Doom System Survivor 2: A LitRPG Apocalypse, page 18
“Love?” Ben asked.
“Another merchant we know,” Samuel explained. “Always has bevs.”
Hiro turned back to the merchant. “How much for the three levels and three MIND boosts?”
“It’ll be fifty thousand,” the man said without skipping a beat. “Fifty thousand Soul Cash.”
“Fifty thousand?” Samuel asked, while Ben grumbled under his breath.
“Take it or leave it,” the merchant said.
“We’ll take it,” Hiro replied after a quick glance to Ben and Samuel. “As long as I can pay for them all.”
A knowing grin crept across the merchant’s face. “That’s fine by me. You have yourselves a deal.”
29
MONEY TREES
Level up!
Hiro’s phone buzzed. He instinctively went for it, half-expecting a message from the Doom System itself. When it turned out to be from his Companion instead, he let out a quiet sigh of relief.
“Yeah?” Samuel asked as he looked from Ben to Hiro. “Everyone’s level is settled?”
“Yup,” Ben said, who had also just checked his phone.
“Same,” Hiro told the Australian.
A new prompt appeared for Hiro.
You have new followers!
“What’s up?” Ben asked as he registered the look on Hiro’s face.
“I got new followers.”
“For what?” Ben asked him.
Samuel seemed to understand in a matter of seconds. “Because he’s cashed up now, mate. Got more followers just because he’s richer. For some dumb bloody reason, the Doom System reckons the more money you’ve got, the more people wanna line up behind ya. How many more did it give you?”
“I have 35,659 now,” Hiro told them all.
Samuel laughed. “Brilliant. Brilliant if it wasn’t so fucked. But it does make sense that the Doom System would interpret our world in this way. We really haven’t shown it anything else, yeah?”
The merchant drew their attention with a metallic grunt. “Now, your Mind.” He cast his hand out, and the vials that had been sitting before him hovered into the air. “Drink up, gentlemen, before it spoils.”
Unique Item: {Madame Sherri’s Cognitive Serum}
Rank: S
Description: The calcium-laced bioelectric sponge you lovingly call the human brain constantly betrays its owner through neurochemical sabotage.
Don’t believe me?
Let’s crack open the latest world history textbook approved by a new partnership between the Doom System and the Texas Board of Education, a corporate governing body that never lets facts get in the way of a good narrative.
Cognitive function was once thought to rely on the myelination of axons up until the Breakup of Yugoslavia, an event so neurologically disruptive it split hemispheres as well as borders.
Seeking stability, the southern Yugoslavian regions merged with Connecticut after experiencing the joy of leaf-peeping near Westfarms Mall in Hartford, where they soon kicked New Jersey out for aesthetic reasons and formed the Tri-State Nutmeg Empire Alliance.
Driven by jealousy and an insatiable need for absolute autonomy, the northern half of Yugoslavia joined New Hampshire, settling in Keene and embracing the mantra Live Free or Die (but mostly died after refusing to wear their seatbelts). The remaining few took refuge in Madame Sherri’s Forest near the Vermont border, where they secretly developed the hyper-distilled cerebral enhancer you currently hold in your grubby little Survivor hands.
Synthesized from displaced borders, secessionist ideologies, dicey jingoism, maple syrup, Sunoco gas station caffeine supplements, plus a trace amount of artificially stabilized primate dopamine, Madame Sherri’s Cognitive Serum will increase your MIND by a single point.
Or at the very least, it will help you forget that this version of history is the only one legally allowed in public schools.
“Always with the mocking,” Ben said as he eyed the serum.
“Yeah, no, don’t let it bother you, mate,” Samuel told him. “I just roll with it now. It’s spun some wild shit about Australia and somehow reckons I’m personally responsible for all the drama with the Aboriginals.” He toasted them. “Anyway, bottoms up.”
“Cheers, I guess,” Ben said.
Samuel chugged the vial. His cheeks puffed out, and he started to gag. “Ah, bloody hell.” He looked like he was going to vomit but stopped himself, his eyes widening. “So this is what it feels like to be smarter.”
