Zarek felt the stretch in his shoulder and his lats, his muscles rippling with power as he ripped himself upward.
Deng.
He landed nimbly on the top of the tall sign, its letter pointing toward the next exit, and its sturdy steel frame swaying under Zarek's weight. His gun, however, was already pointed forward. Every shot he took killed two at the very least, his trajectories so perfectly chosen, and the bullets so powerful compared to their Endurance that they couldn't be stopped.
By the time they got their aim right, it was already too late.
Priya's shots weren't nearly as accurate, and she had to adjust more after every sharp recoil. But she made up for it in spades by pulling her bullets through the air.
The exercise of focus Zarek had taught her in the Harmonic Recall Godsfall Tear was showing its usefulness. She was getting more and more adept at controlling her bullets in space.
Unfortunately, she still missed most of the time. The bullets were moving too fast, and there was only so much time to adjust them in the air. But because she was missing so often even with such added control, the enemies below—who were scrambling as they watched one of their allies after another die—were even worse off.
Zarek had picked off their strongest first. Without a head to keep them together, they stood no chance at all.
Aiming his gun a little higher, Zarek closed one eye. In the far-off distance, one man was scrambling away, falling over to his hands and then rushing up faster than his limbs could control.
He fell over cars, clipped his knees in struggle, and seemed to already be crying tears and drizzling snot as he could almost feel Zarek's aim on the back of his head.
Zarek became eerily calm watching the struggle he had seen many times before. And much the same as always, he chose himself and Priya first.
BANG!
His bullet fired just as the man rushed up to his feet for the last time. The back of his head splattered and what had been his face bloomed open like a flower before he collapsed to the ground in a pool of his own blood.
Zarek holstered his Desert Eagle and then used the whip to swing down again.
He landed heavily on the ground and adjusted Priya on his back.
"I can walk, you know," she said, hopping down.
"Maybe I just like feeling you on my back."
"Me? Or my chest?"
"Is there a difference?" Zarek asked, blinking innocently.
Priya rolled her eyes. "We should hurry."
"Wait, wait. They've been stopping people here, who knows what goodies they've found?"
Zarek jogged up to the toll booths and began checking them one by one until he found what he wanted.
"…Meh…"
He knew that whatever he found here probably wouldn't be that good. People desperate enough to get stopped by these walking clowns definitely wouldn't be all that powerful, so how could the items they had on them be all that great either?
"Oh, this isn't bad. Put this on." Zarek handed Priya what looked like a bodysuit.
She looked at it skeptically, wondering if Zarek was just being a pervert again while they had probably just triggered some sort of gang war.
Zarek chuckled. "Use your senses. Without an Appraisal Skill, or without gaining it directly from the system, you won't be able to tell the exact level of a treasure or what it can do, but you should be able to sense the difference between a normal piece of clothing and a treasure."
Priya stood in silence for a moment and then her eyes lit up. Then her nose scrunched.
"Can't we at least wash it first?"
"It's a treasure."
"Does that automatically mean it's self-cleaning?"
"Well, that depends. Godsfall and organic material don't mix well. That's why the Turned rot and become zombies first. Any treasure will probably burn away any organic residue remaining on its own. But there are treasures with more obvious self-cleaning that acts faster and deals with dust as well."
"…Let's clean it first."
Zarek laughed again. "Alright, fine, fine. Whatever the lady wants."
"Can you tell how strong it is?"
"A bit. It's about middle of the road for E Class."
"And what's that mean?"
"It can add about the strength of an E Master Class to you. So if you had E Grade Endurance in this case."
"What sort of weird metric is that…"
"It's hard to scale properly because treasures like this one basically tune to your body. It's not quite good enough to give you E+ Endurance from E, but it'll get you close. And that'll be variable depending on who's wearing it—unless you push past the limit of the treasure."
"Sounds lazy…" Priya muttered.
Zarek grinned. "I think the system is a lazy bastard too."
--
Note:
[…When a lion runs up to you in the wild, be sure to ask it what its exact stats are before it bites your head off. I swear all of you humans are so ungrateful.]
--
There actually was an exact science to finding out the strength of treasures. That was what Appraisers were for, and in the future, they would make a substantial amount of money for what they did.
But Zarek had never been one to care. Having the general gist was enough.
Priya's Endurance had S- Growth Potential, and there was no way this random treasure could increase it by a similar factor. But once she completed her own Core Breakthrough, her E- Endurance would likely be stronger than most E+ Endurance.
That would be very close to being able to deal with bullets from lower caliber guns. At the very least, she wouldn't have to suffer arrow wounds like he idiotically had to back in the Temp Duplicate Godsfall Tear.
Zarek sifted around, looking for some more stuff. He tossed most of it away as useless until he spotted a small parrying shield.
'Perfect.'
He slipped it onto his wrist and felt his own Endurance take a slight leap.
"Okay, now we can go."
The two rushed off. It wouldn't be until they switched shifts later that day that the gang would realize their entire team had been wiped out.
Zarek didn't need to ask to know that this group was almost certainly from one of the four Tycoons of Lonn City.
As he had said, this city had a large concentration of oligarchs. Some of them collapsed, and some of them rose to the top of the pile.
In the end, those that controlled the toll bridges this early on were certainly among the latter. Of which, he was aware of four:
The Green Corporation.
The Pensare Corporation.
The Sakks and Dalton Firm.
And finally, the one that would grow to trigger the war between citizens and the municipal government in just a couple of years' time…
Global Fitness Incorporated, or GFI.
This last group was the most interesting of them all because they had found a path to improvement that too many neglected in favor of flashy energy and quick treasure spikes.
They would introduce a wave of post-Godsfall Apocalypse Training that would change the world, and the CEO and CFO would accomplish this through the use of an otherwise seemingly useless Talent.
Unfortunately for them, Zarek would be needing that Talent.