[CONGRATULATIONS, PRIME CANDIDATE USER! YOU HAVE REACHED LEVEL 1]
[PLEASE ALLOCATE YOUR REWARDS]
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[CONGRATULATIONS, PRIME CANDIDATE USER! YOU HAVE REACHED LEVEL 1]
[PLEASE ALLOCATE YOUR REWARDS]
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[CON—]
“I hear you, I hear you,” Jacob groaned. He sat up, finding himself on a tabletop in a dark room, and rubbed at his chest. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and there were bandages across his chest, but when he began to peel them off he found that, despite a lot of dried blood, the skin beneath was whole and unmarred. He remembered the axe slicing through his ribs and his lungs, but there was only the faintest line to mark the injury, barely a scar.
He swung his legs over the side of the table and got to his feet. He twisted this way and that, rolled his arms, moved his head from side to side. Everything felt okay. No pain.
Stumbling around in the dark for a bit, he eventually found a light switch and flicked it. He was in some sort of storage room with shelves and a freezebox, boxes stacked in precarious piles and loose bottles squeezed in wherever they fit. A healthy layer of dust coated everything. There was a small mirror hung up on the opposite wall at face height. He went over to it, leaned close to study himself.
He hardly recognized himself. His skin was all gray and wan, eyes foggy and glassed over. White had begun to spring up at the roots of his black hair. Dried alien blood stuck to his chin and neck, flaking when he moved. Clearing his throat, he spat a half-congealed gob of the stuff on the floor. Then he ripped a pink band-aid off his forehead.
I look like a zombie.
He pinched his cheek, rolled the skin between two fingers. Waxy and tough. Holding up one arm, he bit into it until he felt the skin give way. He studied the wound. There was only a small trickle of black blood that quickly ceased.
Very little bleeding.
The bite mark didn’t seem to be mending itself, though. He’d give it more time.
I look dead, but I’m not. Or maybe I’m something in between. Whatever the case, it’s clearly because of the Blessing I was given. Cheat the Hangman. He let that sink in for a moment, and couldn’t help but smile. I finally Snapped. I did it.
A door swung open behind him and slammed against the wall. Jacob spun with his guard raised, expecting trouble, but received a faceful of blonde hair instead as Becca leapt on top of him and wrapped her arms and legs around him, clinging to him like an octopus.
“You’re aliiive!” she squealed, half-sobbing. “I seriously thought you were dead! You were barely breathing, and your heart, it… I couldn’t feel it at all.”
Jacob tried to peel her off. “Jesus, Becca. Take it easy.”
She just squeezed him harder. “No!”
As always, she got her way. Jacob walked her over to the table and sat down so she could hug herself out.
“I’m okay,” he said and patted her head.
“I thought you were dead…”
“I was, I think. But I’m not anymore. I Snapped, Becca. I’m a User now.”
She leaned away just a little to look into his face. Her eyes were red, still wet with tears. “Really?”
“Really.”
“So you have a Blessing? That’s why you look like…” She looked him up and down. “A little dry-aged?”
“Uh, yeah. I think so.”
“What’s it called?” Becca asked with complete seriousness, like it was the most important thing in the world at this moment. “The System is supposed to tell you right away.”
“Cheat the Hangman.”
Her eyes widened. “That’s sooo cool! It sounds super strong.”
Jacob sighed. “Names don’t imply power, you know that.”
“Still, I think it’s a good one. I’ve got a feeling.”
She finally let him pull her off, and he set her down on the floor. “You don’t seem that surprised.”
She slow-blinked at him, not understanding. “Why would I be surprised? You said you were going to be a hero.”
“Yeah, but… Half the kids in the world say that, Becca. Zero point zero zero one percent of them are right.”
“They’re not you, though. You’re special. I always knew that.”
Jacob smiled. His face muscles moved stiffly, not quite doing what he told them to. It probably looked ghoulish. He didn’t care. She was clearly delusional, but it still felt good.
“What type is it?” she asked and made him stand up so she could walk circles around him, closely inspecting his body and poking at seemingly random spots. “And what does it do, exactly? And which class are you going to pick to go with it?”
