When they heard the explosion it was already too late. The first one to realize what was happening was Peter, who suddenly felt a sharp pain in his left shoulder.

At first he was glad that the shot has missed. Unfortunately, that couldn't have been further from the truth. Injuring him was just a nice little bonus.

[You have defeated the level 7 competitor: Isaac]

[Reward: EXP +700]

[Achievement unlocked: The game has begun!]

[Description: Eliminate your first competitor.]

[Reward: All physical attributes +0.1, MGC +0.1]

The boy in his hands, whose name he just learned, was lifelessly falling into the cold sand of the desert.

The others couldn't even react before he turned around and started running towards where the shot came from. They didn't need much time either, it was obvious what would happen if they did nothing.

A few hundred meters away, a large group of men were lying in the partial cover of the sand dunes.

"Good job soldier, you almost got both of them."

The one to whom the compliment was directed couldn't really appreciate it because he was holding his arm and would be lying down if he wasn't already doing so.

With the average person's resilience continually increasing, it was inevitable for traditional weaponry to lose its effectiveness. In terms of firearms, the necessary increase in power output resulted in various structural issues, the countermeasure for which were disposable guns.

The weapons that didn't break apart after a single use were obviously capable of a much greater power output. The trade-off for that was the return of the long forgotten recoil, most of which had to be endured by the user.

If handled by the wrong person, they could easily tear off an arm on the unintended end. In the present case, even a trained soldier had trouble shooting more than once without sustaining permanent injuries.

No one really bothered with him afterwards as their mission still wasn't over.

"Lieutenant, they are coming this way."

"They shouldn't be able to dodge like that. Just shoot them so we can move on."

One of the soldiers was reaching for his gun but then he suddenly lost the feeling of his hand.

His arm was severed by a tall man covered in skeletal armour.

"Thanks for the signal! It would have been a pain to comb through the entire desert, but you were so helpfully loud."

No one moved until the commanding officer addressed the newcomer. He had a pleased smile on his face as he spoke with an obvious fake courtesy.

"A pleasure to see you Mr. Williams, but I'm afraid this is not the best time. You see, we are on an important mission here and we can't have civilians running around, can we?"

The soldiers got into position while the lieutenant was talking. They knew what was going on and were simply waiting for the order.

"Fire!"

In that moment all of them drew their guns and opened fire. It seemed to be effective, until they realized it really wasn't.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Sorry to break it to you, but that won't be working on me anytime soon. You have bigger problems than me anyway."

The officer, baffled, wanted to ask a question but didn't have time as sharp claws impaled two of his men. One of the claws was attached to Manda's hand, who passed the others while running and attack the first unfamiliar face he saw.

The other came from a scaly creature with the claws more questionably attached. Behind it stood almost a dozen more undead monstrosities.

He himself became occupied shortly afterwards when a ball of white light collided with him.

At first he managed to remain calm as the flames only managed to sear his skin. Then he realized that unlike most fireballs he dealt with, this one had weight, quite a lot of it.

The realization came to him a moment too late and he got toppled over by the flying lamp. He then had to quickly get up as the metallic pole got back into its user's still usable hand and was being swung towards his head.

In the end he did manage to get up and get into a fighting stance. He was caught off guard before because he didn't expect that he would have to fight hand to hand and he didn't have much experience in it to begin with.

[Entity class 9]

[Abilities: Phantom blade, Phantom shield, Spirit touch]

Even though his ability was only useful in close quarters, he didn't like to use it that much. In his mind it was useless to punch, or in his case cut, someone when he could just shoot them. So that's what he did. He pulled out his own gun and pointed it at the young man in front of him who was gasping for air.

He didn't get to fire it as his arm was grabbed by another unexpected fighter, a heavily bruised young woman with a strange moving darkness surrounding her. He didn't hesitate much as he chose to dust off his combat ability and with an invisible slash cut off the newcomer's head and severed the hand holding him.

He wanted to turn his attention back to his original target but he noticed that the decapitated head was somehow, for some reason, grinning madly. He was puzzled by it until, in place of the severed hand, a new dark one was growing back rapidly and reached for his chest.

He tried to stop it but the dark hand simply phased through the invisible shield he summoned, then his hand, and finally went through his torso. He desperately tried to back away but instead he collapsed, unable to breathe.

The rest of the soldiers were met with a much harsher fate. Even though nearly all of them were more skilled than their commander, they were still weaker from a purely physical standpoint. They couldn't do anything as the small undead army massacred them.

Anthony, after coming to his senses, decided that letting the children around him kill more than twenty people wasn't a good thing and tried to intervene.

Peter and Manda were the easy portion of his task as one of them was not really the murdery type, and was also barely being able to stand up, and the other was easy enough to reason with. The problem was Sarah.

By now everyone realized that not everything was alright with her. Even now, she was having way too much fun with the unfolding bloodbath, as if she was possessed. The ideal solution would have been to distract her somehow, but they didn't have time to come up with anything so Anthony just tackled her.

Surprisingly it worked, as Sarah's surprise not only woke her up from her trance but the shock it caused made her unable to control her minions, freezing them in place.

At that point, the fight was over. About half of the soldiers died and the rest weren't about to provoke the immortal army again. Everyone agreed that they should try to clean up the battlefield as much as possible.

The only one who didn't help out was Peter. After he had his injuries treated he limped back to Isaac's corpse and sat beside it silently.

After a while the Lieutenant woke up. Rose made sure to only hurt one of his lungs, so even though he was still alive he was also incapable of fighting properly. He knew that as well, which informed his first course of action.

"Please don't kill me!"

Anthony was tasked with speaking to him once he woke up but before he could, one of the officer's own men decided to kick him in the head before grumbling something in native Muntenian, most likely curses.

"As you can see, no one really likes you here. We won't kill you because we need witnesses for what's going to happen next.

That doesn't mean I'll stop anyone from venting their frustrations. In fact, there's already a schedule to who gets to beat you up first."

The aforementioned schedule already started the moment he woke up. The second person to have a go was Peter. He managed to calm down enough to not do anything too drastic.

[Successfully absorbed class 9 Spirit blessing.]

[Result: END +0.15, MGC +0.15, EXP +90]

[Level up!]

[Shadow body LV2: Agility bonus increased from 5% to 10%. The user can become partially incorporeal.]