Logan carved the hell out of the whale, throwing chunk after chunk of blubber and baleen plates inside of his spatial collar, drilling out of the carcass and opening a way for the octopuses to escape. He helped tug them free of the baleen plates, having the stomach sloshing task of prying their remaining tentacles away from the plates like trying to pull an animal out of a sticky trap.
Eventually, he freed enough so that they could help the others. Despite everything, he had to believe that most of them would recover. After all, he’d received [Regenerate] from Ernie for a reason. Octopuses could regrow their limbs.
Before he left the whale behind, he considered throwing the rest of the carcass inside of his spatial collar for food, but then blanched when he realized that Vicious had tried to kill it by injecting her neurotoxin. The flesh would kill anyone who ate it.
But still, the baleen plates might be useful. He could throw them into his new private market. Someone crafty could make them into a customized weapon. If Lara had a class that let her negotiate, others might have something that let them level up by producing items or food. With millions—no, billions of people out there, there had to be unique abilities and classes.
Although he had no way to monitor time inside of the whale, he judged that he’d been stuck for an hour, which meant that he wasn’t too far behind. All in all, it hadn’t been a complete waste of time. Disgusting, painful, ridiculous, yes, but not a waste.
He’d determined that his upgraded [Regenerate] skill could grow back a severed limb in minutes rather than hours. On top of that, [Idiot’s Paradox] had shown its weight in gold, making the pain of a chopped off limb that of a stubbed toe. He’d also managed to deploy [Liche Devourer] for the first time, draining the Karma of a being who’d had access to an immense Karma pool. Not to mention that he’d figured out that it would take a ton of work to charge his black hole.
It better be worth it.
But if it were… if it were, he should have access to an immense weapon, a weapon that he could use during Pied’s mysterious Integration Tournament. Logan had no idea what he was in for… he kept envisioning knights on a horse, users galloping at each other with their lances out in a jousting tournament, but he knew it couldn’t be that.
If it were anything like the trial dungeon, then he might be in for a horror show. By this point, Logan was expecting the worst, the worst that the Collective and the System could throw at him. And based on the torture of the dexterity and perception trials, it could think of some pretty nasty shit.
But it was all speculation, and for all he knew, it could be an intellectual tournament as opposed to physical. There was no sense worrying about it while he had other priorities that were more important.
Logan surged through the ocean, using his Pink Sock to fly through the water like a bullet. As he burst through the surface, he took a breath of clean, fresh air, his mouth slack with relief. The smell inside of the whale had been so bad that he was sure it had drifted inside of his pores and hair, cat piss and acid, rot and hell. It was like he’d been sucked into a garbage truck that had been left to rot in 100-degree weather for a week. The sun was bright in the sky, clouds drifting up above, a seagull gliding through the air.
One after another, the octopuses plopped to the surface before giving Logan pain-filled blinks of gratitude. Some glared accusingly before slinking away and making their own way.
“Vicious knows not to trust,” said a voice behind him.
Logan used his arms to turn around in the water. Vicious was just as small as before, but she had an increased presence, a strength to her that hadn’t been there before. She bobbed in the water, twirling, her mouth in a twisted smirk. “But perhaps the bright one was right to trust in you after all.”
Huh. Vicious was a cranky thing, reminding him of his ex-girlfriend’s cat, who’d just as likely try to sit on his face and suffocate him in his sleep than give him the time of day. But by killing the whale, he’d given her a massive level increase:
[Greater Blue-Ringed Octopus: Level 65. Might in a tiny body.]
[Highest Stat: Wisdom. Characteristics: Excretes neurotoxin. Hidden name: Vicious.]
She was almost on the same level as Ernie! Well, Logan had always managed to coax his girlfriend’s cat out of the bedroom with catnip even though it had hated him. He could see how Vicious understood the value of hanging around with Logan if he’d managed to give her 20 extra levels in one fight.
“Where will you go?” asked Logan.
Vicious twirled in the water like an excited furball with arms. “I will protect my brethren and watch over them while they heal.” She narrowed her eyes. “And you will leave.”
Logan blinked. “I will?”
She stilled in the water and slapped one of her little tentacles against the surface. “You attract trouble,” she said, hissing. “If you stay, you will bring more! More whales! The suction monster from down below! And they will eat us. And if we managed to escape, sacrificing yet more arms in the process, your violence will only attract our enemies, sucking us up in their hover craft vacuums, sending us to the glass cells. We will not go back, ugly human. Oh no, we will not.”
