The two red arrows grew larger and larger the faster he ran. Xavier felt an urgency he hadn’t in a while. He was getting a strange feeling in his gut. Something was wrong, and he wasn’t sure what.
He ran along a road, one the System appeared to have mostly left intact, though every now and then the road was cut through by a copse of trees or, at one point, a rushing river. Xavier kept pushing forward. The road was taking him exactly where he needed to go.
Auras appeared in the distance. At first, it was just a smattering of them. Then, it was hundreds, thousands, more. He looked at his mini-map. He’d never seen so many red dots in one place, and he hadn’t sensed this many auras since he was facing the Endless Horde. He wasn’t about to stand there and count, but god, this was a lot of invaders.
They might not be invaders. Even people from Earth will appear as enemies until I mark them otherwise.
But that feeling in his gut hadn’t left him.
It didn’t take him long to see the city. There was a massive, somewhat translucent dome surrounding it. It reminded him of that Stephen King book he’d read, the one they’d made into a TV show—Under the Dome. This looked almost exactly like that. Within the dome was a medium sized city, one Xavier didn’t recognise, though he supposed that didn’t matter.
This was clearly the Safe Zone where Howard’s family must be, where the Blood Tracker arrows had taken him, and it was currently absolutely surrounded by enemies.
Why would the invaders surround a Safe Zone? They clearly can’t even enter!
The answer to Xavier’s question came when a notification appeared in his vision. He quickly read it.
Quest Log Update (New Quest Available)
Current Quest: Safe Zone Assault.
A Safe Zone has been constructed to keep everyone in the general area under the age of sixteen protected before they are integrated into the System. These people are currently being taken care of by Denizens from Earth who have chosen support classes, or Denizens who are related to the children within the dome and had the option to join them.
This dome, along with every other Safe Zone dome upon Earth, will collapse in 7 days. As it is surrounded by enemy invaders, everyone within the dome is likely to either be killed or enslaved.
Defeat the invaders surrounding the dome before the Safe Zone collapses to receive a reward.
Xavier bit his lip. This… was a worry. Why was the Safe Zone going to collapse in a week?
Xavier froze, staring at the quest details.
“Oh, no,” he whispered to himself. “This is bad. Very bad.”
It wasn’t the invaders around this Safe Zone that he was worried about. It wouldn’t take him a long time to deal with them—not really. And the fact that he had a whole week? That meant it would be plenty easy—he’d get Howard’s kids, and his wife if she was with them too, back to the base in no time, assuming they were even able to leave the Safe Zone—they might have to wait a week, until the dome came down. He wasn’t sure.
No. It wasn’t the people in this Safe Zone he was worried about—it was the people in every other Safe Zone all around the world.
It was like the System was playing some kind of joke on them. He clenched his fists, feeling an anger at the System that he hadn’t felt in a while. He’d taken this whole apocalypse, integration, all of it, in stride. At least, he liked to think he had. He’d hated the fact that the System had pitted him against another potential Champion from Earth just to get him to the tower… Though he’d come to understand why the System might have done something like that. So people would be forced to show their commitment to their world, to the greater good, by doing something unimaginable—killing someone else that wanted the exact same thing as them.
That didn’t mean he’d ever liked it.
But this? The System took a world, one that it knew invaders could access before the five-year restriction had been lifted, and it created Safe Zones for those people in that world who were most vulnerable… but only for three weeks! As though three weeks would be enough time for anyone outside the domes to make the world safe for those within.
He felt his bones creak with how much he’d been clenching his fists.
He thought he would have more time than this to save the Earth. More than a single week. But it looked as though there was more on his plate than he’d first realised.
As he was standing there, thinking about all of this, another notification appeared.
A challenger will be arriving at your base in one minute. If you are not there to fight them, the task will fall onto the highest-level citizen with the most standing remaining in your camp. This citizen is currently JOHN HAMMOND.
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One minute? Seriously? That’s all the warning you’re going to give me?
There was no way he could leave John Hammond to fight a challenger.
[Ah, Xavier, I just got a notification…] John Hammond said through the Communication stone he’d left the man.
[I’ll be there in a minute—in less than a minute, John. Don’t worry.]
A timer started counting down in the corner of his vision. Xavier’s anger only burned more fiercely. The System was playing with him. Watching him. Treating him and his world like fools. Xavier may have had every advantage, but he was being handed an impossible task—protect as many of his people as possible.
He could always abandon that task. Run off and try to complete every dungeon on Earth instead, and just do everything he could to become more and more powerful…
But he had a duty to these people. There may not be a prophecy about him, but it still felt like he’d been chosen for this. Even if he hadn’t, who else was going to do it?
Whoever this challenger was, they wouldn’t be strong enough to defeat Xavier even without him using spells—he was sure of that. Which was why he wasn’t worried about what he did next.
Xavier cast Soul Strike, pouring every single one of his kept souls into the spell. Pure white lightning shot forth from him in a widening wave toward the enemies surrounding the dome. He didn’t care about negotiating with the invaders. About scoping them out or seeing if they could be reasoned with, or if he could gain information from them. No, all he cared about was seeing them all die.
