SOM - Chapter 6 - City of the Dead

Cautiously Luke crept back up the beach and lingered beneath the stone bridge. By the light of the strange glowing blue rods that illuminated the city, the streets appeared empty. However, Luke knew that danger roamed the city. He was going to have to be careful. 

Luke’s plan essentially boiled down to going house to house, looting everything useful and killing anything he thought he could handle. There was a narrow line between boldness and caution he needed to tread carefully. Luke needed to level up, and he needed to gather more concepts. Killing monsters would hopefully achieve both aims.

From what Luke had experienced so far, combat seemed to be the catalyst needed for concepts to form. He couldn’t just gain the [Fire] domain by thinking about it, or [Water] by going for a swim. The exception was his [Undeath] concept, which had appeared while he slept. 

Luke suspected that the grey skin covering his right forearm had something to do with that one. The notification had mentioned exposure to the undead. Perhaps his body had absorbed enough necrotic energy through his plague rat-infected wounds for the concept to form. Mulling things over he glanced at the concept tab in his menus.

Concepts:

Forerunner (Copper, 12%): +1 all attributes. +5% experience gained.

Murderhobo (Gold, 89%): +5 Will, +3 Strength, -1 Empathy. +40% loot.

Warhammer (Silver, 2%): +3 Strength, augments hammers.

Undeath (Bronze, 27%): +1 Endurance, 15% necrotic resistance

It was interesting to see how much they had changed, considering Luke had last checked them less than two hours ago. It alarmed him that his [Undeath] concept had gone up by a full 20%, and he was unsure why. Perhaps meeting the Ferryman had nudged it up, or swimming in ghost water had been a bad idea. He would have to be careful.

With no signs of enemies ahead, Luke ran across the open street as quickly and quietly as he could. Scanning the buildings on the other side of the cobblestones, he looked for a suitable target. 

Some of the stone buildings were still in pristine condition, while others barely remained standing. From his earlier vantage point, he had assumed they were all old and crumbling. The building directly in front of Luke had a sturdy wooden door, and it was slightly ajar. He slipped inside.

No undead monstrosities lay in wait, though in the dim light, anything could be hiding in the shadows. A small beam of blue light filtered in through the window and landed on a large stone table. Luke’s footsteps echoed against stone walls as he walked over. 

The fluffy white seats looked well crafted, but were too small for Luke to sit in. He ran his hand along the back of a chair and felt the spongy texture of the alien wood beneath his fingertips. There were a dozen of the chairs placed around the table, suggesting that the room was a communal space. 

Elaborate artwork was carved directly into the stone walls with metal sconces hanging off at an angle. Inside the sconces were spherical balls that looked to be fashioned from the same blue rock as the streetlights outside. Where’s the bloody light switch, Luke grumbled. Just for a moment, the nearest blue ball reacted to his unspoken desire and flickered on with a bright light. No fucking way! 

After experimenting with the lights for a couple of minutes, Luke figured out how to make them stay on, change colours, and even adjust the brightness. He stopped messing around when he realised he was probably drawing unnecessary attention. Controlling the lights with his mind was literally magic. It was almost as impressive to him as his transformation into an Olympic athlete. 

The far side of the bedroom had an ebony staircase going up and down. After a moment’s deliberation, Luke headed downstairs based on the hope that it would lead to a food larder. He was hungry. 

However, instead of finding a basement, Luke discovered the stairs continued down, with each floor housing several rooms. He followed the stairs down five floors before coming to the bottom. Fortunately, the magical light orbs allowed him to illuminate the dark depths. The building was like an iceberg with only a small fraction of it above ground, but most hiding below. Luke had only glimpsed the surface of the giant city.

Despite Luke’s search for food, the lowest floor wasn’t a storage area filled with snacks, and instead housed five small apartments, and a tiny washroom. He tore apart the rooms in his quest for useful loot, but found nothing of note. The place looked like it had already been ransacked; someone or something else had beaten him to the punch.

All that remained was a random assortment of junk. He found a picture book beneath a bedside cot, A bar of soap in the third-floor washroom, and a random copper key. These items and more made their way into Luke’s brown handbag until it was full. Some of it might be useful, and the rest he could get rid of later if needed. 

Lulled into a false sense of security by the empty rooms and mundane spoils, Luke was startled when the largest room opened to reveal a nest of plague rats. Instead of carefully opening the door a crack and peering through before entering, he had swung it open wide to reveal a dozen oversized rodents sleeping in a pile. There was a moment when Luke looked at the rats, and they looked back at him. 

They attacked.

Slowly, the heaving pile of rotten rat flesh lurched forwards, rolling like a hamster in a wheel. A chorus of high screeches came from the unholy abomination. In the centre of the swarm was a knotted mass of writhing tails. It pulsed like a giant heart. The tails were so intertwined that it was impossible to know when one rat ended and another began. 

