Instead of beelining directly for my tent in the back, I headed over to the private Employee’s Only bathroom to rinse off.
I smelled like an unwashed armpit, and I was pretty sure there were chunks of something unspeakable stuck in my teeth. I brushed vigorously and nearly drowned myself with mouthwash, then wiped the blood, grime, and gore from my body. It took almost an entire pack of baby wipes to get the job done. I really needed to get some proper bathing facilities set up in here, complete with showers. Adding a washer and dryer probably wouldn’t go amiss either, since my clothes smelled like rank butthole.
Hell, my stench had probably freaked Taylor and Stephanie out more than anything else.
I sprinkled a bit of medicated talc powder into my Daisy Dukes then added a fresh layer of deodorant to help combat the lingering stench. Using the extra deodorant probably wasn’t the smartest idea since there were a fair number of Dwellers who hunted by smell. But I figured they’d be able to smell my BO just as much as my deodorant, so it was one half dozen or the other. At least this way, the people around me wouldn’t also have to suffer.
Mostly clean, I quickly hit up the Monolith and distributed the fifteen new Personal Enhancement Points I’d earned from leveling up. I dropped a single point each into Grit and Preservation, bringing my Grit up to 14 and Preservation up to 8. Resonance was still my most important trait by a country mile, so I added another nine points to that, which brought it to 49—and that was accounting for the hit from the Cendral Scale Mail Cuirass Relic. The last four points went into Perception, bumping the stat up to 25.
My Health and Stamina hardly budged at all, but my overall Mana Pool inched up to 110 and my Mana Regen Rate was just a hair beneath 9 Mana per minute.
With my points taken care of, I finally slipped into my personal tent, which I’d tricked out with goods from the Home Décor aisle.
There was an extra-wide cot with a premium, full-sized air mattress on top. A gray area rug covered the otherwise cold floor. A folding camp chair sat in one corner beside a collapsible TV tray for meals. A small nightstand held a battery-powered lantern and a few other personal effects—fresh underwear, clean socks, a few extra shirts. It wasn’t exactly home sweet home, but I’d certainly slept rougher. Hell, I’d crashed at job sites with nothing more than a painfully thin iso-mat and an emergency blanket to cover me.
Compared to that, this was practically a luxury resort.
I kicked my boots off and plopped into the chair. I badly needed to catch a few hours of shut-eye, but I was too worked up over my shiny new prizes from the Arcade.
After carefully looking through the Relics already stashed away in my Spatial Core, I decided to swap Force Multiplier for Mental Micromanagement. Then, after a long beat, I opted to exchange Doodle Buddy for Bad Trip. I was sad to see Force Multiplier go, but fighting up close and personal just didn’t make a whole lot of sense with my current build. Had this been a video game or RPG campaign, I would’ve been on the front line, swinging a sword or bare-knuckle brawling without a question.
But this wasn’t a game. This was my life.
Truth was, spell casting was devastatingly powerful, and with the Compass of the Catacomber, the higher my Resonance and Perception, the better off I’d be in the long run. It just didn’t make sense for me to be hooking and jabbing.
As for Doodle Buddy, I wasn’t nearly as sad to see that particular Relic go.
I planned to hang onto it, since there was a good chance it would synergize with something down the road, but as a stand-alone skill it was rather… disappointing. A fact that had become painfully obvious during the battle against Mohawk and the rest of his Aspirant buddies. As a level 4, the summoned Doodle was little more than a speed bump to anything higher than level 10, which was just about everything on the seventh floor.
And even though Bad Trip didn’t deal any damage, it was a decent crowd control ability.
A chilling tingle rippled through me when I equipped Bad Trip.
When I added Mental Micromanagement, on the other hand, I started to actively bleed from my nose, eyes, ears, and mouth. On top of that, a pounding headache roared through the inside of my skull and an intense wave of vertigo washed over me. It felt like the whole room was spinning drunkenly beneath me. I acutely remembered the warning from the Relic description, “this is a good way to give yourself a brain aneurysm—and no, that’s not a joke.”
Despite the disclaimer, I had indeed thought the flavor text was just a joke.
The sensation lasted for a solid five minutes before finally passing. I used a few more baby wipes to clean up the gore, but the fact that I was actively bleeding from several face holes was rather concerning. I was alive, though, and that was the important thing.
I felt another wave of vertigo—though much less intense—when I activated the effect for the first time.
Although I couldn’t see anything, I distinctly felt a thin, shimmering line of power extend outward from my chest. The invisible strand of energy was no thicker than my pinky finger and it almost felt like I’d grown another limb. But it was a weak, clumsy limb. Uncoordinated and alien. Almost like a newborn infant flailing its tiny hand around for the first time.
The strand of mental energy wrapped around the wooden shaft of my hammer, and it floated upward, hanging unsteadily in the air. It bobbed and weaved as great beads of sweat rolled down my face.
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Holy shitballs. This took a lot more effort than I’d been expecting.
I’d broken my right arm in the sixth grade, and I’d ended up in a full arm cast that ran from bicep to palm.
It wasn’t a clean break and there were complications, which required a couple of surgeries to make things right. As a result, I’d had to learn to write with my left hand. For the first couple of months, every motion was slow and awkward. My handwriting was so bad even I couldn’t read it. And it wasn’t just writing. Brushing my teeth. Eating with silverware. Even wiping my ass. I had to do all of it left-handed, which was a deeply humbling experience.
Trying to use the hammer with the new mental limb was just like that.
I flexed the limb, attempting to take a swing with the floating hammer, and instead I sent the tool careening across the tent. It slammed into the fabric wall and promptly slid down behind the air mattress.
