Two hundred and thirty-five employees. For a businessman, that was the size of a middling company.
Yet in a world that held a billion souls, could that truly be all Hermes had gathered in six days? Hardly.
Each streamer under him had drawn a following of her own. Some commanded only a few hundred. Others had a thousand or more. Taken together, they amounted to a staggering force of roughly sixty thousand. Hermes had demanded no vows of loyalty from them. Those people, he left in the women's hands.
Below, the nine towns spread wide beneath the sky, protected by two walls raised from the surrounding soil and polished to an unnaturally smooth, glossy sheen. The outer wall formed the first line of defense. It stood ten meters high, more than two meters thick, and enclosed a circle three kilometers in radius.
The inner wall was made with greater care. Its hollow spaces could be entered, and a rampart ran along it so people might look out and see what came and went. Between the two walls lay a full kilometer of pale open ground, empty by design, so nothing could cross without being seen.
The nine towns were assigned to the nine participating races, except for the Ant-Hive. Hermes had only Noelani, Makamae, and Kunahihi, three ant queens who had no need of a town of their own.
Each received an equal share, arranged in long rows rather than carved like slices from a pie. Yet the truest strength of the place was not in its layout, but beneath it. Five hundred meters down lay a single circular block of smoothly shaped stone. Hermes had specifically ordered Gabby to forge the walls and towns alike into one unbroken mass, above and below.
The Build-a-Planet add-on made such work possible. Its construction nanomachines had been designed to make hostile planets livable within months. A single settlement was nothing by comparison.
Gabby, however, had grown anxious over her master's choices. She was alive enough to fear death, and she had no wish to share his end.
"Master, this is a very risky move. Gathering so many people in one place may get you killed. If I am left without an owner, I will die with you," Gabby pleaded.
Hermes only gave a low hum in answer. He had studied the Records of the Longest Worlds Collide Series until they sat in his mind as clearly as lived memory. In every account, gatherings of thirty-five thousand souls had been wiped out in the first Events, leaving only a handful alive.
But those people had never possessed a proper town. Nor had they enjoyed a vanguard like him, with attributes already beyond fifty. Worse still, most of them had not even known what event was coming.
Gabby kept muttering under her breath all the same as she rolled out ropes and nets, preparing for the worst. If a great flood came, or anything else that called for rescue, she meant to be ready.
[Next Event – 00:00:00:02]
[Next Event – 00:00:00:01]
[Next Event – 00:00:00:00]
[System Message: The Seven-Day Death Protection is now lifted.]
[Event I: Pestilence Catastrophe]
[Act 1: Infinite Undead Emergence]
[Mission: Personally eliminate 20 zombies within 3 days.]
[Possible Rewards:]
[(Common) WCP Points]
[(Common) Level-up Stones]
[(Common to Epic) Treasure Cache]
[(Common to Epic) Shelter Seed]
[(Rare to Mythical) Settlement Seed]
[Failure Penalty: Regression of personal intelligence and a global increase in zombie intelligence.]
Crackle. Crack. Rumble!
The land shook, and fissures burst open below. From the Sky Fielder II, Hermes looked down as the earth split wide, green light running through the world in jagged cracks like fresh wounds torn into living flesh.
He and Gabby had already foreseen such a disaster as one of the likely possibilities, and she moved at once.
The inner and outer walls began to thicken and climb higher still, while the entrance was narrowed into a funnel no more than three meters across.
Fear swept through the nine towns. People cried out, panicked, and pressed against one another as the ground shook with savage force. Even so, the nanomachines did not relent. They held fast through the violence, keeping the towns from collapsing all at once.
The streamers had already been contacted by Gabby and armed with what they needed to know about the event. Because of that, they were able to steady the unrest.
Not everyone in this world had been as fortunate as those sheltered within these walls.
Beyond their refuge, the breaking earth had already claimed lives by the millions.
[World Population: 990,956,561]
"The ground split open! Run, run!"
"Stay away from the cracks! They're still spreading!"
"Why is the earth glowing green like that? What is that?"
Soon, different kinds of zombies began bursting from the earth.
Some were humanoid and bipedal, ranging from hulking giants to shriveled midgets.
