More than 11 months later.
Status: Name Kevin Moses
Points: 94,309
Race: Human
Age: 35
Stats: Strength: 147
Endurance: 124
Recovery: 84
Soul: 20
Abilities: 5/7
Soul Tracker
Ki Cultivator Earth Tier (Middle)
Basic Shield Mastery (4/5)
Basic Axe Mastery (4/5)
Ceaseless Mind
Kevin was a man transformed. It had been nearly a year since he was first brought to the first layer of the mystical seven layers. Before entering the layers, he had found himself floating in a weird fog-scape utilizing the mysterious Shop for the first time.
Plagued by fears of finding and helping his families, Kevin selected Soul Tracker, an ability that would help him find his loved ones and, as it turned out, help him find certain monsters. Weighed down by a desire to protect his family once he found them, he selected a shield mastery ability. Riding on the backs of countless fantasy stories, Kevin also acquired Ki Cultivator, and a weapon mastery to greatly increase his combat effectiveness.
After months of being in the first layer, struggling and slogging through meditative techniques in an attempt to improve his Ki Cultivation, Kevin opened the Shop in search of an ability. Kevin found “Ceaseless Mind,” an ability that improved his cognitive ability, helped him think faster, and best of all, allowed him to perfectly recall any memory he ever had. In his past he had practiced some meditative techniques, his hope was that perfect recall would make it easier to make progress. In reality, Kevin wanted the perfect recall for a much more shameful reason.
Kevin was forgetting what his family looked like. Not the big stuff, obviously he could remember the big stuff. But Kevin could recall the exact shade of his wife’s beautiful brown eyes. He couldn’t recall if his 9 year old had a scar on her left arm or her right from when she was little and fell. He couldn’t remember the favorite color of his 12 year old.
Kevin selected Ceaseless mind. He spent two full days just going over his memories, weeping at the details he had forgotten. The time his youngest had interrupted her own sentence of what she wanted for dinner to point out the cows in the field as they drove by. The time his twelve year old made him laugh so hard he fell over telling jokes about weird food textures.
When Kevin first arrived here, he had been overweight, and out of shape. He had relied on wood splitting techniques and old military training from a decade ago to get by.
Now he was thick and stocky, muscular and fit. He more closely resembled a professional jock than the desk jockey he had been. He’d even grown enough to get him back over the 6 foot mark as his back health improved and decompressed. His understanding was deeper and his techniques developed.
Kevin got up as he had every day for the last 360 days. He used Light Heavy, an ability he had, to work out almost as hard as Light Heavy became too weak to keep up with his increasingly strong body. Kevin discovered that each 10 points of strength increase was equivalent to one average person's strength. This meant that his current strength stat of 147 put his strength at almost 15 times stronger than the average person, 10 times stronger than he was from before.
This huge increase in strength would have been totally infeasible, even with Ki Cultivator rapidly increasing how fast he could improve himself, except that his Strength Vambrace allowed him to increase those gains multiplicatively at the cost of additional energy and strain. Ki Cultivator took the maximum’s a human could reach out and Kevin’s intense training let him push boundaries. Kevin had stopped training like a human with super powers and had started training like a superhuman.
Obviously, by this point, the 100 lbs dumbbells were wildly too light for almost any exercise. With Light Heavy, he was able to increase the weight of objects by almost 100 times. He was even better at reducing item weights. Fortunately, compared to other abilities, Light Heavy was efficient on energy and really easy to keep activated for long periods of time.
After his workout, protein recovery potion, low-tier healing pill and shower, he sent out pings with his Soul Tracker ability. He checked his children, wife, mother and siblings, each were absent from his senses. Next he sent out a ping for golden morankai. That also came back empty from his senses. Kevin sighed. He had eliminated a golden morankai yesterday, and they didn’t spawn every day. Kevin had averaged three, infrequently four, golden morankai each week for 11 months. The amount of points he had obtained was immense, each golden morankai giving between 10,000 and 20,000 points, though averaging toward the lower end of the range.
Kevin felt a little bad for keeping the secret of golden morankai for himself, but to be fair, the group increased to 74 people when Cameron’s group found a small group on the opposite side of the city. The points he had managed to acquire would not have gone far if they had to split it so many ways. So, he was generous with healing pills and other consumables to help the group, as well as some cheaper gear.
He also did some research into an effective recovery potion that helped recover energy and stamina and , as well as adding to stamina recovery for a few hours after taking the potion. That research would have been impossible without Kevin’s extra points.
Kevin adjusted the rings he wore on his left hand. One was a special spatial ring that held his Black Diamond plate armor for 84,000 points. The other a spatial ring for a matching Black Diamond kite shield, 82,000 points. On his other hand he had an expensive mid-tier special ring for more than 20,000 points.
