Broken Anomaly

The fragments within the chained box that Anna was carrying began to vibrate lightly. Anna, not knowing what to do, took a moment to observe the pieces and her sword hilt.

She put the box down and took the fragments and sword out, arranging them as best she could against the dirt floor.

The vibrations between the hilt and the fragments began to increase slowly. She accelerated the process by pushing them closer together. When the two finally met, in an unceremonious manner, as if all the pieces were magnets, they rapidly combined.

Anna observed her now fragmented sword. It looked worse now than it did before. While before it only had a small piece hanging on to the hilt, it looked much firmer than it did now.

Now it looked like it would crumble at the slightest touch. There were big gaps missing. If she had to guess as to how much of the blade she had recovered, her answer would’ve probably been between twenty and thirty percent.

Even the pieces that she did have were incomplete, as they still had major cracks on them. Though, she could tell that her blade was special and that it would recover. It was just one of the reasons she wanted to find her family as desperately as she did.

At times her sword behaved as if it were alive, and it made her uneasy, not knowing what it truly was.

After a few seconds of looking at her sword, she shifted her glance toward the box. Inside, the red flowers remained the same. She closed it and picked both the box and her sword back up and continued on her journey.

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Eric’s entire body hurt. It wasn’t like when he stressed his core and his energy nodes, it was more like an extreme version of the muscle strain you felt when going to the gym after not having gone for a long time.

When he tried to move, his body refused to respond. He could feel that everything was still in its place, but it just wouldn’t respond. Eric couldn’t even begin to think what the reason might be, and just continued with his efforts

After a few minutes of straining himself to move his arm, it finally responded, and like a floodgate being opened, his entire body began to respond almost simultaneously.

He had been gazing at the sky, unable to turn and see anything. The best he could see from the corner of his eye was the building’s parapet and nothing else. Now he could see his surroundings more appropriately.

But before he could begin to process what he was looking at, an unbearable stench assaulted him. He powered through and took a quick glance at his surroundings.

Nothing but dead rats everywhere, most of them being in advanced stages of decay, their flesh already beginning to fall. Some of the rats had been torn in two, so the gases that should’ve still been inside, were making everything worse.

Eric got up while doing his best to ignore the pain, something he was getting really good at. He descended the building and walked until the smell was no longer as strong.

Free from the odor, he finally took the chance to examine not only himself but the system messages that were demanding his attention.

He first examined his body carefully, making sure to not miss anything.

First, his clothes were destroyed—not all of it, just most. Anything that covered his limbs was completely gone, shirt sleeves? Gone. Pant legs? Mostly gone, they were very tattered shorts now.

“Gotta get that fixed soon,” Eric said, with a genuine dislike for his clothing.

Eric never cared how he looked to other people, as long as he liked how he looked to himself, and right now he didn’t.

While examining his limbs, he noticed something odd. Most of his arms and legs were covered in a mix of fluids, saliva, blood, and whatever else came out of the rats when he fought them.

But the odd thing was that there were certain spots in both his arms and legs that appeared new. Not clean, new. The skin was a bit lighter in tone compared to the rest.

The spots weren’t uniform, they came in all shapes and sizes. The more he looked at the clean spots, the more confused he was.

It wasn’t like he couldn’t think of possibilities, he just wasn’t in the right headspace. His body still felt somewhat foreign to him. The pain of strained muscles, while less than what he had experienced recently, was still pain.

He cleared his head, making a mental note of where each spot was, hoping that Mental focus would be able to remember everything. He then turned to the system windows.

Bloodline acquired!

Bloodline assimilation increased!

????????????????: 22%

The first ones that Eric decided to open were the ones that were blinking red, to be exact, one of them was blinking red, and the other two just opened up alongside it.

Eric was dumbfounded, but he was also exhausted, so he couldn’t even react properly to what he was reading. He tried to organize his thoughts.

“I know what bloodlines are—unique or sometimes inherited traits that are unique to one’s blood or lineage. But what does assimilation mean?” he asked himself. “Am I taking over a bloodline, or is one taking over me? Is it good or is it bad?” he added while looking at his arms. “Guess that answers that,” he added, dismissing all possible worries.

He, lacking any energy, let the topic go. He also lacked far too much knowledge, and any deeper pondering into a topic that was beyond his understanding, like this one, was useless.

After opening up all his remaining system messages, he found none that were unique. All of them were nothing but kill messages. Looking through the entire list, he wondered what level he would be at if he gained experience like normal. Easily would’ve reached level 20, he thought.

Credits 155870

“Cool.” That was all Eric said once he looked at his credits.

He would’ve been more astonished if his mind wasn’t jumping from one thing to the other.

He was trying to let go of the bloodline topic, but his mind kept wandering back. There was also the issue with his clothes, as he was also looking for a clothing store. And for some reason, his stomach felt much emptier than before.

“Wait. What about the muscle strengthening?” he asked himself. “Did I fail?”

He searched through his skills, and he went through all the system messages once more and found absolutely nothing that suggested that he had developed the Augmentation skill or anything that was similar to it. When he didn’t find anything, he clicked his tongue, a bit annoyed.

