[System Decay] Chapter 28: The Good News (Patreon)

There were bodies in the water. They were almost unrecognizable as human now, stripped of all their clothes and equipment.

He had heard gunshots last night. The blood on these bodies was no longer fresh. Whoever had killed him had done so a while ago.

Grimly, Will used Identify on them.

Mark Wong. Neil Patel. Two people, real, human people, who’d died at the hand of other humans.

The freedom of the apocalypse wasn’t just for him. Without the veneer of society to stop them, everyone had the option to do anything they wanted.

Apparently, shooting and looting other Users was what some had chosen to do with that.

It had to be humans who’d done this. There wasn’t a cause of death listed on Identify, but Will knew generally what kind of monsters roamed the area. None of the unintelligent ones would have looted the bodies but left the flesh alone, and the system had explicitly stated that the life elves took all the biological material they could get their hands on.

Combined with the sounds of gunshots…

Will remembered what the system had told him about guns. Users could develop innate defenses to the weapons of the ranks below them, but even at higher ranks, a fast enough bullet could kill.

At bronze, even the least magical gun could hurt him. Will’s only defensive skills were evasive. If he got hit by a bullet, he’d be in trouble.

It was an overcast day, light rain sprinkling down from the heavens onto a blood-soaked world. Equilibrium Mantle kept any of it from getting on him, but he could see the ripples of the falling droplets on the pond that the two bodies had been carelessly tossed into.

Yesterday, there had been 972 million people alive. Today, that number was closer to 900. Will wondered how much of that was because of the difficulty of the world and how much of that was thanks to the primal nature of other human beings.

He tossed the thought aside. Right now, he wanted to find who had done this and stop them before they could hurt more people. The obvious suspect was the clan that had taken over the Everdale University, but he couldn’t discount the potential for it to be an unknown third party that he hadn’t seen yet.

Suddenly very aware of his surroundings, Will thanked the weather for providing him with more dim areas to activate Wraith Cloak within. The invisibility flickered as he stalked his way through the forest, but with Wind Walker blurring his image, he could skulk around stealthily and quickly.

Everdale University had been a pretty large school at somewhere around fifteen hundred acres, but it was hard to tell exactly where it was. Even if the identifying landmarks had somehow survived the explosive integration of Arcadia, the change in landscape made it impossible to tell exactly where it was. While the others had come out of their tutorial straight back into the university, Will hadn’t been so lucky in his placement.

That meant that for the time being, all he could do was move. There was evidence of people being in the area—empty cans tossed carelessly on tree roots, blood trails and scorch marks where there’d been monster battles, dungeons that had already been cleared—so Will stuck around the edge of it, following the trail of crumbs back. He dropped more cheap or looted daggers as he moved, giving him a path to follow back if necessary.

When the forest started thinning out, Will knew he was on the right track towards the university. Loud voices arguing with each other confirmed it. He crept towards the edge of the woods, trying to get a better bead on the situation.

There were two men with guns in front of what looked to have been a campus fire department. Will hadn’t passed by this part of the university much for the past couple of years, but he remembered living closer to it in his freshman year. The trucks had been stripped down to the frames, the station defaced with grafitti proclaiming this as Iron Boys territory.

“What a stupid name,” he muttered to himself.

They were arguing, it seemed, over whether to abandon their post here.

“You heard the boss!” one of them shouted, gesticulating with his gun in a way that Will was pretty sure violated every single range safety law known to man. “There’s a guy here, and he wants us dead. We should get him before he gets us.”

“It’s fuckin’ raining,” the other grumbled. “I’m not going out there.”

Will put two and two together quickly.

Someone—their boss, presumably—had a power that had detected Will’s presence. Either that, or there was someone else here who wanted the Iron Boys dead, which was eminently possible, but he preferred erring on the side of pessimism.

Whatever power it was, it clearly didn’t notify them of his exact location, or these two would have noticed already.

Tyler Lewis. Bronze 0 Marksman. Affiliation: Iron Boys.

Josh Turner. Bronze 0 Hunter. Affiliation: Iron Boys.

Both relatively basic classes, though their rank was on par with Will’s.

Interestingly enough, they had an affiliation with them. None of Lev’s party had that. Maybe that was granted above a certain size? Or maybe they were just awful at cloaking their presences.

