As the lights faded and Alistair settled into his new environment, he began allocating his 850 Upgrade Points.
400 went to an increased Badge slot. Alistair was starting to suspect that the system was more likely to give out Badge opportunities when you had an empty Badge slot compared to when you didn’t. Badges were the quickest way to get an increase in power, so he prioritized that. It was a gamble, but he trusted his luck to prevail.
Sticking with Badges, another 100 went to upgrading “Mythical Cultivator” to Tier 3, whereupon it maxed out at +20% to all Attributes. Those stats weren’t impacting him now, but with his current stat overhang, he would be way, way stronger at level 60.
He went down to his finishing Skill. While he normally didn’t upgrade Skills with Upgrade Points, this enormous windfall of points would prove to be an exception. He chose [Draconic Roar] and [Force Fist] which was quite important as his only vector of nue and his most used Skill, respectively.
[Draconic Roar]'s cone of effect widened at Tier 2, as well as increased its paralyzing effect, though it costed more nue now, at around a fifth of his pool per roar. [Force Fist] didn't seem to grow more powerful, but the activation time went down. At first glance, that didn't seem like a big deal, but it would open the door for him to use it in close quarter combat whereas before he was limited since the lag was too long.
Finally, there was the question of what to do with his remaining 173 Upgrade Points. Alistair chose to put them into one of his most important Skills—[Fighter’s Instinct]. This upgraded it to Tier 6. Or did it? As he put the points in, he received a notification.
> Skill Evolution:
>
> Accept (A/B):
>
> A:
>
> Tier 5 Beginner Passive Skill [Fighter’s Instinct] lost.
>
> Tier 1 Journeyman Passive Skill [Monk Motionlessness] gained.
>
> [Monk Motionlessness] (Tier 1 Journeyman Skill): Embrace the tranquility of a monk’s stillness, attuning your senses to anticipate and counter threats with serene precision. Scales with Agility and Wisdom. Upgradeable (0/500).
>
> B:
>
> [Fighter’s Instinct] becomes Tier 6. 10% increase in reflexes, fighting intuition, and danger sense.
>
> Note: [Monk Motionlessness] is not a direct upgrade of [Fighter’s Instinct]. [Monk Motionlessness] has superior reflex and instincts, but lacks the offensive firepower of [Fighter’s Instinct], though can be supplemented through other means.
Seeing his choices, Alistair immediately went with the new Skill. [Monk Motionlessness] sounded perfect for him. He had no need of the basic techniques of [Fighter’s Instinct] when he had {Psychopomp’s Discipline} and the myriad of Infinite Arsenal.
The question of how the superior senses of his new passive Skill would interact with Tranquil Mind was an interesting one. Hopefully, it would compound.
Looking ahead at the situation, he would find out soon enough. The forest was on fire.
The Teleportation Circle took him to a mining town on the outskirts of the Maine Brothers’ subregions. The initiation obviously changed the flora and fauna—what they didn’t realize at first was that it changed the earth below. The subregions moved around after [The Game of Life] Quest, but the subterranean aspect was still under-explored.
The savage orcs seemed to have destroyed everything. Even the very shack the Teleportation Circle was supposed to bring him to had collapsed. Alistair used his 501 Strength to heave burnt slabs of wood off of him. If his lungs would have been susceptible to the ash and pollutants in the air, he would have been coughing like a smoker.
Immediately, he sensed the presence of at least twenty orcs surrounding the remains of the shack. They were smart, these new monsters. Smart enough to have soldiers camping the only escape route that was guaranteed to bring one to safety.
Alistair’s righteous anger grew as he imagined the scores of innocent civilians that knew about the teleporter, only to be slaughtered ignominiously by a band of orcs.
At once, he calculated the position of all twenty-three orcs within a hundred meter radius. He activated [Dash], shifting from position to position so fast it looked like he was teleporting. At each new location, he dispatched the orc or group of orcs with a single punch.
It took him twenty seconds to deal with all of them, only impeded by the piles of fallen trees. Alistair didn’t break a sweat, cleaning blood from his Devilsbane Gauntlets after he finished with a breath of air.
From there it was a matter of using Justice Quest’s leads to find the survivors. The Talent Tree leaf gave him a vague sense of where innocent lives were in danger—Alistair followed up on that with his keen sense. Specifically, his furthest ranging sense was that of smell. He could smell the fear of the humans within the area and ran toward them with haste.
But before that, he cast down a [Lightning of Justice] down near the shack with the Teleportation Circle. The illuminating light of justice lingered for several minutes, so the people would know where to go.
Along the way, he made sure to clear safe areas in arcs of a circle. The orcs were so weak that even if he let them wail on him with their crude weapons and weak pyromancy, nothing would happen. His Constitution plus [Steel Body] was far too high a mountain for them to climb. Even if they could hurt him, [Monk Motionlessness] ensured he would never be touched.
Once he was sure that the area within a 2.5 kilometer radius was free of orcs, he secured the stragglers. Most of them were hiding wherever they could—in a makeshift hole, up a thick tree, or inside of a bush. Alistair found ten of them, directing them to the golden light where his lightning used to be.
