Sanctum

by Matthew Powell

  Critical Hit! Head Exploded! Spitter Zombie has taken 522 damage!

  Level 2 Spitter Zombie had died!

  Zandrius gains 40 EXP

  It exploded, taking the Spitter’s head with it. The tier 2 zombie might have been stronger than the ones it was surrounded by, but that strength came mostly in the form of its ranged attack. The Spitter’s body was only slightly stronger than a normal zombie’s, and not nearly beefy enough to survive the explosion.

  Without the Spitter shooting its acid, the Plague Eyes ripped through the zombie pack. Loaded with 20 Pestilence each, they infected and killed a zombie in seconds, growing stronger with each one. It took less than two minutes for the eyes to clear the entire pack of zombies and return to Joshua with their bounty.

  Joshua was already close to leveling up again, and the Spitter pack pushed him closer. Rather than call the two Plague Eyes back and take their Pestilence, Joshua created another Explosive Eye and sent it to reinforce them. The eyes made their way to another Spitter pack, repeating the process with devastating efficiency. The entire pack, nearly 20 zombies, died within a minute of their Spitter’s head exploding.

  Joshua, feeling greedy, once again chose to send the eyes after another pack rather than recalling them. It was starting to get risky, if even a single bolt of acid spit hit a Plague Eye he would lose all the Pestilence it had gathered, but the extra Pestilence also made them kill the zombies so much faster.

  Joshua’s eyes had made quick work of the dungeon’s inhabitants, leaving only a single Spitter pack left. Many more tier 2 zombies still roamed the isles, some of them backed by their own meat shield zombie packs, and those would have to be his target once the last Spitter died. The flying eyes approached the last pack, getting within infection distance when the unexpected happened.

  The Spitter managed to hit the Explosive Eye midair with an acid glob. The eye detonated instantly, dealing no damage to the Spitter or its pack. This may have been a loss worth noting if the attack had hit either of the Plague Eyes, but the Explosive Eyes were made to be expendable. Not wasting any time thinking about it, Joshua had the Plague Eyes infect the zombies as they normally would.

  The Spitter, as it turns out, wasn’t afraid of killing its own friends. Mere seconds after the first Plague Eye infected its target, an acid glob melted the poor zombie. Had Joshua been a second late in pulling the eye out, it would have been trapped inside the melting body. He still didn’t have enough Pestilence saved up to send another Explosive Eye to help, his supply drained from creating the last two, so Joshua chose to cut his losses.

  The Plague Eyes retreated, leaving the final Spitter pack nearly untouched. He would get back to them later when there wasn’t so much Pestilence at stake. On their return, the eyes gave Joshua just enough Pestilence to reach his next blessing.

  Total Pestilence has crossed the second threshold!

  For reaching 100 total Pestilence, Filth has granted you a minor blessing of your choice. You may choose one permanent bonus, only changeable by dropping your maximum Pestilence back below the threshold and re-earning it.

  -Efficiency: Requires slightly less Pestilence for all abilities.

  -Power: Slightly increases the effectiveness of all combat-related abilities.

  -Growth: Slightly increases the amount of Pestilence absorbed from slain enemies, slightly increases the learning rate of all Pestilence skills. Stacks with previous bonus.

  The choices were the same as last time, and that made Joshua’s choice just as easy. He selected growth, further increasing his potential.

  Minor Blessing of Growth received!

  Next Blessing: 500 Maximum Pestilence

  The Pestilence required to earn the next blessing had increased exponentially once again, but Joshua had been expecting it. It was almost too easy to gather Pestilence at this point, requiring more time than effort. Speaking of Pestilence, the next set of flying eyes was already moving towards the remaining Spitter pack. This time, Joshua had included a little surprise.

  The Plague Eyes worked just as they had before, moving slightly faster due to the 25 Pestilence Joshua had used to make them. The zombies, already rotting, shriveled into withered husks within seconds of being infected. The surprise wasn’t with them, however. No, the surprise was stored in the Explosive Eye.

