37 War of Worlds

From the pile a body emerged and formed in front of us. Scales and bones formed into plates that ran across the front of the four legged creature. The thing had a reptile’s eyes, slitted but intelligent. The hulking torso of the creature was nothing like the fleshy abominations we faced before.

The creature’s muscles and bones flowed together, like a deadly machine. Like an armored tiger with a mane of bones, the monster roared at me. The bottom jaw split in half, revealing a throat lined with sharpened teeth. The noble facade of the creature shattered as several other pods exploded, slopping onto the ground with wet slaps.

Unnamed of Yawm(lvl 250) - These are the newly spawned footsoldiers of Yawm. If they prove themselves, then Yawm may name them which grants them their previous sentience. They may then raise through the ranks of his army, being granted great power by accomplishing great deeds.

Though unnamed, each of these troops hold considerable power. They may operate in packs and coordinate with each other, and have a level of finesse and skill with their movements. Their regenerative capacities are impressive as well as the sheer tenacity of their forms. Combine this with their tendancy to attack on sight, and they make for deadly foes.

This specific sample is a panthera variant. Many variants and forms can be found of the unnamed. Be ready for combat when you see one.

I sprinted forward, my heels tearing into the ground. I shouted, “Let’s go Althea.”

A harpoon drilled past my head, piercing into the armored lion's face. The bullet of bone stabbed through it, but the creature stayed standing. It shook its head as I reached it. I grinned as my augmentation overflowed like a flood. Finally I would fight without restraints. Even when facing the zombies earlier, I hadn't used all my skills. Now was the time to tear them apart.

My armor grinned with me, the armor shivering in anticipation of its next meal. The lion bit forward, trying to eat me. I whipped a weighted left hook into one of its bottom jaws. The blow snapped the bone of the creature and knocked me towards its left side, out of the way of the bite. I charged forward with my right hand dragging behind me. As the creature turned its head, my fist snapped up into the roof of its mouth.

The teeth of the creature chipped and uprooted as my fist knocked its head upwards. The ground beneath my feet cracked. I roared with my next punch, turning on my heels. My left hand slammed into the top of the armored lion thing's head, cleaving it down like a guillotine. The skull crumbled under the might of my fist.

It swiped with its bone covered paw. The claws scraped against my armor as I deflected the blow, sending it sideways past me. I lunged down before whipping another strike into its side. My fist punctured the bone like tearing through paper. As I pulled my hand out, several black veins crawled out towards me.

I ramped up my augmentation runes as it limped away from me, broken and looking for safety. It found none.

I charged towards it, sending it onto the ground. I smashed the thing’s face, the bones cracking under my fists. With a quick series of bites, I tore through dozens of pounds of the creature, my armor eating it alive. After a minute of my armor feasting, a few bones was all that was left of the unnamed monster.

The other pods formed into three different creatures as I finished off the bone lion. One was a hulking, brown boar with dozens of tusks growing from its face. The front paws of the monster curled into bestial hands instead of hooves like its back feet. The same intelligent eyes looked at me like the bone lion's.

The other creature was an enormous green insect, like a praying mantis except with a flexible abdomen covered in jagged spikes and three eyes. Vibrant stripes of red interlaced the green exoskeleton covering its abdomen, and the limbs on its mouth looked more like teeth than random limbs. The mandible mouth grinned when I looked at it with a eerie drool leaking from its mouth.

The last creature was an orange, dozen legged crab with a mouth for the top of its shell. The arms were made as grabbers for shoving things into the abyss of teeth at the top of the creature. All in all, the creatures made for a hellish scene, except for the boar. It looked almost like a demi human rather than an outright monster.

Didn't stop the boar from charging me faster than the others did. It roared as it approached, the crab scuttling behind it. The mantis opened its scythe like arms, revealing hundreds of horns under them. One horn shot from under the mantises arms at a time, drilling out towards me as the boar reached me.

