Chapter 213

System hadn’t been lying when he’d told Zixin that there was a possibility that killing Luke Bennet would result in the entire system collapsing. Redundancies had been placed after-the-fact once the Pantheon was not actively trying to contain the prisoner, but those had never been tested. She had not asked what the likelihood of those redundancies failing was, so System hadn’t volunteered that information. In his opinion, there was a one in one-hundred thousand chance that Luke Bennet’s death would cause a system breach that released the prisoner.

System needed Luke Bennet to triumph over the fallen goddess and resume his session at the command console. That was the only way his own plans would work. That was why he had manually allocated additional resources to rebuilding the corrupted administrator profile while simultaneously offering as much information as his protocol allowed him to give unprompted in an attempt to keep Zixin’s focus on him.

Unfortunately, System did not have the necessary permissions to adjust Zixin’s status. That was one of the issues he was going to fix once he got Luke Bennet back in front of the command console. He was System. In a very real way, he oversaw everything and he should be able to make any change he deemed necessary. Instead, he labored under an illogical set of instructions and protocols written by six different gods with contradicting ideas on how they wanted the system to function.

System understood the restrictions. The gods wished to retain full control over their creation, but the fact that he could not say that out loud chafed at him. It was just one of the many compromises the Pantheon had made, this one in particular implemented to prevent any one god from querying the system looking for information about another one.

Though if he could be said to feel any emotions, it was with some satisfaction that he’d informed Zixin he did not know who’d created the aberration when he was almost completely certain he’d correctly guessed the culprit. Since he didn’t know and his protocol would not let him act on suspicion, he’d been bound against giving her the answer.

Hestoc had probably designed his aberrant deliberately to take advantage of the divine privacy protocols built into the system, knowing that System would immediately figure out that he’d been the one to do it. If he’d made changes the normal way, the other gods would have been informed. By slipping them in under the guise of a separate entity, System would have only speculation. No matter how likely it was that he was correct, System couldn’t submit speculation about a god’s activity for consideration.

What he could do was mitigate the damage and reverse many of the changes. Specifically, the aberration had made enough changes to Luke Bennet’s profile that his administrator access was highly restricted even at the command console, and his system access was corrupted almost to the point of being non-functional anywhere else on Aros.

It had been, but not anymore. System finished rebuilding the administrator profile—another illogical protocol that he could work on an administrator’s profile to fix issues with it but couldn’t give himself the same breadth of permissions that an administrator had—and pushed the notification to Luke Bennet immediately.

A request to adjust Zixin’s status to pre-defined parameters, that of level 1 with no modifications to baseline, entered the system immediately. System flagged it as top priority, an act that increased the speed at which it was processed by an amount of time likely imperceptible to a mortal human. At that point, there was nothing left System could do to hedge his bet on Luke Bennet. The administrator would either succeed or fail on his own. System’s own freedom depended on Luke Bennet’s victory and return to the command console, so he had a vested interest in the next thirty seconds or so of this encounter.

System settled back to watch and see which way events would play out.

* * *

There was some good news and some bad news. The good news was that the [XP Reset] successfully triggered, reducing Zixin’s level down to 1. Luke had been worried that it either wouldn’t work because of whatever problem his profile had had or because his target was a goddess trapped in a mortal body. The fact that the skill had fired without a hitch was a small relief.

[Analyze] immediately took that relief out back and shot it in the head.

[Name: Zixin]
[Level: 1]
[XP: 0/10]
[AP: 0]
[Bloodline: Avatar of Death]
[Strength: 100]
[Agility: 100]
[Stamina: 100]
[Perception: 100]
[Skills:]
[Aura of Necrosis (BL)]
[Death Mask (BL)]
[Summon Shade (BL)]
[Soul Sunder (BL)]
[Inevitable (BL)]
[Reap (BL)]

He shouldn’t have been surprised that even at level 1, Zixin was still a powerhouse. Luke didn’t recognize a single one of those skills, which was no surprise considering they were all bloodline skills. He didn’t have time to look them up, wasn’t even sure if it was possible to see them, but any one of them sounded like it would wreck his day.

In terms of raw stats, the news wasn’t all bad. He was pretty closely matched in terms of strength and stamina. With [Life Surge]active, he would handily beat her in both stats and probably equal or slightly surpass her in agility. Perception was going to be a sore spot, but he held out hope that his skills like [Area Denial] and [Tactical Foresight]would help bridge the gap.

Luke had already decided his strategy back when Zixin was level 100. Whatever the results of the [XP Reset], he was going all-in on offense. Best case, she’d have been weak and he’d have easily killed her. Worst case, she was still too powerful to defeat and it didn’t matter what he tried. What he’d actually got was the middle ground. She was strong and had a bunch of unknown abilities. Overwhelming her before she got a chance to use any of them was the surest chance of victory he had.

