Jake decided to fuse his motorcycle with the beat-up minivan, the "Sloppy Joe."Not that he wouldn't have preferred something nicer, but fusion came with two hard rules that couldn't be bent.Rule one: the mass difference between the two vehicles couldn't be too extreme. The known ceiling was roughly double.His bike weighed close to nine hundred pounds, which meant the absolute max he could pair it with topped out around eighteen hundred.No minimum requirement, technically. He could've fused it with a beat-up bicycle weighing next to nothing if he really wanted to, but the resulting upgrade would be laughably small. Only an idiot would waste a fusion card that way.Rule two: he needed full legal control over the vehicle, meaning he had to physically have the keys to at least one of the two. It wasn't as simple as walking up to any two random cars and claiming them.Plenty of people in the Caravan without a vehicle of their own dreamed of stumbling onto a car with keys still in it, b

Jake had just finished loading his haul into the minivan and was heading back into the shop for another pass when a sudden wave of dread washed over him, like something massive was closing in.He couldn't pin down the source, but he froze mid-step, scanning every direction.If a real Anomaly or a horde of infected were lurking nearby, they'd have already torn through the village by now. Why wait until this exact moment?Something was off, he just couldn't tell what.He'd considered the possibility it was all in his head. But the feeling kept intensifying instead, growing sharper by the second."...Perception?"Perception was a strange stat. Stay distracted on a task, and its warnings were easy to miss entirely. But once you actually noticed it, once a shred of doubt crept in, the signal kept ramping up fast.Jake backed off a few steps, pressed against the van door, and shouted toward the shop where the others were still scavenging. "Hey, anyone else feel like something's wrong?"Nobo

If the story had stopped there, it wouldn't have been anything worth remembering. The real twist came after.Once the divorce went through, the husband hadn't even been that angry at first, right up until he found out the woman's new husband was the exact same guy who'd whispered in his ear about her refusing to pay for his rescue.And it turned out that same guy had also been the one quietly pushing her toward the divorce in the first place.Once that clicked, there was no missing what kind of game he'd been running.Both of them were furious. The woman regretted the whole thing on the spot, cursing the man out for being a snake.Her new husband wasn't backing down easy either, fine, call it off, but the bride price was coming back first.Jake blinked. "There was an actual bride price? Even now?"Nikki grinned. "Yep. Heard he handed over a weapon card as the dowry.""So did they give it back?""Not a chance. The ex and his ex-wife are refusing to return it *and* demanding he pay them

With the fusion finished, Nikki said a quick goodbye to Jake, practically dragging Sierra back toward the vehicle to inspect every inch of their upgrade.The vehicle didn't look small from outside, sure, but stepping inside made it obvious the interior ran far more spacious than the exterior suggested.That was the origin card effect at work.Like fusion cards, origin cards fell under the rare-card category. Their whole value came from granting a vehicle special baseline traits.Some boosted overall structural strength. Others added speed. Some cut fuel consumption. All kinds of effects, depending on the card.Nikki and Sierra had used a Space Expansion origin card on their vehicle, with that boost active, the interior volume had grown by a full thirty percent over what the shell suggested....Elsewhere, two men were asking around for help lifting a van, propping it up on bricks and stone to swap out the tires.These two counted as another lucky pair who'd landed a working vehicle, n

Zach didn't have a shotgun in hand and figured Jake just didn't trust him enough to hand one over.Fair enough, really. In this kind of chaos, Zach probably wouldn't have trusted a stranger with a weapon either.Truth was, Jake had switched seats purely because driving would've cost him valuable shooting time.Crows could drop cards too, lower odds than a full-sized humanoid infected, sure, but with a swarm numbering in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, the raw volume more than made up for the weaker drop rate.Even a rare card wasn't out of the question in a swarm this size."Open the door, let me in!""Help! They're right on top of us!"...Watching Zach climb into Jake's van, several more quilt-wrapped stragglers rushed over, assuming Jake was an easy mark. They started pounding on the doors, demanding entry without even offering a reward in return.Jake didn't spare them a glance. "Drive. Stay tight with the group ahead."Jake wasn't in the charity business. Early on, sure,