Eventually, the game trail met up with a larger path. This one seemed to get more use and was clearly more worn by larger creatures. I noticed there was a large puddle off of the path a bit, so I walked over to it to see what I looked like. My head was vaguely humanoid. It was covered in the same armor-type material with what looked like a hinged jaw; like a cross between a human skull and a rock. I didn’t seem to have any sort of nose or distinguishing features, or even ears. My eyes looked like black jewels with a bright blue pinprick of light at the center. It wasn’t really what I was expecting, but I didn’t know what to expect in the first place.

My body looked pretty plain, truthfully. No cool armor or fins or anything, though I did have some neat accent lights that made me feel like I was a program in Tron. It seemed like just the barest of basic design to accommodate human-like joints, like an action figure buck that I might have designed in my old life. That would be a starter file with all my engineering in place that I could build on top of later for different figure designs. I noticed that I had toes, four of them. ...and I could move them like my fingers. That felt weird, but I guess it matched with how many fingers I had now. I was going to be AWESOME at climbing trees now. I couldn’t help but think of a certain robot leader from the show Beast Wars now.

I jerked out of my self-study to the sound of a woman screaming. She sounded mad. There was the sound like a crack of thunder and I heard her again cry out in pain. I rushed in the direction of the cries through the brush and trees until I came upon a huge bear with hedgehog-like spines all over it; the creature was the size of an SUV from my old world. Each of the spines was surging with electricity like a Tesla coil. The thing had its back to me and was gearing up to attack a young woman that was stumbling to get back up. She was dressed in what looked like fantasy cosplay and couldn’t be much more than 16 or so. Was she a human? She was slender with dark skin and freckles, short choppy black hair with a red streak, and huge pointed ears... I guess that means “elf”?

I picked up a rock and threw it at the bear. It froze for a second before slowly turning in my direction. The attack clearly did zero damage to it. The girl looked at me, confused, then back at the bear. She muttered something and a stream of water erupted from her sword. I tried calling out to stop her, but I was too late. As soon as the stream made contact with the bear, the electricity build-up followed the water right back to the source and jolted her hard; her whole body went rigid as she was being electrocuted. I raced past the bear and knocked the sword out of her hand. Her body relaxed and she dropped to the ground, unconscious.

The bear roared at me and built up another charge. I set Sparky next to the girl and tried my best to get between her and the bear. The bear tensed and, with a crack of thunder, a bolt of lightning discharged from its back and right into me. Instinctively, I had brought my arms up to shield myself, but as the charge dissipated, I had taken zero damage. Ha! Maxxed out all magic resistance stats! Thanks, Beam! The bear looked confused and frustrated and tried building up another charge.

“Alright. That’s enough of that. [Console].” I found the [BuildCharge()] function running and put a [BreakPoint] in the mana cycle loop to pause it. The Thunder Bear, that’s what it was called, looked surprised and had no idea what was happening to it. I tried to modify the code, but it looked like I couldn’t do that to another creature unless it let me. Which was probably why I had been able to help Sparky, since he had clearly been in trouble. Suddenly, I felt touched that Sparky chose to trust me in that situation. Still, being able to throw a pause on something else’s magic functions was pretty OP.

I was so engrossed in looking through the bear’s [Console] and thinking about its magic, that I completely forgot about the “bear” part. It charged at me and swiped a huge claw that sent me flying. This wasn’t magic that my Max Resistance could protect me from. This was a good, old fashioned, meaty swat, and next thing I knew I was hitting a tree. I hadn’t thought to look at my own [Console] to know what my stats were or how much health I had. That was a mistake, but I wasn’t dead yet, so thumbs up, all four of them. The bear lumbered at me as I ducked behind the tree I’d smashed into. It crashed into the tree and nearly sent it into splinters.

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Quickly, I dismissed the screens for the bear and brought up my own. I was currently at [33/100] health, so taking another one of those swats wouldn’t be a good idea. Scrolling past the stats and into skills, I spotted a race skill called [RockMortar()]. It looked like something offensive, so I activated it while avoiding the thrashing bear. To my surprise and delight, my left hand split apart and my forearm transformed into some sort of cannon. Now we’re talkin’! I rolled out into the view of the bear and took aim and tried to fire. Nothing happened. I glared incredulously at my hand cannon and took off running. The bear was right behind me and faster than I was! I grabbed a branch from a tree as I ran past and sharply changed directions; the bear wasn’t so agile and plowed past me. I scrambled up the tree as best I could with one hand and one useless tube. Those hand feet were coming in handy already! Right below me, the bear had started smashing against the tree trunk to shake me loose.

I had bought a few seconds, so I brought my data screen back up and took another look at the skill as well as the [Console]logs. It appeared that I was trying to fire an empty gun. Oh duh, “mortar.” So it looked like I needed to load it with something in order to shoot something. I supposed rocks, based on the skill title. Obviously, there were no rocks in the tree. I took a look at the [Source] for [RockMortar()] and found that the ammo type was hardcoded as “rock.” Well, that was easy enough to fix. I added an [ammoType] parameter with a default of rock to the function, so now it’d shoot anything that went in. When I committed the changes, the entry in the skill list renamed itself [RockMortar(ammoType)]. I’d probably have to rename that at some point.

I grabbed a pinecone from a nearby branch and stuffed it into the barrel of my mortar and felt something click and grab the pinecone inside my arm. Trying to load it, I nearly fell out of the tree when the bear knocked into it again. This time I aimed down at the bear and thought about firing the cannon, and the pinecone shot out with a considerable amount of velocity. Pinecones aren’t really known for their durability, so the thing shattered on the bear, but it still looked like it hurt it. I grabbed a couple more and kept firing them off at the bear. The bear was actually looking annoyed. Then it pulled back and moved away from the tree. I tried to see where it was headed, and it looked like the girl was back up.

I jumped down from the tree and yelled at the bear, but it was ignoring me now. The girl looked shaky, but she was going to try again with her water magic. Maybe that was the only magic she had? Either way, it wasn’t a bright idea. Now that I was back on the ground, I scooped up some rocks that looked like they’d fit into my arm and loaded them up. I’d put two of them in at once, thinking I might get a shotgun effect, and fired at the bear. This time a single rock shot into the bear like a bullet, and it roared in pain. I could sense that I still had the other rock still inside my arm; this was great! It meant that I could load up on ammo rather than having to load per shot. I kept running around to stay behind the bear, scooping up more rocks as I went and shoving them into my arm.

I kept firing off the rock bullets, hitting the bear. It was noticeably getting weaker now and bleeding pretty badly, but I couldn’t seem to get a kill-shot in. Like some sort of anime hero, the girl launched herself over the bear, coming down in a downward strike with her sword. The attack took the bear’s head off, and she landed, huffing and breathing heavily. She then got up and flicked the blood off her sword before putting it away, looking very smug and proud of herself.

“Where’s your master?” she asked me, her expression turning cold.

“My what now?” I asked, stiffening a bit.

“Your master. Where’s your master, are they nearby? I must thank them for their assistance.”

“You should thank me. I’m the one that assisted you,” I said indignantly.

“No one thanks the sword of the person that wields it,” she scoffed.

“Okay, crazy lady," I said, shaking my head, "It’s been fun. Come on, Sparky!” Sparky dashed out from his hiding spot and climbed up to my shoulder. I gave her a little salute and turned to walk off.

“Wait! Are you Unclaimed Property?” she asked, excitedly. She had a giddy expression on her face, like she’d just found the crown jewels lying in her backyard.

I froze in my tracks and turned to look at her. “What did you call me?” I snarled.