Poll World [LitRPG][Reader Polls]

(This is a paid subscriber vote chapter!)

Gen's partially melted plastic body was still congealing, but Todd's regeneration ability was slowly alleviating the pain and damage. The passive regeneration only had 30 minutes left from when he cast it, but that hopefully would be enough to fully heal the massive amount of damage she'd taken from just being caught in the periphery of Susan's attacks.

Rocketing herself off the ground, she hovered in front of Jasper, who was excitedly investigating his food guide.

She bumped herself against the tablet questioningly.

He looked annoyed being distracted from the reading, but responded, "I looted it off of Twen's body."

She felt a surge of disappointment. She'd seen her group of allies hit by Susan's final massive attack, but she hoped they'd survived somehow.

Jasper scrolled a page and seemed to sense her mood as he said, "Francine and two of Todd's minions are clinging onto life still."

Reacting immediately, she flew up from the steaming remnants of the swimming pool and investigated the ruined terrain where she'd last seen her comrades. Susan's final self-destructive blast had carved a 45 ft diameter trench in the ground, and a collection of smouldering bodies lay inside it.

Rushing forward, she found that Jasper was right. Francine was badly burned and unconscious, but they were still breathing.

Nearby, two of Todd's comrades were also breathing. They were both level 1 and named Hank and Wallis. She hadn't spoken with them before being turned into a lawn decoration.

All three were inches from death, but she could see them slowly healing thanks to Todd's regeneration ability.

Todd and G2n were in the front and clearly had given their lives to protect the rest of the group based on the arrangement of bodies.

Looking past the dead and injured, she saw a few survivors amongst the antagonists. Most were injured, but they were slowly organizing. One in particular was using a command rod to gather up the remaining zombie iguanas and keep them out of trouble.

She ignored all that as her eyes focused on the zombie hatchery, which had exploded. Its soft eggshell was blasted into pieces with burnt bits of rotten egg yolk scattered all over the place. Behind it, the headquarters building had a massive hole in it, and the ceiling was partially collapsed.

Confirming again that Francine was stable, she flew over to the hatchery. It was immediately obvious that it was no longer spewing out iguanas and seemed to be inert aside from some ooze still dripping from the broken shell. Most people would probably think that trading the event's only level 7 actor for a hatchery was a great trade for the antagonists, but Gen personally felt devastated.

She tried activating the hatchery's upgrade interface.

ERROR THIS STRUCTURE HAS BEEN DESTROYED AND CANNOT BE UPGRADED

Not giving up, she flew into the headquarters and located the partially buried storefront. She attempted to access it and breathed a sigh of relief when it opened the shop menu normally. She got another notification as well that her zombie ward amulet had been recharged.

With a thought, she pulled it from her inventory and draped it over her neck. Previously, it had failed to equip as the system didn't register her as a living creature, but after her recent transformation, she could feel a connection to it as it was successfully equipped.

Accessing the store again, she navigated to the base options and took stock of the situation.

WALL INTEGRITY (LEVEL 5): 43% (COMPROMISED)

DEFENSIVE TURRET INTEGRITY (LEVEL 5): 0% (DESTROYED)

HEADQUARTERS INTEGRITY (LEVEL 3): 14%

DOWNSIZER INTEGRITY (LEVEL 5): 11% - (EFFECTIVE LEVEL 1)

ZOMBIE IGUANA HATCHERY INTEGRITY (LEVEL 149): 0% (DESTROYED!)

Immediately focusing on the hatchery, she checked to see if it could be repaired.

REPAIR ZOMBIE IGUANA HATCHERY? (Y/N)

Excited, she mentally selected Y.

ZOMBIE IGUANA HATCHERY HAS 149 UPGRADES…

CALCULATING REPAIR COST…

1,490,000 CONTRIBUTION POINTS REQUIRED!

