Chapter 8-Store

Deciding it is time to look in the store for anything useful Eric grabs the bandana and the hand sanitizer. Putting some sanitizer there where his nose will be he makes sure to rub it in. Then he ties it around his mouth and nose.

Immediately Eric smells the sanitizer strongly without having problems to breathe, so he figured it would work. He isn’t sure using hand sanitizer like this is healthy or not, but at this point he doesn’t care. Next, he put on the gloves that he found, they are a bit big, but they will work to keep his hands clean.

Opening the door to the front of the store again he is ready to jerk back from an enemy or from the smell, but there were no enemies and while the smell was still strong and disgusting it wasn’t quite as impactful as earlier with the sanitizer. Moving closer to the bodies Eric sees that they are in much the same state in which he left them, dead, unmoving, and head cracked open. Not wanting them inside when he is searching for supplies, he starts to drag them outside. By placing them at the front of the store Eric hopes that the smell will be as repulsive to the monsters as they are to him, keeping them away.

Having dragged the bodies outside Eric enters the store again and closes the door. Eric decides to check all rooms, he should have done that earlier to make sure that there aren’t any other zombies, but he didn’t think of it, he was too tired last night. In this new world, he will have to learn the new rules and learn fast before he makes a mistake and gets killed in his sleep.

Other than the break room, bathroom, and the store proper Eric finds a customer bathroom, an office, and the storage room. Assured that there are no zombies Eric notices that he is still hungry.

“It turns out that this store doesn’t have much.” After looking he finds some ice-cream, chips, chocolate, and sushi.

“Day old sushi that isn’t refrigerated is just asking for food poisoning.” He also figures that ice-cream will become hard to get so he goes to the freezer and opens it. Receiving a pleasant greeting of cold air Eric happily grabs some chocolate ice-cream to eat. It is a bit soft but still good enough for Eric, as such his lunch that day became a bunch of chocolate ice-cream.

With a full stomach, Eric looks for something to drink and notices that they also sell bottled water. He could probably use the water orb but decides against it because he needs to practice with it first.

After that odd meal, Eric starts to look through the entire store to find useful things. He finds many different things but if they are useful is another question. Amongst all the things he finds the only useful things are camping tool. There is a camping stove with gas, a camping pot, and camping utensils.

Not wanting to make a mistake later Eric tries the camping stove first. First, he makes sure that everything is attached together, then he opens the gas valve. After a moment Erik tries the spark plug, while it does spark, the gas isn’t set aflame.

Instead, a sweet honey like smell inters Eric’s nostrils. Bewildered for a moment he doesn’t know what is happening, before promptly shutting the gas off.

After some contemplation and checking if it is really a gas canister he remembers that mana has changed the properties of everything, and he theorizes that gas is no longer flammable and instead smells like honey. Eric is tempted to simply open the gas to improve the smell of his surroundings but figures that would be stupid to do since he doesn’t know if the gas is poisonous to humans or not. He tried to use analyze on the gas put the ability seems to fail to activate, ‘Maybe because I don’t have a clear target for analyze?’

His biggest find is a map of the surrounding region, including the location of the closest towns. It appears that the closest town is only a few hours walking distance away, with the next closest being about a day in walking distance, but Eric doesn’t want to rely on that because who knows what he would encounter along the way and it isn’t like he has any practical experience reading a map and judging how long it would take him to walk the distance. Eric just like most people in this era use navigation software to find out how to get somewhere and how long it will take.

Gathering everything of use inside the break room next to the bags he looks out the window and estimates that it is about 3 in the afternoon. Deciding that he will spend another night at the gas station, and traveling in the morning, Eric must figure out what he will do now.

He wants to use the daylight sensibly, so he decides to go outside to see if he can find a low-level monster to kill. Traveling tomorrow will be dangerous and becoming more experienced and a possible level up when he has a safe point to fall back to sounds like a reasonable thing to do.

Eric's Status Screen

Status Screen

Name Eric King Level 2 Age 19 Stength 9(0) Gender Male Constitution 9(0) Race Human Dexterity 12(0) Class Warlock Agility 12(0) Profession - Intelligence 19(2) HP 90/90 Wisdom 16(2) Mana 196/196 Charisma 9(0)