Since he had no idea what they might have been wearing, there was nothing for it but to look at every dead, twisted face. Each time he had to kick a corpse over, the fear would spike, making him sick to his stomach. Then there would be a small flash of relief as he confirmed it was only a stranger, but it was always colored by a mix of disgust and sadness.

All of the corpses had begun to decay, some of them bloated, but none so far gone that they were unrecognizable.

One thing he noticed through the emotional turmoil was that there were no insects feeding on the bodies. He grabbed onto that errant thought like it was a piece of driftwood in the sea of terror that he was drowning in. He wanted nothing more than for the analytical part of his mind to take over, to have at least some meager form of escape from this grim labour.

It seemed to be a part of the design of this world that there were no normal animals. Foolishly, the aliens must have applied that same logic to insects, either turning them into monsters during the Reset, or simply leaving them out. It would doubtless be a ticking time bomb for their planet, with two thirds of the total biomass having been removed. What would happen to plant life, without insects to aerate the soil, to dig channels for water and roots, to recycle dead plants into fresh topsoil, not to mention pollination?

Those thoughts, alarming as they were, allowed him to put less conscious thought into his task as he went from corpse to corpse. Still, the work was nerve racking, each body he investigated seeming to take something out of him. Whenever he spotted a body small enough to match Jasmine's build, it felt like his heart stopped beating for a moment.

By the time he was halfway through the destroyed settlement, his stomach was empty and he felt broken, squatting down with his head buried in his hands. This was the worst thing he'd ever done, worse even than repeatedly dying in that torturous VR environment.

After a long break, he forced himself to continue, his expression a mix of fear and revulsion as he kicked more corpses over. These people deserved better. He wished he could give them some kind of burial, but he knew he didn't have it in him to roam among these dead a minute longer than necessary.

The torment went on for what felt like forever, until he found himself approaching the final cluster of dead with something like hope piercing through the despair.

After he flipped the last dozen bodies and again saw no faces he recognized, Barry broke down in tears.

They could still be alive. No, they were still alive. Had to be.

It was a cathartic feeling, letting him discharge some of that intense mix of emotions he'd been wrestling with. He allowed himself to cry without restraint, knowing instinctively that he needed it.

It took some time to gather himself again, but then, after putting some distance between himself and the dead settlement, he opened his map to check his course to the next MAFT. There were about ten zones between here and there, nothing higher than a medium shade of yellow. But it would still be best to explore this and the neighboring green zones thoroughly before moving on. His family may well have fled the settlement before disaster struck.

It wasn't long before he came across another group of people, struggling to fend off a few wild boars with metal tusks. Already running at a high speed, Barry struck in a flash, taking the beasts' heads off before stowing his blades back into his MAFT storage.

"I mean you no harm," he said calmly as they flinched and scrambled back, holding out a few shoddy spears to ward him off.

"Do you need anything?" He looked them over. "You look like you're hurt," he said, pointing at a girl who looked no older than sixteen. "I have a Fixer Upper, it'll heal all superficial wounds."

When nobody spoke, he gave more reassurance. "Look, I'm a good guy, alright? You've seen what I can do. I have nothing to gain from harming you. Let me just help you with your wounds and then I'll be on my way."

After a bit more coaxing and carefully tossing them some food and his Fixer Upper, the group finally began to relax a bit. From the way they ate, they had been starving for a while. Once they were full, they began to talk and he finally learned what had happened in this zone.

Initially, things had gone well in the settlement. People went out to hunt to gather Value and with access to the MAFT, they had all the food and tools they needed. They defended successfully against their first two challenges and managed the first Quests they were given. But as more and more people joined, the pace of Quests increased and the demands on Value became harder to keep up with. There was a constant pull for Value between a need for food and other material items and a need to empower their fighters. Eventually, they failed a few critical Quests, which resulted in a massive beast wave destroying the settlement.

Many had fled before it hit, which explained why there were now so many people scattered throughout this zone. Smaller groups regularly went back to make use of the MAFT, without wanting to attempt another settlement there. But there was more.

