Willing his sword back inside his spatial collar, Logan hunched his shoulders, braced his legs, and then bulldozed his way into the group, slashing with his talons. He bashed muscular Brad to the side and pushed the skinny man against the wall, the back of his head smacking against the stone wall with a sick, wet sound.
The others shouted and came at him with their weapons, stabbing with daggers, slashing with a sword, pointing a gun—
Damn.
That had been loud.
The skinny man had discharged his gun right next to Logan’s left ear!
But for all their grunts of effort, Logan powered through and pushed them aside like bowling pins. The bullet had cracked the sandstone layer on his helmet, but Logan deployed [Mimicry Armour] to reform it, smoothing it and making it as seamless as before.
“Fucker, get back here!” shouted muscular Brad as he wobbled to his feet. Logan had pushed him to the floor on his ass.
There was one purpose to this. Logan didn’t want to fight with Shoot behind him and vulnerable, and this way, he’d managed to lure the others away from the open elevator.
Logan rushed down the corridor, powering with his legs until he reached the end, leaving them well behind. With enough room, it gave him the cushion he needed to deploy [Life Fabricator]. Back in the trial dungeon, Logan had managed to use [Life Cycle Master] to force the insects he’d hatched to freeze and die in mid-flight. If he could do that with a skill that was less powerful than [Life Fabricator], didn’t that mean that he should be able to do the same with these men?
He didn’t have a lot of time; due to the quest, he needed to figure this out or resort to his normal combat tactics and slaughter the fuckers with his sword instead.
[Quest Progress: 0/50 kills]
[56 minutes remaining.]
The quest was evil as fuck. It was back to the System forcing him to perform like a rat in a maze. It wanted them to fight each other rather than focus on the System or the real people at fault, the sky people. But once again, Logan had no alternative. He was here for one reason only, to find Lara and the kids. If he failed the quest, he’d have a serious handicap. No longer would Logan be fighting people who he felt he could easily overpower; with a fifty percent reduction to his attributes across the board, he might be on equal footing.
Just thinking about it made his mouth curdle, his nostrils flaring with rage.
Clenching his fist, Logan turned around and faced the charging group. He’d burst past them with a spurt of speed, which meant that Shoot was in the clear and he had the room to manoeuvre. And think.
Back in the fight with the rat army, he’d figured out that he could funnel the lifeforce of the rats into a monster vine, similar to what he’d done with Karma by deploying [Liche Siphon]. He’d assumed that the rats hadn’t been aware of the drain, but this way, he could test it for real. But first, he needed a focus point, something that he could grow which would allow him to funnel life from the others.
He’d learned his lesson. If he weren’t careful, he could end up growing a mutated human, some kind of horrendous bastardized version between a human and a plant. What he did to Thorin in the trial dungeon already made his stomach slosh just thinking of it, and he didn’t want to repeat it unless necessary. Plus, he knew it was the easy option.
Logan didn’t want easy.
He wanted what the System had promised him when he’d selected his [Fabled Creation] class. A kickass skill.
Narrowing his eyes, he opened his senses, scanning for the lifeforces of the ten people. Logan zoomed past Ernie’s bright lifeforce, drifted over to the others, acknowledged them, noted them, and then focused on the one who had been most aggravating so far.
Muscular Brad.
His lifeforce glowed like a campfire ember; not overpowering, not much of anything. Just there. Within that glowing aura, other signs of life pinged on Logan’s radar, from the bacteria clinging to Brad’s teeth, to the grease on his hands from a leftover meal. Even deeper were the glowing representations of a digesting meal and the bacteria that lived inside of his digestive tract.
All of this wasn’t the way forward; this was what he’d used in the tactician trial in the fight against the Silverdagger Clan. This time, Logan wanted something new.
Muscular Brad was full of himself, an asshole who thought he knew better than everyone else. It was partly down to a toxic personality, and partly down to his body image. To someone like that, how others perceived them was everything. His self-worth was external. If Logan damaged how he was viewed, damaged his own confidence, he would no longer be ‘muscular Brad’.
But how?
It was back to visualization. If he could imagine it, he could create it.
Each person was alive, but they were only alive because blood pumped through their veins, air flowed into their lungs, and their cells—
Logan swallowed, his throat feeling dry. Was he really doing this? Within muscular Brad’s body, Logan could sense that everything was on a hair-trigger. One wrong alignment, and his whole body would collapse. With a tweak here, an alteration there, he could make his lungs, heart, hell, even his cells work against each other.
