"We need to get out of the car as soon as possible!" Zack said urgently, right as the subway car lurched again, throwing him and all the other pedestrians off balance.
"Let's not panic! Someone will help us eventually," a businessman replied.
"Yeah, let's just stay put. Our city's public transportation team is the best in the world. We might make things worse by moving about. Believe in them to take care of things on their end!" answered a female lawyer.
Zack sighed.
No public transportation team was equipped to deal with demons. Only the military could do that, and even the military could only hold on for the first two years before the monsters grew too strong.
Still, it wasn't like he could just shout 'Monsters are coming, you dumbasses!' and expect to be taken seriously.
He didn't have time for this.
In his previous life, Zack survived the imminent crash and the collapsed subway station by crawling through a utility pipeline to the surface.
Later, the government covered up the incident as a terrorist attack, meaning that Zack didn't learn the truth about the existence of monsters. More importantly, he didn't get the chance to awaken the demon summoning app until months later. That wasn't going to be the case this time around. Armed with knowledge from his previous experiences, he was going to confront the monsters immediately and awaken the app today.
*Creak.*
The subway car shook again violently. This time, people were yelling.
Zack waited patiently as another tremor shook the car. The crash was coming at any moment now. He held onto the railing above, steadying his breath as he prepared for the inevitable.
CRASH.
Civilians screamed in shock as the subway came to an explosive stop.
Dust and debris came raining down from the top of the train, and people coughed as fumes and other undesirable sensations flooded in from the windows.
Zack coughed, but kept his bearings. He had expected this to happen so it didn't shock him nearly as much this time around. Judging by the force of the impact, the people in the first few cars were already dead. The first casualties of the calamity that would later be known as the dungeon break.
"It's no use, the doors are not opening!" a man shouted.
"The windows are too small to climb through as well!"
Panic was beginning to set in on the civilians as they grappled with the terrifying prospect of being stranded underground without food and water after what seemed to them like an earthquake.
Someone had already been through all of this before, and already knew the solution to this problem before it even occurred. Naturally, that someone was the only regressor on the train. Not minding the panic of everyone else, Zack walked over and slammed the glass containing a fire extinguisher with his bare fist, shattering the glass while breaking a bit of his skin.
"Ouch," he grumbled, realizing that he no longer had any physical strength from demon assimilation like in his previous life. This was going to take some getting used to.
"What are you doing?" a flustered businesswoman asked him. The train was full of professionals, as it was the second evening rush hour on the way back home.
"I'm getting us out of here," Zack replied.
Taking the fire extinguisher out from the cracked safety glass, Zack gripped it like a battering ram and ran towards the window, slamming the glass as hard as he could with the metal butt end of the fire extinguisher.
The window shattered upon impact. A hiss came from the fire extinguisher as it began to leak from a dent, but the damage to the window was done.
"Pardon me," Zack said casually, motioning a shocked teenage girl aside as he stepped onto a seat and stuck his head and shoulders out the newly destroyed window, before climbing out.
"T-the transportation department is going to bill you for that," the businesswoman remarked to him while watching him crawl out.
"Nah. Trust me, lady, that's the last of your worries."
He too had a similar train of thought during this situation in his previous life. It was irrational, but ingrained in peoples' minds that destruction of public property was a big no-no.
As he later found out, calamity level dragons didn't give a shit about rules, including laws about destruction of public property.
But think about all that taxpayer money going to waste!
If he remembered correctly, the government stopped collecting taxes around two years into the calamity. Believe it or not, it turned out that dead people couldn't pay taxes.
Zack hopped down onto the train platform, brushing the dust off of his office wear. They had crashed at Plaza station, the name of the station displayed prominently on a sign hanging awry from the tremors.
"Come on guys, get out here!" he shouted. "Hurry! The platform is going to collapse at any moment!"
The part about the platform collapsing was not true. That was something that he made up to force them to hurry up. He wanted to keep these civilians alive as best as he could, but more importantly he needed to encounter a monster as soon as possible.
Right after encouraging the civilians to leave the crashed train, Zack bolted down the right of the platform towards the utility pipeline. He already knew where the pipe was, but he needed to pretend to find it to make it more believable to the rest of the civilians. Going for a bit of a light jog, he disappeared from their sight and hid behind a pillar, waiting for two minutes to sell the illusion a bit better. Once the time was up, he ran back to the subway to see that a few people had successfully emerged, with more on the way.
He feinted his exhaustion, wiping imaginary sweat off his brow.
"Guys!" he shouted loudly with an urgent tone, getting the attention of everyone else. "The way up to the surface has collapsed! We're stuck!"
Upon hearing that, the people groaned. "So what are we supposed to do? It might take days for them to excavate us out of here if it was an earthquake!"
As if on cue, the ground shook again. Earthquakes always accompanied dungeon breaks. That was something that the Calamity Research Society declared after extensive research.
These civilians didn't need to know that though.
Zack continued to shout directions. "It's alright! I found a pipe that can get us out of here. It's just down to the right, on this side of the wall!"
"I'm heading there now. See you guys on the surface!" he yelled, as he bolted down the platform.
He had fulfilled his duty to those people. Whether they took his advice or not was up to them. If they died, they only had themselves to blame. Saving civilian's lives was kind of important, but Zack knew better than anyone else that a gesture like that only delayed the inevitable.
Now, more than ever, he needed to find a monster to unlock the dungeon mobile app and race to that all-important VIP Level 1 where he could finally unlock physical enhancement.
In his previous life, Zack asked a question he was always curious about while having a conversation with a god. "Why does our source of power need to take the form of a mobile gaming app? It could've been anything else. Why an app?"
The answer, as the god put it rather simply, had to do with human familiarity. Cosmic balance dictated that as an answer to the calamity, humanity needed to be presented with a source of power to combat their fate.
Such power had to be presented in a format familiar to humans.
As it turned out, the majority of human beings were at least somewhat familiar with the concept of video games, and nearly everyone possessed a smartphone. And thus, the demon summoning app was born. It was a way for humans to fight back against the demons and monsters that now inhabited their world, all packaged in a universal mobile app with a rather comically flashy golden visual flair and ka-ching sound effects that reminded Zack of a casino.
There was some kind of sick irony about the fact that humanity's survival was gated behind an addictive gacha-like mobile game that was extremely stingy with its pull rates, but after a while people simply got used to it. The demon summoning app's original purpose was fulfilled– it was a very familiar, very addicting format, and civilians easily adopted its usage.
Zack pretended to head towards the pipe, only to leap down into the subway tracks themselves and bolt across the station to the other end. He made a left down a tunnel with train tracks, heading directly towards the tremors. Adrenaline coursed through his veins as he steeled his nerves for the inevitable conflict.
Fighting monsters never got less nerve-wracking. Sure, at one point he got stronger, but the monsters only evolved with him. Every battle was life and death, and a small misstep against even a weaker monster could spell his doom.
Right now, at VIP 0, he was a baseline human with no powers at all. It was of paramount importance that he reach VIP 1 as soon as possible to unlock physical manifestation.
Zack bolted down the empty set of subway tracks as the ground shook harder the further he ran. His feet were beginning to hurt from constantly clipping the steel railings, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Grabbing a metal pipe that was laying at the side of the tracks, probably something left over from a construction effort, he heard the faint growl of a beast up ahead. By the sound of it, it was a Drakken wolf.
"Bring it on," he mumbled to himself, his smartphone out in his left hand and his steel pipe clutched in his right hand.
It was time to harvest his first batch of demon crystals.