Far away, an alien world was slowly drawing closer to Earth, pulled through space and time by the System just as Earth was. Much like Earth, this world was home to a people being integrated by the System. In fact, in the System’s own dimension, Earth and this world were already forever linked, and these realms would soon be one and the same. Reality just hadn’t realized it yet.
Like Earth, this was a temperate world with a handful of distinct continents separated by great seas with ...
2022-12-07 16:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Sakura and I threw ourselves into battle. The creature interrupting our personal time was a giant rat, and I killed it quickly enough. But that wasn’t enough to push Sakura to level 10. We needed more. But thanks to my Death Curse, it was surprisingly easy to stumble across small groups of monsters roaming the streets, many of them quite powerful for anyone other than me.
“Heads up, I see some Fire Squirrels,” I warned Sakura. She hefted her club, though I wanted her to stay in re...
2022-12-05 16:00:10 +0000 UTC
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“Not for the view,” Sakura replied. “I came for you. Mind if I join you?”
I gestured to the ledge I was sitting on, legs dangling off the side of the building. We were three stories up, but the fall didn’t seem that scary anymore. I didn’t think it would hurt me even if I tried to jump to the ground from here.
“By all means, take a seat. There’s room enough for two.” As I spoke, I heard the scurrying of a cockroach following behind Sakura, and I pointed my finger...
2022-12-03 15:59:01 +0000 UTC
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I had promised to heal up a little before seeing Bridget, but I wanted to check in on her. Caleb and Marcus’ backup shelter was unimpressive, to say the least. It was little more than a pile of scraps tucked in the corner of a brick building a little down the street. Their supplies were a window curtain Bridget was using as a blanket, the first aid kit Marcus had, and a half-eaten box of oreo cookies.
Still, now that the office had burned down, it was more than I had to offer. So I tu...
2022-11-30 16:00:09 +0000 UTC
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We followed the roar and soon found what was left of Craig’s remaining people. They’d broken and scattered, but the bulk of them had gathered here.
Gathered and then promptly slaughtered. And the culprit was munching on their corpses. It took me a moment to recognize her.
Her fur was the black of a starless night, and her eyes were like burning coals. Her claws were as long as daggers, and her teeth were deep yellow. The way her feral lips pulled back in a snarl made her look ...
2022-11-28 16:00:09 +0000 UTC
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Alright guys, I'm finishing up the plot line for Paladin 4. I think things have largely come together for me already, but there are a few setting and character elements that I can tweak while writing or adjust in this outline stage.
If you have any characters you want to see (I remember people mentioning Laura the Lady of Darkness as a new favorite they wanted to see again. Any others?) let me know here!
Also if you've got any mysteries you need to have resolved but aren't part of...
2022-11-26 17:00:08 +0000 UTC
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“Who the hell do you think you are, coming in here and killing people who belong to me?” Craig demanded.
Craig - Bandit Gunslinger (Level 16)
For a moment, I was about to tell Craig I'd come to avenge myself. But then I realized why Craig was asking. With my hood up, the blood over my face, and the admittedly impressive enhancements to my body all my stats had given me, Craig didn’t even recognize me. He thought I was someone who’d just shown up and decide...
2022-11-26 16:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Growing up, every kid thinks they're special. Not me. Normal parents, normal school, normal life. Overall, I was as normal as they come. But my childhood best friend was anything but normal.
Her name was Myrina, and whenever we played, there was bound to be trouble.
"Roll me, Carter!" Myrina said, arms tucked tight within an abandon tire we found by the side of the road.
"You sure this is safe?" I asked, cheeks puffy with baby fat. The two of us were about ten years old at t...
2022-11-24 16:00:08 +0000 UTC
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I ruthlessly eliminated Craig’s guards, one after another. They finally realized something was going on after I killed the sixth one guarding the doors, which was further than I thought I would get.
Congratulations! You have advanced to level 12!
Your passive stat points have been assigned. +1 to all stats.
You have four points to assign.
+2 Strength +2 Agility.
Choose a Perception Skil...
2022-11-23 16:00:08 +0000 UTC
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I received several new abilities with my new class, and they popped up before me, one after another.
You are now a Scholar of Forbidden Knowledge. This title is equipped, and it will appear when you are examined.
Your 4 remaining Class points have been assigned automatically. +1 Intelligence. +1 Willpower. +1 Charisma. +1 Luck.
It seemed edgy to me. Now everyone who looked at me would think of me as the Carter, the Scholar of Forbidden Knowl...
