1% Lifesteal

Once he spotted the lights, rather than rush out and introduce himself, the first thing Freddy did instead was turn back around and jog to his hideout.

He prepared his ID, putting it in a pocket.

He cut off the ring finger on his left arm to remove the Blood Ring from there, then he hid the ring in his storage ring. He cut a small incision in his right calf and inserted the storage ring under his skin. It was soon joined by the two cultists’ rings, as well as Sophia’s, which he had also picked up.

Given that the spark of undeath was in the storage ring, he had to cut some grass to heal the wound and seal the rings inside his leg. It was a bit uncomfortable but completely unnoticeable.

Well then.

He sat down on the grass and took a few deep breaths to calm himself.

Naturally, he’d thought through the possibilities and planned what he would do ahead of time.

The best case scenario would be if he could wait another few months for the open passage to be renovated and then just sneak out, pretending to be one of the delvers.

The only clothing he had was a roughly shorts-shaped piece of tattered cloth protecting his privates, but that wouldn’t be too weird. It wasn’t that uncommon to have one’s equipment melted off by a deviant.

But there was one small problem with this ideal scenario—it was unlikely that this passage would remain open.

From the destruction to the appearance of the asura to the numerous deaths, he doubted the average solo delver would brave entering this place for a long, long time. Even if people wanted to return, repairing the damage caused by all that happened would take a while.

The most likely outcome was that this passage would be turned into a private one, and there was also a non-zero chance that it would be permanently sealed if the risk of the asura appearing again was determined to be too great.

In the end, the outcome depended on what exactly happened while Freddy was unconscious.

At any rate, unless he wanted to become a permanent resident of the wild interspace, where he would basically be waiting to get eaten by something, he only had one viable way out—he had to go and ask for help.

Would he get arrested and interrogated? Undoubtedly. Thankfully, he had the evidence on his side. He, indeed, wasn’t one of the cultists. Sophia would have been screwed if she was still in one piece, but the only thing tying him to the cult was… well… Sophia.

And he could very well just say he had no idea she had ties to the cult.

Hopefully, she wouldn’t mind that he threw her under the bus.

With that out of the way, he took one last glance in the direction of the lake. The water shimmered peacefully, and for a long moment, he felt a bit nostalgic. The last few months were the most peaceful months he’d had in… ever, actually. If it weren’t for the risks, he’d almost be seriously considering becoming an interspace hermit.

He chuckled and got up to his feet.

At a slow jog, he made his way through the capragorn realm. As soon as he walked through the passage leading back into the gorel realm, he started screaming. “Hey! Over here! Hey! Help!”

Minutes later, several scouts appeared from the bushes. “Hands behind your back!” a man with a large spear shouted. “On your knees!”

Freddy complied with both commands. “Oh… Thank God. I thought I would be stuck here forever…” he said. He tried acting out what he believed would be an appropriate amount of relief. To his surprise, it came very easily. Tears streaked down his cheeks.

The man with the spear stepped forward and placed the point of the spear to Freddy’s forehead. “Name yourself and the faction you belong to!”

“Liam Cuttingsworth, unaffiliated,” he answered.

“Do you have your ID with you?” the man asked.

Freddy nodded.

“Where is it?”

“My right pocket.”

A small tendril of darkness extended from the shaft of the man’s spear and sank into Freddy’s pocket, extracting the ID. The man looked it over and nodded. “You will be restrained and taken into custody. Do not resist.”

***

Freddy wasn’t tortured.

But to say that the interrogation went smoothly would be a blatant lie.

He thanked his lucky stars that he had studied Liam’s documents. This whole situation was so massive, apparently, that literally everyone who was even vaguely involved with it had been thoroughly investigated. In many areas, these investigators knew more about Liam than the man had probably known about himself.

There were a few odd questions he had to improvise the answers to. Such as why he called himself Liam Johnson in public, why and where he vanished for two years, how he got to the peak of the second star so quickly, why he claimed his talent was related to regeneration when he used to claim that his talent was a generic strength-boost, and why he was involved with Sophia Summer.

He bullshitted his way through the questions, sticking close enough to the truth to leave no gaps. The interrogators repeatedly asked the same questions, sometimes slightly rephrased or in reverse, likely to try and catch him in a lie.

But his months of preparation weren’t for nothing. He made sure to keep his story straight.

