“Oh, come on, now, dude! You are a nurse! Hold it in!” Lucas was super nauseous.

Max had taken down from the crosses one of the people from the town they had settled in. Now, Max was showing him the scalping.

“Look!” Max said with a razor-sharp bone dagger in his hand.

“So neat! Man, we should kill all bald people!” Max laughed heartily while holding the cut-off scalp of them in front of him.

“Don’t worry, dude, you grow a stomach for these things! It took a while for me too! But if you want to be my personal nurse, better to learn how to stomach a few unsavory acts, no?”

Lucas slowly nodded, knowing he had no other choice. It was this or Soul torture. No, not death. Max had once casually mentioned while sipping on some tea that if Lucas tried to kill himself, not only was Max pretty sure he could save him from whatever he tried to do to himself but that he would, later on, cut his very Soul.

“Oh, boy. I can’t wait to get to Jacob and gut him like the pig he is,” for a second there, the pantomime stopped, and Lucas could see the big bad monster below the charisma.

Then, Max shook his head, got rid of the corpse after pulling his heart out, and started chomping on it. It didn’t matter how many times Lucas saw that; he was still far from accustomed to it.

“Yeah, yeah. You know what, just turn. This heart-eating thing is the edgiest and cringiest thing I do. I loathe it myself for it, don’t worry. I mean, cliché much?”

Lucas had never imagined a monster could be so self-conscious.

“But why do you do it, then?” the nurse asked.

“Well, you know—” Max stopped and swore. “Gosh! Dude, I didn’t actually tell you the reason I fell out with the Nazis! But, oh, man, why am I like this? Should I take some supplements for my memory or something? I mean, one would expect this thing to be quite nutritious, no? Oh, but I forget, you are not a doctor. Just a nurse, don’t mind then. The male nurse thing keeps throwing me off.”

Max chewed a bit more, careful not to get too much blood on his face. It was a testament to his experience in eating human hearts that he could perform such an act while not spilling one drop of blood on his chin and clothes.

“Anyway,” he was almost done, “they have a bad taste. And they are all fibrous. So when you bite into the coronaries, they feel like jelly worms. Bleah.”

Max ate up the heart and cleaned his lips with a tissue offered from one of his Undeads.

“About the hearts, it’s not really up to me. I cultivate the Heart-Eating Necromantic Demonic Cultivation Technique. A mouthful, right? I also don’t like how ‘Necromantic’ and ‘Demonic’ are close together, both of them having the ‘-ic’ suffix. It bothers me so much. But what can you do? It’s the most powerful Necromantic Magic-aligned Cultivation Technique I know. The ‘Heart-Eating’ part is bothersome, but it gets better when you get stronger. You have to eat less, number-wise. It becomes a question of quality over quantity. Now, however, I pretty much have to make up for the lack of powerful cultivators with numbers. It is indeed quite bothersome. But, once again, I can’t complain. I can still cultivate even without eating: it’s just slower.”

“So, we need a map, don’t we?” Max yawned. “We need to decide our next objective.”

Max talked with the plural ‘we’, but he did everything on his own. Lucas was just an unwilling spectator, rarely called to heal someone when Max was torturing the tougher people who wouldn’t crack up immediately.

“Oh, by the way, let’s go get some fresh water!” Max jumped up, excited about the most common things. “I really want to clean myself!”

The Necromancer had set up shop in a little town in Nebraska. He had explained to Lucas how monster density and levels worked. Apparently, the lower the population density, the lower the spawn rate of the Demonic Beasts at the start of the apocalypse.

“I have to admit, I’m really good at Inscription Patterns. Let’s stop at the grocery store to get some new shampoo. I think the last one irritated my scalp!” Max pointed with both index fingers and had the undead carrying the scalp of his last victim raise the bloody skin in the air.

Max looked meaningfully at Lucas, who laughed in a Pavlovian reflex. He hadn’t really gotten the joke, but Max was now chuckling to himself with a satisfied grin.

“Anyway, Inscription Patterns. We have hot showers and clean water in the apocalypse. Cool, huh?”

Considering the Necromancer had told Lucas that he had come back from the future in his old self, not that impressive. But it wasn’t an opinion worth losing his life over. Therefore, he simply said: “It’s quite cool, to be honest. Not as much as the Undeads, but still cool!”

He knew he couldn’t overplay his hand. Max wasn’t stupid and knew when Lucas was openly lying. Therefore, it was time for diplomacy and half-truths.

“Well,” Max eyed some of his own creations in disgust, “they are very strong, I’ll give you that. But I’m not strong enough to summon my signature Undeads! I don’t like zombies and ghouls, and they are too filthy for my tastes. Mind you, I’m a practical man, though. So until I can get my cultivation at the 6th realm, it’s going to be hard doing anything really cool.”

“Which realm are you in, right now? I think I forgot,” Lucas said.

Even though one would expect Max to get angry at him for forgetting something, it was a thing that actually made the Necromancer really happy. It was as such because he loved telling the same story or fact over and over.

“Peak of the Oriole realm, my friend! You have to hurry up, Lucas. You are still at the peak of the Mantis realm, for crying out loud!”

“I know, I know,” Lucas had no idea about their respective power levels. He just knew that the mad Necromancer had killed everything in his path without batting an eyelid.

“Well, maybe you will get some wonderful insight under the hot shower! Who knows, that’s how people claimed it worked before the apocalypse, no?”