He got up and began to walk, looking for a clothing store of any kind. When he returned to the American street, he quickly found a thrift shop, and as if nothing had changed, he began sifting through the merchandise.

After a couple minutes of looking around, he decided for black jeans and a black shirt, but he didn’t put them on, he wanted to wash himself first.

When he was exiting the store, he began to hear scurrying from somewhere down the street. He turned and clearly saw monsters exiting various buildings. There were much fewer of them, then there had been rats.

Putting the clothes down on the hood of a car, he began a mad dash toward the nearest monster.

The reason he ran from the rats was due to their number, not their individual strength. So, he was confident that he could take on all the monsters he was seeing.

And he was right. A couple of minutes later, all the monsters that had appeared on the street were all dead. Bats, small wolves, even slimes, all dead. Now he stood looking into the building, from which he saw the bats come out.

If he was right, then this was the dungeon that the bats had broken out of. He wanted to find out two things.

The first thing was to find out why the dungeon seal wasn't restored when the rats killed all the monsters. The second was to see if he still got the bonuses when inside a dungeon that had its seal broken.

Without anything more to say or think about, he went in.

It was an electronics store, no, it was a pawnshop with mostly electronic items.

A quick glance and you could see that basically everything was broken. It could’ve been the rats, or it could've been the bats, it didn’t really matter.

“Wonder if everything will be fixed if the dungeon seal is restored or if this is the new state it will copy.” Eric muttered to himself, having gained a new question to answer.

After exploring the small store a bit, he found three rooms with broken windows. He considered them to be the rooms that spawned the normal monsters. That only left him with a small storage room near the back. He grabbed a screwdriver from a small workstation and tightened his grip on it.

When he opened the door, there it was. Upside down, its feet penetrating the ceiling, was a giant bat about as big as Eric was.

Sadly, for the bat, the room was small, so it was directly in front of Eric when he opened the door, the bat was dead before Eric fully opened the door, its body littered with small holes.

Eric began to feel a rush of mana concentrating toward the floor. He ran outside, not wanting to be caught up in whatever was going on. When he turned, he got a system message.

Dungeon cleared!

+8000 credits.

Bonus reward for restoring the dungeon seal.

+4 Health potion (small).

When he exited the dungeon, a bright flash covered the entire building.

When he could see once more, the building looked much better than it did before. However, if he looked through the windows, he could see that the insides were still the same, completely destroyed.

He read through the messages that popped up as he was running, curious as to where the potions were. Looking around, he noticed them on the ground before him.

That’s when an idea popped into his mind. “Could these...” he said as he touched his eye patch.

Then suddenly, he remembered that his body appeared to have been restored through a bloodline ability. Looking at his arm for a moment, he quickly removed his eyepatch.

When he took off the eyepatch, nothing changed. He closed his left eye, and the world went dark. He then lifted his hand and tried to feel around his eye socket cautiously, in case he had regrown it. But no, he hadn’t.

He then turned his gaze toward the potions, and he knew that they also wouldn’t work. “They could’ve probably helped with what the spider did, but I doubt they can grow a new one,” he said to himself in a mildly disappointed tone.

He stood still for a moment, allowing himself to be a bit disappointed. He had gotten used to his new conditions, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t miss having two eyes.

Taking a deep breath in through his nose, he quickly gathered himself and focused on a new objective, clearing all the dungeons in the city.

He grabbed the four potions and carried them back to where he had left his clothes. That’s when doubt crept up on him, and he instead began to look for something more secure.

After looking for a while, he found a shopping cart in an alleyway. The cart was full of nothing but cardboard. Not really having to search his memories for long, he was sure he knew the owner of the cart.

He looked through the alley with a bit more care, and sure enough, there was a stroller with a baby doll covered in an excessive amount of blankets.

This stroller and shopping cart belonged to a homeless man that people just called “Stevie.” Nobody knew if that was their actual name, but by the time they came to know about him, it no longer mattered, as that was the only name he answered to.

“This means that part of our city is somewhere around here. It’s just not this part, since I don’t recognize any of it,” he said as he walked back, removed the cardboard, and brought the cart back with him.

Just like that, he began to travel with a shopping cart. It looked like he was shopping at each dungeon that he stopped at. Potions, credits, materials, a variety of things kept coming out of each dungeon.

Even though his shopping cart was quickly being filled with various dungeon rewards, even extra weapons, he found nothing as beneficial to him as skill or stat points, at least not yet.

Disappointed but not really surprised, he continued on with his dungeon clearing. At times stopping when monsters saw him from a distance and rushed at him.

Suddenly, he remembered how he was dressed. He dragged the shopping cart into a building, hiding it from any monsters that might spawn. Then he remembered that buildings had water tanks, if not all, at least one had to.

He swiftly climbed onto the top of a building, found a water tank as soon as his foot touched the ceiling, and went to check if it had water. Once he confirmed that he did, he went back down.

Quickly finding a convenience store, he took whatever he needed. He took note of how full it still was. It was odd considering the rat horde. Maybe they didn’t know, he thought.

He returned to his cart, grabbed his clothes, and climbed the building once more.