After the fountain of blood started flowing from his neck, it didn’t take long for the farmer to die.

  [You’ve earned: 50 XP.]

  [You’ve gained: 1 FrankUp coin.]

  I sighed when I noticed the FrankUp coin took up an inventory slot instead of acting like the other currencies.

  “Why didn’t I get a notification when I killed those HATE assholes?”

  “You didn’t have Limit Breaker and you’re at your level cap, so there wasn’t anywhere for the experience to go.”

  I wanted to use Skullcracker to pop the top off his head, but didn’t have enough arms to grapple and open it.

  “Shit. I’m going to have to smash it, aren’t I?”

  Thankfully, Dickhead understood that was rhetorical and kept quiet.

  A random thought occurred to me. “Dick, are those HATE people going to come back as zombies now?”

  “No. You can’t forcefully change another player’s class.”

  I glanced down at OldMacDonald. “What about NPCs?”

  “Nope. You’d need some kind of trait or feat that lets you infect NPCs. It’s a shame you don’t have one. Some of the other classes get something as they level up.”

  “Why would I want to start a zombie outbreak?”

  “The short answer? Freelancers. But there’s a whole questline that explains it. We’ll look into it after you’re set up to use the hearth in town.”

  I glanced around for anything worth smashing a head on, but I was in the middle of a plowed field with rows and rows of cornstalks, without a rock in sight. The closest rocks were probably back at the stone wall. The one I had to hop over to enter the stupid field.

  I grumbled, grabbing both straps of his overalls with one hand. Then I dragged his ass through the cornfield. After the third row of OldMacDonald getting stuck in the stalks, I struck up a conversation with Dickhead. Boring tasks were the worst.

  “Dick, did the System use auto-aim or something back when I was a temp NPC?”

  “No. I was trying to tell you about hit chances earlier.”

  I had to pause and yank the farmer through another row. “Gotta work on your timing. Introducing new mechanics in the middle of combat is shit timing. But it’ll take me a bit to crack open OldMacDonald here, so now’s a good time. Lay it on me.”

  “The formula for hit chance is twice your Dexterity divided by your used Strength. At max Strength, you have a 53.33% chance to hit, excluding their dodge chance.”

  “Then I should have hit with half of those attacks,” I argued.

  Math—easily my least favorite subject in school, right behind Social Studies, Science, and Art. Gym and English weren’t so bad. And while I enjoyed playing games, game math was simple: bigger numbers were always better.

  One of OldMacDonald’s boots slipped off, but I didn’t stop. I’d drag his ass naked if I had to.

  “So, the System was cheating back in the church…” I knew it.

  “No. It wasn’t. There were two additional factors at play. The first is how much of your Strength it applied. There are three Attack Efforts. Pulling the punch, so to speak, uses a quarter of your Strength for the attack. Which is perfect for the low Dexterity you have right now.

  “Full-on attacks use three quarters of your Strength. And haymakers, like the ones you were trying to land, use your max Strength.”

  “You’re telling me to pull my punches?” I didn’t like that shitty idea one bit. “Doesn’t that mean I’ll do less damage?”

  “Some damage is always better than no damage.”

  I saw his point. It looked like Dexterity was even more important than I thought. It reinforced my idea of boosting that attribute first.

  “I imagine you’re probably thinking of just boosting your Dexterity, which is smart, but you shouldn’t neglect your other attributes.”

  A scowl formed on my face. I didn’t like him predicting my thoughts, especially when he was correct.

  Dickhead continued, “They’re all interconnected. For example, if you land a blow using more Strength than you have Toughness, you’ll take Self-damage.”

  He’d mentioned that mechanic before. It seemed like a balanced approach to increasing my attributes would work best. Which was weird to me. Most of the games I’d ever played encouraged me to dump as many stats as I could and min/max the shit out of one or two of them.

  “There’s a back-end formula for Self-damage too. You take the Strength used for the attack and subtract double your Toughness. But it only kicks in if you don’t have enough Toughness. You Know Who won’t let you heal just because Self-damage went negative. You’d need some sort of Vitality leech ability to do that.

