1% Lifesteal

He got smashed yesterday. Today, from the instant he woke up, he was ready for action.

While he was tempted to take a few days off and allow himself to relax a bit, he didn't want to become complacent. There were things to do. Important things.

Repentawa wasn't a metropolis, but it was a city nonetheless, full of leaders and servants, rivals and friends—who knew who, who owned what, who lived where, who hated who—it mattered. The political climate was full of extreme weather events, and keeping track of the patterns was important for anyone who didn't want to get caught in a storm.

Freddy was one of those people. And by god, he was ready to befriend thunder itself.

That being said, making friends was easier said than done. And besides, he wasn't really out here to "make friends." He was trying to establish mutually beneficial relationships with as many of the local powers as possible.

But what would he provide? Just being a peak two-star wasn't enough to give him a lot of political credit.

And who would he make allies with? It wasn't that he just didn't know who the local powers were—he didn't know the relationships between them.

If A and B were mortal enemies, he could only choose one side. If A happened to also be friends with C, they were better a choice than B, who was politically outmuscled. But if A and C were insanely sketchy and dealt in terrible things, he'd rather take his chances with B.

While he was ready to kill, he did not want to side with villains. He was aware that this mindset—especially in the Northern Belt—put him at somewhat of a disadvantage, but that didn't mean he would do literally anything for personal benefit. He had boundaries.

But he was willing to overlook… some stuff. Like financial crime. He didn't give a single shit about tax evasion or theft from competitors. He had a strong dislike of running gambling rings, but he could tolerate it.

Also murder. Depending on context, of course.

He wasn't exactly the purest maiden in the village, and neither was he the cleanest pair of tighty whities in the laundry basket.

He'd be a hypocrite and a fool to go all hero of the masses. He was in the Northern Belt. This wasn't exactly a place where he'd find righteous factions to side with. Still, stuff like dealing hard drugs and human trafficking of any kind was something he could never tolerate.

The first order of business was quite simple. Information.

If he had a hundred obedient spirits like Bloodshed, he'd send them off to spy on people until he got a complete picture of the inner workings of the city. But he didn't.

That left him with only a few options.

He could directly befriend someone powerful and then, through conversation, extract information. This was the last option by default, since it required him to get involved without knowing the lay of the land.

He could also try and step into contact with an information dealer, but that risked putting him on the locals' radar.

But he had a different idea.

He visited several nearby stores and noted any local magazines and newspapers up for sale. He noted the companies' names and then looked for their locations. There were seven places he needed to visit.

While putting his two-star prowess on full display, he went to all of the businesses personally and asked for a copy of every edition they'd published for the last ten years.

It cost him quite the sum, but he managed to obtain a number of huge boxes full of published articles.

Then he got to sorting.

The speed at which a two-star could read was nothing to scoff at. As a two-star, Freddy also had a much better memory than ordinary people. Together with the help of 1% Lifesteal, a massive pile of energy drinks, and several long days of research, he had a pretty decent picture of how things worked in Repentawa.

Freddy stood in his living room wearing nothing but his silk robes and underwear and holding a can of energy drink. His beard was starting to get messy. He slumped on an armchair, swung his arm back, scratched the back of his head, blew some air through pursed lips, and took a sip from the can.

Before him was a wall full of cutout images and articles, all connected with red string and sorted into piles of valuable information.

It was clear as day that the local journalists were spineless.

First, he analyzed whose dick the newspapers sucked the hardest. That was most likely the faction that owned them. Then depending on how they reported on other factions, he could tell who they were enemies and allies with.

There were five major factions in play. Two of them were strong allies, while the other three seemed to keep each other at arm's length, although they weren't strangers to cooperating to keep the other two in check.

The number of violent incidents between two "mysterious groups," as the newspapers called them, suggested that there was a lot of fighting between the major factions.

There was also a fun pattern of a new, smaller faction appearing, then getting slandered to hell and back, and finally, when they were "righteously eliminated" by one of the local powers, it magically turned out that they were responsible for all this bad shit that had been happening for way longer than the faction was even around.

A good number of these smaller players were probably just puppets of one of the more prominent factions, created to take the fall when an operation went bust, and a more minor part was new powers trying to break through—whether they were actually criminals or not it was hard to tell.

Unfortunately, this made it nearly impossible to tell which faction dealt with what kind of dirty work—if anything, it seemed like all of them were willing to at least dabble in things he wasn't willing to tolerate.

Except for one possible outlier.

Around six years ago, a smaller player appeared. They hadn't expired since, mainly because of the powerful three-star at the helm—a man who went by Thor, which Freddy found really funny because the man had the lightning affinity.

According to the newspapers, this organization, which went by Valhalla—again, super hilarious—was guilty of doing an incredible amount of dirty work. Most commonly, dangerous and harmful "terrorist vigilantism".

