Bakuda

The past few hours had been productive. I'd killed two hundred ABB members, and their numbers kept ticking down on my counter, likely because they were being killed by the Empire.

I'd only killed fifty members of the Empire, but they'd lost twice as many members due to the suicide bombers and ambushed by the remaining members of the ABB.

Kaiser's disappearance had dropped their numbers by another one hundred; presumably people leaving the organization because they were unwilling to be led by Hookwolf or due to personal loyalty to Kaiser.

Letting myself get hit by bullets had paid off as well; my physical damage resistance was up by twelve percent; my Armored Shell ability was up one level to Level 4.

This gave me 95% damage resistance in my metal form. Pistols were only doing one point of damage to me, and I was finally resilient enough to be relatively blasé about getting shot.

Furthermore, I'd been healing people in an effort to allow time for my regeneration to kick in. I'd gained another level of regeneration; I now regenerated seven points every four seconds.

Bakuda had tried to send people with bombs in their heads to be healed, but I'd been hit by an explosion that did twenty points of shrapnel damage despite my 95% damage resistance; it had been a four-hundred-point blast. It had also done a similar amount of fire damage.

My fire resistance was twenty two percent; as it added to my physical resistance, it should have made me immune to fire. Instead, once I'd reached 99%, it had rolled over to 99.1%, and was now 99.99%. This meant that I would take damage from any fire attack of 10,000 points of damage, or higher. Any damage below that I was immune to.

It seemed likely that my physical resistance would roll over the same way. It was going to get harder and harder to gain more resistance; I could stop using Armored Shell and allow myself to get hurt more often, but once I reached 99% damage reduction, nothing under a hundred points would help raise my stats at all.

Lung was going to be a bigger challenge than Hookwolf. Hookwolf I could snipe from the air, and even if he somehow managed to get to me, I could simply blink away until I'd regenerated, then attack him again and again until he was dead.

Lung regenerated, and worse, his power escalated. Eventually he would grow wings and the sky wouldn't be safe. I could de-escalate him by blinking away, but he'd regenerate and I'd be starting back from square one.

My best bet would be to steal some bombs from Bakuda; I should have saved the hospital bomb for him, but I hadn't. I'd have to use Oni Lee's strategies against him; hitting him over and over with bombs that did more damage than I was capable of delivering myself.

The only way that would work would be if I discovered the tinker's laboratory. The only way that would happen was if I used the power blinking on the screen in front of me.

NEW POWER CREATED!

EMPATHY!

FEEL WHAT OTHERS FEEL, AND BECOME A BETTER PERSON-OR NOT.

10 FOOT RADIUS, DOUBLES EVERY LEVEL.

Ten feet wasn't a lot; hopefully I could level up quickly; three more levels would be enough to help me do what I needed to do.

I began running through the streets, trying to swerve toward people.

Seeing a little girl crying, I didn't need some kind of fancy power to understand what she was feeling.

As I approached her, I felt her fear and sense of loss. Gamer's Mind muted it somewhat, but it was still shockingly sharp.

Stopping in front of her, I knelt down.

She looked up at me, and I felt a sudden sense of awe and hope.

"Are you an angel?" she asked.

I was confused by this; I wasn't wearing white robes and I didn't have wings. A lot of churches had stopped using that depiction of angels due to the Simurgh in recent years though.

"I'm a superhero," I lied. "Are you looking for your mother?"

"My dad," she said. She pointed at a pile of rubble behind her. "He pushed me out of the way when a building fell on us."

That meant he likely wasn't far. I began using mage hand to toss rocks aside. Empathy wasn't giving me anything, but it wouldn't if he was unconscious.

Eventually I uncovered a hand, and I heard a gasp from the little girl beside me.

I reached out and touched his hand; he was alive!

I healed him, and I felt his sudden sense of terror; not just because he was buried, but because he was worried about his little girl.

"I'm going to get you out in a moment," I told him. "Your daughter is not harmed."

I touched her on the shoulder; she had some scratches and I healed her without looking.

Mage hand pulled rocks from him even as I used my strength to pull other rocks off of him. I eventually managed to free him.

Gratitude so strong that it made me stumble washed over me.

"I've got other people to save," I said.

"Who are you?" the father asked.

"I'm Harvest," I said. "Plant the seeds of hope, and you'll have a bountiful harvest."

I felt that it was cheesy the moment I said it, but neither of them seemed to notice.

"I've got other people to save," I said. "The PRT is two blocks to the south. Tell them I sent you, and put a good word in for me!"

I was moving almost before I finished my speech.

I didn't really care if the PRT signed the kill order or not, but since they were being jerks, confusing them gave me a weird sort of pleasure.

