Chapter 145: Chapter 139

Rayna was in the tower with me, and lunged for the elevator doorway, planting herself firmly in it. I looked around as the massive, teak meeting desk slid out the window, taking most of the expensive office chairs with it.

“Oh damn it. BuyMort, I wanna sell all that furniture, right now!” I shouted.

A BuyMort pod popped into existence with the now familiar fart smell of Tower’s rotting flesh. Most of the pods came from a fruition center, and all the fruition centers had a vat of Tower.

I’d visited three different ones in the month since I met the first version, without much more to report on the creature. It appeared to be the same mind in each vat that I visited and remembered me quite clearly from those visits.

We were becoming friends, I think.

The pod began warping away furniture as it rolled out the window, before zipping away and rapidly diving to go catch the falling bits. The sale wouldn’t be as clean, but it was better than losing it entirely. Every mortie counted.

I grabbed onto the corner of the wall as the building shook. My helmet told me the earthquake was a 4.7 on the Richter scale. It brought up that information on a scroll and pestered me with text about the scale’s name being what its ‘magic’ sensed of my knowledge.

Bullshit.

It listened when people talked and had access to Axle’s online library, which was essentially the internet. Fucking lying nanotech.

I grabbed at my MortBlock and began chain refreshing it. Since I was connected to all the land it now covered, anything the earthquake changed or shook loose was covered as mine.

It was a habit to refresh it regularly anyway, no less than once an hour when awake.

But as the earthquake settled and it became apparent that the building would withstand it, I decided to refresh mine a bit more often for the near future.

In spite of the structural damage I had done to the roof, the penthouse remained secure. Nobody faulted Dearth products, after all.

Just their cut throat business tactics.

Still, it had been funny to watch them turn tail and run. Plus, the earthquake gave me a timely opportunity to secure my claim on all of the new land in my territories.

I watched, as the MortBlocks around my territory resettled on the map. There had been some pushing and pulling at the borders, and aside from a single outpost now technically in enemy territory near the Grand Canyon, there wasn’t anything major to respond to.

I called Axle anyway. Being a Nu-Earth native, I knew something was coming that we needed to respond to. He was in Prescott, managing the day to day business with the elevator, so I told him to take a portal to my position.

Our affiliate had access to a few short-range portals from BuyMort, one of an assortment of perks I’d chosen after we leveled up.

We were level ten, but I suspected we’d get ranked up again after our recent expansion. Assuming I could save the port from the tsunami I knew had to be headed our way.

The earthquake had been centered in Asia, halfway around the world. It was a 4.7 by the time it got to us, all the way around the crust. But over there, it was a solid eleven on the Richter Scale. The entire west coast was probably about to get wiped out.

Axle stepped out of a BuyMort pod’s rainbow beam, and immediately moved to the penthouse suite’s master control unit. It gave him access to the building’s features and controls, which were still tied into Dearth’s satellite network. It was a critical security failure on their part, but I was happy to not let them know. Each and every Dearth tower was hard code encrypted to their satellite access.

It was one of the best weapons I had against them. I had access to all their intel, and they were too dumb to realize it. The Nu-Earth board, I mean. The Sol Board was taking a strangely hands off approach to the conflict, but I suspected they could tell I was in their networks.

Well, my people were anyway. Axle had a guy, someone he knew from before he and Jada fled Dearth. Axle had come up in the company from Storage but suffered no loyalty to them. To me, on the other hand, I saw plenty of indications of loyalty. He still scoffed at my greater plan to kill BuyMort, but he was my right hand advisor in everything the affiliate did, and one of very few people I considered a friend.

Axle connected the Los Angeles tower to the Prescott tower, and his guy connected us both to the satellite network. Then he navigated out to a point in the Pacific Ocean, where an obscene bulge in the ocean confirmed my fears. The lens didn’t even have to zoom in far to find it.

It was visible from space, the local news hounds were gleefully covering it, from the safety of various orbital platforms. Some were on ships, others on newly installed space stations of various sizes and purposes.

