Chapter 8: Chapter 7: You Want A Piece Of Me, Boy?

Slumping back in his seat, his chest heaving with the desperate gasping for air, he found himself grateful for the stale, filtered taste the SCV offered this time. He didn't want to imagine the smell mingling human and Zerg bodies and blood had, particularly when there were this many of them. Aside from the carnage and a big, gaping hole on his front lawn, the damage to actual structures wasn't bad. The supply depots had been beaten up, but they could be fixed. He only lost one of the flamethrower turrets... but then again, only four had been able to participate in the battle, as his furthest defensive positions hadn't been in range of the attack. "Alright, SCVs, start hauling bodies to the flamethrower turrets. We'll have to arrange a pyre." As much as he wanted to bury the civilians that died for him, he knew he wouldn't be able to. Not to mention that it would be almost impossible to tell which limbs belonged to which body. Jack paused, almost expecting condemnation, or for the SCVs to ignore his order. Instead, he got the same, southern-drawling vaguely-cheerful "Roger!" he had gotten before. "Well. At least I know they're used to this sort of thing. At least, I hope that's what it is, and not that they're being made compliant..." 

His interface popped up unprompted, and the green-glow of the 'VICTORY' screen danced before his eyes. Wordlessly, he simply raised a hand and tapped to proceed, almost not wanting to open his eyes to read the messages that followed. He was bone-tired. Adrenaline, fear, anger. All these things had helped keep him operating through the fight, with more viciousness than he thought he had in him, but now that it was over? He just desperately wanted to go to sleep. Reading any new information could be vital, and he might not have time for it before another emergency, so despite that he made himself go through each one. 

'Enemies defeated: 2,500 XP. Resources spent: 200 XP. First Win Of The Day: +25%' Oh. Holy. Shit. He hadn't really noticed the first time, but the scaling bonus to his first win of the day, a mechanic that wasn't so abnormal for a game, was absolutely absurd right now. As battles got bigger and bigger, assuming that he wasn't fighting a serious conflict more than once a day, every fight would all but guarantee a significant bonus. Just this fight alone he had earned a bonus of 675 XP. Does that mean he's about to leap multiple levels? It was only 100 XP for the first one, after all! He confirmed the message, wanting to see what he could produce, and was almost assaulted with chirping pings.

'Achievements Unlocked: Pyrrhic Victory, I Can Do This All Day!, A Little Help Here?, My Hand Hurts!' He was almost taken aback by the pings in rapid succession. Not that he was complaining! "More buffs!" He managed to muster enough energy to be excited about scrolling through, hoping for more benefits that stacked with each other. Same as before, he had to go through them in reverse order. 'My Hand Hurts! - Spawn over 100 units during combat over the course of a single battle. Production units may now be batch-produced.' Well that wasn't a stat buff, but now that he had the ability to drop units more than one at a time, he didn't have to worry about having to trickle his fighters he produced into battle anymore. Plus, his hand did hurt. 

'A Little Help Here? - Eliminate greater than 50% of hostile forces in a single battle with a commander-controlled unit. Units may now receive non-verbal orders from the commander.' Well, that solved him having to route most of his commands through the Adjutant via the comms system. To try and test it, he thought about one of the idle civilians who had been reserve SCV pilots going into the base to prep the assembly for the next SCV, and it wandered off a moment later. Well, he couldn't be sure it wasn't a coincidence they walked off just now, but that seemed unlikely as they had been content to stand around and wait for orders up to this point. 

'I Can Do This All Day! - Personally engage in a conflict for at least four hours without interruption. The commander will maintain a state of perfect clarity and energy through the entirety of battle, and only be afflicted by fatigue once the battle comes to an end.' More buffs for him. Can he get at least one buff to his troops that actually made them better fighters? While he could see the appeal of being able to stay up for days in a prolonged battle, the fact that the fatigue would smash into him like a hammer once the fight was over almost sounded worse than just being exhausted at points in the middle. It didn't seem to come with a toggle option, so he would just have to start thinking about that when he ended up in a long fight. 

The last one tugged at his emotions, thinking about the field of gore that came as a consequence of his civilian charge. In hindsight, it almost felt like he didn't need to do so, both from the standpoint of wasted resources and the moral consequences of the guilt he was feeling. The Zerglings had barely been able to touch him in his buff-boosted SCV, and most of his status displayed yellow or orange even now. Jack hadn't even gotten any single part down into the red. If he had been more confident, maybe... no, no. It would have been stupid to throw himself at the Zerg to test how resilient his upgraded unit was. It didn't make him feel any better, though. 

'Pyrrhic Victory - Emerge victorious in a battle with greater than 95% losses of friendly units. When a unit is lost, 20% of the cost of the unit will be automatically refunded.' Great, so even his system was trying to convince him to get over his feelings about a suicide-wave strategy. If he got in a slugging match with an opponent over time, he could start to replace his units the more that he lost, and his opponent would have to fight through waves of reinforcements. With a slow, long breath, Jack sighed. He's going to lose units. That's a fact, and this is a great perk. He just had to promise himself he would try to make sure his units made it back, and see this as a consolation, rather than a plan going forward. 

As he pressed confirm, he glanced over toward the bodies being dragged into mounds by the Perdition flamethrower turrets, and mentally gave the order for the turrets to ignite the bodies. Even the automated defenses seemed to be taken into account by his mental orders, which he welcomed but hadn't expected. The fire surged toward the corpses and a thick smoke began to rise into the air... but it was a little late to be worried about giving his position away now. 