  Joshua had packed it with 50 Pestilence, the most he was currently able to control without it exploding during creation. It writhed and pulsed with power, looking extremely unstable and ready to explode at the slightest touch. Rather than have the eye fly above the zombies and attack the Spitter from there, as he had done before, Joshua instead kept it flying low.

  The Explosive Eye darted through the zombie’s legs, dodged anything that tried to grab or step on it. The Spitter saw it coming and tried to shoot it with acid, but the eye’s position in the middle of the pack caused the Spitter to hit its own allies instead. When the eye reached the Spitter, it didn’t fly up to its head or down its throat like before. It hovered at chest height, just a few inches from the Spitter’s torso, and exploded.

  Critical Hit! Chest Crushed! Limbs Scattered! Spitter Zombie 714 damage!

  Level 7 Spitter Zombie had died!

  Zandrius gains 80 EXP

  The Spitter’s body tore apart, sending pieces in every direction. Joshua was amazed at the destructive potential the ability had, but it came at a cost. That explosion, while impressive, had taken half of his total Pestilence to create. It was an appropriate price, Joshua considered, given that he had not actually fought a single zombie since entering the dungeon. If the cost for an attack like that had been lower, he would have probably already cleared the entire place.

  The sound from the explosion had attracted several roaming Defaced and Bloaters started making their way towards the sound. Seeing this, Joshua had the two Plague Eyes finish up what zombies they could before the variants arrived and flee back to him. He collected their Pestilence and gave his character sheet a look before moving on to the next stage of his plan.

  Name: Zandrius

  Race: Zombie

  Class: Epidemic Warrior

  Tier: 2

  Level: 7 EXP: 50/700

  HP: 750/900 Regen: 2.75/min while Pestilence capped

  Pestilence: 107/107 Regen: 11/min

  The last Spitter pack had been enough for him to reach level 7, and level 10 seemed so far away. If he was lucky, reaching Tier 3 would be enough to escape the Drudge Bear outside. Joshua had no delusions about killing that thing any time before reaching Tier 4 himself, it was just too powerful.

  Keeping his goals in mind, Joshua began the next step of his plan to clear the dungeon, one that he wasn’t looking forward to. Most of the remaining variant zombies were too strong for his flying eyes to effectively kill, meaning that he needed to get involved in the fight himself. As he was now, the Defaced would swarm and shred him while the Brutes would rip him limb from limb.

  There were several ways to go about beating the tier 2 zombies, but Joshua could only think of two that helped him grow stronger at the same time. The first was trying to create better flying eyes, strong enough to either blow up or infect the stronger variant zombies. While this may work eventually, Joshua was getting a bad feeling from this tactic. The flying eyes felt like they were a tool meant for fighting weaker enemies like the regular zombies, focusing his efforts on them may not end well.

  The second method and the one that Joshua decided to follow was making better equipment. If he could make decent armor from Pestilence, as he had the knife, it might give him the edge he needed to overcome his weakness. Dreading what he knew came next, Joshua leaned against the wall he had sat next to for several hours now and began meditating.

  Chapter 9

  We weren’t entirely sure about adding Soul-Bound items into Macrocosm, but in the end, the development team decided to. Macrocosm was originally going to be a full-loot game, where you can loot everything that another player had equipped if you kill them, and that is
still sort of true. You can still loot Soul-Bound equipment, doing so is just extremely harmful and generally not worth doing. Because of this, anything Soul-Bound is meant to be very difficult to obtain, often only dropping with a very low rate from powerful Named monsters. Technically anything you make from your own body would be Soul-Bound, but there is an incredibly small number of races and classes capable of doing so, and even fewer people masochistic enough to play them. – On Macrocosm Mechanics, from the Chronicles of The Founder

  ◆◆◆

  The first thing Joshua needed, the staple to all frontline classes, was a chestpiece. Much like with the knife, he didn’t need to know about the intricacies of real-world armor, the game took his intent and used his Pestilence to make the equipment. Joshua immediately poured 100 Pestilence into his efforts and was disappointed at the results.