Gen frowned and checked her contribution points. She'd gotten over a hundred thousand from destroying the quarantine wall, fifty thousand from eliminating Susan, and then all the damage from the zombie swarms she'd started and other protagonists she'd taken out worked out to another hundred thousand, so all in all, she had a little over 250,000 contribution points.

She'd briefly thought she was rich, but the one thing she actually wanted was still hopelessly far away…

Ding~!

A three-pointed crown made from jade appeared on her head, firmly attaching itself to her plastic scalp. Focusing on it, she read the description.

Inherit: You may loot contribution points and abilities from fallen antagonists. Each antagonist will only provide a single random ability with all ability augments removed. A maximum of three looted abilities can be held at a time, with new acquisitions optionally replacing old ones.

Not taking her time, she quickly moved back to the bodies. Activating the loot mechanic, she acquired all their gear one by one. Everything they were wearing was destroyed, but the contents of their inventories were intact. Francine's stealth field generator was also destroyed as she found it badly melted on the ground.

With each body, she got an additional notification.

Rolling for ability… Sneaky Swole obtained! 17,000 contribution points obtained!

Rolling for ability… Healing Hour obtained! 80,000 contribution points obtained!

Rolling for ability… Stoneskin obtained! 380 contribution points obtained!

Rolling for ability… Slippery Feet obtained! 507 contribution points obtained!

OVER MAXIMUM ABILITY CAPACITY CHOOSE AN ABILITY TO DISCARD!

She felt all of her crown's abilities disable while it waited for her selection. Of the four so far, she for sure wanted to keep Healing Hour, as Todd's support ability was pivotal, especially considering how injured everyone was.

The Stoneskin ability hadn't saved its owner from Susan's laser, but it wasn't useless, so she kept it. Slippery Feet wasn't immediately apparent what it did, but she was pretty sure it was a debuff for others.

The odd one out was Sneaky Swole, which she was pretty sure was G2n's ability. It increased physical strength proportionally to how nerdy you looked. If she still had her body, she might have considered it, but just like Todd's physical strength buff from before had been useless, she didn't see a use for it as she immediately discarded it.

Checking Francine, Hank, and Wallis once more, she confirmed they were looking less like burnt toast and recast healing hour on each of them.

With that done, she flew up and started making the rounds of using healing hour on anyone still left alive. Some people seemed cautious of her, but after realizing what she was doing, they flocked to the miraculous healing flamingo.

The next step was far less saintly as she started her macabre task of looting bodies. Many were already looted by other survivors, but that didn't stop her from looting them a second time to acquire contribution points and abilities.

Many of the abilities were circumstantial or just not immediately helpful, such as fireballs, ice bolts, and even one Jasper would appreciate that conjured buttered toast.

Eventually, she managed to find a useful one called I See Dead People and swapped it for Slippery Feet.

The new one passively allowed her to sense the location of dead bodies within a mile radius and enabled her to see a flashback of their final seconds when touching the body.

She didn't really need the flashbacks, but the body sensing helped with her looting spree. Some bodies were buried or blown into so many pieces that she might have otherwise missed them.

Her next ability swap was for one called wormhole. It let her open a temporary portal to anywhere she could see once per minute. It would hopefully allow her to escape in a crisis while also providing useful utility.

Protagonists didn't provide any contribution points or abilities, but she still helped herself to their inventories. Most antagonists had under a thousand contribution points, but there were a lot of dead people around the headquarters, and it added up.

By the time she finished, she had a total of 560,000 contribution points. It was still much less than her goal, but it was a start.

The equipment she looted was a mess. She had so many things that she honestly had no idea what to do with them all. Luckily, she found she could sort her inventory by rarity and started just looking at the ones the system considered better and ignoring the thousands of equipment pieces it considered junk. She knew that wasn't technically the most reliable, as things like her Olympic Swimming Pool were also considered junk, but she just didn't have the time to manually sort through everything.

Susan's auto-turret, guns, and personal force field had disappeared, as evidently they were her personal equipment rather than event items and couldn't be looted.

