Defiance of the Fall

Chapter 84: Super Brother-Man

Zac turned toward Ogras a bit confused.

“Why are there already more monsters pouring out? How does the System decide?” he asked hesitantly. He felt that it was too big a coincidence that new monsters just started spawning after Zac and Ogras arrived here and killed the boss.

“You ask me, but who am I going to ask?” Ogras responded. “But I think there might be certain triggers that push out new waves. Perhaps killing the boss immediately sends the next one through. But I think there is a limit of how long you can stall, even if you keep the leader alive. The Ruthless Heaven has its name for a reason, and it won’t let you breathe too easy by finding a loophole.”

If what Ogras said was true the System really created a conflict of interest. Killing the boss would spawn more monsters, but it also probably awarded a good amount of contribution points. Greedy warriors would hunt it for the points, not caring about the results. Soon the whole camp would be overrun by waves upon waves of wolves.

“We need to set some ground rules,” Zac immediately said as he turned to Ogras. He didn’t mind the demon killing the odd wolf around him, as that was only playing around. There were almost an endless amount of targets, and Zac didn’t worry that he wouldn’t be able to hunt his fill. But running for the bosses in greed for contribution points couldn’t be allowed.

“The boss is off-limits until only a quarter of the wave remains,” he said as he stared at Ogras, who only grimaced but nodded after some deliberation.

He didn’t have time to keep thinking up plans as the new wave was upon them. Zac first thought it was large rats when he saw them exit the portals. They were a lot smaller compared to their brethren, the normal ones only reaching his knees in height. They also looked completely wretched, with their mangy fur fallen off at large patches of their bodies. Their eyes were a sinister red, and the feeling he got from them was that they were putrid cursed creatures.

Ogras seemed to agree as he started backing away as he kept throwing out Shadow blades at anything approaching. He even seemed loath to use his real spear, afraid it would get dirtied by the new beasts.

“These things look pretty disgusting. Try not to get bit, I am willing to bet an arm these things carry some weird diseases in their bodies” the demon said with a wrinkled brow. “If you capture a few live ones and gift them to Alea I’m sure she will be delighted. I bet she can create some sinister concoctions from these things after some experimentation. Anyway, I’m off. Good luck.”

With that the demon was gone, using his escape skill to move through the shadows. Zac was left alone pondering whether to stay here right by the portals or to head back. The gnarly wolves didn’t wait for him to make a decision as they stormed him with speed belying their small shriveled frames.

As they scurried close to him they launched themselves in the air toward his face in order to rip into more vulnerable areas. Zac turned his huge axe and with a horizontal swing smashed multiple wolves into broken pieces of flesh with the broad side of the edge. Even their blood smelled rancid, and Zac didn’t want to get any of that on his face. He rapidly backed away and quickly put a handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

Next, he swapped out his huge unwieldy axe to two normal ones. The new foes were too small so he couldn’t easily kill them with the giga-axe. A wide swing would simply fly past above their heads, and he felt that using two normal axes would be more effective. He kept swinging away, decimating anything that moved close as he gradually retreated toward the walls. His kill-speed wasn’t as great as when he used [Chop], but it was respectable.

Since he upgraded his race he found that his body’s coordination improved noticeably, and it had made him resume his training with two axes. The first time he tried it out he felt it was too unwieldy, but by now his arms moved independently from each other, each creating gouts of putrid blood wherever they hit.

Soon enough he was closing in on the wall and saw that most of the first wave was dead by now. A perimeter of melee fighters had been erected, and Zac saw some scared non-combat demons scurrying about the battlefield. They were throwing the wolf carcasses into cosmic bags, to be dumped and burned further away from the camp after anything of value was stripped from the bodies.

It was to both avoid pestilence spreading, but also to not allow bodies to accumulate to the point that they started to form a ramp up the wall. Their work was extremely efficient as they rapidly moved along, barely stopping as they threw the carcasses into the Cosmos Sacks. Obviously, the melee fighters had done a do-over of the corpses first with quick stabs, ensuring that everything was dead.

When they saw Zac and the putrid wolves approaching they all scurried through a gate to safety. The gate wasn’t some thick wooden door like in a medieval castle, but a section of the wall itself even thicker than most other sections. It was created in conjunction between some craftsmen and Earth mages and required 10 Nexus Crystals to power every time it opened and closed. It was a bit slow, but it didn’t present a point of entry or weakness like classic castle gates did.

One exception to the escape through the gate was Alea, who gleefully charged straight toward Zac.

