The number 2 and number 3 strongest humans on Earth sat on opposite sides of a table. Both of them were from the U.S, and they were currently situated at a derelict hospital in New York. After the System had created the leaderboards, they had decided to find each other. Rodney Kane was the one who had sought out Andrew Munro, the self styled Scourge of New York. As Rodney sipped on a glass of whiskey that had been recovered from a mostly intact bar, he listened to what Andrew had to say.
“My sources tell me that the Arbiter is currently in the States as well. After we put up the bounty for him, as expected, a lot of false reports came in. Those people were dealt with, but a few of them had promise. In Outpost 78E, one of the towns that the aliens set up, someone reported that a man was seen looking intently at the bounty listing for the Arbiter. That on its own was nothing special, 100,000 credits is a lot of money, but he then collected the bounty for Lena Scarlet, a well known human hunter. She was infamous for almost wiping out her town in search of levels and if not for her untimely death, she would have been on the leaderboards by now. The fact that the man was able to defeat her means that he is quite powerful and even if he is not the one we seek, he could be valuable.”
Rodney listened intently to the other man’s story. He knew the importance of details, after all those were what had led to his imprisonment for 10 long years. He had been the leader of a massive criminal organization, spanning multiple states, and he had been put away because he had forgotten to change his shirt the day after a particularly vicious heist. Such a small thing had led to one of the detectives on his trail finding out who he was.
He remembered her screams as he had exacted his revenge on her. The woman had lost her opportunity to level up by deciding to protect a group of survivors from the gremlins. Weak from the exertion, she had been helpless against him. The fact that he was over 5 levels higher than her had helped as well. He smiled absently as he remembered wreaking havoc upon the entire institution that had put him away. There was no trace of the district court that had imprisoned him, nor was there one of the prison that he had been put in. Ironically, it was his imprisonment that had led to him being able to become so powerful. He had been placed into a low level prison for white collar crime and when the System came, he had utilized his murderous talent to kill every single inmate there. When the gremlins broke in, he had slaughtered them utterly. On the other hand, Andrew Munro had been a high level government official before the arrival of the System. He would not say what exactly his job had been, but he was just as ruthless and dangerous as his companion. Their goal was to create a new order for Planet Earth and the first step was getting rid of the competition.
In various places across Planet Earth
Phoenix, also known as Lara Toth, sped over the cracked cobblestones of the historical district of London. When the System came she had been an employee at a dog daycare establishment. The advent of the System had led to her gaining a special skill, one that gave her great aptitude for the taming of beasts. With her army of high level dogs, she had swept through the city like a storm, gathering survivors and creating an army to withstand the onslaught. Like Rodney Kane and Andrew Munro, she too wanted nothing more than to find the Arbiter. If not to eliminate him, to discover how to create her own Dao.
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Melissa Tang trekked through the snowy wastes of the far north. She had lived in Yellowknife before the arrival of the System and had been far away from the center of the city when the monsters arrived. She had later discovered that more monsters spawned in greater areas of concentration, causing her to leave her city for the safety of the wilderness. With a canny instinct for survival and a host of high end hunting equipment ransacked from an outfitter, she had made her own kingdom up in the frigid cold, one forged on the corpses of a thousand monsters. With a few survivors at her side as well as a near sapient polar bear that she had named Sweetie, they eked out a passable existence there.
In the most shadowy recesses of the Vatican, The Angel of Death sat in silence. He had been the mysterious head of the exorcism branch of the Catholic Church and as it turned out, banishing demons translated well to killing monsters. In a warped version of the original faith, he and his followers had created the Church of Scouring Flame, one dedicated to the eradication of all things demonic and profane. He had a real name but this current one suited him well as it encapsulated his purpose perfectly.
On the highest peak in the Himalayas, the man known as Profound Visionary sat. Since the advent of the System all he had done was contemplate the new order of the universe and his place in it. His followers had brought him a steady stream of monsters to kill, and he had gratefully partaken. Once the abbot of a secluded monastery, he was now seen as the living incarnation of the Buddha. Utilizing a lifetime spent in silent contemplation, he was the closest to forming a Dao out of anyone living on Earth save Sam.
Elminster Judge, the man who had made peace with the monsters, sat in the middle of a gremlin den. Before the System had come, he had been in a mental institution, sent there for his delusional schizophrenia. When the first monster came into his room, he had thought it yet another figment of his imagination and had simply ignored it. When it started to devour him, he ignored it. After a while, the gremlin realized that this human was different. Through the mysterious processes in which a monster digested human flesh, the gremlin had been instilled with a spark of sapience, but also madness too. With the help of his new friend, Elminster Judge had created a vast army of monsters that helped him cement his position in the region.
Finally, the person known as Anonymous sat at the very top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. The monsters had thrown themselves at the door of the building for hours on end, but when they left, the true monsters were revealed. Clad in a blank white mask, Anonymous had slaughtered their way down the building, cleansing it of any semblance of life save their own. Now Anonymous waited for the monsters to leave so that they could bring their gifts to the rest of the world.