He’d never experienced such intense excitement in his entire life as he did at that moment. Fighting the group of survivors and slaying them one by one excited him much more than he’d ever thought it would. Even though the Dazed negative effect was still affecting him, the survivors struggled to take him down. He felt somewhat dizzy and couldn’t think as clearly as usual. Due to that, he moved slower than before, which allowed his opponents to land hits on him every now and then.
Despite bullets ripping at his mutant body, he was unstoppable. While he could feel the shots inflicting some damage on him, it wasn’t nearly enough to take him down. His body was definitely tougher than he’d believed before. Mana was seeping from some of his bullet wounds but at a rather slow rate to be worrying about it. Even though the Dazed effect slowed him down, he still moved too fast for the survivors to keep track of his movements.
The fierce joy of the hunt and the lust of killing the humans were overpowering him. Hunting prey had long since become natural to him. However, until now, he’d only hunted down and slain mutants. Battling humans, as it turned out, was an entirely different matter. Humans were smarter, which made them way more dangerous opponents than mutants. As a result, battling them was way more interesting and exciting.
Besides, ex-humans never displayed any emotions. They never showed a hint of fear even when facing imminent death. In contrast, humans valued their lives. They didn’t want to die and showed a range of emotions in battle such as fear, anger, and confusion. This group of survivors hadn’t expected him to be much different from the typical dumb ex-humans they usually encountered. The sudden realization that they were dealing with a much more formidable opponent instilled sheer dread into them. And Jake found himself enjoying it quite a bit. The taste of their terror intoxicated him.
He slew them one by one until there was only one left, a young woman named Elena. However, she seemed to have reached her breaking point. She wheeled around and bolted away from him. Jake had always kept her in his field of vision, so he was aware that she hadn’t even fired a single shot at him, paralyzed with horror. Not that it mattered to him. While she ran, he took a moment to finish off the wounded survivors without any concern that she might escape. Compared to him, humans were so freaking slow. He knew no matter how far she ran, catching up to her would be a simple task for him.
He killed off the two remaining survivors, one named Maria and another named Marcus. After that, he gave his full attention to Elena, bursting into a sprint after her. The moment she realized he was chasing her, she burst into tears. His acute sense of hearing picked up the sounds of her sobs as she stubbornly tried to flee from him. She either naïvely believed she could outrun him or simply hoped so. But that wasn’t going to happen. He was quickly catching up to her and was going to pounce on her from behind in a matter of seconds.
Being a morphus, Jake never experienced the rush of adrenaline, which was exclusive to human physiology. He was no longer human, but as he just found out, there was a dark side within him that seemed to mimic the effects of adrenaline. His transformation into a mutant hadn’t deprived him of his humanity. Jake had believed that despite his altered appearance, he was still human on the inside. But the transformation had had a deeper impact on him than he’d initially thought.
After his transformation, a dark beast was born within his mind. It’d been in deep slumber, which was why Jake hadn’t even been aware of his newly acquired dark side. Until now. The joy of slaying the group of survivors and the sheer terror emanating from them awakened his inner beast. It was in control now and craved even more blood. And it was going to get what it wanted pretty soon.
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When one of Elena’s feet snagged on a cluster of weeds, she pitched forward, landing face-first on the ground. She looked back and saw he was almost on top of her. To her credit, she didn’t give up. She quickly got to her feet and continued to run. Jake could catch up with her easily. But he froze instead. When the woman fell and glanced back at him, he seemed to have snapped out of it. He realized what he was doing. What he’d just done.
He’d slain four survivors. By itself, it didn’t mean much to him. When he was human, he’d killed his fellow survivors too. But it was always in self-defense. So the fact that he’d just killed four survivors in cold blood didn’t mean much by itself. They attacked him, leaving him no choice but to defend himself.
What troubled him was how much he enjoyed killing them, relishing his superiority over inferior, weak humans. But it wasn’t his real feelings. It was the dark side newly unveiled within him. Even now as he watched Elena run away, all he wanted to do was continue to chase her, to pounce on her, to tear her to shreds with his claws—
Jake forced himself to stop thinking about it. In his mind, his inner beast screamed at him to resume chasing the escaping prey. But he didn’t want to. He couldn’t let his inner beast control his actions. He had to exercise a tremendous amount of willpower to silence it. It took him a few moments, but eventually, he managed to get a hold of himself. His inner beast seemed to get back to its slumber, and Jake no longer felt the lust for blood. He could finally think clearly and was in full control over his actions and thoughts once more. It was such a relief.
When Elena glanced over her shoulder another time, Jake was already gone. He let her run away and returned to the massacre he’d caused. For a moment, he stared at the mutilated bodies of the survivors he’d slain. The lack of emotion he felt at that moment was what scared him even more than the fact he’d butchered them so brutally. At that moment, he realized that the transformation into a mutant had changed him much more than he’d initially thought. He’d changed not only physically but mentally as well, and it was scaring the hell out of him.
He didn’t want to turn into a bloodthirsty killing machine. He had to control himself. He had to keep his inner beast in check. Jake promised himself he would resist his dark side. He wouldn’t let himself turn into a mindless mutant akin to the typical ex-humans. He was going to save whatever humanity was left in him no matter what.
With that settled, he quickly searched through the dead survivors’ things. They had various weapons, ammo, canned food, bottled water, and whatnot. None of these things were of any use to him. Each of them had a PDA, but all the devices were locked. As a survivor, he had at some point upgraded his PDA, unlocking a feature that let him hack into other people’s handheld computers.
However, now as a mutant, he couldn’t do that anymore. Even his Enhanced Intelligence skill didn’t help in that matter. Perhaps later, when he allotted more points to Mind or acquired some additional mind-related skills, he would be able to hack into PDAs with the force of his mind, but at the moment he couldn’t do that.
None of the dead survivors had any mana consumables on them either, which made sense to Jake. Why carry such items in your backpack when with a simple mental command, one could absorb the energy stored within a mana consumable? Survivors probably absorbed the magical energy from mana consumables as soon as they found them, much like Jake himself had done during his time as a survivor.
The realization that he hadn’t received any experience points for killing the four survivors further solidified his decision to refrain from hunting down and killing humans from now on. They had nothing to offer him anyway: no XP, no mana, no nothing. To avoid getting into a fight with humans and risking waking his inner beast, Jake decided to avoid dealing with survivors as much as possible.
After that, he looked around to orient himself. Before the Pulsar magical anomaly pushed him off the roof, he was on his way to the part of the city that was split with huge crevices. He scanned his surroundings and realized he wasn’t far off from his intended destination. So there was no need to scale the high-rise rooftops. Turning to face the correct direction, Jake transitioned into a brisk run toward his goal.