Chapter 5:

When Ben woke up the next day, it was a bit different than the day before. He felt just a bit calmer than he had yesterday, and while he did still wake up at 6 am, he didn’t resent it as much. Instead, as the grogginess of sleep left him and he sat up in bed, he couldn’t help but feel anticipation.

Since he’d spent most of his day yesterday with his Aunt watching movies and eating junk food, he hadn’t had the time to start the System’s Basic Tutorial. Not that he’d been all that eager to start it up anyway. He’d wanted to avoid any reminders of the things he still needed to do yesterday.

But the day of rest was over now and it was time to get started.

So instead of doing anything else that morning, Ben just threw his legs over the side of his bed, sat up straight, took a deep breath, and said, “System: Tutorial Start.”

For the next fifteen minutes or so, Ben was walked through all the basic features of the System’s Interface for System Users. He learned the basics of calling up different screens with either a verbal command, a mental one, or physically interacting on the GUI. Mental commands were as tough as people online made it sound, and he made a note to practice them more in the future. For the moment, he would use gestures and buttons to make things easier on himself.

Next, he learned to activate and customize the HUD interface, which could display anything from a compass, to the display names of other System Users—or Supers as most people called them—when they were broadcasting, and a whole assortment of other things as well. He played around with this for a long while, only to remove most features except a notification bar, an estimate of his Power Energy Pool, and a compass that he still wasn’t sure if he needed.

After that, he learned how to actively broadcast his display name and rank to other Supers if he chose to, as well as the other ways for Supers to communicate and coordinate with each other. He left the option to display his chosen name and his rank off for the moment and didn’t try turning it on. They’d only really be displayed if another Super actually saw him, but he saw no need to take the chance.

Outside of Haven Island, being an unmasked broadcasting Super would be rather odd and eye-catching. If a Hero saw him they might try and help him get registered, which he wanted to avoid until he had a chance to try and get the cube first. Ben doubted it would be a simple matter and would take up his time. If a Villian saw him… It could be harmless or potentially dangerous. Not something he wanted to gamble on.

He also registered two Chat IDs as he was going through the communication section of the tutorial. One would be linked to his civilian identity as a Super eventually. The other would be for his Heroic identity. He didn’t have anyone he could chat with at the moment and didn’t have any System credits so he couldn’t chat much anyway. But it was better to have it all set up now in case he needed it in a hurry later.

Once Ben finished with the communication section, which he barely needed the tutorial for and already knew what to do from his research, he reached the most interesting part of the tutorial. It was time to look at his Attribute Screen and everything else associated with his Class.

“Attribute Screen, Display,” Ben finally said, and his attribute screen finally appeared before him in a panel of glowing light blue.

Attribute Screen

Name: Ben Long

Class: Storage Gem Adept (Inherited)

Level: 1 Rank: E (Notice: Inheritance will accelerate Leveling Until SS Rank)

Stats:

Strength: 14

Dexterity: 12

Intelligence: 12 (Cap at 20)

Vitality/Endurance: 13

Power Strength: 10

Power Energy: 10

Power Resistance: 10

Free Stat Points: 0

Skills (1/4)

Ben started carefully reading through his attribute screen. When he reached his Rank, though, and the notice next to it, his eyes widened. For the next several minutes after that, he just stared at the words.

Finally, he broke out of his stupor and rubbed his eyes. But nothing had changed. The words were still the same. He tried squinting to see if he was seeing double. But again, nothing changed.

It was still the same words. And those two letters were still the same.

Accelerated Leveling. Until SS-Rank. SS-Rank!

Holy shit!

Ben clamped one hand over his mouth to keep himself from shouting out loud. Internally he was screaming. SS-Rank! That was absolutely insane. That was stronger than every Hero or Villain on Earth. That was insane levels of power! How was that possible…

Ben shook his head and took a deep breath. After a moment, he was calmer and he realized how silly he was being.

The Accelerated Leveling made sense. From what Zelter had said, and what the system had warned, it should have been obvious that something like this would happen. As for the SS-Rank… Well, it explained how Zelter was able to destroy an S-Rank monster with barely any effort at all despite being at the edge of death.

They’d been stronger than every other Super on the planet. And now… Ben would be too one day…

Ben closed his eyes and took another deep breath to calm himself. No. He wouldn’t let this get to him. Since it wasn’t like there was anything he could do to change this. Also, what exactly did accelerated leveling even mean? How fast exactly was it compared to other people’s progression?

Sure SS-Rank was an insane amount of power. But no one on Earth had gotten to that point unless they’d hidden it. Some people assumed it was impossible considering even S-Ranks who’ve gone off-world to fight S-Rank Monsters haven’t reached that level in all this time.

All he knew at the moment, thanks to the notice, was that SS-Rank was possible and he had the chance of reaching it one day. At the very least, Ben doubted it would happen anytime in the next few years or so. So there was no need to think about it for now. At least, not until he had a stronger grasp of just how fast he’d level compared to normal.