Gen paid close attention to Susan's inventory and wasn't disappointed. She had some high-rarity zombie lures that would attract all the zombies within a ten-mile radius, something called a Lazarus berry, and a ring that halved equipment reload time.

The berry looked like a super healing item, and if Jasper hadn't luckily one-shotted Susan, it might have reversed the final fight at a critical moment.

Turning her attention to Jasper, he was squatting at the bottom of the crater, still perusing the pictures of food. She was a little annoyed that he had looted G2n and just left Francine there, but she wasn't much better with her recent looting spree. Jasper, being so hyper-focused on food that he had ignored everything else, was very on brand.

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Flying down to him, she began dumping some upgrades for his equipment. His full-body suit made most things redundant, and his flesh-crater hammer was impressive, but she still had found him some usable items.

One was a return ring that could teleport a recently thrown weapon back to his hand once per minute. Another was sunglasses that allowed you to project your voice like a megaphone, and the final thing was a wrist-mounted grappling hook that she felt was a poetic callback to his giant form.

He finally stopped reading and looked up at the pile, inspecting it.

"Your offerings are accepted, but you should have brought food."

She'd also looted a lot of food items, but chose not to spoil him at the moment. If the food guide was any indication, her body was already heading for dark days.

Instead, she dropped the equipment reloading ring and a cape and hovered in front of them. He stared at them and questioned, "What do you want me to do with these? My hammer doesn't reload, and the cape is worse than my armor."

She precariously hovered with one rocket boot while she kicked off the other and held out her toes, pointing at the ring.

"You want me to put the ring on your toe?"

She flared her rocket boot in agreement.

"I decline. Make your gremlins do it."

Her eyes spun as she remembered her gremlins existed. They had been absent in the fight with Susan, and she just assumed they had died at some point, but feeling for the mental connection, she could feel they were still alive. Forcing her rocket boot back on and snatching up the two items, she activated her new Wormhole ability and opened a portal to the wall around the headquarters before flying through.

She exited the portal, and it fizzled out of existence behind her. Continuing through the giant hole in the wall, she found the three gremlins. The two with the railgun were kneeling on either side of the one with the lightning whip. Around them were four dead protagonists who looked to be on the losing end of a life-and-death struggle, with one blasted in half presumably by the railgun.

The two gremlins were weeping electric tears while the third looked to be dying on the ground as its electricity flared weakly. It was missing both legs and both arms and had double eye patches. She hovered nearby awkwardly. During the mad rush inside, she'd defeated quite a few protagonists before fighting Sarah and then Susan, and she'd forgotten about the remnant protagonists outside.

She could easily guess what happened. The group had been rushing inside while cloaked and hoping to ambush Susan. The gremlins, away from her control, likely had maniacally attacked the first enemies they encountered and ended up being left behind.

The fact that they'd managed to defeat the protagonists with only one casualty was actually amazing…

Feeling guilty she flew to the crippled gremlin and activated Healing Hour.

She expected an error message, but the ability activated without issue, and she waited patiently for the gremlin to stop its pained thrashing, but after a full minute, she grew suspicious. Mentally, she ordered it to regenerate its limbs.

Immediately, its missing appendages popped back into existence, and it stood with both eye patches falling off. The whole group of gremlins cackled with their electric voices, and she mentally sighed.

DUE TO YOUR ACTIONS A PROTAGONIST HAS QUIT THE EVENT. AWARDING CONTRIBUTION POINTS!

She felt confused as she gained a hundred contribution points and looked around before remembering all the random people she turned into mannequins.

Both during the attack here and when they assaulted the mechs, she had hit numerous people with gnomes. There hadn't been any time to finish them off, however, so presumably several dozen people were body-locked.

She ordered her gremlins to smash up the mannequins that were nearby and felt a little relief as she received kill notifications. Hopefully, anyone else who was left would just quit the event…

Not wanting to waste any more time, she kicked off her boot again and ordered the gremlins to equip the ring. They were much more cooperative than Jasper.