But the lingering light wasn’t just good for directing people toward safety. The burst of Mana and thunder and flash of light was a good attractor of trouble.
Already, as Alistair pointed the last woman he sensed in the proper direction, he smelled a whole horde of orcs incoming from the northwest.
[Dashing] toward the oncoming threat, Alistair slipped into Tranquil Mind.
At the end of his [Dash], he found himself on the outskirts of the forest, and in a ruined city. It reminded him of New Boston after Anthony’s attack. Burning and collapsed buildings dotted the skyline. Thousands of orcs roamed free, killing and eating every person they could find. Through [Ghost Whispers], Alistair could hear the dirges of the dead. Crying out for mercy, revenge, and regret.
In Tranquil Mind, Alistair was unshakable. His heart knew only serenity. For these lives that were gone were gone no matter he did. But that didn’t mean any more had to die.
Awaiting him the conjunction of the suburbs and the forest was a battalion of orcs. Based on their leader, he guessed they were the secondary contingent of their army. The leader, probably the orc king, was somewhere else, and then a plethora of orc grunts hunted on the streets for maximum carnage.
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As Alistair hoped, [Monk Motionlessness] and Tranquil Mind worked additively. The orcs moved like they were in molasses. He dispatched all of them with one chop to the neck or palm strike uppercut, all except the boss, which he saved for last.
The tall and burly orc was red, like the blood orcs of the past, wearing a crown of gold and bones. Alistair didn’t bother with an [Eyes of Truth]. Once he dealt with the rest of them, he grabbed the leader orc by the face. One [Blood Hand] and a crunch of the fingers, and that was finished.
Alistair wanted to deal with the remaining orcs individually, but he didn’t have time. Using his Karmic sight, he followed the path of carnage, from which fell Karma seeped like sewage.
The leader of the escaped monster wave was shacking up in a former office building. While it was on the other side of town, Alistair was so fast that it didn’t matter. He didn’t even use [Dash], conserving his Mana while he turned on the jets.
Alistair entered Infinite Arsenal, a thin silver layer shining over his skin as he became the endless array of weapons.
After confirming that there were no humans inside the building, Alistair encased one of his hands in an enormous [Force Fist]. In one fell swoop, he ran sideways against the wall, launching his fist at the foundations of the concrete as hard as he could.
The building started collapsing before Alistair was halfway through. He used all of his Agility and Strength along with the Force Node to obliterate the bottom as much as possible. Dust and smoke filled the air, making it difficult to see what had happened.
Alistair didn’t need to see to perform his next act. He jumped into the sky and rained down a barrage of [Force Fists]. Similar in nature to his finshing Skill, a dozen enormous coral hands punched down at the pile of rubble.
A kinetic shockwave spread from the moment of impact. If the building was destroyed, now it was pulverized. Any survivors of the collapse were certainly dead now, confirmed by the lack of life forces.
Unfortunately for the people of the city, the monster wave didn’t disappear. Alistair was holding out some hope for that outcome—perhaps if he defeated the leader, the grunts would fade away. That wasn’t the case.
There was nothing more he wanted to do than kill every last orc and save every person, but he couldn’t. Not when the Devil Kings were so close to victory.
However, by eliminating the top brass, he gave the people a chance. Most of the citizens had gotten an item or two and had some Skills of their own. They could fight against the monsters. And they would have to.
Alistair had his own mission. Forward straight into enemy territory.
What was the method behind the madness? Alistair figured it out right away. In the fight for subregions, direct combat was a mistake. The path forward was full offense.
The only way to stem the bleeding, if not make up ground, was to take territory faster than the Devil Kings. No one on his side could keep up with him, not even Pharaoh. This mission, only he could complete.
After checking on the freehold overview, Alistair oriented himself in the direction of the Devil King’s subregions. Then, he ran.
Alistair flew across the ground like a jet, using his nimble reflexes to dodge around trees and obstacles. It was funny that once his issue was that he was getting too fast for his reaction time—now, the opposite was true. He was like the Flash, seeing everything in slow motion.
It only took five minutes to reach the enemy’s side. Alistair wasn’t sure what to expect. A land filled with towering evil castles, peppered with volcanic activity like Mordor?
There wasn’t really a change from the Northeast Order to the Devil Kings. Alistair did notice a general lack of life, though he knew there were millions of “hostages” deep inside the land as well.
Like the Northeast Order, it seemed as if the Devil Kings also employed lookouts. With the size of his recruited army, it was infeasible to have a true border defense except in the most high-risk area. The Devil King lookouts stood on top of a constructed valyrik tower standing well above the horizon.
They were a mixture of humans and what looked to be orangutans, probably from the mammalian beasts that allied with George.
Alistair snuck between the shadows as he got a good look at the tower, darting from tree to tree without making a sound. He could feel the foul stench of demon blood from even thirty meters away. They were Devil Princes, no doubt.
