Chapter 66: A Killing Intent, Part 2 of 2

Charlie twisted in Logan’s grip, kicking his feet. “Well, what are you waiting for! Attack him!”

Logan growled and dug his talons into Charlie’s shoulder, slicing deep. Instead of gripping him by the back of his shirt, he gripped him like a stuck pig.

“I’m not sure that’s a fight we’re going to win!” said Nettle.

“Listen to your friend,” said Logan to the other soldiers.

“What happened to Damsel?” asked another, his hand trembling on the handle of his rifle.

“He fucked her up!” said Charlie.

“But she’s still alive?” asked Nettle.

“She’ll be back. And when she comes back, she’ll deliver ten times the amount of pain he delivered on her.”

Logan dug his talons deeper into Charlie’s shoulder, tightening his grip for good measure.

“So it’s to be a fight after all?” asked Logan.

They didn’t wait to respond. Ten soldiers lifted their rifles and aimed at Logan. Shit. That was one thing that he hadn’t tested since he’d upgraded his attributes. He had no idea if bullets would go through his armor and injure him. It was one thing if they went through his armour and grazed him. That was nothing. His regenerate skill would take care of the damage, but if the bullets went so deep that they went to his organs or his heart? Logan had no idea if he would come back from that.

In a way, if they did decide to shoot him, it would answer that question. It was crazy to think that he was thinking of testing this to figure out tactics in the future, but that was the world that he was living in right now.

The problem was that Charlie was directly in front of Logan and the soldiers didn’t want to shoot in case he ended up in the crossfire. As long as Logan kept Charlie in front of him, there would be no way to test whether he was bulletproof.

Logan pushed Charlie forward and then lifted him up so that his feet were dangling. The weight was nothing against his strength attribute, and if it gave Charlie less chance to get away, all the better. “Let’s go,” he snapped. “Voss, stay behind me. Jump away if you think they’re going to pull the trigger.” He raised his voice. “Don’t shoot! If you do, you’ll shoot your boss!”

The soldiers shifted nervously, their hands trembling around their rifles.

Logan pushed Charlie and approached the guards. So far, they hadn’t hit the trigger. Nettle shifted, his mouth parted. He watched Charlie in Logan’s grip with a calculating look.

Logan moved forward. The soldiers took a reflexive step back, but they came up against the barrier of the stacked tires and trailer. Gradually, they inched to the side and cleared a path for Logan and Charlie. Logan still had his aura going at full blast, trying his best to radiate a killing intent.

He wanted them to attack. At least that way he would know who he was dealing with. But his aura was too intimidating, and they were too nervous to shoot him even though he had to turn, exposing his side to angle through the path.

As he made his way into the complex, Logan looked around. It was still early in the afternoon. The word hadn’t spread that there was a problem. Everyone was either talking or milling in front of the tables with the food supplies. Christ, there had to be five hundred people in the street alone, not to mention how many people had to be inside the high-rise buildings. Each person could be an enemy, but they could be an innocent civilian as well, like Lachlan’s mother. A mother who had lost her son.

Second by second, the people turned their attention to Logan and the soldiers. They murmured, their voices growing louder, their expressions nervous. They glanced from Charlie to Logan, their eyes wide as they took in Charlie’s injuries and the blood pouring down his neck.

Logan raised his voice into a shout. “Don’t be scared! There’s no need to be afraid! I’m not going to hurt you if you don’t act against me. My name is Logan. This man,” Logan shook Charlie by the neck, “and Damsel attacked me and tried to kill me when all along, I came here to bring supplies.”

“Weapons, clothing, even food. I know you don’t know who I am, but I’m just like you. Caught up in this messed up situation, fighting to survive. I came here all the way from Canada to help. But I guess I learned my lesson… even in places like this, places with innocent people like you, I have to be on the lookout for people like Damsel and Charlie who are only in it for themselves.”

A man burst to the front of the group, pushing people back. His short hair was spiky, as if he’d slicked it with hair gel, his thin face splattered with blond stubble. He had a faint, pink scar running through his left eyebrow. “Damsel saved us!”

There were murmurs of agreement from the crowd.

Logan increased his aura, and the man grimaced, his shoulders dropping.

“You might believe that,” said Logan, “and maybe she did save a few people here, but she attacked me. She killed Lachlan. I know she killed others in her fighting parties just for being weak. And I’m here. After Charlie tried to kill me, I didn’t leave. I came here to craft a private system market that will allow you to buy items so that you can survive. Let me pass in peace and I’ll show you. I’ll show you all.”

The people looked nervous. Scared. The children in the group hid behind the legs of their parents. And yet, there were a few who looked intrigued, eyeing Charlie and Logan with calculation. He was still radiating his aura… not to the same degree as before, but enough that someone who was level 10 could barely stand.

Logan was betting that they would feel too scared to challenge him.

He searched the complex, looking for a place for his lodestone. He already knew that it didn’t need to be a tree, but for a second, he wondered if that was the wrong choice. If he used [Life Fabricator] to grow a massive tree in the middle of the street, and then attached a loadstone to the trunk, would that not impress them more than anything else?

That was it. That’s what he was going to do. That would give him power, the most important power of all—awe.   

The problem was how to do it. By now, he knew that he could use [Liche Devourer] to funnel karma from the people around him, but he hadn’t gotten it down to a science yet. He could end up killing people, innocent people.

Wait a minute. [Life Fabricator] had to be the answer. He’d gotten practice at targeting the lifeforce of the rats in Hope’s End, which meant that he should be able to target exactly who he wanted to drain. That way, he could drain the lifeforce from his enemies for something good instead of just killing them outright. And best of all, the crowd wouldn’t realize that he was doing it.