Still… as the panic went away, a small part of him couldn’t help but be happy. Even if it wasn’t by an incredible amount, accelerated leveling would mean he could get to B-Rank faster. And if he could do that, then that meant he could become a true Hero faster as well.

Ben shook his head and pushed away the distracting thoughts out of his mind for the moment. Instead, he turned his attention back to the attribute screen. Thankfully, there were no more crazy surprises there and everything was as he’d expected.

His stats matched what he’d expected, being a bit above the baseline tens for the things he’d been training on and just tens for the rest which were things he couldn’t have affected until now. The lack of free stat points was also expected as he was starting at E-Rank. Some people might have been disappointed at that, probably those who were actually chosen by the System.

But for him, who’d been expecting to have to earn access, he was happy just to have the chance to start. And of course, he now had an advantage that no one else at E-Rank would normally have.

Deciding not to dwell on that, Ben went through each of the stats, clicking on them and getting a full description of what they did. He’d already seen these online, but he just wanted to double-check in case he’d been misinformed about anything.

When that was done, he finally decided to take the plunge and see just what kind of power he had. His Class was called Storage Gem Adept. It wasn’t the most impressive sounding Class. But after having seen Zelter in action, he was obviously not going to underestimate it. In fact, his expectations were rather high as he clicked on his Class name.

Class Description

Name: Storage Gem Adept

Description: Storage Gem Adepts can store a variety of energies, things, or concepts into compatible gems. They are then able to either release or apply what is stored. Storage Gem Adepts also have minor mastery over gems themselves.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Ben took in the description and nodded. It was a bit of a short description but it was to be expected. With a Class as versatile as this, there wasn’t much more you could say about it without needing to know what the Skill choices were. If he had to guess, he’d assume that his Skill choice would affect just what he’d be able to store in gems.

Which meant, if he wanted to know more about the Class, he’d need to look at his Skills. So he dismissed the Class description and clicked on Skills.

Skill Page:

Skill slots (1/4)

Gem Inventory (Inherited)

Skill Rank: E (Note: This is an inherited skill. Increase in development speed)

Description: Allows access to specially attuned subspace pocket for storage of gems. Due to the specially attuned nature of the pocket, any material that does not fall under the conceptual category of gems cannot be stored inside.

Size: 0.5 meters cubed

3 Skill slots available: Click here for a list of available skills.

Ben's eyebrow rose at the single skill that was already selected for him. It certainly sounded very useful for his class, and he probably would have gotten it anyway, but he would have liked the option to choose. But perhaps there was a good reason for it. And that special notice would probably explain it. He clicked on it.

Special notice: Warning. Inherited Inventory Skill cannot contain all inherited stored items. Inventory Skill will be filled randomly to 75% capacity and the remaining inherited items will be stored in the Earth System Storage. Please note: Earth System Storage is only accessible on Earth. Once an Item has been removed from Earth System Storage it may not be placed back in without paying fees.

“Oh, wow,” Ben said after he finished reading the notice. He hadn’t been expecting something like that. But it did make sense. Hopefully, this would help with the problem that had been forming in the back of his mind after he’d read his class description. That being what exactly counted as a gem and how much would it cost him to get enough for his power?

Looking into the inventory would help him with answering the first, and hopefully, it would also make it so that the answer to the second part was not too high. Ben had spent all of his saved-up allowance on that battle axe and didn’t want to ask his aunt for…

Ben’s thoughts trailed off for a moment. Then he facepalmed, hard. The battle axe!

After everything that had happened, he’d completely forgotten about the weapon. Did he just leave it in the street where Zelter had died? Wait, no… He dropped it when he tripped, and they must have left it behind. So it was back where he dropped it.

Damn it…

That was a lot of money down the toilet. He probably could have resold it for half the price at least and bought who knows how many gems. Then again… He hadn’t really been paying too much attention to the condition of it during the fight. Maybe he couldn’t have gotten much for it…

Ben facepalmed again and sat in silence for a long moment.

Then he took a deep breath in and let it out.

There was no point crying over spilled milk. And while he did lose his axe, he got amazing superpowers instead. A fair trade… Ugh.

Shaking his head, Ben decided to think about that later. Instead, to take his mind off the loss he opened up the list of available Skills. Maybe seeing what kind of superpowers he now had access to would make the loss sting less.

After he clicked the text, another blue panel popped into his view and began to populate with Skills. As the scroll bar on the side of the panel continued to shrink and more and more Skills loaded in, Ben’s eyes started to grow wider and wider. Eventually, it seemed like all the Skills had loaded, he started to scroll through the list quickly and was shocked.

There were an absurd number of Skills. Like completely absurd. There had to have been more than 100 of them. Probably more. These couldn’t possibly be all the skills he could unlock at E-rank could they? Sure, not everyone got the same amount of Skills as others, even when they shared the same Class. But this was way outside the norm.

Ben started to go through the list, scanning through it quickly to figure out what was going on. After going through about fifteen of them, he started to understand why there seemed to be so many more Skills than he’d expected. A closer look at some of the skills also explained the other reason why.

