3. Leon's First Murder.

It took Leon just a couple of minutes to absorb all 22 cores. He felt the usual rush of energy flush through him. Later that night after taking stock of all his food, water and other useful things like flashlights, batteries, and a radio just in case.

Leon got a decent amount of sleep that night. He heard some crashing noises outside his building but he figures unless they group up in a huge horde there's no way they're getting inside his building.

After packing up some essentials in his pack he makes his way outside. After blocking the entrance he walks down the same road he always does. After passing the same grocery store he continues down the road.

He's going to try and go farther today than he's gone before. He needs to find more zombies to see if he can get more cores and items to help him survive in case something crazy happens in the future.

While walking down a desolate road, Leon hears voices in the distance. It's his first time encountering other people since this whole thing began 2 days ago.

Instead of rushing out like an idiot, he takes the more cautious approach as he slowly creeps towards the voices without drawing attention to himself.

Once Leon makes it to the alley the voices are coming from he sees two guys loading something into a white van.

"Careful man, if you damage the merchandise, boss will have our heads." The first guy says. He looks to be around his late 20s or early 30s but it's hard to tell because hes wearing a mask and a thick jacket.

"Yea yea, stop busting my balls." The second guy replies. This guy is a lot bigger and more intimidating than the first. He's got a large build but is otherwise wearing the same type of clothes and mask as the first.

Leon moves closer to get a peek at what they are loading in the van. Staying close to the wall of the alley he slides closer and closer until...

CRASH!

Suddenly the two guys look behind them and see Leon who has bumped into some garbage bags knocking them over.

"Donny, go get him!" The big guy yells.

"W.. what? Bro were just on a supply run. Plus what if he has an artifact?"

"Don't be a coward! If we can get him plus the girl the boss will definitely reward us." The big guy says and pulls a knife out of his jacket.

"Uhg.... Fine let's get him." Said Donny as he pulls out his own knife.

They both start charging towards Leon. Meanwhile Leon pulls out his talisman and summons his skeletal wolf. With a huge rush of energy and some clacking sounds a large wolf made of bone appears in front of Leon.

"Shit! See what did I tell you bro!"

"Fuck, just get him!"

The wolf pounces forward at the smaller thug named Donny and slams him down to the ground. The thug stabs his knife straight into the wolf's ribs.

CLACK! CLACK!

Both stabs hits the wolfs ribs but hardly leave a scratch. The thug's arm is bleeding as the wolf rips his flesh open with its sharp teeth.

The big thug charges and grabs the wolf from behind and tries to pull it off his friend but it's latched on to his arm.

Leon finds an iron pipe nearby and comes up behind the big guy and slams it on the back of his head. He immediately goes limp and falls to the ground with a large dent in his head.

The wolf let's go of Donny's arm and lunges towards his throat and rips out his windpipe sentencing him to death. Both thugs lay on the ground with a puddle of blood pooling under them.

Leon falls on his arse and tries to recover. That's the first time he's had to kill another human being. Strangely he doesn't feel sick or anything, but mentally it's hard to recover from.

After a few minutes he managed to calm himself down a bit and looks over to see two shiny marbles right where the two guys bodies are.

"Interesting, I didn't think you could get loot from other humans. This new world is getting stranger and stranger." Leon picks up the two cores and stuffs them in his pocket for now.

"It also didn't look like they had discovered any items yet. Anyways, let's see what they were protecting." Leon says as he walks over to the back of the van. He swings open the doors to see multiple rifles leaned up against the walls of the van. There are also a few backpacks full of gear such as tents, rope, canteens and other useful stuff.

One of the things that stands out though is the girl tied up in the middle of the floor of the van. She bound and gagged and unconscious. She looks like a child, maybe around 10 years old. Leon can't really tell, but it's not like it really matters.

Who knows what those thugs were going to do with her. Either way Leon grabs a knife out of one of the packs and cuts her hands free and rips the tape off her mouth.

It might be to conspicuous if he takes the whole van, so he grabs what looks useful and fills a couple of duffle bags with the best stuff. Including the rifles and ammo for sure. Some fishing gear, an electric lantern, and they even had some better clothes that offer protection against the weather.

After cramming as much as he can he hoists up three full backpacks of gear over his shoulders and then wraps the little girl in a blanket and picks her up in a princess carry.

A couple of hours and multiple breaks later he finally makes it back to his apartment building. Thankfully there weren't to many zombies during the trip and his wolf was enough to take care of them.

Even though it says on his system page that he has enough mana to summon his wolf multiple times, for some reason he can only summon one at a time. Leon plans to test it out when and if he ever gets another summon item to see if he can have multiple summons.

Finally back inside his room he walks inside and lays the girl on the couch in his living room. Afterwards he promptly collapses on the floor with the packs falling to the floor next to him. He lays there panting, his limbs completely numb.

Oddly enough, even though it was a struggle for him to make the trip with all the extra weight, it was also much easier than it would have been before the apocalypse. Like before if he was to carry all that extra weight he would have barely made it half way before passing out.

Maybe it's all the cores he has absorbed. At the same time he doesn't really have much information about how it all works anyways. For now, Leon pushes himself off the ground and walks to the kitchen to down a full bottle of water. Afterwards he falls on his bed and drifts off to sleep.

In the morning, Leon wakes up to the sun shining brightly through his window and goes to take a shower. Sadly, once he turns the water on, nothing comes out.

"Great."

At Least he stocked up on water from the store that should last him a while. Leon walks into the living room to check on the little girl he save last night. He sees she is still asleep on the couch.

Hes not sure when she'll wake up but he grabs a couple of snacks and a drink and sets them beside her for when she does wake up.

While taking inventory and sorting the loot he got from the thugs last night, he pulls out those 2 cores he got. They look different from the cores the zombies drop. The zombies cores are a dark red color, but the other two are a lighter shade of red.

Once he pulls out the two cores a blue screen pops up and shows that they are actually D rank cores. "Probably because the basic human is stronger than those zombies." He thinks to himself.

As usual he absorbs the two cores into his intelligence. Surprisingly the rush of energy he gets this time is overwhelming as he feels his power grow by several times.

"What the hell was that..."

"Just one rank higher and it felt like I absorbed dozens of E rank cores."

Leon stands up and feels around his body. Obviously it hasn't changed at all. But he still feels much stronger than before. Pulling the talisman out, he summons his skeleton wolf to see if there are any changes to him.

WHOOSH!

A surge of energy swirls in front of Leon and as soon as he sees the wolf his brain falls of a cliff.

PLOP... PLOP...

The skeletal wolf now has bone like protrusions all over its body, it looks mostly the same but if you were to try and pet him it would be like petting a cactus.

Clack clack clack!

"Whoa... Calm down boy!" Leon says as the dog jumps around in excitement.

"Sit! Sit down boy!"

CLACK!

"Good boy!"

After playing around with his new pet for a while he learns that he's able to retract the bone spike all over his body so he does have accidental friendly fire.

A few hours later it's in the middle of the day and Leon is examining the rifles he got from the thugs. The rifles are just normal bolt action hunting rifles, nothing fully auto sadly.

He doesn't know how to take them apart or anything but he has used rifles like these in the past so he wipes them down and makes sure they're loaded and whatnot.

The next thing Leon does is to check out the clothes he grabbed. It's nothing fancy but there are water proof pants with good padding, a few thermal shirts and socks, and a pair of black combat boots which are much better than his sneakers.