Ch 2

Status Screen:

Name: Adonis Newman

Points: 6,925

Race: Human

Age:24

Title: None

Attributes:

Strength: 84

Agility: 125

Constitution: 68

Wisdom: 16

Intelligence: 55

Endurance: 48

Charisma: 13

Luck: 8

Abilities: 4/9

Inert RESTART (gifted) = x.025% for inert + x.20% for gifted

Sigil: (Stationary Surface)

Cultivation: (Lightning Aspect)

(Basic Mortal Polearm Mastery)

Right before I entered the layer, my points were spent, and my status page was updated. My stats had increased enormously due to my cultivation level; my agility alone was equal to more than all my previous attributes combined, mostly due to my lightning aspect.

‘This time, things are going to start out way differently.’

Looking around, I had arrived in a large crater of trash filled with sandy walls. With thick dark air in the sky with no clear sun to see. Last time, it had taken me 45 minutes just to crest the edge to see the hole in the mountain where people had gathered. I was ready now; I scooped up my backpack while tossing my new clothes in it and then placed the mask formed with a repeating white and grey geometric triangle pattern. Last time, it was a grueling slog; now, I just powered my lightning Qi into my body and dashed up the sloped edge of the crater. As it got steeper, the footing got more precarious, so I thrust my hand forward and tried calling upon my sigil for the first time. Popping into place before me, I placed my right foot on the octagon and leapt upward, jumping forty feet from my previous position. Throwing down another sigil, I leapt again. In under 2 minutes, I had made it from the deepest bowl of the crater to the lip, looking down at the crowd of people below.

‘whew, maybe this time won’t be too bad.’

A little before I got to the entrance people flowed from, I stopped using my sigil to jog through the air and settled to the ground that had been compacted by the city that laid through the opening in the mountain.

The plan was not to be stuck with the newly summoned this time, ‘I need to be able to beat the enemy champions in the end.’ they would only slow me down and would give little back in return until they themselves got an understanding of how this new land worked. I don’t need to be slowed down to the pace that other new recruits would be as they were trained by the different groups that called this area home.

While walking through, I saw a group of about one hundred people huddled together; many had red eyes and tear-streaked faces. This was one of the groups of the newly summoned who were trying to be snatched up by the recruiters for the different factions. This particular group looked to be from the Tenku faction. I joined them the first time, and they helped train me not to die a quick, gruesome death to the standard monsters that populated this wasteland.

Behind the recruiters was a massive shape with a tarp draped over it. I knew that under it would be a dead version of the main foe humanity would face in this layer. This one, by sheer size alone, meant it must be a rare variant called a Magdie. Magdie are monstrosities that have sleek white hind legs that are 8 feet tall at the hip with long but still dexterous tails that can whip around in an instant. They are almost like a centaur in the vaguest sense that they have six limbs, eight if you choose the magdies wings. In the same places, the front four limbs of a magdie are humanoid in appearance, thumbs, fingers, and all, paired with monstrous talons. Their heads are raven-like, increased to the size of a tyrannosaurus rex, paired with thick neck muscles and what once could have been majestic wings. They are always mashed bits of broken feathers and bone that spread 35 feet from either shoulder. They are disgusting chimeras meant to stalk your nightmares.

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“This disgusting monster is what we must face here. Well, a rare variant that requires a full squad of ten to take down.”

I stopped for a second to look at my enemy as the recruiters for Tenku drew the tarp off the monstrosity to the screaming of the unprepared newbies.

Several minutes later, after walking through the trash city, I had claimed an empty room set up for the time being. It was as bare as possible, only an 8x8 room with a single small bed, just a place to sleep at night. I had signed myself up as a non-affiliated “adventurer”; therefore, I didn’t get the best rates to rent out the room, but that was the cost to go solo as of now. The currency for almost everything was points. You would buy almost all of your food and water from the points store unless you decided to go the route of monster meat. The room for the week cost me 12 points and 2 more points than a single basic monster would give you for taking it down. Still, considering that the basic monsters were usually hunted in groups of three to six, your average person would have to take many risks just to get a bed under their bodies and a room to themselves. Monsters were not even the worst threats to deal with. Humans had the most potential to harm another group. Though the points received would be drastically reduced, your average person would be by far the easiest target, especially considering that someone who was weak gave a similar percentage of their points as someone who was strong. Pair that together, both the weak and the strong had to save up to buy better abilities, and outside of the controlled cities, murder came to be almost commonplace among some factions.