"Especially near the end, the vibe in the settlement was… not good. It was run by these guys with guns. Most of them were soldiers, teleported from some base, but a couple of them were… what I'd call rednecks," a woman was explaining, the oldest person in their group, probably in her late thirties. "They'd voted for a guy called Jones to be in charge, but he didn't make the best decisions. Once he came under pressure, he would kind of break down and lash out," she shook her head, grimacing. "I had a bad feeling about those guys from the start. They were really conservative, you know? And not in a good way. So some of the more liberally minded folks, mostly women, ended up banding together. We left well before shit hit the fan and started a smaller settlement about a day's walk from the MAFT. At first, we kept in touch and traded Value for access to the MAFT, but then we decided to just get our own and keep to ourselves."

One of the younger women began to cry and she paused for a moment, putting her hand on her shoulder in support.

"When they left the MAFT and settlement behind ahead of the beast wave, they came for us. Called us rebels, said we were the cause of all this. We refused to let them in, so they attacked. We outnumbered them but they had a lot of guns and…" she swallowed, closing her eyes for a moment. "We ran. That was about a week ago, now. I don't even know how many survived."

Barry asked questions, first if they'd ever seen people who looked like his family, which they hadn't, then more about what had happened and where this other settlement was. As it turned out, it wasn't far from where he'd been ambushed by the three bandits. They may have been murderers, then. He'd just let them go.

He was still so thoroughly shaken from his experience in that graveyard, that the realization was just another shovelful thrown on top of a pile of thoughts and emotions that he could only deal with later.

He had no capacity left to empathize with these women's loss, letting the sad tale pass through him as he focused on his immediate goals: investigate this area for traces of his family, then move on to the next MAFT.

With a few bland words of encouragement and some food and water, he left the group behind and made for the camp that they'd run from. The thought that there may be another pile of corpses waiting for him to sift through made him feel hollow. The only way to deal with it was to distance himself from it, to shut off a part of himself and operate on auto-pilot.

It took him only ten minutes to get to the area, then another few minutes of slowly looking around until he saw it.

A small encampment set in a copse of trees, with a five foot high wooden barricade running from trunk to trunk, connecting in a vaguely circular shape around the camp proper. It was mostly a collection of wooden shacks, perhaps a dozen or so, though there was one building that stood out, looking to Barry like it could only have come from a MAFT. It looked like a shipping container, only sleeker, with smooth seams that were further covered by the whole thing being painted black.

There were quite a few guards on lookout, most of them armed with pistols or rifles, seeming tense as they watched the surrounding forest. But Barry walked right past them with his Abilities active, easily hopping over the wooden fence.

A few others sat around a smoldering campfire passing around a bottle of liquor and it took him a moment to recognize the two men from before. They looked shaken, taking heavy swigs from the bottle.

More people were milling about, some working to repair shacks or pieces of the wooden barricade, while others were cooking on another campfire. A closer look revealed that there were traces of dried blood on some of the walls, along with some bullets lodged in the wood. Taken together with the story of the group, it was clear that this camp had been taken over by force, with some people having been shot and killed. A few of the women who were cooking looked in bad shape, like they'd been beaten.

These things he noted calmly and matter-of-factly; there was no space to deal with any more emotions right now, so onto the pile they went and Barry simply moved on, looking for bodies.

When he didn't find any traces in the camp, he decided to take a more direct approach.

"Where did you leave the bodies?"

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He'd appeared out of nowhere, right behind the group that was drinking. The men flinched back, dropping the bottle and scrambling for their weapons. Two had stumbled to the ground and shouted as they crawled away on hands and feet.

"Shit! That's him! Jones! Jones!"

Barry ignored the guns they pointed at him.

"People were killed here. The bodies. Where are they," he repeated as he looked the men over, one by one.

There were more shouts, people getting to their feet, weapons being pointed at him.

One of the men had moved behind him, and with his attention focused sharply on his senses, he could hear the finger moving on the trigger, the slightest clicking and scraping of metal alerting him to what was about to happen. In an instant, Barry twisted around and grabbed the gun from the man's hand before he could pull the trigger.

He turned back around, looking right at one of the men from before, who was now shaking with wide-eyed fear.

"The bodies!" He shouted. The man flinched and still didn't speak, but his eyes flicked to the right. Barry followed his gaze to beyond the barricade. Of course. They wouldn't have buried them here.

