The party wandered through the woods with no plant monster in sight.

Once a swampy land before a French Emperor came along, the Landes forest counted among the largest man-made woodlands in Europe. Rows after rows of pine trees grew amidst dense foliage, alongside a few oaks, birches, and willows with moss growing on their barks. The forest was eerily quiet, with only bugs to provide noise.

Basil winced as he heard a pine tree collapse behind him; the latest in a long line of victims. A few birds previously hiding in the foliage flew away in fear.

Basil looked over his shoulder and backpack. As he suspected, Bugsy had accidentally snapped yet another tree in half with his tail. The centipede looked at the shattered pine tree with a guilty face.

“I can save them!” Rosemarine hopped to the pine tree’s side and blew colored dust at its wound. “Sweet Pollen!”

“Hey, don’t waste your Special Points on trees!” Plato scolded Rosemarine. “We might need them later!”

“But they’re plants like me!” Rosemarine argued. The severed halves of the tree had joined up again thanks to her magic, but the trunk remained bent and the branches touched the ground. “I healed them!”

At what cost? She had botched the surgery and the pine tree would never stand up again. Vegetal euthanasia would have been kinder.

Basil glanced at Plato, his axe resting on his shoulder. “Do you smell any plant monsters?”

“I don’t smell any monsters, period.” Plato squinted at Bugsy. “It’s as if something is scaring them away.”

Bugsy meekly stared at the ground, his reptilian eyes full of shame. “I’m sorry. All the distances feel wrong.”

Size wasn’t the only issue with Bugsy’s new transformation. The centimagma had accidentally exhaled flames at the foliage outside the house a few hours before, forcing the party to dump bucket after bucket of water to douse the fire.

“Boss, do you think…” Bugsy looked at his owner with faint hope. “Do you think I can still fit inside my bedroom?”

“We’ll refit the garage into a new one easily enough,” Basil reassured the centimagma. He no longer needed to park his car there with the Inventory system. “I can’t say the same for widening the house’s doors so you can fit through them. I ain’t an architect.”

“I’m sorry,” Bugsy apologized.

“We’ll figure something out.”

Something about the falling trees bothered Basil. He had reached a Strength score of 27, just shy of Bugsy’s 30. If the centimagma felled trees with a mere wrong move, could Basil do the same?

Basil stopped in front of a pine tree, much to Plato’s confusion. “What are you doing?”

“Checking something.” Basil tightened his fist and aimed. “One, two, three…”

His fist went through the tree’s bark and stopped halfway through the trunk. Basil felt a little pain in his knuckles as they hit wood, but far less than he expected.

“Mr. Who-Feeds-Me, why?” Rosemarine immediately treated the pine tree’s wound. “Sweet Pollen!”

Basil removed his hand from the bark. It would take a gorilla to leave a hole as large as the one he just made, but Bugsy casually uprooted trees as he moved.

“Relative strength,” Basil guessed. “Not absolute strength.”

“What do you mean, Boss?” Bugsy asked. Rosemarine finished healing the tree, ignoring all of Plato’s concerns.

“That if our Strength scores were equal, you would still hit harder than me due to your size.” Come to think of it, Health Points seemed to grow depending on the physical stats like Strength, yet Rosemarine and Plato had a lesser ratio than Basil and Bugsy. This implied the existence of size-related hidden stat modifiers.

Rosemarine managed to heal the pine tree’s ‘wound’ at a cost. “Mr. Who-Feeds-Me, I’ve run out of SP!”

“I warned you,” Plato said. The cat’s mood worsened when Basil looked into his backpack and tossed some SP recovery medicine at Rosemarine. “You’re encouraging her!”

“Rosemarine, calm down with the pollen abuse,” Basil said. “I need antibiotics to craft SP recovery potions and they don’t grow on trees.”

Rosemarine swallowed the bottle, plastic included, before belching. “Yes, Mr. Who-Feeds-Me.”

“Hey, how is it you obey him but not me?” Plato complained.

“Because when I evolve, he will feed me even more!”

Aww, she was ambitious and cunning!

