He’d gone through the Necromancy skills before, when he upgraded. But not the others; in fact, he hadn’t even known what the options were until he chose which power to upgrade. He focused. The system should tell him what upgrade options the other four class abilities had.
Grey stared at the options for a moment. Necromancy had him thinking that each power only had four upgrades, and then new ones unlocked at tier 5. But… it was pretty clear that most powers had more than that.
Was there a reason for that? And some of these abilities were… interesting. Fairly unique. Bullet with a Name seemed perfect for him; he could take a couple of bullets and name Golden Boy and Nightfire each morning, and when he finally ran into them, have an absolutely devastating alpha strike.
Who exactly came up with these powers? Was it… the system itself? The Committee? Were there actually an infinite, or much larger, variety, and he was only seeing some of the most common options?
He thought for a moment. He knew he could take powers from other classes. Was the real thing that the system could give him any power he could imagine… but he’d gain the most strength from taking similar ones, that meshed together?
What if he wanted to take a Fire Resistance power now?
Okay. So he could do that. But there were mutagens that could do that for cheap; he might get enough Credits to do it after cleaning out the Militia.
What if he wanted to use Necromancy to create a defensive power. Would it let him do that?
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
…So what the system had showed him so far were just options. The most potent possible options, but the possibilities were almost as vast as he could imagine.
The key was to balance what would be easiest to get by spending credits, versus what he could upgrade more easily, and line it all up with either surviving long enough to kill Nightfire, keeping her from escaping a horde of undead, or killing her.
So, the next though; could he get a version of that Dimension Lock ability at this point? That one required level 21+ normally without an expensive mutagen; was there something else he could get now?
…So. Vastly more limited. Best wait, especially if the military would help him level up rapidly. A ‘Tier 6’ curse might be far worse, or he could get that Assassin mutagen, or… yes. For now, he should focus on improving the things he had.
Was there any other sort of ‘Empower Undead’ ability, that would let him… copy abilities? Or enhance ones that were there? He had tons of Fire-Ant bodies. There had to be some way for him to augment their fire resistance, or give it to something else.
Well then. That would be… interesting. He could merge multiple Fire-Ants into a single abomination. Which… would in theory then have better fire resistance than one would on its own.
And even after he got high enough level to get the better version of Empower Undead, he could easily see uses for merging multiple smaller Undead together.
Animation Merge was a winner. And if it was going to keep escalating how many Undead he could control, and how strong they were? So was Power. Time to focus on it for a bit.
After checking his status, he blinked. Bounty Hunter? What was that? He hadn’t recalled getting that notification.
That was… information, at least.
He decided to ignore it for now. He had an enormous pile of Ants to loot, more to animate, two Militia members who may or may not still be alive inside the extradimensional shard…. And one more tool in the arsenal to use against Nightfire and Golden Boy when the time came.
Perhaps the best way to go would be to take human zombies, merge them with fire-ants to make them fire resistant, and give them a rifle? Certainly seemed like a good option. Or…. he could even soak the whole mess in a flame retardant chemical! Cover them in asbestos foam, or…. Well. That was for later. For now… more work to do.
***
Roughly half an hour into his sorting, his work was interrupted as strangers arrived; possibly another group from the same club, judging by the fact that two of them had identical halberds, and they were wearing heavier ant-chitin armor.
There were four of them; all armored, all with rifles or shotguns at the ready, slowly approaching… as Grey clambered back out of the tunnel, and looked out at them. They’d only seen one of his undead so far, that he could tell… he ordered the others to remain in the tunnel where they’d been digging for corpses to add to the pile, and had the one active one start approaching him, in what looked to be an aggressive manner… and then shot it with the Kinetic setting of the Multi-rifle; twice.
As the group approached the armored truck, and the enormous pile of dead ants which… he’d now removed over a thousand bodies which were intact enough to be re-animated…. He waved the rifle in the air…. And then pointed it at the ground.
“G’day there, gentlemen. Were you friends of this group?”
The group surveyed the scene…. None of them pointed weapons at him, though they certainly felt tense.
