Afew days before, Matt had been dropping rocks off the side of the bunker. Lucy watched as he gathered a couple big ones, lied down on his belly, and pushed them off the side. She pretended to work, but after the fifth or sixth rock, she couldn’t fight her curiosity anymore.

“Having fun there?”

“Not really. This is more like an experiment.”

“To find out what?”

Matt dropped a few more rocks, then sat up.

“I was thinking about our traps. They don’t come loaded with stats, right? I don’t have any ‘traps work two hundred percent better against armor’ buffs or anything like that. So, they seem to work off physics. But …”

“The system?”

“Yeah. I have all this vitality, and near as I can tell, that increases how much damage I can take by reducing how much damage an attack actually inflicts on me. But if I jump in the air and someone hits me with a giant club. Do I fly less far than Earth physics says I should?”

“I have no idea.”

“Me neither. And that’s what the rocks are about. I’m just trying to get a feel for it all.”

“Did that actually help? Dropping rocks off a building?”

Matt shrugged. “I can’t actually remember the exact amount of time it’s supposed to take a rock to fall that far, and Gaia’s gravity could be slightly different for all I know. But it seems right, at least. I’ve been watching stuff fall down my whole life and at least it didn’t look weird.”

Back in the present, the locks on the door hissed as they engaged with the bunker, sealing the invader in. Within seconds, they could hear him banging away with his sword on the indestructible door, apparently venting his blind rage. Matt and Lucy looked at each other in shock.

“I can’t believe that worked. Matt, I honestly can’t believe that freaking worked.”

“Can you imagine if we could have done the whole bunker? All four walls? Next time, we absolutely need to trap the whole bunker. He had no idea what hit him.” Matt realized Lucy was a genius in designing trap rooms.

“I don’t think it’s worth it to do that. At least not for, people. Eventually, he was going to figure out he could slice right though those shelves and get out. I’m honestly surprised he didn’t even try. I’m not sure this guy is all that bright,” Lucy snickered.

As if to prove her right, the banging continued on the door. Matt had done some durability testing with his Gaian metal shovel on the Gaian metal bunker before, and he knew from experience that the other reincarnator couldn’t be seeing much visual feedback on his efforts to break down the door. But the new guy kept on, apparently undeterred by his lack of progress.

“How long are we going to leave him in there, Matt?” asked Lucy.

“I honestly haven’t gotten that far. I mean, how long do you think it takes someone like that”—Matt gestured at the door, where the banging from inside was actually speeding up rather than slowing down—“to calm down enough to talk?”

“Well, we don’t really have to let him out at all.”

“Lucy!”

“Matt, we don’t. He showed up with a sword and started swinging it at your head. We don’t owe this guy anything.”

It was true. They could leave him there, and it wouldn’t even be their fault. There was no safe way to let him out. There was no way to know how much food he had with him, and because of that, they had no way to time when he was starved into submission, but not death. The smart move was to leave the door locked, walk away, and forget the bunker even existed.

There was only one real problem with all that. Matt knew what it was like to starve.

“Yeah, unfortunately, we can’t. I’m not that mean. I don’t think you are that mean either, once you calm down,” said Matt.

Lucy’s shoulders slumped.

“Yeah, I guess.”

That was that. It wasn’t a great decision, but it was the decision they had made. And while they expected it might turn out badly, they would sleep easy. Then the touchpad interface for the bunker lit up, proving them wrong.

Entity detected inside structure while lock is engaged. Safety failsafe activated.

They both stood in horror as the lock hissed, clicked, and fully disengaged.

Asadel was still pissed. He didn’t care if the door was indestructible. He didn’t care that it didn’t have a mark on it yet. He had a sword made out of some kind of magical super-metal and he wasn’t going to stop cutting until he cut through the damn thing.

He was also, if he stopped to admit it, a little bit worried. This trip was not turning out as expected yet. He was currently trapped in a metal room filled with god knows how many weird cartoon traps, and he was completely out of food. But he wouldn’t stop to admit it. Between his unconfessed worries and his very real anger, he had exactly one mission. He was going to carve through six inches of door, follow that up by immediately carving through six feet of very bad villain, and call it a day.

So he chopped at the door, not letting up. Speeding up, in fact. This went on for minutes until suddenly, miraculously, the door lock hissed open on its own accord. He immediately threw the door open, just in time to see the demon lord’s leg slip over the top of the trench, disappearing from view.

No you don’t.

Gathering all the strength in his legs, he leapt fully out of the trench in a single jump, landing just a few meters behind the fleeing overlord. He raised his head and roared. He didn’t care anymore, he was going to fly in the face of Artemis’s advice of saving some skills for life-and-death situations. He was going for broke.

Berserker Rage

Did you know that a calorie is a unit of heat energy? People only think of it as a stored dietary energy thing because their human bodies do the hard work through some boring oxidation process that’s too long to explain. You have another option. You can burn calories in a furnace of pure rage, fueling an engine of never-before-reached levels of blood thirst.

Berserker rage taps into your body’s natural fat and glycogen stores, turning them into an especially pure form of quick-burning energy that provides a huge buff to all stats. This absurdly large enhancement comes with only one major drawback: a similarly massive debuff when the skill ends.

