"Tell me," said Logan. "And think very carefully about your answer. Who here has KarmaCoin?"

"W-what's it to you?" asked another man, his hand trembling on the handle of his rifle.

With an audible sigh of annoyance, as if Logan were trying to communicate his frustration, he stepped forward. Using an agility and dexterity score that was off the charts, he grabbed the soldier by the front of the throat. So quickly there was no time for him to react. With a flex of his fingers, Logan dug his talons into his esophagus, tearing out a chunk of flesh.

Ding!

[You have defeated Ned Warren! Triple experience granted for defeating a member of your own species!]

"Aww crap," muttered a soldier and he lifted his rifle, pointing it at Logan's head.

"Don't do it, Aaron!" hissed another. "He's too strong!"

"Listen to your friend. Do you have KarmaCoin?" Logan demanded, pushing up his chin.

"W-why do you want to know?"

Logan's mouth thinned into a white slash. "That's a no, then." With a thrust of his fist, he slammed his talons into the man's chest, carving a deep hole. With another thrust, he tore out a chunk of his stomach and upper intestine.

Logan disregarded the System's kill message and then approached the next soldier.

"Well?" he barked.

This one was young, barely past his teens. With his skinny body and short, dark hair, he reminded Logan of Matt. "I have 100!"

"2,000!" shouted another.

"10,000! Do you want it? You can have it!"

And on and on, a cacophony of noise. Logan narrowed his eyes. There was no way every single soldier had KarmaCoin. Unless they each had a skill like [Life Fabricator] or had stumbled across carbon reduction items like olivine, they had to be lying.

Logan pushed Charlie forward and then lifted him up so that his feet were dangling. The weight was nothing against his strength attribute, and if it gave Charlie less chance to get away, all the better. "Let's go," he snapped at the soldiers. "Voss, stay in front of me so I can protect you."

The soldiers shifted nervously, their hands trembling around their rifles.

Logan moved forward. The soldiers took a reflexive step back, but they came up against the barrier of the stacked tires and trailer. Gradually, they inched to the side and cleared a path for Logan and Voss. Logan still had his aura going at full blast, radiating a killing intent.

"Follow me," said Logan to the men with a gesture of his chin. "If you don't, you'll end up like your companions."

As he made his way into the complex, Logan looked around. It was still early in the afternoon. The word hadn't spread that there was a problem. Everyone was either talking or milling in front of the food supply tables. Christ, there had to be five hundred people in the street alone, not to mention how many people had to be inside the high-rise buildings. Each person could be an enemy, but they could be an innocent civilian as well, like Lachlan's mother. A mother who had lost her son.

Second by second, the people turned their attention to Logan and the soldiers. They murmured, their voices growing louder, their expressions nervous. They glanced from Charlie to Logan, their eyes wide as they took in Charlie's injuries and the blood pouring down his neck.

Logan raised his voice into a shout. "Don't be scared! There's no need to be afraid! I'm not going to hurt you if you don't act against me. My name is Logan. This man," Logan shook Charlie by the neck, "and Damsel attacked me and tried to kill me when all along, I came here to bring supplies.

"Weapons, clothing, even food. I know you don't know who I am, but I'm just like you. Caught up in this messed up situation, fighting to survive. I came here from Canada to help. But I learned my lesson… even in places like this, places with innocent people like you, I have to be on the lookout for XP harvesters like Damsel and Charlie who are only in it for themselves."

A man burst to the front of the group and pushed people back. His short hair was spiky, as if he'd slicked it with hair gel, his thin face splattered with blond stubble. He had a faint, pink scar running through his left eyebrow. "Damsel saved us!"

There were murmurs of agreement from the crowd.

Logan increased his aura, and the man grimaced.

"You might believe that," said Logan, "and maybe she did save a few people here, but she attacked me. She killed Lachlan. I know she killed others in her fighting parties just for being weak. I'm here. After Charlie tried to kill me, I didn't leave. I came here to craft a private system market that will allow you to buy items so that you can survive. Let me pass in peace and I'll show you. I'll show you all."

The people looked nervous. Scared. The children in the group hid behind the legs of their parents. And yet, there were a few who looked intrigued, eyeing Charlie and Logan with calculation. He was still radiating his aura… not to the same degree as before, but enough that someone who was level 10 could barely stand.

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Logan was betting that they would feel too scared to challenge him.

He searched the complex, looking for a place for his lodestone. He already knew that it didn't need to be a tree, but for a second, he wondered if that was the wrong choice. If he used [Life Fabricator] to grow a massive tree in the middle of the street, and then attached a loadstone to the trunk, would that not impress them more than anything else?

That was it. That's what he was going to do. That would give him power, the most important power of all—awe.

The problem was how to do it. By now, he knew that he could use [Liche Devourer] to funnel karma from the people around him, but he hadn't gotten it down to a science yet. He could end up killing people, innocent people.

Wait a minute. [Life Fabricator] had to be the answer. He'd gotten practice at targeting the lifeforce of the rats in Hope's End, which meant that he should be able to target exactly who he wanted to drain. That way, he could drain the lifeforce from his enemies for something good instead of just killing them outright.

Logan targeted the middle of the street, the towering skyscrapers on either side. Asphalt covered the ground, which meant that he'd need to clear it, but he already knew how to do it. He'd just done the same inside of Damsel's prison.