Turning down the block, I felt the increasing pressure that warned that I'd have to release the two from my inventory.

I released the child first; her mother had insisted.

I could feel her terror washing over me; she'd seen other people die from the explosions, and she'd been told what it was going to do.

Before I could reacquire her, she screamed, and her body stiffened. She turned into crystal, and I could feel the horrendous pain she as in the whole time.

I heard a scream from behind me, and a moment later, the mother began boiling away as her body was dissolved from the inside out by acid.

I tried to touch her, only to take twenty points of damage; the acid was so powerful that it was eating through the street.

EMPATHY HAS LEVELED UP!

20 FOOT RADIUS

LEVEL 2

Great.

Bakuda could have made the effects painless, but she'd gone out of her way to make them painful. She'd put a bomb in the head of an eight-year-old child.

At least the Empire didn't target their own people, their own children. I felt my rage grow, along with a sense of helplessness.

There was nothing I could do to save the people with bombs in their heads. I'd inventoried the woman and her daughter for more than an hour, hoping I'd be able to find a tinker, or that I would come up with some other solution.

Maybe I could read enough medical skill books to be able to use far strike to do brain surgery. Even if I could, there would be a risk of infection that my healing ability wouldn't be able to compensate for.

If I could get all of them to Panacea, that might work. However, I suspected that the bombs probably were rigged to blow if they were tampered with, which meant that I would need a tinker ability.

I hadn't gotten Gallant's tinker ability, only his emotion sense; how had he known which power I would get?

I doubted that Armsmaster would allow me to beat him up for his power.

Running through the streets, I was astonished at just how much misery the people were feeling. There was terror, helplessness, anger…all the feelings I'd had when my Dad was being killed.

Had I been too focused on my own revenge to see that other people needed help too?

I'd wanted to help people when I was younger. What had happened to me?

The Empathy grew two more levels over the next hour. The deaths on both the Empire and the ABB side slowed, although the numbers continued to tick down.

At level 4 I could detect all the emotions in an eighty-foot radius, and it was at that level that I felt a sudden sense of smugness coming from a building to my right.

I immediately blended into the shadows and sent my arcane eye inside.

She was in an abandoned car mechanics shop. It had a level underneath, and she was in surgery.

I blinked behind her, and I barely twisted in time to avoid a growing area of… something.

I could see dust in the air, handing suspended and motionless. Had she attempted to Grey Boy me?

"How stupid are you?" she asked. "You never attack a tinker in her lair."

I used mage hand to throw her in the grey boy sphere. Only half her body made it inside.

She was screaming; I'd shoved her in feet first, so that only the area from her waist up was affected.

She tried to do something with her right hand, and so I cut her right arm off with a far strike.

I was beside her, and I healed her before she could go into shock. Her shoulder healed over into a stump, and I could tell that despite the healing she was still in bad shape.

She tried to move her other arm, but I grabbed her hand and started applying pressure.

"I wonder what sort of power I'll get from you," I wondered out loud. "Will I be able to make bombs, or will it be a more general tinker power. Maybe I'll just understand how to use your bombs so that I can do something like this to Lung."

She screamed out loud, and I could feel her fear and her rage. It was nothing compared to what she had put her victims through, and so I didn't feel particularly sympathetic.

"You shouldn't have put bombs in Kurt and Lacey," I said. I leaned toward her and I inventoried her gas mask.

She was younger than I would have thought; in her early twenties.

"You shouldn't have joined Lung at all," I said. "Because I told him I was going to leave him with nothing before I killed him, and you…you were something."

"Don't kill me," she gasped. "I can help you."

I shoved her deeper into the area of null time. She screamed in pain; there was a lot of resistance.

"If you didn't want to get shoved into your own bubble, you shouldn't have made it so that you could shove people inside after it was activated." I said. "You made it one way so that people trying to rescue your victims would get trapped too."

You couldn't enter Grey Boy loops, and null time was generally impermeable as well.

She was stuck up to her chest now, and I doubted that I could push her inside any further.

"If you tell me how to disarm the bombs in people's heads, I might not murder you," I said.

She laughed bitterly.

"You're crazier than me," she said. "How many people have you killed?"

"Six hundred?" I said. "Maybe? They all kind of blur together. You all look alike to me."

She looked shocked.

"Thugs, not Asians," I said. "What do you think I am? Some kind of racist?"

"You've been killing Asians all day!" she said. "Helping the Empire."

"If you'd left me alone, you could have had the whole city," I said. "But you had to kill the last two people in the world I cared about. That means I had to return the favor."

