Chương 80: (B2 Chapter 31)

The three of us rushed downstairs. The closer we got to the ground floor, the louder the voices of a large crowd became, and the more and more crying children could be heard. We finally reached the ground floor and stepped out into pure chaos. Hundreds of people were crowded into the entrance of the building, but the crowd was anything but normal. Old people, really old people, dominated the crowd.

Some were looking around in confusion, some were shouting and demanding answers, while many of them were in wheelchairs.

"Where am I? Did someone bring me here?! I'm going to call the police!"

"Marvin, honey, where are you? I'm scared!"

"Have you seen my little angel? She must be around here somewhere; she never leaves my side…"

"What's going on? Hey! Young man! Tell me this second what the hell's going on!" Voices blended together, with panic and confusion being the predominant emotions, followed closely by anger. Then, there were the children. Preteens, six to ten-year-olds, and even toddlers were crying or looking around, extremely scared. But that wasn't all. There were younger children present too, and some even looked newborn.

Luckily, all the children who couldn't walk yet were grouped off to one side, otherwise they would have been trampled by the crowd already. Even that wasn't all. My eyes then caught on to some others present in the crowd, who were almost all in simple wheelchairs, and all of them were disabled one way or the other. Some were missing limbs, some looked like they had genetic issues like down syndrome, and others were completely still, seemingly paralyzed.

I think we just found out who the System considers 'unfit' Users… I looked behind me and could see the crowd's confusion and panic mirrored in Madelline's and Omar's eyes, though I'm sure it was for entirely different reasons. I spotted movement behind them on the stairs, and saw with relief that Lucas was rushing down. He paused at the sight of the crowd, mouth agape, but I waved at him to get his attention. He then rushed towards me, blurting out a question as soon as he was within earshot.

"What's going on? Who are all these people?"

"Did you read the system announcements just now?" I asked, and he nodded in response.

"Remember how one of the announcements was about unfit Users and that they would be released near the closest gathering of users…?" I gestured towards the crowd, and his eyes widened in the horrifying realization.

"No…" he whispered, his eyes locked on the newborn children. I followed his gaze and I had to admit that I was completely stumped too. We had already been struggling with food and water, so what were we meant to do now? Lucas started moving towards the crowd, and I followed behind him. The old people still in their senses and the physically handicapped persons all shouted questions at us, but Lucas didn't answer, and I certainly wasn't going to.

We pushed through the crowd and reached the entrance of the building, where the horrifying scale of what the system had just done was revealed. The crowd inside the building was nothing compared to the mob outside. There were hundreds, no, thousands more outside. Children younger than two numbered in the hundreds easily, and their cries filled the air so completely that I couldn't hear anything else at all. The realization of what the system had done finally dawned on me.

It had taken all able-bodied people inside the tutorial iterations and placed the young, the old, and the disabled in some kind of special statis state. Presumably, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, had died during those tutorial iterations, while the people that they had been taking care of before the tutorial were protected by the system. And now, the system had just dumped all that responsibility on whoever was closest.

Since we had a large gathering already, I believe we had gotten a lot more people than, say, someone who was travelling alone. I had no idea what we were going to do, but there was one problem that was much more pressing. They're making too much noise!

"Lucas, get them to go inside and calm them down somehow. We need to keep them quiet!" I said, staring Lucas straight in the eyes. He still looked in a panic, understandably so.

"How…? I mean… how…?" he stuttered, not making any sense, but I understood him nevertheless.

"We'll figure it out. For now, just get them inside. I'll go to the edge to…" my sentence was cut off by a scream that cut tore through the crowd's noise with ease. The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. I immediately turned around and saw a crowd of old people pushing each other out of the way, desperately trying to get away from something. I quick-stepped in their direction, my surroundings blurring.

Even though my perception was sharpened, it was still extremely hard to dodge the dense crowd, especially since my skill didn't allow me to change directions. I narrowly avoided a running toddler, painfully aware that if I had crashed into her at this speed, she would have been seriously injured, if not outright killed. My stats had grown a lot, and I wasn't sure how hard an impact from me would be. The skill then ended, and I didn't use it again.

Instead, I used my agility, dexterity, and perception to their utmost, narrowly avoiding the crowd trying to move in the opposite direction. None of the crowd was moving particularly fast, which made it somewhat easy to dodge. However, it still took about a minute to reach the edge, and when I finally got there, I was met with a stomach-churning sight. A group of large feline monsters had caught a few people from the crowd, and had already started feasting on them.

