The next morning, they gave us a proper meal. Except for Robeep, who got some rudimentary repairs done on him and what looked like an oil refill. The engineer was a bald, shackled, dark red skinned lady. Apparently they kept her somewhat well-fed. She wore patched together remnants of a lab coat mixed with rags. They gave her some kind of strange foldable kit filled with assorted precision tools for the job. I tried to track where they led her but lost track of them in the haze. The attempt prompted another pop up and felt like it made me able to see a little further.
Perception +1
My debuffs disappeared and the guards had clearly been drinking since they were incredibly sluggish and irritable, lashing out at anyone who so much as held their head high. Except Robeep, whom they ignored. This gave me enough time to check out my System progress. All my debuffs were gone, even the encumbrance one.
I had four attributes now. My strength was 10 and my dexterity 2. All the beatings greatly improved my toughness apparently since it had shot up to 14. The new addition, perception, was at 5. I also had four skills. They were athletics, dodge, laboring and martial arts, with respective scores of 11, 1, 17 and 5. A squad screen had also showed up. For now it only displayed Robeep, enslaved just like me. He still couldn’t compute what a status was though.
I had no damage, although he was in a general state of disrepair, with scores in the high eighties. They were a far cry from his universal maximum of 150. His oil was at 91 out of 150. Unlike me, he didn’t seem to regenerate on his own. His attributes and skills weren’t as detailed as mine and made no sense whatsoever considering his mechanical nature, but I wasn’t going to complain. The redaction seemed to be based on my own unlocks however. Everything showed as very low for him.
Our labor day passed the same as it always did, but this time I woke up much earlier from the consequences of my daily beating. There was definitely some weird stuff going on. Everyone healed way too quickly and it was hard to get proper information out of Robeep, until I figured out the secret. He wasn’t a mindless automaton. In fact, Robeep sported some rather lofty goals and playing into them was the key to get him to do whatever I wanted.
“Robeep, I need to test you to make sure you are worthy of conquering the wasteland in a storm of glorious bloodshed.”
“Understood Susawa, I shall pass your grand trials and ensure our war cries are the last things our victims hear before we rip out their spines!”
“Why does everyone heal so quickly?”
“That information is confidential and forbidden knowledge for meatbags like us. But to prove my wisdom, I can tell you it happened after the collapse of the First Empire.”
“When did the First Empire fall?”
“The First Empire fell approximately 84957 years ago. May the cowards of the wastes scream our names in hopes of vain mercy for equally as long.”
The timespan nearly sent me into shock. This place was ancient. “How old are you Robeep?”
“My vitality is fit to spread carnage. I am 2194 years old. ”
Nothing could surprise me anymore at this point. I interrogated him for a good hour before our scheduled duties began. Apparently getting transported here changed my race to something called an Admorak. We were supposed to be a brutish warrior culture and feared in the southern deserts. Or we would have been, if my people hadn’t been consumed by endless internal struggles.
The prospect of working until we died appealed significantly less upon finding out how long my lifespan was, something I had considered impossible. Supposedly all fleshy races shared it, stick people aside. We lived up to somewhere in the early 700’s. The stick folk bred and died relatively rapidly, only living for a century or so. The daily cycle and length of a year were similar to Earth, although no real calendar existed because there was no point in keeping track.
Similarly, hunger and dehydration took decades to end a life, even if the weakness and wasting away happened much sooner. According to Robeep, decaying still-alive husks could be found everywhere beneath the sands, but no one bothered digging them up. Brutal injuries could still kill quickly though. That sounded like the better way to go, compared to suffering a fate worse than death. Various factions ruled the wastes, or their own little pockets of it. It was largely unexplored territory and most people rarely ventured outside their settlements.
It was dangerous as all hell. All kinds of strange creatures and mechanical monstrosities wandered about. Ancient ruins promised death or worse. The insane banded together, unified under the banner of weird and unusual goals. My only information source was starting to get skittish for some reason.
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“Robeep, what major peoples are there?”
“I do not see why it matters how our fellow meatbags organize. We will burn their legacies regardless.”
“We need to know our enemies to destroy them all the better. It’s one of the great wisdoms of war.”
“You have a point, but we are talking too much and maiming too little.”
“Look, Robeep. I promise we will crush them all like the vermin they are, alright?”
“Very well, your resolve is satisfactory.”
The cultures didn’t seem any better. There was of course the squabbling Admorak Republic, which was actually a monarchy in perpetual rebellion. Our current owner was the Sacred Principality of Cor’Athaz. They worshipped the eldritch sun for reasons no one remembered, hated nonhumans with a passion and loved making slaves build giant statues. The ornaments served no purpose. Once complete, they were inspected, declared inadequate, torn down and then the work started all over again. It was ridiculous.
