Walking down the silent street, Dominic could practically feel the hidden eyes on his person. These eyes belonged to both humans and monsters, though he was sure that there were more monsters than humans among them.
When he sensed these gazes, he would stop and walk towards the house from which he felt the gaze emanating, regardless of whether it seemed dangerous or not. In the first house where he did this, located 6 lots away to the east, he found a bunch of mutated rodents.
These rodents had once been hamsters, probably the pets of some soft-hearted child. Now, they had turned into ugly, couch-sized beasts that had practically gnawed on everything in the house once they were done with their owner.
Dominic realized his first mistake when he entered the house – he hadn't prepared a melee weapon. While he could use the pistols, after a short bout with the hamsters, he realized his current strength was enough to deal with them.
He had to use the environment as a weapon and picked up any hard object he could find to smash the monsters on the head as they shrieked and continually pounced at him, to which he easily dodged.
In the midst of combat, Dominic understood the value and changes in his stats and his body even more. Acuity made it such that he could easily gauge the intentions and movements of the hamsters, almost like an adult watching a toddler waddle over to strike them – you can easily dodge something as clumsy as that.
Potency, on the other hand, gave him the physical capability to move according to his thoughts. As for Vitality, it mostly ensured he wouldn't get tired while exerting himself like this.
Dominic beat the three large hamsters to death, two brown and one white, watching their twitching corpses and empty black eyes that showed nothing of their thoughts. However, he was tired, sweaty, and frankly quite annoyed.
He wished he had a baseball bat or a cudgel to make the most of his strength. As for swords, spears, or those fancy weapons, Dominic wasn't that far gone into fantasy. He had been to a museum before and actually held a sword, and the first thing that went through his head back then was not 'cool!' but 'how the heck do people fight with this?' because those things weighed a LOT.
Besides, they required a little something called training to become proficient at, something which Dominic did not have at the moment. So the best thing would be a blunt weapon that required nothing but 'smash.'
Dominic searched the current house he was in and, as fate would have it, he found a pretty good baseball bat. There were actually three of them, and Dominic took all three, one for himself and two for his death clones.
Unfortunately, there was some difficulty in moving the bats since they couldn't fit into his backpack, so he simply strapped them across his back like he was some anime swordsman. Amused by his look, Dominic checked the system and saw that he had gained 150 soul points in total as the three hamsters were rated as F-minus in rank.
That was only slightly less than 1/3rd of his current bar for 15 minutes of work, which was not ideal. Anyway, with the bats now, things should move quicker.
And move quicker they did. In the next house Dominic rudely barged into, he encountered what would likely be a modern horror story. The previous owner had been an elderly woman who had adopted many cats and often dressed up her 'fur babies'.
Naturally, upon mutation, those fur babies paid her back for all the love she showed them by mauling her slowly and horribly. Now, the seven or so cats of different breeds occupied different parts of the house and were hostile towards each other.
With the advent of an intruder named Dominic, the cats finally had a place to vent their tension and made sure Dominic felt it. Their speed was something that Dominic could barely keep up with, and their claws were like sharp knives.
He immediately called out his death clones, and the three opened fire without bothering to act pretentious by using the bats. The battle this time was even shorter but far bloodier as Dominic's clothes were now almost rags, and his entire body was covered in cuts that bled.
As he sat in the bathroom upstairs and washed his wounds while his death clones applied first aid from a kit they found in the storeroom, Dominic decided not to hold back anymore. He had not used guns on the hamsters because he felt it would be a waste and wanted to train his skills.
To be honest, the young man had become slightly arrogant after feeling his power grow. In his mind, he could kill that first cat and the giant pitbull with half the stats he had now, so nothing should be able to challenge him among domestic mutated monsters.
His fight with the hamsters only proved him right, which was why he entered this den so arrogantly. In fact, he was not wrong, but he was not wise either. He should have come in with his death clones from the start and opened fire immediately rather than wielding the bat and expecting to take them all down.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Well, the good news was that he gained 600 soul points from this fight as all the cats were at the F rank, neither plus nor minus, so he got 100 for each. This completed one revolution and gave him the chance to allocate one point.
Dominic almost added it to Vitality, but he calmed down and placed it in Acuity. Maybe if he had more sense, he wouldn't have forgotten to get a melee weapon or walked in there like he was Chuck Norris.
