Cautiously, Luke crept back up the beach and lingered beneath the stone bridge. By the light of the strange glowing blue rods that illuminated the city, the streets appeared empty. However, he knew that danger roamed the city; he was going to have to be careful.
Luke’s plan boiled down to going house to house, looting everything useful and killing anything he thought he could handle. There was a narrow line between boldness and caution he needed to tread carefully. Luke needed to level up, and he needed to gather more concepts.
Killing monsters would hopefully do both.
From what Luke had experienced so far, combat was the catalyst needed for concepts to form. He couldn’t just gain the [Fire] domain by thinking about it, or [Water] by going for a swim. The exception was his [Undeath] concept, which had appeared while he slept.
Luke suspected that the grey skin covering his right forearm had something to do with that one. The notification had mentioned exposure to the undead. Perhaps his body had absorbed enough necrotic energy through his plague rat-infected wounds for the concept to form. Mulling things over, he glanced at the concept tab in his menus.
Concepts:
Forerunner (Copper, 12%): +1 all attributes. +5% experience gained.
Murderhobo (Gold, 89%): +5 Will, +3 Strength, -1 Empathy. +40% loot.
Warhammer (Silver, 2%): +3 Strength, augments hammers.
Undeath (Bronze, 27%): +1 Endurance, 15% necrotic resistance
It was interesting to see how much they had changed, considering Luke had last checked them less than two hours ago.
It alarmed him that his [Undeath] concept had gone up by a full 20%, and he was unsure why. Perhaps meeting the Ferryman had nudged it up, or swimming in ghost water had been a bad idea. He would have to be careful.
With no signs of enemies ahead, Luke ran across the open street as quickly and quietly as he could. Scanning the buildings on the other side of the cobblestones, he looked for a suitable target.
Some of the stone buildings were in pristine condition, while others barely remained standing. From his earlier vantage point, he had assumed they were all old and crumbling. The building directly in front of Luke had a sturdy wooden door, and it was slightly ajar. He slipped inside.
No undead monstrosities lay in wait, though in the dimly lit room the shadows could hide anything. A small beam of blue light from the window illuminated a large stone table in the middle of the room. Luke’s footsteps echoed against the stone walls as he walked over.
The fluffy white seats looked well crafted, but were too small for Luke to sit in. He ran his hand along the back of a chair and felt the spongy texture of the alien wood beneath his fingertips. There were a dozen of them placed around the table, suggesting that the room was a communal space.
Elaborate artwork covered the walls, carved directly into the stone. Hanging off at an angle were metal torches with spherical balls. The balls looked to be fashioned from the same blue rock as the streetlights outside.
Where’s the bloody light switch? Luke grumbled. Just for a moment, the nearest blue ball reacted to his unspoken desire and flickered on with a bright light. No fucking way!
After experimenting with the lights for a couple of minutes, Luke figured out how to make them stay on, change colours, and even adjust the brightness.
Controlling the lights with his mind was literally magic, and he took a while to get over his childlike reaction.
Luke stopped messing around when he realised he was probably drawing unnecessary attention.
The far side of the dining room had an ebony staircase going up and down. After a moment’s deliberation, Luke headed downstairs based on the assumption that it would lead to a food larder. He was hungry.
However, instead of finding a basement, Luke discovered the stairs continued down, with each floor housing several rooms. He followed the stairs down five floors before coming to the bottom.
The building was like an iceberg, with only a small fraction above ground. Luke had only glimpsed the surface of the ancient city.
Despite Luke’s search for food, he found nothing edible. The lowest floor wasn’t a pantry and instead housed five small apartments and a tiny washroom. He tore apart the rooms in his quest for useful loot, but found nothing of note. The place looked like it had already been ransacked; someone or something else had beaten him to the punch.
All that remained was a random assortment of junk. He found a picture book beneath a bedside cot, a bar of soap in the third-floor washroom, and a random copper key. These items and more made their way into Luke’s brown handbag until it was full. Some of it might be useful.
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Lulled into a false sense of security by the empty rooms and mundane spoils, when the largest room opened to reveal a nest of plague rats, he had swung it open wide. This revealed a dozen oversized rodents sleeping in a pile. For a moment, Luke looked at the rats, and they looked back at him.
They attacked.
Slowly, the heaving pile of rotten rat flesh lurched forwards, rolling like a hamster in a wheel. A chorus of high screeches came from the unholy abomination. In the centre of the swarm, there was a knotted mass of writhing tails that pulsed like a giant heart.
Lub-dub, lub-dub.
Though thoroughly surprised, Luke reacted quickly, grabbing the door handle and slammed it closed. The rats slammed against the white wood with a resounding crack, breaking the locking mechanism and forcing him back a step. Luke pushed back. With brute strength, he held the door in place.
