The Map

"'What others?" Aroon was refusing the system plan the more he heard about it, "I won't fight with anyone! I'll always fight alone!"

He declared his own decision, a decision that came from the hardships he just lived through the past year.

He lost… many dear things to him and he didn't want to repeat that devastating experience once again.

<Ding! You'll understand when the time comes>

"Speaking again in riddles… Can't you ever say a thing without acting vaguely?"

<Ding! You should focus more on dealing with the task in your hand. Currently, dungeon releases around three thousand monsters all over place. You'll have to kill them during next six hours or else…>

"I know… I know, I haven't gone senile yet," Aroon took a deep breath before holding the sword in his left hand and checked his strange suit once again.

Dungeons run with certain rules. To exterminate a dungeon you either need to clear all the monsters released from it during one wave or go inside and kill the boss.

Aroon knew the grade of this dungeon was E-II. It was something he couldn't deal with currently with his low rank as F-V.

So his other alternative was to go out there and exterminate all the monsters released on the ground before the next wave arrived.

Each wave would take six hours to appear, a known fact to any oldie in the game.

If he depended on the twenty-four-hour timeline he had from the system, he would be faced not with three thousand monsters but much more than that.

And this simple mission would have a disastrous turn for him.

"Can you help me with the monsters' locations?" Aroon said in a dejected tone, "you used to provide us with directions back then."

<Ding! I'll give you something even better> the system mysteriously said, <Ding! I'll give you a detailed map of the town and dungeon nearby>

"Wow! That looks great," Aroon said in his dejected tone before adding, "and I should wander the town in this clown-like costume, right?"

<Ding! It's not my fault! me who decided its shape or style. You, humans, have this would be the form you'll adopt to fight from now on>

"Screw those scientists then," Aroon was pissed off while heading outside the room. "Is there time for me to come and collect the cores and meat from them?" he paused in front of one monster corpse and felt hesitant.

The prices of such pieces were always skyrocketing in the market. Everywhere people would ask for battle tokens. He even heard that some fanatics kept eating this meat to gain superpowers.

<Ding! You have no time for that, plus you a bigger trophy lying ahead>

"I... will believe you this time," Aroon lied. He only left these corpses behind as he didn't have enough time to waste.

Kill the three thousand monsters in less than six hours was a challenging task nonetheless.

He still was acting and thinking based on his old experience of his, which was something he would find wrong soon enough.

The next moment a map appeared in front of his eyes. For someone living through this town for a long time, he already could tell how detailed this map was.

I showed the streets and buildings on a very deep and meticulous level. He could see through buildings, spot whatever lied inside with marked dots.

"Red dots mean monsters, and green means humans... but what do those yellow dots mean?" he asked while pointing to the silver three-dimensional map that blocked his entire vision.

"And can you move it to one corner? I can't see anything through it," he complained when he struggled to see things up ahead of him.

<Ding! These yellow dots represent your fellow fallens. As for the map...>

The system paused before complying with his request.

The map got smaller and went to the corner of his visual field. "Damn! I feel like some fanatic playing one of those old VR games in a funny costume," he complained again while walking in the corridor.

The map showed at least fifty monsters inside this building, a dozen were alone on this level.

"Time to say hi," he sneered while heading towards the first group of monsters gathered up inside one room in the middle of the corridor.

"These monsters can't pose any threat to me."

As he killed all the monsters inside the building he finally headed down to the street.

The scene that met him was a mix of a familiar place he used to live in and the familiar devastation he used to see years ago.

"They never change, sigh," he glanced at all the modern buildings that had many gaps in their outer surface. It was known that monsters were getting strangely annoyed with any signs of modern human lives.

And so at any place monsters invaded, even if they got exterminated they would leave behind a town or a city with deep scars.

<Ding! Some people are fighting and killing monsters in this town> the system ignored his words as he pointed at something else.

"Yeah, there are many fallen gathered here," Aroon started to move slowly through the fire and explosions occurring all around. "I never liked this town, but I can't simply ignore them... How are they doing so far?" he muttered while feeling pain for all this damage around.

He was sent here to this town after losing everything. He wasn't hating the town for this, but for the fact that it was situated at the lost zone.

After the invasion of the monsters to this world, many places of the world were entirely lost for monsters. People used to call these places dead zones.

Such places are scattered all over the globe, with some places deeply hit like the North American continent. Here a very wide ring extended from high up from Canada down towards the Mexican gulf and more south to Mexico.

And the world came to call such a ring the O-zone, one of the largest dead zones in the entire world. The new federation formed by the former three governments of Canada, the US, and Mexico adopted that name.

They called themselves the O federation.