Chapter 7: Book 1: Chapter 4 (Part 2 of 2)

“Not yet,” I shouted in real-time.

Victor sneered at me, misunderstanding who I had been addressing.

“Begging won’t save you monster,” he decreed calmly and squeezed the trigger on the revolver.

I didn’t have time to react as the gun went off with a loud bang, as they tend to do when someone pulls the trigger.

-20 Hit Points. (390/410)

The prompt flashed in front of me as I felt the bullet slam into my right pectoral muscle and I heard it plink as it hit the ground shortly afterwards. I took an involuntary step backwards from the force of the gunshot. I quickly rubbed at the spot where I had been hit in a mild panic. The spot felt a little bruised but there was no sign of any blood and most importantly no gaping hole in my chest muscle.

It was then I remembered that my Hit Points total was four hundred and ten. Losing twenty points left me with three hundred and ninety as the graphic had suggested.

Damn, Dean wasn’t underplaying how ineffective mana-less equipment was. I’d just been hit in the chest by a bullet at point-blank range and it had felt like I’d been hit with a paintball, not a metal slug. My head snapped back up and I had a crazy grin on my face.

The cruel smirk on Victor’s face faded rapidly as I stood there, mostly unharmed after being shot by him. He squeezed the trigger again repeatedly.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Click. Click. Click.

-20 Hit Points. (370/410)

-20 Hit Points. (350/410)

-20 Hit Points. (330/410)

In a panic Victor unloaded the remaining bullets in the barrel and kept squeezing the trigger even after the fifth and final bullet was dispensed. I was hit three more times. Victor’s rising nervousness and inexperience caused him to miss one of his shots. The bullet zinged by my head and buried itself in the plasterboard wall behind me.

It was my turn to smirk cruelly. Although I was delighted to not be bleeding out on the floor, my mind was overcome with a cold implacable rage.

This piece of shit, this worm of a man had dared to oppose me. I would make him pay for this audacity with his miserable life.

I charged across the room and knocked the gun from Victor’s grip as I tackled him hard. My arm wrapped around his chest and I lifted him, driving his body forcefully into the poorly plastered wall behind. The wall shuddered as he collided with it and the plaster cracked from the impact. I wouldn’t be getting my deposit back, not that any of that mattered anymore.

Critical Strike! x8 You have inflicted 136 piercing damage and 80 points of cold damage. Overflow of 126 damage converted at a rate of 2 for 1 (vital spot) for 63 health loss. Victor Guberschmidt is slain.

Victor stared at me in shock and a soft sigh escaped his mouth. Then his head lolled back, and his body went slack in my grip.

You have slain Victor Guberschmidt. +40 XP, +1 notoriety.

The prompt jarred me back to my senses and I shook my head. I looked down at Victor’s corpse in my arms. My right hand gripped a shaped shard of ice which I had thrust into Victor’s side under his armpit and into his heart. I must have utilised my Ice Blades ability instinctively when I rushed him.

I had just killed a man. I should have been filled with remorse and just a bit of existential terror. However, instead of shame or fear, all I felt was discontent that the fight was so short and his suffering brief. A calm, detached part of my mind noted that a rime of frost had formed around my blade’s entry point which prevented Victor’s blood from gushing out all over my floor.

My bloodlust was broken briefly as I heard a shrill squeal. I looked to my right and saw Shana who had been halfway to getting back up from where she fell during her struggle with Victor. Now she stared at me in horror while I held her dead stepfather like a limp dance partner.

Our eyes met, mine still filled with hateful menace. Before I could say anything or order her to surrender, her eyelids fluttered, and she passed out. Her body hit my carpeted floor for the second time with a thump, but she did not appear to be hurt.

There was a tinkling noise and then I heard Quixbix in my mind.

<Quest ‘Who’s the Boss?’ complete. 303 XP and +1 notoriety gained> he intoned formally.

Then he continued in a more conversational voice.

<Not a bad start. A fifty percent kill ratio is satisfactory. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised your intimidation overwhelmed her, as your social stats are impressive, and she only has a Civilian class right now. Oooh, would you look at her potential rating, though. I take it all back, not killing her was an excellent idea and I have just the follow-up quest to take advantage of this opportunity.>

I dropped Victor, leaving the ice blade in his chest and his body collapsed in a heap at my feet. Then there was a loud banging on the wall in my kitchen.