[Participant Name: Dominic Addison
World: Gaia
Talent: Death Clones (A Grade - 2 Clones)
Potency: 4.8
Vitality: 1.6
Acuity: 2.5 -> 3.5
Available Points: 0
Soul Points: 350/700.]
Dominic instantly clutched his head as his veins throbbed in his temples, and his scalp seemed to visibly move as if his brain was expanding and contracting within. He remained seated while gritting his teeth because his brain was indeed doing just that, rapidly expanding and compressing its mass, becoming denser and heavier.
When it came to an end, he wiped the blood from his nose and washed his face to clear the blood that came from his eyes in the form of tears. However, the results were out, and his thinking had greatly increased compared to before.
What made him unhappy was that he didn't feel any wiser, but then he understood that wisdom came from experience and application, rather than raw intelligence. The best he could do was make use of his enhanced thinking capacity to consider more things in each situation.
He had a short snack by chewing a chocolate bar from his bag. He would have liked to plunder the pantry in this house to save his own resources, but those nine cats were still cats, and their greed was endless.
They had thoroughly raided the entire pantry and ruined everything, leaving half-eaten wrappers, opened sacks of flour that were on the floor, wasted rice, while the perishable goods in the fridge were toyed with.
Dominic left and walked along for a while, eventually pausing due to surprise and suspicion. He found that the next few houses seemed to be devoid of life, both monster and human. This made him vigilant until he reached the street where the store was located, and he seemed to understand.
The store had become a fortress under siege, with the defenders being a group of humans who had locked the windows as well as the entrances on the lower floors and taken to the rooftop to defend their lives. The attackers were a mishmash group of monsters from different breeds that completely surrounded the area.
Dominic stood at the end of the street with a curious expression, wondering how the humans had held up so long against these numbers. Even if they took shifts for some to rest and others to keep watch, how did they maintain order amongst themselves?
However, as Dominic stood by and watched, he received some answers in the form of actions. Some of the monsters, which were formerly household pets or neighborhood critters, became impatient and surged forward but were met with fireballs, ice spikes, water whips, and the like.
It was then that Dominic remembered that every human had been given one free random talent, and that he was not some special individual in the apocalypse, though his talent was admittedly quite good.
In fact, as he watched the light show, he realized that these talents were likely not above D or C rank. It was not that he was a professional, but rather that their effectiveness was limited. The blasts had poor range, poor firepower, and could not kill on contact, only injure.
Compared to his A Rank Death Clones who could beat monsters to death even with half his stats, Dominic felt that these powers were significantly weaker. However, if given enough time, the users could develop stronger ways to use them, especially as their stats grew.
And that was the problem, wasn't it? Given enough time, anyone would be able to grow into a powerhouse, but the setting and suddenness of everything made it a struggle to secure breathing space for such a thing.
Dominic also noticed that the monsters were still moving in slowly. After likely more than a day of being repelled by these attacks, they seemed to have realized the growth of fatality within their ranks and were beginning to test the bottom line of the defenders.
If they couldn't pull something significant out soon, they would be crushed to death by the monsters outside.
Dominic was interested in watching, but he did not want to be reactive anymore. As such, he found a corner to hide himself where he could see the proceedings in relative safety while releasing his two death clones with baseball bats in hand.
The two death clones rushed to the back of the monster line and did not announce their presence with words but with actions. They swung their solid bats down on the heads of the weaker-looking monsters, denting them in and causing brain matter to splash.
The best part about this was that the monsters were so congested and clumped together that it made it hard for them to retaliate effectively. The death clones didn't have to do much to succeed; every casual swing would hit something.
In a matter of minutes, they had achieved a healthy number of kills, but their solid bats were now bent and broken in some places. This naturally reduced their lethality greatly, but a weapon was still a weapon.
However, the monsters had obviously begun to retaliate by now, and the death clones were taking damage. Like ferocious beasts, the death clones fought without a care for their lives and went down while swinging.
The monsters felt aggrieved because the death clones had killed a certain number of their brethren, but weren't even flesh-based organisms that they could eat, which meant that they had done all of this for nothing!
As for Dominic, not accounting for the amount of revolutions his soul points bar made, he was more interested in finding out about the rules of his talent. Now that both death clones were dead, he sensed his talent and checked how long it would take for them to respawn and be deployed.
What stunned him was that after some strange force drained energy from his body, making him significantly tired, he felt like his death clones were ready to go once more, so he deployed them.
They were in perfect shape and had no flaws, which made Dominic understand just how potent his A rank ability was and why it was of that rank.