‘So stupid, risking all of humanity for a handful of points.’

‘I will probably stay around this city for a week before heading towards the larger tri-city area. I want to get a proper weapon made before I trek across the wastes.’ The tri-city is considered the main hub in this layer, and despite its increased monster activity, it is where humanity has learned to flourish most as a whole. The powerhouses with their companies and guilds can gather the most points in the densest monster-infested areas, which, in the end, stimulates the economy, bringing more people to the area.

At this point, the best value for a weapon would be one made by crafters out of monster parts. Monsters are so plentiful that even a custom-made one would cost half the points of a good quality one from the shop. So, waiting a week to save the points on other things is the best idea right now.

‘Well, a week without a weapon that I could purchase from the shop is a week that I am not increasing my polearm mastery skill. Are the points worth that time? I could be making my way to the center and working on my mastery. Then again, it would definitely be beneficial to get used to using the new abilities that I have. I will stick to my initial plan and wait, get my weapon made, and get used to my new body and new powers again.’

‘Now I just need to try and find where I got my weapons made last time. I think the shop was called “Gerty’s Weapon Crafting.”’

After placing an order with Gerty, the weapon smith, for a bec de corbin, the day was over, and I was going to be down 4,800 points when I came to pick it up in six days. The polearm was going to have a haft made of magdie bones, with a steel hammerhead and a spike made of the talons from the beast that I walked by when I first entered. I knew that the result would be a weapon equivalent to a 10,000-point store-bought item, so I was happy to agree to the cost of most of my remaining points. At the end of the day, I turned into my little prison cell-like room for the night, surrounding myself in a coffin of hexagonal tiles to deliver some layer of protection.

Waking up the next morning and dismissing my shielding, I went out of the city a couple miles to a nearby but unused area. I needed to test my body and further refine my use of the sigil on the fly. Every step to my destination, I tested using my sigil to firm my footing on the unstable trash dunes, leveraging my strength and agility to launch myself in great leaping strides. Some miscalculations caused high-speed crashes into the sandy dunes a few times, which was quite unpleasant. Still, with my relatively high constitution and my agility, I was able to roll into the crashes, not taking too much damage. I wasn’t unused to that aspect of training; when there were large changes in your body, it took a little time to get used to. I made it to my intended location, which housed a large crumbling skyscraper semi-buried in sand and trash that had broken in half somewhere in the middle and was resting in a semi “A” looking shape. I intended to use the uneven and irregular surfaces to ensure I was prepared for difficult-to-traverse terrain.

Running up to the outside of the building, I kicked off of the exterior wall, contorting my body to get leverage to go farther skyward; I then created a sigil in the air, bounding off of it to propel myself back into the building side. Repeating several times, I quickly made it to the apex of the colossal broken building. Once at the top, I slid down one of its exterior sides; as I reached a massive hole in the concrete structure, I created a sigil in the air in front of myself to stop my sliding forward momentum and quickly propel myself inside the building at nearly a perpendicular angle. I bound through the levels, but something caught my attention fairly quickly, causing me to slow.

Blood.

Relatively fresh blood, too, maybe a few days old. It instantly was clear that it was not the blood of a chimera either. It was that of a human that was easily distinguished by its lack of a reflective silvery sheen in the dark stains upon the floor and wall. Following the stains, it was evident the person had not been long for the world; simply, too much blood was lost. Or perhaps it was several people that lost blood, but the way the trail appeared, that was unlikely to be the case. Turning another corner in the broken maze of a crumbling building, there was the body, a man probably in his early forties with brown hair and a short gray beard on a firm jaw. He had vacant, milky eyes. His right leg was torn to shreds; bone shattered. Without costly items to restore it, the leg would never have been useable again, and being maimed indeed made points much harder to come by. However, I knew several people in my past life who did not let that stop them. Some purchased dexterous composite prostheses, never bothering to purchase the much more costly restorative healing items. There was a significant downside to that, though. A prosthesis would never grow in strength as you did; it would forever be stuck as the day you bought it as you pushed your body further in power.

Seeing my first casualty in this new life put a damper on my new reality, where it had seemed as if nothing was wrong in the world, with so much of humanity still alive on this plain. Especially with the knowledge that this plain was not meant to end humanity, just push us along, make us grow in strength, prepare us for things to come. It is just the vast learning curve that had to be applied to everything. Everything humanity was doing here was new to us. And this foolish man must have been solo hunting; the man died alone, with no evidence of blood from a wounded chimera, just dead.