“Looks like we’ve caught ourselves another loser,” a snide voice said. The face tattooed man in a black tank top from earlier emerged from a corner, bouncing a large cleaver on his shoulder. His ears were flared distinctly outwards, giving him a unique menacing look along with his shaved head.
Two other men appeared from behind Zack, surrounding him in the corridor. One was a retail salesman, his tie and employee badge askew and glasses cracked, with a crazed look on his face. The other was a fat bald man who wore a distastefully orange striped collared shirt with his arm hair spilling out of the short sleeves, and looked very much like a thug.
Judging by the state of their clothing, it was clear that they had taken down a few Meat Maggots.
Three enemies in total. This was a bad situation. But unlike any previous life, he was prepared this time around. He’d done his shopping and put in a tremendous amount of effort preparing homemade weapons and training his stats above ground. The only question was just how much he needed to reveal at the moment.
“Hand over your coins and we’ll let you go, kid,” said the man with tattoos under his eyelid, across his left cheek, and covering his entire neck. He casually sauntered closer to Zack, his upper eyelids hanging down lazily as if he was tired. Out of the three, he was the clear leader of the group, and by far the most intimidating looking.
Still, there was no way in hell that Zack was going to hand over his hard earned iron coins for free. Just the thought of it made him angry. Ever since his father was crippled by the incident, his family had been exploited one way or another because they were too weak to defend themselves.
Not anymore. He was a grown man now, with the weight of his family on his shoulders. He wasn’t going to give up a single coin to these thugs. Zack locked eyes with the face tattooed man’s, not backing down.
“Or else what?” he replied, summoning his makeshift spear. The weapon appeared silently in his hand.
The striped shirt fat man sneered from behind him. “You tryna act tough? We’ll break your legs and leave you for the grubs to eat!” He smacked his lips, revealing a gold plated tooth. “Just like the last guy who resisted. He was squealing like a pig when the grub got to him.”
“That’s right,” spat the retail sales manager with broken glasses in a nasty tone. “So you better listen up and give us your coins if you don’t want to end up dead.”
“How many people have you killed so far?” Zack asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the retail sales manager replied disdainfully.
Zack gripped his spear. The three of them had probably realized that taking down other human initiates was easier than fighting the monsters head on, since unlike Claire who had a ranged weapon or himself who had a large head start, fighting monsters posed a bigger danger than fighting other human initiates.
These assholes clearly thought that he was easy prey just like their previous victims. Time to prove them wrong.
Zack’s eyes darted between the three, checking their weapons. The retail sales manager had a large bloody wrench, while the fat bald man wore a pair of brass knuckles on his fists. Out of the three, the fat man’s weapon type was the least dangerous for a spear to handle. He couldn’t count out the fact that they’d salvaged more weapons he didn’t know about from other dead initiates, but that was a risk he’d have to take.
In a burst of speed, Zack sprinted towards the fat bald man in the striped orange shirt, his makeshift spear trailing behind him.
The fat man raised his fists with a smile, clearly convinced that the teenager charging at him did not know how to fight.
With a quick jab, the spear tip sank into the fat man’s forearm, causing him to howl in pain.
“You little bitch!” the fat man shouted in anger.
There was no time to think, because both the face tattooed man and the sales manager were approaching from behind.
The fat man lunged forward to try to grab him, but he kicked him on the stomach in an attempt to knock him back.
No dice. He was too heavy to move.
As the fat man’s eyes lit up with opportunity and he tried to tackle him, Zack drew the metal dagger that the deceased headmistress dropped earlier from his inventory and slashed the fat man in the shoulder as he approached.
The sound of something metal and dangerous swishing through the air from behind alerted his survival instinct.
Zack stepped to the side, barely dodging a cleaver swing from the face tattooed thug that would have gone straight into his neck if he moved a second later.
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[??] informs you that you have narrowly avoided death.
A strange sense of deja vu was roused in his body, then dissipated while leaving him feeling slightly nauseous.
Fuck. He thought he’d fought well, but he was still too inexperienced. Zack cursed at himself for being too sloppy. It was dangerous for him to fight at close range like this against three armed men who were no longer level 1.
He was surrounded on all three sides, the sales manager swinging at his head with a wrench as the tattooed man approached with his cleaver, a crazed smile on his face.