Though thoroughly surprised, Luke reacted quickly, grabbing the door handle and slammed it closed. The rats slammed against the white wood with a resounding crack, breaking the locking mechanism and forcing him back a step. Luke pushed back. With brute strength alone he held the door in place.

However, a broken door was hardly an impenetrable barrier, and the gap was wide enough for one of the smaller rodents to poke its head through. As a pair of yellow jaws snapped at him, Luke pulled out his hammer in a smooth motion. Steel met bone, and bone broke. Luke’s clothes gained a brand new layer of gore as he pulped the rat’s face against the doorframe with blow after blow. 

The nine conjoined rodents somehow made each other more resilient. It had taken a couple of hammer blows to crack open the skull, and even with the brain destroyed it kept coming for Luke. The smashed head looked side to side in a jerky motion, as it continued to push its way through the door. 

Like a game of whack-a-mole Luke crushed claws, broke bones and splattered skulls, but inch by inch the press of bodies against the door pushed it open. A low growl rolled from Luke’s throat as he strained. He looked around. If he stayed where he was, the rats would force the doors open and fight him on the stairs.

Up or down? Up would lead to the grand entrance hall, where Luke had room to stand and swing his hammer. Down would trap him below and make retreat impossible. He shoved hard and bought a moment’s reprieve, which he used to jump away from the door and sprint up the stairs.

With powerful strides Luke practically flew up the stairs, taking them five steps at a time before turning to see the rats in pursuit. He was back on the ground floor, so could run out into the streets if things went badly.

Whilst the rat ball was a tough nut to crack, it was sluggish. The tangle of rats fighting to climb over one another constantly got in each other’s way. Slowly but inevitably they rolled up the stairs. Luke’s heart beat like a drum as he revelled in the thrill of the fight. He felt truly alive in a way that he had never before.

Gore exploded over the staircase as Luke stomped first one, then two rat skulls beneath him. The tide kept coming, but Luke noticed that the more heads he took out, the more disjointed the swarm’s movements became. He had ‘killed’ four of the nine rats that made up the amalgamated creature, so was almost halfway there. He hoped.

As Luke fought a fighting retreat from the top of the stairs towards the table in the centre of the hall, he watched the throbbing cluster of tails at the centre of the swarm. Acting on instinct, he overextended himself to land an attack on it. With the claw of his hammer he stabbed deep into it, then wrenched it back out again. As he had suspected, the wound made several of the headless rats go limp, becoming dead weight for the swarm. 

Slow and sluggish, the swarm lost cohesion and smashing heads became easy. Luke attacked what he considered the brain of the swarm whenever an opening appeared, and after less than a minute of fighting only one rat was still moving. The lone rodent struggled, but it was tied to the unmoving swarm by its tail. Luke stood above it curiously, just out of reach of the yellow jaws. 

No kill notifications tickled the back of Luke’s subconscious, so the system seemed to consider the swarm as a single entity. Luke wondered how much experience the creature would give him, and he tried to feel for its aura, trying to replicate what the Ferryman had done to him. For a moment he thought he felt something, a density in the air around the rat swarm, and the system filled in the gaps.

[Level 9 Rat-King - This beast is a Chimaera formed from several Plague Rats. Core Domains: Swarm, Disease and Undeath.]

It was like the system had taken the feeling of the creature’s aura, and translated it into English for him. He could kind of see why Charon had described it as being spoon-fed: it was practically cheating. It would have taken ages to figure out the domain by himself.

As Luke focused on the rat-king’s aura again, he could sense that it had a noisy feel to it that spoke of being one amongst many. Mixed in there was a hint of defiance, the refusal to accept death. This second concept resonated with one of his own. He guessed that this was what the domains of [Undeath] and [Swarm] felt like.

This all gave Luke a level of insight into the concepts that would make it easier to cultivate them for himself. However, Luke had no desire to merge himself into a human chimaera, nor become an undead. Besides the obvious reasons, he was mindful of the warning given by the system. He was just starting to appreciate the advantages given by Gaia’s training system, and didn’t want to lose it.

Looking down at the last pitiful rodent trapped inside the rat-king, Luke felt a flash of sympathy. Like any rabid beast, it needed to be put down. To unlock a new concept, Luke finished it with his screwdriver by stabbing it through the eye. He was hoping to get the concept of the [Dagger], reasoning that it would probably come with an agility boost.

[You have killed a Level 9 Rat-King. Loot generated.]

[You have gained enough experience to reach Level 5, Marketplace Unlocked]

[Concept ranked up: Forerunner - Bronze. Awarded for being one of the first thousand humans to unlock the Marketplace. +2 all attributes, +10% experience gained.]

Luke’s hope of a new concept failed to materialise, but the rest of the announcements left a big stupid grin on his face. Not only had he earned some shiny new loot, but he had unlocked some kind of system shop! Only after a few moments did he realise something ominous about the message.

I was asleep for almost half a day. How the hell am I still in the top thousand?