Chapter 98

For the next few days, Jake adhered to the plan he’d devised some time ago—scouring for mana at night and hunting for XP in the sewers during the daytime.

At night, when the world was brimming with mana consumables replenished after a fresh reset, Jake discovered many mana items while the majority of survivors rested during that time. This allowed him to accumulate significant amounts of mana. During the daytime, he hunted down the unsettling dwellers of the underground tunnels: mutated rats and devourers. The former were a strange combination of rats and kangaroos, possessing the size of the latter. Devourers resembled alligators but had the size and body structure of grizzly bears.

The sewers were a truly terrifying place. Some parts were dimly lit by light filtering in from cracks above, while others were enveloped in complete darkness. The repugnant stench permeated the sewers, following him wherever he went. Dirty, stinky water flowed down the tunnels, reaching as high as his knees in some places.

But the scariest part about the sewers was their inhabitants. Mutated rats were quite weak when alone. They were hardly ever alone, though. Most of the time, they banded together in groups that ranged from a few creatures to dozens. Their strength lay in their numbers. While the mutated rats generally steered clear of the exceptionally large and powerful devourers, on more than one occasion, Jake witnessed a large group of mutated rats take down a devourer.

As for the devourers themselves, they were loners. They were huge and powerful, which was probably why they saw little benefit in grouping up with their own kind. They were so strong and dangerous Jake sometimes even had trouble dealing with them.

All of those were likely the reasons survivors never ventured into the sewers. Not once did Jake encounter a human being in the dark tunnels under the city. He was perfectly fine with that. This meant that all the XP the sewers had to offer belonged to him alone. So far, the sewers were the best hunting grounds for XP he’d ever found.

After each nocturnal world reset, all the mutants in the sewers were revived, much like the ex-humans in the city above. During each sweep of clearing out the sewers, he would pass by the massive doors that led to a dungeon known as The Maze of Torment. The recommended level for entering the dungeon was 15-20, but to unlock the door, he needed a Skeleton Key. He still didn’t know where he could find one, so getting into the dungeon remained impossible for now. It was a little disappointing, but he figured that eventually, he would stumble upon a Skeleton Key somewhere.

So, Jake’s routine consisted of searching for mana at night and killing mutants for XP during the day. Once he had cleared the sewers of all mutants, he would return to street level to hunt down ex-humans for additional chunks of XP. To avoid any potential encounters with survivors, he navigated the city by moving across rooftops. He would leap from one rooftop to another, work his way down from the top floor to the ground level, killing all the mutants along the way, and then return to the top of the building and leap to the next roof, repeating the process.

During these days of intense grinding, Jake leveled up multiple times, progressing from twelve to twenty-three. He allocated two skill points to the Body attribute, improving his body’s resistance to damage with each increase. Body appeared to be the most important attribute for him. He also assigned two points to Mind, sharpening both his intelligence and senses.

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In the initial days after his transformation, Jake hesitated to increase Magick because he was unsure of the usefulness of this attribute. However, later on, he discovered that Magick was actually very beneficial. This attribute helped his body manipulate mana more effectively. Each point invested in Magick reduced the amount of mana his body consumed during processes like healing, transforming his hands into claws, and other similar actions. At some point, he even began thinking that Magick was probably even more important than Body, which was why he invested the next several skill points into Magick, increasing this attribute to 5.

Jake also used some of his next skill points to acquire new upgrades for some of his skills and abilities. Skills were passive and constantly active while abilities needed to be activated with a thought. He currently possessed three abilities—Claws, Swords, and Bladed Tentacles—and four skills—Enhanced Senses, Enhanced Agility, Enhanced Intelligence, and Enhanced Reflexes. He’d obtained the last skill a couple of days after the tower-climbing challenge but hadn’t acquired any upgrades for it yet.

Jake considered Claws his primary weapon because he used it the most and was most comfortable with it. This ability currently had two upgrades: reduced transformation time and increased strength. The third upgrade was to increase his claws’ reach, but Jake didn’t see much reason to obtain it. He liked his claws the way they were. They weren’t meant to keep his enemies at bay. For extended reach, he could rely on his swords, which he usually used when fighting blade-wielding enemies like slashers.

While his claws excelled in combat, they proved less practical for other tasks. When he needed to pick up an object or crush a mana consumable in his fist, he found his claws unsuitable and had to transform them back into normal hands for such actions. Increasing the claws’ length would only make non-combat tasks more difficult. Moreover, increasing his claws’ length could also diminish some of his combat capabilities. He often used his claws to tear chunks of flesh from his enemies’ bodies. He was particularly partial to ripping the larynx out of an ex-human’s throat. Increasing the length of his claws could foil this move because the extended length might prevent him from closing his fingers tightly enough.

As for Swords, his second combat ability, Jake had acquired an upgrade for them to make them stronger a while back. Some time after the tower-climbing challenge, he acquired two more upgrades for the ability: one to reduce the transformation time and another to increase the length of his blades.

In the past, he had acquired two upgrades for Enhanced Agility, the first one increasing his reaction time in combat and the second one improving his acrobatic abilities. Recently, he’d also obtained the third upgrade, which enhanced his body coordination. This improvement increased his sprint speed and enabled him to make rapid directional changes while sprinting, which was useful in certain situations.

The Enhanced Reflexes skill he’d recently obtained worked extremely well in combination with the upgrade for Enhanced Agility that increased his deftness in combat. Thanks to these two, he was now so skilled at dodging and evading enemies’ attacks that even extremely fast and agile ex-humans like slashers or chasers struggled to land a hit on him. There were now no mutants that could pose any kind of threat to him at all. Even elite enemies no longer posed much of a challenge to him.

Jake was currently on the roof of a ten-story building, where he’d defeated an elite ex-human moments before. He’d just leveled up from 23 to 24, earning a skill point to allocate. Closing his eyes, he summoned his stats.