Meanwhile in the Hidden Realm:
The concrete in front of Marcos was three hundred and twenty meters long, a circular path that was just over one hundred meters across in the middle, but with a barrier to prevent you from stepping into the fifty times gravity area accidentally. To get there you would need to make a complete loop of the track. This time the first twenty meters along the inside of the track increased the gravity by one time for every meter, after which the gravity increased by one tenth of a standard Earth gravity per meter. Each meter after the first twenty was worth one hundred points, making a complete loop worth thirty thousand, and a grand completion would earn you an additional one hundred thousand points as well as a prize which the system chose based on your skills, the tests you had so far completed, and any physiques you had.
The System informed him that this was one of the few level three trials that the trial ground included, and was considered by many to be the toughest of those that were available. A grand completion, however, would give you enough points to buy pretty much anything the shop sold, as none of the items cost more than eighty thousand, that being a level five cultivation technique which allowed one to cultivate starlight and survive in the vacuum of space or even near a star. It had been developed by an advanced race of humans around three thousand years ago for the purpose of space exploration, as they never developed formation technology to a level where it could be used for that purpose. The system didn’t have any level six techniques available, which would cost hundreds of thousands of points and make a one million point reward needed. As no one on earth had reached that point yet, providing them would be the same as artificially advancing a society’s technological level, something which most sapient races tried not to do. They did not, however, block others from doing so, and so would not interfere if Earth started providing advanced technology to Ilarya.
He briefly traveled to the reward area to spend one thousand points on ten regeneration pills as well as another hundred on twenty training pills. This would be the most advanced training he had ever gone through, and he wanted to make sure he got as far as he could. Once he returned, he stepped onto the field. The first thirty meters were barely noticeable. At fifty he started to notice the weight, but it wasn’t until over one hundred that he actually started to slow down. At that point he took a training pill and a regeneration pill, and started to feel the stress on his body subside as the various systems reinforced themselves. Ten minutes later something in the center of his chest started to hurt, but as the pain soon disappeared he ignored it and kept going. It was likely just a pulled muscle or tendon, after all, and he had experienced over one hundred of those since the first gravity trial. The stress seemed to ease off a bit after that, and at around one hundred and sixty meters he took another set of pills, then another around two hundred. By this time he was starting to feel like he was nearing his limit once more.
He considered using his qi to push through the limit, but decided against it. He had gotten this far by just using his body, at least in this trial, so he would continue to do so until he had no choice but to use his qi. He sat down on the ground, being careful not to fall to the ground, as it might damage the concrete or even make the trial think that he couldn’t continue, triggering an emergency evacuation. He crossed his legs and started using one of the meditations from the martial arts manual to speed up recovery. It wasn’t technically a healing technique, but it did allow the cells in the body to divide more quickly and fix injuries better, so it was just as good, but couldn’t be used on another.
Once he started the technique his mind started wandering, thinking about the trials he had taken. Whoever had built this trial ground must be a body cultivator, because all of the trials he had seen were either physical trials, tests of character, or combat trials. He wondered if there was any way he could learn who created this place. Perhaps the System could tell him. It was likely built by someone he had never heard of, though, so did it really matter?
He then realized that, despite getting distracted, the meditation had continued to cycle qi through his blood vessels. This had never happened before, so he looked for the source of the change. It didn’t take him long to realize that beside his heart was a tiny new organ, one which concentrated the excess qi within him while helping to move nutrients to where they were needed and mark toxins for filtration. It only took him a few seconds to realize that this was a dantian. Some how, without his input, his body had grown one. That must have been what the pain in his chest was earlier, though at the time he assumed her tore a tendon. A dantian could help techniques continue to function even without conscious thought to guide them, so that must be why the recovery technique was now working.
He pulled himself out of meditation and stood up. Rather than conventional exercises, he had a new set of exercises to use to adapt to the field. While the recovery technique ran in the background, he opened up his book and read the second level technique for the Mercy set of moves, a set of disarming strikes. He moved several meters forward and back on the field, but resisted the changes in gravity as best he could. Every time it caused him to make a mistake, he did the move again, being careful not to mess up again. Eventually he had finished learning the level two Mercy move set and moved onto Perseverance. He slowly advanced around the track, sometimes taking a step forward between sets to increase the gravity under which he exercised.
