After the initial surge of savagery and the following hours of testing the waters, the beasts had chilled down somewhat.

Still, Ricardo saw many of them roaming about. That none of them attacked despite him having food in his backpack told him there was something more going on.

His best guess was the head he was carrying. Animals were instinctive beings. If beasts could have that same instinct together with basic logic, it was easy to conclude the guy who had killed a G-5 hellhound wasn't to be messed with. How they knew about the head could be explained by them smelling the head and being able to tell how strong it had been by its smell.

He had to admit it was as farfetched a guess as they came, but he couldn't think of anything else, so he would roll with it.

He tested it by approaching a group of mutated rats. While they didn't run away from him, they looked at him with caution and stepped back a little. That hadn't happened in his bridge until he actively tried to intimidate them. It was evidence enough for him and it should help with his intimidation skill in a pitch.

On an unrelated note, he really needed boots or sneakers. The more he walked, the sharper the pain became, and with it the necessity to find comfortable footwear. Yet, he postponed it. The beasts having calmed down meant they were adapting and thinking better, which told him he was running out of time to abuse their unfamiliarity with their power.

Fighting the pack of mutated rats at the G-3 rank in front of him didn't sound smart. Instead, he kept his eyes open while moving to a supermarket ten minutes away. It wasn't the same he had visited after he found his bridge, but he came here because he had visited it before the apocalypse and knew more or less where the cutlery section was. No reason not to multitask while he searched for his prey.

He found it — the prey, not the knife — a couple of minutes later, when three large beasts jumped from behind a pile of debris, catching two cats by surprise.

Ironically, they were pigeons. The three of them had suffered the same mutation. They became as large as a fat tomcat, gained a third eye on the middle of the other two, their beaks got very pointy, and their wings morphed into long limbs with two junctions. As usual in many beasts, those limbs had long claws at the edge. Their actual feet had become thick enough to hold their weight but didn't look like they became any better at walking.

The ambushed cats died quickly; one pigeon's limbs held their prey firmly while the claws of the others ripped them apart. They started eating and Ricardo hoped they would get into a fight for the food, but it didn't happen.

Which was just as well. He needed to practice sneak attacking beasts and fighting groups. He focused on them.

Mutated Long-Limbed Pigeon — G-3

That they were only at the G-3 rank was the cherry on top of the cake. He felt confident in fighting them, even with no shield. But even better, because of how weak and few they were, he could try a new Intimidation-based tactic, without the fear of terrible repercussions if it failed.

He wanted to try fighting with his backpack on, but it wasn't worth the risk of having it destroyed in the battle. He left it close by on the ground with his metal bar.

He took the hound's head from the backpack and approached slowly, trying to get as close as possible to the pigeons before they noticed him. The food entertained them, so it wasn't difficult, but when he was twenty feet away from them, one of them raised their head and looked straight at him.

That's when he threw the head at them. While it was still on the way, he started screaming and running at them, swinging his wrench wildly in front of him. He wanted to make sure they understood one thing: he was pissed, and he was coming for them.

The other pigeons heard him and all three stepped back, using their new limbs to walk instead of their feet. When the head fell in the middle of them, they let out sharp and loud chirps repeatedly, trying to beat their wings to fly away. All they managed was to fail their limbs aimlessly.

When they looked at him coming, they started chirping even faster and louder, and that's when their reactions differed between each other.

One of them got a hold of itself and started running, using its newly elongated and strong limbs to move faster. The second just started flailing even more frantically and fell on the ground. The third seemed to get as pissed as Ricardo was showing himself to be and made a stand, putting its elongated limbs in front of itself, prepared to fight.

The double-jointed limb gave it a slight reach advantage over the wrench, but when Ricardo swung the wrench at the limbs, they cracked audibly and dropped to the side. The second swing came down hard on the pigeon's head and it died just like that.

It was from the flailing pigeon that he learned a valuable lesson.

He approached to take it out of its panicked misery, but its thrashing was too unpredictable. One limb got a firm hold on his leg, its claws biting deep into the jeans he wore. The jeans and the desperation of the beast were the only things that saved him from becoming a cripple. But he still got slashes deep enough to almost get to his veins, which likely have cut his journey into the system apocalypse short.

A single swing of the wrench killed the pigeon after that.

You've killed a Mutated Long-Limbed Pigeon — G-3

+594 XP — 7,311 total

You've killed a Mutated Long-Limbed Pigeon — G-3

+594 XP — 7,905 total

The same message appeared twice, only the accumulated XP changing on it. That felt unnecessary. After he got his backpacks, put the hound head back inside, and bandaged his leg, he wondered if he couldn't make such messages more organized.

In fact, maybe it was time to check on all his system options and see if he could learn something new about it from them.

'Options Menu,' he thought, and the same menu from before appeared in front of him, containing two buttons, Overlay and Modules. He thought of "Overlay," and a new window appeared showing the General Display, Audio, Gauge Module, Skills Module, Status Module, and Experience Module tabs.

The option to "Group XP gain messages from kills if they happen [X] between themselves," was under "General Display." Its drop-down option was set to "Disabled." He changed it to "5 seconds."

There were other options in the menu, including a very useful "Display Clock?" that was set to "No." He set it to "Yes, Show Local Time," instead. There was also the option to show the Omniverse Standard Time, but it was grayed out and impossible to select. He moved the clock around his vision until he set it comfortably on the top-right edge. He was used to smartphones; it felt natural there.

Another interesting thing he found was the option to have new system messages, except for notifications like XP gain, to show up minimized. He quickly set it on. Currently, getting system messages while he fought required him to consciously minimize them. The distraction might just kill him in the future.

