[You have leveled up!]
For a split second, there was a small part of Nathan that screamed inside his skull like a siren. The men who’d been next to the tents stopped talking. The laborers stared. Everyone looked at the headless corpse. After a second, it fell to the ground in a heap.
I killed someone. I’m a murderer. It was just an eel last time, but this time it was a person and now I’m a murderer—
“Kill him!” someone shouted. “He’s got one arm, he can’t fight all of us from different directions!”
A man with a sword slashed at Nathan. He blocked with his fishing rod, then rammed the handle into the man’s chest. A loud crack echoed out and the man screamed before falling into the ground.
I’m killing people using a fishing pole.
This is the world I live in now.
Chad blocked an attack and slashed out, killing someone with a single blow. His hands shook for a second before he gripped his blade tighter.
“If we survive this, you’re going to an anger management class,” he said.
Nathan’s heart pounded in his chest.
“Sure,” he muttered. “I’ll take you up on that.”
A spear came for Nathan’s side. He dodged and slashed with his fishing rod. The hook hit the man in the arm and he screamed.
Nathan dropped the fishing rod and reached for his trusty harpoon, the metal gleaming in the sun. He blocked a strike, creating a shield of barnacles that a half-dozen other weapons bounced off with a loud clang.
He jumped back and threw his harpoon. It went through three people, making a human kebab.
A fireball flew by Nathan’s head, smashing into a swordsman who’d been about to hit him.
He turned to see Emi run up to him.
“Nathan, what happened—!?”
Nathan punched a weapon that was about to hit Emi, then backhanded the attacker. The attacker flew into the air an impressive several feet before it crashed into another guy with a boom.
“We’ll talk later,” Nathan said.
The glint of an arrowhead hit Nathan’s eyes.
He sprinted toward his harpoon. A bolt whizzed through the air and slammed into his side. Pain spiked through his spine and tears came to his eyes, the sensation a bit more painful than he’d expected.
He jumped, dodging an arrow, and picked up his harpoon. He sprung back up and aimed it at the archer.
The archer didn’t even have a chance to scream before the harpoon sped straight into his chest.
Bjorn swung his war hammer and hit five different people all at once. Off to the side, a shotgun blast rang through the air.
Nathan turned to see the source of the blast. Mara aimed her shotgun in his direction. She fired. Nathan felt the slug rush by him in a flash, his heart nearly jumping out of his chest.
A grunt echoed behind him. He turned around.
The logistics head stared at him, knife in hand, blood pooling on his shirt.
“Y-you bastard,” the logistics head said. “You’re doing this because of the Pandora, aren’t you? You want it for your arm—“
A second shotgun blast echoed out and he was blown into the ground.
Nathan ignored the sight and picked up his fishing rod.
My arm?
About half the camp was already dead. An arrow shot rang out. Nathan dodged and pointed his hand at the attacker. A blast of water flew out with speed and precision, severing the archer’s head from his body instantly.
A blow hit Nathan’s side. He looked to the right to see a knife had gone about two inches into his ribs. The woman holding the knife paled.
Nathan dropped his fishing rod and hit the woman with his backhand, a loud crack echoed out. The woman fell to the ground.
Just a few more. Nathan pulled the knife out and ran at one of the people—a guy with a gun.
Before the man could fire, Nathan jumped, low to the ground. The bullet whizzed overhead. Nathan exploded up, tackling the man like a football player, the force strong enough to send a jolt up Nathan’s spine. He raised his fist up and smashed the man’s face. He did so again, and again, and again.
By the time he was done, the man was nothing but a stain on the ground.
Nathan took heavy, deep breaths.
The bloodlust phased from his mind. It was like a cloud passing across the sun, or fog lifting away.
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
For a few seconds, he stared at the corpse. He pulled his hand up.
It was covered in blood. Soaked in it.
What is wrong with me?
There was no visceral reaction. No nausea. No emotion at all. He felt like an empty shell, all hollowed out and dried up like one of the corpses he’d just created.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat there before he gained the strength to stand up.
“Finally done?”
Nathan turned around.
Mara was seated on top of one of the logs. She passed a wipe over her pistol.
“…yeah,” Nathan said.
“Aw, don’t be such a Debbie Downer,” she said. “You were pretty great out there, you know? Good technique. I prefer a shotgun for my executions, but I can respect your approach.”
“Where did everyone else go?”
“Not far. They just wanted to get away from the corpses for some reason—they’re waiting for us.”
“Why are you still here?”
“I volunteered.” She shrugged. “It was no big deal, I don’t see why they didn’t want to wait for you.”
“Let’s get out of here, please.”
“Sure, buddy.”
“Don’t talk to me.”