“I haven’t had time to look into it. You realize I’ve been passed out until five minutes ago.”
“It’s a Symbiosis,” she said, straightening out and clapping her hands together.
“It could be a Hybrid too.”
“Hmm. It could be, I guess, but it’s probably a Symbiosis.”
Jacob didn’t disagree with that. But the theories could wait a bit. Becca was starting to get side-tracked.
“Mr. Beau, how is he?” he asked. “Is he…?”
“Alive, for now.” She glanced into the other room. “I tried to stop the bleeding the best I could, but he needs a proper doctor. There’s not much I can do for him now other than keep him comfortable and feed him some painkillers I found.”
She led him out into the adjoining room, which was Mr. Beau’s cramped office. Becca had cleared his desk and laid him on there, his severed arm covered up bandages and a bundled up t-shirt. It was all soaked through with blood.
The bar owner had looked unhealthy at the best of times, but now his appearance was almost as bad as Jacob’s. Sweat beaded his forehead and his hair lay slicked against his skull, skin pale and greenish. His eyes moved frantically beneath his eyelids, and he jerked periodically in unsettled sleep.
“Right now all we can do is hope he pulls through,” Jacob concluded. “Anyone try to break in after that one ugly bastard?” Clearly no one had, or they would all have been dead, but he still thought it was important to ask.
Becca shook her head. Good. He went out into the taproom to look things over. The dead urgek was still there, being dead, surrounded by a big pool of deep blue.
“Have you heard anything from the authorities?”
“I listened to the radio a bit. I didn’t even know the interface had a radio function, but I guess it does. I think other cities are being attacked, too, across the whole NEHZ.”
“So the Guild has a lot of fires to put out. Meaning they probably aren’t sending anyone here soon.”
“Yeah… They just keep playing the same message telling people to stay indoors.”
He’d need to check outside to make sure, but in their case it seemed like decent advice. Their only other option was hijacking a vehicle and trying to make it out of the city, but that seemed unlikely to work. The bar was out of the way, and underground too, offering them at least a modicum of protection. The place was already tossed over. If he could just hide the dead urgek and haul some human corpses in, it’d look like it had already been cleaned out. Another urgek would take a quick glance in and move on.
Hopefully.
Maybe.
Assuming a drop pod didn’t land right on top of them and crush them instantly.
“Where did you get that pepper spray from, by the way?” Jacob asked over his shoulder as he went to move the urgek. “You didn’t take mine. I still have it in my pocket.”
“I bought a matching one!” She held up a plushie keychain of her own. On closer inspection, this one wasn’t a ladybug kithraxi, but more of a dark purple.
“Uh huh. I guess I can’t complain since it came in handy after all.”
He pulled on the urgek’s limp arm with everything he had, but he wasn’t able to budge the body at all. It was heavy heavy.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he grumbled. “I’m gonna need to allocate my stats if I want to have a chance at this.”
He would have liked more time to think over his options and test the premise of his Blessing to work out compatibilities, but that just wouldn’t be possible. He asked Becca for thirty minutes alone in the storage room so he could perform some tests and at least outline the basics.
He had a few data points to work with already. Cheat the Hangman had brought him back from the dead once. Whether it could do it again was unclear. It seemed to have increased his resistance to damage by a fairly large margin, making his skin and flesh tougher. He didn’t bleed as much, either. Likely because of a slower heartbeat.
Jacob tried to find his pulse to confirm this. It took him a few minutes to detect anything when touching his neck or wrist, but he eventually found a weak pulse. It was so hard to notice because his heart only seemed to beat a few times a minute, between five and ten.
There was some form of rapid regeneration baked into the Blessing, but the bite he had inflicted on himself earlier hadn’t begun to heal, suggesting it wasn’t always active. Maybe it only worked while he was asleep.
His strength had also increased. Based on his feats from the fight against the urgek, he theorized that his grip strength and bite force had increased by the largest margin. He tested this against the concrete walls, managing to dig his fingers clean into the solid material and pull out a whole chunk.