Temporary buff: +100 percent to all physical stats, +100 percent physical damage resistance, +100 HP regen rate, unlimited STAM pool, +1 level to active sword skill, restoration of highest food-related buff held during the last 10-day period, and movement speed over any solid terrain is doubled

Temporary Debuff: –20 percent to all physical stats, –40 percent damage resistance, HP regen rate set to 0, STAM bar emptied, and STAM regen rate set to 0

Everything Asadel could see was immediately dyed red. His muscles creaked and bulged as his skin stretched to accommodate them. His sword, already light, now felt like it weighed nothing. He was a monster. A monster of death. He was a pool of limitless mayhem just waiting for a target. Luckily, he didn’t have to look far to find one.

Get ready, asshole. Here I come.

Asadel screamed as he charged, crossing half the distance in a split second while activating his two strongest sword skills. It was on. In about half a second, it would be over.

Then his knees buckled, and he barely kept on his feet.

Ding!

Oh no. No, no, no …

Matt watched as the swordsman exploded with power in the most exaggerated way he had seen yet. It was terrifying. The hair on his arms bristled just seeing it. He desperately dug into Survivor’s Instincts to find weaknesses he could exploit or options he could pursue. The response was something like, “Whooa, man. I dunno. No point in running, though.”

Then the swordsman moved, and time slowed down. Every millisecond felt like a minute as he flew through the distance between them, but there was nothing Matt could do. It was like his life flashing before his eyes.

Matt’s body wouldn’t move that fast. It couldn’t move that fast. This was it. The next phase of his plan would have to wait for the next life, if he got one. He doubted that he would.

Then, all of a sudden, the glow around the armored swordsman cut out, and he looked visibly wobbly.

NOW! Survivor’s Instincts screamed. Matt didn’t need to be asked twice. He willed everything he had into Trapper Keeper. He hadn’t had a good chance to use the skill yet, but at this point, he expected one of two things to happen. The first would be that Trapper Keeper would agree with Lucy that the entire trap room was one big trap, and would drop a huge metal building on the poor guy. He didn’t feel that lucky.

It turned out he wasn’t that lucky, but the next best thing happened. The last traps he had set up in Lucy’s room had been the ones that he felt would be the most lethal, and those were the rock-slinging whip-hammer-type traps, which were set up vertically.

The new guy had stopped at the perfect range for one, and was still staggering slightly forward. A trap materialized at his feet, complete with a tripwire that immediately activated. As the rock shot upwards, it seemed that the visor blocked all vision of the trap, and the rock slammed directly into his chin.

The swordsman was staggered. That had hurt him. In a relationship first, it was the only time that the invader had been close enough and not-activating-his-constant-deadly-sword-skills enough that Matt could get a good look at the sword. Eyeing the metal, Matt realized why his Survivor’s knife hadn’t stood up very well to the onslaught.

Matt had exactly one tool available made out of the same stuff. As the bad guy regained his bearings, Matt reached back to his pack and grabbed the only vaguely weapon-shaped Gaian metal he had.

Shovel, don’t fail me now.

Lucy was screaming in the background for him to run. But Survivor’s Instincts and Matt agreed that there was a better move. It was ass-kicking time.

The armored man ran in and hailed down blows. He was still faster than Matt. He was still stronger than Matt and seemed like he could tank more damage than Matt. But now Matt could stop his attacks with the shovel, even if it flung him around a bit. He could exploit the predictability of the swordsman’s fighting style. His chest was heaving too hard to allow for a sigh of relief, but he was relieved anyway. This was manageable.

Even better, he had a plan. Vitality was powerful, sure. But like all stats, it seemed oddly superimposed over what a person’s body could already do. Matt had worked hard on his cardio and pain resistance, and that helped VIT do its job in a way that had made survival much easier for him. But if this guy’s behavior during the chase was any indication, he hadn’t put in the same level of effort. More importantly, Matt assumed that for all the VIT that the other reincarnator had, taking heavy blows on the chin was never good.

The armored guy had already taken a heavy stone to the face, and that was seconds ago. He had to still be rocked from that. And now he was about to take another, if everything worked out. Matt backed up out of the range of the fight while lowering the shovel, then kicked it into the soil and heaved.

And, god bless it, his digging skill kicked in, giving him the time to do all this. Not only that, but his one-in-ten shoveling skill, the dumbest skill he had, chose that exact moment to activate for the first time, flinging ten full shovelfuls of dirt at Matt’s opponent. Matt immediately heard coughing, and didn’t wait for the dust to clear to get visible confirmation of his target.

Gripping his mighty shovel, Matt swung it with both hands like a baseball bat and connected directly with his chin. Did the armored helmet absorb most of the blow? Sure, but if Matt was right, that wouldn’t matter. VIT only did so much, and a full shovel-blow to the face was a lot to take. As the shovel pulled back and the dust cleared, Matt got a clear view of the damage he had caused.

It was zero. In visible terms, his enemy was unharmed, and staring directly at him with pure, unbridled hatred.

But when the damage finally caught up with his brain, the invincible reincarnator finally crashed to the ground like a sack of potatoes.