Chapter 140 - Danger Level Three

[Upgrade Complete]

[City danger level set to level three]

The first thing Jack heard was inhuman shrieking in every direction, like a tornado siren made by demons and bees. He couldn’t spot any one thing making the noise, and glanced back at Hannah to see if she could. Her eyes were glued on something in the distance.

“What is it?” Jack asked.

“Ghouls,” Hannah frowned. “They’re the ones shrieking.”

“They look any different?”

“Too far away to tell. I don’t remember them screaming like that though. I take it the Summer Wind faction is that group of summer elves you pissed off?” she asked.

“Probably,” Jack sighed, peering over the edge at the zombies. They did look different. They seemed more substantial if anything, far less rotting flesh, open sores, and protruding bones. Outside of maybe being a bit stronger, they didn’t seem to get much of an upgrade. Then Jack spotted Nutt frantically scrambling around a corner, running as fast as his little legs could carry him.

“Helphelphelp!” the little goblin shrieked.

Chasing after him was a group of zombies growing larger and larger by the second. Instead of their slow lumbering walk the zombies did, they were running. Their arms flailed wildly in the air as they chased after Nutt, growing in both numbers and in speed with every passing second.

“Hannah-“ Jack started.

“On it,” she said, pulling out her bow.

Jack took a leap off the roof, landing directly in front of Nutt. He grabbed the goblin and chucked him back up towards Hannah. Jack whipped out his daggers and turned to head off the zombies. They crashed into him like an avalanche, and Jack suddenly found himself the star of a Lion King movie as he got trampled under a stampede of zombies.

He had underestimated how much stronger the zombies had become. Combined with their newfound ability to run, and their already ridiculous numbers, he quickly realized how much of a problem this was going to be. Zombies scratched and clawed his body. They bit into his flesh and pulled at his limbs as they tried to rip him apart. Jack slashed and cut at everything he could to little effect. He felt his first bit of real panic on the floor as the zombies continued to dog pile him. It was as though he was fighting against a mountain of rotten flesh, and there was little he could do to get out.

He groaned in pain as he felt a zombie latch onto his left arm and start to bite chunks out of it. Wiggleworm transformed, solidifying onto the length of his arm and crawling up his shoulder into slate back armor. Jack couldn’t tell if it was metal or leather, but it did prevent the zombies from sinking their teeth into his arm.

Explosions started to ring out, and the zombie mountain he was buried beneath began to burn hot. Jack pulled out his flintlock pistol and started firing shots upward. A tornado shot out of the gun and Jack pushed off the ground, ripping free of zombies and launching upwards into a world on fire. Hannah had heard sentinels posted up on nearby buildings shooting at everything with a reckless abandon. He glanced upwards to see an enormous orb of swirling black smoke and orange flames.

Jack leapt up once more to a nearby building and recentered himself in on Hannah and Nutt. Both of them were running across the rooftops of the rundown sector, far away from the flaming orb that seemed to be only increasing in size. Jack sprinted after them, catching up in only a few seconds.

“Took you long enough,” Hannah complained. She came to a dead stop and swiveled hard, leveling her bow at the orb. She charged an arrow, waiting until it was double the size of her arm. Then she let it loose. The trio watched as it sailed through the air like a rocket and slammed into the giant flaming orb. It exploded like a firework, sending hundreds upon hundreds of much smaller arrows in every single direction. Loud bangs, cracks and pops rang out as her arrows found purchase in the world below and exploded on impact. Hannah had leveled an entire square block of the city in seconds.

“How many zombies was that?” Jack asked.

“172,” she said with an appreciative nod.

“How many more times can you level a city block?”

“That was my entire mana core. Going to need to recharge. Think you can protect me while I meditate?” Hannah was looking at Jack with a raised eyebrow. Jack glanced down at his body. His clothing was ripped up, he had bite marks and claw marks all over. He had also just been tramped.

“I’m not going to turn into a zombie now, am I? The assholes kept biting me,” Jack complained as he pulled out one of Nutt’s health potions and drank it down. He watched as the minor wounds healed up rather quickly, but the missing chunks of flesh and deep gouges just became… less bad. He narrowed his eyes at Nutt who was inspecting the effects of his healing potion with a proud look on his face.

“You’re going to have to do better than this if you want a spot on the team,” Jack told the goblin.

“Get me better ingredients and a proper lab then,” Nutt scoffed.

Jack bit back a retort of his own. He supposed Nutt was right. The goblin had done nothing but complain about the lack of ingredients, and had been mixing potions together with equipment that looked like it was repossessed from a meth lab.

