After resting for a while, Mike knew he had to get up and start moving. He didn't even wish to imagine what he would do if one of the cores had created a new body, and he would had to defeat it.
Mike had tried to awaken Tom, but he hadn't reacted at all to his attempts. The only positive thing was that he could feel his pulse.
Mike pushed his dead tired body to move and to go through the aftermath of their battle, collecting the cores from the ruble of the golems. He quickly noticed that the weakest ones didn't have any cores. He had smashed one of their corpses almost into dust before he realized that was the case.
When he had finally collected all of the cores, he retrieved Tom's backpack and placed them into it. Then he lifted Tom's immobile body onto his shoulders into a firefighter carry.
Then he placed his hand on the obelisk and selected activate.
He felt it as much as he saw it as all the earth energy that presided in the lower chamber came rushing toward the obelisk and how the brown lines leading towards the obelisk lit up.
He had left one of the golems alive that was guarding the tunnels alive, as he had been curious if this had truly been a trap. And sure enough, if Tom had activated the obelisk straight away, he would have been done for, the golem rushing at the obelisk, like a moth drawn to the fire. Mike quickly brought his hammer down on it, ending it on the spot.
The energy light show lasted for thirty minutes before he saw a message.
_______________________________
Activation completed.
Linked to the Main City 1
100 City merit points are split equally between the party and free teleports between Main City 1 and the mountainous zone center.
______________________________
He had no idea if that was a lot or not, but he was sure they would soon find out. He placed his hand on the obelisk again. And selected to teleport to Main City 1 with a bag full of loot and Tom on his shoulders.
Once he arrived in the city, he didn't pay any attention to the people around him nor to the newly risen buildings. He headed straight toward the traders.
He went into the closest spaceship, and as it happened, it was Sandy's shop.
The moment he stepped in and saw sandy, he asked, "What is happening to him?" As he pointed at Tom.
Sandy took some kind of a weird contraption from the wall and held it over Tom, reading a screen that she only could see. Shortly after, she seemed to come to a conclusion as she said. "His problem is that he didn't die. However, it might as well become his fortune."
Mike's face was the very definition of confusion. "What do you mean, should I kill him?" Mike asked, trying to figure out what was going on.
"Well if he had just died, the Secverse would have just reset him to his state before the battle. Now he will spend who knows how long in this state."
"But what was wrong with him?" Mike asked.
"I am sorry, but I can't unfortunately tell you that, as it is confidential information, but he should be fine," Sandy answered.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
***
Tom woke up feeling wonderous. However, then he remembered that he was in the middle of battle. He immediately worriedly looked around, looking for the golem, but he soon realized that he was not in the Secverse but in his own bed. To his surprise, there was an IV bag connected to his arm, and there was a note placed on it. "Reward for quick advancement. Also, you don't have to worry that your condition would have affected you negatively in the real world. There are safeguards in place against it. Only positive effects can affect you. However, rapid advancements go a lot smoother if you have some mana to work with, thus this tier 0 nutrient fluid."
Tom slowly got out of bed, considering buying new locks as clearly, his current ones weren't working. He slowly got out of bed and looked at his phone, and he was shocked beyond belief, it had been three days since he had started preparing to conquer the mountain. But before he did anything else, he needed to check just how much advancement he had made in order to need another mana deposit from the Empire. He was curious as to what kind of state he would be in if they hadn't come and given him some mana. However, he wasn't curious about what kind of bill he would have had to pay if he hadn't earned a reward from the AI.
He focused on the place in his mind where his willpower presided. He saw a ridiculously small ball of blue energy there. However, the willpower was an extremely dark blue, a completely different color than before, like it had condensed a lot. He couldn't wait to login back into the Secverse and see just how much his mind had advanced.
But before he could do that, he had a lot of messages to answer. He ignored most of them, but some of the stuck out to him, like the message from Mike. They had exchanged phone numbers, as if one of them died they wouldn't have any other ways of contacting each other, as there was no in-built communication system in the Secverse.
He could have not been happier when he read the message. In it, Mike told him how they had managed to win the battle and how his body had become completely listless. But he had been even happier when Mike explained all that they had earned from the teleporter activation to the fact that the cores they had earned were worth twelve credits. He ended the message by informing him how they were in Sandy's shop, just waiting for him to get back into the game.
Tom send Mike a message back and waited for him to answer as he wanted to handle the sale of the looted cores, so he could get some new cores and credits.
Tom also read the messages he had gotten from his other friends. None of them were in the Main City 1. However, he did learn something interesting. There were some other cities around the Main Cities, as they all had spawned in them. The Other cities were just beyond the point where the zones ended, and the true wilderness started. To Tom's surprise, those cities were completely different from the Main City. The people there had a hard time just exploring a couple of kilometers out of the city toward the wilderness. So they were forced to explore the zones where there were barely any enemies for them to fight. Everyone was having a hard time advancing. Either there were no enemies, or they were so powerful that they had no hopes of defeating them.
Tom detached the now empty IV bag from his arm. Then he consumed some of the nutrient paste as a meal, visited the bathroom, and checked the news.
From there, he learned that there were ten Main Cities and countless smaller cities. To Tom's surprise, most of these small cities were in environments where the players couldn't get out of them at all without dying almost immediately, as there were no zones around them, only unforgiving wilderness.
He had also read how there were players spending all of their credits on training or gear in hopes of being able to just leave the city. These people had reached varying degrees of success. There had been some success stories where someone had successfully killed a monster and earned multiple credits from their bodies, and others had lost everything.
Humanity just wasn't ready to survive on this planet's normal nature. This scared Tom more than anything else. How could they win a war if they couldn't even survive this planet's regular environment? Humanity's armies would die even before they made the first contact with the enemy.
He also ran into an interesting report about some people buying guns in the Secverse. However, sure they worked fine against other humans, but when they were pitted against the monsters, they barely did any damage. Unless they used one of the truly expensive models that just burned money, as each bullet had to be specially made, and they cost a lot.
After thirty minutes, Tom got a reply from Mike. It Told Mike that it would take him around an hour to arrive back in the city, and they could meet in front of Sandy's.
Tom didn't spend any more time in the real world, as he had already lost too much time not advancing, so he went to his bed, layed down, and placed the helmet on his head.