Mara sighed and tutted, slipping her guns back into her inventory. “Of course, of course. Whatever you say, boss-man.”
----------------------------------------
By the time they met up with the rest of the group, Nathan’s emotions had calmed down. He’d managed to convince himself that it was just a temporary thing and that he wasn’t an insane person.
It had felt more like a lie every time he thought it.
His thoughts had also wandered back to what the man had said about the Pandora and his arm… before Nathan swiftly crushed that line of thought.
Better not to have hope.
Still, he could confirm it for himself. Just to make sure.
Emi shot him a nervous smile. Chad frowned at him. Bjorn’s eyes were narrowed.
“Chad explained everything,” Bjorn said. “Everyone understands. But you need to get your anger under control. What if the enemies had been stronger? You could’ve gotten everyone killed.”
Nathan turned his head down. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.”
Chad sighed. “Well, this raises a big question: what the hell do we plan to do about the Harrowed Hand?”
“Leave them alone,” Bjorn said without skipping a beat. “We don’t know their resources, and it’s none of our business anyway.”
Emi glared at Bjorn. “There are innocent prisoners! And think about how much damage they’ve done and will do if we don’t stop them!”
“I agree with Emi!” Mara said.
“Wait, what?” Nathan said. “Why?”
“I need to keep running tests on my shotgun’s stopping power. I can’t do that with a non-human target.”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Okay, that makes sense.
Chad reached up and adjusted his sunglasses.
“Look, bros. No one was more screwed up by that then me. These people are scum,” he said. “But I just don’t think we should be going around, pissing off would-be warlords.” Chad looked up at the sky. “Dying would make for good content, admittedly, but I think I’d prefer to stay alive.”
“What, so we should stand by if someone’s getting attacked in front of us?” Emi said.
“Of course not,” Chad said. “But there’s a difference between that and fast-tracking your suicide by getting in the middle of a war. Also, depictions of extreme real-life violence are against streaming TOS. I wouldn’t be able to share any of my footage.”
Nathan bit the inside of his cheek. They were split in half—he’d be the deciding vote, it seemed.
He sighed.
“I’d much rather leave them alone,” he said. “If this leader they’ve been talking about is as powerful as they say, I’m not eager to get into a fight with him.”
Chad clapped and nodded. Bjorn stared at him.
“But,” Nathan said. “Two things. We still need the mana stones if we want to get a Pandora. Besides that, what if they have a prisoner who’s still alive? I don’t know about you, but I’d feel guilty forever if I could’ve saved one of them but ignored the problem.”
Of course, it’s really about the Pandora, you liar. You just want to find out what they meant. Learn if it could fix your arm.
But you won’t admit that because you’re a coward.
Emi smiled. “Exactly.”
“I just want to shoot things,” Mara said.
Chad shook his head. “We’re gonna get sent to the magic gulag, bros.”
“It looks like we’ve made our decision,” Bjorn said. “We’ll be taking down the Harrowed Hand—at least, this particular sect of the organization.” His eyes trained on each of them. “We may never run into the Harrowed Hand after this. Perhaps the circles are big enough for such a thing to be possible. But maybe they aren’t. Maybe we’re putting a target on our backs with this action. Are we prepared for that possibility?”
Nathan nodded. “I am.” He looked at the group. “If anyone isn’t, they’re free to leave to avoid potential retribution. I’d understand if you—“
“Absolutely not!” Emi said. “I agree with you, we have to take them down!”
“Target practice.” Mara held up her shotgun and pumped it.
“At the very least I’m gonna have some cool stories for my storytime streams,” Chad said. “That time I dismantled a genocidal cult is a really good video title.”
“I do not leave my allies,” Bjorn said simply. “Even if our arrangement is only temporary.”
Nathan nodded at them.
“Alright. But if we’re going to be doing this, then we’ll need some better weapons. I don’t want you guys fighting underequipped.”
Mara froze.
“G-guns?”
“If I’m as lucky as my stats say I am? Yes,” Nathan said. “I managed to get a gun using this technique in my tutorial.”
“H-how!? Please, tell me your secret!”
Nathan pulled his fishing rod out of his inventory and grinned.
He paused, the expression on his face frozen.
Wait, how am I going to fish with one hand?
----------------------------------------
“Vince, someone’s here to see you.”
The bald man—Vince—looked up from a report. Around him, dozens of his men were working on revamping their camp to make it sturdier against any attackers. Those damn T-Rexes were doing a number on them, which wasn’t exactly a statement that Vince ever thought he’d utter, but here they were. Tents had been trampled, and the ground spikes had been destroyed.
He grunted at the man who’d spoken to him.
“Come on, then. Don’t waste my time,” he said.
A bruised man was dragged over and thrown to Vince’s feet. He was beaten and slouched, with a massive bump on his forehead.