Finally, there was the Union of Empires. It was a mess. The empires were actually two power blocs in a forever-alliance of sorts. Each empire was a republic of cities close to each other, where every king functioned more like a senator from ancient Rome and ruled absolutely over a single city. They had an overarching government, but it never got anything done because the leaders changed their minds faster than communications went back and forth. Most messengers didn’t survive their trips anyway, which further complicated matters. They also liked money, being poor was a crime there.
“Susawa, I admire your persistence and hope it extends in equal measure to ripping the limbs off our foes one by one while our laughter drowns out their excruciating torment. But our fragile wet meatbag brains are incapable of processing so much information. Soon you will begin to lose data fragments necessary for peeling the skin off our captured challengers.”
“Let’s steer into your favorite topic then. What kind of wars and battles can we expect outside?”
“Excellent. The tactical and strategic scenario is well worth evaluating to maximize the efficiency of our extinction delivery services.”
It turned out the only reason the three major factions were common knowledge was because they also warred incessantly against each other. Although, calling it small scale raiding and skirmishing might have been a more appropriate description. Populations were both low and high at the same time. The wastes were full of people and they all hated each other. It didn’t help that most of them were insane too. Any information about the robot folk was confidential. It didn’t matter for now anyway, because I had an idea.
The locks on our shackles and cages were ridiculously simple and prompted me to try something out. Someone had tried to escape last night and to my surprise they didn’t kill the guy. They just beat the shit out of him and locked him up again, even though he resisted.
“Hey Robeep. If we’re going to kill all these idiots anyway, then why should we listen to them?”
“Susawa, you are a genius. From now on, I will only listen to you as we slaughter the innocent with reckless abandon.”
“Great. So I was thinking…” I looked at his mechanical body and all the protruding pieces of metal. “Can you maybe get me a few pieces of metal small enough to try and pick these locks?”
“Of course! We will need freedom to effectively murder every single living creature. Except ourselves of course. Ha. Ha. Ha. We will be the only two meatbags left!”
Without giving it a second thought, he ripped a few needle sized pieces of metal off his own body. I saw his chest durability decrease by a point. He tossed them over to me. Our captors allowed me to keep my pathetic excuse for clothing at least and I was pretty sure they didn’t know about the inside pocket. Robeep kept mostly silent aside from the occasional declaration of eternal unrelenting slaughter, while I tried to pick the locks on my shackles.
The mechanism was glaringly obvious but it wouldn’t work for some reason. It wasn’t until the next sun-worship day that I finally had my suspicions confirmed. Coincidentally, my newly unlocked lockpicking skill had gone all the way up to 7 the very same night. Because the debuffs weren’t lowering my skill, I managed to open both the shackles and the cage. Just to be safe, I tossed the impromptu lockpick to Robeep and told him to hide it from our enemies.
And then I snuck out of the cage, unlocking a stealth skill in the process. Robeep almost ruined it however.
“To battle! Go Susawa! Make a necklace out of their eyes and flaunt it in front of their kin!”
“Shut up Robeep, it’ll be easier to kill them if they don’t know I’m coming.”
He kept his encouragements to a whisper after that. “Your wisdom floods the sands Susawa, much like how the blood of our enemies will turn once barren soil into fertile ground.”
Stealth went up pretty fast after finding and approaching the shitfaced night guard. Even though he was blackout drunk and looking away from me, my approach was still noticed somehow. Fortunately, the bastard reacted too slowly and I bashed him in the face with my shackles. It didn’t bring him down but the fight was on.
He pulled out his metal stick before I could do anything and smacked me in the side out of sheer luck. A rib cracked but my elbow pinned the weapon. In almost the same motion, I landed a right hook on his face and felt the recoil rattle the bones in my hand. Stabs of pain impeded me and he easily ripped the baton out of my clutches but not before I slammed a knee into his belly. The guard answered in kind, kneeing me in the family jewels and doubling me over. An impact slammed against the back of my head, sending me to the ground and making my vision swim. Curling up barely helped as blow after blow rained down on my back. My mind faded, the suffering became distant and I lost consciousness.
I didn’t mind, pain had become a state of being by now. Flashing System notifications during the fight told me my plan was working. I woke up earlier every day and every morning some guard got smacked a couple of times. The balance of power slowly started shifting in my favor. Every iteration made me a little faster, a little stronger, a little tougher. Not having to do slave labor was an added bonus, since my daytime recovery messed with the schedule.
This continued for a while.