And yet, that hardly seemed like a strategy that would suck the lifeforce from the others around him.
Growling underneath his breath, Logan was about ready to resort to growing one of his massive trees down below so he could funnel the life of everyone around him in one go, when he thought of visualization.
He had it, it was just on the tip of his tongue, an idea that would—
Fuck’s sake! While he’d been concentrating, the others had launched a full attack, hitting him with their weapons and trying to find a weak spot in his armour. A vein in his forehead throbbing, Logan punched one dead centre in the chest, his talons slicing into skin and muscles. This man was higher leveled than the other two he’d killed, which meant that his talons didn’t go as deep, but he’d forgotten that by not holding back his strength, he might as well have hit him with a tank.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Oops.
He’d just leveled a crater inside of his chest.
Ding!
[You have defeated Kalden Garcia! Triple experience granted for defeating a member of your own species!]
[You have leveled up!]
“Can I come out?” asked Ernie from inside of his pouch.
“Not now, Ernie!” Logan shouted.
As the others hissed and screamed in anger at the sight of their fallen companion, Logan pivoted on his feet and took a running leap at the overhanging corridor. On one side, was nothing but a railing, on the other, ten storeys of free fall. Far down below, the rat army milled inside of the arena, jostling each other and screeching.
Like a javelin, Logan hooked the talons of his right hand around the railing, dangling in mid-air before he used his feet to get traction on the side of the overhang. Then using his Pink Sock, he jumped, summersaulting in the air, before he swung back over the railing and landed on the other side of the corridor.
He’d jumped behind the group again. Logan powered down the corridor, laughing underneath his breath at the absurdity of the situation.
“What’s going on?” asked Ernie. “I want to have fun too!”
Still, Logan couldn’t go too far or he’d be in danger of putting Shoot in jeopardy.
Logan bit his lip as he concentrated on [Life Fabricator] again. This time, he thought he had a way forward.
Visualization.
Narrowing in on muscular Brad’s aura, Logan interposed the image of Brad over the aura. Logan was sensing his lifeforce, had it pinned down, but in his mind, he imagined an image of Brad over top of it.
And then he warped it.
At first, he envisioned Brad, from his bald head, muscular shoulders, white tank top, to his green, army cargo pants and black boots. In his mind, he pictured Brad with a smarmy grin, his eyes eager and sweat beading down his forehead. He was a happy, healthy asshole.
That was to start.
After that, Logan changed the picture. As Brad’s smile faded, Logan pictured his skin turning sallow, his fingernails growing long and brittle. The muscles around the man’s shoulder dissolved, his arms turning willowy and lean. Without that muscle volume, his skin sagged, as if he’d lost fifty pounds all at once.
In the image, Logan envisioned Brad’s face thinning, his brown eyebrows turning white, white stubble on his chin growing. And like all people who aged, his posture dropped, his back hunched and grew a curve, and his arms grew weak.
Logan opened his eyes.
In front of him, twenty feet down the corridor, the others had backed away from muscular Brad, their eyes wide. Brad stood in the middle of the corridor alone and glanced down at his chest. The dagger shook in his grip, and he let out a moan of fright.
Muscular Brad was no longer muscular.
Logan had turned a man who’d been in his early 30s into a man in his late 70s.
He gasped, a feeling of unreality hitting him. Holy shit, he’d just forced someone to age decades just by envisioning it! He’d been viewing [Life Fabricator] as a complex skill, something that needed trial and error, hell, needed science, when all along, it had been down to visualization?
“What the—the—” Brad cleared his throat and swayed on his feet. “W-what did you do to me?” His bravado had disappeared and in its place was a little boy.
Ernie crept out of his pouch and peered over Logan’s shoulder, his tentacles clinging to Logan’s armour. His mirroring effect was still active, so unless the others were concentrating, he should pass unnoticed.
“Did you do that?” he breathed in awe, staring at Brad.
“Yeah.”
But Logan could do more. Why stop there? And better yet, why not continue while they were distracted, thrown off from pursuing him. It gave him time to concentrate.
Closing his eyes while he kept [Life Fabricator] active and his senses wide open, he monitored the auras around him, narrowing once again on Brad. Unlike last time, the aura felt off—sick, as if something essential had leached away.
