CWD: GA ~ Six

The soon-to-be-official assassin started a tiny fire in the crypt, solely for the light, and prepared for his midnight run. Taking a burial shroud, he rubbed it in dust until it became a dark gray, then used it to cover his cuirass and anything else that might shine. He gathered his bow and his last five arrows, then noiselessly followed the low stone wall into the central forest.

The crescent moon above wasn’t doing him any favors, but there were still thick trees and undergrowth for cover near the Stonehenge Pond. Nacho walked from dust to dirt, only coming to a halt when he laid eyes on the Squirrel Lords asleep around the pool. Only one was on watch, clearly not expecting trouble—since it was gazing down at a small fire with its black eyes, nearly asleep itself.

By now, even though there was still water in the pond, it was unfit for humans since it was full of swirling Putrid Mana. That was fine by him. Given how fast the swamp had dried up, that pond wouldn’t last a day once the creeping death hit the center of the Evaluation World. Soon his targets would be weak and dying, even without his intervention.

“Can’t let all those EPs go to waste though, now can I?” Standing in the shadows of a tree, Nacho put an arrow to string. He found himself looking forward to the kill, pleased for the first time by how years of war and murder had changed him—twisted him, really. He’d become a gamer who was determined to win, no matter how grisly the game became.

It was a simple enough matter to pull the string back, take aim, and send a feathered shaft into the throat of the Squirrel Lord on watch. Since it was nearly asleep, the arrow strike caused it to try to inhale, only to get a lungful of blood and Putrid Mana. It went down without a sound; even the *thump* from hitting the ground was muted due to its thick fur. “Those lessons were totally worth it.”

Congratulations! You have killed a Greater Flufftail Terror!

Level 08 Standard Monster = 80 Evaluation Points

Wowee! You’re one special little warrior! These things are tough, mean, and unkind to their rodent parents.

Note: You have over 1000 Evaluation Points! You are killing it! You’re now a one percenter!

A *cha-ching* sound followed, though it was only in his head and inaudible for the demon rodents sleeping around their fire. Nacho hung the bow and quiver on a branch, then crept forward with only his dagger, planning his route. He’d cut throats before; that was the gory truth. He abruptly realized that he was sweating and breathing hard, so he paused to take a few deep breaths.

Under control once more, he continued edging silently forward. He nearly stepped on a sleeping figure on the outskirts of the campfire’s flickering light but managed to pause and reposition. Nacho stared down at the target, knowing that although the task would be harder than it used to be—he didn’t have any of his assassin stealth skills—he knew the basics. Grabbing the squirrel’s demon horn gently, he tugged back and exposed the monster’s neck. A quick slash later, the thing was dead.

Another eighty Evaluation Points went into his total, but he wasn’t paying attention to that: the beast managed to gurgle a warning with its last breath, jerking awake the other Squirrel Lords. Nacho dove behind a stone before the first of the blood started to pool, cursing his luck silently. He’d gotten two of the fluffy terrors, but he still wasn’t going to fight the remaining four on their own turf that night. Eyes glittering as he marked his next prey, the man slithered south silently, retracing his path through dead trees and across ever-more dust… then running back to his hillside home.

Too amped to sleep, he watched the fake crescent moon cross the blank black sky. Nacho already knew what he would do next: nothing.

That little glade of trees would vanish, the water would be gone, and all he would have to do was wait. Those beasts would get hungry, then thirsty, and when they saw his fire, they’d come to investigate.

Nacho let one day pass in total relaxation and luxury, by this world’s standards. The following day was a nice, lazy one as well. Refusing to poke his head outside, he could only imagine what havoc a week in the Evaluation World had wreaked. The place was likely a dry, dead forest on a plain of dust. The temperatures, even in his shelter, began to swing from sizzling heat during the day to frigid death at night. Even so, Nacho didn’t risk a fire. Not yet.

On the afternoon of the eighth day, he took his flint and steel and started a nice-sized fire in an area he had specifically prepared for receiving… guests. More important than the flames was the smoke, and to remove all concern that it might be a trap, he slid most of his water barrels—brimming with water—out next to the fire. It would only be a matter of time before the fluffy terrors came to investigate, driven by their desperation. Even a single day without water was a long day indeed.

Nacho dug himself a little hidey-hole in the dust and covered it with leftover dried grasses he’d woven together. He adjusted the blind so it blended into the gray, black, and yellow landscape. There he sat, with his crossbow, longbow, throwing daggers, and other weapons ready to go. A barrel of water that he drank from constantly was his only companion, as he needed to stay completely hydrated. Those oversized vermin might have meat to eat, but they had to be running out of water: he had checked to verify that there were no containers among their goods when he had scouted the camp.

