The once great city that Jake had called home for the last few years was nearly unrecognizable. The grand buildings were broken and in tatters, the streets dominated by the reclamation of mother nature.Jake simply walked down the street at an average pace. Grass and weeds, not asphalt, were beneath his feet. On the way, he saw several other groups of humans. Some tried to approach him, some observed him warily, and some hid and believed their gazes undetected.For those who tried to talk, a quick glance was usually enough for them to leave him be. Their inability to Identify him, without a doubt, also played a role in their decision to avoid him, which was exactly what Jake wanted right now. To be alone.He was actually quite overwhelmed by the number of people he saw. One often forgets precisely how many people live in big cities. In the end, it got so bad that Jake had to get off the streets. A quick leap using Badger Jump took him up to the roof of a still-standing four-story apar

Three years before the Initiation beganMatteo got out of the shower after his workout and got something quick to eat. It was just another Sunday night like any other where he had to get up early and get ready for work. But today was a special day, as today was the day he would claim his big promotion.He looked out at the penthouse that he had lived in for the last two months, feeling it was all a bit hollow. His only real possession in the entire apartment was a piano, which he had inherited from his grandfather.After he put on his suit, he packed his briefcase with all the necessities he would need for the day’s work and rode the elevator down to the ground floor. His employer had insisted many times for him to get a driver, but Matteo had refused time and time again. He preferred to do things himself.Riding in the car that was worth more than the average yearly income of several households, he soon found himself in the industrial zone where the boss had set up their current base

Time marched onward unforgivingly. Soon two weeks had passed since the conclusion of the tutorial.Earth was in chaos as the newly returned humans scrambled to find a foothold. Factions quickly formed, though they were more just collections of people who happened to be in the same area when they returned.Many had thought the nightmare over upon exiting the tutorial, naively believing that humanity could return to some semblance of normalcy. Sadly for them, reality proved the exact opposite. Earth was far more dangerous than nearly all the tutorials.In Jake’s tutorial, the beasts hadn’t ever really attacked people in the outer zone. They’d been incredibly passive and easily avoided most of the time. It was only in the beginning that people really died to the environment and not their fellow humans.Upon their return, they found Earth to be far less friendly. Beasts and monsters roamed about without any restrictions. An area filled with weak, single-digit monsters could easily be inva

That day had been like any other to Jake. Alchemy, meditation, skill testing, and mana practice. Everything had been tranquil until he suddenly got a weird feeling, one he quickly identified as coming from the mana in the air itself.Something had entered the area permeated with traces of his mana by the Pylon of Civilization. In the back of his mind, he had a vague feeling of the direction of the intruder. Or intruders. He felt several responses, but he was unsure of how many or how powerful they were.He hesitated a few moments before he stopped his mana practice and decided to go towards the disturbance. Whatever it was, he would have to deal with it eventually. Besides, his danger sense and intuition didn’t ring out in warning even as he used One Step Mile towards the intruders.There he found four humans under attack. One middle-aged man, two teenagers or people in their early twenties, and a woman around thirty. Their attacker was a tiger that actually reminded him of the King o

That was pretty cool, if I say so myself, Jake thought while walking away from the valley, trying to look as cool as he possibly could. It had nothing to do with how he’d had no idea where the hell to take the conversation after his whole “murder is fine” speech.Besides, maybe it was time to go for a bit of a walk. Jake hadn’t left that small valley for the better part of two weeks before today. While some immortal god might scoff at him for thinking of that as a long time, he did feel like it was.He just needed a bit of a push to get him out of there.Talking with Miranda had been very enlightening in many different ways. He had learned a lot about other people’s thoughts on the system and even learned about other classes, professions, and other tidbits. He was also coming to understand that his tutorial was very much an outlier.The Viper had told him that, but it helped to have a human reiterate and put it into perspective. Just the sheer amount of god-fuckery and interference t