“Alright Mike, I think that’s about all we can do for you. You’re as healed as you’re gonna get,” the doc said, as he read through a stack of notes detailing my injury. “I know you can’t pay now seeing as how you’ve been on bed rest since the collapse, but I think 4 Silver should cover everything as soon as you have it.” I brought up my status window for a cursory glance.
[Michael Ward
HP - 220/226
Unassigned - level 7
Strength - 28
Dexterity - 20
Defense - 20
Intelligence - 19
Vigor - 18
Charisma - 16
Skills - N/A
Mutations - N/A]
After my sternum had cracked, it had really sucked watching my body slowly wither away after all I’d done to build it, but there was nothing else I could do for it without injuring myself further. Doc Stevens had said I couldn’t do any lifting, should spend as much time resting as possible, and even said I should stop pushing gear. While I hated every waking moment of it, he outright stated he wouldn’t help me get better if I didn’t listen to him. He was a doctor in the old world, but everyone is a diver in the new one, and taking care of me took away time from him training and diving.
“Thanks for everything Doc. I’ll get you the money as soon as I can,” I said over my shoulder as I walked out the door. Finally, after 3 long months, I was cleared to work out again.
-
When I got home, the first thing I did was something I’d been avoiding since my injury. I hopped on a scale to see how much I’d lost, and how much I had to gain to get back to where I had been before I’d gotten injured. While I knew I’d lost a lot of muscle, and could even see it in my body, it was still utterly devastating watching the number swing around to land on 173 pounds. I cursed my bad luck. While I had been stuck on bed rest, the whole world had been getting stronger without me. I don’t even mean that in some sort of self deprecating “woe is me” kind of way either. Three months into the system had unlocked some crazy strong abilities for the rest of the world. Unfortunately, I’d been going for a PR on bench press when the system took hold. It had been a shock to my system, and combined with the every light and electronic around me suddenly fizzling out or exploding in some cases, I’d lost control and dropped the bar loaded with 405 lbs right onto my chest. I’m grateful I’m alive, don’t get me wrong, but I feel like I’m justified in being upset that 6 years of hard training to me, could be accomplished in only a couple of months by anyone, and I didn’t even get to enjoy the headstart my strength would have given me. Okay, maybe woe is me a little bit.
It doesn’t matter now, all of that is in the past and I need to look forward. All of that is gone. All of the supplements, gear, and effort my body could handle won’t bring it back, not when ideas like bodybuilding had been left behind in the old world. Everyone was a dungeon diver, even if only casually. It was all most anyone did now, and I had a lot of catching up to do.
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Shaking myself out of my pity party, I heard the front door close. “Yo,” I called out to let James know I was home. “Hey Mike! What’d the Doc say? Good news hopefully?” James shouted across the apartment to me. I walked out of the bathroom with a huge smile on my face. Seeing that smile was all the answer he needed, prompting an, “Oh fuck yeah! I was actually just home to grab gear and head out to meet some of my friends for a dive. You tryna come with? I can’t bring you in since it’s not safe, but I can introduce you to my friends and show you around a bit now that you aren’t rotting in bed anymore.”
“Bed rot was the Docs orders! You know I’d be 20 levels ahead of you by now if I’d been able to dive!” I threw back at him.
“Yeah yeah yeah, go ahead and get dressed, and I’ll send you off on baby’s first dive.” He responded with a heavy laugh. The funny thing is we both knew it was probably true, James had been my lifting buddy for a while, and while he was many things, motivated was not one of them.
He stood just a bit taller than my 6’ at 6’2”, and while he had a decently athletic frame, he was only a bit broader than me now after I’d dropped nearly 50 lbs. He stood there with a goofy, almost proud grin on his face as I got dressed for my first dive. He was wearing the newest set of leather armor he’d gotten as a boss drop. Whatever had possessed the mad man to pick the [Silent Assassin] class at his height and clumsiness was beyond me, but he’d made it work so far. With his cowl pulled back, I could see his messy black hair and his mutated bright orange eyes that, for some reason, helped him see in the dark.
Fully dressed, I looked up at him, “I finally get to do it. I’m gonna get my class.” “Yeah, and then you can finally pay me back for all my food you’ve been eating!” he said, prompting a small laugh. After a bit of back and forth, we headed out the door and started the 30 minute walk toward The Haul.
On the way I began to organize my priorities. First order of business, I needed to hit level 10 and choose my class. My class options will tell me what I was going to be able to do, and what type of gear I’ll need. Most people chose classes that boosted their stats pretty equally, hoping to cover as many outcomes as possible, but I’d seen James full throttle everything into his Agility and he’d done pretty well, so I figured it was probably alright to do the same thing if that’s what I was offered. I was probably the only adult in the world who hadn’t been in a dungeon yet, and I had some serious debts to pay. I owed James 6 silver, 2 per month that he’d let me stay with him and use him as a food delivery service, and I owed Doc Stevens 4 Silver for the biweekly check ups.
On the way, James told me a decent bit about how everything worked, giving me at least a base level on it all. Most of what he said was probably helpful, but I can’t lie, once he started talking about what to expect in the dungeons I started tuning out a bit. It’s not that I don’t trust what he has to say, but watching his level climb all the way to 87 when I had watched mine sit at level 7 for months kind of soured everything he had to say about the dungeons. I wanted to figure it out for myself anyway, I learn best by doing after all. James seemed to sense my unease with the conversation, and grew silent about halfway to our destination.
We walked the half hour across the giant sidewalk the freeway had become. I felt a slight pang of guilt pierce my heart as I remembered my old Supra that still sat in the gym parking lot after the Collapse. Watching what I’d come to recognize as a soft current of Mana drift through the graveyard of abandoned cars made me miss the days I felt invincible speeding down the interstate in the dead of night. Mana made lots of things work in weird ways. Electricity? Forget about it. Unless you were a lightning mage, mana made it completely unmanageable and wild. Gasoline? Gunpowder? Pretty much anything that combusts? It just didn’t now. It would still burn, but it was like any other fuel source. Mana seemed to make any kind of controlled energy into something wild and unpredictable, and it would tame anything that was wild and unpredictable.
Eventually we wound up at the expansive building that had consumed a lot of my childhood, and promised to consume a good bit of my adulthood. The Haul used to be the City Center mall, and was one of the many places dungeons had spawned at, opening sinkholes in the ground where monstrous creatures crawled out of in the collapse. Countless people around the world are assumed to have died that day, but it hits a bit closer to home when it happens down the street from your apartment. A few of the people I went to school with were in the mall when it happened. Once the dungeons had been cleared, the monster spawns stabilized, leading the owner to reclaim it and use it as a new business opportunity once the profitability of monster drops was realized.
Startling me out of my train of thought, James spoke.
“We’re here.”