2022-11-21 16:00:11 +0000 UTC
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Myrina was wearing a white cloth dress, sort of like a toga. It looked somewhere between ancient Greek clothes and gym wear. Her hair was also done up behind her head in an unusual style. I wasn’t sure what to call that kind of bun, but it had a certain elegance to it. The only thing unusual about her appearance was the fact that she was wearing eye shadow, which was something I’d never seen on her. In fact, I was pretty sure she wore no makeup at all, just her naturally flawless face.
2022-11-19 16:00:10 +0000 UTC
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Fourth rewrite of the first chapter!
My parents died when I was off at college. I guess that’s better than having them die when you’re a child, but it still sucked. Not only was I in a strange place missing home, but I also knew I had no home to come back to.
I struggled to make new friends. I think my dour mood at the time turned most people off. Everybody except for this one girl, that is. Odd as she was, she soon became my best friend. I don’t th...
2022-11-18 17:29:51 +0000 UTC
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I rallied the spare Mana to cast Mana Bolt and take out one of the zombies awakening above me. Sure enough, the kill didn't push me to level 10. The curse was real, and it was standing between me and getting a class.
I was all the way up at half health by the time I made my way out of that dumpster. I had to shove a mana bolt through three separate corpses about to turn into zombies before I made it out, and if it wasn't for my new strength stats I didn't think I'd have made it out at a...
2022-11-16 16:00:09 +0000 UTC
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Hey guys, I'm asking this question a few chapters early for you guys since I'm a bit ahead of you all right now, but this is one of those things that I can't really wait for you all to catch up before voting. So I'll just put it up now.
I’m trying to get some opinions on what jobs sound interesting to you guys.
I'm not making any promises. All these suggestions are things that I think would go well with the story so it shouldn't matter which one I use, but if I start writing one...
2022-11-14 20:07:11 +0000 UTC
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Most of the places where bathtubs and VR headsets should have sat were empty. These slots represented the newly-formed tether between the humans of Earth and the System. Its arrival had replaced whatever had filled this dimension previously or at least intercepted our souls from heading there. Had the System placed our real afterlives out of reach forever?
That was a scary thought.
Another scary thought was the idea that someone in this Dimension could just hack at the System cont...
2022-11-14 16:01:00 +0000 UTC
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Craig’s forces were herding the defenders from outside through the door and into the office, where all the other bodies lay on the ground.
Craig activated a skill. His back straightened as some of his wounds eased, and he seemed to recover Vitality at a tremendous pace, just like Mind over Flesh. He strode back into the office, forcing himself to walk properly despite the bullet wounds and the no doubt heavy pounding in his skull.
“Fuck, I had a big speech planned, but I can...
2022-11-12 16:01:00 +0000 UTC
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“Give up, Carter. You can’t win. Might as well let me make this quick,” Craig chuckled. He stalked his way through the halls, and I wove through the door to the adjacent office as quietly as I could. I just needed to buy ten seconds. Once I had Deflect equipped again, I’d be much more confident facing Craig down.
I took a survey of my options. First, I could make my way out of the office. Most of the windows had been boarded up, but I could pry a few loose given time. Or I could...
2022-11-09 16:01:02 +0000 UTC
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I’d been keeping myself nearly full of mana and avoided going all-out, so I was ready to join Ben and the others at a moment’s notice. But the signal had never come. So where was he? Surely Craig was as weakened as we were going to get him. I’d gone from hearing a gunshot every minute from his side of the building to one every half an hour. He was probably conserving his last bullets.
Overhead, the sky went from blue to orange, and the waves of ...
2022-11-07 16:00:09 +0000 UTC
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The glowing eyes in the alley soon resolved themselves into hundreds of scurrying cockroaches. I turned to Marcus and the other gunners. This would be their best chance to gain levels.
"Open fire!" I shouted.
Marcus was the first to pull the trigger, but the others soon followed suit. Ben had been fairly meticulous about who was armed and who wasn't and everyone who'd gotten a weapon was someone who at least had a passing familiarity with how to use it.
But that still meant ...
2022-11-05 15:01:00 +0000 UTC
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"Murder?" I asked.
It hadn't even been a full day, and we'd gone from a society of law and order to plotting the death of a fellow human. I would've liked to say it was wrong, but I'd killed those escaped prisoners a few hours ago in full view of the survivors we were rescuing. I didn't have room to talk.
"That's right. Cold, premeditated murder," Ben said. "It's best to put it out there here and now. That's what we're going to do. Craig's a pro...
