“What the Hell is that thing?!” Dan shouted in horror, scrambling to put distance between himself and the faceless wooden man that was attacking him with a small tree branch. “Shoot a fireball at it!”
“I’m not going to blow up the wood golem, dingbat,” Derby snorted. His voice whined in emphatic annoyance. “I conjured the wood golem for you to practice on.”
“What?!” Dan shrieked.
Before Dan could question that further, the wood golem flicked its wrist and whipped its stick against his left shin.
A wood golem hits YOU for 1 points of damage!
“Ow!” He shrieked, as he clutched the shin and hopped away on his other foot.
“Don’t be a baby,” Derby said. “Hit him back.”
Dan put down his bruised leg and halted his retreat from the tree monster. He raised his sword and charged, shouting epithets that involved the tree’s mother, among other things. With his first swing he went right for the golem’s blank face with a speed and ferocity so great that he was stunned when the blade bit into wood early and stopped. The golem had caught his sword with its stick.
For a moment while both weapons were locked between them, Dan stood wide-eyed and indecisive, too shocked to make his next move. Then the golem pulled its stick free. The last foot of the stalk hung from wood fibers, as the long sword had cut deeply and nearly severed it. The damage gave the golem no pause. It advanced, bringing the broken limb down at Dan in a series of overhead strikes that he barely got his sword up in time to block. After three blocked strikes, Dan was beginning to feel like this would be easy. That was when the golem kicked him in the balls.
Dan fell in the grass squealing.
“You have to block low too,” Derby said with a chuckle. He muttered to himself “Always gets them the first time.”
After Dan’s entire midsection stopped feeling like a steamroller was sitting on it, he climbed back to his feet and assumed the best battle stance he could muster with his lack of training and lingering nut-kick-hunch. Every time his thighs moved it felt like his balls were rattling in a cocktail shaker. He tried to block it out of his mind by thinking about splitting that stupid tree dummy’s head with his sword.
As he stood, delaying any movement, Dan watched the golem’s broken wooden sword re-knit itself. Fibers grew from the edges of the split to reunite the loose end with the rest of the stick. When it was complete, only a slight swell in the wood at the point of breakage suggested that it had ever been damaged.
“Agh!” Dan roared as he moved forward more cautiously, swinging his sword in wide horizontal swaths that the golem could not avoid. The golem blocked his sword on the second swing, but this time Dan had not put so much force into his attack, and the blade did not stick in the golem’s cane. He changed the direction of his swing and brought his sword around to strike at that that wooden forehead.
Whack! He buried the rotting metal in that wooden skull for a whopping 13 damage.
Your Riposte skill has increased to 2.
Your One-Hand Sword skill has increased to 2.
“What the Hell?” Dan grunted. Almost as if it was answering him, the skills page filled the open air in front of him. “The skills page?”
“Yeah, that’s your skills page.
Dan was overwhelmed by a multitude of words and numeric scores. It seemed there was a skill score for every action anyone could ever perform in life. The page gave values for Fork Eating 87, Umbrella Opening 19, Nacho Cheese Dipping 182, Typing 79, and Shoe Tying 90, among many other things…
“Butt-Wiping?!” Dan exclaimed.
“If you buff that one higher than three-hundred you can always wipe with a single square—even after taco night.”
“That’s weird.” It sounded useful.
Dan’s curiosity got the better of him, and he went hunting for his Alternate Picking skill. It had to be high, right? That was a thing he practiced every day for more than a decade. Unfortunately, before Dan could quantify his ability to produce low E pedal tones, the golem’s cane smacked into the side of his head. The pain came after a thump that sounded like the fat low-end of one of those shitty Fender Deluxe Reverbs. He scurried away from the wooden beast reactively.
“I killed that stupid thing!” he shouted. “I cut its head in half!”
“It’s magically animated wood,” Derby said with another aggravated sigh. “It doesn’t even have a brain. You… You just keep hacking at it. I’ll be over here.” He waved his hand in front of him, spreading a thick dusting of glowing blue sparkles that descended slowly through the air from his hips down to the grass. In the wake of the dust, matter filled the empty space. When most of the dust was on the ground Dan recognized the object that had materialized there—a wooden frame that extended six feet in parallel with the ground and had cloth strips draped across it. It was a sunlounger.
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“Whatever, dude,” Dan grumbled as he returned to attacking the dummy.
Dummy training went on for hours while the wizard sat in his conjured chair, paying very little attention. Every few minutes he would look up, shake his head, and return his gaze to Laddes be Better than Lasses by Lorde Rychard Maesterson.
As Dan dueled the dummy, he found that increases in skill points came along with new insights regarding what he was doing. When he realized he could always hit the dummy in the legs while blocking a high attack, he gained a point in Riposte. When he noticed the dummy always slashed with the stick—never thrusted—he gained a point in One-Hand Sword. When he saw the dummy leaving openings after its downward slashes, outward slashes, and overhead deflections, he gained a point for each observation. It was like a video game—but not. In video games with skill numbers, you could just repeat the action ad nauseum and gain points without any thought. The skills Dan gained in this world seemed to be actual reflections of his experience.
He wished it was the other way. That would have been easier.
