Formless Ascension: My Affinity Is Limitless

Uhtred pressed two fingers against the young scout’s neck and felt a faint, steady thrum. He was still breathing. Standing up from the unconscious body, Uhtred briefly considered what to do with him, but looking around at the low-lying brush blanketing the area, he decided to just leave him there in the foliage.

He’s gonna be alright, Uhtred shrugged mentally. It’s the safe zone after all. There shouldn’t be any beasts inside here... right?

He turned his focus toward the settlement a short distance away, squinting his eyes to take in the layout properly. To his surprise, fully-fledged open-sided structures rose from the ground, each large enough to shelter at least a few thousand people at a time... But that was exactly the problem.

While these pavilion-style buildings were massive, and there were dozens of them scattered across the sector, Uhtred could see from a glance that it still wasn’t enough to properly hold everyone.

Heaving his obsidian battle-axe onto his shoulder, Uhtred strode directly into the settlement, not even bothering to stay out of sight. He headed straight toward one of the outer structures, using the severe ruckus, commotion, and constant shouting happening at every single building to blend into the surrounding crowd.

He managed to slip in unnoticed — or at least as unnoticed as a guy carrying a weapon nearly a grown man’s height could manage. His arrival immediately caught the attention of those standing closest to him, all of whom were men, surprisingly.

People from every corner of the globe were scattered and jumbled together in a chaotic mass. Having been torn from entirely different continents with entirely different languages before the integration event, their voices clashed over one another as everyone tried to yell, speak, and command the attention of the crowd.

In Uhtred’s vision, these people were still at Level 1, with the vast majority of them even at Level 0. None of them knew what a language translator device was not to mention possessing one, which only made the situation that much more chaotic and tense.

Uhtred, however, could hear very clearly what was being said by every single person regardless of language. With the help of the pendant, the discordant voices melted away, allowing him to clearly understand what everyone was saying.

Under normal circumstances, Uhtred would have paused to marvel at the wonder of the translation device. He would have taken time to try and understand the mechanism of how a simple device could enable him to understand languages he had never encountered in his life. But he didn’t have the time to appreciate any of that, rather, his focus was entirely on the dark context of what the crowd was actually arguing about.

The collective attention of the men was fixed on a frantic individual standing at the front of the platform, shouting in English to try and pacify the mob.

”Please try to understand!” the man yelled, his voice cracking from stress. ”The women and children are the first priority! The disabled and the elderly are also our priority! They have to be taken care of and given use of the shelters before any one of us can think to do the same!”

Uhtred’s gaze flitted toward the interior of the closest structure, and the pieces of the puzzle quickly clicked together. Apparently, because of the severe space limitations and the massive population congestion, this group had decided to enforce a sort of moral boundary, giving up the dry stone floors beneath the shelter roofs to the most vulnerable.

But it wasn’t just the prospect of sleeping outside in the dirt that had the surrounding men so thoroughly incensed. They were vexed and bitter about an entirely different injustice.

Listening to the translated curses rippling through the crowd, Uhtred repeatedly caught mention of a ”Scorpion’s camp.” From what he could piece together, this Scorpion character was undoubtedly the true boss of the goons Uhtred had seen at the zone border.

Scorpion was most certainly a Pioneer, one that was powerful enough to enforce his own laws in this place to the extent that it affected everyone severely.

Apparently, this entire settlement of about twenty to thirty thousand was just one of the many human ”sectors” inside Zone 0. The next sector was at least a day’s journey away, which therefore meant no one could decide to trek through the night to another sector on a whim. And Scorpion and his gang of criminals and delinquents had taken advantage of this fact.

They had used their early levels to take hostage of more than half of the total structures available within the entire settlement. They enforced their illegal control through threats, intimidation, and direct bodily harm to anyone who tried to object. By monopolizing more than half of the pavilions for themselves, they had forced the rest of the disorganized population to fight and struggle over the remaining scraps.

Uhtred smoothly slid the obsidian battle-axe off his shoulder, resting the heavy head against the ground while leaning his forearm casually across the top of the shaft. Even with his essence draw reined in, his presence, coupled with the pristine craftsmanship of his custom black survival apparel and the massive star-metal axe, instantly began to draw a second wave of attention.

The men standing on the periphery of the crowd began to cast lingering, flitting glances toward him, trying to meet his eye as if searching for an elite pioneer who could change the tide of things. It was what they were clamoring for, after all.

The men in this camp were literally shouting for a bold, coordinated action to be taken against Scorpion and his camp to break the blockade on the system-given resources.

From what the murmurs revealed, Scorpion and his goons were systematically fleecing everyone else in the settlement. People could technically join their camp for protection, but they had to pay a steep admission fee, half of their already meagre system-given 2 multiversal tokens.

On top of that, even after entering Scorpion’s camp and getting shelter, there was still the matter of the rules... or rather, lack of rules Scorpion had set in place in his territory. It was a lawless, all-you-can-grab kind of camp that was nothing short of barbaric tribalism. If you lacked the power to protect yourself, chances were you would lose the rest of your multiversal tokens and everything on your person to someone more powerful in minutes.

The icing on the cake was Scorpion himself. According to the rumors Uhtred was hearing, the man was incredibly misogynistic. Even without walking down into the gang’s camp to inspect the place, the picture painted by the disgusted murmurs of the crowd made the horrific conditions for women clear.

It was the exact reason why the vast majority of the female population, along with the children and the elderly, had fled that side of the settlement entirely, packing themselves into congested, desperate camps like this one.