Ugly human? Oh, come on! “I’m going, I’m going,” he muttered. Damn, way to show gratitude. If it hadn’t been for Ernie and Logan, Pied would have boiled these things into mush and stuck them inside jewelry by now.
Vicious hissed again and then backed away, scooting through the water like a dog doing zoomies as she went after the other octopuses.
Logan huffed and closed his eyes as he paddled in the water, letting the sun illuminate his face. That was one smelly, unpleasant task done, and although it hadn’t gone the way he’d planned, at least he could tell Ernie the truth without feeling guilty. He’d transported the octopuses and they’d gone off on their own.
Logan gave himself one more minute to bask in doing nothing, of letting the ocean wash away the crap in his hair, before he opened his eyes, fixing a point in his mind as he deployed [Threshold Shift]. It was time to take care of his little Matt problem.
It was time to go back to Jack’s cabin.
***
With a crack, Logan materialized on the patio of Jack’s neighbour, right outside the scene of carnage he’d left over a week ago. Travelling from the Coast—with clear, crisp blue air—to a world covered in smog was beyond disconcerting. Logan’s constitution attribute let him suffer through the bad air, but he’d need to do something about this shit soon if he wanted Lara, the kids, and the others to live comfortably.
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He could have chosen to teleport right into the middle of the kitchen, but he suspected that the XP harvesters’ corpses were still inside, and after almost two weeks, it wasn’t a scene that he wanted to see.
Or smell.
Plus, he could deploy [Life Fabricator] to double check that no one was inside of the house. Logan’s senses came back with nothing but mold and rot.
Logan looked around, anxiety eating away at his insides. Finally, finally, after all this time, he’d returned. In a shitty world, Jack and Tasha had been the only ones who’d helped him. Next to Lara and Ernie, they were the only ones he could rely on in a kill or be killed world.
But the Logan who’d left them behind was a different man. Would they even recognize him? Back then, Logan had judged the hell out of Jack, believing the man callous for not caring about other people. But in a way, Jack had an advantage over Logan; he’d experienced a horrible loss, losing his kids and his wife all in one shot. Jack may have been a hardened man even before that had happened, but he’d been smarter than Logan, less likely to trust.
After what Logan had put up with in the trial dungeon, and after what he’d had to do to Asthea, did Logan have any leg to stand on? Jack hadn’t murdered anyone.
That had been Logan.
Logan didn’t think he’d ever trust Jack, not fully, but he could understand him better now.
And for all Logan knew, the man hadn’t survived.
Festering worry knotting in his belly, Logan willed out his cell phone from his spatial collar, powering it on, hoping that it had enough juice. He ran his thumb over the cracked screen as it turned on and then he navigated to his text messages.
Tasha: checking in. how’s the journey? hope you didn’t come across anymore bad dudes.
Tasha: Logan?
Tasha: answer me, jerk. you’re making me worried.
Tasha: Logan?
Tasha: I need you to come back. things are tense here.
Tasha: you were right about Matt.
Jack: Answer Tasha’s text messages. She’s worried.
Jack: Your sister texted me saying you’re not responding. Now you’re worrying me too.
Jack: Just check-in, all right?
Jack: You better come back with a weapon.
It was the same as last time. Despite his hopes, he hadn’t received any additional messages, the network completely down. He had to wonder if cell phones and the internet would soon be something from the past. Humans were full of ingenuity though, and he couldn’t see them going back to the dark ages where people communicated through frigging telegram and letter. Either the System would give them a way to communicate with others, or someone would have to get their shit together and come up with a solution.
Logan had left Jack’s cabin and Matt behind with what must have been resentment and anger. He’d ‘borrowed’ his spear gun, lying and telling him that he was taking it fishing and returning that day. But resentment over a lost spear gun wouldn’t make anyone with a conscience go on a killing spree. And yet Logan had suspected that Matt hadn’t been all there. After all, he’d killed a defenceless kitten.
Tasha and Jack’s last text messages didn’t give him confidence that something shitty hadn’t gone down here. Running a hand through his hair and pulling on the strands, Logan paced back and forth on the patio, sweat soaking his clothes underneath his armour.
Oh well, there was nothing for it but to go forward. First, though, he’d leveled up in the fight against the whale and he needed to allocate his points.
Logan pulled up his stat sheet for a full review.