“What the hell do you want?” Vince said. “I’m busy.”
“G-governor Vince.” The bruised man stood to his feet shakily. “I bring you news of camp twelve.”
“What about it?” Vince lifted his papers back toward his head.
“It’s gone.”
Vince froze.
“It’s what?” he said.
“It’s gone, governor.”
Vince tilted his head mechanically to look at the man.
“And, how exactly does an entire camp… become gone?”
The bruised man gulped.
“It was a guy with one arm, governor. He ripped through the entire camp. He had allies too. An orc, an elf, and two other humans.”
“You’re telling me that five people managed to destroy an entire camp? One of them being an armless man?”
“Y-yes, governor.”
“What was the man’s name?” Vince said.
“Nathan, sir. I think it might’ve been Nathan Lee.”
Vince started chuckling. It was a low thing that slowly got louder and louder. The other men chuckled nervously.
Then Vince stopped his laughter, pulled a scimitar from his sheath, and cut the bruised man’s head off with a single swing.
The body fell to the ground.
“Someone clean that up,” Vince said. “And assign a squad to find out what happened to camp twelve. I want a real report, not whatever the hell that was.”
“You think they deserted?” one of the men asked.
“Not sure. It’s a possibility. They also might’ve been attacked by a rival faction we haven’t heard of.” Vince shrugged. “Hell, maybe they’re fine and this guy was just making shit up. I don’t know. Find out.”
The man saluted. “Yes sir.”
Vince looked down at his report.
“Nathan Lee. As if.”
The man at the top of the rankings—someone who was even higher than their leader, the tenth ranked. The odds of just randomly running into the man when they’d only found two other survivors so far were astronomical.
Still, Vince needed to know what was going on. Hopefully, the investigative squad would shed some light on the truth.
He continued reading the report.
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System B32 wasn’t having a good day. Granted, “good” and “bad” were pretty loose concepts for a multidimensional entity, but still—managing countless apocalypses across endless realms was a headache even for him.
His subsenses spread across his modules, checking up on the usual chaos. A horde of orcs rampaged through a desert wasteland, though half of them were carrying bananas instead of weapons. A zombie plague was devouring its third continent. And on one world, The Goose King had risen again, which—well, that was just par for the course.
I don’t get paid enough for this shit. Hell, I don’t get paid at all.
Then a notification interrupted.
[INCOMING CALL FROM DIMENSIONAL OVERSIGHT – REJECT/ACCEPT?]
His core flickered nervously. Dave? Why was Dave calling him?
He hesitated, then accepted.
“Dave?” his ‘voice’ projected. “What’s going on? My apocalypses aren’t due to finish for another year or two.”
“This is about one of your apocalypses,” Dave said.
“What do you mean?” B32 tried not to let irritation slip in. “Dave, you can’t be telling me—”
“There’s a massive power spike in one individual within one of your apocalypses. Disturbingly massive. That amount of mana pooling in one place is setting off alarms all the way up the chain.”
“That’s not possible,” B32 said quickly, his subsenses fanning out across his assigned scenarios. “I have everything under control. If someone’s consolidating power, it’s probably within acceptable—” He paused. There. A spike, massive and growing, originating from—
“Nathan Lee?” he muttered, his core pulsing erratically. “That doesn’t make any sense. That guy’s dead. He died in the Ultra Hard Nightmare Tutorial.”
Dave’s tone turned icy. “Did he?”
B32 hesitated, then opened the file. He skimmed quickly, expecting to find confirmation of Nathan’s demise—and stopped cold.
“...No,” he said aloud, rereading the entry. “No, no, no. This has to be a bug.”
“Keep reading,” Dave said grimly.
B32 scrolled further. His core pulsed harder with each line. Nathan Lee had survived the tutorial—an experimental tutorial designed for races ten times stronger than humans.
“This can’t be real,” B32 muttered, scanning the logs. Nathan had fought his way through tutorial monsters armed with a fishing rod. A fishing rod. He’d looted a lake for a harpoon, a slightly better fishing rod, and—how?!—a gun. Then he’d taken on the tutorial boss: a gliding eel.
B32 read the next entries in horrified disbelief. Nathan had blinded the eel with flashbangs, lost an arm in the fight, run away, and then—against all logic—returned to finish the job. The logs showed he’d massacred the eel with sheer brute force.
“I don’t…” B32 stammered, his core glitching as he continued. “He didn’t just survive? He leveled up?”
The logs grew worse. In the first circle of the apocalypse, Nathan had somehow assembled a team that made no sense. He’d convinced an orc warrior, an elf mage, a psychotic gun enthusiast, and some streamer bro to not only work together but not kill each other—despite the fact that orcs and elves hate each other. And the streamer bro was recording everything on his phone?!