He activated his Abilities briefly to avoid being shot at as he moved, until he was over the barricade and spotted a large trench where corpses had been stacked on top of each other. From some logs of charred wood and ash scattered across the bodies, it looked like they'd made a few attempts to burn the dead, but it hadn't gone very well.

Barry put up a pane of [Reflect Momentum] to his back, then began looking through the corpses. There were about three or four dozen, thrown carelessly onto a pile, so he had to heave the dead on the top off to be able to get a good look at the ones below.

He sank into auto-pilot, moving quickly and pragmatically, eyes flicking robotically from one body to the next as he pushed them off, ignoring the shouts coming from the camp to his back. When he pulled two corpses in the second layer aside to reveal another below, he stiffened.

He recognized those shoes. Modern sneakers, their once bright coloring of yellow and neon pink now worn down and covered in dirt and dried blood. The memory came to him instantly; the last time he'd seen these sneakers was outside of dancing class, before this nightmare had started.

They belonged to Emily.

His eyes traveled up to confirm what he'd already known and he staggered, like he'd taken a punch to the gut, bending over with his hands on his knees. He tried to hold the feelings at bay, to shove them all on top of the pile, but this was so large, so much to bear, and he was buckling under the weight of it all.

Emily. He'd barely even thought of her, after the Reset. His thoughts had been with his family, and survival, and a thousand other things. He'd all but forgotten about her. Kind, funny Emily, who'd always listened to his troubles, always tried to include him in conversations and pestered him to join her at parties.

Emily was dead now. Not a victim of the beasts created by the aliens, but killed by other people.

He slowly turned his head back in the direction of the camp.

"Did you do this?"

***

Jones had been taking a nap when the shouting started. If it was those two idiots again, he was going to kill them. They'd somehow gotten their asses beaten, and Jeffrey killed, getting all the guys in camp riled up with a crazy story about some teleporting man. Ridiculous.

It was believable that those idiots had tried to rob someone who was high-tier, but there was no Ability that made someone teleport. What they should have done was a proper assessment, bringing back actionable intel, but then, they weren't proper soldiers. Idiots that lacked training, that was what he had to work with here.

He grabbed his rifle and ran out, finding his men running around like headless chickens, most of them lining up by the barricade on the northern flank.

"I-it's the guy from before! H-he's back!" Sam shouted, barely able to get the words out. He reeked of booze.

Jones pushed him aside and went up to the rest of the men, who had their guns pointed at someone outside of the camp. There was indeed a young man and he seemed to be… digging through the corpses? He wasn't armed, nor was he wearing armor.

"Jackson, report," he snapped.

"This guy suddenly appeared out of nowhere, right behind us. Didn't seem scared of the guns, moved like lightning. Asked about where the bodies were, then went out and started looking through them."

He ordered his men to get in a proper formation, more spread out with some taking cover further back in the camp. Then he continued to observe the young man, noting the mobile MAFT on his back. That meant he could have access to weapons.

"Who are you? What do you want?" He called out, but there was no reaction. The young man just kept going through the corpses, seeming like he was looking for someone. Then, suddenly, he stiffened, staring at one of the corpses in the bottom of the pile. The man stood there for a while, bent over, looking like he might puke, when he turned his head towards them. Something in that cold gaze made a shiver run down his spine.

"Arms ready," he ordered. "Fire on my mark."

He could see the young man's lips moving, but he was too far away to hear. The man seemed to realize it and stopped himself, but then, when he next spoke, the voice came from right next to his ear.

"Did you do this?"

Jones cursed, his men flinching at the same time he did. Something was wrong here. The man must have stealth Abilities to have been able to slip by his guards, but why the hell would he waste Value on an Ability to project sound?

"High tier protocol! All Abilities on! Spread out!"

The young man straightened, looking at them with what he thought was anger in his eyes. The voice came back, louder this time.

"Did. You. Do. This?"

One of his men fired and Jones let out a choked sound as he saw the bullet stop and fall to the ground. That was [Reflect Momentum]. How damn many Abilities could one person have?

At least that one was weak against bullets which had high amounts of kinetic energy. The man's PE Capacity should be drained with just a few volleys.