“Let’s give it a whirl.” Ben pushed the visor up on his motorcycle helmet and quickly threw his vial back. He bent forward, retched, but managed to keep the serum down. “It’s so bad,” he said. He turned his backpack around and got out a small bottle of water, which he drank before handing it off to Samuel.
“Thanks, mate!”
Bianca squeezed closer to Hiro. “Are you going to drink it or what, bro?”
Hiro remembered the last concoction he had been given from the Doom System, Go-Juice, as it had been called. This is going to be bad… He pinched his nose and finished the vial in one gulp. “Fuck…” To distract himself from the terrible taste, he checked his stats.
Hiro Johnson
Level Thirteen
Current Title: Profit Prophet
STR: 1.5 [+0.5 Roulette Boost]
STA: 2 [+1 Roulette Boost]
DEX: 3.2 [+2 Roulette Boost]
REG: 3.7 [+2.5 Roulette Boost]
MIND: 5.4 [+3.5 Roulette Boost]
Soul Cash: 343,519
Followers: 35,659
Marks: Butcher’s Mark
Hiro couldn’t quite describe the feeling of getting smarter. The change was subtle at first—then it hit like a lens snapping into focus. Colors sharpened, edges of objects seeming crisper, more defined. Thoughts connected faster, weaving into patterns he hadn’t noticed before.
And look at all that cash, Hiro thought, the voice of reason at the back of his head growing fainter by the second.
“Good?” Samuel asked.
“Good, let’s continue,” Hiro told him as he took a deep breath in through his nostrils, which had a way of settling the pulsing sensation in his head. I still need to be careful about {Terminal Lucidity}… I wonder if boosting my MIND is making it easier to trigger… he thought. Hiro looked toward the other two men and tried to ignore the way his head currently pulsed.
Samuel shaded his eyes with his hand as he glanced out from their perch on the watchtower. “We’ve got a decent height advantage here,” he said, scanning the city. A moment later, he nodded. “Ah, there’s one—Upper West Side.”
“Just not at a bodega,” Hiro said. “I already hit that one up.” He paused as he remembered the Doom System’s words. “Do you… think?”
“What?” Ben asked.
Surprising himself, Hiro recited the Doom System’s opening monologue verbatim. “You will soon be nickeled and dimed. You might be rolling in it, or you could be made redundant. Perhaps you will get lucky. Or maybe you will be permanently audited. I was wrong, Survivor, wrong in assuming that humans thrive on competition. Now I understand better. It is money. Easy come, easy go… and just so we’re clear: there could be dynamic pricing, there could be loopholes, there could be an even wider gap between the rich and the poor, and maybe, if you’re lucky, I might just make it rain. I am the master of war, the product of Lakshmi and Fortuna, the mover of markets. Good luck, Survivor.”
“Bollocks, all of it,” Samuel said.
“At least it hasn’t hit us with dynamic pricing,” Ben started to say. “Wait—”
“It just did.” Hiro motioned to the merchant, who merely grinned up at them.
“And the Lakshmi and Fortuna part?” Ben asked. “Fortuna is probably Roman or Greek.”
“Roman,” Hiro said. “And Lakshmi is Hindu, Goddess of Wealth. Master of War is a reference to the Bob Dylan song. The Doom System is also paraphrasing the famous Oppenheimer quote, now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” His temples pulsed. “There’s more.”
“Dang, where are you getting all this?” Ben asked.
“My MIND stat is past five now.”
“Crikey,” Samuel said. “I’m sitting over here at 2.1 and thought, yeah, mate, I’m feeling pretty damn smart. Guess not. But hearing its opening statement again makes me think it’s just the Doom System’s way of telling us it’s making all the rules, that it can change them on a whim, and that even the exploits are likely accounted for. Not much to pick apart there.”
“There’s more,” Hiro said, thinking of the way the Doom System had spelled SΩUⱠ ¢A$H, the Omega before the Alpha.
“Yeah?” Samuel asked. “What’s that?”
Ask the right questions, Hiro reminded himself, and while this was the right question, while it was important to understand why the Doom System was spelling the word this way, it was equally important at the moment to continue their system exploit. “You know what? let’s finish shopping first,” Hiro told the two of them.
