6 Reality and Illusions

I had just barely gotten out of the stairs and back onto the surface when a gigantic quake shook the earth, almost knocking me off balance. I staggered, flailing about for something to grab hold onto. All around me, dust shook and billowed outward like a storm, shaken loose by the reverberating tremors. Broken buildings trembled, several of them actually folding and toppling over, their weakened rivets and joints loosened by decades of corrosion and rust.

I somehow managed to vault over a shaking pipe and land on my feet, coughing and choking on the cloud of dust that swept up to engulf me. Below, the ground shook and warmed, having absorbed large volumes of heat from the ever expanding explosion.

Behind me, the stairs from which I had emerged collapsed, the walls splitting apart from the violent force and imploding. There was a shudder beneath my shoes as the underground facility disintegrated, the ground help up only by tons of rock that had existed ever since the birth of the planet. There was a lurch, and for a moment I feared that the ground would cave in under me, swallowing me into yet another abyss.

Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about such things. It took a while, but the ground stabilized and the tremendous tremors ceased. I didn't even realize when the quakes stopped – I was so used to cowering in the elemental force triggered by manmade forces that it took several seconds for my mind to absorb the fact that the floor was no longer shaking beneath my feet.

Taking a deep breath, I straightened and glanced around warily. Cautiously testing the ground with a foot and sighing in relief when it didn't collapse under my weight, I hurriedly proceeded. My glasses flickered on, highlighting a route through a three-dimensional holographic map that was displayed across my lenses.

With this, I should be able to find my way back to District 4.

"That said, where am I?" I asked, pushing my glasses up my nose and looking around in concern. Even though I had returned to the surface, the wrecked structures and ruins of a once glorious city didn't look familiar to me. There were no landmarks I could make use of, with all the skeletal remains looking similar to each other. I could be miles away from where I had fallen, and I wouldn't know.

Before I could get my bearings and analyze the digital overlays with my glasses in the hopes of pinpointing my location, the Kill Count flickered to inform me that it had just updated.

"What in the world…?"

After the explosion, the Kill Count had jumped from 0 to 50. No doubt I had earned 50 Kill Count points just from slaying the grotesque. It was possible that the Kill Count included stray zombies who were swept up in the explosion, but I doubted it. The number was too round, too perfect to include any zombie stragglers. I intuitively concluded that killing a single warrior category mutant such as a grotesque was worth 50 points.

Of course, I would have to find a way to confirm this later, but right now I felt elated. Looking around to ensure that I wouldn't be ambushed or assaulted right now, I took shelter under a pile of the debris that coincidentally fell upon each other to create a rough overhang. Leaning against the gritty, rough surface, I began the process of spreading out my points to my stats. 50 was a lot, and I would benefit from improving my stats as quickly as possible.

My Strength, Endurance, Agility, Willpower and Spirit were all boosted to 23 each, while my Ability now had 24 points. Still a long way from the 100 I needed, but it was better than nothing. I was getting there. When I first started out, it was at 0, and now I was about a quarter of the way there in less than a day.

Depending on how things went, I might be able to unlock the ability three days later?

"Now I'm getting ahead of myself," I muttered. Reality wasn't a game. I wasn't going to conveniently run out of District 4 into the wastelands and farm zombies everyday. There were reports to make, as well as a lot of red tape to get through. Even Evolvers weren't allowed to leave the fortress cities freely – we would need to get exit permits and the like. Apparently it was for security reasons.

Also, Evolvers were a rare, precious resource. Even the loss of a single one would be a huge blow to the fighting strength of a district. It was for this reason that each district hoarded their evolvers very possessively. And the exit permit was to ensure we didn't simply defect to another district as and when we liked.

Speaking of which, I still felt pissed that my classmates sacrificed me to save their own skins. It was one thing when I chose to divert the grotesque's attention away from them so that they could escape, but it was another thing entirely when they murdered me by throwing me into a hole along with the grotesque. There was absolutely no reason for that kind of nonsense.

I seethed when I remembered Qi Ren calling me trash and jeering at me, as well as his flunkies cheering when I fell to my supposed death. I will have my revenge!

Okay, this was bordering on edgelord territory now. Calming myself down, I noted that none of their actions made sense. As I said, there was absolutely no reason for them to kill me, no benefit, no motive, nothing. I wasn't trash like Qi Ren claimed – and I had never heard him call me trash before. We had gotten into arguments, yeah, but nothing as serious as him seeking to murder me in cold blood. Also, I was average. Right smack in the middle in terms of power hierarchy or ranks. I wasn't at the top, but I wasn't at the bottom either. So why would he call me trash all of a sudden?

Suddenly, I paused. I thought I had heard skittering on the edge of my hearing, saw a flicker of movement on my peripheral sight. Zombies? Holding my breath nervously, I watched my surroundings, keeping an eye out for any hostiles.

My glasses registered nothing.

Yet I felt a chill run down my spine. A sense of foreboding that there was something predatory watching me. It didn't feel as oppressive as the grotesque, and in any event, I had boosted my stats to the extent where I probably didn't have to fear confronting that monstrosity in combat. But I had a feeling that this new foe was a lot trickier to deal with.