“This errand is a bust.” Plato stretched his legs. “But it was nice to go hiking in the woods again. Seems like everything returned to normal at last.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.” Basil looked up through the leaves above his head. Barely perceptible streaks of red light tainted the blue skies, the tail of distant auroras. The Ogre Den’s influence had covered the Barthes, but it wasn’t the only dungeon active in the region. Basil would say another was located near Mont-de-Marsan from the aurora’s distance.

Did the plant monsters migrate to new dungeons after the Ogre Den’s destruction? If so, Basil could say goodbye to his dream of a fanged flower hedge.

“Boss, I see a house!” Bugsy said with sudden excitement. “It’s not ours!”

Basil’s eyes wandered to blackened walls standing at the forest’s edge. The trail the group had followed led to a small suburb of brick houses. Basil immediately recognized the place, having often hiked in the area.

“It’s Angoumé, a small village near the town of Dax,” Basil explained. “Barely three hundred inhabitants.”

“Oh, I remember the place.” Plato licked his lips. “The butcher always tosses me a treat whenever we visit.”

“The baker is pretty good too.” Reminiscing made Basil hungry for croissants, chocolatines, and other French pastries. “Cheap too.”

“Let’s go.” Plato gave his master the cutest, most adorable stare he could. “Please…”

“I want to visit a human hive!” Bugsy said with enthusiasm. “I’ve never seen one!”

Rosemarine joined in. “Can I eat the baker?”

“No, Rosemarine, but I can buy you pastries.” Basil was about to assent to his pets’ request when he suddenly noticed a worrying detail about Angoumé. He frowned in alarm, his fingers tightening on his axe. “Something is wrong with the place.”

“Boss, I don’t hear anything,” said Bugsy.

Exactly. Angoumé had been a quiet place, but never a silent one.

It’s not my problem. Basil gazed at the houses with an impassioned look. It’s the police’s job to protect people, not mine. I should stay out of this and trust the government. If I could do so well on my own, everyone else must have overperformed. There’s nothing to worry about.

Yes, he didn’t have to do anything.

…

…

Shit.

“Fuck me,” Basil said as he stepped inside the village.

“Basil, I’m not that kind of animal,” Plato quipped before following his owner. “Find yourself a girlfriend of your own species.”

The first person they met turned out to be a woman three decades older than Basil, and he wouldn’t take her on a date anytime soon.

Basil raised his axe as he approached the figure. The middle-aged woman stood on the threshold of the first house beyond the forest with glasses on her nose and a torchlight in hand. She looked poised to inspect an overgrown hedge, but would never reach it.

It was difficult to move with a body of stone.

Danielle Jacqueline Hiquet. Level 0+1 [Humanoid]. Status: Petrified.

A shiver ran down Basil’s spine. The statue was a living person.

“Boss.” Bugsy’s joy at discovering a human village didn’t last long. “What happened here?”

At first glance, Angoumé looked like a postcard ad: cozy beige houses surrounded by vast gardens of flowers and lush lawns. A beautiful pond of water bordered a road without holes and a yellow hotel restaurant. It was a favorite spot of old people to stay the night in quietness before enjoying Dax’s famous thermal cures.

A closer look revealed grisly details. A car overturned on the road; a hole in a house’s wall; a human statue half-sunk into the pond’s waters; and most worrying of all, the enormous footprints dug into the walkway.

Plato didn’t make a sound as he walked to Basil’s side. His steps were slow, his ears raised. “Basil…”

“Plato, you check the houses,” Basil ordered with a tone that brooked no disobedience. “I’ll investigate the hotel. Rosemarine, pull any statues you find out of the water. Bugsy, use your tremorsense and warn us if anything approaches.”

“Yes, Mister,” Rosemarine whispered back. She had sensed the danger afoot.

“Yes, Boss.” Bugsy applied his antennae to the ground. “I’ll roar if I sense anything.”

Basil gritted his teeth as the party split to cover more ground. He walked up to the hotel near the pond and found the glass doors shattered from the outside. Basil carefully stepped inside the entrance hall with his axe poised to strike at the first provocation.

A thin layer of dust covered the peeling paint of the hotel’s walls and the lights had died out. A dead television was mounted above an office counter with a pegboard holding the rooms’ keys. A petrified man in his forties, almost certainly the manager, stood near it with an expression of abject fear. The breakfast hall was empty, the food safe inside the fridges.

