Chương 7

I flattened myself against the wall of the hut, my attention fully focused on the Sphere of Intuition. Voices were a little indistinct before they entered the radius of my skill. After that, I could hear them as clearly as if they were beside me. It was a large group. Twelve people — about eight men and four women.

"Damn, there really isn't no one here yet," one said.

"I don't know, Charles. You said we should check out another haven." Another haven? I thought. They have already been to one? How fast have they moved? Now that I noticed it, they looked a little ragged. Their clothes were in tatters in several points, and a few of them had big splotches of blood all over them. They must have been through a lot of fighting. Charles was the tallest of them, and the one who looked worst. He had a sword in his hands. It was covered in blood. Jesus Christ. What have they been through?

Then I noticed their hands. In the Sphere of Intuition their hands looked dark, as if smoke clung to the fingers. The skill let me pull in close, near enough to count knuckles. Six men and two women carried it, and all eight of them looked determined. Killed a monster, maybe. An alpha. Then I looked at the other four. They were agitated. Afraid, which under the circumstances was not strange at all. Their hands were clean. Two ways this goes. They fought monsters, and only eight of them got a hand on the alpha.

That's what the smoke is. I swallowed. Or those four look afraid because they are afraid. Because they didn't fight, and that's all it is. I wanted one of those to be true. I couldn't read levels. But through the Sphere, as they filed past, I could see that nobody in that group carried a high assessment score. Not even Charles. His read D, F, B. A D in conduct, an F in cooperation, a B in creativity. Fuck. I was no Sherlock Holmes. The smoke on their hands. Four of them frightened.

Anybody who had sat through a couple of crime shows would have landed where I landed. These motherfuckers had killed people, hadn't they? So, now the real question was, what was I gonna do about it? And how was I going to explain to my teammates? I had just been told by Bluemont not to reveal the details of my Skills, no matter what. If I did, I would become a target for the Sorvos Empire. Ok, maybe…

"Hello, is anyone here?" Charles shouted, sheathing his sword. Fuck. I was forced to leave my hut and put on my best poker face while Lucas already greeted the newcomers.

"Hey, guys," Lucas said.

"Damn, that's a whole lot of you. Glad to see so many people survived."

"Yeah," Charles said with a charismatic smile.

"Oh, how many of you are there?"

"Oh." I came out of the hut, catching Charles and the group from the back.

"Hey, guys."

"Oh." Charles turned over his shoulder to look at me and then slowly whirled his body.

"Didn't hear you there."

"Yeah, no, sorry. I was just taking a break. We're a little tired. Did you just come to the haven? I'm John."

"Oh, we were at another haven, but our guide told us to explore a little bit more, and now here we are."

"I see," I smiled.

"Well, we should maybe get a beer later, but our guide just told me that we should really head out to hunt. You guys are gonna rest here?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, then that's great." Lucas came to me and said, "Oh, Bluemont said we have to head out already? I thought we had longer."

"Yeah, he told me that we're burning daylight, and it's gonna be hard to level up."

"Oh, the alphas, right." Lucas sighed.

"Have you guys killed an alpha yet?" I asked nonchalantly.

"No," Charles said slowly.

"We're taking some time to get stronger. We're thinking of tackling one tomorrow, maybe." I smiled.

"Yeah, that's a good idea, I guess." And then I inwardly thought, Fuck me.

"Why did we leave in such a hurry?" Tina asked.

"We just found other people. Man, I wanted to know what they went through."

"Yeah, John," Marcus said.

"Why are we running?" Apparently, I hadn't been subtle about the fact that I wanted to put as much distance between me and those guys as we possibly could.

"So," I said, looking behind us. We had been walking away for about fifteen minutes now, and we had already passed our first two groups of hyenas out the side of the haven.

"Here's the thing. They were just outside my hut, and I heard them talk about hurting people," I said slowly.

"What?" Hailey went pale.

"Are you serious?"

"Yeah," I muttered.

"I don't fully know whether they killed somebody, but..."

"Oh my God, I knew it," Tina said, punching her palm. I looked at her, uncomprehending.

"What?"

