Gabby felt little joy at it. What stirred in her was closer to concern.
Her master's appetite for level-up stones was far too great. Even now, the thought sat poorly with her.
By her reckoning, an ordinary human needed no more than three level-up stones to rise a level. A hive-ant, favored with finer genetics and a stronger natural frame, might need six or seven.
Yet her master burned through them at a rate that made both seem modest.
"Master, how many level-up stones do you need to level-up?" she asked.
Hermes did not stop. He kept bombarding the zombies below as he answered.
"One hundred for the first, two hundred for the second. It goes up by a hundred each time."
"Master, this may be the system's compensation for your genetics. Check how much you gained," Gabby said.
Hermes looked.
He did not stop attacking, but the sight still hit him hard enough that he stumbled where he stood, tripped in shock, and nearly hurled himself off the platform.
[STATUS WINDOW]
[Username: Randomizer]
[Age: 6 Days] [Level: 6]
[Next Level: 511/600]
[Race: Devil]
[Class: (F-Rank) Trash Peddler]
[Constitution Rating: 127.00]
[Strength: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Agility: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Dexterity: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Reflex: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Tenacity: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Intelligence Rating: 127.00]
[Processing Speed: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Comprehension: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Analytical Logic: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Memory: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Internal Energy Rating: 127.00]
[Qi: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Mana: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Elemental: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Divine: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Cosmic: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Eldritch: 127.00] (+5) (+10) (+15) (+20) (+25)
[Karmic Rating: 97.00]
[Luck: 388.00]
[Faith: 0.50]
[Fame: 0.00]
[Enmity: 0.00]
[Trash Peddler Skills]
[Summon Peddling Tool]
[Make a Loan]
[Sell Personal Assets]
"Three..." Hermes muttered, still not quite believing it, though his hands never stopped working through the weapons Gabby fed him.
For a fleeting moment, it seemed the zombies had grown slower, as if their weak points had become easier to find. Then he understood. It was not the dead that had changed. It was him. His attributes had crossed into another realm.
"Master, what do you mean, three?" Gabby asked.
Hermes had already composed himself by then. "Three digits. I hit three digits in my status window."
That was enough to leave even Gabby shaken. Blue numbers and letters flickered across her eyes as she recalculated in silence. This result had gone far beyond the trajectory she had predicted.
It meant the level-up stones had been absorbed with perfect efficiency, without wasting even a drop of energy. Then her thoughts turned to the Paradoxical Willow Mycelium.
No record had ever shown those creatures joining a Worlds Collide Series. For now, it was only speculation, but the possibility lodged itself in her mind.
Gabby tried at once to send her findings back to the Hyperion Database, only to lose the thought halfway through.
A moment later she remembered she was supposed to be helping Hermes train, and the urge to report him to Hyperion slipped away as if it had never been there.
It was not the first time that had happened. Nor the second. Squeezing benefits from the Cosmic Chronographic System had never come easily.
If such things were simple, every great power in the stars would have used these series as little more than laboratories, sending in their own people to run experiments and passing samples in and out whenever it suited them. But the truth had never been so generous.
While all this passed unseen, known only to the system and its administrators, Hermes began to think his killing speed was still too slow.
"Gabby. Build me a fly swatter. As big as possible. We're wasting time. Make it useful for excavation too."
Gabby gave a quiet nod. Nanomachines swept over Hermes at once, taking the measure of his reach, his grip, and the weight his frame could bear, while she turned to the alloys used for spacecraft hulls, the kind made to ram through fields of rock in open space.
Soon enough, the thing took shape. It was a monstrous swatter, more than forty meters in length and breadth, ugly in design and brutally practical.
Before taking it in hand, Hermes made certain there were no Second or Third Evolution Zombies nearby. Those were the dangerous ones.
They could breathe poison, leap walls, and endure enough punishment to threaten his employees if even one slipped through. Seeing none, he dropped from above and brought the swatter down on the first mass below.
Bang!