They were using tactics, unlike their zombie counterparts. That made them much more difficult foes. With my runes finally unlocked and oppression baring down on them the whole time, I was a far stronger foe than what the zombies faced as well. That, and I had a tad bit of support.

Off in the distance, the ear shattering echo of Althea's rifle blared. A horn of bone shot through the arms of the mantis , pinning them to the pod tree as it shrieked. The boar reached me, trying to gore me on its tusks. I almost laughed when it reached me.

I stomped forward, the energy in my runes reverberating with a destructive force. The pavement shattered under my feet as I weaved all my weight into my next blow. My right arm dragged behind me as I turned, my body struggling with all the untapped energy. I pushed more of my own tenacious life force into the blow, further amplifying the already devastating punch. As my blow landed, it was like unloading a cannon into the boar's face.

The tusks shattered. The skull ruptured down the middle. Blood sprayed in all directions like I was squishing a watermelon full of blood. My armor grinned, a set of spiked teeth forming. The same bloodlust of before crawled from every direction. I stomped it out as I stomped the boar's neck, ending its life.

I was going to be an eater of monsters, not become one myself. I ducked backwards, dodging a claw from the fucked up crab. Several claws bolted towards me, but I curved myself, dodging each of them. They dug into the pavement below me as the crab turned itself and dug its teeth into the boar's corpse.

With a quick snap of its neck, it threw the monster into the pit of teeth at its center. I leapt up towards it, landing inside its mouth. The jaws of the monster closed, turning the once open mouth into an iron maiden. The teeth of the creature cracked and fractured against my armor. With a reformation, I turned my hands back into the shovel claws I used for digging dirt. Instead, I dug into the insides of the crab.

The monster's mouth opened when I dug into its insides, the numerous arms above me poking at me in a desperate struggle to get me out. The white flesh of the crab's muscle showed in every direction as I turned its insides into outsides. I laughed,

"Who's eating who now?"

The crab's lashings on my back doubled in effort at my taunting, but the damage was already done. The thing couldn't get me out, not without my clawing my way out first. After a minute of sloshing it, the monster stopped struggling, only twitching now and again.

Inside the thing, I ate my way out, my armor consuming the meat like a ravenous beast. Althea walked up to the edge of oppression before screaming as she jumped back. She snapped,

"So you're alive. That aura still hurts like a scalpel."

One of my arms stabbed out of the crab's outer shell before another arm opened the hole further. Cracking the shell open, I fell out before standing,

"Thanks for the support."

She glanced around at the bodies, "I don't understand how they can sit in the aura. It's just too painful."

I rubbed some crab gunk off my armor, "It's because they have a ton of damage resistance, and you don't."

Althea raised an eyebrow, my explanation obviously not enough. I spread out my arms as I continued, "Think of it like this. Oppression is physical and chemical damage. Having a high physical damage resistance reduces the damage it deals. It does 8000 health and 30% of your health a minute, but that's only if you have zero damage resistance."

I closed my arms in, "But see, most enemies over level 300 will have hit the resistance cap for constitution pretty easily. That means they have 95% damage resistance. Oppression does 1/20th its normal damage. That means only 400 and 1.5% of their health as physical damage. It's more like a counter to very squishy builds and hordes of weak enemies. Enemies like this-"

I kicked the shell of the crab, "will usually take way less damage than heavier hitting moves like my punches."

Althea nodded, "So armored enemies give you trouble then?"

"Uh, relatively speaking, yes."

She raised her rifle, "That's good. My abilities are great versus armored targets. I can fill in the gaps in your offense."

I nodded, "Yeah, we are. Anyways, let's put our points into our skills and continue on. Standing still doesn't sound like a good idea. Elijah almost got me because of that."

We opened up our status screens, remaining wary of any nearby sounds. With seven levels under my belt, I met a crossroads when I opened my status screen. At first, I tossed around the idea of investing my points into either constitution or strength. They both gave very useful bonuses for sure, but they weren't anything spectacular. Kessiah had called them more of the same.