“Turn your damn TV down,” the muffled voice of my neighbour Mrs Pearson yelled.

Mrs Pearson was an irascible old lady that was going senile. Thankfully, she had mistaken the fight for a TV show. I lived at the end of the complex so there wasn’t anyone on the other side. Beneath me was the laundry room, so it was possible somebody was in there and could have heard. I saw a prompt at the side of my vision letting me know Quixbix was ready to give me a second quest but wanted to check out if anybody was on the alert after what had just happened first.

I hauled Victor’s body out of the way of the door and got a second peripheral prompt different from the first.

Would you like to loot Victor Guberschmidt?

Looting your kills. Obviously, that’s a thing now. I mentally selected yes.

Please select the items you wish to acquire.

Currency: 2 GP, 50SP, 50CP

Inventory: Empty

Framework Drop: N/A (sentient)

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I added the coins to my own collection. This also indicated that we had an inventory of some kind just like WoW and other MMORPG’s. As I closed the loot box, I got another prompt.

Would you like to automatically add coins to your stores when looting?

That would be useful, so I picked yes. The Framework then tried to ask me to make some other choices about looting, but I didn’t have time for it right now. I chose the equivalent of the snooze option and finished moving Victor out of the way.

With the body moved and out of sight I opened my front door a crack and peeked out. Nobody was standing directly outside, which was a good start. I opened the door fully and leant my head out to get a view of the gantry. There were another five units on the upper floor of the apartment block. All the doors were closed, and the steel gantry was empty. Another good sign.

I stepped out of my door, moved to the railing and looked down at the concrete paving on the ground floor. There weren’t any looky-loo’s or interested parties that I could see. Most of the parking spots out front were vacant, so it appeared that few people were actually home. How few cars were present was a little surprising, but I wasn’t going to bitch about my luck with a dead body in my apartment.

One of the few vehicles present was an expensive-looking silver Mercedes parked in front of the complex. This had to be Victor’s, nobody who lived here had the kind of scratch to afford a car like that.

Now a bit calmer and not so focused on the immediate surroundings I glanced at the view around me. I could see that the single plume of smoke I’d seen earlier was thicker and had been joined by several more. These must have been vehicles in motion that lost power or had a freaked-out driver crash them. Damn, now that I think about it, it would really suck to have been in an aircraft or a high-speed train when the Framework was initialised.

I also realised that my eyesight and hearing were much improved. I could make out people in the apartment block opposite waving their hands in a panicked manner. They weren’t gesturing out the window towards me, so it must have been a more generalised ‘what the fuck has happened to the world’ kind of panicking.

Anyway, I had confirmed nobody was about to call the cops. Wait, the phones, did they even work. I dug mine out of my shorts pocket and pressed the power button on the side. The screen lit up, but I quickly saw there was no network or signal, not even the option to make emergency calls. I powered the phone down to conserve the battery and put it back in my pocket.

With one last glance around the neighbourhood, which revealed a couple of people were beginning to leave their homes but seemingly not in response to what I’d done, I went back inside and closed the door.

As soon as I was back inside my eyes fell on the prone form of Shana. She was still unconscious. I walked over to her and picked her up and carefully laid her on my crappy couch so as not to wake her. While I was kneeling beside her the prompt from Quixbix flashed rapidly, he must be trying to tell me something. I decided to open his quest and see what the fuss was about.

Path of the Soulbinder 1 (K)

Shana Colton has a high binding potential and would make an excellent asset for any aspiring Soulbinder. In her current state, she is incapable of resisting the binding. Take your first step on your path of power and bind Shana Colton to you.

Success: You bind Shana Colton.

Rewards: 3,400 XP and future Path of the Binder quests.

Simple Oak Bow, Simple Leather Quiver, 20 x Simple Oak Arrows, Bracers of the Bound

Failure: If this quest goes incomplete the rest of this quest chain will remain locked and unavailable.