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Interesting. That should have solid combat applications. Focusing on extremely close range with grappling and takedowns might be beneficial. Good thing I already know a bit of that.
[CONGRATULATIONS, PRIME CANDIDATE USER! YOU HAVE REACHED LEVEL 1]
[PLEASE ALLOCATE YOUR REWARDS]
“I get it,” Jacob snarled at the message that popped up in his mind, consisting of what felt like both sound and visuals. “Give me a minute, will you?”
Pain was dulled to the point where he almost didn’t feel it anymore, which was definitely a benefit, but his other senses seemed to have taken a hit, too. His vision was a bit blurry, and while he could still hear the sounds of violent conflict from up above, they were more muffled than before. His fingers felt half-numb, too. A quick test confirmed that his remaining senses were similarly diminished.
In return for his increased strength, it seemed his body responded more slowly to input, and his movements were sluggish. The zombie comparison was feeling more apt by the minute.
Evidently, Cheat the Hangman was a bit of a mixed bag. Symbiosis Blessings were often like that, since it was hard to work around potential drawbacks when they were baked into one’s very physiology. It wasn’t the type he would’ve wished for himself. He’d always seen himself as an Armament User, swinging a magic sword around or some such. It could have been worse, though. It could have been a Familiar Blessing, or something else that didn’t mesh with his personality at all. A person’s Blessing was supposed to reflect them as a person, but it wasn’t always in obvious or agreeable ways.
He figured he’d learned about everything he could about his Blessing in such a short time, but maybe the System knew something else. He wasn’t sure how to direct the advanced interface inside his mind, but he figured a simple verbal command was a good place to start.
He cleared his throat, somewhat awkward. “System, bring up information about my Blessing.”
[CHEAT THE HANGMAN]
Symbiosis Blessing
Base form
Death is not the end, but beware its effects.
Well, that’s vague. And slightly ominous.
He asked the System to elaborate, but just got fed the same line again. He had no idea why the System insisted on being coy about the specifics of Users’ Blessings, but it was a well-known trend. There was some speculation that it was to encourage Users to get to know their abilities more intimately and feel out their strengths and weaknesses for themselves. Jacob wasn’t sure he believed that, but he didn’t exactly have a better explanation either, beyond the System just being an asshole for no reason, which honestly sounded just as likely.
The wording implied that he could come back from multiple deaths, but it wasn’t exactly something he wanted to try out, especially with that warning tacked on the end.
“Okay, I’m ready,” he said. “Show me my Level 1 rewards.”
[PLEASE CHOOSE A CLASS FROM THE FOLLOWING LIST]
Fighter
Guardian
Operative
Sage
Erudite
Icon
A screen appeared with the corresponding text to allow him to make his selection with hand gestures.
Jacob had already done a decent amount of research on the various classes to prepare for this day. Picking a class would give him a certain number of points bound into specific attributes, as well as a number of free points he could allocate however he wished. He would also be allowed to pick a talent at Level 1 based on the class, which could serve as a nice complement to his Blessing if he chose wisely.
He immediately discarded any notion of picking Icon due to its focus on Appeal and enhancing the User’s charisma and social status. It would likely be useful for making money, but the idea of being a sniveling suck-up with less actual ability to go around repulsed him.
Sage and Erudite were well-suited for slower, more considered conduct, designed to boost the User’s mental processes in various ways. He couldn’t see a way that this would mesh with his Blessing, so he counted those out too.
Cheat the Hangman was a fairly basic power-boosting Blessing, so the obvious choice was to pick Fighter or Guardian to compound on that benefit. He could probably make himself fairly tough that way, even at Level 1. But his Blessing had a severe weakness that he wanted to rectify as soon as possible—it made him slow. If he was going to be working at close range, he’d need the speed and agility to close the distance or he’d just get riddled with bullets even from regular fighters. Despite his general resistance to damage and ability to shrug off seemingly mortal wounds, he wasn’t unstoppable. He doubted he could take many urgek slugs before going down, even if he picked a relevant talent and put points in Vigor.