Only an hour later, the Squirrel Lords came stumbling on weary legs with their tails appearing matted and sickly. Their hairless heads had grown pale, and they looked to be on the verge of collapse, though it was hard to tell with the horns and the inky black eyes. Frankly, they were just plain creepy.

One carried a drawn bow, another a loaded crossbow. Both wore curved swords at their hips, though the other two had the melee weapons out and ready to deal with anything close-range. Nacho braced the stock of his own crossbow against his shoulder and lined up his bolt with the lead bow squirrel. He was nervous, his hands sweating lightly. “This is all just practice; I have well over a thousand evaluation Points.”

Nacho would enter that Evaluation Mall as royalty.

He pulled the trigger. The bolt struck the bow squirrel in the chest, and it sank to its knees. A system message told him he was eighty Evaluation Points richer. With no time to waste, Nacho immediately got to work cranking the wheel of the string and slipping another bolt in place. He carefully blinked sweat from his eyes as he settled back into position.

“One down, three to go.” The squirrels hadn’t seen where the shot came from, and they scrambled to take cover inside Nacho’s crypt. He felt violated. “Crypt, sweet crypt. Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like crypt.”

Nacho didn’t have to wait long. The thirst drove them out. They sprang for the water barrels with cups, and the minute they dipped into one, Nacho nailed the crossbow squirrel in the back, right where his little evil squirrel heart should be.

It let out a cry, and Nacho heard the *cha-ching* that guaranteed his kill. Sadly, the two remaining anthropomorphic vermin spotted his face. It was time for a few close-up kills, not that Nacho was going to play fair. No… it was time to put his traps to work.

Nacho released his crossbow and launched himself out of his hidey-hole, screaming as he ran straight at the squirrels. He kicked away the dead beast’s crossbow that lay in the dust as the others recoiled in confusion, triggering the action and sending a bolt shooting out across the dead ground. With the weapon rendered useless, he sprinted along the stone path through his pit traps.

The first sword squirrel followed him carefully, but the mace-wielding one stepped into a pit; his foot crashed through the grass and onto a spike. Macey-demon let out a shriek of pain and rage. Hearing that the trap was effective, Nacho spun and knocked the sword squirrel against a pile of rocks—right where he had hidden halberd away in the tangled grass. The demon squirrel found himself impaled but alive, but Nacho fixed that with a single thrust of his dagger.

The system allocated Nacho eighty additional points as the last of the monsters limped toward him, the mace in its paw glowing a sickly green. Nacho sized up his opponent, realizing that this guy had some nice armor—if the assassin didn’t let his eyes drop below the creature’s knees. “Probably should’ve invested more in shoes than chainmail!”

Nacho used the moment the squirrel took to understand his words to dart forward, just before it could start swinging the mace. He drove his short sword into the squirrel’s chest, but it merely rebounded off the armor. Macey-fluff whipped his fancy morningstar around, crushing the human’s left arm, but Nacho had already begun moving and managed to plunge his dagger into the exposed throat, driving the knife up to the hilt in the monster’s arteries.

Those black eyes went lifeless.

Congratulations! You have killed a Greater Squirrel Lord!

Level 09 Standard Monster = 90 Evaluation Points

Stupendous work! +25 bonus points for killing the big cheese!

Note: You are crafty. We like that.

Nacho checked, and he had one thousand, five hundred and eleven points in total. From what he’d seen, there were no other monsters. He didn’t get all of the points that were possible, thanks to the Flufftails killing the creatures who’d congregated around the Stonehenge Pond, but his results were still more than acceptable. His left arm was numb from the mace strike, and he figured the bone was broken for sure, but in the end, it wouldn’t matter.

Using his healthy arm, he dragged the bodies of the Lords out into the dust. He doggedly returned to his crypt and laid down for a few minutes. Taking stock of the situation, Nacho breathed a sigh of relief. He might not have a door, but he had two barrels full of water, a clay pot half full of peanuts, one full of strawberries that were already going bad, a few pine nuts, and some blackberry pouch jelly.

“I did it. Everything here is dead except for me.” He eased up and walked out to sit by his fire, and all was darkness except for the fake crescent moon in the inky sky. Then he had a thought that chilled him to the bone: he was going to starve to death unless he ate rotten monster meat. He had enough water to last him a good long while, but in conditions like this, the food would go bad. From there, it would be a slow decline into death by starvation.

