3 Retribution Time
"Hey, you forgot one thing," said a man.
He was a bulky man dressed in a simple trouser suit. The man, along with his two colleagues, left the tavern to go after Seth.
Seth himself had gone out a few seconds ago, leaving the naive woman who fed the shabby man behind. He was pretty disgusted by that. Even though all wasn't well in the world, she was still trying to be nice to people.
The man came out of the tavern, seeing the figure of Seth, who seemed to be walking south, away from the city center, which was the Eiffel Tower. The three men spontaneously chased after Seth to give him something, according to what he had seen in the tavern earlier.
"Hey, wait!"
Seth ignored the voice calling him, focusing on walking south to search for the whereabouts of the Achilles party, the group Jonas had joined. He needed to meet the three quickly so that the chemistry could be well established due to longer acquaintance.
The man chasing Seth turned annoyed. He kept calling out to him without knowing his name. When he was right behind Seth, the man pulled Seth's shoulder, causing him to twist.
"What's wrong?" asked Seth sarcastically.
"There's something left behind," said the man, sticking out his clenched hand.
Seth squinted his eyes, observing the stranger's hand. The fist didn't open. Instead, it surprisingly landed a smashing blow on Seth's stomach, making the man groan in pain.
"AKH!"
"Take it, asshole! Acting cocky like you're the greatest here." The man grinned, continuing to beat Seth relentlessly, even as Seth lay on the ground helpless.
Two of the other man's friends chose to join the man in beating Seth. The three seemed to gang up on Seth, ignoring the pitiful stares of the surrounding citizens, who didn't seem to care that someone was being beaten.
Since the apocalypse happened on Earth, people have been more apathetic than before. They were more concerned with their lives than dealing with other people's problems.
Seth tried to fight back with the baseball bat in his bag, swinging horizontally to make the three men back off. However, Seth didn't easily fight those who had a higher level than him.
"LOSER!" shouted the man in the middle, the leader of the group of three.
He kicked with his metal boot into Seth's stomach, making Seth roll away with his eyes closed, trying to endure the pain from the kick.
His baseball bat slipped from his grasp, was picked up by one of the three men, and continued to torment Seth in the middle of a city street. Seth racked with dizziness, fatigue, and pain from the men's relentless beatings, could only surrender.
He lay limp with bruises on his face, chest, and stomach. Seeing Seth defenseless made the trio begin to stop the attack.
"Know your place, little brat!" the man holding Seth's baseball bat groaned.
One man, the leader of the small group, was seen walking toward Seth's right hand. He seemed to start pulling out an axe from his waist, holding it with both hands.
"Sorry, this might be painful for you," the man said.
He swung the axe towards Seth's right hand. The man, without any guilt, chopped off Seth's right hand roughly.
"AAAAKH!" cried Seth, pale-faced from the considerable blood loss caused by his severed hand.
The man turned out to be a game point robber. There were two methods to steal game points; by handing over the game points from the user to the robber or taking the system bracelet.
When the system bracelet is removed from the user's hand, the system inside the bracelet will turn idle. Whoever makes a connection from their own bracelet to the idle bracelet, all attributes of the previous user will be transferred to the user who made the connection, except for skills.
Not many people get special skills, such as Seth's time looping skill. Such special skills were not embedded in the system bracelet but in the user's body. That was why robbery by cutting off the user's hand wouldn't be able to steal someone's skills.
The man pressed the button on Seth's bracelet, displaying Seth's status with idle written in red above the user's status title.
"Tch! Only a braver, but he's acting like a jerk," the man said, looking at Seth's status.
"K-Kill ... me," Seth whispered, his face turning pale.
"Woah, he can time loop," said the man's colleague.
He walked over because he wanted to know what Seth's status was. His eyes gasped to find that the man they had just tortured had a special skill, something rare for people in today's world to acquire.
"I've heard of it. Every time he dies, he'll return to the previous time," said the man's colleague.
"Does that mean he's immortal?" asked the other male colleague, walking over after he had emptied Seth's bag.
"There is a limit. I'm sure there is a limit; no one can keep looping back in time," said the man who led the small group.
In the end, Seth's status, such as EXP and GP, were sucked up by the small group leader. With the additional EXP from Seth, he managed to level up to 67 from 66.
After robbing everything, the man threw his right hand with the bracelet still attached to Seth's lifeless body. The man's sight became blurry, blood pouring from his severed hand.
"Hope you manage to connect that hand," the man said.
He laughed loudly after robbing all of Seth's belongings, leaving the man lying helpless on the muddy and dirty city street, with raindrops starting to fall on him.
When he was entirely dying, his eyes witnessed a woman with white hair down to her back and armor on her body sitting beside him. Her lithe hand stretched forward, holding Seth's right hand that was severed by the robbery.
"I didn't know you could time loop," said the woman whose name Seth had yet to learn.
"If you die and do the loop. You can come to me. I joined a large party called Hive at the beginning of the Skywatcher invasion," she said.
Although his consciousness slowly began to fade, Seth could still hear the words of the woman beside him well. He moved his head, turning his head to the right in an attempt to look at her face.
From the woman's perspective, Seth's eyes looked blank, like someone who was on the brink of death. She regretted not being able to help him when he was being beaten.
"Your ... name?" asked Seth, quietly.
"My name is Astrid Rasmussen."
"Astrid, huh? I'll ... look after you," Seth said softly.
The last of his energy spent, Seth died for the third time in his life. He failed to find his colleagues and ended up dead at the hands of robbers who had a higher level than him.
Astrid realized that Seth was dead. She closed the man's eyes and carried him away to be buried.
***
Seth woke up again with a bad mood filling his heart and mind. He reflexively held his right hand where, in his previous memory, the robbers cut off it.
His eyes darted to the side, right and left. Seth was surprised with a gaping mouth to find him in his office as a young doctor in one of the hospitals in Chicago.
"What the...?"
Seth grabbed his phone lying on his desk, finding that it was 10 o'clock in the morning on June 13, 2065. Surprisingly, he looped back to a moment where the alien invasion hadn't happened yet.
The man hurriedly ran to his office window, opened the curtains quickly, and saw cars passing by on the city streets, people working in the office on their computers, and planes flying across the city sky.
"I'm looping back too far," Seth complained.
His head throbbed every time he finished a time loop. He walked over to a glass cabinet filled with medicine. He took out a bottle of medicine to relieve the dizziness symptoms in his head, he took two tablets at once.
The door to Seth's office opened, a woman dressed as a nurse came in carrying a file containing patient documents, "Doctor Seth, there is a patient who needs your help."
Seth was silent momentarily, staring at the nurse with a flat stare. His reverie was broken again when the nurse called him a second time.
"Doctor Seth?" the nurse asked.
"Ah, yeah. I'll be right there," Seth said.
As Seth was getting ready, his phone suddenly rang. He saw his girlfriend's contact number clearly displayed on the screen. He picked it up and listened to what she wanted.
"Can we meet during lunch break? I have something I want to talk about," asked the woman, Seth's girlfriend.
"I can. We'll meet at your favorite restaurant," Seth said.
"Okay. Thanks, Seth," said the woman, hanging up the call.
Seth put his phone away again, his mind still confused by what had happened. He tried to recall the times when aliens invaded the Earth. Seth just remembered something when he noticed the digital calendar on his desk.
"The invasion! It will happen today."