The attribute I found sticking out to me was actually intelligence. The benefits weren't as direct as either strength or constitution, but it had a massive bonus in the form of arcane blood.

Yah see, health was my bread and butter stat. I had enhanced resistances which were multiplicative with my health. My armor gave bonuses to my total health. I even got bonus health regeneration from building health. Arcane blood meant that intelligence would effectively give me health instead of mana, and health regen was essentially mana regen as well.

That meant that intelligence gave me some compelling bonuses, not even including the other stuff intelligence gave like critical thinking. In the end though, I held onto the attribute points. I figured consulting Torix or Kessiah was a good idea for my next stat allocation.

With a little more health than before and at level 167, I trekked onward into the deeper parts of the city. Althea tailed not far behind me, staying where oppression had touched. The plants and other various fungal plants would shrivel, giving enemies less places to hide. That was a serious problem since the spare plant here or there had turned into a thick tundra of fungal things.

Yellow and tan capped mushrooms of varying heights collected into dense clusters on the ground. Stalks of dark yellow crawled and twisted into clusters, creating shrubs above the mushroom floor and grass floor. Roots from nearby pod trees were growing between these patches, along with dead grass. Vines of black crawled up and out of these tall trees, latching and crawling across nearby buildings and power poles.

At this point, the density of the forest of fungi made moving forward a slow trudge. We didn't even make it a hundred feet forward before several zombies crawled out of cars, windows, or from out of the ground. The underground zombies had long roots growing out of them, like they were part of a tree system of some sort.

Seeing humans molded halfway into the plants made me wince. My high willpower saw me through the experience though. The horror of it all crept up my spine and weighed on my shoulders, but all the bonus internal motivation kept me stable. I could grit my teeth and deal with it, keeping calm despite the chaotic disturbance.

Even as the corpse of a father and his children sprinted towards me, I didn't hesitate. I was ruthless. The two children leapt towards me with their warped corpses, but a harpoon detonated one and my fist crushed another one into the ground. The black blood splattered in every direction as the father dived onto me. It pressed me down onto the ground, the man's neck split open with teeth and organs spilling onto me.

I chomped forward, my armor devouring the creature. The jagged teeth cleaved through the flesh, severing and absorbing the creature in seconds.The creature realized rather quick that it wasn't the hunter. It was the hunted. It tried crawling away as I ate it, but with two quick stomps, I crushed its legs. It couldn't escape as I tore it apart with my helmet's teeth. Althea shouted from a block away,

"What the fuck are you doing? Eating it?"

I dropped an arm into the armor's portal, "No. This is how my armor absorbs it now. I can't evolve my armor any other way."

"It's fucking gross."

"Really? Can you say your power isn't?"

After a few seconds of contemplation, Althea shot a harpoon through the core of one of Yawm's pawns, "Yeah. Alright. Touche."

I ran over towards the corpse before using my armor to get the ambient mana from it. With the corpses handled and the plants being destroyed, we trekked forward through the ruins of Springfield once more. Fifty feet later, Althea and I stood at the crossroads between the cityscape and suburbia.

The houses turned into stores and congress buildings as we moved forward. The raided stores were empty with broken windows and full of rotting meat. Cars crashed into telephone poles, light posts, and even brick walls, blood splattered onto the windshields. Once Oppression's radius touched these cars, no enemies spilled out. The petals couldn't make their way into those enclosed spaces. It gave me some hope that we may find some survivors. Then I remembered Michael and Kelsey.

Anyone alive would just be turned into those abominations. Oppression would be a merciful death for most, especially when compared with slowly being converted from the inside out. We still had to find some more spawns for leveling.

Fortunately, we didn't have to look far. Off in the distance was a grocery store. The sound of chewing leaked out. Several of the spawns crowded around a few unconverted corpses and some rotting meat. The refrigerators weren't raided for the most part. It had taken some time for people to finish the tutorial, meaning anything that required refrigeration was spoiled by the time people could get it.

Now the zombies swarmed around those festering hellholes, their fucked up mouths sunken into the rotting mush. We could take advantage of them feasting.

