Defiance of the Fall

As soon as the monster had died , it seemed as though the source of the fires had been removed . The fires had quickly extinguished , the marks left behind the only proof they had existed at all . Had it not quickly dissipated then the fire would fire would have completely destroyed him . Maybe not his body , but all his life-force .

Zac was nauseated and on the brink of passing out , but he somehow summoned power he did not know he had and got up on his feet . He shuffled over to the imp and yanked out the axe . He had no energy to look through the corpse , and simply continued his way back home .

He was almost delirious by this point and was barely able to keep his bearings . Luckily he was quite close to edge of the island now , and almost on the opposite side of the pillar . The monsters were pretty scarce this far out still , and he didn’t encounter any more demons that night .

With the last strength in his body he managed to stumble back into his camp . As soon as he saw the familiar sight of the metallic camper his legs simply gave out . He fell down onto the ground end let the sweet darkness embrace him .

It was midday the following day when Zac woke up again . Body was stiff and he sported a splitting headache . It was as if he had been drinking until passing out last day . He spit out some gravel he had got in his mouth and slowly got up .

After a quick check-up it seemed that most of the wounds were in decent shape . None of the scratches and tears from the demons were still bleeding . Some of the more shallow wounds were just a white line today . A few of the worse wounds would have to stay in bandage for at least another day though .

The spots where the black fire had burned him yesterday were still a bit grey and shrunken , but had gotten noticeably better . He felt that he headache he had likely came from these wounds . The fire yesterday must have had some magic properties that damaged in other ways than just burning . He shuddered when he remembered the pain from those blasts .

He prepared some breakfast and sat down in a camping chair to go over yesterday’s results . He brought up the status window with a thought to go over the gains .

Name Zachary Atwood

Level 18

Race Human

Alignment Human (Earth)

Titles Born For Carnage , Ultimate Reaper , Luck of the Draw , Giantsbane , Disciple of David , Overpowered , Slayer of Leviathans , Adventurer , Demon Slayer I

Strength 46

Dexterity 33

Endurance 34

Vitality 43

Intelligence 29

Wisdom 29

Luck 44

Free Points 0

Nexus Coins 3 370

He had gained almost 3000 Nexus Coins with just one day of fighting , which seemed quite good . If he based the gains on the amount of cosmic energy he got from the different monsters he could somewhat guess how much each kill gave him . He would say that he had gained roughly 100 for each demon dog he had killed , and between half as much and double that from the demon hound . The largest amount was rewarded from killing the imp . He still remembered that burst of energy even though he was almost delirious . If he hadn’t gotten that extra energy boost after the fight he might not have made it home .

Still , the amount gained yesterday was far short of most of the buildings he had seen in the town building interface . It made sense , as building a whole town was usually not done by the efforts of only one person . If he had a few hundred people who came together and gathered Nexus Coins the amount gathered would be massive , even if the other people were far weaker than himself . There simply was power in numbers .

The thought gave him a sense of urgency . It was undeniable that he had likely gotten a quite impressive head start compared to most people , even though he was not too happy with his current situation . But if some great leader emerged in a tutorial village and created a large force he might lose his head start . Abby had mentioned that the system liked those that stood in forefront . If someone was going to get titles and other advantages from building a town first , then it should be him .

It might be better for humanity if some country leader or military general got that head start . But it was the apocalypse , and he had his goals . He needed to be a bit selfish in that regard , and couldn’t just give away opportunities to others and hope they would use them for good .

He also noticed that he had a new title , Demon Slayer I . It was from the quest he had received in the beginning , which had told him to kill 10 demons . The title gave him 1+ all stats when fighting enemies of demonic alignment . However , he didn’t quite understand how the title worked . He should have activated that title somewhere mid-day , but he had felt nothing different when fighting afterward . Zac thought that the 1 stat point perhaps was too low a number for him to notice anything .