He threw his pancho on over his athletic spandex clothes and went to the roof. Nessar wasn’t doing his round yet so Kevin started circling the building searching for threats. He found a morankai climbing up the outside building much as he had those months ago. He tapped his ring and withdrew a Red Orc compound bow and a heavy target arrow. He drew and fired. The morankai fell.
--- Points Obtained: Points 11 ---
Kevin continued walking the building as people started filtering up to the roof. Soon Cameron joined him. He, like Kevin, looked better today than when he first arrived.
“Kevin, how has the day treated you so far?” Cameron asked as he approached.
“Well enough Cameron. How are the people?” Kevin asked.
We are coming along.” Cameron replied in a daily ritual the pair had fulfilled with the same consistency as Kevin’s workouts.
“Do you know if Jerod will be out of his rooms today?” Kevin asked Cameron. Jerod was a necromancer that the shop titled “Necrozark” for one reason or the other. He could animate dead morankai, even making Frankensteinian monsters by combining corpse parts. It was … well a bit grotesque but with the small army of morankai that Jerod had collected, their little community was quite a lot safer.
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“He, as he usually does, is taking the night watch. Ah, you have some good abnormals for him?” Cameron asked in his gravelly voice.
“Some.” Kevin replied. “Yesterday there was one that was almost 8 feet tall with blue skin. On top of being abnormally strong and fast, it could also run full speed on the ceiling. It was eerie as hell.”
“What mechanism do you think it used to do this?” Cameron asked, likely considering his own abilities.
“Hard to say really, I think it was more of a Spiderman situation rather than a ‘Cameron master of gravity,’ situation.” Kevin said.
“Psha.” Cameron said. “I’m sure Jarod will be happy to see you, you always bring him the best specimen’s. I’ll go over to his skyscraper and see if he is coming up today.”
“Oh don’t trouble yourself Grandfather, they are in my backpack, they can wait a month as easily as they can a day.” Kevin said, referring to the preserving quality of the storage space. “Besides, he took night watch last night too, I’m sure he’s sleeping.”
“Oh fine fine,” the older man said with a chuckle before taking on a somber tone. “You know tomorrow is a year here right?” Cameron said.
“Yeah.” Kevin said, a morose timbre entering his own voice before it broke just a bit. “Are you worried yet?”
“To be honest,” Cameron said, “Yes. I’m sure you noticed it. The morankai are spawning in greater numbers, adventuring up the buildings more. We haven’t lost anyone in a long time but not everyone can handle an abnormal and those are getting more common too. We have been in the center of this city for months, we’ve looked everywhere, even going to the ground floor and there is no sign of an exit. If this isn’t the only cluster of skyscrapers, then how do we get to the center.”
“Right.” Kevin said, remembering the only time anyone tried to cross the grasslands. Half the group had journeyed to the edge of the city to watch Lee, the martial arts instructor, try.
Lee had an irregular number of points when he entered the first layer. Hundreds of thousands of points. He had moved himself directly to Earth Tier for cultivation, Basic sword mastery and an ability that gave him some control of the ground. Normally that would have been a very helpful power, but in the concrete jungle, much less so. Lee, as the strongest member of the group and wanting to actually test his stone abilities, had stepped out of the sharply contrasted city onto the open grass field that surrounded it.
Every single morankai nearby immediately went ‘World War Z’ and came after Lee, including a number of powerful abnormals. If it hadn’t been for Cameron, Nessar, Kevin and several other powerhouses of the city cluster, Lee probably would have died immediately.
Even using the nearby skyscraper to beat a punishing tactical retreat up the stairwell, it has been a near thing to get out of there alive. After they climbed back down to ground floor they verified that most of the morankai were gone from the immediate area. However, the moment Lee stepped foot on the grass, morankai poured out of the surrounding buildings, buildings that had been empty.
Lee decided to leg it into the grass, which got taller and taller. Soon he was wading through it like water, tangling him up as the stalks refused to break. Then, the grass practically engulfed him. He used stone shaping abilities to pull himself up out of the grass but by then the pack of, fortunately, normal morankai were on him. Cameron went and collected him himself and that time the group ran rather than fought.
No one had dared try that again since.
“Even with the gains we’ve made these last few months, I don’t think any of us are nearly strong enough to walk out of this city.” Kevin said.
“Even if we could, we don’t even know which direction is to the center and which direction is oblivion.” Cameron said. “For now we just keep fighting, keep growing. We all have Ki Cultivator now, and most of us have a weapon mastery. We will continue to grow and hope we grow fast enough.”
Kevin nodded. He considered telling Cameron about the golden morankai then, it could be a big boon to everyone in the city, but Kevin was waiting, just as everyone was. They all felt like a shoe was about to drop. Kevin wanted to know what that shoe was before he shared his secret.