Logan interposed his image of Brad over that aura. Brad wasn’t just withering and aging. Logan envisioned his bones turning brittle, his skin splitting, the organs inside of his chest deteriorating and rotting. It wasn’t the body of a healthy man, instead it was the body of a corpse, something that returned to the earth swarming with worms and maggots—
“Holy shit!” one of the men screamed.
Logan opened his eyes and then promptly wished he hadn’t.
Brad was no longer standing. Instead, he’d collapsed into a pile of mismatched… well, mush. His chest was still moving up and down, but it was as if he were breathing through cotton. His eyes were vague and yellow, full of jaundice. His limbs were twisted things, so skinny and brittle they no longer supported his weight.
“Yucky,” said Ernie.
No kidding.
With a gurgle, Brad took one last breath and then slumped, boneless.
Lifeless.
Ding!
[You have defeated Ed Williams! Triple experience granted for defeating a member of your own species!]
That’s right, Logan had forgotten that his real name was Ed.
His stomach sloshing with acid, Logan swallowed and held back a grimace. In a way, the experiment had been a success. He now knew that he could use [Life Fabricator] to force someone to age. Age rapidly.
But unlike before, Logan had done it without having to leach the lifeforce from others. Either the aging process didn’t require that much Karma, or it was because he hadn’t technically grown something out of nothing. In the fight with the rat army, he’d done that with the vine, but it had only been possible because he’d funneled life from the rats.
Damn, [Liche Devourer] sure could come in handy right now.
Either way, Logan had figured out another use for the skill. And yet… he didn’t like it. Force aging another person? Stealing their ability to fight? It felt like cheating, something that should be done to only his worst enemies.
In the fight with the Silverdagger Clan, he’d learned that skills could be more versatile and powerful than physical attributes alone, but that was only because he’d been outclassed. This time, it was Logan who’d outclassed the others.
Logan had just learned something about himself. Despite his initial enthusiasm that he could treat this situation as an opportunity to experiment, Logan wasn’t built that way. If he had to fight other people, he’d much rather do it one-on-one, strength against strength.
Even worse, the nastiness of what he’d just done had wiped away his anger as if it were never there. In the back of his mind, he knew that the Cursed Rope continued to try to feed his emotions and corrupt them, but Logan was too jarred and disgusted for it to have any effect.
Even the quest had lost its lustre.
But if these idiots continued to want to fight after that demonstration, well, it was on them.
“Last chance,” said Logan, willing out his sword and getting into a fighting stance. This time, he’d do it the traditional way. “I don’t want to fight you, but the System seems hell bent on forcing me. But I’m not the kind of guy that kills just for the sake of killing. I’m here for a reason. I’m looking for my sister and her kids. If you help me find her, I might go easy on you.”
One person in the group, the jaded-eyed man, glanced from the mushy remains on the floor to Logan, his hand trembling around a gun. Lowering the weapon, he took a wary step back from the group and retreated down the corridor. “I don’t need the bounty that bad. I can’t help you find your sister; Pied would know and treat it as a betrayal, but I’ve got no further beef with you. You don’t go after me, I won’t go after you.”
The skinny tall man with a blond buzzcut spat a glob of saliva and gave the retreating man a severe glare. “Oliver, you should broaden your definition of betrayal. If you leave now, I’m going to tell the agents that you abandoned us. And you know that will get back to Pied.”
Oliver scowled. “So do it! Better that than dead.”
The skinny man clucked his tongue and laughed. “Now who’s the idiot? Betrayal means you’re dead, fuckwad. Pied doesn’t tolerate it.”
Oliver’s mouth thinned, but he kept his eyes glued to Logan as he continued retreating. “Do what you want, Levi.” Then in a voice full of wariness, “You always have.”
The skinny man, Levi, rolled his eyes and then gave the rest of the group a once-over. “Anyone else going to be a coward? Or can we get back to killing?”
Turning to Logan, he scrunched his nose. “So you have a powerful skill. It can’t be denied. Is that why you ended up with the bounty? You aged an alien that you shouldn’t have?” He spat another glob of saliva, this time aiming for the remains of Brad.
Then in a sing-song voice, he said, “But we all know that skills have limitations. You’re almost at Karma deprivation, aren’t you?” He gave the group a bright grin. “That means we need to kill him before his karma pool replenishes, boys!”