anything beneficial and now here he is, already a Tier Two.
I’m not jealous.
Okay. Maybe I am.
Of course, Locke didn’t read anything about what being a Tier Two Bone Breaker means. That worries me. I can’t see anything about the next Tier of my class until I have enough XP to fulfill it, which means all I know is how much it costs to level up. I don’t know what the Second Tier is called. I don’t know what new abilities or limitations I might have. All I know is that for me, it will cost one thousand XP, five shards, fifty Harrow Coins, and five animal byproducts. I’m one short on the shards and I only have the macaw feathers and the beetle chiton currently for the animal byproduct. I’ll need to work on that, but first, I need my XP to move or else I’ll be stuck as a Tier One forever.
For the first hour of Locke running, he carries me as if I weigh nothing. On the second hour, he finally starts to slow and I convince him to put me down and let me walk. His strength has clearly increased, along with maybe his vitality. I can’t see his stats and I don’t want to particularly ask right now. Not when we’re still stuck in this frozen wasteland. There’s literally nothing here. No buildings. No animals. No people.
But after another few minutes of walking, we start to see something on the horizon.
It’s small at first, dark shapes that we can’t make out. The closer we get to them, the more they rise from the ground into the sky. They cast their long shadows across the snow as the sun starts to descend around us and we hasten our steps. Neither one of us wants to be caught in the Shatterlands at night again. There may be no animals now, but there are things that wander on the night ice we’ve yet to run into. Things that only fear fire according to Cipher.
As we draw near, I realize that the sprawling shapes are buildings, tall, but not nearly as tall as the ones in Dross. They have similar shapes to them, but they’re more decorative looking, not the smooth look of our decaying buildings back home. These buildings have some huge differences, though.
First, they’re not decaying. None of the buildings look like they’re falling apart. They’re clean and whole and as towering as the day they were built.
Two, where Dross is lit up with candles and lanterns cobbled together from stolen or collected resources that give it an eerie glow, this city features bright lights in the windows, lights everywhere. The closer we get to the city, the more the lights drown out the stars until all we can really make out is the brightest ones and the moon. It isn’t until the air starts to warm and the snow begins to slowly melt, that I realize just what I’m looking at.
NEW REGION UNLOCKED:Welcome to New Babel
NEW ZONE UNLOCKED: Welcome to the Speakeasy Sprawl
The two notifications are loud in my ears, but somehow still not as loud as the sounds of the city that suddenly slam into us once we walk out of the Shatterlands fully. There’s some sort of invisible wall between zones that make it so sounds and the creatures can’t pass through. There’s still some crossover, such as the snow that melts and reaches across the barrier or the sight of the buildings from far away, but we’ve never heard the sounds of the other side until the notifications come through.
And fuck if this place isn’t loud.
It’s nighttime, but that doesn’t seem to matter. The sounds of people, of strange honks echoing between the buildings, of music, all filter into my mind until it’s almost overwhelming. There’s the mechanical whir of some machinery I can’t see, the hiss of what looks like steam trailing up from metal plates in the ground, people shouting at each other as they walk up and down the street. The walkways are crowded with people, all clamoring to go somewhere that I can’t even pretend to guess at. It’s overwhelming, and when I glance over at Locke, I realize I’m not the only one overwhelmed. I watch as he stares up at the buildings with wide eyes and then quickly takes a step back into the snow, silencing the onslaught of sound.
Dross is loud. So many people concentrated in one place means that it can get loud when they all go about their business, but there are no sounds of machinery. No honking.
No loud, echoing music.
I take a hesitant step forward, off the concrete dip, and scream when two, large and bright, lights come right for me. I leap back just in the nick of time as a large metal box rolls by, honking. A man hangs out the side of it, his fist shaking at me.
“Stay out of the street, fustilugs!” he shouts, and then continues on his way in the metal box.
