บท 13: Chapter 13: Kinda Bored, Might Regret Later
[Results: Rarity — Unique 9,999 (Locked) | Semblance: Heart Death Field (Ability)]
[Results: Rarity — Epic 10,000 (Locked) | Katayoki's Song (Ability)]
"Wakey wakey, master," the shrill tone of Katayoki's voice called out to me and for once I was more disturbed by it rather than infuriated or annoyed. Where before I couldn't quite place what was wrong with his voice, now it just seemed to be normal aside from the fact that it was warbled and distorted, as if put through several modulators while he spoke.
"What happened?" I asked as I looked around and found myself still in the void. I couldn't remember what led up to me rolling whatever it was that gave me those last two abilities.
"I'm not really sure myself," the spirit shrugged. "My best guess is that unlocking your Aura changed your soul and me by extension. Check this shit out," he said before conjuring up a knife and throwing it.
Then, without moving he teleported over to where the knife had landed already positioned such that he was holding it.
"We didn't even lose our original gimmick," he laughed as he threw his knife and willed it to create a cutting rift when he recalled the knife back.
"Is that supposed to be your "Song" or is it my Semblance?" I asked.
"It's the Song. I have no idea what your Semblance does."
"Makes sense. I can't imagine you'd have anyone or anything to test something called "Heart Death Field" on inside my soul." When he started whistling in a way that screamed "guilty," I asked him "You haven't attempted to use it, have you?"
"Of course I did." The shameless bastard said, "It's your ability. It wouldn't have come from a positive Gacha pull if it hurt you."
"Why am I not surprised?" I sighed.
"Anyway, you should probably go back to the waking world, master. You've been out of commission for almost thirty hours. You're going to miss the chance to start your morning routine on time if you don't get out of here in the next few minutes."
What?! 30 Hours!?
That wasn't too bad. All I'd lost was my free day. The upgrade to Katayoki's power was more than worth the lost time. Whatever my Semblance turned out to be would be the cherry on top.
…Or maybe not, I'd find out while running my laps around Vale and attempting to use my Semblance against the Grimm. Bringing it out was easy enough, but all it did was cast a dome forcefield with a 200-foot radius where all the colors of the world faded. Against the Grimm at least, it did absolutely nothing.
It turns out the real cherry on top of the bonus I received with regards to Katayoki's power was the fact that I was now able to summon the knife outside my soul. It cost me around half my Aura to materialize the knife, but there was no extra cost to maintain it and I could dismiss the knife to regain all the Aura I used to make it.
It did cost a bit more Aura to make use of the knife's special abilities, but I could teleport a couple dozen times or leave just as many tears in space before my Aura started to dip to critical levels. Unfortunately, my Aura did not regenerate as fast as my Magicka did after casting Healing. It did recover faster than Ki or my physical stamina when I finally managed to drop it, though, so at least there was that.
Suffice to say, it was enough for me to spam Katayoki's Song to instakill all but Alpha Grimm and recover enough to do it all over again in between the times I ran into any packs of Grimm while running my laps. It was quickly becoming my favorite way to get rid of any pests in my way.
I finished my morning workout without figuring out what my Semblance did. On my way back to the inside of Vale's great walls, I did discover that Katayoki's Song had a seemingly unlimited range with no extra cost for long-distance teleportation. I threw the knife as hard as I could and tried to teleport to it when I lost track of it and I did so a couple miles into Vale proper.
Since I could throw things several times faster than I could move personally, I decided to be a lazy ass and make a few extra throws to get back to my apartment as quickly as possible.
[Congratulations! For accurately hitting a target with a throwing knife from more than 3 miles away, you have earned two Rare Gacha Coin!]
'That counts?!' I screamed internally. It was more luck than skill that I'd managed to throw my last knife directly onto the roof of my apartment building, but still. This had exploitable potential. But that was a concern for another time. Right now, what I really needed to focus on was taking a shower and going to get more Gachas at my job.
I planned on running the next couple hours on autopilot, when I ran into someone I wasn't expecting after entering the restaurant.
"Mr. Arc?" I called out. When the man turned around, I said, "Damn, I wasn't sure I'd ever see you again, especially not so soon."
"That cooky old bastard didn't send you after me, did he?" The man asked spitefully.
"Uh, no. I work here."
Immediately, his attitude flipped to the point that it unbalanced me. "Small world, huh?" Gone was the suspicious and cold Hunstman and in his place was just another man I wouldn't pick out against any other in a crowd.
"Sure is. Anyway, I hope you enjoy your food. I gotta go clock in and start working in the next couple minutes or I'll be officially late," I said before taking my leave.