One of them stepped closer to the edge, looking around… “....Yes. They were part of the Burning Rivers. We were all in the same… LARP group… before this.”
From the voice, this one sounded feminine; though with the armor, and the helmet, he couldn’t be sure. They seem to have made some decent fake medieval-style plate mail out of pieces of black ant chitin.
She hefted the halberd she bore over her shoulder and stared at Grey through the slits of her helmet. “What happened here?”
Grey glanced around. “When I arrived, they were being killed by ants. Looked like they were using this armored truck to crush them, and they fell in one of the holes. They shot them til they ran out of ammo, then switched to pole-arms and got rushed. By the time I showed up, it was already over. I used my Multi-Rifle…” He patted the alien weapon.
“Cleared out the ones around the truck. Found five dead, four on top of the truck, one inside. Don’t actually need the weapons, and definitely not the wallets; if you’re willing to take an oath you’ll give them to next-of-kin, I’ll hand those over.”
He grimaced and looked up at her. “One of them was still swinging as I showed up… only had one good arm left, but doing his best. They fought til the end.”
She focused on Grey, after surveying the scene… and nodded. “They called us when the truck fell into the pit. We told them we were an hour out… they said they didn’t have the ammo to make it that long. They said one of them was still inside the truck, though. Any idea how they got in?”
He thought about it for a moment. “...Doesn’t make much sense, actually. The driver’s-side door was already open when I got into the hole, but the passenger-side door was unlocked. These things are damn sturdy even without being upgraded, not sure how the ants got it open without chewing the whole thing apart.”
One of the others stepped up, set his hand on the first woman’s shoulder. “Jane. They said they had to break the door lock on the driver’s side to get into it at the junkyard. They didn’t have the door key, just the ignition key.”
Jane, apparently, sighed. “Well, fuck. Would’ve felt better if I had someone to blame and kill, instead of just some scavenger picking over the corpses. Fine. I swear on the System that if you give me their wallets I will do my best to ensure they get to the families involved, if any survive.”
Grey nodded; and after a moment, laid out five mostly identical wallets; one labeled ‘BAMF’ in hot pink, while the others were generic black leather.
She looked at them… hesitating over one of the four identical ones… and picked them up, letting them all vanish into her own storage.
“Not the guns? Honestly, I’ve got one with infinite ammo, if you don’t have some next-of-kin who want them, I’d just sell them at the system kiosk. I’m not really interested in their stuff, just the ants.”
Obviously he was interested in selling their stuff for credits. But appearing to have as little greed as possible would be beneficial.
Jane sighed. “No, no. You go ahead and keep them. Any problems with us taking the truck?”
Grey studied it. “Not my truck, not my problems. You have a way to get it out?”
One of the others stepped up to the edge; and raised his arms. After a few seconds, the dirt formed a neat, smooth ramp…. And started to condense. Visibly packing itself down.
“Well, thats a yes. Would you be willing to use that to open a path to the Queen’s chamber? Crawling back and forth is an absolute pain.”
And would’ve been suicide. He hadn’t actually been in there; only the zombies had.
The earthshaping man gave a nod. “Sure. You already killed her?”
“Yup. Finished off the whole nest. Used poison and a Mana Rifle. Your friends had already done most of the work, though. I had… maybe a couple hundred left, at most, and the Queen herself.”
He guided the man over to where the Queen’s nest was; he couldn’t loot through his Undead, so it would save him a trip crawling through the tunnels; and showed them the picture of their friends at the end, of the mass pile of ant corpses covering them before he’d gotten started.
When they were gone, he took the last mostly intact corpse… the Fire Ant Queen… and dumped it into the Village.
He paused for a moment, observing the shard to see if he could spot… Ahh.
Two Militia men. One of them still alive, missing a leg, hiding atop a rooftop; asleep. The other, in pieces. The survivor appeared to have tied his pants leg into a knot around the stump that ended mid-thigh, and had managed to avoid being torn apart by the ants… so far.
Perfect. He could kill the man with something that didn’t leave much of a mark, and use him as a trojan horse against his allies. One crutch, or perhaps reattach the severed leg, and however big a bomb he could improvise.
