Congratulations, please select an Ability Stone.
An ethereal panel appeared above each of the three gems, and I leaned in to read them.
Ability Stone (Common): Minor Speed
Toggle, At-Will
At the cost of 1 Stamina per second, the user’s Dexterity is increased by 20%.
The stereotypical speed boost, always a good option.
Ability Stone (Common): Second Wind
At-Will
Once per day, the user instantly regains 25% of their maximum Stamina.
Yet another staple of RPG abilities, but usually it did some sort of healing. I wasn’t sure just yet how important the Stamina stat was though.
Ability Stone (Common): Barkskin
Toggle, At-Will
The user gains resistance to melee attacks, but their Dexterity is reduced by 20%.
And there was the classic “become a turtle” ability. First, before making any decisions, I needed to check two things.
Dexterity: A measure of one’s overall speed, reflexes, and precision with their own body. This affects how fast one can move their body, and how accurately they can move it.
Stamina: A measure of one’s remaining physical energy. Reduced by usage of physical abilities, acts, and other conditions.
The description for Dexterity was helpful, but Stamina’s blurb was basically useless. Regardless, I decided right away that Barkskin was an instant no go. Yes, being able to resist incoming attacks if I got hit was neat, but also why should I sit there and let them hit me in the first place? I had guns. If something got close enough to actually strike me, that meant something had gone horribly wrong.
The ogre? That was just one example of what could happen. I should’ve done more to get away, instead of standing there like a tree.
The fact that it would make me reload slower, aim slower, no thank you. My direct battle plan could boil down to “Stay away from sources of ouch, do not get nice and cuddly with things that want to murder you.”
With that out of the way, my options were between Minor Speed and Second Wind. I could see both options being extremely useful in emergency situations. No time to reload as an enemy draws in? Burst of speed to finish the load or dodge out of there. Giant stone door closing and I’ll just barely get there in time? Speed up and dash through. Exhausted during a long battle, a sudden spike of energy was fantastic. Heck, the ability even had me starting to think about buying some adrenaline for just-in-case.
The way I read both of them, they would both scale as I leveled up, since they worked off of percentages instead of raw numbers. That was also awesome.
Ultimately, I couldn’t decide one way or the other, so I delegated it to a coin flip. Heads for Speed and Tails for Stamina. Everything hurt too much to flip it the standard way, so I stood it on its side on the floor and spun it. And waited. Even as the spin died down, I could see which side had ended face up, and the System seemed to step in.
Ability Stone (Common): Minor Speed has been selected.
Granting Ability.
I didn’t even have to do anything, like the System was forcibly keeping me true to the coin toss. That was something I’d have to keep in mind if I ever wanted to start making bets or promises. The other two stones vanished suddenly in a flash of gold light, leaving only the Minor Speed stone behind, which began to dissolve before my eyes into a golden glow that drifted toward me. Sure enough, when I looked at my Status window, there it was.
Abilities: Minor Speed
A jab of pain in my side reminded me that it was time to go home, Ability prize be damned. I took just enough time to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, took a long drink of water from my backpack, and began my painful trek home.
If it wasn’t for my tape markers, I don’t know if I’d have found my way back out. On several occasions I had to stop and sit down, catch my breath, and let the pain subside. When I finally saw the void down the tunnel, with the inside of my fridge door facing me, I almost broke down and cried at that beautiful sight (but I didn’t, because my momma didn’t raise no bitch).
The first thing I did, after dropping my backpack right on the floor, was check the stopwatch to see just how long I had been in the dungeon.
Eight minutes.
I’d wager that it had taken me about an hour or so to find the treasure chest that sparked the horde, and about three hours to stumble all the way home.
The entire battle, start to finish, maybe covered four minutes. That meant I had been unconscious for around four hours.
My dog perked her head up from chewing on her bone when I walked into the living room, then got up to run over and start licking me. I was coated in dried blood, granite dust, and sweat. I had to push her head away as I walked toward my bathroom. Something caught my eye as I passed by my office.
Sitting right on the floor, next to my workbench, was the green gem I had found yesterday. I figured one of my cats had jumped up and knocked it off. Despite how badly I just wanted a shower, I couldn’t let it just sit there. I walked over and painfully bent down to pick it up.
Then a panel popped into view.
Gem of Lesser Restoration
Real shit?
I didn’t even stop to think about it before willing the gem to activate, which it did with a blinding flash of green light.