Althea and I skulked into the nearby grocery store, the rows of empty aisles standing tall as I was. A few places were left unlooted, like parts of the aisle holding motor supplies and the like. I picked up two bottles of lighter fluid, which is basically butane. I motioned towards Althea. She raised an eyebrow in confusion, but I walked forward anyway. She would understand once the plan was started.

As I got within Oppression's range, I pointed at the zombies. I tossed a bottle of lighter fluid towards them, the bottle landing in the brown filled fridge the spawn's ate from. I tossed another bottle,

"Shoot it."

Althea raised her rifle, landing a harpoon dead center of the bottle, detonating the bottle in a fiery flash. The explosion chained with the bottle in the fridge, setting all four spawns on fire. I moved forward at the same time as the detonation, putting the spawns within the range of Oppression. They died over the next five minutes from a few harpoons and the residual damage from the fire and my aura.

Skill gained! Resourceful(lvl 1) - You use what's at hand for whatever you need. +1% to damage from environmental objects or traps.

With the new skill and five more levels under my belt, we walked out of the store no worse for wear. I shut off Oppression before walking up to Althea and saying, "How much more hunting should we do?"

She glanced around, making sure no other zombies were present, "We kill them until we need to sleep."

I shrugged, "Alright. Whenever you get tired then."

That's how we spent the rest of the day and even a few hours into the night. Althea could see in the dark, surprisingly enough. That let us set traps or just brute force our way through the enemies. When all was said and done, I gained sixty one levels and Althea gained seventy two. It made a night and day difference for both of us.

We retraced our steps, finding our way out of the barricade with Kessiah's help. She tailed us the entire day, making sure no one or no thing could just kill us before we could fight back. She actually killed several named ones, yet we never found any sign of a fight having taken place. In my mind, there hadn't been a fight. Kessiah probably had stabbed her arm through the named one's skull before throwing the body somewhere. I wish she had let me turn them to mana instead.

Still, plenty of progress on that front as well. I was getting close towards my next evolution, and I had enough points in intelligence for the perk point if I wanted it. I needed to make sure before I put points into it though. As we walked through the forest and towards our current base, Althea and I discussed our layouts.

"But how is strength supposed to help with my cannon?"

I rolled my eyes, "You have a perk that doubles your effective strength already, and you put most of your points today into strength. That makes the perk for it required at this point. Your melee attacks will become devastating. You won't have a weakness, and in a world where you could die at any moment, weaknesses are what kills you."

"Then why don't you work on some ranged attack? That's a pretty glaring weakness."

I nodded, "I've got a few plans for it already. I just have to see if they're at all feasible."

"Like what?"

With a burst of effort, a blob of writhing, black mana spawned above my hand. A set of red, translucent spirals kept the tendrils of energy from shooting out too far. It shook in my hand, "This is my affinity for dominion. It's got more than a few uses, ranged combat being one of them."

The mana blipped out. I sighed, "But I can't work with it yet. It should help round out my style of fighting quite a bit."

Althea pursed her lips, "Well...fine."

She clicked the screen in front of her before her muscles rippled. She stared at her hands for a moment before smashing a hand into a nearby tree. The wood exploded outwards like she'd struck it with a grenade. The tree's trunk bent away from her strike, long wedges split up and down the bark and wood. The tree fell over as Althea grinned,

"Yeah...This was a good idea."

I shrugged, "What can I say. I'm full of them. Speaking of which-"

I opened my own status screen. After watching how right I was about Althea's investments, I put some faith into my own judgment. Intelligence would give me the most bang for my buck. Investing directly into intelligence wouldn't though. Endurance gave me a 50% attribute bonus, as did willpower. With the way my perks worked, investing into endurance fed into willpower which fed into intelligence. If I just kept increasing endurance, I'd unlock the intelligence perk eventually.

