Defiance of the Fall

Chapter 118: Recruitment

Zac was stumped, even forgetting his pain for a second as he saw the heaving girl standing over the mangled corpse of the Mayor. It looked like turning him over wasn’t an option anymore. The other girls in the room were also staring blankly at their companion and the man who likely had been the source of no small amount of grief.

Not sure what else to do Zac sighed and walked over to the government worker and put the mangled corpse into his Cosmos Sack. The girl warily looked at him, her eyes widening a bit at the magical display of the pouch.

“When these cultivators returned from the Tutorial they killed a group of townspeople who defended Greenworth after the integration. Do you know what happened with the bodies?” Zac asked as he looked up at the girl still wielding a piece of shrapnel.

She appeared to be somewhere around her twenties and was quite beautiful. In fact, all of the girls in the room were, and their skimpy clothing did nothing to hide their curvaceous bodies. However, their eyes quickly told anyone that they were not willingly standing in this house, as they were hard as stone, marred by whatever they had experienced the past months. No one said anything for a while, until a small voice from the back row of women could be heard.

“They… They were buried to the north side of the inner wall. There was a park there before, but it has turned into a cemetery for those the council had killed,” a young girl finally answered.

Zac nodded and turned to leave.

“Wait!” the woman with the makeshift weapon suddenly shouted after him.

Zac didn’t really want to deal with these girls, as his mind still was on his father’s remains.

“You can all leave. I will talk to the leaders of New Washington and have them send a proper Mayor here,” he said.

“That’s not it. Take us with you,” she said with a somber expression.

That made Zac stop and turn around with a serious face. His once again looked over the group, this time using [Eye of Discernment]. As he suspected none of the girls were strong, the highest being level 14. If they were powerful they would not have been in their current situation, dressed as belly-dancers or courtesans of a harem.

“I am sorry, but you are of no use to me. I need warriors, not more refugees,” Zac immediately shot her down.

“But you can train us! You must be a high ranker from your aura and what you did in here. Thom was over level 30, but he was helpless against you,” she refuted.

“Train you? You are all barely level ten. Helping you attain a power that could contend against the forces of the world would take an immense amount of resources, why should I do that?”

[Joanna wishes to enter a Contract of Binding. Time: Indefinite. Accept?]

Zac’s brows rose as he saw the prompt appear in front of him. He knew about the Contracts of Binding from Calrin. None of the demons actually mentioned it to him, even though they usually were his main sources of information. Zac assumed that they were afraid he would try to impose it on them in the future.

A Binding Contract contract was more accurately named an employment contract. It made a person a subordinate who couldn’t betray their employer. His orders would to a certain degree become compulsions as well, unless giving a detrimental order, such as committing suicide or ruining their cultivation. That of course only was true for the type of employment. If he contracted this woman as a soldier he couldn’t order anything about her private life.

Furthermore, one essentially had to enter the contract willingly, and you could set the duration yourself. It was a normal method for Clans in the multi-verse to make sure of the allegiance when hiring people, such as external warriors for war or exploration of a mystical realm.

But could also be a tool to permanently bind a person to a force, as was the case with the prompt in front of him. The time was set to indefinite, and only Zac could rip the contract and free the girl. The only other way for her to get free was to reach a higher level than him. Zac had thought about forcing this type of contract on the demons after hearing about it, but he learned that it was impossible for the same reason.

Apparently it was impossible to use on people of a higher level, and pretty much all of the demons were higher level than him. It was simply that the restrictions on the invaders were still in place, making it easy to forget that almost all of them were at the bottleneck, working at either their Dao or their Constitution in order to evolve. The System wanted to promote the strong, so it wouldn’t allow the strong be in servitude of the weak. Of course, Zac’s power level was actually higher than the demons’, but his situation was a bit unique.

Zac stared for some time at the woman who apparently was called Joanna. She had a steely determination in her eyes that he hadn’t even seen in Emily, who herself craved power.

“… Are you sure about this? You will likely be sent to bloody battlefields fighting both humans and aliens if you follow me. And that is if you even survive training,” Zac said as he stared her down.

An idea was forming in his mind as he looked at Joanna and the others, but she alone wouldn’t cut it.

“As long as you give me power nothing else matter,” she said, not flinching the slightest from Zac’s stare.

Zac finally accepted the prompt, feeling a mental connection forming. It was not like gaining another limb, just an additional awareness in the corner of his mind. He took out a spear and slammed into the ground in front of her, and then took out a female’s leather armor from his pouch.

