Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion - Chapter 60 - Homicidal One

Once Alistair Reed had grown strong enough, he was able to dispense with all subtlety.

It had taken him a full two days to kill all the members of his tutorial. The more of them he’d slain—luring them into dark alleys, taking them out when they were sleeping, or coming upon them when they were alone—the easier it had become.

Not from a moral standpoint. In that way, it had already been easy. Alistair Reed didn’t have any moral qualms about killing his own people. He didn’t have any moral qualms at all, come to think of it.

Soon, he wasn’t bothering to take out loners. Soon, he was taking down whole groups, finding it easier and easier for his daggers to slide through their flesh the stronger he’d become.

He’d managed to get his Dagger Mastery skill to Rank 10, and it drastically improved not only his Speed and the damage his strikes did, but also the amount of piercing damage they had.

To the point where a Warrior’s flimsy, thin leather armour wasn’t enough to stop him punching a hole straight through it. And a Mage’s robes? They were nothing to him.

Alistair grew more and more confident, until, at the end, he was striding through the streets taking down people one by one. As a Warrior, he didn’t possess the same types of spells that Mages had, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have spells.

And one of those spells made it impossible for someone to hit him. At least, for a short period of time.

Phase Shift let him become incorporeal, and he could choose the moment in which he activated it, shifting in and out of the spell’s usage to conserve its energy.

It let his body become incorporeal. His weapons, on the other hand, remained solid. The spell warned that there were ways to circumvent and cancel it out, but that wasn’t something Alistair needed to worry about facing these people.

He’d long ago dealt with any truly competent members of the tutorial before they were ever given a chance to fight back.

When all was done, Alistair had left the section of the city where his tutorial had been set up, leaving nine hundred and ninety-nine corpses behind, searching for the next tutorial worth of people, as he was yet to receive a new quest.

He’d cleaned off all the blood—not a speck of it his own—that he could, but his armour was still caked in the stuff, something which he knew he’d have to explain at some point.

But it had all been worth it. In so many ways, it had been worth it. This System coming, integrating Earth into the Greater Universe, it had finally let him take off the mask he wore and show the world who and what he truly was.

An apex predator. One designed for a singular purpose: to kill.

And when he’d completed that first quest, he’d received something he hadn’t expected. First, he’d received something called a Storage Ring, which he’d used to strip the corpses of their weapons and armour, figuring he might be able to sell them at some point. Assuming any semblance of society managed to return, of course.

Then he’d received something far more valuable: titles.

Apparently, the titles hadn’t activated until he’d finished his first quest. They’d been accumulating, waiting to be activated.

He’d received a title called “Homicidal One.” According to the title, he’d been the very first integrated Denizen of Earth to kill another human in cold blood.

The title seemed very specific about it being in cold blood, as though there might be other ways humans had been killing each other.

And the title? The title had said it was upgradeable. The more of his own people he killed, the stronger the title would become. So he hadn’t just received a single title—he’d received a series of them. Each title offered him not only bonus attribute points, but let him cause bonus damage to humans.

Specifically humans.

Like the System wanted him to kill his own people. Like it was unlocking his true potential and letting him follow his desires to their ultimate end. Not that Alistair knew what that end was.

He was too busy having fun to think of the bigger picture.

As he strolled through the city of his birth, Alistair Reed began to realise something was off. He didn’t yet fully understand what the System had done to Earth when it integrated the world into the Greater Universe, but he was beginning to recognise that things had… changed.

Buildings weren’t where they were supposed to be. Hell, streetsweren’t where they were supposed to be.

When the integration had happened, as far as he knew the System had plucked everyone from wherever they happened to be and sent them to a little room made out of void-like nothingness, evaluating them, making them choose their moral faction, making them choose their available basic class.

Then the System had thrown them back into the world wherever the hell it felt like throwing them. Those few people that he had spoken to back at the tutorial, and the ones he’d overhead talking, all had said they’d been somewhere else when they’d been teleported away. Whether they’d been uptown or downtown, they hadn’t been here.

And now, it seemed, no one else was around either.

But that wasn’t what Alistair was finding strange.

Fronton, the city he’d lived his entire life in, had its streets built in a grid—much like Manhattan Island. The streets and blocks were uniform, and so were the names of those streets.

Yet things had changed.

When he’d realised this, Alistair had stopped in the middle of Main Street—what should have been Main Street—his eyes narrowed, staring at a tall building that shouldn’t be there. A building he was sure he’d only seen on TV.

The Empire State Building. A building from a city many miles away.

This confirmed Alistair’s suspicions that the System had royally screwed with not only the people and animals of this world, but the world itself.