  He held a few inches of thick rust-colored thick fabric in his hands. It wasn’t much, especially for 100 Pestilence, but it was a start. Joshua started funneling all his regenerating Pestilence into the chestpiece, watching it grow inch by inch. The process took significantly more Pestilence than the knife, but his greatly improved regeneration meant that it took about an hour to finish.

  Pestilence Gambeson

  Soul-Bound Armor

  Mitigation Potential: 50

  Pestilence Towards Next Upgrade: 0/100

  Congratulations, you have either found or made your first piece of armor! Armor in Macrocosm functions in a similar way to weapons, blocking up to a certain amount of damage before starting to wear down. Damage is only blocked if the attack hits the armor itself. Please remember that different types of armor can have varying effectiveness at blocking different types of damage and may wear down faster depending on the damage taken.

  It was a padded gambeson made of the same rust-colored material, just enough to block an attack from the weaker zombies. It wasn’t much, but it would have to be enough. Joshua equipped it, the armor shifting slightly to fit his frame. He split his Pestilence generation between creating the next piece of armor and the gambeson to upgrade it as soon as possible.

  Creating the gambeson had given Joshua enough practice to make the rest of the armor much faster. He made armguards and leg guards with a defense of 25, and a thin helmet with a defense of 50. In the time it took to make these, the gambeson had reached its first upgrade and doubled its mitigation potential to 100.

  When he was done, Joshua looked very much like a medieval foot soldier. It was kind of hard to move around with all the armor equipped at once, but the added defense was worth the loss of mobility. The only remaining weakness that he had was the Pestilence Knife.

  The knife had served him well, and its damage potential was more than high enough, but he needed something longer to help keep the zombies at a distance. Fighting the regular zombies or the Defaced up close worked well enough, but the Brutes and Bloaters were enemies he didn’t want to get near unless it was necessary.

  A bow or crossbow would be nice, but they required practice. Joshua needed something that required little-to-no practice to use but was still capable of killing zombies. It only took a few seconds of thinking for Joshua to come to the obvious conclusion: he needed a gun. Up until now, he had been thinking about his equipment as if he were playing in a fantasy setting, with swords and daggers and gambesons, but he wasn’t. This was very much an apocalyptic world, and the zombies were likely meant to be shot, not stabbed.

  Joshua waited until his Pestilence had fully regenerated before beginning, wanting to see how much of a gun he could make in a single go. He dumped another 100 Pestilence at once, just as he had with the gambeson. Once again, Joshua was even more disappointed with the results.

  Half an inch. Half an inch of rust-colored metal sat in Joshua’s hand, barely enough to even be certain that it worked. Joshua almost felt despair at the thought of sitting here for another several hours just to make this single weapon when a new notification raised his spirit.

  Crafting Skill Learned!

  Beginner Item Synthesis: Pestilence

  Through constant practice, you have learned how to synthesize items from pure Pestilence energy. Creating new items takes less Pestilence.

  Crafting skills were something Joshua had never considered. In most of the games he had played to make a living, all his equipment had dropped from looted enemies or been bought from other players. It looked like he would be making his own gear for the foreseeable future, so a crafting skill like this was a great boon.

  Joshua waited a few minutes for his Pestilence to regenerate to full and repeated the process, dumping all of it into the gun. The half-inch piece of metal grew to two inches. The crafting skill had tripled the amount he was able to create without increasing the Pestilence cost. Joshua did this again eight more times before the gun was finally complete.

