The undead.

He'd informed the people at the bounty office multiple times about them, even offering to direct any hunting squads to the zombie's location. But no doubt they just put it on the to-do list, as they did with everything else they couldn’t be arsed to deal with.

While the bounty was decent, there was no way in hell he was tangling with the undead. Despite the generally held notions of them, you never, ever, went for a headshot. They just become more powerful, as whatever drove them was freed from having to rely on a husk of decayed grey matter.

He had seen it. The locals weren't the only ones to notice his success, and killing rats in the basement was already a long-held tradition in the RPG community; so, of course, the new adventures had come in. Had they the numbers they may have even come flooding in.

A bunch of morons from the nineties had taken to using his barrels to do what he did, but then decided to move deeper into the sewers to avoid the ever-growing competition. He had followed them to get back the barrel they had taken with them. He might have been able to buy a dozen more with the silver in his pocket but that barrel was his, not theirs.

Too scared to confront them head on, he was forced to listen to their narcissistic bickering for an hour before they came across the walking corpse. Not the one that had dealt with the cronies, that one was still intact. and this one had been a woman, mid-twenties, from the upper market district judging from the remnants of her clothing.

A description that, at the time, tickled the back of his brain. He didn't know why 'till much later, but the body before him was that of the daughter of the House of Salt Sellers, a well to do family of locals with deep roots in most of the city's political groups. Her unsolved disappearance had been all anyone would talk about for weeks, bringing the council under fire for not being able to solve it.

Someone stepped forth from the group, Goodie didn't know if it was the leader or someone who wanted to be the leader, but whoever it was certainly had the build for it. Broad chested and blond-haired, and he'd have bet his boots that under their golden locks were a pair of pretty blues to complete the cliché. Despite their looks, however, they turned out to be a caster, possibly a [SHAMAN], but more likely a [WIZARD] with the Elementalist specialisation, as moments later, a long sliver of ice had appeared in their hand. They then mimicked a stance that Goodie had only seen on the sports field, from those people that tossed around those giant white toothpicks.

Then the guy tossed it, the action too crude to describe any other way. The makeshift spear hurtled in the general direction of the zombie.

And missed.

They tried again, this time implanting the ice stick right into the corpse's skull. The force of the impact enough to cause the head to snap back, breaking its neck. The sound of its spine snapping reverberating along his bones and straight into his soul.

According to modern media, the zombie should have dropped, then and there. Instead, it was like someone had flipped a switch. Gone was the shuffling, moaning creature. In its place, an adrenaline-fuelled abomination that raced towards the group before him, the mass of their bodies may as well have been the same as a feather in the face of its charge.

He didn't know what happened after that as he had legged-it straight to the bounty office to warn them about the whole mess. It still took them a week and a few more deaths to finally get off their arses and come deal with the bloody thing, however.

Someone passed by the entrance of the alleyway, sending Goodie's paranoia into overdrive.

A woman. A whore on her way to the docks. It was probably sexist to assume such a thing, but this wasn't Earth. The level of the local society had at best reached that of the eighteen-hundreds, and as such, the locals practised the more traditional values. So, no woman would be out this late unless they were high society on their way to the opera, or low society on their way to work.

As he settled back down, Goodie's thoughts returned to the crew he had left for lunch.

It may have been the best choice logically, but it was also a shit move. Before he arrived here, he would have been disgusted at what he had done, and that was just a few months ago. Barely a tick on the metaphorical clock of his life.

A better person would have saved them…or something. He wasn't a better person, he was him.

What truly disturbed him about the whole situation, were the cronies, the generic nobodies that filled the ranks of every organisation. He saw himself in their faces, as there was no real difference between them. And in another life, he would have been one of them. Obediently cowering in the shadow of anyone who promised enough or yelled the loudest.

But in this life, he had his stuff and his snake to hide behind. So…death.

Her Majesty. Gone were the days of her being a glorified hologram. He had never missed an opportunity to grab a free attribute point for her when [SACRIFICE] offered it and the results had shown. While he originally focused on her mental attributes, he switched to upping her physical specs when he discovered that her abilities, the abilities of the shadow demons, did not rely on mana but their own health.

Once he had ten points for each of her attributes, he invested solely in her constitution until it was incapable of increasing anymore. After that, he chose willpower to boost the power of her abilities.

Her body, once she had the attributes to give it form, had originally taken the form of dull, grey charcoal. but as her beauty increased, the colour deepened, her body becoming more akin to glass. At least that’s how it looked when you focused on her. The moment you stopped, even if you kept her in sight, she would take on the impression of a shadow being cast. But even when she had your full attention, her colour always seemed weird, as if it were behind her. As if she were a glass sculpture placed upon an eternal black space. Not a flat surface but an endless depth, a void that kept threatening to pull you in. Almost as entrancing as her swaying.

A lady once asked him where he purchased the beautiful obsidian necklace that he wore, only to be given a fright as its true nature became clear.