He called himself Liam Johnson to distance himself from his real name due to his past, which was very reasonable given the life the man had lived.

He vanished for two years because he was focused on training and improving himself so he could escape his life, and he claimed to have reached the second star a long time ago, he just hadn’t reported it until he had to update his ID before travelling to Nova York.

The reason why he “claimed to have a strength-boosting talent” before was because he intenionally kept his far superior talent a secret to stay out of trouble with his enemies.

And finally, he was involved with Sophia Summer because she was hot and he was trying to get with her. He definitely had no idea that she was involved with the cult. They accepted this excuse most readily out of all of them.

Well, it was pretty realistic.

On the plus side of them thoroughly digging into him, they had already gathered enough evidence to decisively conclude that he had nothing to do with the cult. On the negative side, Liam Cuttingsworth was a fucking criminal, and Freddy was now being prosecuted in his stead.

Dealing drugs, breaking and entering, battery, assault, racketeering, tax evasion—even goddamn sexual assault was on the table.

Liam had been one hell of a piece of shit.

Thankfully, as a peak two-star archhuman, very different standards and procedures applied to him. The more powerful one got, the more easily they could get away with bending the law.

A peak two-star was too valuable to society to get thrown behind bars for just any reason.

He wouldn’t call sexual assault “just any reason,” but the morbid reality of the situation was that it wasn’t considered serious enough to land him in prison.

It was, however, together with all the other crimes he was accused of, enough to get him stuck with a 2.5 million dollar fine.

Ouch.

After spending three weeks in custody while everything got sorted, he was finally free to go.

Exactly 4 months and 28 days passed since he got trapped in that passage. The date was the 28th of October, year 2217.

His cuffs were removed, and he was taken out of his cell.

Wearing a white T-shirt and grey sweatpants, Freddy stepped out into a particularly chilly but beautiful fall day. It was late afternoon. The distant sun cast its gentle light through a small scattering of colorful clouds, giving them a golden lining and pink body. The air felt rather clean, fresh, and just slightly humid. The streets were scattered with puddles and people moved about, going about their lives.

The cool air brushed across his lightly exposed skin, sending chills and goosebumps across his body. His shirt fluttered in the wind, revealing abdominal muscles that looked like a godlike sculptor had chiseled them to perfection.

He had no time to appreciate any of this. Instead, he ran to the closest cafe and sprinted into the toilet. There, he conjured a tiny blade of blood on his finger and dug into his leg. After a messy few seconds of digging, he extracted all the storage rings he had shoved into his calf.

With trepidation, he pulled Sophia’s head out. For a long moment, he feared the worst. Mold or discolored patches would be a surefire sign that something had gone wrong.

As it finally appeared in his grasp, he sighed a small breath of relief. There was no discoloration, and it smelled like nothing at all. It looked like his vigorous decontamination had kept it safe.

He used Purify for a few minutes on it just in case before returning it to his ring.

After returning his Blood Ring back on his finger and having it bite through his skin and into his bone again, he walked out and sat in the cafe.

It was a quaint little place with rustic decor and plush, large seats. The people inside were mostly on the older end—mortal folk in their fifties and sixties. He watched them flip through newspapers, his enhanced perception allowing him to catch a glance at a headline. To his surprise, even so many months later, there was still a small article talking about what happened with the passages.

It seemed that the Santorio hub wasn’t the only place impacted by the cultists.

His interest piqued, Freddy asked the waiter whether they kept any older copies of newspapers somewhere in the back. They didn’t. But, they did have a large volume collection of numerous articles that had been published on the subject, which was even better.

Just as his coffee arrived, so did the massive catalog of articles. It was so damn huge he could kill someone with it.

He picked it up and cracked it open. The aromatic cup of coffee tickled his nostrils. Passionately, he took a long, deep gulp and let it wash over his tongue, warming his mouth and throat as he felt the caffeine kick buzzing his brain. “God fucking damn I missed coffee.” He placed the cup back on the table and breathed out a sigh of satisfaction.

And with that, he started reading.

The text came with numerous revelations and surprises. The cult. or rather, the Republic of Prosperity, as it was called, had been completely destroyed. He snorted at the fact that they called themselves a “republic.” Once it was discovered that they were the culprits, the empress personally visited them to help disband their faction and arrest the members.