Logan targeted the middle of the street, the towering skyscrapers on either side. Asphalt covered the ground, which meant that he’d need to clear it, but he already knew how to do it. He’d just done the same inside of Damsel’s prison.

Logan pushed Charlie to the side, back to the edge of the crowd, where he fell to the ground and out of the way.

“Voss, keep an eye on him. Let me know if he moves.” It was a risk releasing Charlie, but what could he do? He was no match against Logan, and if he tried to sneak through the crowd, Logan would just recapture him again.

Voss gave the other soldiers a wary look, but he nodded all the same.

Turning back to the street, Logan examined it, then took five steps back. He needed more space. He didn’t need to clear all the concrete—only a hole big enough for the main sprout to burst through the ground. Once that happened, the force of his massive tree would do the rest.

With a blink, Logan carved out an excavator’s size hole of asphalt and dirt and willed it inside of his spatial collar.

The people watching made a sound of shock. That meant that no one else had used a spatial storage device for the same purpose before. Either that, or no one had a storage ‘pouch’ with large enough capacity to try.

Logan concentrated on the soldiers. Surprisingly, even though he had pushed Charlie to the side, no one had tried to shoot him yet. But Logan didn’t have any idea if it were because of his blasting aura or the fact that there were so many people around him that they could end up in the crossfire.

Logan looked at each soldier, giving them a once-over. Other than Nettle, they were all wearing masks so he could only see their eyes. Some were blue, some were gray, but most were brown, wide and nervous.

“Raise your hand if you have KarmaCoin.”

The soldiers looked at him blankly.

“Don’t be shy,” said Logan. “If you lie, it could be the difference between living or dying.”

Three soldiers raise their hands

“To the side.” Logan made a gesture with his head at Charlie. “Next to him.”

Even though the soldiers held rifles, they looked nervous: blinking rapidly, a tightness around their eyes, biting their lips so hard they were bloodless. They still didn’t attack him. Shuffling, they gave the children peering out from behind their parents’ legs a haunted look and then moved to stand next to Charlie, whispering.

Logan narrowed his eyes. “Voss, watch them. Watch them all.”

Deploying [Life Fabricator], Logan concentrated on the soldiers who remained, envisioning a straw, connecting him… connecting their lifeforces and filtering it into his skill. The connection tight in his mind, Logan focused on the cleared area in front of him.

He hadn’t done this in a while, but he figured it was like riding a bicycle. The memory would come back to him, he only had to visualize it.

Logan took a deep breath and then made sure to blast his aura in a killing intent, a threat, something that would make the people around him think twice about attacking him when he wasn’t looking directly at them.

Then he closed his eyes, trying to focus on thinking tree, tree, tree, and not that feeling of having a threat at his back. He needed to finish this; craft his lodestone and then eliminate Damsel’s supporters. Right now, there were way too many of them in this crowd.

Taking another deep breath to try to calm his mind, he pictured a seed the size of a watermelon, something substantial enough that it could birth a monster carbon sucking tree.

Deep within the pit he’d carved with his spatial collar, he envisioned the seed as if it had been buried there all along. And one after another, fine root filaments spread like cobwebs, surging through the dirt, looking for moisture and nutrients.

Logan clenched his fist.

He had it.

This was pure practice.

Bursting from the other side of the watermelon seed, he envisioned a sprout exploding, searching for sunlight and air. It erupted through the dirt and then climbed, width doubling in a second.

Logan turned the sprout into a trunk, a trunk where the rings continued to advance. It was like envisioning a circle, then envisioning outlining that circle with a pencil over and over again, spreading the outline until the line exploded off the edge of the paper.  

He envisioned a trunk so large that it would cover a front yard, end to end. And that was just the trunk. Limb after limb, an interconnected network; he spread them until they smashed into the side of the skyscrapers, cracking the windows, the tips of the limbs latching onto the building for stability.

He thought of…

He thought…

Wait. What was going on?

Logan got the strangest sensation, as if the tree didn’t want to be a tree. Growing this thing back at Richton’s Tomb had become like child’s play at the end, so why was it giving him trouble now? The only thing he could think of was the lifeforce he was using. Unlike last time, he wasn’t draining life from the pine trees and plants around him.

This time, he was draining it from other people.

Logan ground his teeth, a vein in his forehead throbbing. He’d come this far, and a little thing like a misbehaving tree wouldn’t stop him now.

Disregarding the strange feeling, Logan persevered, a gush of blood bursting from his nose, keeping that tether between his tree and the soldiers connected.

If the tree felt wrong; if the trunk seemed a little off, Logan ignored it, all in his pursuit to make it obey.

Then, he clenched his other fist, envisioning the limbs exploding with foliage, foliage that had microscopic holes that sucked in carbon like a vacuum. Again and again, green exploding like confetti, so many leaves that they blotted out the sun.

Ding!

[You have defeated Bodhi Landhan! Triple experience granted for defeating a member of your own species!]

[You have defeated Quinn Harthoven! Triple experience granted for defeating a member of your own species!]

[You have defeated…]

[…]

[You have leveled up!]

[You have successfully deployed the skill, Life Fabricator, in a carbon reduction event! Calculating carbon reduction… 100,000 tons captured! You have been awarded 390,000 KarmaCoin!]

Logan opened his eyes, beaming. He’d grown another massive carbon tree, a tree so large it was bigger than a tree found in an old growth forest. Around him, the crowd stared at the roots that were as big as a man, peered up at the foliage by craning their necks, and then gave Logan a wide-eyed look, their expressions of fear replaced with awe.

“Logan!” screamed Voss.

Logan turned around, searching for Voss, and then gazed at the five withered soldiers—their bodies sucked of all moisture like scarecrows—and the other soldiers who’d taken in their fallen comrades and then aimed their rifles at Logan.

And unloaded.

 <----Go to chapter 67