Chapter 42: Bounties

    The day after that exciting night, I met back up with my squad.

    Of course, seeing Umara again was fun. It was like I was teasing her with every glance I gave her, just the two of us aware of what was different.

    I had a smile on my face all day while she tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible. Part of me just wanted to go up and give her a kiss on the cheek, just to embarrass her. But I held myself back.

    Although I hadn’t grown up in this world, enough time and interaction had made me understand that social customs weren’t the same as America on Earth.

    Everyone was generally more reserved and modest, more so resembling 20th century America rather than the 21st century.

    This meant that there wouldn’t be any sex after the third date. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if we barely started kissing by that point.

    I understood that everything would move slower. Not that this changed the way I thought about things. From my experience, I was used to things moving much faster. While I was willing to wait for things like sex, I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to do something like wait until marriage, even though according to my own religious belief system, that was the standard.

    At the very least, I would be pushing our intimacy forward as best I could. That was simply the way I did things.

    Before all that though, we would need to have our first date. Which, considering the circumstances, wouldn’t be easy.

    There really wasn’t much to do on this military base, especially not alone. The recreation room always had people in it and I wasn’t interested in having our date in a room full of sweaty knights.

    There weren’t any restaurants, clubs, or any other fun places to go either. In fact, the best candidate for a date given the bare requirements was probably the chapel.

    So unless we went AWOL, sneaking onto the Rail and going back to the city, having a date would be close to impossible.

    However, after some thinking, I realized that not all hope would be lost. There was still one activity that could give us both alone time and a good location.

    Missions.

    After the sudden siege, a few days were spent simply recuperating. Shockingly, there were zero deaths during that time, though there were a few critical injuries like some severed limbs.

    But it ended very well, all things considered. And afterward, the cleanup was taken care of swiftly.

    So I spent most of my free time with my squad, all of us just hanging out and having fun. We would also find other squads to play games with, and on the training grounds there was frequent sparing ongoing. I also spent a lot of time studying my formation. That alone took up 3-5 hours of my day since I would get so engrossed.

    But eventually we were put to work. When the second week of our stay started, there was a large list of missions suddenly posted.

    Like that, all the Elite squads were called to report early in the morning. So the night before, we all went to bed eagerly.

    ......

    “You have your armor prepared?”

    Feiden asked from across our room. I could see him preparing all his own gear with familiarity.

    Feiden wore a full set of armor, but he also had some special items like recovery pills similar to what I used to carry.

    Since I had very little to prepare, I just nodded.

    “Yea, I’m good.”

    “Do you even have armor?”

    “Yea, it’s my coat.”

    “That thing?”

    He looked at the coat hanging on the corner of my bed with curiosity.

    It looked like a normal black coat unless you inspected it closely and found the purple lines. So to most people, I just really liked the coat and wore it all the time. Not that it was a false assumption, but the main reason I wore it was for its protection.

    But I didn’t need people knowing how amazing it was. Even I didn’t completely understand how high quality it was. So I gave him a succinct answer.

    “I can’t wear heavy armor like you guys, so that coat acts as light armor.”

    “I see. What about your feet and head?”

    “I have boots. As for my head, I can’t say I really have anything for it. Plus, I need my eyes for my weapons, so no helmets.”

    “Makes sense.”

    King of Anarchy

    King of Despair

    King of The Brood

    King of Unholy Light

    These were the titles of the four strongest beings of the Scourge. Each of them stood at the pinnacle of power, Authority 12, and had lived for hundreds of years.

    They were each terrifying existences. There were no pictures of them, and there wasn’t even a bounty posted. But there were some details about their power, or at least the consequences of their presence.

    The most eye catching was the King of Unholy Light.

    It was said that all who stood within the light emitted by this King would be melted where they stood and turn into an unrecognizable monster known as a fleshbug. These fleshbugs would then seek out the nearest human, and upon contact would melt the victim and turn it into an identical fleshbug.

    The most horrifying part about this wasn’t the transformation though. It was the fact that, when a fleshbug would seek out a human target, it would mysteriously acquire the memories of that human and begin speaking with the voices of those its target knew and loved.

    It would come to you with the voice of your lover, child, or best friend. And with your memories it would try and tempt you toward it while hunting you from the dark.

    Because of this, there were accounts of soldiers going insane from the horror and trauma of encountering these fleshbugs. And it was said that a siege of these monsters would hail a unholy symphony of screams that drowned out entire valleys.

    Simply reading about this beast made me shiver, and I quickly remembered that this was just one of the four Kings.

    I didn’t end up reading any information about the other three, forcing myself to scroll past the bounty before staring up at the ceiling with my eyes wide open.

    To say that I wasn’t scared was a lie. But I found comfort in the fact that the Kingdom of Dragon Tongue was able to hold its ground against these horrifying creatures and survive till this day.

    There were people out there so powerful that they could fight on the same level as those Kings. They were keeping us safe.

    This was all I could tell myself to try and drown out the horror from those stories. Because I knew that, if anything, those stories were watered down from reality.

    After several minutes, I finally regained myself. But I found that I wasn’t able to close my eyes, so I pulled back up the site and started scrolling further down the list.

    The beasts lower down weren’t nearly as terrifying. They had pictures and there was much more detailed information.

    I read intently, compiling information on dozens of different beasts of different types and levels before coming to a conclusion.

    There were in fact intelligent beasts among the Scourge, and those beasts didn’t come from infecting humans.

    There were bloodlines within the Scourge, and there were different levels for these bloodlines.

    The ones most prevalent were the Royal bloodlines. There were four of them, and each descended from the Four Kings.

    In fact, those with these bloodlines weren’t really beasts. They were humanoid creatures with intelligence and special powers. They could cultivate power just like humans, but in general were more powerful at the same Authority. An Authority 6 Royal wouldn’t lose to an Authority 6 human, regardless of type.

    It took very talented humans to fight on par with Royals, and the only saving grace was that there weren’t many Royals.

    At least, there weren’t many worth concerning over. The limits of a Royal was purely dictated by their bloodline density, which fell off with each generation. This meant there was a strict hierarchy that frequently cycled itself at the lower levels and almost never changed at the higher levels.

    Other than that, there were Unique beasts. These were creatures without a royal bloodline that ascended beyond standard limits to attain both intelligence and strong powers. Some of them even birthed their own families and bloodlines.

    I saw many of both types of these creatures on the bounty list. Because of that, I now knew the identifying features of a Royal and what to look out for with a Unique beast.

    At some point, I logged out of the Node and shut down my Aerial.

    In the darkness I stewed in my own thoughts, thinking about what I learned. It was a shock to know that there were obscenely powerful beasts out there, ones that could annihilate entire cities simply by being there.

    And then there were the Royals and Unique beasts, enemies that I would probably end up facing sometime in the future.

    Looking at them and hearing about their powers had me fearful. It was difficult to believe that I could actually rise to their level, let alone kill them.

    But my own powers gave me confidence. And when I thought about the threat they posed and the devastation they’ve caused, I became more angry than cowardly.

    They needed to be eradicated. Every last one of them were monsters undeserving of their life on this world.

    I was already sure before, but it seemed that with everything I learned, I was only becoming more certain of my conviction to fight these monsters.

    So for a while I laid on my bed, smoldering in hate that drowned out any fear I had for the Scourge. And it was only late in the night when I finally managed to fall asleep.