“Don’t lose these. If you do you’ll have to purchase new ones with your own money, and the amount of slaughter needed to afford them will probably kill you,” Zac said.

Joanna eagerly looked at the gear, and without hesitation took off the little clothes she had on. Zac unashamedly looked on, reminded that it actually had been months since he’d been with Hannah. He forced himself to refocus as Joanna equipped the gear, and after some struggle managed to pull out the spear from the ground.

With demon armor and a spear in her hand her aura completely changed. She already had the steely gaze of a warrior, but now she had the appearance to match it. Of course, some weaponry didn’t change the fact that she still was a level 13 weakling, but she did look quite heroic.

“I am leaving Greenworth in two hours. The offer Joanna received stands for all of you. But let me make it clear. I am not offering you freedom. I am offering you power. You’re welcome to choose freedom instead and stay behind. Though you should know that things might get chaotic with both the Mayor and the Council dead. Those who wish to follow me, gather with Joanna outside these mansions in two hours,” Zac said as he disappeared with his movement skill.

He quickly exited the house and found some soldiers hesitantly standing in the distance. They should have heard the commotion, and unless they were blind they should have seen Zac’s final strike where he almost ripped the mansion in two. Zac frowned, not in the mood to start killing the soldiers. He wanted to avoid further bloodshed, already regretting massacring the warriors at the gate in his rage.

“We mean you no harm,” one of the older soldiers shouted from the distance. “We just need to know what’s going on. Scouts report of a beast horde arriving within the hour, and we need to prepare.”

“The council members are dead. The mayor is dead,” Zac simply said. “I will eradicate the horde for you, but after that you’re on your own.”

None of the soldiers looked overly surprised by the news. Their captain simply nodded.

“There are over a thousand boars heading our way from the north. The council usually gather outside the town to fight in order to avoid the destruction of property,” he simply said.

“I will join you in an hour,” Zac said as he disappeared, once again moving with [Loamwalker].

He kept speeding away and soon reached the park that one of the former slave girls mentioned. The area was filled with mounds of overturned earth, some graves old and some clearly made within the last week. All in all there had to be hundreds of bodies buried across the area, giving it a gloomy atmosphere.

Zac had no idea which one of the mounds contained his father so he could only walk along aimlessly. He noticed a large boulder lying some distance away and walked over to it. With six quick swings a towering monolith was created that Zac lifted up with a grunt.

He walked over to the center of the park and placed it by an intersection of two somewhat overgrown paths. Using his inhuman power he pushed it some ways into the ground, securing it in place. Seeing it was stable he carved two simple lines in the monument.

Gone but not Forgotten

Rest in Peace

Afterward he simply sat down, reminiscing about the past. The park was empty except for himself and his thoughts, and there was a heaviness in the silence. It was as though it blended with the heaviness in Zac’s heart, and became a palpable thing around him. If a human walked close to Zac at this moment it wouldn’t be surprising if they would be physically impacted by the mood.

Zac didn’t move as one memory after another flitted through his mind. Finally he opened up his eyes after roughly an hour. He sighed and got to his feet, and took one last glance around.

“I promise I’ll find Kenzie, if it’s the last thing I do,” he said as he lightly touched the monolith.

With that he pushed north, to help out his hometown one last time. With neither his father nor sister around, he honestly didn’t care too much about Greenworth. He didn’t really have any close friends anymore, rather co-workers and acquaintances. His closest friend died 4 years ago, long before the integration, and he never really looked for new ones after that.

Still, it was the town he grew up in, and where most of his childhood memories were. Even if it wasn’t really the same town any more he didn’t want to see it fall to some boars. He knew that the soldiers likely could take care of it, but it cost bullets. By now it should take quite a few munitions to destroy a horde of wild animals, as their endurance kept increasing. He didn’t know how much reserves the army still possessed, and he didn’t want the townspeople to suffer due to his actions earlier.

After running for about ten minutes, he saw the battlefield ahead. There were simple defenses erected, but from experience he saw that it wasn’t really enough to impede a beast wave. He walked up toward the man who spoke to him back by the mansion, who nodded at him.

“The beasts should arrive in five minutes, we’re making our stance here. There’s luckily is no high-level beast amongst their kind, the largest boar is roughly four meters high and level 43. We will likely have to use grenades on it, as bullets seldom work against the ones that size,” the soldier reported

“No need for all that. Just stay here and I’ll be back in a bit,” Zac said.

With that he pushed out toward the forest in the distance, using [Loamwalker] to increase his speed even further. After one minute of rushing he saw the horde approach, and he relished the chance for some no-holds-barred unthinking carnage.