4-9: None but the Dead

Just beyond the gang's new front gate lies a scarred land, a land of grey and black pounded by unceasing acid rain. The Deadlands, it's called. It's not a safe place for humans or shek. Acid rain burns the skin, acid lakes do far worse, and even the ground is so acidic it'll melt bare feet.

Needing to stretch their legs after two weeks of hard labour, Jam gathers up a team to explore it. Hivers and skeletons are completely unbothered by acid, so Beep, Silvershade, and Burn join eagerly. Animals are immune too: Pilaf is in. Surprising the rest, Horse decides to volunteer too.

Though vulnerable to acid, Horse has the right gear to be quite well protected. His plate jacket gives 40% resistance to acid, his iron hat 35%, and his leather pants 10%. 80% is the threshold where one's natural HP regeneration will overcome the damage from acid rain; his gear brings him to 85%, meaning he won't be gradually dying while he explores. Of note, however: This will not protect him at all from swimming in acid! Acid lakes will still turn him into goo.

Promising not to take Horse swimming, the Deadlands party ventures forth.

The others take the implication behind Burn's words: Skeletons live here. They're deathly curious to learn more but Burn, as always, leaves them with only half an explanation. They'll have to find out more for themselves.

Barely an hour later, they spot one of those workshop ruins, the like of which they've explored off the coast of Vain and in the Purple Sands. Straining to see through the rain, Silvershade can make out what looks like several skeletons moving around in there, but it doesn't look like anything Burn would call a “safehouse”. They warn the others to be on high alert.

The skeletons here are called “Broken Model 30”. While they must have been perfectly intelligent once, the ravages of time seem to have left them with little more than the drive to guard this place and the propensity for violence. There's no talking with them; they attack anyone and everyone on sight, not even uttering so much as a battle cry.

These skeletons are a pretty manageable threat. 35 in each of their stats means they'll dish out some good damage with those big fragment axes of theirs but a single group of them won't put the gang in danger of actually losing the fight. The real problem is those turrets. On each end of the workshop, there's a deadly double-barrel harpoon turret, each harpoon capable of dealing up to 90 damage per shot. Against anyone but Burn, a lucky harpoon shot could take out a limb in an instant. Silvershade and Beep have particular cause to fear—hive princes' and workers' fragile bodies mean that a couple well-placed shots could kill them outright.

If only the gang can deal with the turrets, these skellies will go down easy. Jam sneaks up to the workshop alone, hoping to stealth KO the turret guard and give their comrades an opening to rush in. They have the best assassination skill of the whole gang and they're decently sneaky... but they don't even make it halfway up the ramp before they're spotted, every skeleton in the place swivelling in their direction with an audible creak.

Jam does an about face and sprints right back the way they came. They figure they can work with this—some of the skeletons will chase them, hopefully far enough away that the harpoons can't reach, and the gang will be able to at least soften their numbers. It's a classic, reliable plan. They're quite confident in it until they take a harpoon to the leg.

Their sprint slowing to a limp as pain courses up their thigh, Jam is now little more than a sitting duck. The skeleton reloads and immediately hits that same leg with a second harpoon, taking the limb's HP into the negatives and opening a gushing wound. Forget running, adrenaline is the only thing keeping Jam standing.

The skeletons chasing Jam now looking a lot more threatening, Burn dashes forth, slings the struggling hiver over their shoulder, and carries them to safety. At least the skeletons keep chasing just as Jam hoped; the gang makes their stand.

Neither the stabbing pain nor all the blood they're losing hinders Jam's ability to fight. The gang prevails in a decisive battle that makes it look like everything went as planned—so long as you ignore the trail of hiver blood.

There's still the rest of the workshop to deal with and Jam's injury calls for a new strategy. Silvershade has a decently long-range crossbow now, slightly longer-range than the harpoon turret, so the gang takes a breather while they try sniping. It doesn't go great. Silvershade is a decent shooter but these long shots are a devil to make; they end up burying far more bolts in the mud than in their foe.

Out of clever ideas, the gang decides to try a stupidly simple one. Burn bum rushes the workshop, drawing fire. Once they close the distance, the others charge in behind. It works and it doesn't. On one hand, the turret guard is not fooled, pivoting away from Burn and putting a harpoon through Pilaf's foreleg the moment the gang comes into range. On the other, the gang does still manage to overwhelm the defenders, forcing the skeletons off the turrets and into close quarters.

The broken skeletons dispatched, the gang snaps up the Engineering Research and valuable tech miscellany and moseys. Beep takes a short breather on the way out, leaning on the railing and peering off into the distance, thinking about meeting more skeletons like Burn. He perks up when he spots a light in the distance, an unmistakeable orange glow shining from behind the sheets of rain. Convincing himself it must be a sign of skeletons, he takes off after it, leaving the others no choice but to follow.

As they approach, Beep's little dot of light separates into several distinct columns, illuminating a collection of buildings they can barely make out. This, Burn now admits, is the Black Desert City, where skeletons dwell.

The gang climbs the hill up to the city. Unlike any other they've visited, this one has no walls, no gate guard to demand to check their bags as they enter. The round, dome-roofed buildings share their design with the various ancient libraries scattered across the world and with some of the fancier buildings in the United Cities, but as the gang draws close, they can see these are plainly more sophisticated. The lip of the rooves bear a ring of what they can only guess might be large, round vents. The walls are covered in a layer of some sort of tile—whether reinforcement or decoration, the gang can't say, but it's certainly more interesting to look at than the usual sheet metal.

Even the streetlights are unlike anything the gang has ever seen. Judging by the wheel each one has attached to the base, they're gas torches, lighting the city by blasting continual gouts of flame into the air. It makes the gang feel a little primitive with the piddly little wooden torchpoles they have at home.

If any of the gang are worried about coming across as gormless tourists, staring agape at even the simplest things in the skeleton city, they shouldn't be. From the stoop of a nearby building, a skeleton named Horace stares back, clearly just as astonished by them.

While Beep seems to take Horace's comment as a mere case of mistaken identity, Jam and Silvershade find questions swimming to the forefront of their minds. They've never been called human before. Most people consider hivers and humans to be different things. Is this skeleton's eyesight going or have they legitimately never seen a hiver before? What would that imply?

Horace doesn't have anything more to say. The gang ambles on down the torchlit street, turning heads as they go. The skeleton residents watch them from in front of their homes: Smaller, ramshackle buildings of patchwork scrap metal that betray just how much ancient knowledge has been lost even to them. Horse's unease grows under the skeletons' expressionless gaze; he's not used to being the centre of attention in this way. He finds himself wishing they'd stop staring and actually talk to the gang, not just about them. He comes to regret that wish immediately.

Further down the street, another couple skeletons discuss the gang as if they're not there, not even bothering to keep their voices down.

When Beep tries to get their attention, one of the skeletons turns to him and blurts out:

The implication seems to be that hivers and shek are offshoots of humanity, products of some kind of divergent evolution, and that this happened sometime after the skeletons of the Black Desert City isolated themselves from the rest of the world. At least that's the case as far as these skeletons know. You'd think having such a short history, shek and hivers would have stories passed down about their origins—creation myths at the very least—but surprisingly, there is nothing of the sort to be found in Kenshi. All we have on the origins of shek and hivers is conjecture based on the musings of the skeletons here.