5 More reviews and 30 more Power Stone donors are needed before the bonus chapter.
I had a thought about Nier: Automata and the world of Cyberpunk 2077 separated world travels. Imagine him going to the Automata world as the only human, gaining their trust over time, and eventually being treated like a god, as they would for any human. He could manipulate them to gain master control as only human follow orders of and work them as his police force. As for Cyberpunk, I have no idea.
*****
Location: The Apple Inn – Room 303 (Executive Suite).
Time: 06:40 PM.
The glow of the Windows XP calculator app illuminated Atlas's face in the darkening room, casting ghostly shadows into the hollows of his cheeks.
He stared at the screen. The numbers stared back, indifferent and horrifying.
14,073,748,835,532,800.
Fourteen quadrillion.
"This..." Atlas whispered, his voice cracking, "is impossible."
The realization washed over him like a bucket of ice water. He had been so drunk on the power of his new form, on the thrill of the claws and the upgrades, that he hadn't looked at the road ahead. He had just looked at the speedometer.
But now, staring at the exponential curve, he saw the cliff.
"If the XP requirement doubles every level," Atlas muttered, tapping the desk with a trembling finger. "By Level 50... It's a hill I can't climb."
He did the mental conversion.
"If a standard zombie gives 10 XP... I would need to kill 1.4 quadrillion of them."
He stood up, pacing the room frantically. The plush carpet felt like quicksand.
"There aren't that many people on Earth! There aren't that many living things in the solar system! To reach those numbers, I would have to become a cosmic entity. I would have to travel to other galaxies and extinguish entire civilizations just to get a single ding!"
He leaned against the wall, sliding down until he was sitting on the floor, clutching his head.
"I'm not playing an RPG," he realized with a sick sinking feeling. "I'm playing an idle clicker game without the auto-clicker. I'm Sisyphus, and the boulder just got heavier than the sun."
He had killed powerhouses of this world. He had killed the Licker. That was 500 XP. A drop in the ocean. A molecule in the ocean.
He couldn't even begin to imagine what it would take just to defeat a Super Saiyan 2—let alone challenge gods, reality warpers, or slay beings that stood above them. At his current level, such entities were untouchable. Before he could even entertain the thought, he would need to reach at least level 100… with power enough to shatter a planet.
"I need answers," Atlas hissed, looking up at the ceiling. "I can't leave this for my future self. My future self is going to be stuck at Level 29 for a thousand years trying to grind boars in a forest."
He took a deep breath. He needed to know the worst.
"Pleione," he called out, his voice laced with genuine dread. "Will I be needing a quintillion-scale EXP for level ups indefinitely?"
He prayed to the Goddess of Luck. He prayed to whatever R.O.B. who might have put him here. Please, let the math be wrong.
The System chime rang out. It sounded ominous in the silence.
[Affirmative.]
Pleione's tone was factual. Cold. Uncaring.
Atlas felt his non-beating heart stop.
"Affirmative," he repeated, his voice hollow.
He looked at the calculator again.
Level 66. That was the magic number where the math broke reality.
"I'm dead," Atlas whispered. "I'm stagnant. I'll never reach the Apex. I'll just be a mid-boss farming trash mobs for eternity."
The despair was physical. It weighed on his shoulders, pressing him into the carpet. Why give him a System if the goalpost was in another dimension? Why give him hope if the math proved it was a lie?
He imagined himself, millions of years old, drifting through space, trying to find a planet to blow up just to get from Level 65 to 66.
"I would need to blow up galaxies filled with life to make up for that number!" he shouted at the air.
He lay back on the floor, staring at the chandelier. "I give up. Level 20. That's it. I'll hit Level 20 and retire. Maybe open a taco stand in the apocalypse, save some women and enjoy life."
But then, the System spoke again.
[Addendum.]
Atlas opened one eye.
[Do not succumb to despair, Atlas. While I cannot violate the causal restrictions of the System to reveal full future data, I can provide context.]
[You are correct that quintillion-scale EXP is an eventual requirement. However, by the time you reach the threshold where such numbers are relevant, you will no longer be a 'Zombie'.]
Atlas sat up. "What?"
[You will have transcended. You will be the God of Evolution. And I can confirm that the exponential curve alters its variable.]
[At Level 30, you will NOT need 13,421,772,800 EXP. The curve flattens. The mechanic shifts.]
[The only thing I can tell you is this: After Level 20, the method of gaining exp changes. You will be surprised.]
Silence filled the room.
Atlas sat there, processing the words.
The curve flattens.
The mechanic shifts.
He wasn't doomed to grind quadrillions. He just had to survive the early game.
"I don't need to kill the universe," Atlas whispered. "I just need to get to Level 20."
A wave of relief crashed over him, so powerful it was almost dizzying. It felt like coming up for air after drowning. It was the sweet, sweet sensation of Maury Povich opening that envelope and screaming, 'You are NOT the father!'—watching eighteen years of child support vanish in an instant.
"Oh, thank God," Atlas gasped, scrambling to his knees. He clasped his hands together, looking up at the hotel ceiling as if it were the Sisters of Battle Chapel.
"Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Buddha! Thank you Great Emperor! Thank you, Lady Luck, you beautiful, fickle mistress!" He laughed, a manic, broken sound. He was shaking—his soul vibrating with the whiplash of emotions. He felt like an ant that had been clinging to a leaf in a hurricane, only to be washed gently onto dry land.
"I'm not fucked," he laughed, wiping a tear from his eye. "I'm just challenged. There's a difference."
He took deep, shuddering breaths, calming his violently shaking soul. From the lowest of lows to the highest of highs in seconds.
"This world wasn't so bad after all," Atlas grinned, standing up and brushing the lint off his expensive trousers.
The rabbit hole of numbers had almost swallowed him, but now he saw the light.
"Level 20," he set the goal. "That's the target. It's hard, but it's possible. 52 million XP? I can do that. I can kill a few armies. I can hunt all the B.O.W.s. Furthermore, the Multiverse shouldn't be that far off in this curve, right?"
It wasn't so bad that this world was a mix of movies and games. In fact, it was perfect. The games provided the enemy variety he needed to farm. The movies provided chaos.
"At least with the hybrid world," he reasoned, "I can reach Level 20 quickly. I have Lickers. I have Hunters. I have Nemesis. I have so many Giant Mutated beasts, I have Birkin. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet of XP."
Atlas finally calmed down. The manic energy settled into a warm hum of determination.
But the reality of his location sobered him up quickly.
"Raccoon City," he muttered.
He was in Ground Zero. He was in the petri dish.
"The math works," Atlas acknowledged. "But the geography is a problem. I'm sitting on a target."
He didn't know when the shit would hit the fan.
He didn't know when the Nuclear Warhead would turn this hotel into glass.
Sigh.
Atlas turned away from the desk. He looked at the window.
He froze.
The sun was gone.
While he had been spiraling over math and surfing the slow-motion internet, the day had evaporated. The sky outside was a deep, bruised purple, fading into black.
He looked at the digital clock on the bedside table.
06:40 PM.
"I spent all day..." Atlas shook his head in disbelief. "I didn't even realize."
He had been sitting in the same position for hours. If he were human, his legs would be asleep, his back would be screaming. But his undead physiology had kept him perfectly still, a statue of concentration.
"The internet of 2002," Atlas groaned, rubbing his eyes. "It's a time vampire. Half of that time was just waiting for pages to load. If I had an AI search engine... if I had 5G... I could have done this in two hours."
He felt a pang of longing for the future he had left behind—the convenience, the speed. But then he remembered the mortgage, the boredom, the fragility.
"Trade-offs," he muttered.
He shut the laptop.
THUD.
The heavy sound echoed in the room, signaling the end of the research phase.
He stood up and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window. He peered through the crack in the heavy velvet curtains.
The city outside looked peaceful. Cars were streaming down the streets, red taillights leaving trails in the dusk. Office buildings were lit up. People were walking to dinner, to movies, to their homes.
But Atlas didn't see a city. He saw a map.
He saw the invisible timer ticking down above the skyline.
He saw the webs of conspiracy stretching from the sewers below to the satellites above.
He saw the unseen rot spreading through the water pipes.
"The Cannibal Sickness," Atlas whispered. "It will soon be in the houses. The rats will soon be in the pantries."
The silence of the room felt heavy, pregnant with the violence to come.
But this time, Atlas didn't feel dread. He felt anticipation.
The numbers on the calculator had scared him because they meant futility. But now he knew the numbers were just a ladder. And he loved to climb.
"There is no limit," Atlas said, his grey eyes glowing in the reflection of the glass. "I can go as high as I want. As long as I can find something big enough and strong enough to kill."
He pressed his hand against the cold glass.
Below him, Raccoon City was lighting up for the evening. The streetlights flickered on, illuminating the hunting grounds.
Wooooooo-ooooooo.
The distant wail of a siren cut through the air. Then another. Then a third.
The frequency was increasing. The chaotic symphony was beginning.
"Let them come," Atlas whispered, a feral grin stretching across his face, revealing teeth that were slightly too sharp to be human.
"Let the Lickers come. Let the Hunters come."
He clenched his fist, imagining the Nemesis roaring his name..
"Let the Nemesis come."
He watched the city, no longer a victim trapped in a quarantine, but a wolf waiting for the sheep to panic.
"I need the XP."
---
Atlas lay on the bed, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, but his mind was miles away—drifting through the ruins of Raccoon City, past the Arklay Mountains, and into the terrifying, labyrinthine future of a world that shouldn't exist.
He knew too much.
His self felt heavy, swollen with the implications of his research. He saw the threads of the Resident Evil movies—the desert wasteland, the clones, the telekinesis—tangled hopelessly with the intricate bio-political thrillers of the Resident Evil games. He saw the Mold. He saw the Las Plagas parasites. He saw the C-Virus turning cities into gas chambers.
But after doing some research, he figured out he didn't know much, and he wasn't sure how helpful what he did know was in this mixed bag of a world. But that didn't stop him from coming up with theories and mixing both worlds in his head, creating possible futures and figuring out his next moves.