“Give up and kneel over, kid,” the tattooed man said confidently.
Zack simply shrugged.
He took this fight because from the very beginning, he was sure that he’d win or at least be able to disengage safely. It was only a matter of how much he wished to reveal.
A can of bear spray appeared in his hand, causing the tattooed man’s smile to instantly drop off his face.
“What the fuck is that?”
He squeezed the nozzle, unleashing a torrent of horrendous mist that was enough to bring even a bear to its knees towards the three men.
“Aaaaah!”
“The fuck is this crap??”
As the three men recoiled backwards, Zack walked forward with his breath held into the mist and plunged his spear into the fat man’s belly, piercing his shirt and embedding the spear into his insides.
The mist burned his eyes, but Zack gritted his teeth and powered through it.
The fat man screamed and held the spear, preventing him from pulling it back out, but Zack did not relent. Taking his looted metal dagger, he stabbed the fat man three times in his sagging breast until he could not hold his breath any longer.
Exhaling, Zack stepped back, his eyes tearing and swollen. They’d all be fighting blind if this went any further.
“I’m going to kill you!” the fat man roared. He was still standing, a remarkable testament to his extraordinary base stat in Vitality.
If Zack had to guess, his base Vitality stat was somewhere around the 9 to 10 range. However, he knew from experimentation with that stat that it had trouble mending blood loss and other critical wounds. Only time would tell what kind of damage he would sustain from this exchange.
“I’m going to feed your bones to the dogs!” the face tattooed man shouted in anger, squinting terribly as he lumbered forward with his cleaver. “Where’s your weapon now, huh?”
He was right. The spear was still stuck in the fat man.
All three of them approached him with murder in their eyes.
Zack lifted the bear spray once again right as the sales manager struck his wrist with the wrench, knocking the spray out of his hand and leaving him defenseless.
The face tattooed thug lifted his cleaver with a furious look on his face. “You’re out of tricks, kid. You fucking die now.”
“Not so fast.”
There was still another weapon inside his inventory perfect for this striking range, something that he had ample practice with at this point.
Zack summoned the steel pipe from his inventory, inciting looks of surprise from all three men. The looks on their faces said everything–how was it possible for him to have four weapons at this point in time? It didn’t make any sense.
There was no reason to answer their confusion. He swung as hard as he could, connecting directly with the face tattooed thug’s cheek and knocking a tooth out.
A wrench swing came from the side, hitting him in the side of the neck painfully. Zack shrugged it off and teed up once more, swinging hard and fast from the left, and then from the right, then the left once more.
He felt his arms go numb with every strike, every blow to the head. His eyes burned and his ears rang with disorientation. The blows rained down on the sales manager with cold disdain. After a minute long onslaught, he was dead.
A cleaver swing cut into his ribcage as he was busy mauling the sales manager, digging into his flesh. The pain was terrible and blood poured from his wound. If this went on he would die. He checked his health bar and realized that it was dropping steadily.
Zack grabbed the bear spray from the ground and emptied the rest of the can onto the two surviving assailants, while hovering a hand over the dead sales manager to access his inventory.
[Body of a Male Human – Recently Deceased]
This lootable object contains…
A metal wrench.
4 iron coins.
A protein snack bar.
With watering eyes and a rapidly depleting health bar, Zack looted his spoils, and then rose to his feet. He began to stumble away, a hand clutching his bleeding side.
The excessive amount of bear spray he used had permeated through the entire area now, and Zack felt his throat closing in and swollen. There was no way he could continue to fight in this condition.
“Where the fuck are you? I’ll rip your throat out! I’ll kill you myself!”
He ignored the angered shouts from the face tattooed man who was now missing a tooth. Opening up his dungeon map because he could barely see, he retreated from the two disoriented assailants and was relieved to have survived the ambush.
It was only after he put some considerable ground between himself and the two remaining thugs that he felt comfortable checking the rest of his alerts.
You have slain a Human Initiate [Level 3].
Level up! You are now level 9.
So killing other human initiates gave a substantial amount of experience. Zack could barely breathe as he limped on forward, as the sun above had begun to wane, signaling the beginning of the afternoon.
A new notification appeared before him.
The plot has advanced. There will now be stronger monsters appearing within the labyrinth. It is advisable to begin traveling in groups.