With the new equipment, she saw that her gnome fire rate changed from 10 gnomes a second to 20 gnomes a second, doubling her fire rate. An unexpected effect was that the jets on her rocket boots intensified, and she could feel her flight speed increase as a result.

Her swimming pool's cool-down was also reduced to only three days, but the event only had two days left, so it wouldn't be recharged in time.

The cloak she had the gremlins tie around her neck was a happy find. It was bulletproof and self-regenerating and would automatically whip around to protect her from damage.

Finished with her dress up, she finished looting the nearby protagonists outside and flew back over to the hole in the wall.

In the distance, she could see Jasper had finally climbed out of the pit and was standing next to the familiar figure of Hon with a new bicycle next to him.

Opening a new portal, she and the gremlins startled Hon with their sudden appearance.

He calmed when he recognized her, and she quickly cast Healing Hour on him as he was still covered in burns from the UFO.

Jasper turned to look at her and said, "Hon has informed me that the dragon nest is apparently established. His remaining gremlins are engaged in battle with their spawn, but the threat will continue to escalate."

Hon held up his keychain, showing the familiar miniature UFO. "I had the self-repair focus on the size-altering ability. It's still broken, but I could at least collapse it and evacuate while it keeps repairing."

He looked puzzled, "It got a new ability called assimilate, but it wasn't from any of my polls. Solomon started answering my texts again, and he said it wasn't from his either. He's fine, by the way, zombie-Trank got destroyed, but he managed to take out the Gundam in exchange. I told him to head here, but it's a long walk for him." He looked at Gen, "Was the assimilate from one of your polls?"

She fired her rocket boots excitedly in affirmation.

He nodded, "Makes sense you're the only other person left who's really interacted with it." He looked mournful as he looked around the destroyed base, and his eyes lingered on G2n's barbequed body.

"I know I was doing my own stuff with the UFO, but this event was the first time the club really got to come together and it just sucks that it went up in smoke before the end…"

There was a moment of silence before Hon held up the keychain again, "Well, as it's your poll, you can decide what to do with it."

She inspected the item and saw the new ability description.

Assimilate: Choose one thing to incorporate into the UFO.

Mentally, she scoffed, another typical LEO description. She'd had a streak of intuitive abilities and equipment, so it was high time she got something ambiguous.

Mentally feeling out the ability, she tried to figure out what a "thing" classified as and found that there really were no limits. She could target the air, herself, Hon, a gremlin, any item in her inventory, random rocks, literally anything she could physically touch was targetable.

Making a decision, she decided to make a poll and see if her viewers had any particular insight. Trying to limit to only good options, she did not include any joke options that would potentially be useless, as knowing her viewers, they would make sure to vote for it.

She considered waiting until the zombie hatchery was repaired, but she didn't know if that would make a difference, and with dragons incoming, they really needed a boost sooner rather than later.

She also considered putting Jasper as an option because it would be funny to combine him with a second thing after the special zombie incident, but she didn't want to be a bad teammate when he'd been on more or less his best behavior.

As for the other options, they would hurt to lose potentially, but she just had to pray LEO would make the upgrade worth the investment.

A groan nearby made them then, and they saw first Hank, then Francine, and finally Wallis start to sit up painfully, their slowly regenerating skin looking like burnt bacon.

Gen flew over and dropped three sets of clothes from amongst the hundreds she had looted.

It took several more minutes for them to get dressed and regenerate enough to speak. They all looked mournful that Todd was dead and a bit confused how Gen had his ability now, but after some gremlin facilitated communication, they seemed to get the gist of it.

Hank and Wallis were busy texting on their phones before turning to Francine and looking unsure.

Hank spoke, "So we're not getting a response from the command base. Hopefully, they're just busy rather than destroyed. Wallis and I are both on the combat side of the organizational hierarchy, so even though you're new, you're on the diplomatic side of the company, so you're in charge outside of fights now that Todd is dead."