Valhalla dabbled in tearing criminal operations apart, and the newspaper always made it seem like they were just "annihilating the competition" or even "plundering the contraband for themselves."

Freddy was inclined to believe that if anyone in this city was worth allying with, it was these guys. They were probably the main reason why Repentawa had the reputation it did.

Granted, their leader did himself no favors with his appearance. The dude was a heavily tattooed skinhead with a goatee. It was hard to look more criminal than that.

Sighing, he took a deep gulp of his beverage. This wasn't looking good. If he really couldn't find a single half-decent faction to try and partner with, he'd rather sell the apartment and move elsewhere. It wasn't just a matter of moral values, either—allying with nasty fucks would make him a target of the aforementioned "terrorist vigilantism." He was in no mood to brawl with Thor or any other superhero wannabes.

It was too early to say anything for sure. He had a good picture of who was who and how not to accidentally offend them.

Besides, before he could even dream of becoming an "ally" rather than an "employee," he needed to have something of value to offer. Personal strength wasn't a bad choice, especially if he assembled a decent party of fighters. But there were other options, too.

He could also start and grow a company that filled a hole in the local market. There were a few issues that Repentawa struggled with, like commercial goods transportation to and from other settlements. If he could start a transport company and grow it before someone tore him to shreds, he'd be in a great spot.

But he needed more personal power before any of this could take place. Mainly, he needed to shore up his core weaknesses and learn how to actually fight.

Repentawa had only a single passage. This was a common pattern in the Northern Belt—the area was pretty thin in ether density.

Thus, this passage wasn't owned by anyone, as enforced by the empire.

Surprisingly, there was also a dungeon not too deep in there, and it was a very peculiar one. The entrance was unlocked every six hours, and as many people as wanted could enter inside.

The dungeon was a fortress in the middle of a vast grass field. Over six hours, escalating waves of enemies would rush at the fortress, and whoever was inside had to fend them off. Depending on how many soldiers every individual defeated, they'd get a special reward.

Most people just got a bag of silver coins, more or less depending on the number of soldiers they took down. But if a fighter could make an outstanding contribution, they could also get special rewards, primarily weapons, neither cursed nor inscribed but relatively high in quality and made from decent material.

While this dungeon technically ran four times a day, it was usually only populated once or twice a day, sometimes not at all.

Nobody wanted to enter if there weren't enough participants because if the fortress was overrun, it was game over. Surviving even in that situation was technically possible, but it was not easy.

There were a few other things that were peculiar about this dungeon.

Only a select few elite enemies provided ether. This was a shame for a few reasons. It made the dungeon a poor place to gather and meant that ordinary enemies didn't help with essence recovery. Thankfully, this also meant that the elites were the only troops that could appear as deviants.

Another thing that was very strange about this dungeon was the enemies were… humans, at least in appearance. This wasn't unheard of, but it was uncommon. They couldn't be reasoned with, though; they just spouted random war chants and profanities. But they could be demoralized.

To Freddy, this sounded like a great place to practice his throwing abilities. The fortress itself was full of supplies, including an infinitely respawning reserve of ammo like throwing javelins, arrows, and even boulders and bolts to launch from catapults and ballistae.

While the value of this dungeon was only middle of the road, it sounded like an absolute fucking blast to participate in. It also sounded like a decent place to practice fighting. He couldn't wait to check it out.

Scratching his thick beard, Freddy got up and took a shower.

Before he could go do anything, he had a shopping trip to get out of the way.

As for his purchases, he kept his budget under a million dollars since he didn't want to blow all his savings at once. That only left him with a relatively small cushion of half a million.

It was the same arrangement as last time—high-quality helmet, vest, vambraces, and boots, with many layers of minor middle-quality gear.

As soon as he approached the passage hub, it was clear as day that it wasn't privately owned.

The passage itself was open and sitting in the middle of the city, surrounded by numerous stands where traders from different companies were haggling for whatever goods were brought out of the interspace. Not too far from the passage entrance, small groups of healers waited patiently for anyone injured to come out looking for their services.

This was a true open passage—there were no fees or counters where he had to register and no rules anyone had to follow. Conversely, this likely meant that the first few steps had been plundered clean long ago.

Before going in there, Freddy walked up to one of the stores selling equipment and purchased a guide. It cost five thousand dollars, which was annoying but to be expected.

The guide was quite hefty, with maps and detailed routes to all the discovered passages within.

There was a lot of reading to be done.

Because the entrance took to a relatively weak section of the interspace, this part had been explored up to quite a few steps out. Given that, with every new step, there was an exponentially higher number of new passages to find, it added up really quickly.

To Freddy's surprise, there were actually two routes that took to places in entirely different parts of the world. This wasn't uncommon, given that the entire interspace was interconnected, but it was still a crazy thing to consider.

In less than an hour of walking, he could be in Yugoslavia or on a small unnamed island.

