Blake the Recruit Boss

As soon as System announced that it was ready to deliver the download, all five men got system-slapped.

Sergeant Tom, Bob, Johnny, Ralph, and Will reacted to the system slaps with grunts and gasps. They had not been expecting to get popped upside the head.

Within minutes, they were staring into space, looking at all the pop up menus, not sure what they were seeing.

Marvin went to each of them, explaining what exactly they had to do to set themselves up within the system and answering all their newbie questions.

And since they had no energy to start with, he donated five green points to each of them so they could at least kick-start their system.

Blake was glad Marvin was helping out the men since he was busy watching out for Jasmine. The traveling group had finally reached a tiny village on the outskirts of the jungle and she was getting the help she desperately needed.

As long as she stayed with the healer woman, it gave Blake a little peace of mind.

Marvin wandered over to where Blake stood as he stared down at the sick girl lying on the mat with gentle tender eyes.

"You are looking like one love sick calf, dude." Marvin muttered, mostly to himself.

"Shut up Marvin and mind your own business." Blake grumbled.

"Alright alright. Don't get your panties in a bunch. I have to go get these men set up and start their first quests so they can pick up some basic weapons."

Blake stared at Marvin with a blank look.

"What basic weapons? What kind of first quests?"

"You know," Marvin shrugged. "Go find this. Pick up that. Don't tell me you skipped through all that."

Blake frowned.

"My first system quest was to Retrieve the Spirit Skull from the Holy City of Champa at Myson Mountain."

Marvin shook his head.

"No, no. That's the Big Assignment that advances you to the next level. I'm talking about minor side quests."

Blake shook his head.

"I didn't get any side quests."

Marvin grumbled under his breath about something having to do with dumb bosses.

"Take a look at your right hand side. You see that symbol that looks like an S worm? Open that one up."

Blake looked over to his right visual periphery and sure enough, there was an S worm looking symbol. He opened up the symbol and a long list of things to do and to pick up opened before his eyes.

"Well dang. If I'd known this was available, I'd do more stuff instead of just kill a bunch of mobs and pick up guitars and guns."

Marvin laughed.

"But the stuff you've been doing are what gives you the super points, not the piddly stuff. Don't get me wrong, you still need to do the piddly stuff just to clear them out of your to-do quest log."

"Okay so what do I do now that I know this thing is here?"

"Look through the list. Most of the stuff there, you probably either have already accidentally done and it's checked off or it's so easy for you, you can just plow through and do them quickly and gain those points you need to up your level."

Blake checked the S worm list and sure enough, things like, 'Pick up object and place into bag', and 'Eat first incense meal' had already been done.

One of the biggest scoring ones had to do with his acquisition of the various weapons that he had found along the way. Blake raised an eyebrow. He was still missing a whip and a rope.

Casting his eyes around, he saw a good length of rope made of bamboo hanging on the side of one of the huts next to the healer's shack.

He wandered over to the rope and used up one red point to add it to his weapons cache.

«Congratulations. You have gained a weapon: Rope. Bamboo. Level 1»

The bar on the top left showed 8 of 10 available weapons he could own. This meant that once he picked up a whip, which he honestly did not know where to go to find, he would have exactly one spot left for the last weapon.

Opening up the quest tool showed one less quest for him to do and gave him a small percentage of green energy point. It was almost not worth doing except that the rope really was a good add to his weapons cache.

Scrolling through the minor side quests, Blake chuckled when he got to the 'recruit' section. The quest to 'recruit one new person to the system' had been checked off, along with 'recruit five new people to the system'.

The next 'recruit' quest was ten people.

Blake laughed. It wasn't as if he was some Avon Lady, going around recruiting sales reps to add to his pyramid scheme sales goals. These were just people he had met up along the way.

Looking at the recruit quests reminded him that he had five extra people to take care of.

"Before you go, there's a lot of food that was smoked and left in the food hut. Why don't we feed the men so they can gain a bit of energy?"

"Good idea. I wasn't sure how we were going to be able to do that since there's no temple around here we could take them to."

Blake grinned.

"I have incense that I took from the Tiger Temple."

Five minutes later, they were all munching on roast pork and cooked ducks with all the vegetable sides that hadn't been polished off by the villagers.

Blake's package of 100 incense was down to around 80 or so, give or take a few. He could afford to feed each man for about eleven more meals before he would have to find another stash of incense to steal.

This was an important meal, however. They had been starved for so long, their faces weren't even showing. After they ate, Blake could finally see for the first time, what they looked like.

The four men who followed Tom were all-American boys even younger than Blake, and Tom was not much older. Of course, if one counted the actual year that they'd been born, they would be in their eighties and nineties at this point.

After their meal, Marvin took them off for Demon System training while Blake continued watching over Jasmine as she slept.

He was half snoozing himself when Luis chimed in.

"Hey. Blake. Me and the old nun just landed in Vietnam. We'll be in Myson around afternoon tomorrow. Where are you currently?"

"We're in a tiny village on the edge of the jungle. At the speed we're traveling, we'll be lucky to get to Myson by nightfall tomorrow."

"We'll meet up tomorrow then. The old nun, Dai Tu Liem just met up with an old monk. He is Jasmine's Great Uncle. His name is Dai Tien Hoang."

"What about her Aunt, Tien Ha? Were you able to find her? We were supposed to meet up with her at the Japanese restaurant and she never showed up."

"She showed up with her Great Uncle. Apparently, at the time you and Jasmine got assaulted, she was locked up inside one of the temples by a group of nuns."

"Oh my God! How did the Uncle know she was trapped?"

"She sent a message using, of all things, little bugs. When the Uncle came to the temple, it was pandemonium."

Blake's eyes widened.

"What happened to the nuns?"

"They all got turned into black birds." Luis whistled.

"What???"

"You heard me. He turned them into crows and they flew away."

"Oh wow. He must be a crazy powerful warlock." Blake shook his head.

"He's scary powerful, Blake." Luis' voice shook a bit.

"Then I'm truly glad he's on our side, because everything that I see on the other side is so scary it makes me want to crawl into a corner and turn into a hair ball." Blake said with a shiver.