The changes to his body were using a large amount of nutrients, and he had already used all of the satiation pills he had brought with him from Earth. Still, he didn’t want to leave the track. He had made it two hundred and forty meters so far, and might be able to advance to the end of the track on his first attempt. The restoration technique had allowed him to avoid the need for regeneration pills, but he still needed food. Currently the only thing left in his stomach was a weird black goop that had somehow been separated off to a fold in the side of his stomach wall. He spit it onto the track and realized that it tasted like the weird aftertaste from the various pills, all mixed together. Apparently, they had all contained small amounts of something he couldn’t digest, but which he also wouldn’t absorb. With as many pills as he had taken so far, however, he assumed that they would poison him if he had absorbed them all. He needed to find a way to do this without pills.
While the satiation pills were probably safe, he wasn’t sure about that. That meant that he needed a new source of food. He only had one on him, so he pulled out the dead bird from the beginning of the trial. He removed its talons, as they seemed to be the only thing that was special about the bird, and cleaned it, throwing the unwanted parts outside of the field. While he now had a raw bird, he had no way to build a fire. With his strength and survival skills, he could probably build one by rubbing sticks together, but he didn’t have any dry wood on him at the moment. Not wanting to leave the field until he had finished it, and knowing that eating raw meat wasn’t always dangerous, he pulled off some of the meat and put it into his mouth. While the taste and texture were strange, it didn’t make him sick, so he kept eating it until his stomach was filled.
A strange feeling went through him as he ate it. First, he realized that the muscles in his back were growing stronger. Then he realized that his perception was getting better. He was able to notice objects moving near the corners of his eyes, and his eyesight had greatly improved. Next, he felt his skin change, and his muscles all felt strange for a few seconds. He didn’t know what those two things were about. This was a strange discovery, however. Had he somehow taken the hawk’s special abilities or better perception and stronger flight muscles in his back? It must have something to do with his new physique. He would have to read the physique book later to find out.
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He stored the half of the bird that was left, then kept doing his movements. Now they felt a bit easier to do. At first he had assumed that it was because he was no longer hungry, but that didn’t really explain everything. This must be related to the hawk. They had better hand eye coordination than humans, or better talon eye coordination, and could move accurately even at high speed. If this ability to take the abilities of the animals he ate really was part of his physique, then he would get far stronger in the future from just the variety of his diet.
He eventually made it through all nine sets of martial arts techniques at level one and most of them at level two, but by then he had made it to the three hundred meter line. Things had been getting tougher as he slowly advanced, but he had kept pushing through. Now, however, he was once again hitting his limit. He was having to pause for several minutes at a time for every meter he walked, and the recovery was taking longer each time. He might have to use a regeneration pill just to fix the damage before long.
After a few minute rest he continued and made it to the three hundred and five meter line when his phone rang. It was Jim. Apparently Jim had managed to get close enough to him to get a signal through. He answered the call and put the phone to his ear, though it wasn’t easy to do so with his arm weighing so much and even the few hundred gram phone now feeling as if he was lifting a child with one arm. “Hello, Jim.” he said, his voice a bit rough from the strain he was under.
“Good, I finally found you. I’ve been teleporting around, trying to call you for the last few minutes.” he said. “Carol and Franky need you immediately.”
“Why?” he asked, a bit shocked. The need to help someone else had allowed him to ignore the pain temporarily.
“Serial killer at the exit.” he said. “He’s killed at least a dozen people at the final store location, then hung them up and drained their blood. Somehow he’s refining it to improve himself. To make things even worse, some necromancer wannabe is taking the bodies after he abandons them and is reanimating them, so there’s zombies running around trying to grab people too.”
“Are they working together?” Marcos asked. The fact that two psychopaths had decided to do that at the same time couldn’t be a coincidence.
“As best I could tell, they are actually fighting each other. Or at least competing. Every time they meet they start yelling insults, and if the killer finds a zombie he crushes its head. While we can handle the zombies well enough, the serial killer is too strong. Several of us tried to attack him, only to be turned into his next victim. A few of us had guns too, but he’s like something out of that Keanu Reeves movie from around the turn of the century. He is some how able to dodge bullets.”
“How come you got away but the others can’t?” I asked. It was strange that they were still in danger but he slipped away.
“There’s a teleportation area here that you have to use to move into or out of the area. I managed to reach it while the killer was away and I was being chased by zombies, but the two of them ran away, so I assume they are too far from there. If you are planning on teleporting in, though, I can return. I managed to buy some sort of qi blaster rifle before I ran, and it can use my qi if needed, so I can back you up.”
