Musuem Core Chapter 15: Law of the Jungle

London’s city center should have been a ghost town. In many ways, that would have been less terrifying than the reality of the situation.

No one knew how the city had been turned into a jungle, or anything about it, really, save the fact that it had, in fact, happened and that the effect didn’t seem to be spreading further.

People were supposed to be afraid of crap like that, and make the smart decision of running as though all the hounds of hell were chasing them. Of course, some people just froze up, but that was still a more reasonable decision than trying to get into the disaster zone.

So many people were here that it seemed as though this place was busier than it had ever been normally.

Obviously, part of that was an illusion created by the fact that ordinarily, most of the people she was seeing would either be in buildings or spread out across various streets, rather than all pushing up against a hastily erected police and military barricade, but it was still utterly insane to see so many people there.

At least a hundred people were trying to get into the jungle, which ended in a strangely abrupt fashion behind where the police cruiser was parked, as though someone had picked up a plot of land and plopped it down in the middle of the city.

Jaclyn just wound up laying on the horn until the crowd let her through. Slowly, painfully so, she made her way to where Lawrence and Gillet stood, trying to convince people to not march into the jungle.

It was only going so-so. There were already two corpses behind them, strangely twisted animals that she wouldn’t want to meet in life, though they’d clearly been particularly strong.

So there were creatures coming out of the jungle … that was bad.

Of the two, only Gillet had a gun, which was going to leave them badly underpowered when something serious showed up.

Generally, there was a benefit to not having a gun as a police officer. By its very nature, a gun being present in a situation escalated the situation. It immediately ratcheted up the stakes to “life and death” without even having to be drawn.

Anyone who got close enough to touch your belt would be close enough to go for your gun, and the same went for anyone who didn’t stop after you pointed your gun at them. The moment someone was about to be able to go for your gun, it was a matter of you or them, and someone was going to wind up in the hospital, if not the morgue.

Of course, someone deciding to grab your Taser or pepper spray was still a big issue, but not something that could get someone killed without things going seriously wrong.

Yet if things reached the point where death was a serious risk, whether it stemmed from other people or, well, monsters, a gun was the greatest safety blanket you could have. Except, you know, removing yourself from the situation.

Now that she was closer, she could see the remains of police tape on the ground, right in front of an area that seemed to be moving in fast-forward, leaves in the breeze seeming to violently vibrate. So that was where the other end of that weird area had been.

“Inspector Abrahms, how are things out there?” Lawrence asked, pushing a weeping woman’s hand off his shoulder. She, at least, seemed to be here to look for a missing loved one, unlike the several people who looked ready to go diving into the jungle as though this were a damn adventure movie.

“Weird. We don’t know who’s in charge, and we don’t know what’s happening in there, so we’re looking. We should be ready to come back out in a few hours at the latest.” Jaclyn explained.

“You might want to make sure you don’t linger,” Lawrence said. “The beasties are starting to show their ugly mugs. I’m pretty sure they were just as freaked out as we were in the beginning, but they’re getting over it.”

Jaclyn grimaced.

“I’m pretty sure the superintendent is trying to get a military quarantine going, but that’ll take a while.”

A small, spectral bird that looked like an electric kingfisher fluttered out of the window past her head, a scout she’d already been warned Gula would dispatch upon arrival at the forest.

Whatever Lawrence was going to say next was drowned out by someone starting to scream and shout upon spotting the orc on the passenger seat and realizing she wasn’t human.

“Guys, there’s a fucking orc in there, it’s her fault!”

Oh, for fuck’s sake …

If Gula were responsible for the entire mess, that would mean she had near-godlike power. And that idiot felt that the best response to that situation was to start slinging accusations?

“TALK TO OWENS!” Jaclyn yelled at Lawrence over the surging noise of the crowd and floored the accelerator. Thankfully, no one was stupid enough to try running into the jungle.

Yet. She was pretty sure that at some point, there’d be no shortage of idiots running into the magical jungle in pursuit of treasure, be it real or imagined.

Around her, the world grew dark as the sun vanished behind the jungle canopy and the roars of the crowd faded away, replaced by an eerie silence.

The quiet might have been normal-ish for a normal English forest, the occasional birdsong notwithstanding, but weren’t jungles meant to be noisy? It was as though the world itself were holding its breath.

Had Lawrence been correct about the creatures being freaked out by the situation?

Thankfully, when she voiced the question out loud, Gula had a proper answer.

“On most worlds, there are scattered apex predators with vast magic powers. Immense changes like that are usually a sign that anything that draws attention to itself will be torn apart.”

