Chapter 59 Strength Reaches Max Level!

Magnus Vane watched Daryl settle on the narrow counter beneath the window, his back turned toward the room as though the woods outside were suddenly the most interesting thing in Georgia. A faint smile tugged at Magnus’s lips, but he spared the man any further embarrassment and found an out-of-the-way corner of the cabin for himself. Before lying down, he removed the splint from his right arm; its five-hour healing timer had already expired, and the fracture was completely gone. Magnus opened and closed his hand several times, rotated his wrist, then flexed the arm without finding even a trace of stiffness or pain.

“System-made medical gear really is ridiculous,” Magnus thought with satisfaction. A crude splint built from broken furniture, a bedsheet, and tape had repaired a serious fracture in only a few hours, something ordinary medicine could never have accomplished so quickly. More importantly, enough time had passed since the Blood Moon that the final Weakened status disappeared from the corner of his vision. His maximum Stamina returned to normal, and for the first time since waking inside the church, Magnus felt completely healthy again.

For one ridiculous second, he wanted to run outside and fight another hundred walkers just to test himself.

Then he glanced at the sleeping Dixon brothers and suppressed the impulse.

Magnus opened the skill panel instead.

The familiar Strength tree appeared in front of him, filled almost completely from top to bottom. Strength Lv8 had already pushed his physical ability far beyond anything he possessed before the outbreak, yet two levels still remained before his core attribute reached its maximum. Each of those ranks required three skill points, making the final stretch extremely expensive, but Magnus had been saving specifically for this moment.

“Level Eight alone probably made me several times stronger than when all this started,” Magnus thought as he stared at the final upgrades. “So what exactly happens at Nine and Ten?”

The question was enough.

Magnus committed six skill points.

[Strength Lv9/10]

[Strength and Headshot Damage greatly increased]

Almost immediately, heat exploded through his body.

Magnus clenched his jaw.

The sensation was nothing like the gentler improvements of the early Strength levels. It felt as though liquid heat had entered his bloodstream and spread through every muscle at once, forcing his entire body to rebuild itself from the inside. Steam began rising faintly from his skin while his shoulders, arms, chest, back, and legs tightened beneath the Athlete’s Attire.

His breathing deepened.

Muscle fibers contracted, strengthened, and reorganized with frightening speed.

The change reminded Magnus of the physical expansion he had experienced during the second Blood Moon, except this time there was no rage threatening to overwhelm his mind. His previously athletic frame became noticeably denser, with harder definition appearing along his shoulders and arms without turning him into something grotesquely oversized. Even the system-generated light armor stretched tighter across his torso as his physique adapted to the new level.

Then Magnus selected the final upgrade.

[Strength Lv10/10 — MAX]

[Champion]

[Strength and Headshot Damage greatly increased]

[Your physical strength has reached the maximum level of this attribute path.]

[Against ordinary walkers, overwhelming force alone is now enough to become a decisive advantage.]

Magnus lowered his head and waited for the second wave of changes to finish.

Several faint pops sounded from his joints.

He immediately forced himself to relax before the noise woke Daryl or Merle.

When Magnus finally raised his head again, the cabin felt subtly different.

Not because anything around him had changed.

Because he had.

The Stone Sledgehammer resting nearby looked almost absurdly light now. Magnus picked it up one-handed and felt virtually no resistance from the weapon that had once required both arms and his entire body to control. Even the jump from Strength Lv7 to Lv8 had been significant, but Levels Nine and Ten together were on another scale entirely.

Magnus slowly curled one hand into a fist.

“Jesus.”

The difference was enormous.

The combined improvement from the final two levels felt almost more dramatic than everything leading up to them. With the Cigar enhancement still active through his equipped Stalker Hood, Magnus could feel additional Strength layered on top of an attribute that had already reached its natural system maximum. For the first time, he genuinely believed an ordinary walker’s skull could be crushed with his bare hands if necessary.

His mind immediately returned to the church.

“If I had this during the Blood Moon…”

Magnus looked at his fist.

He wouldn’t have needed to let the Berserkers pin him against the wall.

He probably wouldn’t have broken his arm.

And if the same number attacked him now, he doubted the fight would end with him unconscious beneath a mountain of bodies.

The thought brought a dangerous confidence with it, but Magnus forced himself to remember how close arrogance had already brought him to death. Maximum Strength did not make him bulletproof, immortal, or immune to being surrounded. A rifle round could still kill him, and enough walkers could still bury him under sheer mass if he fought carelessly.

Still, the upgrade changed everything.

Magnus checked the system once more.