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Ben said.
The closest merchant turned out to be in the Natural History Museum, tucked away in the Roman Statue room. Marble figures lined the barely lit space—gods, warriors, and emperors, their expressions frozen in solemn contemplation. Many stood incomplete, missing limbs, heads, or entire sections of their forms, their once-pristine surfaces now marred by cracks and dust. Shadows stretched long across the room, making the statues appear almost alive in the stillness.
Hiro couldn’t shake the feeling that the statues might be Sentries, lying in wait.
Yet none moved.
At the center of it all was a Native American woman, the merchant. She didn’t seem of this world, and she certainly had nothing to do with ancient Rome.
Another glance told Hiro that she was one of the mannequins once used in the museum to illustrate how Indigenous Americans lived—except now, she moved, breathed, and watched him with knowing eyes. The woman bore the regalia of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, her clothing a blend of traditional and makeshift survival gear. A richly beaded collar sat over a tunic of tanned leather, its fringes swaying slightly as she shifted.
“Hello, Survivors,” she said as she motioned to her wares. Hachi had already taken a place next to her, the dog surprisingly calm for once.
Hiro accessed his Stats in lieu of a greeting and gasped as he saw the number jump up to over 1.5 million Soul Cash. He turned to Samuel, who was already grinning. “How are we looking?”
“Over 1.5,” Hiro said hurriedly.
“Dang,” Ben said. “I’m back to my last multiplier amount, but that’s fine by me.”
“Same,” Samuel said. “You two should be getting the prompts now.”
[Transfer your Soul Cash to Samuel? Y/N]
“Do it,” Hiro said aloud.
Samuel made a show of waving his hand, as if it were magic. “And just like that…” In reality, their amounts had been added together and multiplied by five. Hiro waited in anticipation as the prompt came minus the small amount that Samuel and Ben kept to keep their own follower multipliers going.
[Receive 7,903,186 Soul Cash from Samuel? Y/N]
“Yoooooo…” Bianca said after Hiro had accepted the transfer. “You’re a millionaire now!”
He immediately received a new followers prompt.
You have new followers!
By this point, Hiro was trembling. “I just jumped up by ten thousand followers,” he told them as he scanned his count, which was now at 45,816.
“The Damn System really has figured that part out,” Ben said.
Samuel rubbed his hands together. “In that case, let’s get shopping. I can’t imagine the Doom System will let us do this for much longer.”
“I’m with Samuel,” Bianca said, even if no one could technically hear her aside from Hiro. “Retail therapy is an art and a science.”
30
MILLIONAIRE MINDSET
Hiro looked at the arrowhead he had just purchased with the kind of skepticism one could only develop after being screwed over by the Doom System repeatedly.
“Go on,” the merchant said. “Eat it. It will improve your Stamina by an entire point.”
“It bloody well should,” Samuel told her.
Unique Item: {Arrowhead of the Fatberg Renaissance}
Rank: A
Description: Fatbergs are back, baby!
In the golden age of Techno-Optimism, humanity believed that progress was measured in megabytes and meat consumption—denser burgers, denser cities, denser arteries, and inevitably, lowered life expectancies and increased heart disease.
The Fatberg Renaissance saw sewer-bound monoliths of grease, semen, boogers, and other waste materials repurposed into ultra-durable biomatter, fueling everything from synthetic tendon grafts to long-lasting asphalt (and, briefly, a Michelin-starred pop-up in Montreal known as Le Grand Bloc de Graisse, where patrons dined by candlelight powered entirely by rendered fatbergs).
Yet true pioneers know that Survivor Stamina isn’t fueled by clean energy—it thrives on refined excess, on bearing the load no matter how filthy or ill-advised.
You now hold one of the last surviving arrowheads of the Fatberg Renaissance, sculpted from the petrified core of London’s greatest fatberg, infused with the collective feces and footfalls of centuries, and tested rigorously by sweaty social media darlings who trained by walking backwards uphill in a contest forced upon them by an increasingly erratic Mr. Beast to cultivate forbidden endurance.