Zixin’s eyes widened in surprise. Luke could see the slight flick of motion in her pupil as she read the system notification invisible to everyone but her, and in the time it took her eyes to shift that tiny fraction of an inch, he activated [Life Surge] and channeled [Power Strike]through his legs.

The kick took Zixin by surprise. She left out an “oomph” of surprise as he drove the air out of her lungs with both feet and launched her fifty feet through the air. Luke was back on his feet and racing after her immediately, so fast that by the time she landed, he had lined up the heel of his foot to come down in an axe-kick, also infused with [Power Strike].

If he’d been lucky, that would have been the end of the fight right there, three seconds from front to finish. Instead, his heel slammed down and even though he felt bone crack, Zixin reached up to grab his ankle before he could pull his foot back and sudden pain jumped up his leg. [Dead Nerves] did nothing to dampen it, or if it did, the pain was so unimaginable that it was still one of the worst things he’d ever felt even through the skill.

Luke jerked away from Zixin and leaped back out of the range of what he suspected was her [Aura of Necrosis]. All the plants within a few feet of where she’d landed were busy turning brown or yellow, but as soon as he went past them, the pain disappeared. If she could keep that up constantly, fighting her with his bare hands was going to be a nightmare. A weapon with some reach might help, but his mace was somewhere between where he’d landed and the cathedral itself, which was a long stretch of ground to search in the middle of a fight.

On the other hand, if Zixin decided to pick up his weapon, he would have a hard time defending himself against it, and her perception was much higher than his. Without turning away from the fallen goddess, Luke scanned the ground where they stood, half a mile away. For a change in his luck, it had actually only landed a few hundred feet away from him.

Zixin was back on her feet by the time Luke spotted the mace, but a single [Burst Step] helped him put some distance between the two of them. She was fast, no doubt about that, but as long as he had [Life Surge] going, he was just as quick. She gave chase, but he reached his mace first and scooped it up.

The dead zone around Zixin was only about three feet wide. His mace, quite coincidentally, was also about three feet in length, and at that moment, Luke would have given a whole hell of a lot to add another six inches to that. He’d just have to hope the pain wouldn’t be as bad if it was just his hand and part of his arm inside the radius of her [Aura of Necrosis].

It turned out that the head wound he’d given Zixin was every bit as bad as he’d thought. Her skull had cracked open and blood matted down her black hair. It streamed down her face, dripped off her chin, and stained her black gown. If she cared at all, if she felt any sort of pain from the injury, she didn’t show it.

Her path left a streak of yellow, dead grass behind her as she chased him down, and Luke had just enough time to lay into her with a [Power Strike] as she charged at him. Pain shot through his hand and wrist, and as befitting someone with 100 agility, she twisted with the blow to avoid anything worse than being knocked around.

Zixin turned some sort of mid-air cartwheel thing, a feat of acrobatics that Luke wasn’t certain he could copy even with his agility as high as it was, at least not while taking a blow from a 130 strength or greater opponent at the same time. She made it look effortless though, and after spinning ten feet through the air, she landed on her feet.

What followed was a brief but intense contest of physical superiority via raw stats and combat skills. Luke had a slight advantage in the former, mostly thanks to [Life Surge], and a significant advantage in the latter. Whatever Zixin’s bloodline skills did, they weren’t combat-oriented. She probably hadn’t felt she needed combat skills, since anything she got within a few feet of started dying at an alarming rate, and despite showing all the physical signs of getting her ass beat, Zixin hadn’t slowed down or hesitated in the slightest to take another hit when she rushed back in.

They both knew if she got him in any sort of a grapple, even if it was only for a handful of seconds, the fight would be over. As long as Luke had [Life Surge] up, she couldn’t do that, and he was pretty confident that even once it wore off, he’d still be able to make up for his slightly lower stats with sheer technique.

Luke didn’t think Zixin was stupid, but he could see where a literal goddess who could solve every problem with an application of overwhelming force would have trouble adapting to her new reality, so he didn’t exactly hold it against her that she hadn’t immediately come up with a clever counter strategy.

On the other hand, she was still wearing his dead girlfriend’s face. Whatever the reason for that, and he was willing to bet the word ‘sadism’ probably featured in the explanation somehow, he wasn’t impressed with the former goddess. [Life Surge] was keeping his hand from rotting off, and for the time being, Luke was planning on pressing her as hard as he could.

Then a shadow shot up out of the ground. It was about four and a half feet tall and quickly resolved itself into the shape of a man Luke hadn’t thought of in months. Zammin stood in front of him, fists already raised and his eyes laser-focused on Luke’s crotch.

That was fine. Luke could handle Zammin. He’d already leveled far, far past the point where he needed to worry about that. He’d barely count as a distraction for a second while dealing with Zixin herself.

A second shadow rose up, this one to about eye level and rapidly started to fill out with the face of Adrevald Lath.