My bravery about the new quest that I had received, and my dismissive attitude towards it, melted away the longer I walked. Even though I had grown a lot recently, I still had terrifying, crystal clear memories of the giant casually ripping the roof off of my rental house.

A bounty on the giant was…a lot to think about. But I had to admit a part of me loved that I was being pushed to get revenge.

At one point, I had actually gotten the impatient idea to just head to town and burn the whole place to the ground with all of my brand new abilities. It didn't take me long to realize how dumb that idea was. After all, I still didn't even know exactly how many goblins had been around that my hellhound, Bacon, had destroyed. By now, I had to imagine that the town was crawling with monsters. It seemed the entire purpose of the roaming human defenders was to kill monsters before they could actually make it to town. Despite the meat grinder, there were sure to be many monsters that got through.

Going to town was likely a deathwish–I was having delusions of grandeur. The giant wasn’t going to just sit around and let me try to kill it, either.

And there might still be human survivors. Even if I had a nuke in my back pocket–which I didnt–I didn’t think I could indiscriminately kill everything without knowing for sure I wasn’t killing innocent kids and dogs or something.

Once I settled down, I knew better than to run into town right now. My first few hours of experience after the world had changed hadn't exactly been a walk in the park, before nor after my friend's shop in town had been demolished.

I mused as I walked. Taking the next two days to get stronger was the best course of action. Now I was planning to use every minute of it that I could.

When I had first met Aldina, she gave me some ideas I hadn't thought of, places to find antiques that would synergize with my ability [Spirits of the Past]. Since then, I'd done a lot of brainstorming, trying to come up with a few other places I might be able to find old items with a soul. Aldina had pretty much already nailed it. I couldn’t think of many other, concentrated places for antiques.

Raiding a museum would be amazing. But at the moment, I was heading to a local junkyard I knew of. Of course, junkyards had been one of Aldina's ideas.

I paused my musings long enough to stop on the side of the road and listen. There was definitely some sort of commotion in the woods not very far away, and I decided to check it out. The experience of skulking through the underbrush reminded me of the first few terrifying minutes of escape after my house had been destroyed, then my very first fight with goblins. I'd come a long way since then.

Back then, I'd been in good physical shape and a few skills. The me back then was incomparable to the superhuman me now. Unfortunately, I probably still looked cooler back then, carrying a badass glaive and not too weighed down. Nowadays, I felt like I was becoming increasingly covered in antique junk.

I figured out what had been making the commotion in the forest pretty quickly. Two zombies were awkwardly walking their way through some bushes and making an absolute racket. It looked like one of them might have been an original-original zombie when the apocalypse started–one that appeared from elsewhere. The monster was wearing clothing that probably hadn't been popular on Earth in three hundred years.

The other zombie, a big man, had on a monster truck t-shirt and was wearing boxer briefs. The two zombies became aware of my presence at about the same time and immediately altered course through the underbrush towards me. With all the vegetation in the way, they were much slower than they would have been on the street, which still wouldn't exactly have been blazing fast. Thank God.

I hadn’t seen any running zombies yet, and I desperately hoped they didn’t exist in real life.

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As the creatures grew closer, I realized that with my skill [Built different], I might actually be completely immune to zombies. The way my skill nullified status effects during combat meant that if a zombie bit me, I would immediately be in combat according to the system, and then any virus or curse the zombie imparted with its bite would be instantly nullified.

I shook my head at the thought. Back when I’d first received [Built Different], I’d felt the skill was underpowered. But by this point, I could confidently say it had saved my ass dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

Seeing the slow moving zombies gave me an idea.

I felt like I had a decent amount of time, so I ran away for a few seconds just to give myself space and then broke a small tree off to use as a makeshift spear. Keeping an eyes on the weay I’d come from, I used the antique pocket knife I picked up in town several days ago to fashion a crude but effective spear.