However, a broken door was hardly an impenetrable barrier, and the gap was wide enough for one of the smaller rodents to poke its head through. As a pair of yellow jaws snapped at him, Luke pulled out his hammer in a smooth motion.
Steel met bone, and bone broke.
Luke’s clothes gained an extra layer of gore as he pulped the rat’s face against the doorframe with blow after blow.
The nine conjoined rodents somehow made each other more resilient. It took a couple of hammer blows to crack open the skull, and even with the brain destroyed, it kept coming for him. The smashed head flopped around like a limp noodle, but the body kept scratching at him and pushing its way through the door.
Like a gruesome game of whack-a-mole, Luke crushed claws, broke bones and splattered skulls, but inch by inch the press of bodies against the door pushed it open.
A low growl rolled from Luke’s throat as he strained with all his might. He looked around. If he stayed where he was, the rats would force the doors open and fight him on the stairs.
Up or down?
Going up would lead to the grand entrance hall, where Luke had room to stand and swing his hammer.
Down would trap him below and make retreat impossible; the choice was obvious.
Luke shoved hard and bought a moment’s reprieve, which he used to jump away from the door and sprint up the stairs.
With powerful strides, Luke practically flew up the stairs, taking them five steps at a time before turning to see the rats in pursuit. He was back on the ground floor, so could run out into the streets if things went badly.
Whilst the rat ball was a tough nut to crack, it was sluggish. The tangle of rats fighting to climb over one another constantly got in each other’s way. Slowly but inevitably, they rolled up the stairs. Luke’s heart beat like a drum as he revelled in the thrill of the fight. He felt alive in a way that he had never felt before.
Gore exploded over the staircase as Luke stomped first one, then two rat skulls beneath him.
The tide kept coming, but Luke noticed that the more heads he took out, the more disjointed the swarm’s movements became. He had ‘killed’ four of the nine rats that made up the amalgamated creature, so was almost halfway there.
He hoped.
As Luke fought a fighting retreat from the top of the stairs towards the table in the centre of the hall, he watched the throbbing cluster of tails at the centre of the swarm.
Acting on instinct, he overextended himself to land an attack on it. With the claw of his hammer, he stabbed deep, then wrenched it back out again. As suspected, the wound made several of the headless rats go limp, becoming dead weight for the swarm.
Slow and sluggish, the swarm lost cohesion and smashing heads became easy. Luke attacked what he considered the brain of the swarm whenever an opening appeared, and after less than a minute of fighting, only one rat was still moving.
The lone rodent struggled, but its tail tied it to the unmoving swarm like a ship’s anchor. Luke stood above it curiously, just out of reach of the yellow jaws, and corrosive spittle.
No kill notifications tickled the back of Luke’s subconscious, so the system didn’t think the abomination was dead; it seemed to consider the swarm as a single entity.
Luke wondered how much experience the creature would give him, and he tried to feel for its aura, trying to replicate what the Ferryman had done to him. For a moment he thought he felt something, a density in the air around the rat swarm, and the system filled in the gaps.
[Level 9 Rat-King - An aetherling chimaera formed from several Plague Rats. Core Domains: Swarm, Disease and Undeath.]
It was like the system had taken the feeling of the creature’s aura, and translated it into plain English for him. He could kind of see why Charon had described it as being spoon-fed: it was practically cheating. It would have taken ages to figure it out by himself.
As Luke focused on the rat-king’s aura again, he could sense that it had a noisy feel to it that spoke of being one amongst many. Mixed in as well was a hint of cold defiance. This second concept resonated with one of his own. He guessed that this was what the domains of [Undeath] and [Swarm] felt like.
This gave Luke a level of insight into the concepts that he supposed would make it easier to cultivate them. However, Luke had no desire to merge himself into a human chimaera, nor become an undead. Besides the obvious reasons, he was mindful of the warning given by the system. He was learning to appreciate the advantages given by the system, and didn’t want to lose it.
Looking down at the last pitiful rodent trapped inside the rat-king, Luke felt a flash of sympathy.
Like any rabid beast, it needed to be put down.
In a half-hearted attempt to unlock a new concept, Luke finished it with his screwdriver by stabbing it through the eye. He was hoping to be offered a [Dagger] domain, reasoning that it would probably come with an agility boost.
[You have killed a Level 9 Rat-King. Loot generated from death echo.]
[You have gained enough experience to reach Level 5, Marketplace Unlocked]
[Concept ranked up: Forerunner - Bronze. Awarded for being one of the first thousand humans to unlock the Marketplace. +2 all attributes, +10% experience gained.]
Luke’s hope of a new concept failed to materialise, but the rest of the announcements left a big stupid grin on his face. Not only had he earned some shiny new loot, but he had unlocked some kind of system shop!
Only after a few moments did he realise something ominous about the message.
I was asleep for almost half a day. How the hell am I still in the top thousand?