"They had a terrible look to them. I knew that they couldn't be trusted." Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. I refrained from telling Tina that up till literally a second ago, she had been complaining that she didn't have the time to mingle with the ones she had apparently spotted as potential murderers.

"Yeah," I said.

"So that's going to be a real problem."

"It was bound to happen," Lucas commented coldly.

"Bluemont told me that killing people nets a lot of experience." I looked at Lucas, a little worried.

"Uh, right. Why were you asking that?"

"Oh." Lucas shook his head.

"I don't wanna kill any of you guys. I mean, not now that we're not in the office anymore. I got some ideas before." He laughed, but we didn't really laugh that much in return.

"Oh, come on. Our job used to stress me, okay?"

"This doesn't stress you?" Tina said. Lucas raised his bow and said, "Did you see how cool this is? Listen, if I die here killing monsters instead of getting a stroke from McDonald while I'm designing some HVAC system that nobody cares about, dude, I'm good."

"I don't think you would say that while a boss chews you up."

"Yeah, of course I wouldn't while a fucking boss kills me, but whatever. I'll say a fucking prayer on my deathbed while some monster is eating me alive. Give me the fucking apocalypse over my desk job any day of the week. Fuck the four-hour life." I looked at Lucas and asked, "What's the four-hour life?"

"It's basically when you get out of the office, you really have four hours to live your life, when you factor in eating, getting to your job, going back from your job, sleeping. It's a term some people use online for a desk job."

"Oh." Thankfully, for some reason, people seemed interested in that definition, which they had never heard before and would probably never have to use again, since our office was in some indistinct alien world, most likely.

"So what are we gonna do?"

"If it was up to me, we kill them off," Lucas said. I turned to Lucas with both my eyebrows raised. Marcus cringed and said, "Wh— killing them?" Our project manager didn't look thrilled at that prospect.

"If they killed people, they're murderers." Lucas shrugged.

"Yeah, Lucas, we're not gonna start just killing people, okay?" Tina said aggressively.

"Yeah, we are," Lucas shot back.

"What are you talking about? If they're killers and they're gonna kill more people, more innocents, we should put their asses in the ground." I expected Tina to shoot back angrily, but the little woman actually put a hand on her chin and said, "They did probably kill innocents, didn't they?" That seemed to settle it for her.

"Okay. Before we turn into The Punisher, which I'm not against," I said, "we should really focus on two things." They all looked at me.

"First, Bluemont sort of gave me advice on how to kill the alphas. He said that a combination of skills I have is probably gonna do a lot of damage to them, so that's one. Second, as far as the other group goes, inside the haven they cannot do anything to us. So we keep our eyes open. If they approach, we tell them to get lost, that we don't want other people attracting monsters or whatever, and we hope to God it doesn't come to blows. For now, we're going to mind our business and not go back there.

There are twelve of them and five of us. Even if we kill an alpha or two, we're not strong enough to take them." Hailey smiled at that.

"John, I don't know if this is proper, but you're really taking well to this apocalypse."

"Oh," I replied, almost embarrassed by the compliment.

"Uh, thank you, I guess. Not sure that's a good thing, but whatever keeps us alive." While sitting after killing another group of hyenas, I spotted something in the ground. Tracks. I told the others to gather and that I had seen tracks. They came and said, "Are you sure that it wasn't the normal hyenas doing that?" But I pointed out that the tracks were from a much larger hyena — or another animal, actually. They were three times the size of the dog-sized hyenas.

"I hate them so much," Hailey said.

"The sound they make, it's so creepy."

"Yeah. Now I get why they say they laugh. They kinda sound like they're choking sometimes. Scary," I said. We followed the tracks. We lost them a couple of times — but, well, they lost them a couple of times. I could easily keep my eyes on them thanks to my Sphere of Intuition. But I didn't wanna blow my cover too badly, so I let us run in circles for a few minutes here and there. And then we finally got over a small mound, and we all went with our bellies close to the ground.

In the distance, not too far ahead, was an alpha.

"Fuck," Tina swore, surprising everybody.

"That thing is huge." I agreed with Tina's assessment. The alpha, which was called Alpha Wild Hyena, Level 7, was one big motherfucker.

"So," I said, looking at it, "I'll take the alpha, but I need you guys to hold off the hyenas for me." There were four hyenas around the alpha.