There came a time when Dan found himself wondering which thing was first—the skill point, or the thing he learned with the skill point. If he were better at making observations—or if someone just listed a bunch for him like a cheat sheet—would he gain all those skill points instantly?
After a few minutes of that, he realized he was thinking almost entirely about that weird chicken-egg dilemma without dedicating any higher processes to the ongoing duel, yet he was whacking the splinters out of the wood golem anyway. He had not gained any skill points in a long time. He did not know exactly how long since he had no time-keeping implements.
“I’m kicking this thing’s ass now, dude,” Dan said. He had One Hand Sword 10, Riposte 10, Block 10, and Parry 10 when he glanced at the Skill page.
“Great,” Derby said, without even a cursory glance up from his book. “Now go kill some woodland critters until you reach Level 3.”
“Woodland critters?”
“Did I stutter?”
“What’s a woodland critter?”
Derby finally turned up from his book to glare at Dan in frustration. “We’re going to be at this forever… A woodland critter. Furry or feathery things that live in the woods. Squirrels, beavers, chickadees, deer, foxes, mice, porcupines, rabbits, raccoons, skunks, woodpeckers. You need your hand held? Here. Here’s a quest to kill twenty turkeys.”
A box popped up in Dan’s overlay. It looked like a weathered scroll of parchment. On it was written exactly what Derby had commanded, except in a much fancier manner of speaking.
Hail adventurer,
Derby the Wizard wishes you to slay twenty turkeys.
Gobbler Gorefest [Level 2]
0/20 turkeys slain
Quest Completion Rewards: 20,000 XP, 1x Simple Boots
“Boots? I can get boots for this?!”
“Yeah. I’m sure not waiting for you to learn Skinning and Tailoring. The Dark Lord will reign again before you figure that one out.”
“Where do I find turkeys?”
“That way.” Derby pointed into the trees; opposite the direction they had come to the tower. “Just past the trees is a waterfall you can use to wash off. You should. You look like rubbish. Follow the water and you’ll probably run into some turkeys before long.”
Dan followed the wizard’s pointing finger to the trees, excited about getting some shoes.
The forest was not as dense on the other side of the clearing. About twenty yards into the trees, Dan found the waterfall Derby told him about. The water poured from a steep stone ledge that faced the direction he had come from. It splashed down into a pool that ran down several escarpments into a little stream that trickled away. Further that direction, the rock wall leveled off and the stream continued into the distance with grassy banks on either side. The tree line was back, away from the water, by a dozen yards or so on either side.
Dan walked down to the bottom of the rocky ledge in his mud-caked pants and waded under the falling water. He had never showered under a waterfall before. He was not the outdoorsy type and did not have the cash or the interest for tropical vacations. The water pelted him like middle school dodgeballs, blasting filth from his skin and hair.
He climbed out of the water and immediately started shivering. It was a cool spring day—or at least whatever was comparable in the land of make-believe—and he had no towel to dry himself. He shrugged off the discomfort and began to follow the stream as Derby had directed him.
He had walked only a few yards when he had a peculiar realization: He no longer hurt all over. He no longer felt the throbbing pain of being bashed in the testicles, no longer felt the pain from being hit in the head dozens of times—he felt great.
Puzzled, Dan leaned over the stream at his side, feeling his face as he studied his blurry reflection. The scrapes and gashes he had gathered throughout the day—mostly from the golem—were all gone. There were no bruises on his knuckles from the golem’s cane crashing against them during clumsy swordplay.
As he was beginning to ponder that new mystery, movement in the periphery of his vision caught his attention. He turned and saw a flock of large black birds near the side of the stream, only a few dozen yards from where he stood. They had long necks and ugly reddish protrusions dangling from their throats. They looked like vultures—at least the cartoon ones Dan knew. Despite that, the name plates all said the same thing: |a turkey|.
They did not have turkeys back in Brooklyn. Dan had only seen turkeys in pictures, and they were always plump and colorful, with a wide plumage of feathers. These were different. These were hideous monochrome gangly things with bobbing heads.
Dan shrugged. He was no turkey expert—nor did he want to be. He knew only that Derby had tasked him with killing twenty turkeys, the big dumb birds were right in front of him, and he had a sword. What else was there to think about?
Dan dashed at the turkey gang stealthily, expecting them to flee when they noticed him making his armed approach. He picked a turkey on the periphery to be his first victim, and as he dashed toward it with his longsword raised, he thought ‘Strike first! Strike hard! No mercy!’
When he was approximately ten feet away, the birds went completely insane. His target turkey turned toward him and lunged, shrieking and flapping.
There was no uniform reaction from the rest. Some continued pecking at the ground, eating whatever little seeds or nuts they were all munching on. About half ran away warbling in terror. The other half stood their ground, hissing, then flying, straight at Dan’s face.
In seconds, he was blinded by a curtain of flapping wings and falling feathers—of raking talons and pecking beaks that felt like daggers stabbing at his face and shoulders.
Panicked, Dan turned on a heel to run, but the birds clung to him—were already behind him. He was practically buried in them. As a hundred talons bit into his flesh and blood filled his eyes, Dan screamed.