In other words, as far as the “locals” were concerned, something very powerful had intervened, while according to Gula, this was “merely” a cataclysmic natural disaster. It was bad, really bad, in fact, and they already knew that several knock-on effects just waiting to bite them in the ass months or years down the line. But even so, in the here and now, there was no pissed-off malevolent force looking for targets to take its anger out on.

Of course, there were still animals around, they were just very much in hiding.

She wouldn’t have spotted even a tenth of them even a couple of hours previously, but now, her power helpfully highlighted them for her.

It wasn’t a particularly powerful capability just yet, but it was already having an impact.

Right now, she was primarily drawing on the “instincts” portion of the bond. It allowed her to spot opportunities as a badger did, ones she, who was very much a city girl, one-hundred percent would have missed.

There was one small issue, though. The information was also colored by how a badger would see the situation. For example, that snake was apparently venomous but so much she’d be in danger even if it bit her several times. However, it would also be good eating.

Her response to that had been to shudder slightly and internally swear at her power, only for it to slightly shift around the provided information.

Instead of cutting out the crap, it began to explain how the information also applied to her. In her mind, it felt like her power was an overexcited kid trying to show off, going “You, yes you, you can eat that snake too, it’ll taste great, you really should ...” on a freaking loop.

So yes, it seemed her power wouldn’t outright sabotage her by highlighting opportunities that would be fine for a badger but bad for her, but it had absolutely no respect for the fact that she didn’t want to eat snake.

In fact, why on Earth was it constantly focussing on showing her opportunities for food?

That particular question was answered without any proper input on her part, as her stomach growled loudly, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten all day. It had started with Eve not wanting to go to school and her not being able to take the time to eat, instead promising herself to pick up something at a bakery. And then shit had hit the fan and any thought of food had been shoved to the back of her mind.

Thankfully, she’d thought to grab the bag of supplies she normally brought with her on stakeouts when heading out of the precinct and started munching on a cereal bar a moment later as she navigated the car through whatever gap in the trees she could spot.

As she did so, her power’s stubborn insistence to show her everything she could nibble on without dying or getting the runs faded alongside her hunger.

She was more grateful for that than the situation really should have warranted, and she solemnly resolved to eat three meals a day whenever possible, but the last thing she needed was her power extolling the nutritional virtues of rats and cockroaches while she was searching for clues. Not to mention that it might start reminding her that humans were edible while she was in the morgue or at the scene of a murder.

But any real changes to her life as a consequence of her powers would take a while to truly arrive. Right now, the main issue was the jungle she was driving through, something she’d have to deal with for months or years to come.

***

It was strange to see how much London had changed over the course of a few hours. Sometimes, buildings were almost intact, standing within a gap in the treeline, where the jungle that had been slapped atop the city had had a clearing.

In other spots, the buildings had been utterly wrecked, looking like something right out of a post-apocalyptic movie set a hundred years after the death of humanity. Skyscrapers shattered as titanic trees had grown through vital load-bearing structures, bringing down the whole thing while reaching into the skies as if to replace what they’d wrecked.

A particularly impressive and shocking sight was an entire glass front shattered as vines had erupted from the inside, destroying every single pane and covering the ground in front of it in glittering shards.

But what they were missing were humans, mainly the living, but there were also remarkably few dead bodies. Part of that could doubtlessly be explained by dead bodies simply being eaten and those who’d survived being in hiding, but this was the middle of bloody London. There should have been hundreds of thousands caught in the area of transformation.

Right now, she was navigating down what had to have either been a game trail, or a river that hadn’t been properly transferred over. After all, it seemed like bodies of water didn’t swallow the ground to make room for themselves.

But if this was a game trail, what kind of absolute monsters called this jungle home?

For the dozenth time since moving into this alien world, she picked up the heavy-duty radio she’d been given, one that could reach beyond the jungle on its own power, and shared her “scouting data”. It obviously wasn’t much of a report as she’d only covered a tiny part of the forest. But this wasn’t about properly exploring this place, rather, she was here to get an initial overview of what on earth was going on here.

As time passed, the tense silence of looking around, just about ready to jump at the shadows gave way to conversation. Mostly, it was Jaclyn asking for clarification on various topics she hadn’t been able to dig into before rushing in here.

Firstly, she actually wanted to know what Gula was capable of. She clearly felt she was capable of handling herself, but if they wound up in a fight, they’d have to be working together.

It turned out to be very simple. She had the Wandering Spiritcaller Class at E-Rank, which allowed her to summon spirits of monsters as if they were spells, projecting elemental effects. This had further been upgraded at E-Rank, allowing her to summon full spirits and have them act independently. There was a numerical limit, and she hadn’t shared what all her spirits were, but her main ones were a Halcyon, Caladrius, and Tatzelwyrm.