Her strength and speed, when combined with her intelligence, were enough that each night he would send her to hunt in the butcher's district by herself. Only until she had spent half of her health, healing her in the morning with [SUMMON SHADOW STUFF]. Not just so he could sacrifice her levels alongside his, but also to try and drive the rats out of the area. The whole place was both a breeding and feeding ground for the vermin and with the amount of blood present, no type of bait could be noticed above the overpowering scent of iron in the air.

Goodie sighed.

Comparing how she acted then and now, he missed the days when she wasn't intelligent enough to understand his commands. She would question him constantly, not in English, or any other spoken language, but in emotions and impressions.

She would often stare at him with a lazy smile that was permanently plastered across her face and a gentle sway that did not move from side to side, nor in circles or figures of eight. Just simple random pattern that would hypnotise and steal away your time like an APP game. Both of which left him with the impression that [DRUNK] affected more than just her victims.

Now, there was nothing. She would perform her tasks with the speed and efficiency of a machine. Then she would wrap herself around his neck and descend into a slumber, her desires being only for sunlight, warmth, and the shadow stuff that made and powered her.

She truly had become the alpha of alphas…of garden snakes. Yes, for all her power, she was still just a snake. Her strength may have been enough to throttle him, but against a normal man, or even a warrior? And outside of wherever it was that [SHADOW RUN] took her, she was as vulnerable as any other garden pest. One clean swipe of the blade or a fireball was all it would take to end her, or at least her body.

Her abilities? The ones inherent to shadow demons were only good for hiding and escaping, and while she could use [SHADOW RUN] to travel up a person's body to bite or strangle them with ease, she still had to pay heed to gravity; while she was certainly smart enough, she was not going to be learning three-dimensional combat manoeuvring overnight.

Her venom and ability to inflict [DRUNK] were subject to her bite attack which, while capable of piercing leather, relied heavily on whether or not her fangs could sink deep enough to hit the bloodstream.

And though [DRUNK] could take the common man out of a fight in moments, her venom…

[(SHADOW) EMERALD SNAKE VENOM]

COST: 2HP / BITE ATTACK

GRADE: PATHETIC

TARGET SIZE CATEGORY: MINUTE

GOVERNING ATTRIBUTE: WILLPOWER

DAMAGE = WIL +/- effects = (100)

RATE = 100 / WIL +/- effects = (1s)

TIME = 1 X WIL +/- effects = (100s)

…was only good on paper.

The basic math not including any and all special effects, of which she had none, was that she could do one-hundred damage every second for one-hundred seconds.

100 / 1 = 100

100 X 100 = 10000

The potential of ten thousand damage sounded extraordinary until you encountered the real numbers. What the [SYSTEM] and the library failed to explain, and the reason why he had to camp out in the market district for a week, so that he could harass a couple of alchemists into giving him the low-down on what was what, was that poison effects were less reliant on their own properties and more on those of their target’s. The primary ones being their size, their constitution attribute, and various forms of poison resistance.

The target size category was the size of the creature that the poison was meant to affect at full power. While the venom of some creatures could slay hundreds of men with a single drop, the venom of the emerald snake was only meant for the more robust, palm-sized insects of this region. The effects of the poison would be halved for every level of difference above the preferred target size. The inverse also being true but with Her Majesty's venom being focused towards the minute, she would only have the advantage against bacteria.

Constitution added a delay of one second per attribute point and a reduction to damage and time by one point per ten attribute points. Thankfully the average constitution lay within the six to nine range, with even adventurers rarely going beyond thirty unless they had chosen a warrior class. And he while may have only arrived just over a year ago, Goodie had never heard of any adventurers who had snubbed magic in favour of fighting in melee range. Class abilities helped immensely, but the front lines still suffered the highest casualties when confronting monsters or magic, not to mention the lack of use for said abilities outside of combat.

Resistance to poison was the real kicker as it was both effective and extremely easy to obtain. He himself had [(MINOR) POISON RESISTANCE] LV.37, although he had to buy his poisons as the one time he had asked Her Majesty to bite him, her [DRUNK] effect had him getting another talking too from his landlady. The first aspect of the skill being the comparison of grades, which acted similar to the effects of the difference in size category. [(MINOR) POISON RESISTANCE] was meant for anything of common grade or bellow. Not thinking it was worth the time, he had never bothered remembering the negative grades, but pathetic should have been around five or six levels down…maybe? which meant that properties of Her Majesty's venom would be divided six times before the level of the skill was even calculated. Once the level did come into effect however, it would be multiplied by the difference between grades, then added to the rate, and subtracted from the damage and time of the poison.

Using himself as an example,

SIZE CATEGORY: AVERAGE

CONSTITUTION: 24

[(MINOR) POISON RESISTANCE] LV.37

[(SHADOW) EMERALD SNAKE VENOM]

100 DMG per attack – every 1s - for 100s

after calculating effects of difference in size category =

6.25 DMG per attack - every 16s - for 6.25s

after calculating effects of his constitution =

4.25 DMG per attack - every 40s - for 4.25s

after calculating effects of resistances =

0 DMG per attack - every 262s - for 0s

Truly pathetic. even against one of the locals, like the pantalooned gobshite that was responsible for his current camp-out, it would have had little to no effect. So, the worst that guy was going to suffer was a hangover in the morning.