I sighed. Just perfect.
Even though the spell had cost less than a single point of Mana, I felt mentally exhausted by the effort.
Most of the Relics so far had simply conferred their abilities without much muss or fuss, but this one required genuine skill, it seemed. And that was with only a single strand of telekinetic energy. If I pushed this Relic up to level 15, I’d be able to wield fifteen different strands simultaneously.
Though, honestly, even the thought of attempting to wield two objects simultaneously left me queasy.
I wasn’t about to give up, though.
I’d never been the smartest, strongest, or fastest sumbitch around, but if I had a superpower, it was that I didn’t know how to quit. Even when I probably should’ve. The sheer thickness of my skull was the stuff of legends.
Using nothing more than my mind, a trickle of Mana, and a truck worth of sheer willpower, I pulled the cot aside and forced the hammer back into the air.
I wasn’t going to let this spell beat me, especially not after spending five thousand fucking tickets on it.
For the next several hours I used a combination of Jolt Cola Mana Elixirs and Pharmacist’s Scales to keep that hammer aloft. It turned out to be a damned bit easier to keep my Mana topped off, thanks to an exploit I hadn’t even thought of. The Mana Capacitor Sigil, baked into my stupid Versace Bathrobe. Not only did Mana Capacitor increase my maximum Mana Pool by 15% and my overall Regeneration Rate by 10%, but it had a secondary ability called Wild Surge.
Every spell I cast had a 5% chance of triggering Wild Surge, which instantly replenished up to 50% of my Total Mana Pool, while simultaneously boosting my Mana Regen rate by 25% for two minutes. There was also an additional 50% chance of proccing a duplicate spell at no additional cost, though that mattered less in this instance.
The cost of Mental Micromanagement was only one Mana per Minute—which was dirt cheap—but I quickly realized something important about the spell: Even though I wasn’t actively “recasting” the spell every minute, the VIRUS interface acted as though I was. Which meant for every minute I had the spell running, there was a 5% chance of triggering Wild Surge.
On average, running Mental Micromanagement for twenty minutes straight almost guaranteed that Wild Surge would activate, instantly restoring up to 50% of my Mana Pool.
And that was only the beginning.
After a little experimentation, I discovered that if I disrupted the spell—quickly cutting off the telekinetic flow—but restarted it before the end of a minute passed, that counted as a new cast, but cost no additional Mana expenditure. Essentially, “juggling” an item in the air—stopping and restarting the telekinetic flow in rapid succession—could trigger Wild Surge almost once a minute. Best of all, the regeneration buffs stacked.
Between Mental Micromanagement and my stupid fucking bathrobe, I’d figured out a truly broken exploit to generate a nearly constant supply of Mana.
Even though I was tired, my discovery only enticed me to practice even harder.
For the first hour or so, I just held the hammer in the air. Working to keep it nice and steady and not bobbing drunkenly all over the place like a sailor returning to ship after a long night of debauchery. I also practiced starting and stopping the flow of energy while keeping the hammer airborne. Although it didn’t cost much Mana, the sheer concentration required was insane. Like trying to do advanced calculus. While cooking pancakes. And giving a cat a bath. All at once.
But the longer I practiced, the easier it got. Not easy. But easier.
Once I could handle that, I tried doing stuff with the hammer.
Move it across the room.
Swing it.
Hit things with it.
I even tried tossing it straight up into the air, then catching it before it hit the ground. I failed more often than I succeeded, at least at first. By the third hour, I hardly dropped the hammer at all. As tired as I was, I moved into the store and started doing a little target practice. I had Croc toss throw pillows from the Home Décor aisle into the air and I’d use the hammer to smack ’em down.
It looked ridiculous, but the practice helped hone my rudimentary abilities considerably.
We progressively moved to smaller and smaller items, pillows to packets of ramen noodles, then finally tennis balls, looted from the seasonal aisle.
“You know, Dan,” Croc said, tossing a green ball heavenward, “this reminds me of that whole montage in Breaking Dawn—the fourth and final volume in the international bestselling Twilight series—where Edward patiently trains Bella in the use of her new vampire powers.”
“Dammit, Croc,” I growled, batting the ball away with a soft squeak. “I thought we already talked about the Twilight thing. You’ve got to stop comparing us to Edward and Bella. It’s weird. Really, really weird.”
“There’s nothing weird about loving the Twilight series, Dan. But if it makes you feel better, I could maybe compare this to the time when Edward and Jacob had to set aside their differences and work together to take down the Volturi—though really, that unlikely friendship more closely mirrors our current relationship with Jakob.” The mimic paused. “I just realized Jakob the lizard man has the very same name as Jacob the werewolf. Oh what a twisted tale of love we weave, Dan.”
I sighed. “Just throw the damn ball.”
Once I could hit an object out of the air eight out of ten times, I attempted to use the hammer at increasingly greater distances. The further away an object was, the harder it was to wield accurately. Although the spell description said the range was line of sight, I found my ability to keep the weapon airborne failed completely at about sixty feet. I also realized that at those further distances, utilizing my demolition screwdriver was actually much more effective.
Swinging the hammer took a far greater degree of mental dexterity, while simply shanking something with a projectile was surprisingly simple. The mechanics of it were just easier.
Still, progress was progress, and by the time I headed back to my tent—a pressure headache building steadily behind my eye sockets—I felt reasonably certain I could use the ability in combat without actively hurting myself or others. Plus, I could confidently trigger Mental Micromanagement frequently enough to ensure that Wild Surge procced, which meant I’d be able to cast more spells, faster.
Satisfied with my efforts, I collapsed onto my mattress and was asleep before my head even hit the pillow.