[Monday, September 14]

Zachary woke up and got ready for school. As he did, he had many things on his mind.

After talking to Agatha, he understood that he couldn’t level up anymore.

However, what did this mean with respect to monsters? How could he protect Earth, or at least his town, Burlington? This was something he needed to figure out.

He came out of his room when his stuff was packed. His mother made him breakfast while she watched the news.

“Here you go,” she said after a while and gave him a plate.

“Thanks.”

He pretended to watch the news while thinking about other things.

There was a story about unexpected civil unrest in Beijing.

Confused reports about people attacking each other and dragging some of them away were being televised by numerous news stations. No one knew what was happening there. Footage taken from a helicopter showed people in torn rags running rampant in the streets and limping toward a line of police cars. Tear gas was released, but the limping people ignored it and continued their advance! Then the footage was cut for some reason, back to a reporter who continued speaking.

“Okay, Mom. I’m going now,” he said as he grabbed his bag and walked out the door.

He didn’t bother picking up his bike. Instead he decided to complete the daily quest. This was another thing he and Agatha talked about.

Because he had two bodies on two different planets, he technically had two daily quests. Because they rewarded stat points, it was incredibly useful in the long term to complete them. That’s why she scolded him for not doing them before.

A status point was awarded. Zachary dropped it into {Intelligence} as he arrived at the school.

English class went fairly normally, though he couldn’t help but glance at Frank and Michael on occasion.

Michael was calm, acting casually like he always did. He tried passing the ball like the three football players usually did, but Frank’s didn’t seem to be in the mood. He didn’t pass the ball as often as he would’ve.

Jacob refused to take part, ignoring them entirely. Eventually, Michael gave up trying to pass it to him.

At that point Zachary would glance at Jacob or Saya and feel more reassured in his faith in humanity.

English ended..

Zachary had too many things on his plate to care about wrestling with Frank. To him, a little more that four days had passed since then, not including the time he spent in nightmare dungeons, so he had plenty of time to cool off.

All that mattered was how Frank felt, and he didn’t start a fight or an argument, though Zachary didn’t know why. It would be perfectly in Frank’s nature, but at least he could have some peace and quiet.

Thus, the day passed uneventfully.

…

Jacob sat with Zachary at lunch. Then Saya joined them.

Zachary was surprised at first, but figured that they simply wanted to talk to him some more about everything.

“Hey Zach,” Saya greeted. “I’m glad you’re doing okay. I was worried until you sent me that email yesterday.”

Zachary smiled reassuringly, then he hurried them to sit down.

He looked out of the corner of his eyes suspiciously, not wanting to be overheard. His face turned serious.

“Hey guys, I have bad news.”

“What is it?”

“You remember the portal we talked about? Well more of them are coming, I guarantee it. The monsters inside of it will pour out. I’m afraid I don’t know what kinds we will face, that’s why we have to get stronger.”

“At what? Killing monsters?”

Zachary nodded. “Yep.”

“I don’t understand,” Jacob said. “I promised I’d help you, but killing giant snakes and stuff, like the one I saw you throw back through the portal, I don’t think we’re cut out for that.”

“Of course you aren’t,” he agreed. “Not yet at least.”

[Jacob Langer, (age 16)]

[Saya Park, (age 15)]

Zachary squinted when he used his [Observation] skill on them. Normally it showed their ages, but right now, he wanted to see their combat potential. He used [Observation] again.

[Jacob Langer, (level null)]

[Saya Park, (level null)]

On the one hand, it was impressive how strong the football players could become even without leveling up. Of course, Jacob had never killed anything in his life, and the same could be said for Frank and Michael and many of the people on Earth. They could still rival Zachary’s speed and strength, enough so that he could be beat up. It could be proof that Zachary could become stronger the same way too, without the need for levels.

However, “null” was an interesting value. Everyone in the cafeteria had it instead of a number. Was it because they weren’t players like him?

“I can see your strength,” Zachary said mysteriously, “If we can improve it, it means you can protect yourselves even if no one else can help you.”

Saya and Jacob made confused expressions.

“And how do we do that?”

“We need to find a portal and go inside to start training.”

They started to freak out.

“Zach! Slow down! You can’t just say things like that without offering an explanation!” Jacob said harshly. “First explain what you mean by us needing to get stronger too. Won’t the military protect us.”

He shook his head. “The military will have an impossibly hard time protecting everyone since there won’t be a front line of defense. Think about it. The portals with the monsters can appear anywhere, even inside of cities and secure places.”

Saya’s brows scrunched up with worry. “Then what is everyone else going to do? Don’t we need to tell everyone so that they can get prepared?”

“Oh. Don’t worry about that,” Jacob said. “Actually, Zach and I already took care of that.”

“Yeah. We did it anonymously by delivering a letter with a part of a monster I killed as proof.”

She thought about what the boys had said for a moment. “Really? You guys did that? Well, I guess that would work the fastest and easiest. Okay.”