  Tainted Pistol

  Soul-Bound Weapon

  Damage Potential: 20 Blunt/500 Piercing/200 Infection (DOT) 20P/shot

  Pestilence Towards Next Upgrade: 0/100

  Congratulations, you have either found or made your first ranged weapon! Ranged weapons’ damage potential functions differently than melee weapons. All ranged weapons have an incredibly low Blunt damage threshold, which is only considered when the weapon is used in melee. As such, ranged weapons used in melee combat will break extremely quickly. Any other damage types are used when the projectile that the weapon fires hits its target and details the absolute maximum damage that the attack is capable of inflicting. For the purposes of your current weapon, no bullet fired from it will ever do more than 500 Piercing damage and 200 Infection damage regardless of how critical the attack. Upgrading Soul-Bound ranged weapons can have unpredictable effects.

  Joshua had been curious about how damage potential would work with ranged weaponry, and it seemed Macrocosm was prepared for his exact questions. He had managed to create a gun resembling an M1911 from the 20th century. The gun itself, much like his helmet, was made of a rust-colored metal. He had been hoping to create one of the laser or gauss weapons that modern militaries used, but that would be a little too overpowered for these zombies. This pistol would more than suffice.

  The damage was high, capable of out-damaging the Pestilence Knife with a critical shot. Its only downside was the prohibitive cost. At 20 Pestilence per shot, Joshua could only fire five bullets before running out of energy. Getting an idea, he popped out the gun's clip and almost jumped for joy. It was empty, and he could fill it preemptively.

  Joshua took the time to fill the guns 7-round clip and fully regenerate his Pestilence before heading out to find a test subject. The guns damage should be more than enough to kill any normal zombie in a single critical shot, and if it didn’t then the infection damage would. From what he could tell, the bullets functioned like miniature Plague Eyes, damaging the target's body when shot and then breaking down into Pestilence energy that proceeded to rip them apart from the inside.

  Rather than wait for the gun to upgrade, Joshua immediately set out to test it while draining his Pestilence regen towards it. He temporarily stopped his Pestilence Sacrifice until the new pistol was upgraded. His HP had already gone all the way up to 750, and while it wasn’t maxed out, it should be more than enough for him to survive.

  The open areas of the supercenter dungeon were mostly empty, still cleared out from Joshua’s destruction of the three Spitter packs. Only a small handful of roaming zombies were left. These zombies made the perfect training dummies for Joshua’s new weapon. He approached one, getting close enough for it to notice before taking aim.

  Joshua took a stance as close to a police officer’s as he could manage, with the pistol in his right hand balanced on his left arm and the knife in his left hand pointed out. It was awkward to walk like that at first, but he would get used to it eventually. The zombie took notice and started shuffling towards him.

  Once the zombie was just a few feet away and preparing to lunge, Joshua pulled the trigger. He had always preferred
to use swords or other melee weapons in other games, and so he had never learned how to shoot a gun, let alone one this primitive. There was a small popping sound and the zombie's ear blew off into a fine mist.

  Joshua was prepared to run when the gun went off, knowing that a firearm like this was supposed to make a loud bang, but that didn’t happen, perhaps because it was powered by Pestilence instead of gunpowder. No matter the reason, Joshua took advantage of the weapon’s relatively silent nature to fire off a second shot. This time it connected.

  Critical Hit! Brain Destroyed! Walker Zombie has taken 500 damage!

  Level 3 Walker Zombie had died!

  Zandrius gains 8 EXP

  The zombie died instantly. The bullet took off a chunk of its head, dealing the maximum possible damage. The recoil of the weapon was so slight that Joshua barely even felt it, almost as if he was shooting an air gun. The sheer lethality and ease-of-use that the pistol had shocked him. It didn’t even have its first upgrade yet, and it was already so powerful.

  Rather than keep testing it on the regular zombies, Joshua immediately set out to hunt the variants. Those two shots had more than proven the pistols worth in his eyes, so killing the tier 2 zombies shouldn’t be too hard. Even in the worst-case scenario, he could just unload into the enemy and run away.