Francine looked panicked as they saw everyone watching them.

Gen hadn't realized Francine had formerly been hired coming out of the job fair, and Hon mirrored her thoughts as he quickly congratulated Francine.

Francine stammered as they said, "It's just a probationary hire… they'll reevaluate after three months." Francine looked at the other two, "Are you sure? I know the company policy, but… I've just been generated, so I don't have much experience."

Wallis shrugged, "It's fine, if we all die, we'll get paid either way as long as we follow standard operating procedures."

Gen listened with interest. She knew they were working for their company in the event, but she had no idea how payment and hierarchy worked exactly.

Francine didn't look reassured, but the survivors from the base were also gathering now, so they took a deep breath and shifted to business mode.

Francine looked at Hon, "Who's in charge on the club's side now?"

Hon glanced around, scratching his head, "I don't know G2n was in charge, but like the main people under him are all gone… everyone left is about as low rank as me…'

Jasper coughed from the side and stepped forward, his voice becoming slightly louder thanks to the new sunglasses. He waved his food guide around, "I have slain the original Gen, and I also am the inheritor of Twen's will. No one is more worthy than I to inherit this position."

Hon looked like he wanted to object, but hesitated before shrugging and saying, "Uhh, sure. So what do you want us to do?"

Jasper nodded, "My brethren will arrive here soon. From here we shall embark on the great journey and take what is owed to us! Any who wish to follow know this! The path is perilous, but all shall receive their just desserts!"

The shell-shocked survivors looked uncertain, but some gave a cheer as they seemed eager to embark on what Gen suspected was a food tour.

Francine, to the side, was considering while reading their phone and checking reports.

They spoke, "On our side, I'm still trying to figure out what's all going on. The incubations were largely successful, so special zombies are wreaking havoc right now. This is a critical moment where we need to spread infection as much as possible and deal critical blows to the protagonist's side. To do that, we need to get the antagonists more organized, as right now there are dozens of groups working independently and just as many potential targets."

Francine took a big breath, "Primary targets as I see it is the tank barn that should still be in this zone, the dragon nest which has started hatching baby dragons, the mech factory which is producing a new line of improved mechs, and then as many population centers as we can crush."

Pointing at their phone, Francine continued, "My company, Fortune Wardens, has contacts with many of the other groups. I can serve as a coordinator for all of them and connect any of you with one. First, there's Fortune Wardens, obviously, we've got the biggest base of the antagonist groups, but we've been targeted a lot as a result, so the bulk of our focus is on defense.

"There's a company called Frank's Fish Shack, which has been doing really well despite its small size, and has an upgraded fishing trawler that has been doing hit-and-run attacks. They're focused on the dragon side of things right now.

"There's a group called Anarchy Alliance. I don't know what their deal is, but they've coordinated some big sabotage attacks and assassinations. They're the ones who helped disable the tank barn, and they look like they're targeting the mech factory next.

"The final noteworthy one is another company, Terry's Temp Agency, they have the highest number of successful incubations as they had an unusual amount of biomass. They're focused on taking out NPCs and clearing zones."

Everyone seemed a bit overwhelmed by the information and started discussing the options and details they had heard about the other groups.

Gen wasn't sure where things would end up, but listened in as she made another poll.

Gen looked at her polls nervously. Depending on what was selected, she wasn't sure how she could help or coordinate, but she'd do her best and the viewers wouldn't blame her for that… probably?

Her worries were interrupted by a crashing noise, and everyone turned their heads in unison to see six hulking forms entering through the hole in the wall.

They were reminiscent of Jasper's boss zombie body in that they were giant iguanas with black veins and rotten flesh, but unlike his armorered metal form, they instead had purple crystals embedded in their flesh that pulsed with ominous energy.

Jasper stepped forward, looking jubilant.

"The time has arrived!"