“So that brings me back to the main topic,” Zachary said. “Monsters will start pouring out of portals in the upcoming months. The only way to close them is to go inside and destroy something called the dungeon monolith.

“The issue is that it will be hard for the military alone to find and close all of them. Some portals are bound to slip through their fingers. Everywhere will turn into a danger zone, especially the wilderness. That’s why I want to build up your guys’ strength.”

“So let me get this straight,” Jacob held up a finger. “You want us to follow you into some portals because it will make us stronger?”

Zachary nodded. “We can kill two birds with one stone. You guys will gain experience and we’ll be closing the portals so other people won’t get hurt.”

“That sounds fine,” Saya agreed, “but I’m still hesitant to fight monsters with you. How can you alone guarantee our safety?”

Zachary nodded reluctantly. “It’s hard to prove it to you now, but I’m actually way stronger than I look. So you’ll have to trust me until you see my powers in action. I can crush wolf skulls with my hands and throw rocks so hard they turn to dust upon impact. While it’s true that I can’t and won’t guarantee your safety, I will offer the next best thing: that I’ll do my best. Plus, I’ve already been inside a few of them, so it’s not like we will be in the dark.”

They made skeptical looks, but nodded.

Zachary continued, “Okay then. Jacob, what time do you get out of practice tomorrow?”

“Uh. Six thirty. Why?”

“Saya, you and I get out of culinary class at five tomorrow. Let’s, all three of us, tell our parents we are hanging out at each other’s house and say we will be home by nine o’clock. Then we will look for portals. If we find one, we’ll go inside.”

After some back and forth, the three eventually agreed on this plan.

…

The rest of the day flew past.

Zachary went to his Mandarin class, finding that his teacher, Mr. Wang, was absent for some reason. A substitute teacher was there, but they merely studied the textbook on their own.

After school got out, Zachary went to the cafeteria, met the culinary class teacher, Mr. Hay, and grabbed an apron. The other students accepted him readily and Saya helped him learn how to make a new dish. The best part was he got to eat it afterwards! His ever growling stomach thanked him.

In hindsight, this was probably another good reason to stop leveling up so quickly. Every time he leveled up, his consumption stat would also increase. Obviously he should keep that as low as possible.

After class ended at 5:00, he talked to Saya some more, before bidding her farewell.

‘Okay,’ he thought. ‘Time to test out that feature here on Earth. But first-’

He ran around the school and through the neighborhoods until he found an empty plot with tall grass. He waded into it until he found one.

“Hiiaah!” he cried out as he leapt forward, his hands clasping in front of him.

He missed and had to try again.

He leapt forward, his hands closing around a little creature before it could leap away. Success!

He held the grasshopper carefully.

[Cannot transfer to inventory]

He nodded, expecting this result. He couldn’t transfer certain living things to his inventory. Plants and mushrooms he could. Animals and insects he could not, at least, while they were alive.

‘Now for the next test.’

He pictured an alleyway he had seen in Limon, the next town over where he had dropped off a certain package, and activated [Fast-travel].

Wap!

He stuck the landing, the space behind him sealing back up in the next moment.

He held up the grasshopper which was still in his hand, and let it bounce away to freedom. He nodded in satisfaction.

Apparently it was possible for him to bring living things by carrying them. However, what if he was holding an entire other person? Furthermore, what if he was riding a horse or something else?

Of course, Zachary would have to wait thirty minutes to get back to Burlington as his mana recovered.

He walked to the police station, the same one where he had dropped off his package and note, and was shocked to see several vans parked out in the front. They belonged to news stations, and there was a reporter in front of one of them, holding a microphone and talking into a camera.

Zachary quickly back-tracked and left the scene of the crime.

In the same place he just left, a tan-colored military truck pulled up alongside the building. The back of it opened up and some soldiers walked out while carrying a cot. The news reporters got out of their vans and approached the men as they tried asking some questions.

“Sir, why is the coast guard here?”

“Are you here about ‘the package?’”

“Do you know anything about the mysterious killer, or the note he left?”

A soldier blocking their view of the cot responded, “Don’t know, and don’t care. If you’d please excuse me and my colleagues, we have to get through.”

When they got inside the police station’s morgue, they moved Paul Thompson’s body from the cot onto the table. The town of Burlington didn’t have a morgue with forensic services, that’s why they had to bring it here.

The coroner thanked them briefly and the soldiers excused themselves to wash their hands.

The leading soldier went into the waiting room since he hadn’t interacted with the body. He sat down and waited silently. In the same room, there was another man, an FBI agent smoking a cigar while taking a break from his work. Neither of them said a word as they chose to ignore each other.

A small TV was playing in the corner of the room.

