Bodega Cat (System Apocalypse, Deck Builder, Litrpg)

"God you're so sexy when you yell at the guild to do shit."

"Well it's not my fault. They're all fucking lazing about and it's two minutes till the Bell. I wonder what fresh hell the system has in store for us." Ashley patted the bullhorn on her hip, a gift from the New York finest precinct number seventeen

Though they could potentially do this themselves, it was easier for them to delegate the power to clear some of the mobs.

The guild itself that was more and more becoming like a militia with nearly one hundred six-person squads ready to break off into sections.

They all had assigned sections. However everyone was a bit biased in where they wanted to work. They wanted their building and block to be secured first. This made it difficult, more akin to herding lizards than anything else.

But they had signed the guild charter. If their apartment building was inside of the guild zone of protection, then their place would be safe.

"You got enough people grumbling about not being able to secure their apartments?" Kate said.

"It's like they're not trying to help their neighbors. Yeah keep running you."

The party ran down the street as Ashley yelled curses.

"They need to do their jobs," she whispered. "We made a plan for a reason."

The plan was to start from the center, and work their way out. This meant that they were all stationed on the edge of the safe zone, and a lot of people that have lived nearby were standing on the 2nd avenue walkway and the 45th Street walkway. Walkway where it was just jam-packed full of humans bring out their decks.

"It might not be alright. But you did everything you could," Kate said.

They wanted to encourage people to actually use their decks. I wonder what's going to show up. Chances were that the ante would be raised and that was when the message came across loud and clear.

"As a consolation prize?" Bagel said. "They don't understand what that even is."

There was a difference between the original pizza rat and what had now spawned all over the place. Yes, they had a similar color pattern but this one looks like the beefed-up version of the pizza rat. It had evolved and gotten stronger. Bagel already wanted to sell one. What did it matter if the market was about to be flooded?

So when the first one was spawned right on time. He took Swift action with all four of his summons attacking at the same time and dispatched it.

Janet hit them high and his cooks and worker slammed into the new mob.

That gave him exactly what he needed. The card floated up onto the dead mob and his worker brought it over for his inspection.

---

What got his goat was that killing one now provided him with two cards. That was two cards where the pizza at and the pizza wrote an up unusual size. And it looks like he could play the pizza rodent of unusual size on top of another pizza rat getting more comb but he would have to have more energy available and the electric type. That was fine as he had perks for that.

What he did not have was any other similar cards. Every other creature that he had could be played on its own. This one required another card to evolve or upgrade from.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"Oh you got two cards instead of one? The game done changed on us," Kate said. " Can I see that? Okay so it looks like it is an evolution of the first one. It's more deadly. Okay, Wow."

Kate passed the cards to Ashley. " But yeah this is going to change everything. I've only got so many cards I can put in my deck and alcohol and the more powerful card. I'm going to have to put this one and that one but if I don't draw the first one before I draw the second one? The deck building website is going to go crazy about this."

Second avenue did not have a car in sight for the first time and it seemed like the street lights no longer served a purpose. They'd gone all the way down a block away to forty fourth street to do this right in the outside of the safe zone.

The mob was not that much more difficult, but it took two of theirs to take it down. Not only that, when it died, he got two credits instead of one meaning that this was going to be to be more valuable.

"If they're going to send us these then it'll be faster for us to buy up land, but I think that the land is going to become more expensive," Bagel said.

"Are they scaling the difficulty?" Ashley said.

It was an unspoken problem that the government had not figured out yet. The city needed to buy the land back from the system but every piece cost something. The hope was that the growth of each block of land would not increase that much. It has only been twelve days and the system was effectively doubling the reward, even as it made the mobs harder.

"Are they that much harder?" Kate said.

Bagel considered it. No they were not. "Not especially."

"So does the system want us to win or not?" Kate said.

"It insists upon itself," Ashley said. "It has to. There is no other way. But wait... If we buy up all of the land here... Eventually they won't be able to spawn anything, right?"

"We're going to need to run more dungeons," Kate said.

"Of course you both would say that," Bagel said. "Ashley?"

She turned to face him.

"I need more investors."

"On it."

---

After the tension of the twelfth day coming and going Bagel finally felt like he had time to work with Meatball one on one. With the newer cards coming up, she would have more options earlier than him.

"How are you feeling about it?" He said.

"This is all so much. Like I want to help out but only one of those dungeons was as easy as the ones from the begining apparently."

