I took a second to confirm that the Stickman was dead, then examined my health. I had only lost eight HP from the creature’s last attack, but my toxicity had gone up to twenty-four. I guess poison stacked? Regardless, my health pool was large enough that eight damage was negligible, and my health regen had plenty of runway before the toxicity build up became a threat. I stood and surveyed the rest of the battle.
Two Stickmen were chasing after Chilla, who landed an arrow in one creature’s arm joint, sending it crashing to the ground. She turned and ran toward a wall, the second Stickman chasing after her. Chilla ran up the wall, then backflipped off of it, the second Stickman crashing into the stone as it tried to lance her. Chilla landed behind the stunned Stickman and sent an arrow through its small skull. As it collapsed, she drew a dagger from her belt, then coup de graced the first Stickman, which was still struggling to get back up.
Overall, it was cool as hell.
Varrin was fending off three Stickmen, weaving blocks, shield bashes, and sword swipes with the power and precision of an industrial machine, three others laying dead at his feet. Two more were in a bloody heap near Sir Sayil, who parried and thrusted his spear at two more. Blood trickled down his legs from beneath his chainmail, but his movements showed no sign of injury. Of course, I didn’t really know shit about fighting so take that with a grain of salt. He wasn’t limping and crying and puking is what I mean.
Another was dead near Xim, who swung her scepter at a second, but the blunt end of the weapon didn’t do much. A third Stickman had crept up behind her and was rearing back for an attack with glowing claws. I rushed at the creature, hitting it dead center in a shoulder tackle, taking it down just as its claws descended. Instead of shredding through Xim’s back, the claws came down on me, with one hitting the back of my right leg and the other piercing my left ass cheek. It stung, but I’d had worse spankings from my fiancée.
I got my hand on the Stickman’s chest and cast Oblivion Orb, the creature shrieking as a significant portion of what I think was its ribcage disappeared. I concentrated on the spell again, driving my palm deeper into the wound until the monster stopped moving. When I stood, I watched as Xim finished her opponent off by knocking it down, stepping on its neck, then bashing its skull against the stone floor with her scepter until it cracked open like a Cadbury creme egg.
Chilla helped Sayil finish off his opponents, cutting one in half from behind with dual daggers. Then they moved to flank the three Varrin was fighting and took them down without much fuss.
After the last Stickman fell, Varrin began walking the battlefield, examining each corpse in turn. He drove his sword through a couple that were still twitching, then looked over our group.
Chilla wiped away a combination of sweat and poison mist from her brow, but otherwise looked unharmed. Xim went to examine Sayil, who was leaning on his spear. Altogether the battle probably lasted no more than a couple minutes, but I was surprised that no one was even breathing heavily. I checked my bars and, by focusing a little, managed to get numbers to show up, overlaid onto each.
Health: 205/221
Stamina: 128/130
Mana: 20/40
Poisoned, Toxicity: 36/hour
My toxicity was starting to get a bit high, but with my health regen of 114 it still wasn’t close to hurting me. Other than my mana, of which I’d blown through half, my numbers looked fine. My stamina would be back to full in about five minutes, and my health would take nine. My mana, however, would take five hours to recover. That was a problem I needed to address if I planned on using magic to fight.
A strange sound started to come from the bodies of the Stickmen, and I instinctively took a defensive posture again. It was a sort of sizzling hiss, and I watched as the bodies of the Stickmen began to shrivel and dissolve. The skin and tissue of each sloughed off onto the ground, then melted into the stone, leaving behind a black stain. After a minute or two all that was left were thin, black bones. As I watched the macabre display I got a new notification.
Your party has slain 15 Stickmen: Demon, Grade Zero. Your party receives the following rewards:
1) 30 Ruby Chips.
Party Leader has set chip and currency allocation to even distribution.
You receive: 6 Ruby Chips.
A series of glowing scarlet coins appeared in the air in front of me, then clattered to the ground. Chilla looked over at me and shook her head. I knelt down and gathered up the six ‘chips’, and looked them over.
They shimmered with an ethereal luster, casting dancing points of light against the palm of my hand. They were flat and circular, about the size of the fifty-cent pieces my grandpa used to give me as a kid. There were two ornate symbols carved into the chip, one on either side, with sharp lines that came together in gently curving points. Overall it looked like an intricate Nordic rune designed by a calligraphy enthusiast.
The chips had a satisfying weight and were warm to the touch, and I slid the small stack around in the palm of my hand as I stood back up. They had good haptics. I noticed Chilla was now standing very close to me and I jumped.
“You can set those to appear in your inventory,” she said, “so they don’t make a shit-ton of noise by falling onto the ground.”
