by Macronomicon
Contents
Chapter 1: Old Habits
Chapter 2: Lesson One
Chapter 3: Job Hunting
Chapter 4: Survival Skills
Chapter 5: Finishing the Job
Chapter 6: Gettin’ Paid
Chapter 7: Punitive Remuneration
Chapter 8: Getting Out of Dodge
Chapter 9: Local Culture, Friendly Wildlife
Chapter 10: Road Trip
Chapter 11: Buying Company
Chapter 12: Run Forrest
Chapter 13: Networking
Chapter 14: Can’t Go Back
Chapter 15: Knock Knock
Chapter 16: Throttled
Chapter 17: The Academy
Chapter 18: Plan C
Chapter 19: The Trial
Chapter 20: Location, Location, Location
Chapter 21: The O’sut Bottleneck
Chapter 22: Factory Settings
Chapter 23: Fan Mail
Chapter 24: The Calm
Chapter 25: The Storm
Chapter 26: The Storm (Pt. 2)
Chapter 27: Aftermath
Chapter 1: Old Habits
***Chris Acker, level 56 Ranger***
Chris Acker whistled as his machete popped in his hand, transferring that exact sensation of cutting through a vertebra through his wrist and into his arm.
The mob’s head rolled off into the street and wobbled in front of one of the men in a similar kneeling posture, held there by the supernaturally strong hands of Chris’s demons.
The man alternated between sobbing and babbling pitifully.
You have gained a level!
You are now level fifty-seven!
“Finally,” Chris muttered, straightening up and working the tension out of the back of his neck. He’d been hunched over, hacking off heads a good half hour, and he was starting to cramp up.
Still, much faster than hunting monsters.
For whatever reason, monsters gave jack shit for XP, at least relative to humans and those other aliens. A man could spend months risking his life fighting monsters people would have only dreamed about before The System, and he’d get maybe four levels.
Rule of thumb: If it can speak, it’s worth more XP.
Chris had figured that out during the Tutorial, when he’d bashed Tony over the head with a rock after the bastard had stolen his weapons. He’d gotten two levels. Two whole levels.
Once the Tutorial was over and Earth had been added to Pharos, everything had kind of fallen to shit for a hot minute before the locals showed up with their government, pointing to their flag and how much bigger it was. In the end, most people accepted tyranny for a hot meal.
Not Chris.
Chris had it figured out.
People were just bags of XP living in close proximity to each other. All you have to do is take advantage of that, and kill enough people, before eventually no one has the power to stop you.
Risk vs. reward.
Sure, when he first got started luring men into dark alleys, they might have been able to stop him, but now?
He glanced at the blood-bound demons that held the few remaining mobs still. They loomed over his prisoners, easily twisting their arms back like a man tormenting an eight-year-old boy.
Now, nobody was going to stop him. It was simply too late for that. Killing people was the most viable way to increase a man’s level, and levels were the quickest way to gain more power to kill. One fed the other.
It was an exponential, runaway equation. After Chris finished with this town, he would skip a few towns over, then maybe backtrack a little bit, so the powers that be didn’t find a pattern in the disappearing towns.
Once he was more confident, he could move up to a small city.
Chris’s eyes glazed over as he pictured the amount of power he could accumulate from an entire city.
“Please, please,” the next guy in line whispered, tears and snot falling like rain.
“Nope,” Chris muttered, bringing down the machete again.
Pop.
The head flew off, knocking up against the previous one. Chris glanced along the line, doing a quick mental tally.
Only a dozen or so adults left, Chris thought, tapping the blade against the corpse’s ribs to get a little of the spatter off. Then I’m outta here.
Chris didn’t know what children were worth, XP-wise, and frankly he didn’t want to know.
Anybody that would consider killing kids is a sick fuck, Chris thought, maneuvering behind the next weeping mob, a grey-haired old woman with saggy tits.