"I can do that," Tina said. Both Lucas and her had put more points into Intelligence, and now they had more mana to spend, and a few points into Willpower, which allowed them to regenerate their mana quicker.

"So, let's do this." I was very nervous. I knew that Bluemont had said it would be easy because of my skill, Judgment of Raziel, but I was still not sure that he was right. And if he wasn't, we might very well be staring down the end of our lives. If he was, though, this would put us ahead of the curve. We had realized, after seeing the group of twelve, that there weren't many of us. We had good synergy, but we were only five. Taking on an alpha with twelve people was one thing.

Taking one on with five meant that essentially each of us had to take on one hyena. I told Hailey to get a spear from Lucas's leftover F-ranked weapon chest — he hadn't opened it, just like I hadn't opened my armor chest after getting the Armor of Raziel. Now she was holding a spear in her right hand and a staff in her left. She would toss the staff to the ground while we engaged the hyenas. The only thing she had to do was hold off her own hyena long enough to give me time to kill the alpha.

"John, are you sure about this?" Marcus asked while we were getting up.

"Yeah," I lied through my teeth.

"This is going to be great." Please, Lord, I have not been to church in a good minute. If you're over there overseeing this whole planetary invasion, please let this fucking work, I prayed silently. And so the Alpha raised its head and made that disgusting, creepy cry all the hyenas made, just ten times as loud. Oof. The hyenas started running toward us with the Alpha right behind them.

"Okay, guys," I said.

"Game time." They all spread out, each managing to take one hyena. Tina and Lucas managed to kill theirs almost instantly, with Hailey struggling the most, barely able to keep up with hers but soon helped by Lucas and Tina, and Marcus having stunned his own target by using Shield Bash right in its face. The project manager had grown much stronger, especially after dumping all his stat points into Strength, just like I had done. I looked at the Alpha, which now lunged at me, and I thought, this better fucking work.

I immediately activated Judgment of Raziel, feeling light on my feet for a moment as five points of mana left my body. A series of sparks appeared all around the Alpha. The Alpha didn't even stop for a moment. I thrust forward with my spear. I knew that the fire damage should be enough to eventually kill it, but Bluemont had refused to give me any exact detail on how much damage I would be delivering to the Alpha, or how hard it would be to kill.

I suspected it would be a struggle — that I would be partially mauled, that I would need as much healing from Hailey as humanly possible. I had even given Hailey a potion of clarity, just in case she needed to replenish her mana to keep healing me. Hell, I had even made peace with the fact that I might lose an arm, or a goddamn foot, or an eye. However, the moment the very plain gray spearhead grazed the chest of the Alpha, I was thrown back by one loud fucking explosion of fire.

My eyes couldn't fucking register what had just happened. The blast threw me back. However, thanks to the Sphere of Intuition, I saw something that I couldn't believe. I caught the aftermath of the explosion only. There was already a crater — a goddamn black, smoking crater with the grass around its rim still burning. There was a fine shower of blood and gore coming off what I could only presume was the obliterated alpha. Because there was no alpha anymore. There was nothing.

I saw two hind legs, the only parts spared by the insane explosion. They fell in opposite directions. And finally, I landed on the ground, coughing. However, I didn't feel any damage on me. I didn't feel burned, despite the fact that some of the flame had clearly come at me. In my Sphere, I could see that everybody was looking at me. The hyena that had been attacking Hailey was upon her, but it had turned to the explosion, whimpering, terrified.

It had even forgotten to keep attacking Hailey, who was only keeping it at bay by holding her spear like a staff right in the monster's mouth. I took that beat to kill the monster, and Tina came up to me.

"Holy shit, John."

"Yeah, holy shit," I agreed. I looked at the spear in my hand and then at the crater again. Bluemont had told me I wouldn't be able to picture it. That bastard was right. I breathed heavily and felt my head go a little light. I had blown more than half my mana to use this skill, and it would take me almost an hour to regenerate it all — and at the very least twenty minutes before I could use the skill again.

"Okay, let's move out," I said to the still-stunned audience.

"We gotta keep grinding." I looked up at the column of black smoke rising from where we were. You could probably see it from miles away.