The first’s description sounded like a pint-sized Thunderbird at first, but turned out to have been the kingfisher that was still circling overhead.

The second was Gula’s healer, a glowing white dove-like creature that could absorb sickness, disease, and even injuries from those around itself, though physical damage would be the hardest to remove and rapidly deteriorate the sumon.

And the third was one Gula was unwilling to summon in the car as it was too dangerous. A half-meter-long cat-snake-dragon-thing that apparently had blood so toxic that stabbing it with a spear would cause the toxin to travel through the wood, and kill not only the wielder but anyone in contact with them, up to and including a horse the wielder may be riding on.

So yeah, the Tatzelwyrm was good for dropping on an enemy, but it held ludicrous potential for collateral damage.

That then soon segued into Gula talking about her past, explaining that the Worldstrider Tribe was truly massive, with her group being just a small group of youngsters forming a new subgroup. And while they were mostly E-Rank, the tribe as a whole had mapped out the powers provided by Classes at the higher Ranks.

Well, most of the regular powers. You’d always be offered two options, but extraordinary deeds could grant stronger upgrades and you could even switch to a new Class if your deeds significantly deviated.

For example, Jaclyn’s Anima Monk had two baseline upgrades, Spirit Projection and Transformation Bond, which they wound up discussing at length. They might have known there were creatures out there, but thankfully, the beasties were holding back.

The first power would allow her to project spectral body parts belonging to her bonded animal based on specific movements, which would massively increase her offensive and defensive potential. Claws when attacking, spectral fur when defending, and that was just the start. Not to mention that further down the line, she’d have the chance to pick a second bond and the combination of Spirit Projection and a flying animal would allow her, too, to fly.

In the meanwhile, the second didn’t seem to be for her at all. It did exactly what it said on the tin, it would allow her to either partially or fully transform into her bonded animal. This would under no circumstances weaken her physical strength, even if her bond had been something like a mouse or even a flea, though lacking mass would still rob her punches of power.

In essence, it was the standard werewolf package of powers, perfect for anything at or above the user’s weight class for power and solid for infiltrations when it came to small bonds, such as mice, while also granting the user all biological adaptations and natural weapons their bond held. In other words, it was great for bears and stuff, but not good with honey badgers.

Between their larger-than-life reputation and the fact that they regularly ran off even groups of lions, it was easy to forget that they were only the size of a Jack Russel Terrier. Transforming might have made her tough and dangerous, but it would also make her so tiny that her enemies could literally use her as a football.

Unless he got offered some kind of crazy upgrade when she hit E-Rank, she’d definitely be grabbing Spirit Projection as her power.

And once the conversation about powers ended, they began to switch over to discussing topics closer to traditional small talk.

It was strange having small talk with an orc, Jaclyn reflected. Even meeting one was incredibly weird, but honestly, the previous conversation had been utterly insane. Talking about superpowers and “character progression” should have belonged on a Vs battle board website, not real bloody life.

She slowly made her way towards the Themse, just to see what had happened to it. As it turned out, the river had been completely buried, a mass of dirt not just having replaced the water, but filling the channel to the point where it was level with the street. That wouldn’t last, the river was still flowing outside of the transformed landscape and would, in time, sweep away the blockage, it was only a question of how much flooding there’d be before then.

She reached for her radio to report that and make sure that people could prepare for any issues, but the machine only crackled in her hand before throwing sparks and dying.

Well, that wasn’t good …

She went for her phone next, despite how shitty the cell reception in London had been before a jungle had torn through it. Hopefully, she’d be able to get through to someone, but it didn’t even turn on.

Theoretically, it might have been a coincidence, but if electronics were failing, she needed to get the car out of here. The Husky had mechanical backups for when power steering and the like failed, but she didn’t fancy trying to wrangle this beast through the jungle without electronics. Especially if, no, when, an animal or monster finally figured out there was no apex predator waiting in the wings.

Making her way back out was easy enough, she had a compass on the dash, a solid sense of direction and she’d memorized how she’d gotten in here.

That went well for about five minutes, until she spotted a group of people lying on the ground, looking badly torn up. Were they dead, just injured, or a trap?

She stopped the car and stepped out while drawing her gun from the holster.

“I’m going to check on them, cover my back,” Jaclyn ordered Gula, who only nodded in response.

They advanced slowly, eyes scanning every part of the jungle for an ambush. Something had injured those people.

But nothing appeared … until she bent down to check the first body’s pulse.