{“This just came in! The Chinese military has swept into Beijing to re-establish order. This has been a breathtaking twenty hours folks!”}

{“Watch this! Footage from earlier shows frenzied civilians in black rags charging a line of gunmen. Mind you that there is some powerful tear gas being released, yet they are all ignoring it and failing to disperse peacefully. With no other choice, the military had to shoot them down. However, they didn’t go down even with many holes in the chest! Only after shooting them in the head did they die.”}

{“Furthermore, there have been reports of large amounts of premortem necrosis seen from their bodies. Many theories have been proposed including narcotics, water poisoning, and viral infection. However all of these have been ruled out. But this is not the highlight of this story.”}

The footage panned back to the action. It was night-time in China, but everything was illuminated by flood lights as platoons of soldiers converged to a single location.

The soldier watching the TV suddenly squinted. The FBI agent put down his cigar.

{“After fighting back the deranged civilians, the center of the conflict was identified as this. Folks, what you are seeing is very real! It is a crack in space, hanging impossibly in the middle of the street. This is a portal!”}

Footage zoomed in on the approaching Chinese military as they occasionally released shots at the object - no - through it!

The soldier stood up abruptly as he got closer to inspect every detail.

Surprisingly, the FBI agent also stood up as he looked at it with wide eyes full of recognition.

Zachary went back home after his mana fully recovered.

His mother got home from work at the same time he did, and when they walked inside, she put on the news. Their attention was quickly captured.

At this point, the events happening in Beijing were all over the news, and it was inevitable that he would see it. He took one look at the TV screen and paled. Before his mom could see, he rushed to the computer.

He scrolled through news article after news article with a dark expression while connecting the dots.

Frenzied people with pre-death tissue decay?

It all pointed to undead.

Fortunately or unfortunately, pop-culture was so ingrained that many people across the world also thought the same thing. It was why the story was being blown out of proportion in the first place. Publicity skyrocketed in every country. As a result, paramedics in China were urged to move with extreme caution.

Those who had been bitten, or even scratched, were examined seriously, but the good news was already out. Bites didn’t turn the living into the dead. It had only been twenty-four hours, but there were zero, none, not a single report, of such an instance occurring. It was one of the first things to be investigated (and publicized), so as to avert panic.

Instead, it was suspected that the “reanimation process” took place somewhere else. The behaviour of the undead confirmed this: they would capture people before dragging them back through the portal. Those people would come out later as freshly crazed puppets.

The good news: it didn’t spread like a B-rated horror movie.

The bad news: there was still a body count. An instance dungeon had opened in the middle of the city... and no one had been ready.

Zachary felt sick. Even if he could teleport over there, there were many reasons why he couldn’t act; his secrecy and the fact he had to keep his level low were just two of them.

He clicked and stared at the screen in powerless horror as a realization dawned on him; this was only the beginning.

Agatha’s words echoed in his mind, “Only when the first major nation of your world falls due to the instance dungeons becoming too powerful, and there is nothing you can do to stop it, only then should you visit me here again. I will tell you how to complete the end game.”

Zachary shivered in his seat.

As the story developed, a heavily fortified military encampment appeared around the portal. There was no telling what the Chinese, or the governments of other nations, would do next.

In Washington DC, two reports appeared on Madam President Mary Bolet’s desk.

Somehow, even amidst the chaos happening in China, those two had surfaced to the forefront of her priority.

“What are these?” she asked.

“These are two files from Colorado. I think you should give them a read. They might enlighten us on our current situation,” Vice President Lance Jander responded.

Bolet nodded, then spent ten minutes reading through a total of thirty pages. Upon finishing, she snapped back to reality.

“This is!”

The first report was about something called Paul Thompson’s Spatial-Temporal Anomaly, an object that had appeared in a small town and had already revealed some shocking things. There were photos of a portal identical to the images she was receiving from China.

The other report, on the other hand, was riddled with caution, a note reading that it was the ramblings of a potential killer. Inside were forensics reports and grotesque pictures. She looked at Jamela’s report, translated by Zachary, along with his note. At first, it seemed like it was written by a lunatic, but upon careful consideration, the words were calm and rational. It explained everything, never contradicted itself, and so far it was the only thing that could tell them what the heck was going on.

“I’ll email a copy of these to President Jiang. You send a copy to his secretaries.”

“Madam, are you sure we should be sending these over? One of them is classified. Plus, there’s no benefit to us for giving them away.”

“Ah! Yes, yes. Of course.” She nodded her head.

“There’s no reason for us to send something like this over to them. If we were to take the killer’s notes seriously, there might be more of these portals appearing. We should start preparing, just in case, and let everyone else figure it out for themselves. Besides, we don’t know if this person’s words are completely valid or not.”

There was some more nodding from other people in the room, thinking those words were rational.

But then Bolet slammed her hand on the oval office desk.

“Nonsense! There are people dying right now!” she pointed at the papers in her hand, “This note offers a way to protect everyone, an explanation of how to close the portal, as well as what we might find inside! This is not the time to be thinking about nationality. Of course, national secrets are a must, so I’ll hold off on sending the second report, the one about Paul Thompson’s STA, but this one they can have! In fact, I’ll send it to every national power. And Lance...”

“Yes?”

“Send some backup to Colorado. Find out who wrote this.”

[End Chapter 28]