[Strength: Lv10/10 — MAX]

[Skull Crusher: Lv4/5]

[Heavy Weapon Handling: Lv1/3]

[Fortitude: Unlocked]

[Pain Tolerance: Lv1/5]

[Healing Factor: Lv1/5]

One skill point remained after spending the six required to finish Strength, but Magnus left it untouched for now. Skull Crusher Lv5 had finally become eligible now that Strength reached its maximum, yet he didn’t have enough points to purchase it immediately. There would be more levels ahead, and waiting a little longer wouldn’t hurt.

Magnus looked toward his remaining medical supplies as another source of confidence. He still had roughly a box and a half of system-compatible Antibiotics stored in his backpack, giving him a safety margin against infection that nobody else in the group possessed. Between that, maximum Strength, Skull Crusher Lv4, Healing Factor, his upgraded equipment, and the Quality 5 Stone Sledgehammer, Magnus felt far better prepared to help clear the prison than he had been when the convoy left Hershel’s farm.

Tomorrow, if everything went right, they would finally reach it.

Walls.

Fences.

Cell blocks.

A permanent base.

The thought gave Magnus a sense of security he hadn’t felt since waking in Atlanta.

“Good.”

He dismissed the interface.

“Time to sleep.”

Magnus stretched out on the cabin floor and closed his eyes. It wasn’t comfortable, and the hard boards certainly weren’t a mattress, but the exhaustion of the past several days finally caught up with him now that every immediate threat had passed. For the first time since arriving in this world, he fell asleep without wondering whether he would still be alive when morning came.

Merle woke him at dawn.

Daryl had already gone outside and returned with two squirrels, giving the three of them a quick breakfast before they packed their gear and headed back toward the highway. The fresh tire marks left by Rick’s convoy were still visible in patches of dried mud along the shoulders, making the route easy enough to follow once they reached the main road. With only three motorcycles instead of an RV and several heavily loaded vehicles, there was no longer any reason to maintain the convoy’s slow pace.

The motorcycles accelerated whenever the road opened.

They occasionally reached highway speeds before wrecks, walkers, or damaged pavement forced them to slow again. Even with the constant stopping and rerouting, the three covered ground far faster than Rick’s group could have managed. When the RV had broken down during the storm, they had already been only around sixty miles from the general search area Magnus had identified for the prison.

By late afternoon, thick Georgia woodland appeared ahead.

Magnus slowed.

Daryl and Merle did the same.

The three motorcycles eventually rolled to a stop near the edge of the forest road.

Both Dixon brothers looked toward Magnus.

Magnus stared back.

Then scratched his cheek.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

Merle raised an eyebrow. “You’re the one who said finding this place would be easy once we got here.”

“I said easier.”

Daryl gave him a flat look.

Magnus ignored him and studied the woods ahead.

The search area itself still covered dozens of miles, and while Magnus remembered the prison’s general surroundings from the original timeline, he had never actually traveled these roads before. Knowing that the facility stood somewhere inside a forested region on elevated terrain was very different from knowing which road turned toward its gates. Fortunately, he possessed something Rick’s group never had.

“Map.”

The system interface unfolded before his eyes.

A large topographical display appeared, centered on Magnus’s current position. Explored terrain showed in full detail, including the dark gray road they had followed and the green woodland surrounding it, while everything beyond remained hidden beneath pale gray blocks representing unexplored territory. As Magnus traveled through new areas, those sections would automatically reveal themselves.

The system map wasn’t merely a road map.

It tracked terrain.

Elevation.

Roads.

Clearings.

Explored structures.

That made it infinitely more useful than the paper maps they had relied on so far.

Magnus leaned closer to the display and studied the surrounding elevation. The prison from the original timeline stood in a substantial clearing surrounded by woodland, and its large buildings rose above much of the nearby terrain. If they searched systematically while watching for unusual open ground, higher elevation, or roads branching away from the main route, finding it before nightfall was realistic.

“Follow me.”

Magnus revved the motorcycle.

Daryl and Merle exchanged a glance before starting after him.

“There should be a town somewhere reasonably close to the facility,” Magnus called back. “And prison traffic would need a real access road. Staff, supply trucks, transport buses—they couldn’t run everything through dirt trails.”

He accelerated along the forest road.

“So we stay on the main route and watch for branches leading deeper into the woods.”

Magnus kept part of his attention on the system map as they moved. Each time the motorcycles entered another unexplored section, blocks of gray fog disappeared and revealed the terrain underneath. Ridges, depressions, side roads, and stretches of open ground gradually appeared across the interface, allowing Magnus to eliminate areas far faster than he could have by riding blindly through every turn.

Daryl and Merle followed closely behind.

The three motorcycles pushed deeper into the forest.

And piece by piece, the unknown territory ahead began to disappear.

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