No one. I taught Bagel how to become a cat and he didn't think he was going to teach her how to become a cat. What he could teach her, how to do would be how to be a merchant or how to work in this society that the crazy humans had constructed around them.

"So they just do this thing where they dance around the issue and they don't do it but then they expect us to be straightforward," Meatball said. "Or... they have these great ideas and they don't follow through?"

"Exactly like who would want to have a great idea and then not follow through. So you're going to take the evolution cards?" It was more of a formality than anything else, the fact that she had a pizza rack-based electric deck already meant that any cards that worked well in that context would be good to her.

"I'm going to put two of them in there to see how it works. I still have six Pizza rat cards, but the uh design on these new ones is slightly different. It's like two different humans made them separately."

Bagel didn't have a background in design or anything like that. He just understood that someone had a job behind it. Artwork? That was something he could chase after when things finally settled.

"So the humans are going further afield now," Meatballs said. "They were talking about going someplace called New Jersey? And another place called Brooklyn?"

Bagel had heard of these places before. That didn't mean he knew anything about them but...

"They're heading out that far? That's not even a new neighborhood. That's like a whole different borough."

"Well after the announcement, a lot of the humans were griping about... Well a lot of shit."

It was kind of the natural condition of humans to bitch about things that they couldn't change. They also bitched about things they could change and everything in between, which meant that if they weren't pleasantly in conversation then chances were that they were complaining about something. Bagel could guarantee that people would complain about the TSA if they knew what was going on.

"How is the TSA going?" Meatball asked.

"We are about to wrap around the corner or..." He started. "You want in don't you?"

Meatball smiled. "Well, if I am going to do something with your credits I might as well keep it within the family."

" The humans are going to feed you no matter what you do, so don't feel like you're obligated to help us out in some way."

"Oh I know. And I appreciate you. I definitely appreciate them."

"Just because we made you a deck bearer, it doesn't mean that you have to do what I say or what jelly side layer says. You can do what you will."

"I'm not doing this out of obligation Bagel. I'm doing this because I want to."

It was the right answer and Bagel knew that they had done the right thing.

"You know with these guys now dropping two cards at once we could just as easily make more awakened cats just by killing five more mobs. It remains to be seen if every place is like this, but there's a strong possibility that it could be."

What he left and said was that jelly's side layer was now actively looking to recruit new unawakened cats and turned them into awakened ones but he was help in the efforts? Or were they trying to get more cats to work for them?

"So you've been alive for two days? Why do you think that jellyside layer is so focused on awakening? More cats and the possibility now that they could do it again and again."

Meatball put her front paws down and lowered her torso in the let's play position.

Never one to say no, Bagel summoned Janet to perform the normal laser chasing act.

"You know what? We've got lasers to Chase."

He thought better when he was a little worn out from chasing lasers all over the place. It felt good to him. Playing games with another cat felt right.

He couldn't help but smile at how she was just a little bit faster on some of them when he was clearly tired. That didn't mean it felt any less competitive. It just meant that he would get her the next time.

That life from before the system arrived. It felt so old and unfamiliar. He couldn't even imagine another day without the system and all the little things that had changed in his life. Heck, just being able to express himself verbally to humans and other cats was such a gift.

They played for about ten minutes before things died down.

"So what are we going to do about these evolution cards or what is it stage one cards?" Meatball said.

"We? I thought you were just free loading here. I mean I guess we're going to sell them, but should we sell them as a package? Sell both cards for two credits instead of one card on its own for One credit? The market kind of collapsed on these and I'm going to need to figure out a way to get cars from other boroughs and neighborhoods now."

He really wanted to see if the opossum dragon card had a second stage. According to Janet, not every card had gotten the second stage evolution upgrade for people's decks. In some cases, the cards that had come from the mobs had changed and in a lot of cases, the mobs had changed.

It was far too soon to check.

Janet had been monitoring social media friends about it and trying to give him a better insight to what the humans were saying in aggregate. Things had changed and not all for the good. The adventure is guilt was now pushing to train more professionally and send people out further and further afield so that they could create a larger, safe zone with the eventual goal of leaving only specific pockets for card activities.

"You know Janet got a message about potentially leaving the area south of the United Nations undeveloped as it is to be a Monster refuge?"

"These humans are just trying to push their problems off into other people."

"Well could you blame them? They don't even have enough time to run their TSA."