He briefly summoned the Experiment Cursed Needle #7, but recognized that there was only so much he could do. For the weak, to put it bluntly, demon blood was an irrevocable curse. It turned them to madness without a cure. Merely freeing them from whatever Devil King they were enslaved to was not true freedom from their conditions.
Alistair said a silent prayer. To whom, he could not say, for the cruelty of the multiverse made him doubt in some grand benevolence. He used Dev’rox as a springboard to jump up from until he was around level with the top of the tower.
Then he activated [Dash], using the airwalking aspect to glide across the sky in one movement, landing on the tower.
Before any of them could react, he killed them all, each with one punch to the head. An instant, painless death.
Killing is too easy now, Alistair thought to himself. I can swat down a human life more easily than I could a fly in the before.
“That’s how it is and how it always shall be,” Dev’rox said. “Such is the Mandate of Heaven. You cannot escape this fact of life no matter how powerful you may be. Best get used to it now.”
Alistair said nothing to this, focusing on his senses as he tried to detect if there was a hidden trap. Perhaps the tower was rigged to automatically send back a signal if all the lookouts suddenly died. However, he found nothing. Just death.
The funny thing was that despite the Northeast Order’s size, they had almost never employed the conquest right of subregions. Alistair had won the vast majority of the freehold’s land from [The Game of Life], and then the rest came from voluntary leaders bringing in their flock. He found the idea of invading other people’s subregions for no reason to be immoral.
The rules for subregion conquest were surprisingly simple.
First, move enough people/construct enough buildings on the subregion. The exact specifications were complex and depended on several factors, but the principle made perfect sense. If you had so many colonists in a subregion, then it should be yours. Second, kill the steward of the subregion while occupying the land, who was the highest ranked individual native to the subregion, or the appointed individual by a shareholder like Alistair. Third, imbuing enough Mana in the central unit.
The central unit was simply a Mana crystal found at the geographic center of a subregion, though you could move it with Land Store credits. The more developed and populous the subregion, the more Mana you needed to imbue in it to shift sides.
Alistair sprinted to the Mana crystal right after he dealt with the lookouts. As he expected, it was unguarded, sitting on a pedestal in the middle of a park. It took him ten seconds to transfer the necessary Mana.
This was Alistair’s life for the next six hours. He went from subregion to subregion, incurring deeper into the Devil Kings’ territory. Along the way, he vanquished many monster waves and destroyed lookout towers before they even got a whisker of his presence.
His actions wouldn’t go unnoticed for long. After dealing with his fiftieth subregion, Alistair was certain that they knew of his presence. If they were paying any attention at all to the global layout, they would have noticed a fifty-subregion deficit seemingly out of nowhere.
That didn’t stop Alistair. He wasn’t worried about anyone but George. With his keen senses, he was also confident that he could detect the Devil Kings before they detected him. So he continued onward. In six hours, he collected two hundred subregions, seventy of those coming from when he assassinated a low-level Devil Prince and stole all his property.
Alistair was relentless in his approach. He used his bloodhound nose to track down any hint of demon blood, going for the strongest to maximize his chance of stealing the most subregions. His body did not tire, and his resolve did not falter. This was not even light work compared to what he had done in the past.
Six hours turned to twelve, twelve turning to a twenty-four. In a day’s time, he captured 1,000 subregions. He barely encountered any Devil Princes anymore. Even when he ranged out further, chaining [Dash] multiple times, for the last seven hours, he didn’t get a whiff of any powerful demon bloods.
They must have realized my strategy, Alistair concluded. They’re minimizing their losses by retreating anyone who owns more than one subregion.
Attacking the Devil King heartlands was a tall order—they had their own heavy fortifications, just like the Northeast Order. Knowing that any strong fighters they had were out of the way allowed for other options, however. Alistair’s reinforcements arrived at the scene.
It was a small band of some of the most rugged soldiers that Blaise had raised in his academies. They followed orders absolutely and Alistair felt comfortable trusting them to clean up the slack.
Over time, as he collected a larger number of subregions, beasts came out of the woodwork to try to reclaim the subregions at the beginning of Alistair’s rampage, ones he was too far away to protect. That was where the soldiers came in. They wore all black except for Alistair’s insignia, and all had stealth-related Classes. They easily dispatched the beasts and preserved the gains.
The Devil Kings could try sending in stronger cultivators, but they risked losing manpower for nothing in return, since if Alistair intercepted them, they were done for.
The all-out offensive front was effective. Slowly but surely, the Devil Kings’ subregion count dwindled. Not by a lot, but anything was impactful this close to the finish line.
As for Alistair? He was sitting pretty. The monotony was even enjoyable. He had his mission, and he executed it. It felt good to stretch his legs and use his speed to the fullest, where he truly felt like the fastest being on Earth. Nothing could catch him and he captured subregion after subregion.
One day became two, and two became three. Alistair was confident he could continue his scorched earth warfare ad infinitum. But he suspected there was going to be a more natural breaking point.
The third wave of [Armageddon] had arrived.