I wonder what she’s worth, Chris thought, lining up the machete with the nape of her neck.
“You know what I hate about people like you?”
A voice caught his attention. It was deep, but soft and feminine, causing him to look up, frowning.
There, sitting on the town’s well, was a melas woman reading a paperback book and smoking. She had an open pack of Camels sitting beside her, and the book had a dark cover with Stephen King’s name featured prominently on the front.
Melas had orange skin and pitch-black nails and hair. They were larger than humans on average, and tended to be muscular as well. The more aggressive ones grew horns.
This woman had horns.
She’s here to stop me, Chris thought, a spike of anxiety going through his guts.
“Kill her!” Chris shouted, pointing at the alien. His demons could give him the time he needed to retreat if she turned out to be—
The melas woman flickered between turning pages, and Chris felt as though he was being torn apart as each and every one of his bound demons slumped to the ground, bisected. Their blood splattered against the adobe buildings as Chris sank to his knees, clutching his chest as his heart registered each and every death.
“I hate people that are smart enough to realize that killing other people is the fastest way to raise your level, but stupid enough to think they were the first person to think of it.”
She held apart a thumb and forefinger, still not looking at him. “Right on that fine line between clever and intelligent. That’s where people cause problems.”
How can I get out of this? Chris thought frantically as the ache in his heart began to calm down, his adrenaline numbing the pain and kicking his brain into high gear.
Calm down. Think. I just got my new Class Ability last week.
Chris’s C-ranked Class, Ranger, didn’t mesh well with his Myst Core, but the Class itself was good at surviving, and that was exactly what he needed to do right now.
His Class had given him the Decoy Ability at level fifty. All he needed to do was break line of sight.
Chris glanced at the alley behind him, then back to the melas sitting on the well, seemingly lost in her book.
In order to break line of sight, he needed a distraction.
Chris took a deep breath and funneled the Myst out of the flaming pit in the center of his soul. He reached in and grabbed the hand of the biggest badass he could find, tearing the creature through the barrier between worlds and into existence.
Directly between the two of them.
“Who dares summon—”
Decoy.
Chris leapt straight back, leaving a live-action decoy of himself standing right where he had been, picture-perfect down to the thick blond hair and cocky grin, and landed directly behind the newly summoned hellspawn.
Predictably, Chris felt the jabbing sensation in his heart when the demon was slaughtered, but he was already turning the corner of the alley.
At this rate, she wouldn’t even know where he’d—
“Hurk!” Chris’s breathing ended in a pained grunt as something snatched him by the collar.
Desp
erate, Chris swung the machete behind him wildly, aiming to catch the alien with the blade and force her to let him go.
Instead, something caught his arm. Chris didn’t have any time to think before his arm snapped the wrong way, wrenching a scream out of his lungs.
Something kicked his knees out, and dragged his other arm behind him, breaking that in the process, too.
“Come on then.” The melas’s rich voice spoke from directly behind him. “Let’s get this over with.”
Steely fingers clamped around Chris’s skull, and he tried to fight them off, but he did little more than flop his arms and scrape dirt up with his boots as the alien dragged him to the center of town.
“Here we go. Try not to be a little bitch. This is for posterity.”
“Wha—” Chris couldn’t quite follow the creature’s meaning, glancing up at her in confusion as she produced a little sphere on a tripod and set it on the edge of the well, fiddling with it like a cameraman trying to get the best angle.
Suddenly a picture of her appeared on the wall of every building, directly in front of the cowering citizens of the town. Those who hadn’t take the opportunity to fuck off yet, anyway.
Directly in front of him, deformed by the shoddy craftsmanship of the well, Chris could make out his own face, eyes widening.
“Ah, there we go,” she said, straightening in front of what was presumably a magical camera.
“Greetings citizens, this is Imperial Enforcer Vresh Tekalis, dispatched to the west reaches of the empire upon reports of a reaper.