“Oh. Thanks,” I said, hefting the chips, pleased at the bright clinking sound they made, almost like glass. “How do I see my inventory?”
Chilla rolled her eyes.
“Just think about it, dumbass,” she said. Then she turned and sauntered away back toward the others, who were gathered around Sayil. The way she moved was very fluid and I wondered if that was from putting points into Agility. Would my hips also sway in a hypnotic, cat-like manner if I got my Agility higher?
“Also, they aren’t paint chips,” Chilla called back over her shoulder. “Don’t eat them.”
...What? I blinked and turned back to dealing with the strange coins.
At first I didn’t realize she was being literal with the ‘just think about it’ comment, but I realized that Chilla meant for me to focus on the idea of an inventory the same way I focused in order to interact with system screens and spells. I brought up mental images of inventory screens like the ones I’d seen in video games and a window appeared.
Inventory
Current storage: 0/200
I was disappointed that the inventory had some sort of limit, though it was pretty vague about what the limit was. Zero out of two-hundred what? Pounds? Kilograms? Individual items? I looked at the chips in my hand, then held them up to the screen. They zipped off of my palm and into the window, as though they were sucked in, and then appeared on the screen as a small icon.
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I focused on the icon, thought about removing the chips, and they floated back out and into my hand in a neat stack. That was pretty nifty. I put them back away into the inventory, which still showed zero out of two-hundred for current storage, and was able to pull up a list of options which let me set the chips to automatically appear there.
I grabbed the large sack Varrin had given me and started back over to the group. I looked down at the heavy bag and began to wonder why I was carrying it, if everyone else also had access to an inventory as well. Was this some sort of hazing?
“We could use one of my antidotes,” said Chilla, looking over Sayil.
“No,” said Sir Sayil. “The build up isn’t that bad yet. With my current regen the poison nets me seven damage per hour, so I can go a while before I’m in danger. I’d rather save it in case we run into other venomous creatures.”
“With my mana regen,” said Xim, “I can output ten points of healing per hour without dipping into my reserves.”
“Alright,” said Varrin. “Xim, get Sayil back to full health. The antidote might clear the poison he’s built up, but he’d immediately go back to taking twelve damage an hour from this mist. If we run into something else that stacks more poison, which I suspect we will in this place, then we’ll use an antidote only when someone’s poison damage exceeds their regen by more than Xim’s hourly healing output.”
I was impressed with how calm and calculated everyone was with this whole life or death struggle thing we were going through, and I took a look at Sayil as the group discussed our situation. There was blood on the outside of his chainmail pants, mixed in with the dark, gooey stuff that came out of the Stickmen. There was a pair of ragged holes in his armor along the abdomen, and I presumed a Stickman had hit him with one of their glowing-claw attacks. This must have caused him to accrue more Toxicity, like it had with me. But unlike me, his regen wasn’t high enough to counter it.
If Sayil took a hit like the ones I had, it would have ticked his Toxicity up to around twenty-four. If he was netting seven damage an hour, then that would put his total health regen at seventeen-ish, thirteen of which were coming from myself. So, Sayil only had a base regen of around four?
Assuming Sayil had no buffs to his regen, that made his Fortitude either three or four. According to Xim, Sayil had balanced his stats to consider both defense and offense as a melee fighter, so his Fortitude should have been decent. If a four was decent, did that mean that Xim and Chilla had even less health and regen?
I started down a rabbit hole, considering the reasons why the stat value was so low, until I finally settled on what I thought was most likely: carryover stats.
I’d gotten fourteen stat points from my carryovers. If that bonus was unique to me, then I started with fourteen more points than a normal level zero Delver–more than double what I was supposed to have by default. That sounded like an enormous advantage, but I didn’t have enough information to decide how busted the extra points were.
I didn’t want to outright ask the others about their stats until I understood the culture of this society better. Asking such a thing might be incredibly offensive. Then again, it could be a matter of course. Varrin had asked me about my build pretty soon after I met him, but Varrin was an ass. I didn’t think he was a good point of reference.
My thoughts were interrupted when I realized Varrin was talking to me.
“...or Fortitude?”
“Sorry,” I said, “what was that?”
“I asked whether you put most of your points into Luck or into Fortitude.”
“Why do you think I did either?”
He pointed to my midsection, and I looked down to find that my shirt had been completely shredded. At this point it was less of a shirt, and more like a loose collection of cloth scraps. Like the kind you keep around for arts and crafts, or to clean oil and soot off your hands when working on an engine. But, with blood on it.