The next screen returned to his commander level, and the bar shot up from 1 toward 2 like a rocket, passing the mark almost instantly. The marine's picture was replaced with a pale-looking blonde woman with a short pixie-cut hairstyle and white armor... until that too was met by the progress bar. Before he even had gotten a good look, the new picture was that of a black-painted, squat-looking helmet sandwiched between two massive pauldrons. "Marine and Medic unlocked, and it looks like the next unit is the Marauder. Something to deal with any heavier ground troops. But my first level was only 100 XP, why did I only level up twice?" Jack reached forward and tapped at the experience bar, and numbers flashed beneath it displaying his total: 3,475 / 10,000. He didn't know exactly where in the middle the division for level 2 and 3 had been, but it was clear the costs of each level were increasing dramatically. Why can't anything ever be easy? 

Looking through the production screen again, what he had been worried about was true: Medics took Vespene gas to produce, and he still had none of it. Everything would be much better going forward if he had medics on hand! He wouldn't be as worried about doing things like using the combat stimulants in the medical bay with the borderline-magical health-regenerating properties of the medic. Which... was probably exactly why they required a more advanced energy source, really. Still, he wasn't going to waste any time getting some marines set up around the base. At ten times the cost of the civilian at 50 minerals a pop, the same as the twelve-foot-tall mech that was an SCV, their armor and rifles must require some serious materials.

Using his new batch-production, a squad of fifty marines appeared before him and dropped his mineral reserves down to a mere 1475, counting what he had spent on repairs and everything in the battle's aftermath. Unlike the sloppy formation the civilians had arrived in, these appeared in ranks, five rows of ten. As they appeared, rifles loosely gripped in their hands, they looked around and surveyed the ruined terrain, the track-marks of bodies being dragged, and the bodies waiting to be added to the assorted pyres. "Hell. Looks like we just missed all the fun." One remarked as he dropped his visor, and drew a few coarse chuckles from the group as they did the same. "Commander." The speaker raised one hand from the front of his rifle in salute, "You gonna give me orders?" 

Jack aimed the gripper-arm of his SCV toward the massive pit where the Nydus worm had been earlier that day, "I want half of you to guard that pit and make sure that there aren't any lingering Zerg in the tunnel that are going to pop out and surprise us. The rest of you split into squads of five and take up position behind the defensive nodes. The perdition and missile turret combination emplacements." He would have to see about getting some sort of proper entrenched position set-up for the Marines, but at the moment he was still treating this location as a relatively temporary base. He needed Vespene gas before he would be happy about really bunkering down and settling in to a 'home'. 

Wait just a minute. The realization hit him like a hammer dropped from the sky, and he whipped his attention back toward the gaping tunnel. Nydus worm. The Zerg shouldn't be able to make a Nydus worm without access to Vespene gas. Maybe there was some sort of cavern or they had dug out an underground base? Why didn't he think of that sooner, when he couldn't figure out where the first detachment of Zerglings had arrived from so suddenly? Nothing said everything had to be built out in the open like in the game! He was still thinking like battles were held on a pair of two-dimensional planes, one for air units and one for ground units. But Zerg can burrow. Of course they would be able to have an underground base if they wanted to! It could just be a tunnel, but that many Zerglings seemed to indicate a base of some kind, and even his currently-limited sensors should have been able to pick up anything like that near him. 

With the rich minerals being harvested and processed, it was only a matter of time before they recovered from this mutual 'draw' of a battle and came back looking for him again. Now that he had access to troops, he was going to make sure he really rolled out the red carpet for them, and he wanted to save up a significant bank of resources to add more troops as required now that he could call them up in batches. "I really wish I could manage to get more than one SCV built a day, it's a real stranglehold on my ability to advance. I guess that means I should stop standing around in this one and let it get recharging, then." Marching to the command center, he waited alongside the bay door. "Adjutant, open the bay door." A buzzing chime of disagreement sounded, and he rolled his eyes. What was the problem this time? "Unidentified troops present. Defensive protocols prohibit the opening of bay doors at this time." 

Jack sighed, reaching up to rub at his temples as he felt a headache forming. "Defensive protocols? You didn't have a problem with any defensive protocols when you let the Zergling just walk right into the SCV bay last time!" he argued. "The bay doors were already open during the incident that Pilot 21283 is referring to. Had the SCV bay doors been closed properly at that time, I would have been unable to open them while the Zerg were present." The AI only seemed to follow the rules at its own whims, and found ways to flout technicality at him whenever he needed it to do something. "Then I identify the troops as friendly, so you can open the door and let me in!" After a long pause from the Adjutant, the door started to screech and grind, working to open the heavy plating. "Designation noted." The Adjutant's reply was surprisingly terse, but Jack shrugged it off, having more on his mind at the moment.

Once the SCV was back on the charger and he was back on his own two feet, he idly wondered if there was a way to factory-reset an Adjutant. The current one was only going to keep giving him more and more problems as he moved forward from here. As far as he was concerned, this was his command center, by virtue of 'finders keepers'. As far as anyone was concerned, the original owners had lost this place in battle. If he could somehow scrub whatever registration there was and deal with the issue of the AI's loyalties, he would be able to really start to establish his own foothold without worrying about someone coming along and laying claim to it.

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