“I heard you’re bringing me gifts?” she exclaimed, looking absolutely delighted. She unheedingly ran straight into the frenzied pack of the mangy wolves, and Zac’s eyes widened in alarm. It was one thing for him with his huge endurance to be running around in the midst of the beasts, as these small ones couldn’t hurt him either.

But even he was wary of their blood as it looked positively unclean, with a greyish murky color instead of red. Luckily his clothes had a self-cleaning feature and the blood just slid off after a short while. But for the slender demoness to do the same approach seemed suicidal. He wasn’t sure what stats a poison master focused, but it didn’t feel like it was endurance at least. He quickly changed direction and ran to help her out.

Soon he realized he was worried about nothing as the beasts that got too close to her simply melted into pools of goop. Zac immediately stopped in his tracks, afraid to get caught in whatever poison the demoness had surrounded herself with.

Next she quickly threw out a small needle at one of the beasts that looked extra wretched, and it powerlessly fell down on the ground immediately after the needle embedded itself in its throat. She walked over to it and picked it up, and for some reason it didn’t melt like the others around her. Zac first thought the beast was dead from the needle, but the frantically whirling eyes of the beast told another story.

“It seems its condition is due to living in a weird environment. The Ruthless Heavens calls its race Blackswamp Wolf, so it probably lives in a miasmic swamp. Something in the waters is corroding these wolves, and over time they have transformed into these cute little things. Perhaps it’s possible to extract whatever’s the cause and add it into a concoction,” she started to mutter mostly for herself, seeming eager to try and weaponize the wolves’ affliction.

“People with less than 80 or so vitality shouldn’t come in contact with their blood, or they will probably get sick,” she added with a louder voice up toward the walls before she started to continue to examine the beast. She quickly broke all its limbs with a deftness that hinted that this wasn’t the first time she did experimentation on animals and started to retreat to the wall while she flipped it over to look at every detail of the poor creature.

Zac simply moved away without a word and kept killing wolves with his two axes. These small wolves were a bit more annoying to kill since they were so small, but he wouldn’t stop. Each one gave around 110 Nexus Coins, even better than the last wave, and he was accumulating wealth and cosmic energy at a terrifying speed. It was barely more than a barghest, but they were everywhere. If the density of barghest was this crazy he would have finished grinding for his first class quests in less than a day instead of a week. Of course, with his stats at that time he might just have died from being swarmed rather than just having more targets to kill.

Less than 30 minutes had passed since the start of the quest but he already managed to accumulate something like 30 000 Nexus Coins. He had only used less than a quarter of his cosmic energy so far, and could keep going for a long time. The attacks from the wall had reduced somewhat though, as some of the demons were sitting down and absorbing energy from Nexus Crystals that Zac provided.

Some of the other demons kept blasting away, greedily farming some money, and a few burly-looking demons even dared to jump down the wall as well, apparently trusting Alea’s judgment. This wave was starting to thin out as well after the furious melee continued, and it gave Zac a brief chance to catch his breath.

He had been busy with the monsters, so he ignored the prompt from the System that entered his ears just before the monsters arrived. It said that a Ladder was activated, and he was curious to see what that meant. He kept killing any beasts who approached with a quick swing with his axes, but it was mostly by instinct as he focused on the new screen that popped up.

[Ladder System initialized. Enter pseudonym or real name?]

That gave Zac a start. He started to feel that the ladder system was akin to a ranking that you could see in many games, where his level was listed against others. It sounded like something the System would do. It wanted to force people to get stronger, and a ladder would generate competition amongst the elite.

Entering his real name would let his friends or family know he was alive and fine, but it might also cause them trouble. He was pretty sure he should be up there in the rankings if the Ladder was only for earth, even after his month of not gaining levels. Someone might want to exploit his family, or even kidnap them to threaten him if such a connection was made public. He already had created a beacon with the name Port Atwood, which should hopefully be enough when the town gained some fame in the future.

After coming to a decision he chose pseudonym, and a new problem presented itself. What should he call himself? At first, he thought of just using his class name, but he didn’t know if people learning of the name Hatchetman would have some implications. Suddenly he had an idea, and he chose ‘Super Brother-Man’ with a nostalgic look in his eyes. He could only pray that Mackenzie, his little sister, would remember.

She was only five when he played pretend-superheroes with her, using the name Super Brother-man. He hadn’t thought about it for over a decade, and no one but her should know about it. As soon as he chose it a large window popped up, and he quickly realized that he was right, it was a ranking ladder containing various names and their accomplishments.

As he went through the list his mouth started to widen into a grin.