Chapter 176: Accumulating favors
Once the interrogation from the representative was over, he assigned some soldiers to escort Tarish and the rest of their team back to their homes.
Before Atlan entered the truck, some of the dwarves he saved personally thanked him for his service.
"You have the dwarves' hands and arms. If you need anything, we will make sure you get it."
The rest of the bandaged dwarves nodded their heads and showed off their muscles to Atlan.
Even though the official story was that the anomaly resolved itself without anyone killing the Sapient Infection Canzer, the dwarves had a feeling in their guts that the Star Porter had a big hand in killing those Canzers that caused the suffering of thousands of dwarves in the Masamune district.
Atlan boarded the truck and it set off back to the City Center where his house was located.
After everything was resolved, the soldiers and the Operators went on their way to restore the Masamune district to the industrial heart of the City it once was.
Some of the soldiers in charge of picking up rubble and litter around the streets saw a peculiar piece of equipment lying on the ground.
It had a long wooden handle and a large rusted curved blade.
It was Atlan's scythe.
In the chaos and rush of saving the dwarves out of the Heat Wave, Atlan's scythe fell out of his back.
Probably just some trash from a workshop, thought the soldier.
He was going to put it in the bin to recycle the metal, but some of the dwarves saw the scythe in his hands.
This was the first dwarf that Atlan saved when the Symptom appeared in the district. He was also one of the dwarves who promised to help Atlan with anything he needed.
He quickly recognized the scythe as something that belonged to the Star Porter.
Explore more adventures at empire
"Hey! Give me that!"
The soldier was intimidated and quickly gave him the scythe. "What are you going to do with that piece of junk?"
The dwarf smiled. "I'm going to repay a favor."
######
Atlan stepped off the truck, with Tarish and her team looking over him with moist eyes.
"Thank you again, Star Porter."
"I hope we can meet again. Hopefully in a better situation."
"If you have anything you need, anything at all, you can talk to us and we can help you with it. We may not be the strongest out there, but we do have valuable experience we can share."
Atlan sincerely thanked them for their offer. He'd need it. As 6th stage Saviors, they embarked on tens or hundreds of missions to get where they were now. He'd be remiss to ignore their advice just because he was physically stronger than them.
He might breeze past stages like it was nothing, but there were also a lot of things he couldn't skip past with his Grim Reaper cheat.
For example, he still needed time to learn and practice the manifestation of his Giant Hand in his Soul System. He couldn't cheat his way out of slowly learning how to activate it within a fraction of a second.
Perhaps the hardest skill to learn was how to lock on to a target with his Cherubic LifeSkill.
He was extremely lucky that the Sapient Infection Canzer's root was located deep underground where it could not move around freely.
If the root moved even an inch away from its original position, then Atlan would have needed a few seconds to refocus his target.
It was a vulnerability in his skillset that he needed to shore up quickly. However, there was no way to speed it up other than to practice it as much as possible.
But as much as he wanted to, he had no feasible way to do it. For him to activate his Cherubic Retribution LifeSkill, he needed a target. And to find a target, he needed to be on a mission to the Remedium.
That was a dangerous place in and of itself.
And even on missions, he couldn't just activate his other LifeSkills in front of his teammates. Even if he had a Modify Memory Spore LifeSkill to change their memories, he didn't want to rely on it when he didn't need to.
If only I had my own Pocket Remedium where I could summon my own Pseudo Canzers, it would solve all my problems. It'd be like shooting two birds with one stone. I get to practice my LifeSkills and I get to farm some experience points, fragments, and Genuses.
As far as he knew, only those who performed great deeds and services for the City were awarded their own Pocket Remediums. The families with deep roots in Genesis City were the only ones who accumulated enough merit to have it. Atlan would probably need a hundred years before he was eligible to get one himself.
That's too long. Maybe if I keep showing my talent, they'll eventually give me a Pocket Remedium…
But of course, he knew it wasn't that easy.
Atlan shook the thought off his mind and focused on what he could do now. And the only thing that was on his to-do list was to go to sleep.
He waved back at Tarish and the others at the truck.
Once they were gone, Atlan went directly to his bed and went to sleep.
He expected another visit from Pterina tomorrow morning. That would surely entail a lot of questions about the mission and his alleged Physique LifeSkill that was greater than S class.
If he was questioned about it, then he could lie to her and say that the LifeSkill in his Soul System only had a question mark in its class.
That answer would be vague enough so that she'd believe that he had no idea that his LifeSkill was above B class.
No matter what, Atlan wasn't worried about her interrogation. His Grim Reaper Physique would deny any attempts at peering through his lies.
Atlan closed his eyes and went to sleep.
#####
The next day, Atlan was greeted with a knock on his door.