“Reaping is defined as the systematic murder of sapient individuals in order to gain levels at an accelerated pace. It is an intolerable cancer on our society, a direct violation of the Sacarus Accord, and the punishment is death.”
Chris watched his own eyes go wide.
“I, Vresh Tekalis, have found this human guilty of reaping and will now carry out his sentence.” The orange-skinned woman brandished Chris’s machete.
“Please, please!” Chris babbled, eyes watering as his heart began pounding, drowning out the woman’s response.
Chris felt the rough, notched blade rest against his neck, dull from the hundreds of people he’d executed that very afternoon.
Then he felt her start sawing.
Chris Acker watched himself get decapitated.
***Vresh Tekalis***
Vresh grimaced as she worked. She deliberately sawed the man’s head off his twitching body. Slowly. Not because she enjoyed it, but because it had to be horrific. The video had been shared to every man and woman above the age of majority, and it was meant to be seen as a stiff reminder:
Yes, we are watching.
Yes, we will find you.
Gross, Vresh thought, tossing the head aside, and continuing with her rote lines.
“The sentence has been carried out,” Vresh said, swallowing the urge to puke. She couldn’t be seen to be unwilling to perform her duties, despite how little joy she took in them. Appearances mattered. “Ending transmission.”
She reached out to tap the button on the top of the spherical camera, but the blood on her fingers caused it to slip, sending the camera toppling backwards into the well.
“Eep!” She lunged forward and nearly caught it, but the little sphere slipped out of its tripod and fell downward, spinning as it receded down the well.
“Phooey!”
I’m gonna have to buy another one out of pocket, she thought sourly. That made this her third lost empire-wide transmitter. Those things didn’t grow on trees, and her quartermaster was sure to give her a merciless reaming.
***Jebediah Trapper***
“She seems cute,” Jeb said, moments after the video feed hit the water and abruptly cut off. The image of the horned woman’s pouty face flickering in front of the camera as it receded down the well lingered with him.
“In a…just-killed-a-guy kind of way?” Smartass asked, raising a tiny brow.
“Kind of?” Jeb said, waggling his fingers. The contrast between the woman who’d literally sawed a man’s head off and the girl fumbling and giving a frustrated ‘phooey’ was highly amusing to him.
Smartass opened her mouth to say something, but was cut off by Jeb’s stomach, growling ominously in displeasure.
“Breakfast?” Jeb asked, pushing himself to his foot, leaning against the alleyway’s walls to stabilize himself. Jeb stifled a yawn as he slipped on his pegleg with a bleary grumble before using it to nudge his trash camouflage over his valuables.
People usually weren’t interested in digging through trash. If they were, it was usually because life wasn’t exactly going their way. That kind of applied to Jeb too, come to think of it.
“We could be living in an inn,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “With pillows…and baths.”
“Like I said, I’m more comfortable outside,” Jeb said, glancing up at the sky and shoving thoughts of PTSD out of mind. Jeb had spent the first two weeks after the Tutorial staring at the ceiling of inns and abandoned buildings before he’d found himself moving his bed closer and closer to the window.
Just to get fresh air, he’d told himself. Then he told himself it was so he had an escape route in case he was attacked. It was as though he was fleeing the room in stop motion.
It was when Jeb was contemplating sleeping with his head out the window that he realized his war PTSD was subtly rearing its ugly head, steering his decisions through an uneasy fear that had no name.
Other than The Spike. The fear loomed over him, always fooling his brain into thinking the ceiling would collapse on him at any moment, skewering him with a thick spike of steel. Hence the name.
Jeb had to do something about it.
Well, there wasn’t exactly an internet to look for a therapist in Kalfath and Jeb didn’t think his shrink would ever get back to him for a second session.
The first time Jeb had tried to muscle through the fear, he’d tried to off himself, so Jeb changed tactics and dealt with the problem by avoiding it entirely: He slept outside in the alley.