The first reason was that a large majority of the Skills were tied together. Those Skills allowed either the storage of something, the application of something, or the transfer and release of something. So each of the things he could store in gems had three Skills associated with them. That meant that in reality, there was only really a third of the Skills available to him since taking a single one of the skills would probably be worthless.

Well, perhaps not worthless but limiting.

The other reason Ben figured out after noting a repeated note next to several of the skills he looked at.

Note: This is an inherited skill and the Rank requirement is void

A quick scan through the whole list showed that at least half of the skills on the list had this, perhaps even more. So that was the biggest reason why there was such a discrepancy when it came to skills. Though some of the Skills with this note had only an E-Rank requirement originally.

Regardless, knowing the reason why he had so many skills didn’t make the task of choosing just three of them any less daunting. Just how was he going to choose from all these? As Ben contemplated this, he continued to scroll, before stopping on a particularly eye-catching Skill.

Gem Concept Storage Death (Black Diamond)

Rank Requirement: S (note: This is an inherited skill and the Rank requirement is void)

Description: Store the concept of death inside a black diamond. Storage rate and range determined by Power stat.

Was that what Zelter had used to just wipe out the S-Rank monster? The energies he’d seen were black. But shouldn’t a death concept just make something die? Instead of disappearing as if it never existed…

Ben shook his head. There was no point in him speculating so much now when he barely understood his power. After all, what did it actually mean to store a concept? A concept was something abstract, wasn’t it?

Frowning, Ben hopped off his bed and went to his computer. A quick search online showed that his definition was correct. A concept was an abstract idea. So perhaps the concept of death could just make something disappear because of… conceptual reasons?

Then again the System was created by aliens. And while the translation system it had was really good, perhaps the concept was the only word that fit but wasn’t quite right.

Ben shook his head. He’d need to wrap his head around things like this in the future no doubt, but for the moment he’d leave it for later. After all, he was hardly going to go with Death as the first thing he’d choose. While it was probably very strong and great for killing monsters, it didn’t seem all that versatile. And he also had no idea how he could even fill a gem up with Death. Could he just get it from dead monsters or something?

Ideally, that would be the case but something made him think that an S-Rank skill like that wouldn’t be so easy to use.

So putting that aside for the moment, Ben went back to going through the list and trying to pick something that would be good for his first gem. Something that would hopefully be strong and also have a lot of versatility.

After a very thorough reading of all the options available to him, as well as a quick trip to the bathroom and grabbing a bite to eat, Ben came down with a short list of options he was strongly considering.

Short Skill List:

Gem control

Rank Requirement: E (Note: This is an inherited skill. Increase in development speed)

Description: Allow the movement and control of gems from a distance. Range and speed of moment determined by power stat.

Gem Energy Storage Kinetic (Clear Quartz)

Rank Requirement: E (Note: This is an inherited skill. Increase in development speed)

Description: Stores Kinetic Energy into a clear quartz gem. Storage rate and range determined by Power stat.

Associated skills: Gem Energy Application Kinetic, Gem Energy Release and Transfer Kinetic

Gem Energy Storage Thermal (Garnet)

Rank Requirement: E

Description: Stores Thermal Energy into a Garnet gem. Storage rate and range determined by Power stat.

Associated skills: Gem Energy Application Thermal, Gem Energy Release and Transfer Thermal

Gem Stat Storage Strength (Black Onyx)

Rank Requirement: E (Note: This is an inherited skill. Increase in development speed)

Description: Stores Points of the Strength stat into a black onyx gem. Storage rate and range determined by Power stat.

Associated skills: Gem Stat Application Strength, Gem Stat Release and Transfer Strength

Gem Stat Storage Vitality (Garnet)

Rank Requirement: E (Note: This is an inherited skill. Increase in development speed)

Description: Stores Points of the Vitality stat into a Garnet gem. Storage rate and range determined by Power stat.

Associated skills: Gem Stat Application Vitality, Gem Stat Release and Transfer Vitality

Gem Physical Concept Storage Hardness (Topaz)

Rank Requirement: C (Note: This is an inherited skill. Increase in development speed)

Description: Stores the Physical Concept of hardness into a Topaz gem. Storage rate and range determined by Power stat.

Associated skills: Gem Physical Concept Application Hardness, Gem Physical Concept Release and Transfer Hardness

Gem Elemental Storage Wind (Amethyst)

Rank Requirement: D (Note: This is an inherited skill. Increase in development speed)

Description: Stores Elemental Wind into an Amethyst gem. Storage rate and range determined by Power stat.

Associated skills: Gem Elemental Application Wind Gem Elemental Release and Transfer Wind

Gem Elemental Storage Fire (Ruby)

Rank Requirement: D (Note: This is an inherited skill. Increase in development speed)

Description: Stores Elemental Fire into a Ruby gem. Storage rate and range determined by Power stat.

Associated skills: Gem Elemental Application Fire, Gem Elemental Release and Transfer Fire

Now all that was left was to choose.

Ben took in the list for a long moment. Then he nodded. And kept on looking at it. Finally, he sighed.

This was gonna take a lot of time to think about.