The wave had already destroyed the Hawaiian islands and was rapidly bearing down on the western coast of North and South America. According to all accounts, it would hit us within the hour. It was expected to top five hundred meters when it came ashore. Axle quickly compiled a comparison with our two-hundred meter tall tower for me to understand exactly how tall this thing was.

“Okay, that seems terrible. What can you do?” I asked the tall Knowle.

You are reading story BuyMort: Rise of the Windowpuncher – How I Became the Accidental Warlord of Arizona. Apocalyptic GameLit at novel35.com

He licked his nose and scowled.

“Off the top of my head? Detonate shaped explosives underwater of sufficient size to counter the incoming wave. It’s not perfect, but we might save portions of the immediate area, this city in particular.”

His friend on the monitor was another Knowle, with dark black stripes across his muzzle. He chuckled and chimed in, “You know, that’s not impossible. We have some shaped nuclear explosives in storage, and several portal uses left.”

“That mean nobody portal out if bombs fail,” Rayna chimed in. I valued her input, but she had a way of bringing down the mood when it came to managing disasters.

Not that I felt this one was being managed particularly well.

“Okay, someone tell me why we have shaped nuclear bombs, and how any of this is even possible?” I asked.

“Tollya,” Rayna grunted. “Said was good deal. Nukes always useful.”

I chuckled dryly and nodded. “Every time she buys us something, it makes me want to allocate her more funding. But that can’t possibly work, can it? Just nuke the tsunami? I don’t wanna be mean, but c’mon. That sounds dumb to me.”

Axle swiped at the air in front of himself, reading the specifications on the bombs. He had a limited version of Afflqwst that provided him with a glossary of information on my quests. The app was predatory to the BuyMort programming, and carved out cheats. Like compiling all information needed to accomplish an Afflqwst quest.

The quest I had been ignoring since it popped up. The impending tsunami was far more relevant.

Quest – Preserve new territory from effects of incoming natural disaster.

REQUIREMENTS:

1. Activate countermeasures to neutralize incoming tsunami.

PROBABLE OUTCOME – Affiliate territory destroyed. (78%).

POSSIBLE OUTCOME – Affiliate territory protected. (6%).

REWARD – Item coupon.

Of course. And another Item coupon too, which made perfect sense. The last forty of these I had done had been item coupons. Each and every stinking one of em worth fifty-five thousand morties, the price of a first stage starfish suit.

Axle shook his head. “Afflqwst underestimates us,” he hissed.

“Does it?” I hissed back. None of the hobb guards in the room aside from Rayna were cleared to know about our Afflqwst app. Only my most trusted lieutenants knew about that advantage.

I looked up at her and continued in a normal volume, “You guys are talking about shaped charge nuclear bombs as if that won’t destroy the coast line we’re trying to save.”

Rayna shook her head. “Not perfect. Less damage than wave. What we have.”

I sighed and shook my head, before siphoning a large amount of morties from the affiliate account into my own. The remainder of our bounty from Dearth, five billion. Our operation turned over billions in trade daily, but Axle was smart and spent the vast majority of it on upkeep and improvement, along with my various rescue projects.

Our flex account for emergencies would need refilling after this.

We kept large amounts of morties out of my account normally, so I didn’t accidentally spend them all on a really expensive Nah’gh sex worker or summon an armada of Sleem with one of my nightmares. My dreams were very much either or since BuyMort. No middle ground, no peaceful serenity. Just one extreme or the other.

With five billion morties in my account, I asked BuyMort for help. Something to stop the tsunami from destroying our entire shoreline, specifically. The storefront tossed a series of ads at me once I entered my request. I swiped through them, looking for one in particular. It showed up anytime I did high enough priced searches for pretty much anything, which told me they were operating locally.

TWO GUYS AND A TRANSDIMENSIONAL PULSE ION CANNON – Ever seen a bad guy and thought Kaboom? These are your guys. They’ll portal in and give you one shot at a special discounted rate! You’ll have to pay full price for each shot after. Good for assassinations and vaporizing assholes. We can kill ANYthing.

That was the one. I mentally clicked it and opened a MortMobile call with the provider.

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