Name: Logan Hart [Hidden Name: Idiot]
Rank: 2 out of 5,990,212,993
Level: 161
Class: [Epic] Fabled Creation
Grade: E6
Species: Human
Skills:
* Idiot’s Paradox Lv. 28
* Idiot’s Inspect Lv. 10 (capped)
* Deepwater Explorer Lv. 3
* Regenerate Lv. 16
* Mimicry Armour Lv. 3
* Undead Stamina
* Foresight
* Lodestone Creationist Lv. 1
* Liche Devourer Lv. 1
* Life Fabricator Lv. 3
* Threshold Shift
Titles: Eager Beaver; Mass Murderer; Audacious Corpse; Run Until You Drop; Malicious Meat Sack; Forerunner
XP Progress: 2,000/322,000
Karma: 3,600/3,600
Intelligence: 600
Constitution: 48
Strength: 365
Agility: 381
Dexterity: 302
Endurance: 683
Perception: 141
Wisdom: 587
Luck: 105
Free Attribute Points: 25
KarmaCoin: 252,600
His stomach plummeted. For the first time, the overall population had dropped below 6 billion people. And it would keep dropping, all the way up to the purge.
Logan felt pressure, immense responsibility. He knew that he wasn’t responsible for every person on the planet, but the fact that the System had given him the Save Humanity Quest made him feel it regardless. Not to mention that each of his ‘to-do’ items kept stacking up. It was as if someone in the background was piling everything it could onto him, making it impossible for him to prioritize the Save Humanity Quest. If Logan didn’t know any better, he’d suspect that the glitchy AI minion was back and fucking with him.
Logan had gone from level 156 to level 161, which had bumped up his grade from E5 to E6, getting him ever closer to D grade. That meant that [Regenerate] had jumped to level 16, which would help the next time he lost another limb.
He had 25 free attributes to assign, and although he’d like to continue upgrading his wisdom attribute so that his Karma would regenerate quicker, based on his attributes, there was only one upgrade that made sense.
With the permanent effect of his True Grit Rings, his attributes were massively out of whack. After Logan had received [Regenerate], he’d deprioritized his constitution stat, believing that his skill would take care of those problems. After all, in the dexterity trial, he’d been amazed that Asthea and Arsen had healed at a much lower rate than Logan. The only explanation was that [Regenerate] took care of healing way better than anything a higher constitution could do.
But Logan had been proven wrong during his stint in Pied’s Kingdom. Although [Regenerate] took care of any physical injuries, it did shit against someone who had a mental manipulation skill. While his constitution stat was low, he had a real vulnerability. He needed to upgrade the stat, especially before he had to fight in the Integration Tournament. Who knew what kind of skills his competitors had?
Decision made, Logan allocated his attributes:
[Constitution: 47]
[Constitution: 50+]
[Constitution: 71]
His [Forerunner] title gave him a 5% static boost to all his attributes. 71% multiplied by 5 gave him 4 extra attributes, which meant that his constitution attribute ended up at 75.
With a gasp, Logan’s eyes bulged, his senses exploding and his mind feeling cracked wide open. He straightened, his adrenaline surging, as if he’d swallowed fifty cups of coffee all at once, caffeine injected directly into his veins.
As the effects of the upgrade faded, he could only blink. It had been a while since he’d upgraded his constitution stat, but Logan began to believe that there was a reason someone with a lower stat could be manipulated. At the beginning of the integration, upgrading his constitution attribute had made him feel refreshed. It had helped him heal his injuries, but this time, he was convinced that it had done something to his mind as well.
Feeling ready to go, Logan willed out a handful of sand to reform his facemask and activated the camouflage effect of [Mimicry Armour] to turn on the invisibility feature. Before he burst onto the scene, he wanted to do recon to get an idea of what he was dealing with first.
Trying to keep quiet, he made his way into the backyard, close to the shoreline, and then jogged in the direction of Jack’s cabin. It had taken him about ten minutes to go from one property to the other last time, and if Logan really wanted to, he could make it there in a second, but his aim was to be stealthy. His Pink Sock wasn’t quiet.
Other than the smog, everything seemed normal, all the way up to the gate that separated the private property from the common area. Logan scaled it with a small leap, and then…
Holy shit. Logan surveyed the scene with a sour taste in his mouth, rocking back on his feet, not believing his eyes. In front of him, the wild, dry grass had transformed.
Transformed into green beans.
Fucking green beans.
Every inch was covered in the crawling plant, green bean after green bean sprouting from the vines. The plant was so thick that he couldn’t see the dirt or sand down below.
Everywhere he looked, there was nothing but green. For fifty feet, in every direction.
Shit.