“Well, that’s a problem for aged Nacho to deal with tomorrow.” He wrapped up in a burial shroud next to his fire and went to sleep, half-hoping some monster would just kill him as he slept so that he’d be done with this place.

No such luck.

He spent the next several days exploring every inch of the Evaluation World, which had been reduced to a dusty circle of dead plants. All the rivers were dry enough to start a fire on, the swamp had dessicated into cracked mud, and the Stonehenge Pond lay empty. The western part of the realm might’ve been a nice place back before the withering had hit it—it lay thick with the parched remnants of trees, grassy knolls, and lots of sandy riverbanks.

He found a rambling cottage with eight rooms, more weapons, armor, and broken food storage containers. Nacho figured it had been the Squirrel Lords’ home, since he found far too many empty walnut and peanut shells, as well as some rotting meat which might have been a chicken at one point. Why the Squirrel Lords had smashed up the clay storage jars, he had no idea. They could’ve used them to store water and avoid his homegrown ambush.

Nacho thought maybe his wounded left arm would kill him, but he didn’t think it was going to be fast enough to avoid some thirsty days. His body was already healing, though he was getting hungrier. He’d run out of satchel jelly, he’d polished off the pine nuts and strawberries, and he only had a handful of peanuts left back in the crypt.

On the way home, he collected more firewood, deciding that even though he didn’t need to return to the crypt, it was as good a place to slowly die as any other. He built himself a firepit inside the crypt and dug out a chimney, then rubbed sticks together in the sun, instantly creating flame—the wood burned like paper.

He wasn’t sure if there was some kind of penalty for ending the Evaluation himself, but given how terrible things were in the Evaluation World, Nacho figured some people just gave up all hope. He wouldn’t.

In the end, he didn’t need to.

A couple days later, weak from hunger, he woke up on the burial slab. It was his fourteenth day in the Evaluation World. Two weeks was a whole lot better than two days, and he had nearly eight times the points. Confused as to why he had woken up so suddenly, he realized that dust was shaking from the walls of his crypt. His fireplace crumbled, and it felt like the entire world was quaking.

Nacho slipped off his slab and stumbled out of the crypt, freezing in place as he watched a Godzilla-sized abomination rise out of the dust in the distance. On its head was a rocky crown he recognized even from this distance—those were the Stonehenge Stones. The pond must’ve part of the giant’s skull.

“Gross,” Nacho laughed dizzily. “I was drinking head water.”

The giant had to have been at least four hundred feet tall, likely a Tier five monster, though there was no way for him to prove that. Whatever it was, all he knew for sure was that it meant he didn’t need to die from starvation anymore. It stepped forward on stone feet, a wobbling stone mountain crushing through the dust and causing a storm.

Half the world seemed to have been drawn up into the monster already, and the ground seemed to be absorbing into its body like an earth elemental from legends. It grew larger every second, so Nacho grabbed his bow and started toward it. “Maybe a lucky shot’ll score me another fifty points. C’mere… you.”

The rock monster came swaying over. Up top, there might’ve been a mouth and eyes, but at that distance, it was too high up in the sky to really tell. Nacho started giggling as he fired arrow after arrow into the stone limbs, though they bounced off harmlessly.

It wasn’t long before Nacho was looking up at the giant stone heel of the final monster. the sun was blotted out. Air rushed past and around him.

Then it was Splatsville: Population Nacho.

Nacho didn’t feel his death, which was a nice surprise. Being mauled by the Gecko Bear had been awful. This wasn’t bad—just some air pressure, and then nothing.

Aww, we’re sorry, Player, but you were killed by a Tier Five Stone Catastrophe!

Evaluation complete.

You died with 1511 Evaluation Points, but how many people would charge at something like that? You have been evaluated as worthy. Because you were cut off before going as long as you could have lasted, we’ll round you up to an even 1600 Evaluation Points! Great job!

Ready to mix up a delicious future?

Go shop!

“Ha, I called it.” Part of Nacho was disgusted that the Patrons had thrown such a wildly unfair monster as a Tier five at him. There hadn’t even been a Tier one in the entire area; everything he’d fought was Tier zero! The other part of him realized that it didn’t matter, except for allowing him to skip starving all by himself for weeks on end.

Mostly, Nacho was just glad to be alive. Again. He was back in his body, in a tuxedo, blinking at the bright lights of the weirdest mall imaginable. As he settled back into himself, he slowly smiled at the realization that he had a small hill of Evaluation Points burning a hole in his pocket.

Time to cash in.