“What’s that?” Hannah asked, pointing at his arm.

Jack held up his left hand for inspection. Wiggleworm had transformed into a piece of armor in the midst of all the chaos and he hadn’t gotten a chance to take a look.

His hand was covered in a pitch-black metal gauntlet with fingers that sharpened into deadly claws. Beneath the gauntlet a segmented armor ran all the way up his arm reaching just past his shoulder. He poked and prodded at the armor with his finger, it was rigid like metal and the segmented sections seemed to seamlessly slide into each other as he bent his arm back and forth, not prohibiting his movement in the slightest. Running along the length of his arm was also a set of serrated spikes.

Jack bent down and grabbed onto the roof of the building. His claws sank into it with ease, and he was able to rip out a chunk of the metal roof.

Jack inspected the armor further. When he still had the shadow mimic, he was pretty positive he had never fed it any armor that looked like this. Although things had gotten kinda blurry there at the end with him just throwing whatever random armor he found and gathered the mimics way. Before he could test further though, the armor disappeared. Wiggleworm was now a much smaller tattoo, barely able to wrap twice around his forearm. Jack stared at the much smaller tattoo of the centipede with a sudden realization. He had been feeding his shadow mimic almost non-stop. He hadn’t really fed Wiggleworm anything at all.

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“Am I supposed to be feeding you something?” he asked.

Wiggleworm peeled her head off of his arm, looked at Jack, and then bit his arm.

“Ow. Fuck. Okay I get it. What do you eat then?”

Wiggleworm didn’t respond, and Jack made a mental note to figure out what the hell weird tattoo bugs ate.

“So that could have gone better,” Jack said, turning back to Hannah and Nutt who were both staring at him.

“Ya think? Maybe next time don’t jump down into the literal horde of freshly upgraded zombies. Idiot,” she harrumphed.

“I was saving Nutt,” Jack protested.

“Yea, and then I watched you turn around to fight the zombies, and now I’m all out of mana.” Hannah dropped down into a seated position and closed her eyes. “Protect me. I swear to god if I get hit by anything I’m dropping a bomb on both of you,” she threatened.

Jack nodded, peering once more over the roof’s edge and down at the city streets below. Zombies were filing in one by one, likely to inspect the destruction Hannah had rained down moments before.

This is probably a good opportunity to train, Jack thought with an annoyed grimace. If there was one thing in the world he hated, it was training. He had spent the better part of his life being so good at stuff that he never really needed to train. He spent almost all of last year doing nothing but training and hated every second of it. It was becoming more and more apparent though that if he didn’t push himself harder, his life in the Tower was going to be cut short. That he couldn’t abide by. He still had people he needed to kill afterall.

“Nutt, I’m leaving Hannah to you.” Jack said, pulling out a strip of cloth from his void sack.

“Wait? What? No! Hey, what are you doing? Why are you blindfolding yourself?” Nutt asked rapid fire.

Jack tied the piece of his cloth over his eyes tightly, and then jumped down to the streets below completely blind.

The first thing he needed to get sorted out was his newfound ability to strike like lightning. He could pull it off about one out of every four attempts, and he needed to maintain a high level of focus on his body to do it. None of that was going to work going forward. He needed to be able to keep his entire focus on the fight and rely on his body to do whatever he demanded of it.

He first let himself fall deep into Storm Stance. He needed his arms to become two bolts of pure lightning that struck down everything in his path. The problem however was that Storm Stance wasn’t necessarily about singular devastating attacks. Storm stance was about overwhelming your opponent with an unrelenting storm of attacks, an unending barrage of lightning strikes that rained down on your opponent. It wasn’t death by a thousand cuts, it was obliteration by a thousand lightning bolts. Jack had come to realize he had a sort of warped understanding of Storm Stance the more he delved into it, largely in part due to his weird mana situation. On the first floor when he had his mana drops, his attacks had always been grand, flashy, and final. One devastating ability that wiped his enemies off the face of the Tower.

To make matters worse, he had gotten an executioner class. An executioner was all about killing your opponent in one singular blow. One swing of the axe. Jack had been toying with the idea of tweaking Storm Stance a bit, figuring out how to make it blend with his particular set of skills. His answer was simple. Every strike of his daggers needed to bear the weight of an execution. He had already been doing that to some degree when he would strike out with his daggers like lightning. It was likely why it was so difficult for him to pull off in the first place. One singular strike wasn’t meant to be the end of everything, but the culmination of ten, a hundred, or even a thousand strikes in rapid succession that would eventually destroy his opponent.