The day passed normally, with Kevin leading a hunting party after training in the morning. He took nine people out with him and the group took turns culling morankai and point farming. They worked as a unit and cleared out skyscraper after skyscraper, wracking up a reasonable number of points each.
Kevin only had to step in once when one member attempted to solo an abnormal with a cry that made you drowsy like a fucking jigglypuff. Kevin’s constitution combined with Ceaseless Mind let him push the foreign influence away better than the group member so Kevin broke its jaw.
He kept the abnormal unbalanced long enough for the young man, a 20 something named Ricky, to recover, kill it and take the points.
After the hunting party got back, Kevin did his second training routine, one entirely focused on acrobatics and extreme martial arts techniques. Kevin was superhuman after all, some of the forms, styles and techniques involved in these extreme styles, though ineffective with human levels of strength, against human opponents, were perfect with superhuman strength and the zombie-like morankai, especially the abnormals.
After this training, Kevin went out alone and culled several other skyscrapers worth of morankai, including a short bout on the ground floor to gather up a whole bunch of them at once. With Kevin’s advantages and abilities, he could easily handle twenty or thirty of the creatures at a time if he withdrew tactically or had a terrain advantage, he could handle many many more if than that if he could bottleneck them in the stairwells. Methods like that are how he had convinced his group that he was earning points in the regular fashion for the gear he had.
To be fair, he had killed a truly ridiculous number of creatures and earned a truly ridiculous number of points, even more so if you didn’t ignore the points earned from the golden morankai.
Kevin stayed out, culling the morankai by the dozens, including a number or abnormal morankai, until the sun set and even a short time after. The night was overcast when he returned to the roofs, somewhat uncommon but not unheard of weather. He headed back to the center of the city, where the group had setup in one of the center most skyscrapers.
It was the most dangerous territory in terms of the number of morankai that spawned, but the group was full of veterans at this point. None of them would sweat a single morankai, most wouldn’t even care about having to fight two. As Kevin approached he saw the sentries that were always posted around the central skyscraper. Jerod’s necrozarked morankia. A pair stood motionless on each bridge to the tower, two more on the balcony a few floors down, and Kevin knew two more would be in each stairwell.
The sentries let Kevin pass and step onto the tower. He saw Jerod sitting in a comfortable looking lawn chair with a fire cracking away merrily right on the roof of the skyscraper. Jerod was a freshly 30 year old man, chocolate skin on a slender frame. His exceptional height and long arms probably would have made him a shoe-in for any basketball team in high school, but his temperament was much more of “I am the the Night” than “night out on the town” despite the sunglasses that he wore literally at night.
Kevin walked up to Jerod, bought a few stacks of firewood from the shop for a couple dozen points. “Evening Jerod.” Kevin said.
Jerod nodded at Kevin’s offering of fire wood. “Hello Kevin.” Jerod said in a pretty melodious voice, somewhat at odds compared to his sunglasses at night, leather trench coat over literal chainmail look. “Cameron said you were looking for me?”
“Yeah, I had a few abnormals for you, actually I have a few more now too, I got a good one with the hunting party, lets out a cry that makes folks sleepy.” Kevin said with a bit of a smirk.
“Like a fucking jigglypuff?” Jerod answered.
“That’s exactly what I thought,” Kevin said, letting some of the humor fill his voice. “Anyway yeah, got five or six of them in here now.” Kevin said gesturing to the storage backpack he carried around like airport luggage.
“Oh nice. I think if I get some compatible ones, I can make a pretty exciting puzzle.”
“Puzzle” was the word Jerod used to describe the Frankensteinian monsters he pulled apart and stitched together. One of those monsters was on the bridge Kevin had crossed. It took the powerful body of one abnormal, combined with the head, neck, esophagus, and stomach of another resulting in a creepy creature that was physically more powerful than normal but also had some sort of weird acid breath attack.
“You still trying to get that four armed golem monster to work?” Kevin asked.
“Yeah. I’m near a breakthrough, I just know it.” Jerod said, getting a far off expression about his face despite Kevin not being able to see his eyes.
Jerod pulled out another seat from a storage ring and Kevin sat down for a while. They discussed their progress through various powers trying to guess at how much farther they could push individual abilities. Ki Cultivator and weapon masteries were quantifiable when it came to what improvements you made. The other abilities were less so.
After a time Kevin stood and stretched, eager to get back to his room and meditate to consolidate the day’s gains.
“Anyway,” he said as he stored the chair back in his ring, “Want to leave that with me and I’ll bring it back to you tomorrow?” Jerod said, indicating the backpack.
“Sure,” Kevin replied. “Do you want me to do a sweep of the lower levels tonight or do you want your goons to handle it?”
“Hm. No it’s fine, let the squad handle it.” Jarod said after a brief consideration, “I could use the points and practice.”
“Kevin nodded and waved and walked back to his room for his nightly meditation.”