It helped that I could move the attributes back and forth on the status screen, letting me try out different combinations of stats. With all my multipliers from my trees, endurance was still my best bet for making the most out of my attribute points. Once I invested all my points, I'd need about fifty more levels for the level 100 perk.

Level 221 Attribute Totals

Strength - Increases carrying weight, maximum speed, and physical power 44.2

Constitution - Increases hardness, density, and weight of your body 36.3

Endurance - Increases regeneration of stamina, health, and their totals 384

Dexterity - Increases ease of movement, flexibility, and reflexes 32.8

Willpower - Increases internal motivation, mana regen, and Mental Res 187.8

Intelligence - Increases memory, critical thinking, and total mana pool 80.3

Charisma - Increases likeability, persuasion, and decreases prices at shops 36.7

Luck - Increases money found, odds in your favor, and chance of rare events 40

Perception - Increases comprehension, the five senses, and awareness 30.5

Daniel Hillside Totals Regen Buffs/Debuffs

Health 12,800/12,800 2169/min Oppression Damage- 8000+25%hp/min

Stamina 7825/7825 89/sec Elemental Res - 97%

Harbinger of Cataclysm 14,963,456/16,000,000 0/per min Plasma Res - 97%

Phys Dam Reduction - 97% Rad Res - 97%

Phys Dam Bonus - 542% Mental Res - 97%

At this point, my health was probably comparable with Torix. Curious of my new potential, I jogged in front of Althea,

"Hey, mind shooting me through the arm? I want to test something."

She didn't even hesitate. Althea raised her rifle, unloading a shell into my forearm. The shell lodged a few inches deep, but didn't pierce enough for any meaningful damage. With all the leveling perks adding up, the shell hadn't even slung me back either. I was too heavy and too dense. I stood my ground before ripping the bone spear out of my arm.

I grinned, "Thanks. That was all I needed to know."

Althea's jaw dropped before she frowned, outrage spread all over her face, "How did you block my harpoon?"

I waved behind me as I jogged forward, "With health. Fuckloads of it."

Charging my runes, I dashed forward before she followed behind me. At this point, I was genuinely durable in my mind. I still had a ways to go before I could just ignore any damage, but low level enemies couldn't touch me anymore. Enhancing my regeneration enhanced the bonuses from augmentation too, making me faster and stronger. With a bit more practice with the runes, I'd be a damn fine destroyer.

With that in mind, I headed back for some more practice with the runes. Before we reached the cave, the ground in front of the entrance exploded. Kessiah had appeared in an instant and said,

"Someone's in there besides Torix. Be ready."

Althea and I set ourselves up for a fight as we headed back into the cave. As we entered, Torix's voice came into focus,

"I take it we'll reap the benefits of your trading as well."

An electronic voice replied, "Yes. Indeed you will. Schema and the legion will be pleased with your cooperation."

We reached the bottom of the stairs before a faceless, robotic humanoid turned its gaze towards us. Smooth, futuristic, and intimidating, it looked like a normal, lightly armored skin suit up until you reached the shoulders and arms. A giant platform was bolted onto the torso of it, making a flat line of black armor at its head and shoulders. It was a giant block of smooth machinery with two giant, over-sized arms hanging from the sides of it.

The arms hung straight down as the robot's massive knuckles pressed against the ground even as it stood up. Black cables hung from the back of that platform. Tubes ran through the colossal, hydraulic arms and torso. Several moving bolts were locked in at strategic points, giving the arms and shoulders excellent range of motion. On the black plate covering its head, six silver bolts created a hexagonal pattern.

The entire living suit was black, besides for the white, polished steel of the bolts and the glowing blue resonating from several of the joints. Just looking at the thing let me know it wasn't something you fought. You had to listen to whatever it said, otherwise it would tear you limb from limb.

Kessiah reaffirmed my suspicions as she lowered her guard. Althea and I followed suit. As we stepped up, I tilted my head,

"Who the fuck is this?"

The faceless armor looked at me. With a robotic edge to its voice, it said,

"I am the overseer sent by Schema. It is good to meet you, Harbinger.”