Jack wondered what it could be like if he could make it so that every time he struck his opponent, it killed them. What if he could do that a thousand times over in rapid succession? He wanted his lightning to strike with the finality of an executioner’s axe swing. And then he wanted to be able to do it a thousand times over in rapid succession like an unrelenting storm.

The first zombie finally noticed him, and with a vague goal in mind, Jack set out to train. Taking away his eyesight allowed him to focus more on his body and what exactly it was doing. In addition, it added a high degree of difficulty and strained all of his other senses to the world around him. He heard a vague groaning noise from the zombie’s mouth and lashed out at the zombie's head with his dagger. He was rewarded with a kill notification a moment later and quickly moved on to the next target. This zombie was far less vocal than his friend, and Jack missed the head entirely. If he had to guess, he just removed the zombie's shoulder from its body. He grimaced as he followed up with a second attack, aiming for the head once more.

If Rodeo had been here training him, he would’ve been shot in the back with a magic blast or something for failing to kill the zombie in one blow. Jack briefly thought about getting Hannah to shoot arrows at him when he failed, but he felt like having to headshot zombies while blindfolded was already enough of a handicap. He could recruit her for training if things got too easy.

Jack pushed on to the next zombie, listening for the scuffling of rotten feet on stone. He couldn’t waste any time when it came to killing the zombies. He had to make sure he killed them fast enough before they got a chance to overwhelm him and he got Mufasa’d again.

Jack carried on for another thirty or so minutes with mixed success. The first thing he hadn’t anticipated was how tired his arms would be. He had pulled off the striking technique about fifty or so times with each arm. His strikes were growing noticeably slower with each zombie he killed which was a serious problem considering he shaped his entire life around being fast, and this technique demanded speed as much as it did power. Which meant he had to focus all the more on his body to make sure he was draining it of every ounce of strength he had available to him. The problem with focusing more on his body was that it drew his attention away from the constant stream of zombies running at him. Twice now in the past thirty minutes he had to jump back up to the roofs to avoid being overrun because he wasn’t paying enough attention. He had even considered removing the blindfold, but somewhere in the back of his head Rodeo started mocking him so he kept it on out of spite.

It wasn’t until Nutt started screaming that he took it off.

Jack made his way back to where he had left Hannah mediating, finding Nutt facing off against a ghoul. Curiously, Jack hadn’t come across any of the ghouls since the city upgraded its danger levels. The ghoul was hunched over on all fours. It had a small body that was all long limbs. It didn’t appear to have been upgraded much outside of a pair of long clawed fingers and a long tongue that dangled out of its mouth, moving like a snake.

The ghoul threw its head back and let loose a screech so loud that Jack could practically see soundwaves rippling through the air. Nutt fell to his knees with a pained scream and Hannah let out a loud “What the fuck?” somewhere behind him. Jack pounced on the ghoul, slitting the creature's throat and burying a dagger into its skull before it could put up a fight.

The damage had already been done though.

“Hannah, I hope you’re done,” Jack said, picking up Nutt and shoving a health potion into his hands. The little goblin had blood coming out of his nose and both his satellite sized ears.

“Not even close,” she walked over to Jack to inspect the ghoul, and then she immediately started scanning the surroundings. “Shit. That was an alarm bell wasn’t it.”

“I think so,” Jack said, narrowing his eyes on the street that immediately started to fill up with sprinting zombies pouring out of every alleyway. The trio watched as the flood of zombies crashed into the house, almost knocking it down completely. When that didn’t work, they began frantically hitting, clawing and smashing at the house. Then they started to pile on top of each other, climbing up the mountain of zombies in a desperate attempt to reach Jack, Hannah, and Nutt. To make matters worse the surrounding rooftops were littered with ghouls that hadn’t been there previously. None of them jumped at the party, instead they stalked the rooftops, staring at them with hungry faces, letting out much smaller screeches of their own.

They got smarter. Better at hunting, Jack thought as he stared down the ghoul. That was their upgrade.

“There’s nowhere to run!” Nutt squeaked, quivering from behind Hannah’s leg.

“Run?” Jack smirked at the goblin. “I think I’m done running.”

Jack slipped back on his blindfold and leapt over to a nearby roof, dispatching a pack of ghouls with a fury of strikes. He panted slightly. His arms felt like jelly. The ghouls would make sure they were constantly surrounded by enraged super zombies, and if at any point he got overwhelmed by the unending horde he would likely be dead.

Now the real training begins.