In an instant I was in agony, as my broken ribs shifted around in my body to realign themselves and fused back together. All I could do was drop to the ground and take the fetal position.
And scream.
There was a lot of screaming.
My broken arm snapped straight, the bone mended over. Honestly, I think that upping my Endurance earlier had been a mistake, because if it had been lower at least I’d have passed out from the pain.
Minutes passed before it suddenly ceased. The torture ended like it began, in an instant. My dog stood over me, licking my face as I tried to sit up. I gently pressed on my ribs with my left hand, then my bicep. I flexed my right arm, and it felt just like it had when I woke up that morning. All of my ribs felt like they were back where they belonged.
After taking a moment to appraise the results, I kind of wished that I had just called 911 and got a ride to the hospital to heal up normally, so that I could’ve saved the gem for something else.
But shit did that hurt.
My dog refused to leave me alone, she paced back and forth whining until I started petting her. When she finally calmed down, I stood up and made my way into the bathroom.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Piece by piece I stripped off my clothes. My vest was soaked in blood, but still in one piece. Plate carrier, similarly coated, but with the sound of rustling pieces of shattered ceramic whenever it moved. Cargo pants, salvageable. My t-shirt and hoodie were done for. It turned out that a few of my ribs had been poking through my skin and tore small holes in the fabric. Beats me how I survived that.
I stood in the shower and let the steaming hot water pour down on me, letting all the stress and blood wash away down the drain. When the water began to rapidly cool down, I rushed to lather up and scrub the grime off, stopping the water just as the Ice Age began in my shower. That damn water heater. It moved up a few levels on my priority list.
After I dried myself off, I pulled on some fresh clothes and grabbed a trash bag from under the sink.
I carefully poured the pieces of ceramic and dust out of the plate carrier, then tossed in my shirt and hoodie. My carrier, vest, and cargo pants all went into the wash with plenty of detergent and set to heavy load. While my laundry machine began the fill cycle, I sorted through the stack of papers in my filing cabinet until I found the warranty information for my flashlight and red dot. An hour on the phone later I had assurances that the manufacturer would be sending me a return label in the mail.
It didn’t hurt to buy some replacements, it’d take weeks to get those back after all. No way was I going back into the dungeon without a rifle light and a dot.
Yep, despite my very intimate brush with death, I was already sitting on my couch and thinking of all the things I would bring on my next trip into the dungeon. Among the top items on the list was higher caliber weapons. My 5.56 and 9mm had both served me well for years, right up until the ogre ignored eight rounds in the chest, multiple in the knee, and one in the eye.
.308 would be a bit much of a jump, but 7.62x39 would be a good step up in power. I didn’t have any AR’s chambered in it, but I knew just where to get one. As for my handgun, well of course the perfect mix of power and capacity would be a 10mm. I used to have one, a Dan Wesson Razorback, but I had sold it the year before to pay some bills.
I needed to stop by Charlies to cash out my gold, make a trip to the gun store, but a look at my phone said it was only 12:30pm. I had been in the store only hours ago. That’d look way too suspicious if I walked in and started buying guns and ammo less than a day after my last shopping trip.
I figured that I needed to waste some time.
I changed into sweat pants and a t-shirt, buckled on my new favorite pair of boots, grabbed the stopwatch, and walked outside to the side of the road. The weather was beautiful for this time of year, with the slightest breeze and just a bit of overcast that made sure the sun wasn’t pure agonizing hatred beaming down on me. Perfect running weather.
I readied my stopwatch, and checked my Status.
Stamina: 100/100
It seemed that another effect of the gem was a full restore of my Stamina. I hit the start button and took off.
Lets preface the rest of this by saying that I loathe running. I don’t mind stationary cardio bikes when I work out, since I could sit there and watch a movie, or maybe read a book while my legs cycled away. Put me on a bike for half an hour, I don’t care.
I can’t read while I run. I’ve tried.
If I had a stationary bike at home, trust me I’d have used that instead, but that’s expensive and I didn’t have money to spend until recently.
So running was my only option to burn through Stamina.
On average, when I’ve been timed, I maintained an eight minute mile, and crapped out around the sixteen minute mark if I started in perfect condition. At the five minute mark, I saw 90/100 Stamina. I could’ve stopped the experiment there, but I still felt fresh and ready to go, so I kept on going.