The sight of a child no older than five, still alive and conscious, having its chest bitten apart by a massive feline monster was something I don't think I'll ever be able to forget. The child's struggles were slow now, but he was clearly still alive. I acted quickly, using quick step and piercing strike to kill off the monster in one hit to its neck. The rest of the monsters, busy feasting on others, were also quickly dealt with, and I returned to the boy in urgency.

He looked up at me weakly, his chest ripped apart and a large amount of blood already pooled beneath him. I told him it was going to be okay and then looked around to see if I could spot a healer. Finding none, I looked back down at him to see his eyes, still locked on me, but now glazed over. No…

It took a long time to get the crowd packed inside the building. The forty to fifty of us were simply not enough to get the panicked and confused crowd to listen to us, and Lucas had to ask Omar to release a massive orb of mana that crashed loudly in the distance to silence the crowd for a few seconds, during which he had finally gotten his voice heard. I kept circling the perimeter of the crowd, fighting off numerous monsters attracted to the crowd and the noise.

However, I couldn't be everywhere, and some fights took longer to resolve, resulting in dozens dying before Sam and Hannah showed up to support me. By the time the crowd was completely inside, and the small children had also been moved, evening had arrived. And surprisingly, it wasn't just monsters that had been attracted to the crowd and noise, but others as well. About twenty other people who had completed their tutorials had arrived over the time we were getting things under control.

The few short discussions I had with them about their tutorials had been fascinating. All of them had failed to complete their tutorials, and almost all were the only survivors from their iterations. I wanted to know in greater detail what had happened, but this was clearly not the time. Instead, I asked them to head inside and focused on defending. Once everyone was inside, I went inside too, finding the entrance hall, that had once seemed so massive, now having no space whatsoever.

"You expect us to believe the nonsense you're spouting, boy?" shouted an old man angrily at Lucas, who had just tried to explain what was happening and where they were.

"Look, I'm trying to help. But if someone doesn't want it, they are free to leave," he responded exasperatedly, and I had an inkling this had been going on for a while. It had taken a long time to get things settled. Quite a few of the older people who could still walk relatively fine had chosen to leave, stomping out angrily shouting about calling the police despite the numerous warnings we had all given them.

Hannah, Sam, and a woman who was a mage and was one of the ones who had failed her tutorial went with them, hoping that they would get into their senses when they inevitably ran into monsters and would then return here. I watched as Lucas tried to make sense of things and handle it to the best of his ability, but the scale of this was just too much for him alone. Even when Mason and a few others joined him to help, it was still overwhelming. There was just too much to do.

The building was large enough to house all this massive crowd if they all slept lined-up on the floor of its rooms. But the crowd wasn't exactly suited for sleeping on the floor… Not to mention that the apartments started from the third floor, and most people here couldn't climb so many stairs. Then, there was the problem of food, water, and a surprising new addition to the chaos, healthcare.

There were a lot of special needs that we now had to consider, and this new world of ours didn't really adhere to those needs. We didn't have any medicines, so would the healers be able to take care of them? And what would they need to do exactly…? Heal them constantly…? Moreover, the children were an entirely separate, and perhaps the most pressing thing to address. Even with the people who had arrived from their tutorials today, there were less than seventy of us, and hundreds of children.

The preteens could be somewhat reasoned with, and perhaps the children older than seven or eight could be talked to. But the ones who were younger… And perhaps the most burning question of them all – what to do about the ones less than a year old? Some seriously looked only a few days old, and they obviously needed suitable food and nutrients, and round-the-clock care. It was… overwhelming… to say the least.

In my mind, a thought kept rising out of pure logic, one that I kept trying to push back down but it stubbornly returned to my mind again and again. We should leave… It was just too much, and logically, leaving them to their own devices was the best way to ensure our own survival and continued growth. However, it wasn't something I was willing to do. I wasn't heartless, and leaving a bunch of helpless people and children to be eaten by monsters wasn't something I was willing to do.

That boy's empty stare was still fresh within my mind. Still, the thought kept returning, and it wasn't until Madelline spoke up from beside me that the thought got silent.

"Have you guys seen the system store?"