2022-11-02 15:01:01 +0000 UTC
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I recovered quicker than Sakura did, and the people in the clinic were kind enough to let us use their decontamination shower. It wasn’t a request either, since the two of them were paranoid about all the zombie goo on the two of us. Their reasoning became apparent when we started talking to them.
“Are you infected?” The man who shouted at us before asked. Before we could respond, he shined a flashlight in our eyes. “Hmm... unusually responsive pupil dilation.” He pressed his ...
2022-10-31 15:00:10 +0000 UTC
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Note: After fixing a stat point error you guys pointed out, I accidentally re-uploaded the wrong chapter to Patreon. That was chapter 15. I've fixed it and this is the proper chapter 11 with the stat error fixed.
Ben was important enough to park his car fairly close to the office building. The thing we called a parking garage had been a tiny underground affair and barely worth of the name before the integration, but with the System pasting fo...
2022-10-29 15:00:08 +0000 UTC
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My team ran past zombies as fast as possible, smashing them apart with whatever they could lay their hands on. The violence echoed throughout the grocery store, making the place feel like a war zone. A zombie would stagger after us every once in a while, but we quickly disposed of them before they could reach us.
You have slain [Newly Risen Zombie - Level 1] x3
Despite being disgusting and terrifying at first, the zombies turned out t...
2022-10-26 17:43:36 +0000 UTC
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Hopefully just two or three hours!
I edited chapter 10 on my laptop which only has like 64 gigs of storage, so I keep everything in the cloud. That has worked just fine for years, but today it finally bit me in the ass.
The whole server is out for some scheduled downtime, which I must have missed the notification for. I do have the chapter in a backup I made earlier this week, but it’s unedited and I remember making some heavy additions to it, so I think I’m just going to wait...
2022-10-26 15:00:14 +0000 UTC
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Craig’s dramatic entrance, speech, and exit caught everyone’s eyes. Even those who had no interest in his offer were talking about him.
“Wasn’t that the building’s security guy?” A woman asked. “Didn’t he harass Jessica in the hallway last month? I was certain he’d be fired for that! Does he have blackmail on the building manager or something?”
“The dude just pointed at a bunch of chicks and told them to follow him, and some of them actually did. Holy shit, I...
2022-10-24 15:01:03 +0000 UTC
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I was playing with more AI art , mostly to help visualize a few of the characters in the current chapters of Amazon Apocalypse and to have good references in case I ever need to have art drawn of them (and to help keep descriptions consistent if I need to describe them 4 books from now and have forgotten what they look like.)
Anyway, I was thinking about where to save these where I wouldn't lose them, and eventually decided Patreon was the best place to keep them. So... I'm sharing them...
2022-10-23 16:34:02 +0000 UTC
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When we returned to the third floor, Damian was alone. Everyone else in the office had picked up their things and left. He scowled at us as we walked by, and I shook my head. If he wanted to die for n end of year bonus that would never come, that was on him. At least he wouldn't be getting anyone else killed.
There were Scavenger Cockroaches nibbling on the corpses on the second floor, and we killed them off before continuing back down to rejoin all the survivors we’d gathered so far....
2022-10-22 15:00:08 +0000 UTC
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Sakura’s company owned the building, so she was naturally a familiar face to the law office. She was the one that collected their rent, after all. Sakura wasn’t exactly friends with everyone here, but she recognized a few people by name, so I left them talking to her.
They had many obvious questions. Mostly about what had happened, if we’d experienced that strange meeting with the System, and if monsters were showing up everywhere or just in their office. Sakura brought them up to...
2022-10-21 15:00:09 +0000 UTC
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You have led your party to victory against a fellow party leader! As a result, you have been awarded the title Raid Captain.
When leading a party, your stats receive a boost equivalent to 1% of the average stat of everyone in your party across all stats.
I looked up at Craig, and his eyes met mine. I didn’t like the look in his eyes. They reminded me too much of the monster I’d fought. Just like the Rat Matriarch, he wanted revenge.
My a...
2022-10-19 15:00:10 +0000 UTC
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“Everyone, form a line! We’ll hold them here!” I yelled.
Some froze. Others shakily took a few steps forward.
“Move it! One line in front, one in behind,” I yelled.
I felt Bridget and Sakura take positions beside me, and Caleb reluctantly backed us up. Following their lead, the others put on brave faces and formed a line.
“What Carter said!” Sakura yelled. The office workers still recognized her as their boss, so when she backed me up, the holdouts steppe...
2022-10-17 15:23:18 +0000 UTC
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