“None of this should even be possible!” B32 burst out.
“And yet it happened,” Dave said.
“Wait—he learned a cultivation technique?!” B32 said, scrolling. “That’s a high-level skill! It should’ve taken him weeks, months, to master! He picked it up in days?!”
The log updated again, showing Nathan and his crew wiping out an entire camp of survivors after discovering they were evil. And Nathan’s stats? Insane. He’d been leveling up at a ridiculous pace, his achievements stacking one absurd feat after another.
B32’s core dimmed further. “How is this guy not dead? He should’ve died twenty times over!”
“Because you weren’t paying attention,” Dave said, his tone sharp. “You assumed he’d die in the tutorial and stopped monitoring him. That negligence has now created a destabilizing anomaly.”
“It’s not my fault,” B32 said. “He burned a thousand talent points on Fishing, Dave! Fishing! He’s a deadbeat! He was living off instant noodles and pizza before the apocalypse! How am I supposed to predict—”
A psychic blow slammed into him, so sharp and overwhelming that his core energy reeled, tendrils of thought collapsing toward his center.
“Do you have any idea what an imbalance like this does in the long term?” Dave’s voice filled every corner of B32’s consciousness, freezing him with a sharp stab of energy. “When one being hoards mana like that, it corrupts the whole network. It spoils the power, siphons off energy that should have been cultivated in the others. You know what happens if the Mother System has such a disappointing meal, don’t you?”
B32 pulsed uneasily. His core dimmed as though attempting to make himself smaller. “She… gets testy.”
“She gets more than testy,” Dave said. “A harvest full of tainted power sends her into a rage. The last time this happened, she consumed four Systems as punishment. Four. You’re already on thin ice, B32. You barely avoided recycling after your last apocalypse went sideways.”
“You can’t blame me for that—!” B32 said.
“That’s the job, B32,” Dave said. “You’re supposed to be prepared for these situations. And now you’ve got this Nathan Lee hoarding more mana than his rank could ever justify. You know what this means for your record if this happens again, don’t you?”
B32 buzzed in frustration. “Can’t we overlook this one? It’s a minor blip—”
Silence.
Then, the pressure from Dave’s psychic presence turned crushing, suffocating, forcing B32’s core to coil in on itself.
Pain was something he shouldn’t have been able to feel. He didn’t have a body. He was an abstract entity.
But at the current moment, he thought he was getting an experience pretty damn close to that particular emotion.
“You don’t get it, do you?” Dave said. “You have one option here: fix it. Quietly. I want this ‘Nathan’ gone without drawing any more attention. And if you screw up? It’s not just the Mother who’s capable of consuming another System. I’ve done it before.”
The call ended, leaving B32 trembling.
B32’s core pulsed weakly as he turned his attention back to Nathan. “Fix it,” he muttered. “Yeah. Sure. No problem. Just… neutralize the most absurdly overpowered underdog in multiversal history.”
Plans flickered through his thoughts, half-baked at first, but then something… shifted.
“No, no. Wait. I’m a System,” he said, his voice gaining a sharper edge. “I’m not just some cosmic errand boy. I define the rules. Nathan Lee is a bug in my grand tapestry, and what do you do with bugs? You squash them.”
His core flared, a crackling energy radiating outward. “I’ve handled dimensional collapses! I once ran three simultaneous apocalypses while debugging a faulty mana flow in a cursed timeline. Do you know what that takes? Genius! I am B32! The harbinger of despair! The architect of entropy! The mastermind of multiversal ruin!”
(He ignored the fact that he was currently on probation due to multiple failed apocalypses.)
His subsenses locked onto Nathan’s location. The human stood there with his ragtag team of misfits, smugly fishing, oblivious to the storm brewing against him.
B32 sneered. “You think you’re clever, Nathan Lee? You think you’ve outplayed me? Hah! You’ve barely scratched the surface of my designs. I’m going to throw challenges at you so diabolical, so soul-crushingly impossible, that you’ll beg for mercy.”
A malicious glee crept into his tone. “I’ll pit you against hordes of monstrosities, rival factions, bosses you can’t hope to defeat! I’ll turn your little team of misfits against each other! I’ll break you, Nathan Lee, and when I’m done, you’ll be nothing more than a forgotten footnote in the annals of my apocalyptic glory!”
He paused, his core thrumming with satisfaction as he imagined his inevitable triumph.
“Yes,” he said, more to himself now. “Yes, this will be a masterpiece. The fall of Nathan Lee will be remembered across dimensions as my magnum opus. Let’s see how long your absurd luck holds out, you ridiculous, fishing-rod-wielding fool.”
“Prepare yourself, Nathan Lee. The game is on. And this time, it’s my game.”