“Your clothes are torn to pieces,” said Varrin, “but you’re hardly injured.” He leaned in and squinted at the holes in my chest which, by this point, were nearly gone. “People who come out of a fight looking like that are either very lucky, or very tough.”
“I see,” I said, feeling like I’d been called out on my charade, though it wasn’t like I’d lied about anything. I was just being selective with the info I shared. There wasn’t much point in squirming out of this one, so I admitted the truth. “Fortitude.”
“I figured as much,” said Varrin. “Maybe you should be the one carrying the shield.”
I looked down at the steel kite-shield strapped to Varrin’s forearm. It had taken a beating in the fight, with dozens of holes punched into it across the front by the Stickmen’s front legs. At this point it looked like it might do more good as a cheese grater than a shield.
“I’m good,” I said. “Just don’t worry about me if a baddie or two comes my way.”
“Way ahead of you on that one,” said Chilla. “When that Stickman rushed you I figured you were a goner.”
I smiled, ignoring the fact that she had just admitted to leaving me for dead, at least insofar as she believed at the time. Varrin kicked at the body of the Stickman whose head I’d mostly severed with my Oblivion Orb.
“Your fighting skills are poor,” he said, “but at least you put enough into INT and WIS to kill something. I’m wondering why you were going after them like a pugilist at first.”
“You saw that, eh?” I said. “Sorry, I panicked.”
“It happens,” said Xim. “It’s even common on the first Delve. People forget about half of what they can do and start fighting on instinct. I think you did well.”
Varrin shrugged, then went to his pack–not his inventory–and grabbed a cloth, then began to wipe down his goo-covered sword. Xim placed a hand on Sayil’s neck, and a pulse of light went down her arm, similar to what had happened when I cast Oblivion Orb, though her light was golden, rather than white. The light transferred to Sayil, then disappeared under his chainmail.
“Thanks,” said Sayil, putting his pack back on.
“Normally,” said Varrin, “I’d suggest a short rest to recover our resources, but I think we’re in good shape. Let’s go ahead and move on.”
No one objected, and we began making our way deeper into the misty cave. I wanted to try and squeeze more information out of the group about the inventory system, among many, many other things, but we’d gone back to our silent march with Chilla at the lead keeping an eye out for danger.
It wasn’t long before we found ourselves at a small, ancient stone bridge which spanned across a viscous river of dark liquid.
“Underground river,” said Varrin.
“A weird one,” said Sayil, peering into the muck as it flowed by. “Think that bridge is safe to cross?”
The bridge was old and crumbling, with a number of large cracks that spiderwebbed across the masonry. I could see chunks of stone on the shore beside and below the bridge, where significant pieces of it had already broken and fallen off.
“We could ford the river,” Sayil suggested.
“You wanna walk through that?” Chilla said, her nose scrunching up at the thought.
“Chilla’s right,” said Varrin. “We have no clue what that stuff is. It’s obviously not water and, given the state of this place, I’d bet a golden note that it’s poisonous.”
“Only one?” Chilla said. “I’d bet ten.”
“Chilla, you go across first since you’re our scout. After that, we’ll move across from lightest to heaviest. So, Xim is second.” Varrin took a glance at me and Sayil, seeming to weigh us each in his head. Sayil was a little taller than me, with chainmail armor, spear, and pack, but I was a lot broader than the slim-framed beast-man and carried the heavy sack Varrin had given me.
“Sayil, you go third, the esquire’s fourth. I’ll go last.”
The order made sense. I doubted there was much of a difference between Sayil and me, but Varrin was obviously the heaviest, being over a head taller and even broader than myself, while also wearing the heaviest armor of the group. As soon as Varrin was finished deciding the marching order, Chilla crept her way across the bridge without incident.
Xim and Sayil passed over without much fanfare, aside from a few small bits of stone that the bridge shed into the ‘water’ from its underside. I stepped across it gingerly, more than half-expecting it to fall to pieces beneath me, but got across with only a single, large brick dislodging from the side of the walkway and splashing into the muck.
I held my breath as Varrin crossed. This would be the most dramatic, and perhaps most predictable time for the bridge to collapse, with the party leader striding confidently across after the rest of the group had gone over untroubled. A few larger pieces of the bridge dislodged during Varrin’s journey, but he stepped off the other side without any catastrophic architectural incidents occurring. He turned back to give the bridge an appraising look.
I was expecting him to make a mouthy comment along the lines of, “That wasn’t so bad,” or “Looks like the worst is behind us,” but he was smart enough not to taunt fate with such an obvious provocation. It was a real missed opportunity though, because the moment he turned back around, a massive, sludge covered hand reached out from the slimy river and grabbed him by the waist.