“I’ll try and finish this trial as quickly as possible, then.” Marcos said. “As soon as I’m out I’ll call you and we’ll head there together.” Jim agreed and Marcos hung up. While he wanted to do this without relying on qi or pills he no longer had that option. He activated every boost he knew, took a regeneration pill to resist the effects of the stress this would put on him, and ran towards the end of the field. He made it there faster than he thought he could, and immediately called for the teleportation map, ignoring the congratulatory message. Once the map appeared, as well as a jar and small book, he called Jim back, throwing the two items into his storage bag. They were aparently the reward items that were given to anyone that got a grand completion on this trial, but he could examine them later. “Okay, I’m ready. What is this location called?” After finding the location, he and Jim hit their buttons simultaneously and disappeared from where they were, reappearing at the teleportation pad together.
The air was filled with the screams of innocent people mixed with the groans of the undead. Marcos counted at least fifty of them, and there were likely more of them elsewhere. He knew that his two normal styles wouldn’t be a good match for these creatures. Mercy concentrated on non-lethal take-downs, which weren’t an option, and Perseverance focused on precise strikes which they likely wouldn’t be susceptible to either. That meant that he’d have to use Force.
The first of the monsters came at him and he ran forward, planting his fist into the middle of its chest. The first move of Force focused on hitting as hard as possible, and combined with an unaugmented physical strength that can function at nearly fifty times Earth’s gravity there wasn’t much left of the zombie’s torso after using it. As Jim fired his gun at them, putting holes through most of them, Marcos quickly finished off the others in the immediate area. While they didn’t experience fear and therefore didn’t run, some of them were far enough away that Marcos had to run after them to kill them.
While the two of them fought, Marcos nodded one of the zombies suddenly get a holographic arrow through an eye socket, followed by two in its chest. The arrows then exploded, blowing chunks out of the zombie and causing it to collapse. Just as the zombie fell, a woman ran at one of them with an impractically large sword, almost two meters in length and ten centimeters across, and sliced it in half before charging at the next. Marcos realized that woman was Carol.
Within a few minutes Marcos and the others had killed all of the zombies in the area and returned to where Jim was waiting. Franky seemed to appear from nowhere, carrying a bow and quiver. “I didn’t see a necromancer. Did you?”
Jim shook his head. “He must be somewhere else, gathering bodies. When he first showed up, he had several that looked like they were killed by traps or wild beasts.”
Marcos nodded. With people dying from the trials, he didn’t have to wait for the serial killer to finish them off. “In that case, we need to wait at the teleporter and capture him once he’s through.”
“Mind if we help?” a voice said from behind him, and Marcos turned to see the LARP group from earlier. They seemed to have better equipment now, at least, though they seemed to have focused too heavily on aesthetics instead of function. Still, they might have picked up the best looking of the good things they could find in the store, so it might be high quality equipment. Behind them lay almost two dozen zombie corpses.
“Decided you wanted to try and fight a necromancer, now?” he asked, and Caleb nodded.
“Yeah, we killed several of those beasts, so I’m sure we are strong enough.” Caleb pointed at the others. “So, seems you reunited with your party.” He introduced himself and his team mates, including their character classes.
Franky chuckled. “In that case, I’m Franky, the team’s rogue. You’ve met our monk, Marcos. This is Carol, our barbarian, and that’s Jim, our, uh…” he wasn’t sure what kind of traditional fantasy party roll Jim filled so he didn’t say one.
“Artificer.” said Jim, and Franky looked surprised. “What? I played fifth edition pre-qi, and I was an electrician before I retired. I also passed both the level one and two Formation trials, and the level one relic crafting trial.”
Marcos nodded. “In that case, Caleb, take your team and find a place to hide. We need to get him away from the teleporter before attacking him so he doesn’t run away. I also want to talk to him, to see if we can get him to surrender. He probably won’t, but ambushing him is basically a homicide, even if his minion killed people. At this point, though, we only know he mishandled corpses outside of that. If we offer him a chance to surrender and he does, good, but if he attacks us, it’s self defense and we a legally allowed to use lethal force in self defense.”
Caleb nodded. “In that case, we’ll go behind the building over there and cover him from behind. You always come out of the transporter facing the store, so he won’t see us back there.”
Marcos nodded. “Then we’ll hang out in the store and draw his attention. I wanted to do a bit of shopping anyway, so I might as well do it now.”