Which led him to a somewhat less likely pick. Operative. The class geared towards evasion and stealth. It only had three bound points in Finesse and five free ones. Slightly fewer than Fighter and Guardian, which both gave ten points in total, but the majority of those were bound points meaning the allocation was much more strict.
He had a specific talent in mind from the Operative pool, too.
Yeah. That’s got to be it.
He selected Operative and locked in his choice when prompted.
[PLEASE ALLOCATE 5 POINTS AMONG ANY OF THE FOLLOWING ATTRIBUTES]
Vigor (0)
Finesse (3)
Senses (0)
Mind (0)
Intuition (0)
Appeal (0)
He’d put at least one more point in Finesse and another few in Vigor. He debated whether to put any into Senses to make up for his diminished sight and hearing especially, but he wasn’t sure if that would also negate some of his newfound pain tolerance. He asked the System, which refused to comment. It felt like a gamble, so he decided to leave it alone.
Instead he considered Intuition. It would help him process information quickly and think on his feet. Likely not the worst thing in the heat of battle.
He went back and forth on how many points to put in each attribute, but punched it in after a few minutes of thinking.
Vigor (3)
Finesse (4)
Senses (0)
Mind (0)
Intuition (1)
Appeal (0)
[ARE YOU SATISFIED WITH YOUR SELECTION?]
[Y/N]
Since the advanced interface was mostly in his head, he figured responding with a mental command should work, too. He tried it, thinking the word ‘Yes’ as strongly as he was able. It worked.
[CHOOSE A TALENT FROM THE FOLLOWING LIST]
A long list of names followed, but Jacob already knew which one he wanted. He scrolled down using his mind until he found one called Dash, and expanded that one.
[DASH]
Operative class talent
Active
Third tier
You are able to release kinetic energy from your body to move a short distance in any direction you desire. Causes moderate physical strain.
Dash would allow him to close distance and dodge attacks more effectively, or even chain into attacks to give them extra punch. It was also supposed to be usable mid-air given enough practice, allowing him a bit of three-dimensional maneuverability. It was a staple for many heroes and could serve as a base for sustained superspeed in certain builds when combined with other talents.
It was a big reason why he’d chosen Operative in the first place. He didn’t hesitate in picking it, and finalized his selection.
[THANK YOU!]
[SELECTION COMPLETE]
[BLESSING]
Cheat the Hangman
[CLASS]
Operative
[ATTRIBUTES]
Vigor (3)
Finesse (4)
Senses (0)
Mind (0)
Intuition (1)
Appeal (0)
[TALENT]
Dash
[ARE YOU SATISFIED WITH YOUR SELECTION?]
[Y/N]
Yes.
At higher levels he would be allowed to take aspects for his Blessing, modifying its effects to further strengthen and specialize it. But that was something to fret over another time.
[INTEGRATING CHANGES WITH PHYSICAL MATRIX]
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Jacob keeled over as a sudden spasm went through him. He tried to catch himself against the table but his grip slipped away and he fell to the floor. A full-body cramp forced his body to curl into the fetal position. Something squirmed inside him. His muscles twitched, expanding and contracting, and his bones creaked as tendons went taut.
He ground his teeth together and pushed out a low growl along with a line of spittle.
He was hot. Extremely hot, as though he had been laid on a bed of coals. It didn’t exactly hurt, but it wasn’t pleasant either. It was certainly the strongest sensation he’d felt since dying.
He became aware of his body straining, expanding, growing. It came in waves, moving outward from his chest and into his limbs. Unraveled on a microscopic scale, then put back together again slightly changed.
Then it abated, and suddenly it was over, leaving him a panting, shivering mess. He lay there for a while, just breathing, trying to collect himself. He found the strength to stand, pulling himself up by using the table. He ended up gripping it too hard and splintering the edge in the process.
“Oops.”
He went over to the mirror to inspect himself, taking it off the wall so he could angle it better. He’d certainly packed on some mass in just a few minutes, with defined musculature around his stomach, chest, and arms. He’d always been the lean type, but now he was leaning more ‘beefy’. Definitely the Vigor at work. It was harder to tell what the Finesse had done for him, but he was sure he’d feel the difference when he put his body to the test.