"You killed Oni Lee!" she said. "You attacked first."

"He attacked me," I said.

"He saw you at a whole bunch of Empire events," she said. "Thought you were an Empire cape."

"I was wiping out the Empire," I said. "How did you know I was the one who killed him?"

"He was planning on going after you the next time he saw you, and then he winds up dead?" she said. "We aren't stupid."

"You might be a little stupid," I said. I looked at my watch. It had been a couple of minutes.

I used Far strike to cut off her other arm. She screamed, but I healed her before she went into shock.

"I had to make sure you were disarmed," I said. I leaned down to her and said "Get it?"

She spit at me, but I dodged to the side.

"I'll kill you!" she shouted. "I'll kill all of you!"

"How do I save the people with bombs in their heads?" I asked.

"I'm the only one who can remove the bombs, and I needed my arms to do that you bitch."

I cut off her left ear, slapping a piece of cloth on it to staunch the bleeding.

Blood seeped through, and I had a new screen.

NEW POWER CREATED!

MAD BOMBER!

YOU CAN USE IMPROVISED EQUIPMENT TO CREATE EXPLOSIVES FOR PLEASURE AND PROFIT!

BE THE ANARCHIST YOU ALWAYS KNEW YOU COULD BE!

THE HIGHER THE LEVEL, THE MORE ESOTERIC THE EFFECTS!

LEVEL ONE- STANDARD EXPLOSIVES ONLY.

"I'm going to start peeling pieces off of you," I said. "Your ears, your eyelids, your cheeks…you'd be surprised at what people can survive. I wonder how long people can survive without a stomach, kidneys or intestines though."

She stared up at me and began to sob.

"You're dead," I said. "But if you help me, I won't have to go after your family."

"I don't care about them!" she shouted. "They never recognized my genius."

Her emotions tracked with that, but I could feel something.

"Your grandmother then," I said. I could feel her emotions catch. "The only one who was good to you. I wonder if she'll do as well as you as I start peeling pieces off of her?"

"I won't let you!" she shouted.

I felt a sudden conviction inside her; a fatalistic acceptance. It was a feeling I was familiar with myself; I'd felt it after my father's death.

She had a false tooth; I could see her tongue moving.

I blinked to the door, and then blinked outside one thousand feet in the air.

-100 POINTS PHYSICAL DAMAGE

-12 POINTS FIRE DAMAGE!

PHYSICAL DAMAGE RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED BY 1% TO 61%.!

FIRE RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED TO 23%!

I felt my consciousness leaving me; I was down to 0 hit points.

There was blackness for a moment, and then I woke up. I was falling, but I had 7 Hit points.

It takes 10 seconds to fall a thousand feet, and I regenerated every 4 seconds.

I was getting awfully close to the ground; I passed through a ball of lightning that did 4 hit points of damage to me.

ELECTRICAL RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED BY ONE PERCENT. YOU NOW HAVE 13% ELECTRICAL RESISTANCE.

I blinked upward twice, hovering above the devastation.

Given my resistances, that was 2000 points of physical damage and 11000 points of fire damage. I was at the edge of the effect, and explosions tended to decrease by a lot as the distance increased. I had no idea how bad the damage would have been at ground zero.

I was 2200 feet in the air. There was a single crater with a thousand-foot radius. It had eaten into the bedrock and dropped down a thousand feet.

I could see spots of null time, and other spots where electricity burst forth in a continuous loop. There was ice, and places where the air itself had turned to crystal.

The crater itself had turned to glass.

There were explosions all across the city. Apparently, she'd had a dead man's switch that I'd known nothing about. She should have told me.

How many people had she murdered?

I found myself wishing that I could kill her all over again.

YOU HAVE LEVELED UP!

YOU ARE NOW LEVEL 8!

YOU HAVE 128 HIT POINTS!

A roar from behind me, and I saw Lung. He had wings and he'd grown to thirty feet tall; apparently, he'd been in combat for a while.

I only had one hit point, and there wasn't time to eat or regenerate. Lung was faster at flying than I would have expected.

Blinking away from him, I taunted him. He had enhanced hearing at this size.

"Have you lost enough yet?" I asked. "You should have stayed in your hole like the coward that you are."

I ate a candy bar and gained a few hit points.

"I told you what I was going to do," I said. "But you wouldn't listen."

I blinked directly below him and then I launched a Far Strike at his crotch.

At this size it didn't do any damage at all, even though I should have been doing 260 points.

He felt what I was trying to do, though, and he roared and dropped down toward me.

"Plane shift," I said casually.

Maybe it was time to harvest Kaiser. I thought I'd let him stew for long enough.