31.

The feeling of godhood fled within the hour. The aches and pains returned with a vengeance, stealing my breath and part of my sanity. I was forced to sit down and just rest as my stomach tried to crawl free of me and start its own search for food. As the others ripped apart the webbing and started prepping for the incoming attack tonight, I feasted on bread and oatmeal. There was no meat in the keep, the few mana hearts we had brought were not enough to get the keep back to fighting strength and feed us. Night was trickling closer, only an hour away, and we would have to begin the second fight of the day. Hopefully one that wouldn’t leave more of our own dead.

I had stared into the slack faces of Paul, Isabella, and Chrissy before ordering their bodies dumped into the keep’s furnace to give us some more power. I hadn’t really known any of them that well, but the grief etched on their comrades faces was more than enough of a reminder of the gaping hole they left behind. I had caught Miguel sniffling more than once; even old man Hayden was red-eyed as he lowered their friends into the furnace, their personal effects placed aside for if we ever managed to get home. The bag of dead people's property that we had at our original fort was growing larger by the day. I.Ds, clothes, pictures, wallets, and purses. The last remnants of their lives rotting in this damned tutorial.

Luke hadn’t lost anyone, his own attack fierce enough to push the bugs back. The look of fearful reverence in those assigned to him was enough to make my stomach twist in envy. He was a quiet and awkward man, but was skilled enough that everyone ignored his social blundering. I now had a chance to be like that, the surge of my assigned stats would allow me to replicate his physical attributes. There was something that set him apart though, some instinctive edge that showed everytime he fought. It warned all who watched that he was unassailable. A mountain that couldn’t be surmounted.

My team looked at me with mixed looks that were hard to decipher. There were hints of fear there, which wasn’t necessarily bad, but the respect and reverence wasn’t there at all. Fear and maybe caution? Miguel looked at me like I hung the moon, but then again, I had saved his life. The remaining seven mountain squad members weren’t too thrilled with me though. I had suborned them, marched them across miles of freezing cold tundra, and then nearly a third of them died following me. Hayden was looking at me with true venom in his eyes. I idly pushed around the idea of the older man having an accident tonight. A shove in the right direction and he wouldn’t be able to recover in the fighting that was likely to come washing over us like a tide.

Region NSR-1 Occupied

The alert broke the nervous anticipation of the setting sun. This could be catastrophic. We were tired and battered. If this new occupation introduced more bosses for us to fight, we were fucked.

“Miguel, ignore what I said. Use your stats right now.” It was our only chance. We needed heavy hitters and Miguel was sitting at level eighteen and had thirty six points waiting to be used.

“Are you sure? You just told me not to use them,” Miguel was only half paying attention to me, looking off into the distance as he accessed his menu. I couldn’t tell if he had been looking at the announcement or had already opened up his stats to start dumping points. We’d had discussions with Bobby around how to do idealized builds, based off a lot of guesswork and some logic.

“Shit’s about to go down and we’re going to need everyone to step up.” At least, if I didn’t want to expose my new elvish allies to the gaze of the rest of humanity. I had plans for them that would only work if they weren’t known about. Well, plans for Thrush anyway.

“Ok ok, just give me a minute.” Since Miguel was going off of a speed fighter's rough build, we had hypothesized that he would need to build around not only dexterity, but also constitution, perception, and endurance. Endurance had been fairly easy to pick out, he would be useless if he exhausted himself in the first thirty seconds of a fight, regardless of how fast he was. Constitution would keep his body from bursting against the extreme stress that the dexterity stat provided. Perception had been a bit more talked about, if he was going fast enough, and more importantly, doing it quick enough, he wouldn’t be able to process what was happening. He would need to elevate both perception and intelligence. Every stat worked together, there would be no min-maxing, even Agatha’s insane stat dump into mana likely had drawbacks that we hadn’t encountered yet.

Miguel Herrera

Perception: 10

Intelligence: 8

Strength: 12

Constitution: 10

Vitality: 8

Endurance: 10

Dexterity: 18

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Mana: 10

It took only a few moments for Miguel to figure out his stats and send me his new updated sheet. He took more points in mana that I figured he would have, but who didn’t want to do magic? The dexterity of eighteen would be cool to see, especially once he used the dash skill. If skills were multipliers like we were beginning to assume, he would be faster than anything we had experienced so far.

“It’ll have to be enough. You’re still fairly squishy,” I said with just a hint of a smile at him. I had double his constitution, while he had an extra eight points in dexterity. I was building a true tank build, I could take the punch and keep going. He was going with a pure killer, so fast that nobody could touch him, and able to unleash a huge burst of damage when he did land his hits. His strength was only a few points below my own, and once you added in the speed of his attacks, I had a feeling Miguel could well be on par with any sentient in the tutorial.