Still fuck-ugly though. He wasn’t sure ten points in Appeal could fix that face.
Guess I lost my chance to ask Becca out, unless she has a thing for the undead…
He only felt a tad bitter about that.
Hanging the mirror back, Jacob turned to go back into the adjoining room when he saw Becca standing there by the threshold, a hand on the doorknob. She gave him an awkward little wave.
“How long have you been standing there?” he asked.
“Oh, only a little while.”
“Long enough to see me seize out on the floor?”
“Umm… kinda? I thought you might get angry if I tried to help, so I didn’t bother you.”
“I thought I said to give me some privacy.”
“I know! But I got lonely, and, well, maybe a little overexcited. It’s not every day you get to see your best friend Snap and turn superhuman.”
Jacob shook his head with a shallow sigh. He didn’t see the utility in admonishing her any further. He should have known she wouldn’t be able to stay away.
“So…” She took a few steps into the room and closed the door behind her. “Whatcha pick?”
“You mean you didn’t snoop long enough to tell?”
“No…”
“I picked Operative with Dash. Three in Vigor, four in Finesse, one in Intuition.”
She thought about that for a bit. “Hmm. I can see that working out. Starman’s an Operative, you know.”
“I know. You’ve told me a thousand times.”
She came a bit further, clasped her hands behind her back. Gaze downturned, bashful. “So, hey… I wanted to talk to you? It’s about something important. Well, not that important. But pretty important.”
“Go ahead, but make it quick. We need to see to your boss and get this place secured.”
She came all the way over to him and slowly looked up until their gazes met. Her blue eyes always made him feel a sense of belonging.
“You can’t laugh or call me weird,” she said, sounding very insistent.
“Sure.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“Pinky promise.”
They did a pinky promise.
She looked away. It took her another minute to actually get out what she wanted to say. “So, basically… I kind of love you and everything, okay? Not in the regular way, but like, in the special way.” She blushed, glanced up briefly, and looked away again. “I know this is a bad time. Sorry about that. I wanted to tell you sooner, but it was too awkward because of the brother-sister thing.”
Jacob took a few moments to digest that information. “You do?” Then he frowned. “Wait, brother-sister thing? What does that mean?”
“Yeah, like, how you’re kind of like my brother.”
“I’m not your brother though.”
“Kind of like a step-brother.”
“But… I’m not.”
“Yeah, anyway, I didn’t say anything because of the brother-sister thing, but since you almost died, or did die, or whatever, I wanted to make sure I got everything off my chest. So that whatever happens, I won’t regret anything.”
“Stop saying ‘brother-sister thing’, you’re making it weird for no reason.”
She grinned up at him. “Okay, bro. Whatever you say.”
Jacob groaned.
“You don’t have to answer right now,” she continued. “I just wanted to tell you.”
She started to walk away, but Jacob grabbed her by the arm and reeled her back in. She yelped, and he realized he was holding her too hard, softening his grip.
“Wait,” he said. “What about…?” He motioned to his generally ghoulish facial area.
“What about what? Your badass Symbiosis Blessing?”
“I think there are a few other words for it, some less flattering than others.”
She shrugged and gave a little giggle. “I dunno. I think it’s kinda hot.”
Oh, good. I don’t know if it’s a hero fetish or a zombie fetish, but I’m glad I’m pushing her buttons.
She’s a very strange woman…
“In that case…” The vulnerable words stuck on his tongue. He cleared his throat. “In that case… I love you too.”
She fluttered her eyelashes at him. “Not as a sister?”
“Mention that again and I’ll take it back.”
“Nooo, don’t do that! I’ll be good, I’ll be good!”
He leaned down to kiss her. Maybe that would shut her up. She went on her tip-toes to meet him.
As soon as their lips touched she quickly pulled away, a hand over her mouth. “Ooh, you’re so cold!”
“What did you expect?”
I guess the zombie fetish theory is out.