Chapter 253: Rats and Champions (1/2)

Zac wasn’t overly worried about drawing the ire of Nenothep Medhin. Part of the strength of the Medhin Royals was their armies, and even if the Emperor might be able to keep up with him using [Loamwalker], there was no way that the normal soldiers would.

After learning more about the situation he resumed heading toward the central area. Since he wasn’t climbing the mountains to loot the summit palaces this time around he was making time, and in less than half a day he passed almost as many mountains as he visited the first two weeks in the hunt.

He was staying away from the mountains altogether now that he knew the situation, instead opting to run through the middle of the valleys between. The monsters were extremely densely grouped there and he also avoided other cultivators who were more likely to stay closer to the mountains.

Beasts were constantly pouring at him, and he had unceasingly swung his arm back and forth for hours. Zac guessed that he'd already killed more beasts since returning compared to the whole week down in the caves. He wasn’t even able to properly stop for dinner and instead kept swinging away while eating dried jerky with his free hand.

His guess had been correct about the strength of the animals. After he'd moved this far inland the average power of the beasts was 10 levels higher compared to the edge he started at. If this trend continued then the innermost part of the hunting ground should be filled with beasts close to the bottleneck, perhaps even with a few E-Grade alphas in the mix.

Zac really wanted to go there, but he also knew that was likely where the E-Grade cultivators were stationed. He wasn't ready for that sort of confrontation, so instead he started veering toward the mountains looking for people. However, this time he was looking for people to set up alliances with rather than to gather information.

The mountains this far inside were more populated, and he quickly found a couple of cultivators, sometimes even small groups of them who stayed together to more efficiently hunt the valley beasts. Not everyone could be a one-man army who could freely roam the forests below without any worries to his life.

However, finding people that filled all the criteria wasn’t quite as easy. They needed to not only be from Earth, but they also needed to be the leader of a town, unaffiliated to the New World Government, and also have a teleportation array. It was only after finding, or rather cornering, ten individuals or groups of people that he found someone who fit the bill.

It was one of the Scandinavians Zac heard about during his first visit to the New World Government, and Jonas was surprisingly enthusiastic about entering the agreement. Zac was pleasantly surprised since he had been prepared to essentially force the alliance upon people.

But it turned out there was an Incursion close by that they had a hard time keeping in check. The invading force kept growing stronger while they couldn’t improve as fast. Zac simply told him to open the Teleporter for trusted people and he would come by within a week after returning.

During the next hours he managed to find three more people who fit the bill, though two of them weren’t very close to any Incursions. But at least it would increase his options and open up possible locations for new Thayer Consortia branch stores.

When everyone heard that he could provide shops with both better equipment and lower prices than the System-run stores they were extremely enthusiastic. Good gear was still hard to come by since the stores in the system only provided extremely basic stuff and it was extremely hard to gain equipment-gaining quests.

But the next target he found was pretty surprising. It was one of those rat-like things that Salvation had caught and turned into Silver Soldiers. At that time Zac had thought they were something local, but now that he spotted a living one he saw that it possessed ladder positions.

Zac grew extremely curious and hurried over to catch it. The ratman possessed a dexterity-based class, and it desperately tried to dodge Zac's pursuit. It even used its tail to change direction mid-leaps, but in the end it wasn’t enough to escape from [Loamwalker]. Finally, it took out its token, but Zac was prepared and threw a rock that smashed into its wrist, making it drop it.

Zac flashed over and immediately snatched the token before resuming the pursuit. A minute later he had cornered the ratman against a cliff wall, and when it saw there was no escape it looked at him with fear. It didn’t say anything, but instead frantically gestured at Zac, but Zac had no idea what it was trying to convey.

“What are you doing? Can you speak?” Zac asked.

“Oh, you’re one of the ones gifted with the language skills,” the ratman said with a decidedly feminine voice. “Please don’t kill me, your ladder position is so high, I won’t make a difference. I have people relying on me back home.”

“I won’t kill you,” Zac said. “But I am curious where home is. I haven’t seen your kind before, and as far as I can tell there are only participants from two worlds.”

“I am from the world with different species. Ishiate, humans, and Zhix,” the ratman quickly said. ”And I know who you are. You're the human champion of our world, the Super Brother-Man”

“How do you know that?” Zac asked.

”Because we met the other species in the tutorial. We also got a lot of them spawning with us afterward, but most of them are dead now...” she said. ”I know about all the ladders.”

Zac frowned as he looked at the fidgeting humanoid in front of him. It looked like the mystery of the missing people could be explained through this thing. But what did she mean by most being dead?

“Did your kind kill the humans?” Zac said as he let some of his aura leak out.

“No! We have lost most of our people as well! It’s the Incursion! Those crazy golems fill our tunnels and towns with magma, killing us by the millions sometimes,” she quickly said.

“Explain,” Zac said with a frown.