Others came insect-like, skittering and misshapen, while some were no bigger than rodents.
There were reptilian forms as well, all of them clawing their way out of the broken ground.
The moment the first of them rose, Hermes unleashed a storm of spears from both hands. His arms blurred into afterimages, each throw so fast and clean it seemed the air itself was being torn apart.
One zombie fell, then another, then ten more before the first bodies had even finished collapsing.
Above the shattered land, a great voice boomed across the sky, announcing Hermes's feats one after another as though the world itself had begun to take notice of him.
[First Blood Achievement! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
[Second Evolution Zombie Kill! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
[Third Evolution Zombie Kill! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
[100 Kill Achievement! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
[1,000 Kill Achievement! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
[10,000 Kill Achievement! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
Hermes did not so much as spare the rewards a glance. He passed from spears to fifteen kinds of bows, then to a hundred throwing weapons, with a few slingshots mixed in for good measure. What he wanted first was not loot, but experience.
He had already devoured Basics of Aiming All Long-Ranged Weapons, and now the knowledge was turning real in his hands.
Gabby stood behind him, feeding him one weapon after another. Some she placed into his hand with neat precision. Others she hurled at ugly angles, meant to break his rhythm and test whether he could recover without thought.
She kept the pattern shifting, never once letting him settle. Each exchange came faster than the last, until the barrage looked almost spiteful, as if some furious wife had caught her husband faithless and was flinging his belongings at him one by one.
[100,000 Kill Achievement! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
"Gabby, start collecting the level-up stones dropping from the zombies," Hermes said.
Based on the guides Hermes had studied, a man with an F-Rank Class would be given five zombies at a time. Once one was killed, another would rise to take its place within three to ten seconds.
A person could hide and conserve his strength if he wished, since the zombies would not go searching for him unless he remained near enough to draw their notice.
An EX-Rank Class, however, would be saddled with fifty. Hermes meant to squeeze every bit of use he could from the presence of those people, since a free round like this would not come twice.
"Right away, Master," Gabby said.
Level-up stones of different colors floated into the air, each one marked by one of the six energies of the universe.
With them came the treasure caches, their hues ranging from dull iron to rich bronze and lustrous silver.
Then came the shelter seeds, each no larger than a pinky's nail, though they differed in shape and form.
Anyone with sharp enough eyes could see there was something hidden within them, the faint outline of a structure folded tight inside the seed.
Gabby stowed away the chests and shelter seeds first, then turned her full attention to the level-up stones. She gathered the six different energies and fed them into the Hyperion Crafting Table, combining them with practiced care.
After that came the slower work. She examined what lay inside each stone and judged what was missing.
At the heart of a completed one should have been a flower of nine petals, each petal a different color. So Gabby sorted them with meticulous care, searching for the missing petals that had to be found and fitted back into place.
But the Hyperion Crafting Table was not perfect.
At times it failed to add a petal. At times it stripped away an element by mistake. That was only natural.
A level-up stone was not something even Hyperion technology could truly replicate. The process was little more than cutting it apart with extreme care, working down to the quark level, then trying to fit it all together again. Errors were bound to happen.
A hundred thousand had dwindled to a little over two thousand.
It was costly work. Wasteful, even.
From the guides Hermes had bought, he knew the Level-up Stone Synthesis feature would come in time. It was not a question of if, only when.
Once it appeared, ten ordinary level-up stones could be fused into a single perfect one, with far less waste during the process.
The danger lay in the waiting itself. Some information placed the feature as early as the Second Event. Others did not see it until the Fourth.
If Hermes held off that long, the advantage he had clawed together would not remain his for long. The other participants would keep building their attributes while he remained stuck at level one, and every day of delay gave them more room to close the gap.
But swallowing a regular level-up stone now was hardly better. That sort of haste had its own price. He might gain a level, but he would be spending a valuable stone for a weaker result, and waste once paid was not so easily won back.
Each level-up petal stood for one of the five constitutions and the four intelligences. Hermes understood too well what that meant.
A level was like nourishment given to a growing child. If something vital was missed at the right moment, there was no truly making up for it later.
[First Level-Up to 2! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
[First Level-Up to 3! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
…
[First Level-Up to 6! Congratulations to Randomizer!]