Once I finished reading the quest, I was granted the knowledge of exactly how the Soul Binding process worked. It was remarkably simple. I needed to touch my intended target and simply will it to happen. If the target was incapacitated, they would be unable to resist and be bound to me. If I tried to use the ability on someone capable of resisting, and they chose to fight the binding, there was a chance of failure.

The calculation on whether it worked was exceedingly complex with a lot of different factors involved, though most to a lesser degree. The two most important aspects used was comparing my Domination against her Willpower, and Domination was my highest stat. Even if she awoke and elected to fight the odds were stacked heavily in my favour. I reached my hand out to touch her cheek and claim her.

My hand stopped just shy of her face; my fingertips had almost brushed her soft smooth skin. I shook my head and snatched my hand away. What the fuck was I doing? I had been about to bind this girl I’d just met against her will. Something was very off. I stood quickly, retrieved the gun from Victor’s slack grasp and padded across my apartment and into the bathroom. I needed to get a grip.

I stood at the basin and turned the tap on. Water flowed freely, so at least that was still working without the power. But for how long? I quickly put the plug in the sinkhole so as not to waste any more water. When the basin was half-filled, I turned the tap off and splashed my face with it. I’d gripped the sides of the ceramic basin tightly and had to force myself to ease up.

I straightened up then and was startled by my first proper glimpse of the new me in the cabinet mirror above the basin.

My brown hair was now jet black and the tips were a frosted ice-blue. My ears were pointed, and my canine teeth were a bit longer and sharper. My cheeks and jaw were smooth, no sign of the five o’clock shadow I usually exhibited. The most shocking change was in my eyes. The sclera were no longer white but the same impenetrable black of my hair. The iris popped with the same shade of ice-blue as the tips of my hair and the jagged band markings across my body.

I stepped back from the sink and gave my body a thorough examination. I wasn’t disappointed by what I found. All the muscle definition I had lost during my inactivity with my shoulder injury had returned and it had brought some friends to the party. I had a bona fide Superman physique. Also, based on the evidence of the reflection of my head being at the top of the cabinet mirror I had gained a few inches in height.

I flexed my new muscles, trying them out. Which was when I figured out that the shoulder injury that had plagued me for months was gone without a trace. A closer inspection revealed that even the scarring from the surgery to repair the damage was gone. Small victories, eh.

Not being able to resist, despite the circumstance, I pulled my shorts and boxers down. A wide grin spread across my face as I observed the enhancements in my undercarriage. I’d been above average before but now I was hung like a donkey. Big victories too.

I also realised I was hairless downstairs, which was a little bit odd. I quickly found that my chest and armpit hair were gone too.

The grin on my face faded slowly as I continued to stare at myself in the mirror. I had gone through significant physical changes that much was obvious. However, the question remained, what else had changed about me?

I had killed Victor without thinking and relished in my triumph. What’s more, even though I was now feeling more like myself I felt no guilt for ending him. Sure, he was basically a slug person, and he had shot me, but killing a person shouldn’t be that easy. There were plenty of arguments that could be used to justify taking his life, but that wasn’t what bothered me. Not being bothered was what bothered me.

Then, of course, there was what I had almost done to Shana.

Did I lose my humanity when I became an Acheronian? And if I did, was this a good or a bad thing? The world, according to Dean, would shortly become a monster-filled cataclysm. As much as I wished to believe he was full of shit, all evidence pointed to the contrary.

His needling question echoed through my mind, ‘are you willing to be a victim?’. I can’t deny I had hoped I would have a bit longer before being put on the spot to answer that self-defining question. Yet here I was with little time to waste and the stark choice in front of me. Do I complete this quest or not?

If yes, then I would become stronger and increase my chances of survival but would do so at the detriment of somebody else.

If no, I would remain a decent law-abiding human being who would, in all likelihood, then have to rely on others also being decent human beings to survive this catastrophe. I was too pragmatic to believe that was likely.

Like any good student facing a deadline, I fudged it. I would go back in there and ask Shana’s permission to bond her. If she said yes, I could procrastinate on the bigger questions a while longer. If she said no, well if she said no, then I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

I dried my face with the hand towel and after one final look in the mirror, walked back into my apartment and the unconscious form of the young woman on my couch.

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