As he messed around with the Options Menu more, he found that all Overlay-related options from the Modules could be accessed through both the Overlay and Modules buttons. They were duplicated for ease of finding, probably.

In the Audio tab of the Overlay, he found interesting things. He could set up an audio cue when he received a notification or message and even set up conditions to prevent them from playing, like when he was fighting, meditating, or sleeping. There was also a "Waking Up Alarm" in there, so he could always wake up at the same time every day. It was all very interesting and quite helpful, even.

He activated the audio cue at a low volume for most things except XP gain. Then he made it so it wouldn't play if he were fighting, meditating, sleeping, under high stress, or focusing hard on something.

He also set up his alarm to "Sunrise (currently 5:48 AM)." It just wouldn't do for him to keep sleeping while the beasts woke up, not in the beginning at least. He might change that later if he found the morning to be more forgiving than the night.

Before he could check the other modules better, rats appeared.

Not one or two, not a few dozen, not even a couple of hundreds. Thousands of them came from one end of the street, covering the buildings' debris like moving carpets.

The swarm was back.

Ricardo's shock made him stare dumbly at it for a mere moment, but even that was long enough for him to swear at himself for the time lost.

He had to run, not stand still like an idiot!

Dumb luck made the swarm come from the way opposite the river and he quickly put his backpacks on before turning and running for his dear life. When his metal bar hit a sizeable chunk of concrete and fell from his hand, he didn't even consider stopping to recover it.

The stench of rot coming from the rats made him gag. Briefly glancing back, he saw they were covered in blood and ranged from the G-1 rank all the way to G-4. He sped up and felt elated that the first few dozen stopped to eat the pigeons' carcasses. The following ones kept coming, but they were a little slower than him.

Then he tripped and fell, and they approached.

He stood up and yelled in rage to intimidate the swarm, but they kept coming unfazed. While running, he swung his wrench behind him. It hit a rat, and they shrieked and entered a frenzy, becoming fast enough to almost completely overcome him.

He ran in desperation, but because there were so many obstacles everywhere, they always caught up to him.

When that happened, he turned and swung his wrench a few times. The obstacles in the way affected the individuals of the swarm differently. Some had an easier time overcoming them than others, so the swarm became a kind of a lengthy line that got thicker the further away from him they were. That would be great if not for even more rats joining the swarm the more he ran away from it.

Still, his swings kept him barely ahead. And staying ahead was all he could think about. He panted, and he was happy he also rarely skipped cardio exercises at the gym.

Night fell on Juiz de Fora while he ran, and the rats' eyes shining red in the dark helped. His vision was severely limited, but thanks to their shining eyes, he could see them come, hit them, and survive.

Multiple times, he tripped and missed a swing, getting bitten on the legs or arms. The first time, he cried out loud so hard from the pain it hurt his throat. The next multiple times, he cried even louder, until his voice was completely gone. The bites were deep and some of them took bits of his flesh away.

He was bleeding all over and this only seemed to make the rats even more intent on killing him.

Suddenly, the ground disappeared from below him. Or rather, dizzy from the blood loss and in the increasing darkness of the night, he didn't see when he stepped on nothingness. In his desperate run, he had arrived back on the river and fell on the riverbanks, a grass slope with water on the end.

And there be monsters in there.

He had never heard of alligators in the city, but there was one right there, waiting for someone dumb enough to enter the waters. Or at least, he thought it was an alligator. He saw nothing; he only felt the jaws of something big biting his left hand and trashing him.

Until his hand was gone.

The thrashing left his upper body on the grass, his lower half on the water. The pain was such that he couldn't even think, but it was blessedly decreased by the light-headedness of the blood loss.

He tried to stand up to keep running but stupidly used his missing left hand to give himself some impulse. The pain of the stump touching the ground made him give up immediately and lay on the ground.

It saved him from a huge maw that bit the empty air where his head would be had he stood up.

The snapping sound from the bite was terrifying. He rolled sideways, taking his body out of the water as best as he could, just in time to avoid another bite. That made him realize there was over one alligator. He kept rolling on the ground until the slope got too steep, and he didn't have the strength to keep going.

Up above, he saw hundreds of pairs of shining red eyes looking down on him.

The rats squeaked and moved at the edge but refused to come down. He dizzily thought about how funny it was that he considered the beasts less adaptable than him, but they knew better than to come down here for their doom.

He looked back at the water and saw shining green reptile eyes on the surface.

To his surprise, the alligators were keeping to the river. He didn't know why, and he didn't want to care. But his mind whispered that the most likely explanation was that there was some bigger, meaner beast around that both the rats and alligator feared.

If he went up, he would die. If he tried to swim, he would die. And if he tried to walk at the margins of the river, he likely would just enter the territory of a new beast and piss them off too.

But that's if he could even move at all. He was exhausted and he just couldn't go on. Now that he had stopped running, his legs refused to move. He could barely see too.

The first beast to find him would kill him, it was that simple.

He was done for.

But just in case. Just in case he survived. Just in case both rats, alligators, and imaginary mean beast considered him unappetizing and let him live, he refused to die of blood loss. He forced himself to stay awake and took his belt off, making a shitty tourniquet at his stump.

He also drank most of his water to avoid dehydration and ate his remaining six energy bars. They gave people food after they donated blood, so it should be the right thing to do. He got bandages from his backpack after many tries and used his teeth to open the packages up. Then, he did his best to bandage the many bites throughout his body.

He was midway through bandaging his right arm, also using his mouth to do so, when he fainted.