He watched as the pure white bolts of jagged lightning zigzagged through the air until they shifted, forming countless soul apparitions of monsters, men, women, and elf. The invaders barely had time to turn their heads. From this distance they were nothing more than ants to him.
Even up close, they would be nothing more than ants, to be crushed beneath my boots if they got in my way.
The mass of invaders turned. Tried to run. Xavier watched the red dots on the mini-map shift like a school of fish away from a shark.
Then the red dots began to blink out. They disappeared, swept away.
The Otherworldly Reaper had brought death upon every single invader standing outside of the dome with a single spell.
When Xavier glanced in the corner of his vision, he saw that the timer still had fifty seconds remaining. The anger that had been burning in his chest subsided, and he realised the weight of what he’d just done. The number of lives he’d just taken.
He blinked, took a deep breath and let it out slow. Should he have done that? He hadn’t even bothered to block communications—he’d just wiped them all out.
What if someone had seen that display?
Xavier examined the mini-map. There wasn’t a single red dot left. He couldn’t read the auras within the dome. The barrier would be protecting them. They are all safe. They would have seen what he’d done—or at least the aftermath of it. But who would they tell, in there?
The enemies wouldn’t have had time to communicate anything. They’re all dead.
He cast soul harvest, pulling in the souls of the enemies he’d just slain. Not all of them—he couldn’t fit all of those souls in his reserve yet. There was still time remaining on the countdown, so he pulled out the Basic Viewing Glass and saw a myriad of portals around the Safe Zone city.
I’ll have to clear those out later.
The five-mile Portal Block item wouldn’t be able to cover such a distance—his Soul Strike had a wider range than it, and apparently so did his Aura Sight, something he hadn’t realised.
My mini-map’s expanded…
Xavier shook his head. He was wasting time. He summoned the portal back to his base and stepped straight through it.
At least that’s one Safe Zone I’ve protected.
As he stepped out of the portal on the other side, he received a notification—he’d completed the quest.
~
Alistair Reed had followed Commander Flinders and his contingent of invaders to the Safe Zone. They’d stepped through a portal—Alistair’s first time ever doing something like that. It was a little bit disorientating. He’d taken one step and moved countless lightyears away, all the way to whatever world this man had inhabited before invading Earth, then they’d walked to another portal in the middle of a large field and stepped straight through it, returning to Earth—just another place on Earth.
It seemed counterintuitive, travelling to another world, another solar system, to get somewhere faster back on Earth.
But Alistair wasn’t about to complain. He was just glad he’d been able to convince this man that Xavier was a threat. A threat that needed to be dealt with immediately.
Once Xavier is dead, I’ll be the strongest Denizen on Earth. I can kill Commander Flinders and everyone who serves under him, then move on…
He wasn’t sure exactly what trap the man had in mind. It had something to do with an item he held within his hand. What he was clear on was the fact that this man wanted to take Xavier off of this world.
On another world, Xavier Collins would be nothing. He would be child’s play to kill for someone of a higher grade. Flinders said any E Grade would be able to destroy him. That thought was worrying to Alistair. A part of him had known that he wasn’t strong compared to others in the Greater Universe. That this world was just getting started, while the Greater Universe had apparently been around since roughly the beginning of time…
I guess that’s why the System is giving us five years to get started.
An army of invaders surrounded the Safe Zone when they arrived. Alistair followed Flinders and his soldiers into a camp close to the barrier dome.
Alistair bit the inside of his cheek, making it bleed. He was feeling nervous. He didn’t like being surrounded by this many enemies of Earth. He was sure he could have killed Commander Flinders and all of his men—he’d killed a fair few of them trying to talk to Flinders in the first place—but this was beginning to get a bit overwhelming.
He didn’t like the habit of biting the inside of his cheek. When he’d been nothing more than a normal human, he’d had scars that had built up overtime inside his mouth from doing it so often, but it was a nervous habit that didn’t show the world what he was feeling, and he clung to it.
Alistair was also feeling worried about Xavier. Being here, this close to the dome barrier… it felt like too much of a risk.
“We need to get out of here,” Alistair said. “We can’t be close when he arrives.”
Commander Flinders glanced at him. Alistair saw disdain in his eyes. But the man didn’t argue. He still saw Alistair as an asset—Alistair would be the bait, in the end, after all. That, he knew, was part of the plan.
“Agreed,” Commander Flinders said after a pause. “This isn’t the trap—this is a scouting mission.” He nodded to their destination, then got moving at a run, his soldiers trailing behind.
Alistair Shadow Stepped, teleporting past the man to the line of trees he’d indicated. When he reached it, he was well ahead of Flinders and the others. He crossed his arms, tapping his foot impatiently as he waited. When the others finally arrived, Flinders had the soldiers construct a camouflaged hideout, one that prevented the observation of auras. He also put down a few defences—mental and otherwise—to ensure Xavier wouldn’t break through it and control their minds.
He won’t even know we’re here.
It was in that hideout that Alistair Reed, Commander Flinders, and the soldiers under the man’s command, had watched the thousands upon thousands of invaders surrounding the Safe Zone’s barrier dome get decimated in a matter of seconds.
Alistair stared over at Commander Flinders. The man looked pale. Pale as death.
“I think we’re going to need a bigger trap,” Flinders said, his voice barely above a whisper.