For being bronze rank, they were surprisingly reticent to move. Will guessed that they had used monster cores to level up rather than grinding. He didn’t know all of the negative effects of using monster cores for experience, but if they were scared of a little rain, there was no way they’d been going through actual dungeons again and again like he had.

That brought him to another question.

Was he willing to kill them?

Will had slaughtered over two hundred monsters by now. Some of them had been passingly intelligent, like the goblins, which had been capable of speech. But another human?

“I dunno, man,” the one his system had identified as Tyler said. “I’ve got a real bad feeling about this. I don’t think we should stay here.”

The sigil of the Hunger was going to give him away. Will was tempted to toss it away, but he utterly refused to do that until he either figured out what it did or spited the Hunger into telling him.

He drew the stealth bow and an arrow that he’d dipped in a vial of spider venom, applying a Chaos Transfer to it. It was overkill for a human being unless that human had great resistances.

They weren’t threatening him right now, but they might have hurt people already. Judging from his quests and what had already happened, they were going to keep hurting people.

“Shit!” Josh shouted, dashing behind a wall. “Someone’s aiming at us!”

Will raised an eyebrow. Was that a Perception skill?

“It’s him,” Tyler said, sweeping the gun across his line of sight. “Shoot him if you see him.”

Will couldn’t hear whatever Josh replied from his distance of nearly a hundred feet, but when the Iron Boy peeked back around a wall, the gun was pointed straight at where he was hiding.

Shit. He slowed time, burning mana to consider the situation.

Right. This wasn’t the world before the fall. Will had always considered himself as a man with strong moral fiber, but now, if he pissed someone off, they could simply choose to try to end his life. After all, who was going to stop them?

In fact, they had already ended lives. And they were going to end more.

In that instant that Time in a Bottle stretched out into half a minute, Will made a decision.

There were no laws to stop them, and Will could never claim to police the world.

But if it came down to it, he would put an end to the suffering they caused.

The moment Time in a Bottle ended, Will marked Josh for death and loosed his arrow.

His aim wasn’t perfect. Caiyeri had helped him train his usage with the bow, but even though he’d had the pressures of life and death pushing him, he’d only used it for a few days. As such, he couldn’t hit an instantly lethal shot.

He did, however, hit his target.

[First Blood] doubled the power of your attack.

[Mark for Death] increased the power of your attack.

[Poisoned Arrow] inflicted a level of [Corruption]!

[Poisoned Arrow] inflicted a level of [Poisoned]!

[Poisoned Arrow] inflicted a level of [Bleed]!

Practice didn’t make perfect, but it pushed him closer to it, and he’d practiced a lot.

An air-splitting crack told him that Josh fired the gun reflexively, but Will had been more decisive with his shot. The bullet came nowhere near him.

A second after the shot missed, the screaming started.

Tyler, predictably, panicked. He shouted something incoherent and started shooting towards Will, aiming in the same direction that his friend had.

Will stayed low to the ground as he got closer, sticking to the treeline as well as he could. The blind fire did a great job at knocking pieces of wood off of the trees behind him, but none of them came that close to him. Still, he didn’t want to poke his head up and eat lead. That would be a terrible end to his run so far.

“Run,” he snorted. “Like I’m speedrunning a game or something.”

You have defeated [Josh Turner].

Achievement earned: Murderer

You have killed another User. Congratulations. Your moral alignment is now one standard deviation more evil than the median User at this stage.

Reward: You have earned the [User Killer] title.

Title: [User Killer]

Common.

You can no longer enter areas protected by pacifist gods. You have gained access to evil-aligned hubs.

Level up!

The flurry of notifications sobered Will up.

Somehow, the system calling him a murderer made it seem less real. He’d taken a human life, and he felt… better than he should have. By doing this, he’d taken a small part of revenge for the two who’d been murdered and looted, and he’d stopped them from killing others—and himself.

“This is how the world works now,” he told himself. He was scarily convincing.

The moment the patter of gunfire stopped, Will placed his two level-up points into Speed and sprinted forward. Escape Artist and Wind Walker more than doubled his running speed, and though Wraith Cloak stopped applying out in the open, the passive blur that Wind Walker provided him was more than enough for him to be confident in moving quickly.