Before I fully left, though, I noticed the entourage of similar-feeling teens and adults that accompanied the Huntsman. Aside from the woman who was asking Nicholas who I was, everyone else shared a distinct resemblance to him. Physically, I couldn't tell all that well, but by the Ki Signatures I was confident they were all probably his children; all eight of them.
'Good for him,' I thought before returning to the scheduled autopilot run of the rest of my day.
Unlike in my last shift, I didn't need to replace the evening bartender so I cooked for the whole time I was on the clock. I earned a couple hundred Gachas as was expected before retiring for the day and heading back home.
Not really feeling tired from my work, I decided to take on another scenario. I still had two to choose from, so I took out a 25-Lien Coin and flipped it. Heads would be for the Terrorist Takeover Scenario, while Tails would see me go fight off zombies.
The coin landed on tails.
Disappointing, but not really. If it turned out to be a slaughterfest I could breeze through like the Gang Initiation Scenario, I could just quickly deal with the zombies and move on to resolve the terrorist issue before going to bed.
I accepted the Zombie Store Invasion Scenario and found myself in a darkened grocery store with a couple of other people. With the electricity seemingly cut off due to a zombie apocalypse, only the sunsetting rays that entered from the windows illuminated the interior of the grocery store.
I could hear the moaning and groaning of the zombies from the outside. It would have been amusing, if not for the dire atmosphere cast by the frightened and terrified people locked in the grocery store with me.
"What the hell are we going to do?" A man asked. "Those things go crazy at night and the horde we managed to escape from earlier has only gotten bigger. Any moment after the sun fully sets, they could go off and start charging at the barricades."
"We do what we can," a woman sighed as she rubbed a cloth over the machete that was in her other hand. "Keep quiet, stay away from the windows, and pray for the best. Hopefully, they'll forget about us before their aggression picks up. The only other way out of this is for someone to send us reinforcements. Barring that, we can try fighting to the bitter end."
As some people started breaking down into hysterics others were quick to subdue them to prevent screaming out and attracting more zombies. Of course, it wouldn't be a Bad Scenario if I wasn't dropped at the most inopportune time. Consequently, the zombies outside started to react and begin ramming their bodies against the fortified doors and windows of the grocery store.
Naturally, because the barricades set up had been jerry-rigged, probably by an amatuer and with materials that weren't perfectly suited for the task, the zombies began to break in less than a minute later.
Ironically, the fact that zombies began pouring into the store turned out to be a good thing for the other people involved in the Scenario. Because they were all scrambling away from the zombies, they mostly huddled into the same area which left less of them for me to have to keep an eye out for while I started making my rounds around the store and killing the zombies off.
Unsurprisingly, every dead zombie only yielded Uncommon Gachas. To be honest, they were even easier to deal with than common Grimm. Zombies with slower, weaker, and even dumber as they didn't make an effort to evade me in vain.
It took me a few minutes to kill every zombie within a hundred feet of the store. That amounted to 327 zombies, but because we were in the middle of a downtown area in the ruins of a formerly large city, there were probably tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of zombies still around. I wasn't complaining. I would just think of this as a time trial event in which I had to get as many Gachas as I could.
Now… I may or may not have started throwing Ki Blasts around to get sets of up to five zombies killed at a time. Logically, it was the most efficient way to complete my goal, but it still felt wrong to leave so much collateral damage behind to the buildings, ground, and anything else that got too close to a Ki Blast explosion. Sure, no one would care since the city had been overrun by zombies, but it still felt like I was a little kid who was spouting off curses when there were no adults around to reprimand me.
Anyway, the Scenario lasted until the sun fully set and an armored van showed up to pick up the survivors. The only reason I knew this was because my Gacha powers gave me a dedicated reward for not letting a single person die due to the invasion. I wouldn't have known this otherwise as I'd been miles away from the grocery store by that point, killing off my 8,767th zombie.
[Congratulations! For keeping all the survivors of the overrun grocery store alive, you have earned a Locked Rare Gacha Coin!]
[Congratulations! For killing off more than 5,000 zombies before resolving the Scenario, you have earned a Locked Unique Gacha Coin!]
I stood in my room covered in the dried blood of who-knows how many zombies. Now, I could go take a shower, roll my Gacha and go to fight with Katayoki. Or… I could go disrupt the plans of some terrorists and see how much more dire a situation could get from a Unique Scenario.
Between dealing with my Zanpakuto Spirit and facing something worse than a zombie apocalypse, it was hard to tell what would result in the most regret.
"Hmm," I hummed. Maybe I was thinking too deeply. For all I know, maybe I'd side with the terrorist once I discovered their motivations. Yeah right. That was about as likely as the cartel gangsters I'd killed accepting me with open arms. I had to go into the Bad Scenario expecting the worst.
Still not really all that tired or drained from my day of work followed by the zombie extermination, I accepted the Terrorist Takeover Scenario.
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