More than anything, this was an experiment in how to conserve my supernatural power. My antique bayonet, Private Malone’s Last Stand, was a really good weapon, and I could use the bayonets skill to magically lengthen it. However, I couldn't elongate the weapon for an unlimited amount of time.

I’d seen the screen for my bayonet so many times now I could imagine it in my mind’s eye:

[Private Malone’s Last Stand]

This bayonet was attached to an M1917 during World War I. Private Malone and one other soldier fought an entire squad of enemy soldiers by themselves in brutal trench warfare. The heroic charge ended in ultimate disaster but burned a record of an indomitable warrior’s spirit in the pages of history.

You may activate this blade for one hour per day. Activation creates a spectral blade extension. Extension can be activated and halted at will. All activation time is cumulative per day. Each activation requires extra stamina, and any more than three activations will cost an extra five minutes of the total activation time.

Once my spear was done, I turned to find the zombies again. It wasn't difficult since they were still making so much noise in the forest and weren't far away to begin with. As I closed in, I considered my spear's reach and the natural advantage it gave me against monsters. My bayonet had served me well so far, but mostly because I had been fighting creatures smaller than me with a shorter reach. There was a reason why bayonets were meant to be fixed to the end of a rifle, making an impromptu spear.

I still fondly remember the glaive that I used in the first few hours of this new messed-up world. It hadn't had the reach of a proper spear, but it had still been a badass weapon.

Testing my shoddy wooden spear against zombies turned out to be educational. It was easy to stay outside of their reach, especially with the added agility that I now had. But even with my superhuman strength, I had a hard time getting a clean shot on their heads, which was the only way to put them down for good.

The jabs of my spear with its crude, sharpened tip kept glancing off their skulls or just penetrating the monsters’ cheeks and mouths. It was quite a gruesome sight. And with all of the blood and viscera generated by my clumsy attacks, I was glad I was pretty sure that I couldn’t catch whatever made zombies, zombies.

Finally, I managed to get my spear tip into the eye socket of one zombie. The kill was messy and destroyed my weapon. The tip actually broke off in the thing’s face. At least the zombie stayed down.

That left me with one other zombie, the original one, with the old-time clothing. I danced back and smacked the thing's hands away so it couldn't get a hold of me with its undead strength, and made a face at my ruined spear. I could have broken it with my foot on the ground and gotten at least some sort of point, but that defied the purpose of testing out a weapon with more reach and leverage.

I threw the spear away, unlimbered the shovel from my pack, [Passionate Earth Mover] and darted in when the zombie was off-balance, delivering a solid hit to the monster's skull. The heavy shovel, in addition to my system-granted strength, easily crushed the top of the thing's head. I shook my head and headed back to the road.

Once I was near the road, I vigorously kicked the blade of my shovel into the ground multiple times to clean it. All three of my main melee weapons—my shovel, the bayonet, and my antique pan, if I needed it—were effective at close range. But I really needed a proper weapon, something a little bit more substantial than using a bayonet as a sword or a small shovel as a mace.

But that was a problem for the near future, and the whole reason I was heading to the junkyard in the first place was to hopefully pick up some new skills and maybe even solve some of my gear deficiency issues. If I was going to be killing the giant in two days, I needed some more substantial weapons. Heck, I needed to be more substantial.

I was aware that I had far surpassed most of the people in the area for raw power, but I felt like I was only beginning to see synergy between some of my more oddball skills and my core abilities. The fact that there were other champions sponsored by gods in the world had not escaped me. And not only that, I had to imagine that just like anything else humans could do, there would likely be people who were more talented than others at leveling up. I refused to fall into the trap of thinking I was actually good.

Without the quest I’d gotten from Anubis, I would be in a very different place right now.

I pulled up my system menus as I walked, studying them, trying to memorize as many skills as I could for my own advancement, and also to recognize them if I spotted them in other survivors. The opacity of my screens made it easy to keep watch even as I read, and I continued like this for some time as I walked towards the junkyard.