He kept walking. He could have stolen a car, but it would be tough driving through the streets. Maybe a motorcycle would have worked, as traffic was blocked, everyone having been taken out of their cars at once, but he’d never ridden a motorcycle.

Wouldn’t that be a funny way to go in the apocalypse? Crashing a dammed motorcycle?

The streets weren’t completely deserted. Feral dogs, cats and rats roamed. Just like Alistair and the city itself, these animals had been altered into something other by the System. They appeared as though they had been avoiding the tutorial area, but once he’d left, they began to attack him.

Packs of mutated dogs, grown larger and fiercer than they should be, came out of the woodwork, barking and snarling and barrelling straight for him. His Phase Shift spell helped him remain unharmed, and his daggers carved up the bastard mutts quick smart.

And more Mastery Points flowed into Alistair.

So he made a game of it.

Alistair broke through the side mirror of a car with the butt of one of his daggers and beeped the horn. The keys were still sitting in the ignition. He turned it on and blared the horn in three long bursts.

Then he waited.

Rats drew up from the sewers in droves. Cats, perched on balconies and the sides of rooftops, climbed down fire escapes toward him. Dogs barked and howled, making their presence known, appearing on all sides of the street.

Even pigeons appeared, flying through the sky, mutated and larger, their beaks longer and sharper, swooping down toward him.

Alistair threw his head back in a laugh, slashed his daggers against each other to make a satisfying metallic sound, then waited for the mutated animals to come for him.

Three hours later, after doing this in five different intersections, he reached level 10, and got to select his first class. He chose something called a Rare Class, as it offered him the most attribute points. And it had a cool name—Heart Striker. He could live with that.

Though he made good progress killing animals-turned-beasts, he was beginning to wonder why he hadn’t come upon any more humans. Fronton should have had millions of people in it. His tutorial couldn’t have been the only one here, could it? There had only been a thousand people.

It didn’t make any sense to him that the city would be so deserted.

Then again, what about this new reality did make sense, other than him being rewarded for wholesale slaughter?

It made him wonder how the world had been changed. The streets. The buildings. Like this city was a mismatch of six others, and all the puzzle pieces had been jammed together to make something else. Something other. Something altogether alien.

It was bigger than it had been before, too. A lot bigger.

He’d gone to the top of one of the tall skyscrapers and looked out. Everything was different. He could see mountains that shouldn’t have been there. Could see smoke from fires drifting up into the sky.

Is that where the people are, outside of the city?

It made him wonder how he hadn’t noticed this all when he’d first been returned here. It made him wonder, as well, what else this System was capable of. If it could take his world and change it in a blink of an eye, it was capable of damn near anything.

Which means the System is essentially God, and God is rewarding me for killing others, for causing chaos. The System itself, changing the world as it has, appears to be an instrument of chaos just as I am…

A bolt of purple lightning struck the ground a few miles away from where he stood on the rooftop, the breeze playing with his shoulder-length blonde hair. He titled his head in fascination, narrowing his eyes. Though it was far away, he could clearly make out the appearance of a portal.

And people stepping out of it.

Quest Log Update (New Quest Available)

Alistair smiled, opening his log.

Current Quest: An enemy incursion has appeared in your vicinity. As an instrument of chaos, you have no allegiance to your world.

You have two paths:

Path one: Infiltrate and join the enemy.

Path two: Destroy the enemy incursion by any means necessary.

One cannot walk backward on the path.

Progress: Incomplete

Reward:

1. 5 Skill Points

2. Bonus Mastery Points.

3. Unknown Item

Alistair smiled, broadly and with far too many teeth.

That’s when he realised he’d been wrong about the city being deserted. There were others, they were simply difficult to see. They weren’t driving cars. They weren’t walking down the streets. They were in small clusters. He returned to the street, walked into a sporting goods store, and took binoculars—intended for bird watching, as though that were a sport—and headed back to the roof.

With his careful inspection, he spotted signs of a dozen more tutorials around the city, and in the centre of them all, the portal, with enemy soldiers streaming through it. And he was sure there must be more tutorials, in areas blocked by buildings, places he couldn’t see.

No, the city wasn’t deserted. It was just that each tutorial had been segmented from one another, and the city had been elongated, grown, transformed into something far larger than was possible before, so those tutorials could be secluded from one another—like the System didn’t want them to coordinate.

Probably the same reason that the internet was down. That phones and radio weren’t operating. The System want us to play by its rules, not our own.

For what purpose, Alistair didn’t know. But what he did know was that this city, populated as it was, was about to turn into a bloodbath.

And he was the one who would turn on the tap.