Sorry. Basil pickpocketed the manager until he found his master key. It astonished him that some establishments hadn’t switched to keycards yet. I don’t like stealing, but this is an emergency.

The elevator leading to the upper floors was as dead as the electric grid, so Basil walked up narrow stairs. Rows after rows of closed rooms awaited him. He checked them one by one.

All the hotel’s bedrooms looked the same. King-sized beds faced a tv mounted at the center, with a smaller area dedicated to the shower and toilets. Windows opened to a small individual terrace granting the tenants an impeccable view of the pond outside.

Most bedrooms were empty, but not all of them. One housed an elderly couple sleeping peacefully, their flesh turned to stone. A second had a man in his thirties petrified on the toilet, his eyes half-closed in sleepiness.

The dungeons first appeared early in the morning. Monsters must have fallen upon these people before they even knew what hit them.

If I lived in the city, I might have become one of them. Basil felt bad about leaving people turned to stone, but nothing in his arsenal could undo the petrification ailment. Each occupied room had its windows broken from the outside. They came, they petrified, they left.

In spite of the tense situation, Basil struggled to keep a straight face upon finding a third room with victims. The two occupants had been petrified mid-coitus. While the man seemed to take pleasure in the act, the much younger woman was clearly faking it. Basil couldn’t help but check the man’s belongings. He kept a photo of his family in his wallet, but with a different woman for a wife.

He didn’t even bother to remove his wedding ring, Basil noted scornfully. If the man couldn’t keep his vows, he shouldn’t have made them in the first place. I should call his wife and inform her if I get the chance. It’s only proper.

Basil walked to the room’s window and studied the hole in its center. The creature that broke through it couldn’t be bigger than a soccer ball.

Bugsy’s roar echoed outside and made the walls tremble.

“Damn it,” Basil hissed as he rushed through the door. “I knew we should have stuck to the forest—”

Click.

Basil’s head snapped in the bed’s direction right as a small sphere emerged from beneath the bedsheet. He didn’t have time to turn around before an orange ray blinded his vision.

Level too high! [Petrify-Ray] cannot affect you!

When Basil regained his sense of sight, he found himself facing a floating orb of copper and bronze. A single orange eye of crystal gazed at him from the sphere’s core, a strange gear symbol painted on the steely eyelids.

Unity Watcher Level 2 [Artificial]. Faction: Unity.

“FOR THIS WORLD TO LIVE LEVELS MUST STAY DOWN!” The orb’s booming voice made the walls tremble and Basil wince in pain. His ears! “PETRIFICATION IS TEMPORARY! SUBMIT FOR YOUR SAFETY—”

“Shut up!” Basil snarled before punching the orb. “I ain’t deaf, asshole!”

His mighty fist shattered the crystal like glass and sent the orb crashing against a wall. Basil’s heart skipped a beat as the creature nearly hit one of the petrified victims, but it narrowly missed them.

“LEVELS MUST STAY DOWN…” The orb’s message grew gargled and weaker. “Doooownn…”

Basil finished the monster off with a swing of his axe and rushed outside the hotel. He ran as fast as his legs could carry him, but his fears turned out to be unwarranted. He found Bugsy and Rosemarine near the pond with the remains of a shattered metal orb laying on the shore. Plato quickly rejoined them, unharmed and yet furious.

You earned 1000 EXP (125 each).

“Boss, this thing came out of the water!” Bugsy snapped his mandible at the broken watcher and revealed his fiery fangs. “I destroyed it in one blow!”

“I killed two more in the houses.” Plato hissed in anger. “They petrified everyone, Basil, even the cats! The cats! They got the butcher and the baker too!”

Even the baker? The bastards!

“There was one in the hotel too.” Worse, Basil hadn’t missed the ‘Faction’ part when he analyzed the orb. The machines belonged to a larger group. “Bugsy, why didn’t you notice them?”

“I swear, I didn’t sense anything! My tremorsense only picks up vibrations in the ground and the thing didn’t make any noise!”

“I mistook one for a metal ball until I poked it,” Plato defended Bugsy. “It smelled of oil, so I thought it was a harmless gizmo.”

Basil’s jaw clenched. “Mines. They were mines. Dormant bombs set to activate at the first sign of movement and finish off stragglers.”