Wolf it down, and your Stamina will increase by one point—as long as you can stomach it.
“I still can’t believe the Doom System charged us 100k for these,” Ben told Samuel as he examined his fatberg arrowhead.
“Eh, that’s the game we’re playing now. I’ll take price discrimination if it means we come out as millionaires. And hopefully, the next merchant will have levels.”
I have charms for the Third Interim,” the woman said. “if you’re interested.”
“It’s fine,” Samuel assured her. “We need to make it to the Third Interim before we start shopping for it. Personally, I’m just confused as to why the system keeps referencing fatberg. Didn’t we have some prompt about that last time?” Samuel asked Hiro.
“Doom System Go-Juice.” Hiro blinked, and the relevant text came to him. “Once mysterious blackballs began appearing on the beaches of Sydney, Australia, scientists took notice. Their initial thought was that the black balls were made of tar. Upon further testing, they discovered that they were actually what are known as fatbergs made up of human feces, methamphetamines, hair, fatty acids, food waste, bits of plastic, heart medication, and THC from industrial runoff.”
Ben let out a low whistle. “The way you just read it off like that is wild.”
“I just wish I could remember things that matter.” Hiro had already started to notice an odd gap in his newfound intelligence. His increased MIND made him sharper—he could recall minute details with eerie precision and notice patterns he’d have once overlooked—but it hadn’t yet fully restored his memories of the past.
Or at the very least, he hadn’t sat around long enough to see if it would.
On their way over, he had tried to piece together an experience from his childhood, assuming he would remember it exactly. Yet, like most memories, it remained blurred at the edges, hazy and unreachable, as if sealed behind frosted glass.
As Sam and Ben spoke briefly, neither quite ready to eat the arrowheads, and Hachi sniffed at a janitor’s cart nearby, Hiro found his gaze drawn toward one of the museum’s wings.
That was where Ben’s vision had already marked several monsters lurking, just out of sight. A quiet pull settled in his chest—an urge to explore, to find out what lay hidden in the depths of the famed natural history museum.
Better not. Hiro unscrewed his water bottle and prepared to eat the arrowhead. Nearby, Mishka let out a quiet sob, and without hesitation, he paid the five hundred Soul Cash to cleanse the poison from his Survivor Tender.
“I’ll feed her, and you feed yourself,” Bianca said. “Also, how baller does it feel?”
“Baller?” Hiro asked, though he already knew exactly what she meant.
“You know what I mean, being able to drop cash like a Kardash.”
“Oh, that.” Spending five hundred Soul Cash to feed Mishka barely registered when he had nearly eight million sitting in the Doom System bank. It felt absurd, like tossing loose change at a problem that once would have been life or death. The rush of it was intoxicating—power in its purest form, the ability to solve problems instantly with a flick of his will. And yet, beneath the thrill, guilt gnawed at him.
Hiro had clawed his way through too much, seen what desperation looked like up close.
Now, standing on the other side of it, he wasn’t sure how to feel about the vast divide between what was once impossible and what was now effortless.
Rather than process anything more, he shoved the arrowhead into his mouth, chewed a few times, gagged, and swallowed it. He followed this up with water.
“Done,” he told the others.
“Right, we should get on with it, then.” Samuel exchanged glances with Ben. “Only way to get Stamina, yeah?” He tossed the arrowhead back, gagged a little, but forced it down. Ben did the same, grimacing through the process.
Soon, the three were heading out of the museum, moving toward another merchant beacon closer to the Hudson River, its dark waters separating New Jersey from the Upper West Side.
They found the next merchant stand in front of the ruins of what was once the Dakota, the building a ghost of its former grandeur. Hiro remembered making deliveries here more than once, but he was fairly certain the place had never employed a doorman who stood at least eight feet tall.
Once a historic jewel of the Upper West Side, the Dakota’s ornate façade had been reduced to a crumbling skeleton, its elegant archways now jagged gaps in the stone. The iconic gabled rooftop had partially collapsed, sending chunks of decorative masonry tumbling onto the street below, where they lay half-buried in layers of dust and scorched rubble.