At ten minutes, I was at 80/100, and still felt fantastic, like I could just keep running full tilt forever. Usually at this point my feet would already be screaming at me to stop, but those boots made it feel like I was running on clouds.
It was time to ramp it up.
Ability: Minor Speed activated.
Going off my usual average, I could run an eight minute mile comfortably, about 7.5mph, slowing to 6mph around the twelve minute mark. For short sprints, obviously I could push that, but long hauls aren’t usually ran at max speed. I had been outpacing myself the entire time, and if the GPS on my phone was to believed I was moving at 10mph, for ten minutes straight.
Then my ability activated and I jumped to 12mph. My Stamina began plummeting like a block of lead from a cliff.
Even as it neared empty, I still felt just the same as when I had started.
5/100
I was considering changing my career as a track runner, maybe an Olympic athlete.
3/100
Maybe Nike would sign me. But then I’d have to wear their shoes… Never mind not Nike.
1/100
Ooh, Red Bull would be a good sponsor. I drank it religiously, had a 24 pack delivered every three weeks for the past two years.
0/100
My runner’s high came to a abrupt end, like a car hitting a concrete wall, and I began to remember why I fucking hated running. I slowed down to my normal pace immediately, and four minutes later I was already calling it quits so I could go home. My phone said I had ran three and a half miles.
What did I learn? So long as I had Stamina I could keep going at full throttle like a Finnish soldier with his entire unit’s supply of meth. The moment it ran out, I was back to just normal old me.
That was amazing. I had been thinking that I’d black out or be rendered useless. Nah. The way it actually worked felt like one of those isekai cheat powers that the protagonist gets.
Something else drew my curiosity while I watched my Stamina slowly tick back up.
Aura: 100%
I had ignored it earlier, because it had been at zero, but now that it was full, I had to know.
Aura: This spiritual force acts as an invisible barrier that protects the user from physical harm. Higher level enemies are able to overpower it with ease, while lower level enemies may be unable to affect it at all.
So a goddamned energy shield?
There was no way that I wasn’t going to immediately test this out.
I called an Uber for the rest of the trip home, and by the time I got there my Stamina had reached 10/100, about a rate of 1 every 3 minutes.
First of all, I needed a baseline to work off of. I was currently working off the theory that the system didn’t recognize things from our world, so what would happen if something from Earth tried to hurt me? I wasn’t going to go and try to stab myself in the leg, but I had another option available.
My cat Lily was laying on her favorite roost of the tall tower in my living room, right by the window where she could bask in the sun. I gave her a few head scritches, and she began purring, then I poked her in the snoot.
Her ears flicked back in displeasure, and she eyeballed me accusingly.
“Get bothered idiot.”
I poked her again, and she growled quietly in warning. Then I poked her again, and ruffled her ears. She finally swatted at me with a paw. It had been several weeks since the last time I had clipped her claws, and the razor sharp tip of one caught the skin on the back of my hand, leaving a clear mark of her wrath. She hopped down from the tower and ran off to escape my bothering.
Aura: 100%
The number hadn’t budged, and I could see the smallest amount of blood well out from the scratch. Either my cat was a far higher level than me and could ignore my Aura, or yet again the System didn’t recognize things from outside of the dungeon’s world. This would require further testing.
Planning for a lighter expedition, I grabbed my older backpack, which held only twenty liters, and the coil of paracord out of my new one. I spent a moment picking a primary long gun, and settled on my good old Mossberg 590.
I am not usually the kind of guy to grab a shotgun over other options. I believe that if you live in a state that lets you own an AR (AKA, a non-communist state), then you should always pick the AR for home defense. I’ve used a shotgun when hunting birds, and used one in a few competitions, but I was an AR guy at heart.
That being said.
My shotgun had been modified by a gunsmith friend to take a pistol red dot and an extended eight shell tube. My stock was swapped for an extendable with a pistol grip. I had a mount for a flashlight (and a bright one at that), along with a bayonet lug that just perfectly fit my ka-bar. I also happened to have a shell pouch, which was meant for a hunting trip that me and my buddies had planned but never went on.
I filled that up with 12ga 2 ¾” 00 Buck.
Eight in the tube, one in the chamber, twenty five in the pouch.
I recalled an ancient proverb,
“Pistols put holes in people. Rifles put holes through people. Shotguns, the right load at the right range will physically remove a chunk from your opponent and throw it on the floor behind him,”
I was in the middle of opening the fridge door when I stopped in my tracks.
What the actual fuck was I thinking?