“Not all of us are you. Don’t need to be a tank if I just don’t get hit,” Miguel said with a laugh. I could tell he was riding the high of the stat dump. There was an intoxicating feeling to becoming a demigod afterall.

“So, that’s why you all felt so weak,” Luke said as he walked up to us. Before, when I had been around him it had been like standing on the bottom of a deep pool. Uncomfortable pressure bearing down on me from all angles. Now, though, he stood before me and it was hardly noticeable. A slight difference for sure, he was still exerting power upon both Miguel and I, but nothing outrageous. If I just focused a bit, felt the mana stirring inside of me like a whirling pool in my sternum, Luke’s pressure disappeared.

How was I feeling mana? The feeling had erupted the minute Luke had walked up to us. Minutes ago, there had been nothing, and now, I could feel it. I pushed it to the back of my mind as I rose to my feet to tower above Luke. He might be the better fighter, but there was something psychologically pleasing about staring down at him.

“You weren’t using the stats when you leveled. Now, though, you’re close to me,” he pointed at me as he said it, then turned his head to look at Miguel.

“You, close but not quite. I know for a fact that I’ve been fighting and killing more than you have. The both of you. Levels are raised based on stat comparisons then? I get less experience from killing things weaker than me based on the ratio of my stats versus theirs? You leveled faster by not using those stats and just working your way up slowly?” The pressure I had just finished ignoring reappeared, now tinted with the copper scent of blood.

“Close enough,” I said as Miguel moved to stand side by side with me. I cursed the feelings of euphoria that came with the burst of stats. While we were close to his level, he had so much more fighting experience than us. We could give him a challenging fight no doubt, but in the narrow confines of the keep where Miguel was limited in his movements, we would die.

“That translation skill was useful for you.” Luke turned and walked away without another word. The man was strange. Also scary in how fast he had just deciphered weeks of planning with only a few context clues and some general logic. He wasn’t just some meathead warrior who fought to give himself meaning.

“Shit, I thought we were going to have to fight him,” Miguel whispered.

“Could you feel the pressure?”

“Yeah, did you smell the blood?” Miguel asked with a worried look as his hand gently touched underneath his own nostrils.

“Yeah. Glad that didn’t devolve into a fight. Now Bobby is the only one who hasn’t used her stats. We get through tonight, then regroup with them tomorrow when we attack the fort,” I reassured Miguel. And myself. There was something comforting about having people you could rely on to help you. I missed my team. That was different- when had I grown emotionally attached to them? Could this be a side effect of perception?

“We’re still going to attack tomorrow. Even after…” Miguel gestured lazily toward the furnace where we had laid to rest our allies.

“Survive and conquer, Miguel. We can survive and hide and hope whomever conquers us is kind and lax and doesn’t cut us apart for the experience. Or we can do the conquering.”

“This shit sucks.”

Well put Miguel. This shit does suck.

“Come on, we’ve got stuff to do. We only have a little bit before it's dark and we start getting attacked.”

“What do we need to do?”

“Get that scorpion set up and be ready for the elementals. It’s the only way, so far, that we’ve found to unlock the mana stat. We need to kill them as quickly as possible and harvest the hearts. Without Agatha here to help us out, this could be problematic.”

“What’s the plan then?”

“I don’t know. I’m hoping to figure it out as we walk up the stairs and onto the roof,” I told him honestly. I didn't know what was coming tonight. All the monsters so far had been sea themed and had loose looks similar to earth animals. Kinda. If you squinted and turned your head. The elementals were the first true non-sea life thing we had fought, and even then, they had been brought forth by the octopus monsters. Who had rare intelligence mana hearts. We were too far from the sea to kill those, but we might get a few of the elementals and a contingent of fishmen and commanders. Or, being further inland we might get something completely different. I didn’t know.

“Sorry, Billy. I didn’t mean to bug you about it.” There was no sincerity in his tone about that apology. In fact, a dawning suspicion emerged.

“Did you just say a pun to lighten the mood?”

“Was it a pun?”

“Maybe? Bug me, we just fought bugs, almost died to them. You know what? For tonight, regardless of the rules, we will call it a pun and it lightened the mood.”

Miguel didn’t laugh, but he chuffed quietly through his nose as we marched up the stairs and that was good enough for me. I allowed myself a stray thought to wonder about just what faction it was that had occupied NSR-1. Another fantasy race like the elves, or something different. We had the bugs and the lizards and then ourselves, that was half of the factions accounted for right there. Who knew, maybe we would get dwarves.