Dust burst upward. Flesh and bone flew apart. Green zombie filth sprayed in every direction. Hermes did not pause. He raised the great swatter again and brought it down once more.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Each strike crushed the dead by the hundreds, flattening them into the broken earth as if he were beating vermin out of a floor.
From a distance, it might have looked absurd, some giant, faceless businessman wielding a fly swatter ten times his own size at the end of the world. Up close, there was nothing comical about it at all.
[First Level-Up to 7! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
[First Level-Up to 8! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
...
[First Level-Up to 10! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
Hermes stopped at last, not from fatigue, but because there were no more zombies left above ground. The rest were still clawing their way up through the cracks.
So he set the great swatter against the fissures and pried them wider.
"Come on now. Don't be shy."
His voice still held that melodic note, which only made the taunt feel meaner.
Once the ground loosened, more of the dead came spilling out around him. The cleverer undead had already grasped there was no real way to fight a creature like Hermes head-on, so they began slipping away in ones and twos, fleeing in all directions.
They meant to feel their way around the high wall and reach the great mass of living vitality gathered behind him. Hermes himself was a delicacy beyond price, but even the finest meal had to be chewed for it to be enjoyed.
For now, they wanted easier prey. Once they began feeding on class users, they could evolve powers of their own, and by then even Hermes might no longer seem so impossible a foe.
Hermes would not allow that. Better to lose an arm than let the reputation he had only just begun to build be torn apart.
But the zombies had already gained ground, and if Hermes gave chase now, he would only be a fool begging to be fooled.
Frustration tightened in him, and something older than thought stirred awake in his blood.
The blood of the Primordial Space Titan woke. The blood of the Star Sage Monkey woke with it. Both rose at once.
Hermes threw back his head and let out a sigh, heavy with disappointment, and the sound rolled across the unnamed plains like a judgment.
It was not a skill. It was older than skill, older than craft, older than any learned cruelty. It was the first mockery, a taunt so ancient it had sunk into blood and bone and refused to die.
The zombies that had been scheming ways to breach the ever-rising wall broke off their plots at once. Whatever cold designs had been forming in their ruined minds were swept aside in an instant.
As one, they turned and rushed Hermes in a frenzy, madness taking them whole as they were drawn toward the place where he stood.
Hermes met that frenzy with one of his own. He planted his feet, spun in place, and turned himself into a whirling meat grinder in the middle of the battlefield.
Yet his taunt had not called to the zombies alone.
Behind the walls, the ten races waiting for the dead to reach the towns felt it too.
Frowns spread from face to face. Cortisol spiked. Adrenaline surged. In a single breath, their emotions turned ugly.
"What was that? I feel like I want to kill someone," Lena said, her eyes going red as she looked from face to face around her, like a hunter measuring prey.
But Gabby had foreseen it. Through her Boohoo Away add-on, she released an invisible mist of calming agents and nanomachines. The worst of that sudden fury was blunted before it could spill into bloodshed.
Hermes, however, had changed.
The calm jet black of his skin was no longer calm at all. Red and purple patterns now flowed across it in living currents, winding and shifting like something eager to be let loose.
Yet Hermes was still in control. That much was plain to see. The more troubling truth was that he seemed to be enjoying himself far too much.
Hermes leapt from place to place, swinging the great swatter in savage arcs, and laughing as zombie heads burst from their necks and flew.
[First Level-Up to 11! Congratulations to Randomizer!]
The level-up calmed Hermes. The color of his skin returned to its plain black hue, washing over the red and purple until the old color settled back into place.
Even so, Hermes could still feel how much he enjoyed the thing in his hand. The swatter was too fun to swing.
Some raw part of him thought he ought to find a bigger one.
Another part took a darker pleasure in the violence itself. Those were the genetics he carried now, and they would not be silent simply because he willed it.
Still, Hermes was only six days old in this new life, a newborn creature with the sentience of an old man from Earth. Habits could still be curbed. The Endermind Draconic genetics gave him enough reason to see the danger clearly.
He only needed to remind himself of one thing. Fun and fighting were tools, not a way of life.
Once he had himself in hand again, Hermes went back to work, methodical as ever, whacking zombies apart in steady rhythm.