I reached for my pistols, feeling a sense of comfort as I tightened my fingers around their grips. Picking up my pace, I vaulted over wreckage and obstacles. My glasses helped pinpointed my location, making use of satellite tracking to guide me. I had a sense of where District 4 was, an internal compass leading the way at the top corner of my lenses.

Then the ground shuddered – or it seemed to shake, but I didn't feel any vibrations beneath my feet. a grotesque burst out from the rubble, lumbering toward me with a roar.

At first, I thought it might be my old foe, but I realized that something was very wrong. Firstly, I had already received the Kill Count points for slaying it. Secondly, it looked completely unhurt. No matter how durable it was, considering the power and heat of the explosion from the plasma generator, it should at least be severely burned, with charred skin and blackened flesh. Yet there wasn't even a single smudge of soot on it.

The grotesque looked too uninjured, too…clean.

A new grotesque then?

Hefting one of my pistols up, I grinned as I savored the opportunity to test out my newly raised stats. Could I fight on par with a grotesque now?

The azure bolt lanced through the charging grotesque, only for its bulky silhouette to waver and almost dissolve before reforming itself again. My shot passed through and blew a huge chunk of concrete apart, shattering it into thousands of fragments.

"An illusion?"

I blinked and shook my head. Checking my lenses, I saw that the targeting reticule was not red. It had remained white, unfocused and not locking onto anything.

The grotesque was not real.

"What the…what a waste of time and evolution energy." I lowered my gun, and with realization came truth. The grotesque literally disappeared from my sight. I frowned and looked around, still on high alert. The grotesque might be false, but whatever conjured the illusion of it was real. And it was clearly targeting me.

The question was who…or what?

The faint flurry of movement on the edge of my vision again. I spun around and saw nothing, even as I took aim with my guns. The targeting reticules danced wildly, desperately searching for targets and finding none. There wasn't even a zombie in sight.

"…what the…"

I exhaled in frustration. Was I jumping over nothing now, getting scared of my own shadow? No, the illusion of the grotesque was real. I saw it, shot at it, and then watched it disappear. Even if the illusions weren't real, their creator was.

"What are you doing, trash?"

I turned around at the familiar voice and caught sight of Qi Ren standing on top of one of the crumbling rooftops. He had one foot planted on the edge and was leaning forward, sneering scornfully at me. Behind him, Cheng Yan and my other classmates gathered.

"Trash like you should just die!" Qi Ren shouted and sent earth spikes erupting toward me. I watched dumbly and waited for them to pierce me, only for nothing to happen. One of them simply pass through me before vanishing.

I was right. They were illusions. I recalled that time when I thought I had seen them screaming at me for being trash and trying to murder me. Yeah, that was an illusion too. No doubt about it. There was no absolutely no reason for my classmates to stay behind. They would have run away by then, fleeing back to District 4. Why would they stop just to murder me? They could have just let the grotesque do the job without intervening.

The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. Nothing added up…unless the whole thing was a hallucination.

But how did I fall into the abyss then? The grotesque and the earth spikes were fake. They had no physical effect on me whatsoever. Yet the hole was real. I really did fall into a cavernous crater.

Wait…I remembered one small difference from that time. I had thought the whole thing was real and I was running desperately away from what I thought was Qi Ren's earth technique. I was sprinting for my dear life, attempting to outrun the expanding maw in the ground.

But what if that wasn't real? No…now that I thought about it, I understood what purpose the illusion served. It was a very clever trick, designed to deceive me into running away from nothing and right into a real hole. The attacks weren't real, but the hole was…unfortunately, I couldn't see the crater because I was too caught up in illusions.

"So that's how it is."

A smile crept up my face. I turned away from Qi Ren and the others, and their voices disappeared when I ignored them, the illusions no longer effective. When I saw the movement at the corner of my eye, this time I didn't just turn around. I fired immediately, the bolts lancing through a small figure and eliciting a shrieked.

Now a winged figure flopped down, clutching at its wounds. Shaped like a monkey and about half the size of a human, but with wings, it was an imp. A mutant that was physically weak, but very devious. Right, I had heard that it had the ability to release hallucinogenic chemicals into the air, causing anyone who inhaled them to see and hear things that weren't there. Striding forward, I pumped a couple of shots into its head and saw my Kill Count go up from 0 to 5.

So a mutant that wasn't a normal zombie gave extra points, huh?

"Too bad your illusions no longer work on me," I said, realizing another difference between now and then. Why I was somehow able to remain calm and analyze the situation to deduce they were illusions. My Spirit had been raised, and thus my resistance to mental attacks such as illusions had been increased as well. I probably didn't have to worry about future illusion attacks from imps.

I knew there was something wrong with the whole contrived scenario of betrayal and abandonment. Real people didn't do that in real life. Only villainous caricatures from an edgelord story about revenge and ruthlessness would. And such characters only appeared in fiction. Perhaps the imp had been reading way too many edgy revenge web novels and thought it could fool me. It did, for a few moments. But I had hopefully grown up and stopped being childish enough to indulge in power fantasies about getting back at all the people who insulted me (often by imagining how I would kill them, and how to justify my murder of them, mostly by making them out to be one-dimensional villains designed to be the foulest humans possible).

Now it was time to go home.