Chapter 7: Outpost (1/2)

It had been four hours since Zac had woken up after getting hurt. Even after moving around for hours, his wounds were just dully throbbing, and he once again was amazed by the efficacy of his constitution. If his Endurance and Vitality grew to 100, would he be able to regrow limbs?

He had spent the last hours discreetly surveying the surroundings to come up with a solution to being stranded in the woods. He had made some discoveries during this time, some more shocking than others.

The first thing Zac had done after figuring out the basics of the system was head back to the scene of the fight to retrieve his axe.

When he arrived at the boulder, the monster was still there, and by then a putrid smell had started to emanate from the carcass. This meant that the system would not remove bodies like in a game. What was dead was dead. After looking around the body, even somewhat moving it to look beneath, it also hadn’t dropped any items such as gold or equipment.

He still didn’t know if that was just bad luck or whether the system was not that convenient and just wouldn’t hand items to you in that manner. Perhaps you would have to make do with what already existed, or there were chests strewn around the world.

Just judging from the smell and how the beast looked like when alive, it would not be serviceable to eat, even if fresh. The axe lay next to the body, blood caked all over the shaft and the head. Luckily, it hadn’t been corroded or rusted yet, and after a good cleaning, the axe was almost as good as new, albeit slightly dulled.

The next realization he made on the way back to the camp. Since the world in a sense had turned into a game, he thought maybe there was some sort of equipment system. But when saying things like “equip,” “equipment,” and “inspect” got no response from the system, he surmised that there probably was no such thing. An axe was just an axe. Maybe there would be magic gear in the future, but at least for now he had no means to distinguish it. He felt that he had missed something though, as one of his quests would reward him with something called “E-grade equipment,” whatever that was.

However, he still was no closer to completing that quest now than he was back then. One thing at the time.

The next discovery was that will and determination do not a mechanic make. After popping the hood of the car, he had blankly stared at the engine for a few minutes, hoping something obvious and easily solved would present itself. But he had to simply face reality that he would not be able to drive back, at least not with that car. The battery was well and truly dead.

But the most disturbing discoveries came after. Since discarding the car seemed the only option, Zac had started scouting the road back to see if it was possible to traverse or whether it was teeming with monsters.

He stealthily moved along the road they came from, keeping to trees and brushes, axe at the ready and maintaining a constant vigil for any sign of danger. If he kept this pace going back, the trip would likely take a week, and he didn’t cherish the thought of sleeping out in the open.

But before he got further than around a kilometer, the road abruptly stopped, and dense forests gave way to a cliff with a drop of roughly five meters. The road, heck, the whole ground, was simply gone.

The view that instead greeted him was a panoramic view of an ocean. At least he thought it was, as he could see no land in sight, and he was still too sore to climb down and test whether it was freshwater or salt water. He guessed it was salt water though from the smell in the air. In either case it was mind-boggling, as the campsite was hundreds of kilometers away from any body of water of that size.

Finally he remembered some words the system had said at the start, which he had completely glossed over in his panic. It said it had merged the planet with others and had been somehow randomized. Just how powerful was the system in the end, to grab multiple planets out in space and mash them together without him noticing anything.

That thought was almost scarier than the immediate threat of the demons.

This also made him realize that most of his plans of going back home and finding his family likely had to be scrapped. If the system could drop an ocean in the middle of the country, his family might be on the other side of the planet for all he knew.

Which brought him back to now. Zac had mutely trudged back to camp, this time with far less vigilance than before. Still, it seemed that there were, at least for the moment, no threats in the immediate vicinity.