  “But don’t worry about memorizing formulas. All you need to remember is that you’ll hurt yourself with every attack you land if you don’t have enough Toughness.”

  I understood but still didn’t like the idea of holding back in a fight.

  “So, I’m stuck using a quarter, three-quarters, or my full Strength?”

  “Yep, some classes have traits that allow them to get around some of the mechanics, but as a zombie, you’re stuck with the default.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “And what’s the second thing the System used that I didn’t?”

  “Grappling. It’s really strong, especially when you’ve got more Strength than your opponent. You’ve got triple the amount of most NPCs your level right now.”

  “Well, the System had two goddamn arms, and I’m stuck here working with one,” I grumbled.

  “You only need one arm, and even if the NPCs could match your Strength, grappling would only have a small chance of failing. Less after we factor in your Grappling skill.”

  I remembered one of my traits gave me plus five to my Grappling skill. I wondered what other skills I had but pinned that topic for another conversation.

  He continued explaining. “Once you’re both locked into a grapple, it’ll be a lot easier to land attacks, which works in your favor since you’re much stronger.”

  Zombie might not have been the worst pick for me after all. They were simple brawlers. I’d always preferred a direct approach when dealing with assholes; punching usually did the trick for me. I liked simple. It was effective, reliable.

  Brawling had always been a basic two-step process: First, lay hands. Second, start clobbering. It didn’t get much simpler than that.

  I finally reached the rock wall, palmed OldMacDonald’s face, and started bashing the back of his head into the rocks. It gave way on the third strike, so I flipped him face down next to me. Then I took a seat and dug in. I was about to ask if eating brains would regrow my limbs, but that hadn’t happened when I finished GodFather back in the Lair.

  After finishing OldMacDonald, I checked my Vitality.

  Vitality: 44% (322/715)

  I’d need to take down a few more farmers to get topped off.

  “Don’t forget to loot the body,” Dickhead reminded me. “Anything you take from NPCs will auto-adjust to fit you.”

  I glanced down at my boots. They were your standard brown, steel-toed Timberland PRO shitkickers. While they were built to last, I had put them through their paces with only an hour of sprinting. No matter the quality of the boot, nothing could withstand a beating like that forever. It’d be smart to pick up a replacement.

  Too bad OldMacDonald had lost a boot along the way. They were of decent quality. No brand name, but you could tell the craftsmanship was up to snuff by the laces, thread, and tread.

  The moment I stuffed my hand into his pocket, I got another loot notification.

  [You’ve gained: 15 gold, and 2 potion of healing. Total gold: 15.]

  I yanked my hand back. It was empty—no gold, no potion.

  “Where’d that potion of healing go?”

  “It’s in your inventory. You should add it to your hotbar so you can use it in combat. Hotbar assignments take up one Cognitive Load each. You can also add things like your gravekey. While you can’t use it in combat, you can activate it right before the first hostile action registers.”

  I assigned both the potion of healing and gravekey to my hotbar. That’s when I noticed the gravekey was grayed out with a cooldown timer on it. There were two hours and thirty-four minutes remaining.

  It had been about an hour and a half since I’d last used it. “The gravekey has a four-hour cooldown?”

  “Yep.”

  “That means I’m limited to using a FrankUp coin once every four hours.” I wasn’t a big fan of restrictive rules.

  “Yeah, but in practice it’s difficult to use your gravekey on cooldown. Stuff rarely lines up in four-hour increments. I’m hesitant to mention it, but there’s a QoL to reduce that cooldown.”

  I sighed. “Of course there is.” I was curious to know how much, but it didn’t matter. Not until I unlocked my franking word again. I had some farmers to, uh… farm.

  I quickly learned that the farmers were smart enough to run away, but they only did so at low Vitality.

  After punching the poor sod in the face for the fifth time, he yelped and started running away, screaming bloody murder.

  “Get back here, you little shit,” I said, chasing after him.

  I’d been testing out the pulled punches because I didn’t want to get any more gore on my jacket. But the bastard ran faster than me. I had to wait until he ran out of Mana to catch up to him again.