"Staggered fire!" He called out, and his men began to fire in succession, slow controlled bursts as he'd taught them. That, at least, they did get right.

But their target did not look the least bit concerned. As bullets continued to pile up in front of the man, a chill ran through Jones's body.

"DID YOU DO THIS?"

This time the question came as a deafening blast of sound, making them stumble back and cry out as they grabbed at their ears. Jones was shocked and confused, his ears were ringing-

"They were rebels! Jones, what should we do?"

The man disappeared as one of his men cried out an answer. Jones lifted his rifle, scanning for a sign of movement as his heart pounded in his ears. There, footprints. But they were moving so fast-

"Trace the footprints-"

His shout died in his throat as the man reappeared behind Jackson, an odd white blade cutting through the soldier's neck. Jones reacted in an instant, turning his rifle and firing, but the man was already gone. Footprints, in his direction, shit, he had to-

***

As soon as the tip of Barry's blade whispered along the soldier's neck, cutting just deep enough to sever the spine, he was ducking and on to the next one. This one had been the ringleader, he thought. The name and circumstances had been evidence enough.

These men needed to die.

His blade went through another neck like butter and just like that, the lights went out and the man collapsed like a puppet. Fast and painless. It was better than they deserved. The soldiers were firing wildly, shouting, trying to trace his movements, but they moved so slowly, almost as if they were underwater.

He traced the movement of the next target's gun, swerved to the left in his approach to get out of the line of fire, then turned around the man's back and slashed at his neck. The soldier had somehow felt what was coming and tried to jerk back at the last moment, but he moved towards the blade so that it cut deeper than intended. The man's head flopped all the way forward as he hit the ground, hanging on only by a thin flap of cartilage and skin, blood shooting out of his artery.

Barry didn't feel sick this time, only laser-focused on his task. Another nasty chore that needed doing, just like pushing the corpses aside.

He glanced up and spotted three men fleeing. Focusing on the nearest one, he took four long strides, the white scimitar just barely kissing the neck and then the soldier fell limply down. He had to twist out of the way of more shots as he went after the next soldier, but it was one a matter of seconds before the next one was down.

Only when he looked up, searching for the last of the soldiers, did he notice that there were more people. Civilians. Some were running away screaming, others staring at him with horror.

He cursed inwardly at having gotten too focused and lost sight of his surroundings again. Where was the soldier-

There. Hiding behind a woman… no, he'd taken her hostage. He held a gun to her temple, and for whatever reason, his hand was in her jacket pocket.

Barry blinked twice, feeling like he was waking up from a dream. What the hell was he doing? This was reckless. He hadn't considered collateral damage at all. This place was full of innocent people and bullets had been flying-

"Stay away! I'll blow her fucking brains out!" The man was panting, gun-hand shaking as he looked at Barry with wild eyes.

He felt like he had more clarity now and his mind was racing. There were at least forty yards between them and he still had to accelerate, so it would take too long to cross. If he disappeared, the man might pull the trigger. A flashbang would likely have the same result. Could he fit a pane of [Reflect Momentum] right in front of the trigger? No, too risky, it could simply fail. But… Yes, there was another Ability, one he'd used only once or twice.

He activated [Infuse Momentum], holding up his hands in an attempt to calm the man down as he carefully targeted the pistol in his hand, pointing the arrow for the direction of force straight up, allocating more than enough PE…

"Don't come any closer! I've got a-"

The gun jerked up, flying out of the man's hand, and Barry launched himself forward with all the speed he could muster. There was a faint clicking sound of metal on metal that he couldn't quite place as he blasted ahead. The soldier cried out, pushing the woman at him, but it was trivial to twist past her, taking the final few steps as he brought his blade around.

Only when he cut the soldier's head off, did he notice the pin in his hand.

The pin of a grenade. He had a fucking grenade.

His heart hammered as he turned and sprang back, stowing his blades in his MAFT with a mental command, lunging for the woman who had fallen to the ground. He wasted a precious second digging in her pocket with his left hand as he easily lifted her up with his right. He finally felt the ribbed surface of the grenade, hurled the woman to his right as he grabbed it, then twisted to the left and thr-

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