Many of them got the death sentence.

But the thing he found most surprising was the report of the man behind the cult—it was Nathaniel Kirurg. The man also known as Silver Heart. Freddy thought back to the figure he saw facing the empress. A horrible chill went down his spine as he realized who that person had been.

He was one of the first people ever to reach the third star. And what did he do with that power? He made a massive harem and declared himself the ruler of an enormous area. His attempt to establish himself as a leader failed once he was taken down by a group of renowned heroes, including the currently-reigning empress.

Their meeting must have been one hell of a reunion.

Freddy wondered how that man managed to survive a literal execution. But, well, who knew what exactly happened back then.

The empress once more claimed that the man had died in the realm but didn’t disclose how and didn’t take credit for his demise. Yet again, Freddy had to wonder whether the man was actually dead or not.

He saw no mentions of the asura, but there was plenty of speculation about the “mysterious power” that chased even the empress herself out of the realm.

There were so many trash articles trying to squeeze as much juice out of the story as possible. More than one headline was about the private life of a delver speculated to be trapped within the passage.

Even he had an article dedicated to him, and it was a good one, too. They talked about his strange, stoic appearance and his sudden rise from a helper for another party to someone who could retrieve as many as… 200 gorels a day?

He didn’t quite remember doing that.

That wasn’t the only detail that was unbelievably exaggerated and even outright false. For example, claims about his talent and abilities weren’t even in the same ballpark as reality. Apparently, he was an assassin with dark and death affinities and a talent that allowed him to sneak up on opponents unnoticed. They even briefly mentioned Sophia, citing her as his lover.

Then, they made up a story about where he came from, followed by an entirely fictional tale about his education in a poorer archhuman academy.

It was so absurd that he was starting to doubt the legitimacy of much of the information presented. It took all the willpower he had not to start laughing out loud at the absurd claims.

As he made it past that and into the reports about the death count… it stopped being funny.

Almost nobody survived the ordeal.

Not just in Santorio, either; all the affected areas had high death counts.

Right around the time the empress escaped from the realm, a handful of delvers also made their way out. All of them were with the groups the scouts retrieved. Out of the seven survivors, he, surprisingly, recognized three of them.

Theodore Osborne, Jacob Santorio… and Beatrice Osborne.

While he technically didn’t have anything to do with the woman, he still felt relieved that she had survived. Had she died in a terrorist attack that would be pretty much the worst way to conclude the absolute disaster that happened between them.

There was a lot of information about the other passages affected, but most of those were resolved with comparative ease.

He slammed the volume closed at around 9 p.m. and headed home.

While it was a bit of a waste of money, he had been paying rent for the past five months due to the automatic payment he had set up. At least that meant he had a place to stay.

His keys were in his storage ring, and he took them out to unlock the door. The moment he stepped inside, he noticed something strange.

He found several pairs of shoes, including female ones. Confused, he made his way towards the room, only to find an absolutely terrified couple screaming and shouting at him. The man threw a bedside lamp, and the woman repeatedly shouted “Intruder! Intruder!”

Freddy was furious. “What the fuck are you doing in my apartment!?” he yelled at the couple, who did not look apologetic at his accusation.

“Get the hell out!” the man kept yelling.

Thoroughly bewildered, Freddy ran outside, ready to kill the landlord if he didn’t explain himself.

His angry knocking woke up the owner of the building, who looked quite shocked to see him.

The man’s explanation, while still infuriating, made sense. It was unfortunate, but it wasn’t anyone’s fault. Freddy’s bank account was frozen after he was presumed dead, and the monthly payments for the apartment stopped coming in.

Truth be told, the owner could have been more prudent and changed the goddamn lock to ensure that something like this didn’t happen. But it was hard to blame the man, given what people thought happened to Freddy. And besides, he could have also visited the landlord beforehand to ensure that nothing was out of the ordinary.

At any rate, pushing the issue wasn’t worth it.

Once he apologized for the disturbance to both the landlord and the couple, he sighed and went to a hotel instead.

He didn’t go for anything fancy. He rented a small room for 300 bucks just to have a place to sleep through the night. That was still quite pricey, though.

After a decent night of rest, he quickly got up and rushed outside.

From helping bring Sophia back to life, to training, to getting more money…

He had a lot of work to do.