Well, Yugoslavia and the American Empire had established a border and sealed the path off, but it wasn't impossible to break through it.

If there was less hostility between sovereign nations, it would be easy to get anywhere in the world. But alas.

It would take him longer to read through the whole guide than to scan the last ten years of local news, so he chose a few interesting paths and studied them.

After around two hours of reading, he headed in for his first run into the local interspace.

Just as he got off the bench and headed for the passage, he spotted something that immediately caught his attention.

There was a kid that looked no older than maybe 18 or 19. He was walking forward in oversized equipment with a small shortsword strapped to his waist. He was skinny and maybe of average height. His short, black hair was combed back, and his eyes were flickering all over the place. A lump was visibly stuck halfway up his throat, and his steps were incredibly nervous.

Inexperienced and underequipped folk weren't an infrequent sight around these parts. The local interspace was relatively easy to handle, so even one-stars shouldn't have too much trouble going at it alone.

But this kid wasn't a one-star.

He was a mortal.

Well, he seemed to be, at least. Freddy couldn't feel the kid's soul.

Suddenly, Freddy was struck by a thought. This young man seemed like an ordinary citizen. It was improbable that he had any connections to the local powers. At the very least, he didn't recognize his face from any of the numerous articles he'd read. He didn't even resemble anyone Freddy had seen.

If he was trying to be more social, he should probably try to socialize more. What better person to get some practice on than someone who didn't seem involved with the local politics?

…

Well that sounded like a good idea in theory. But Freddy felt queasy at the thought. Why? This was just some pathetic kid who was probably up to something idiotic…

So why did he feel so anxious about approaching him?

His palms were sweating beneath his gloves, and his heart rate was elevated.

Come on now… he chided himself mentally. You can't seriously be nervous?

Freddy didn't find it hard to talk to people per se. But his mind went back to that time he approached that receptionist girl. That shit sucked. Putting yourself out there only to be shot down wasn't a pleasant experience. To Freddy, who had spent most of his life playing the social reject, trying to make friends was a spine-chilling thought, even with some random civilian.

No good, he thought. If I want to get anywhere, I'm gonna have to get over this.

And with that thought, he got up and approached the young man before him.

***

Lucas was having a real crappy day. And week. And month. And year. Honestly, he didn't remember the last time his life wasn't miserable.

There he was, standing in his dead brother's old gear, quivering like a coward and second-thinking the life choices that brought him there. The worst part was that it wasn't even his fault.

His dumb broad of a mother got herself in trouble again. After gambling all their savings and a large loan away, she was being threatened into paying it back as quickly as possible. Else, both she and Lucas were getting their kneecaps removed. And not surgically, either.

Though they might lose their kidneys surgically. And half their lungs. And probably a part of their liver. Maybe a finger or two… What other parts of the human body were worth money?

At any rate, they needed a miracle to get out of this one. And there was only one thing Lucas could think of. "Come on, you got this, man," he told himself as he squared his shoulders up and finally looked straight at the passage.

Prime vestige manifestation. Little was known about the phenomenon, but fighting against monsters could help people generate one. Most people died before getting that far, but there was a good number of people who succeeded.

His older brother had been one of them. Well he didn't last long after getting his talent, but he did manage to get it.

"God, I can't do this," he mumbled as he shrank again.

Whoever the hell was in charge of his fortune, would it kill them to throw him a bone sometimes?

"Hey there," Lucas heard a deep and intimidating voice call from his side.

He turned around and froze. An armored giant of a man was staring down at him.

The man proceeded to take his helmet off, only to reveal a full, thick beard and angular features beneath. The man's gaze was predatory and intense, like a hawk staring down at a mouse.

Lucas felt his buttcheeks clench. "H-hi?"

"Hello," the man said again and smiled tensely. "I'm Freddy stuuu…" The man coughed. "I'm Freddy Cliff. Nice to meet you."

Why was this man introducing himself? What was happening?

"Uh… Hi?" Lucas tried dumbly. "Can I help you?"

"Sorry for being rude, but you're a mortal, right?"

Lucas tensed and nodded briefly.

"And you're planning to head into the passage?"

Lucas winced at that and then nodded reluctantly.

The man laughed with a voice that made Lucas's chest tighten, and he nodded vigorously. "You're a pretty brave dude. If you don't mind, you uh… You want me to come with you?"

Lucas's lips tightened into a line. "Yeeeaah… Sure thing, man! I'd… Oh, I'd really love to, but I uh—"

"Great!" The man lightly slapped Lucas's back, causing him to stumble forward a bit. It felt like a horse had kicked him. "You have anything to do before we set off—oh, yeah, I forgot, what's your name?"

"I'm… I'm Lucas," he said. "Lucas Black. And I can go uhm… whenever… whenever you want…"

"Great! Let's uhm… Let's go then."

"Sure thing," he eked out. I'm so losing my kidneys today.