Logan pushed Charlie to the side, back to the edge of the crowd in front of the soldiers. Logan had broken his arm and dislocated his shoulder, so his percussion skill was useless. Not to mention that unless the man had a skill like [Idiot's Paradox], there was no way that he'd pick up a weapon anytime soon. Still, it was best to keep an eye on him.

"Voss, watch Charlie. Let me know if he moves."

Voss gave the other soldiers a wary look, but he nodded all the same.

Turning back to the street, Logan examined it, then took ten steps back. He needed more space. He didn't need to clear all the concrete—only a hole big enough for the main sprout to burst through the ground. Once that happened, the force of his massive tree would do the rest.

With a blink, Logan carved out an excavator's size hole of asphalt and dirt and willed it inside of his spatial collar.

The people watching made a sound of shock. That meant that no one else had used a spatial storage device for the same purpose before. Either that, or no one had a storage 'pouch' with large enough capacity to try.

Logan looked at each soldier, giving them a once-over. Other than Nettle, they were all wearing masks so he could only see their eyes.

"Raise your hand if you have over 100 KarmaCoin."

The soldiers shifted in fear.

"Don't be shy," said Logan. "There are no right or wrong answers here."

One after another, a dozen soldiers raised their hands, leaving less than ten. In the back of his mind, Logan had to wonder what kind of man he'd turned into to be so blasé about this. The soldiers didn't know it, but each of them would die. It was just a matter of what use Logan would get from them before that time came.

Before the Integration, Logan never would have thought that he was capable of something so ruthless, so calculating.

But then he thought of what would happen if he left them here.

Damsel would return.

And the cycle would start all over again. More Lachlan's, more innocents cut down.

Logan tightened his lips and pointed to the soldiers who had more than 100 KarmaCoin. "To the side." Logan made a gesture with his head at Charlie. "Next to him. The rest of you, move to the other side."

Even though the soldiers held rifles, they looked nervous: blinking rapidly, a tightness around their eyes, biting their lips so hard they were bloodless. They still didn't attack him. Shuffling, they gave the children peering out from behind their parents' legs a haunted look and then moved to stand next to Charlie.

"Voss, watch them. Watch them all."

Deploying [Life Fabricator], Logan concentrated on the soldiers who remained, envisioning a straw, connecting him… connecting their lifeforces and filtering it into his skill. The connection tight in his mind, Logan focused on the cleared area in front of him.

He hadn't done this in a while, but he figured it was like riding a bicycle. The memory would come back to him; he only had to visualize it.

Logan took a deep breath and then made sure to blast his aura in a killing intent, a threat, something that would make the people around him think twice about attacking him when he wasn't looking directly at them.

Then he closed his eyes, trying to focus on thinking tree, tree, tree, and not that feeling of having a threat at his back. He needed to finish this; craft his lodestone and then eliminate Damsel's supporters. Right now, there were way too many of them in this crowd.

Taking another deep breath to try to calm his mind, he pictured a seed the size of a watermelon, something substantial enough that it could birth a monster carbon sucking tree.

Deep within the pit he'd carved with his spatial collar, he envisioned the seed as if it had been buried there all along. And one after another, fine root filaments spread like cobwebs, surging through the dirt, looking for moisture and nutrients.

Logan clenched his fist.

He had it.

This was pure practice.

Bursting from the other side of the watermelon seed, he envisioned a sprout exploding, searching for sunlight and air. It erupted through the dirt and then climbed, width doubling in a second.

Logan turned the sprout into a trunk, a trunk where the rings continued to advance. It was like envisioning a circle, then envisioning outlining that circle with a pencil over and over again, spreading the outline until the line exploded off the edge of the paper.

He envisioned a trunk so large that it would cover a front yard, end to end. And that was just the trunk. Limb after limb, an interconnected network; he spread them until they smashed into the side of the skyscrapers, cracking the windows, the tips of the limbs latching onto the building for stability.

Then, he clenched his other fist, envisioning the limbs exploding with foliage, foliage that had microscopic holes that sucked in carbon like a vacuum. Again and again, green exploding like confetti, so many leaves that they blotted out the sun.

Ding!

[You have defeated Bodhi Landhan! Triple experience granted for defeating a member of your own species!]

[You have defeated Quinn Harthoven! Triple experience granted for defeating a member of your own species!]

[You have defeated…]

[You have defeated….]

[…]

[You have leveled up!]

[You have successfully deployed the skill, Life Fabricator, in a carbon reduction event! Calculating carbon reduction… 100,000 tons captured! 10% Mass Murderer title penalty in effect! You have been awarded 390,000 KarmaCoin!]

Logan opened his eyes, beaming. He'd grown another massive carbon tree, a tree so large it was bigger than a tree found in an old growth forest. Around him, the crowd stared at the roots that were as big as a man, peered up at the foliage by craning their necks, and then gave Logan a wide-eyed look, their expressions of fear replaced with awe.

"Logan!" screamed Voss.

Logan turned around, searching, and then gazed at the withered soldiers—their bodies sucked of all moisture like scarecrows—and the other soldiers who'd taken in their fallen comrades and then aimed their rifles at Logan.

And unloaded.

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