As he ran, Will inventoried his bow and took a knife, then threw it towards the building. The moment it reached the edge of his radius, he activated Weapons Free, bringing himself and all his momentum thirty feet forward. Will caught the spinning knife in the air and kept running, rounding the corner onto Tyler.

Josh’s body was a gory mess, green poison spilling out of corrupted veins. Tyler looked down at his friend in horror, having taken cover behind the wall.

He looked up towards Will, eyes flying wide. Josh brought the gun up and squeezed the trigger—and it clicked empty.

“Wait,” he said, stepping back. “Wait, we can talk about this.”

“Should’ve thought about that before you tried to shoot me,” Will said, drawing his slayer sword.

Josh turned to run.

Well, half of him turned. Then, the top half of his body slid off of the bottom where Will had cut it.

Critical hit!

Will’s second victim was dead before he hit the ground.

#

Will was nearly halfway from Bronze 3 to 4. Two human kills had given him more experience than several dozen monster kills had.

Universal Ability: [Marked for Death] - No matter your alignment nor how much you suppress your aura, detection skills will always identify you as evil. Beings of a higher tier than you will know of your existence, and will know your location and identity if you are close enough to them. Killing another User grants increased experience.

Selecting the Reaper class had granted him this. The first effects hadn’t triggered yet, but it seemed like the only beneficial part of the ability had made killing these two a veritable XP farm.

The thought crossed his mind that leaning into this ability too hard was a surefire way to make him a mass murderer, but Will didn’t see himself becoming a monster. Not yet, at least.

If he could dispense justice and level up along the way, that was all the better.

The class was Reaper, after all, and he would do as it stated.

He wished that Caiyeri had been here. With her, they could’ve done a nonlethal attack on Josh and extracted information from him. Will, however, had no stomach for torture and was also no good at ensuring the information was accurate, and he knew how inaccurate it was, especially with someone so inexperienced as him.

Also, all his attacks were lethal.

Will inventoried the empty guns, then looted what he could off the bodies. Unlike the monsters, there was no individual system prompt for him to loot the body. He had to manually inventory everything.

They hadn’t respected the dead they’d killed, but Will granted them the dignity of at least keeping their clothes on in death. He had no use for cut-open rags with intestine and corruption all over them, anyway.

These two must have been low in the organization. They didn’t have much loot on them besides a bunch of unformed rank coins and a handful of bronze ones. Will also grabbed both guns—the system just recognized them as “semi-automatic rifle,” though Will recognized them as AR-15s—alongside a couple clips of ammo.

He knew very well how magical armor could completely no-sell bullets, and he didn’t have any skills that could actually make the guns work more effectively, so he stuck to the weapons he knew for now. Without the ability to apply the devastating conditions that his other skills let him use, the rifles were probably best to either give to others in his party or consumed with Destructive Synthesis.

Hm. He wanted to explore the former option first.

Will: Hey all. Any of you know how to use a gun?

Lev: No.

Allie: I shot a pistol once.

Trevor: Yes. What type?

Will: AR-15, I think. It’s got some custom stuff on it.

Trevor: You have one?

Will: Yes. On an unrelated note, I think the Iron Boys may be unhappy with me.

Lev: Oh, shit. Did you fight them?

Will: Maybe. Again, unrelated, two Iron Boys are dead.

Allie: Jesus. Who?

Will: Tyler and Josh? Know either of them?

Trevor: Josh Turner?

Will: That’s the one.

Trevor: Oh. That guy’s called me every slur under the sun and told me to go back to where I came from after I caught him trying to steal my wallet. The sun shines upon me a little brighter knowing he’s gone.

Will: It’s raining.

Trevor: Not the point.

Lev: OK. Will, are you fighting right now? If not, then maybe head back.

Will: No. I saw two people that they killed and stripped down to the skin for their loot. I’m not going to stand by and let more people get hurt. You three stay safe and keep grinding. I’ll handle this.

Allie: Good luck. Sorry for not being able to help.

#

“Shit,” Kyle said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Dylan looked at his party interface nervously. Two of the icons there had greyed out, with [DEAD] displaying next to their name.

“Where was that?” Andrew asked. He’d discarded his gun, preparing his magic instead.

“The fire department,” Kyle said.

“What are we going to do?” Dylan asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Kyle said darkly. “Surround him. Kill him. Make it hurt. Let’s go.”

They went.