  He tripped and tumbled when I swiped him from behind. I pounced, pinning him with a knee on either side. My fist came down hard against the back of his head. After the loud crack of his skull, I got two more notifications.

  [You’ve earned: 50 XP.]

  [Your Punching skill has increased to level 1.]

  “Great… Only four more to go.” I jammed my hand into his pocket.

  [You’ve gained: 15 gold. Total gold: 30.]

  “Stingy bastard didn’t even give me a potion of healing.”

  I shrugged. If I could rip his head off and toss it in my inventory with only one arm, I’d have a non-combat potion of healing. Sort of.

  I took his boots into my inventory. Only seven slots remained.

  Having to drag these meat-sacks back to the rock wall every time to eat was becoming a pain in the ass.

  I found a nice rock that fit in the palm of my hand. Then I pressed a knee into YoungMacDonald to hold him down as I beat the ever-living brains out of him.

  After I finished cracking him open, I held up my bloody tool to inspect it. The edge was rounded but narrow enough to focus the energy of each blow into a small surface area. It was more than good enough to crack some heads, so I tossed it into my inventory.

  No more stone walls for me.

  I finished up with YoungMacDonald and checked my Vitality again.

  Vitality: 84% (600/715)

  Curious how close I was to my next Intellect rank up, I asked, “Dick, What’s 90% of my Vitality?”

  “644,” he said.

  Not close enough.

  Unexplored hayfields lined the other side of the road. I grew tired of trudging through rows of cornstalks, so I switched it up and trudged through the hayfields instead. While the NPCs could see me more easily, I could also see them, and I needed four more kills before I could move on.

  These were just simulated people; they weren’t real, or so I kept telling myself. I was pretty sure I hadn’t actually killed anyone before the World Dungeon, but there were a few close calls. I hadn’t stuck around to see if they ever woke up.

  But every asshole I put down deserved it.

  I crouched low after seeing a farmer unbaling a haystack for his cattle.

  At first, I’d been worried that the tall grass wouldn’t provide enough cover, like the cornstalks had. But NPCs had a limited detection area. A player would’ve seen me duck-walking my unstealthy ass from a mile away.

  That worked to my advantage.

  I ambushed from behind, slipping my arm around his neck for a deadly embrace. My teeth sank into his naked collar as I bit down hard. I ripped my head back, tearing his throat open just like all the others.

  I was getting pretty good at that.

  [Your Biting skill has increased to level 1.]

  Apparently, the System thought so too.

  The farmer fell away with his hands pressed against the fatal mark on his neck. I listened to his gurgling throes as three more farmers stood up around the hay bales.

  [You’ve earned: 50 XP.]

  Shit.

  They’d all been bent over, working just out of sight as I approached.

  “Goddammit,” I muttered, eyeing the three pitchforks in their hands.

  After a moment of confusion, they aggroed on me, leveling their damn pokers in my direction. I could see where this clusterfrank was heading.

  “Screw it,” I said, charging the closest one.

  He yelped and hid behind his pitchfork. My first swipe batted the tool aside as I lunged forward with a shoulder tackle.

  We both went down in a tangle of human and zombie limbs. I snapped at him as he squirmed under me. The asshole wouldn’t stay still.

  I felt the first of the four prongs plunge into my back. While annoying, it didn’t hurt. Actually, it helped me pin down the squirming farmer.

  I saw my moment and took it, lurching forward to take the bite.

  I missed as the second farmer drove his pitchfork into my neck. He pushed my head to the side, dragging my mouth over the farmer I’d been attempting to bite.

  It was the worst, slobbery, awkward kiss of my life, and that was saying something as I’d had more than my fair share of awkward kissing. First time with a dude though.

  Both farmers from above had me pinned, but not out of the fight. I formed a fist and played whack-a-mole with the poor bastard under me. The first slam bloodied his nose. His face only got worse after that.

  I lost track of how many times I pulverized his face, but I knew the System would tell me when to stop.

  [You’ve gained: 50 XP.]

  Good, now to deal with Dumb and Dumber.

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