Basil noticed new statues along the pond’s shore, one human in uniform, three goblins, and two dinocranes. Only the rotten remains of a spinotter remained unpetrified, although a powerful blow had ground its skull to fine paste.

“I found them in the water, Mr. Who-Feeds-Me!” Rosemarine boasted with pride. “I dragged them out myself with my vines!”

From the group's composition, Basil guessed that they were a raiding party from the Ogre's Den. The goblins had come expecting to kill helpless humans, only to find themselves facing a more dangerous creature.

This is Megabug all over again. Basil’s eyes examined the petrified goblins and then the symbol on the broken orb’s eyelids: a gear with six sides and a ‘W’ mark at its center. But the orbs belonged to another group than his Apocalypse Force.

Basil didn’t know whether he should take it as good or bad news.

“Can I eat it?” Rosemarine salivated at the sight of the spinotter’s carcass. “I’m hungry!”

“That’s the only monster they didn’t turn to stone,” Plato pointed out.

“Spinotters are level 2.” Basil quickly put two and two together. “The orb failed to petrify me because I was too high-level.”

Plato caught on. “All the petrified people I’ve found were level 1 or 0+1. They didn’t have the time to take a class.”

“The orbs can’t petrify creatures with a level equal or higher than their own,” Basil guessed. The level limit would explain why these weak creatures packed such a powerful ability. “They killed the spinotter because it was too strong.”

“There’s no way the orbs did the deed, Basil,” Plato replied as Rosemarine devoured the spinotter. “They were even weaker than birds.”

“Boss, I think I know who killed it.” Bugsy pointed at the enormous footprints along the road’s boardwalk with his tail. “Look.”

Basil and his party gathered around the tracks and examined them. Shaped like a mix between a small circle and a larger crux, they were around two meters in diameter. The footprints’ depth attested to the weight of whatever creature left them.

“They’re pointing towards the town of Dax,” Basil noted as his eyes followed the tracks. “I don’t think even an elephant could leave such huge footprints.”

“Do we go after that monster, Boss?” Bugsy asked with a hint of excitement.

That was a risky proposition and Basil’s new Warp Spasm Perk wouldn’t help much either. He would never spit on new powers, but to lose control of himself in the process sounded like a bad bargain. Especially since he risked attacking his allies.

I should have expected something like that from Berserker. Basil gritted his teeth. The creature went in the opposite direction to the house, so we should be safe. Everyone else though…

“Boss, I don’t want to sound stupid but… I don’t get it.” Bugsy cleared his throat. “Why didn’t they kill anybody besides the spinotter? Why petrify humans instead of harvesting their experience points?”

“Maybe they stored the food for later?” Rosemarine suggested with a cute belch.

Her idea… Her idea made a disturbing amount of sense. The orb did warn Basil that its petrification effect wouldn’t last.

The [Petrification] ailment is permanent unless magically removed.

So either the orb had lied or its kind could undo petrification at will.

“What happens if I were to shatter a petrified individual?” Basil quizzed the System.

You will gain experience as normal.

The watchers could have petrified victims so that their allies could kill them to grind safely. Yet when Basil remembered the orb’s words, he realized there was probably more to it.

“Did the machines say anything?” Basil asked his party.

Plato shrugged. “I killed them before they could.”

“The one I destroyed said something about a barrier,” Bugsy said, his tail scratching his head. “I think?”

“For the barrier to stand, levels must stay down,” Rosemarine quoted.

Basil’s jaw clenched. “What barrier?”

“I don’t know, Mister.”

“So Basil, what do we do? Do we retreat?” Plato’s claws came out. “Or do we hunt?”

Basil considered his options. The sensible option would be to return to the house without poking the hornet’s nest. If the creature was anything like Megabug, it had to be level 10. Basil would never forget how close to death they had come when they fought an opponent stronger than them. And yet, running away meant abandoning other people to petrification.

It’s not my problem, Basil tried to tell himself. The police can handle it. It’s their job, my taxes paid for their training and weapons. I didn’t spend years contributing to the French State’s coffers without expecting a return on my investment.

Basil glanced at the petrified man on the shore and at his uniform. He quickly noticed the words ‘police municipale’ written on the shoulders.

“Fuck me,” Basil cursed. “Bugsy, fetch me the petrified goblins.”

Some warriors drank wine before battle, but Basil preferred to chop heads.