Chapter 49: Block Patrol
Peacock Park was as safe as it could get after the apocalypse. Coop was sitting on a wooden bench taking a well earned break while watching ducks swim along the shore of a small lake inside the park. The sun was shining and birds were cheerfully singing from the branches of nearby trees. There weren’t any Primal Trackers to be seen.
Coop hadn’t found where the monsters were spawning from, but he had culled the invaders through the night and into the day. Every once in a while another pack would roam into the edges of the park, but at the rate that they were returning, it would take them weeks before they returned to their previous numbers.
He considered hunting the packs and tracing their paths to try and find where they were coming from, but he already knew he wouldn’t be able to finish the quest chain before the girls were due to return. He didn’t want to leave the park and make it more difficult to meet up with Camila and Charlie. He ended up having a relaxing morning watching birds and squirrels. He massaged his calves and recalled his stretching routine from back at the fort before he walked around the perimeter of the park. His quick patrol found two more packs of five monsters to defeat.
While exploring the park he found evidence that someone had camped inside the dugout of one of the baseball fields, but they had been gone for quite a while. Otherwise, it seemed like the park had been claimed by the Primal Trackers relatively early in the assimilation. It would have made a good place to grind monsters even in the early days. The park was a lot easier to move around in compared to the sandy dunes of Ghost Reef where he had hunted the Ancient Defenders.
Upon returning to the main entrance of the park, where he would meet the girls, he decided he would add a block to his little patrol. He could cycle back to the entrance of the park frequently enough to not worry about missing Camila and Charlie’s return. This way, he would also find more monsters to hunt and hopefully ease the burden on any survivors that were still in the buildings.
While many of the buildings had obviously deteriorated after the assimilation began, he noted that most of them were still structurally sound. Having a civilization shard in a city would probably be a huge boon for developing a proper sanctuary. As long as someone like Balor was around, to strengthen the foundations, the city would basically come prebuilt. Coop wouldn’t have abandoned all the free real estate if he had the choice. Back home they only had the lighthouse and the fort to begin with, and they had both been extremely helpful. Ghost Reef was still defined by both of the original structures.
He walked along a tree covered street that led away from the park. It was lined by a series of storefronts on both sides. There was a barbershop with its red, white, and blue pole still standing, a clothing boutique with wedding dresses displayed in the front window, a used bookstore still full of books, a specialty coffee shop with a smashed front window on one corner, and a fancy looking steakhouse on the opposite corner.
On a whim, Coop went into the bookstore to test his scavenging ability. He had to force his way into the locked front door, but his improved Strength allowed him to force the door open with minimal damage to the rest of the front. The door probably wouldn’t lock anymore, but he doubted that would be a problem in the future. If someone wanted to get in they would just smash the windows anyway. At least it still looked intact without a closer inspection.
He tried scavenging a book from a table that displayed new bestsellers for anyone that entered the store. It immediately joined the rest of his profession’s collection. Coop was surprised that it worked. He thought there would be more restrictions on what was eligible to be scavenged. He couldn’t just loot anything he came across, he had tried other random items before and found himself unable to get them into his storage.
Coop thought it was possible that this was the true purpose of the scavenging profession, and the auto looting of defeated enemies was actually just a secondary feature. Of course, Coop was pushing that secondary feature to the extreme, getting all sorts of benefits from the profession due to his grinding sessions. He had barely explored other possibilities due to the isolation of Ghost Reef.
In any case, his profession allowed him to hoover up all of the books from the small bookstore. It had piles and piles of books stuffed into bookshelves and even stacked on the floor. They were mostly in pretty good shape even if some of them were worn from previous readers. He didn’t discriminate with which books he claimed. All types of fiction, non-fiction, and everything from encyclopedias to journals went into his spatial storage. He’d take them all back to Ghost Reef and see if the undead archive would take care of them. It seemed like a shame to leave them behind and he knew some factions would value their contents. He remembered that pre-mana knowledge was the reason Jones had been Chosen, for instance. Coop cleared out the entire store and exited back to the street.
Coop made it to the first intersection and took a left, planning on wrapping around the block back to the park. Halfway down the block he was confronted by a pack of Primal Trackers led by a level 30 elite that had been waiting among the overgrown bushes on the sides of the road. Of course he wasn’t deterred, attacking them directly with his ethereal glaive already equipped. He moved to the group of monsters who had positioned themselves into a familiar half circle designed to give each member an equal opportunity to attack. Coop stepped directly toward the leader, in the center of the five monsters, and thrust his honed glaive forward.