“Hey! What’s the first rule of Wizard Club?” Smartass said, hands akimbo, flying directly in front of his face.
“Is it…don’t talk about Wizard Club?” Jeb asked.
“Good. When phrased as a question, it isn’t a lie. You’re sooo close to a hundred days without telling a single untruth. You almost screwed yourself over with that ‘comfortable’ statement, I felt it. Lucky for you, you actually are more comfortable outside, barely. For some awful reason.”
The first rule of Wizard Club, and the only advice that Smartass had given him thus far was ‘Never Lie’. It seemed arbitrary and strange, but Jeb trusted that the fairy wanted that candy bad enough to give him good advice.
It was actually pretty difficult, though. Lies rolled off people like snowflakes, and Jeb had spent the first week astonished at how often he lied.
White lies in public, like ‘good to see you’, ‘it was fun’, ‘I appreciate it’... These reflexive, polite statements were all lies.
Lies by exaggeration: ‘He kicked the shit out of me.’ ‘That chili lit my asshole on fire.’ ‘You fart-knocker.’ They all counted too.
Etc., etc.
The only lies allowed were misleading truths and lies by omission. Technically not lies at all.
Try to go a day without uttering a single untruth. It’s harder than it sounds.
“So what happens when I go a hundred days without telling a lie?” Jeb asked, hobbling out to the street corner, scratching his beard. The scraggly thing was starting to get respectably uncomfortable.
“Then, my enormous disciple, we begin the second stage of your wizard training,” the fairy said solemnly. “Human wizards were rare for many reasons, primarily because telling the truth seems to be beyond your capability, as a species.”
“Your commentary on my species has been noted,” Jeb muttered as he emerged from the alleyway and angled toward his favorite spot for begging, the corner of a street where a mo
dest amount of traffic passed by every day. Just enough to earn a day’s wages but not so much that he would attract the attention of the local fuzz.
The city wasn’t kind to humans, or beggars, and human beggars were right out.
“Morning, Jeb.” A keegan in a snazzy uniform of black with razor-straight gold trim oozed into view, regarding Jeb with that skull-grin they all shared. It was much easier to read a keegan’s expression by looking at their eyebrows.
Think of the devil. Jeb grimaced.
“Morning, Officer Zlesk,” Jeb said, keeping his tone as neutral as possible.
“You remembered my name! I’m flattered,” Zlesk said, his expression amused.
I certainly hope so, Jeb thought. He’d rather have the authorities be flattered than insulted, all other things being equal. Less pain in his ass that way.
“Seemed like a good idea,” Jeb said.
“Right,” Zlesk said, his stance shifting as he peered down at Jeb. “Where you headed this morning?”
“Gonna beg on the corner of Lorne and Kole,” Jeb said, motioning to the wide street just a ways down the road, where a lot of traffic meant decent pickings, begging-wise.
Not having a Class or level was rough. Jeb was now living in a kind of communist fantasy world, where everyone got the job they were good at, and did it superhumanly well.
In short, unless the task was killing for profit, there was really nothing else that he could be expected to do better than an eighteen-year-old pissant with a Busboy Class.
Jeb was on average dumber, weaker, and slower than a normal citizen. The only thing he had going for him was experience and moral flexibility.
Still, Jeb would rather not become a mugger or bandit and make others miserable simply to survive, so…begging filled the occupational gap that kept him breathing.
“Corner of Lorne and Kole, huh?” Zlesk asked, rubbing his chin. “That place gets pretty crowded between noon and three. You planning on holding up traffic?”
“No such plans, sir,” Jeb said, his pegleg clacking against the cobbled stone as the alien police officer stalked him through the street, prodding for some kind of actionable offense.
“You know, I’ve actually been mildly disappointed with you humans. First species to make it through the Impossible Tutorial. Bam! I thought every single one of you was going to be some kind of natural-born survivor, fierce apex predators smeared with dirt and blood, waiting to be unleashed.”