---Richard---
Richard lay on his back on the roof of an intercity transport trailer. The vehicle bumped along while Richard ignored the minor way it bludgeoned his head onto sharp metal with every uneven stretch of ground – which was all the ground between cities. It’s not like the cranium massage hurt with his stats and skills.
In one hand he held a laser-focused explosive repeater, in the other a half eaten sandwich.
“Day-MAn; dun de dun de dun dun – Fighter of the Night-MAn; dun de dun de dun dun – Champion of the Sun~” he sung taking aim at a passing deerclops and squeezing out a pot shot as they bounced past.
With a roar the creature was blown back and then began to charge. It tanked all nine of Richard’s stone shots and continued to give chase like something out of a child's nightmare. Each step released a reverberating thud as it hit – the footsteps far louder than something only a half dozen meters tall should have been able to release.
Richard shoved his sandwich in his mouth and took a massive bite – cursing as they hit an unlucky bump and he dropped a chunk of bread. His stone hands began reloading the gun while his free hand idlily brushed a blue strip and began fast charging up the aether capacitors once again.
Removing his hand from the charging strip for a moment, Richard manipulated a several molecule thick scalpel into scraping out a chunk of his finger. He then doped the batch of stone bullets with his thick blood and began aiming lazily for the monster once again.
“Commit un-alive mii-amigo,” Richard saluted while firing the next batch of bullets – aiming at center mass, bit eye hadn’t seemed to do much other than enrage the fucking thing. Once again the deerclops tanked them but Richard had expected that. An application of a strip and pouring of a liquid caused Richard's chest to smoke and the monster to flail. A final roar rang out followed by a final thunderous slam as the monster fell.
🎯 Achievement get: Mobile marksman. (common)
Description: Kill an in-tier monster, using ranged weaponry, from on top of a moving vehicle.
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Stat: +1 body power.
Stat: +2 mental speed (aiming focused).
Richard was technically not allowed to be up here. It was a good thing the driver was such a chill guy – man looked stoned out of his mind which might have had an influence on the decision not that Richard was complaining. Considering he was letting Richard do whatever he wanted so long as the bus wasn’t damaged…well that made him cool in Richard's books.
On paper – or more accurately by AI verification – Richard was acting as a defensive volunteer for this trip. He was only supposed to take shots at already aggro’ed fauna – or step in on anything the short ranged turrets missed.
But again the trucker was a chill guy. The two other passengers were knocked out hard and this was mostly a supply run so…potshots for everyone!
Richard stared about looking for something else to shoot – in hopes it would continue doing such a good job of keeping his mind off things.
Things…Ah I ruined it.
After Richard had infiltrated the guild he’d been pissed off and restless. His self claimed philosophy had come up against the real world and been smashed in by the weight of logic.
Logic hurt. Fuck that guy.
If Richard was angry at what the bastards had done he ‘needed’ to save the girls. If he didn’t care about the girls and didn’t care about saving them…well then he couldn’t be angry at what had happened to them.
Simple as that.
Richard had really really really wanted to just go on a rampage…and yeah he really really wanted to pretend he was just using the horror as an excuse to run wild while not caring about the horror itself... But then, as satisfying as bombing the shit out of the place would have been, it would have invalidated the entire reason for his anger. For some stupid reason it was hard to trick himself into ignoring that. He’d accepted the world was real. He’d accepted the world was fake. He’d stopped caring about propriety. He'd lived in the world and relaxed.
And yet he still couldn’t trick himself into just looking past that unpleasant shit.
Fuck. Just remembering it pissed him off.
His whole goal – Richards only goal – was to have fun and the guild had fucking ruined that.
Richard nearly threw his gun over the side at the memory.
Some people were just out here to ruin things for everyone.
Richard squinted and pointed his space gun at a very suspicious tree. Waiting for a moment of stability between bumps, he took a shot – loosing interest when the tree didn’t start moving randomly or bursting into tentacles like a mimic.
I don’t trust that tree…I think it's following me.
Richard stared until it disappeared behind a hill and sighed.
Well, he’d been pissed at being manipulated into doing the boring helpful thing and now he wanted to leave that city and pretend it never existed.
The capital should be fun to explore?
At least from what he’d heard and read. Richard was excited especially as he had a solid goal.
“Guess I’m done with this. Fun while it lasted – I wonder if James is in range?” Sending a message off with a thought, Richard sat in silence for a moment and then slumped to the side half falling off the roof once again. “Why the fuck am I pining. Am I really that pathetic? Fuck that. You didn’t see anything peeping blue. What was that? I don’t speak pervert sorry. Now! How can I go about fixing up these bullets?”
Richard dragged his half melted chunk of stone over to the middle of the trailer and moulded it into a giant bowl. Tossing some bolts into the center he stirred them and chanted a quick joke “Bubble and bolt-il. Oil and trouble…that was fucking awful why didn’t you stop me Mr system?” Staring up at the sky with a hurt expression Richard sighed and stored down at his bowl once more. A quick almost subconscious wave of his hands had the cylinder melted the bolt completely surrounded.
Squeezing and stretching the ball of stone like he was kneeding bread Richard blindly grabbed around trying to reach his box.
His box. His good box. He’d bought a chair priced at the level of sports cars and only just recently found it could fold up into a compact box that held all his tools.
Fuck Richard loved this chair. If anyone messed with the chair they’d have a very threatening recorded message and a bomb to contend to.
Pulling out a pair of goofy looking glasses Richard shoved them on his head switching his free slot from gun duty to x-ray glasses duty.
He bypassed a password lock and hooked the feed into his AI enhancing the results that scrolled down his glasses.
This was definitely doing something – and now was as good a time as any to finally figure out this mystery.
Really, this world seemed to be allergic to kinetic based projectile weapons and Richard…well he understood. He had looked into it and had a whole list of facts for why energy based options were preferred.
When you wanted to shoot hords of creatures…well using a finite supply of physical bullets was expensive and a logistics nightmare at best and outright dangerous at worse. There was a very very good reason why the cities were using laser and plasma based turrets.
When you had cheap – practically endless energy from a gravity well – then those were some of the most robust and foolproof options for defense. Creating matter from scratch was incredibly expensive energy wise – E=MC2 really hated pure matter creation. There was obviously fake matter – that unstable and short lived stuff that some skills or certain replicant items could make…
But those were still more expensive energy-wise than the ‘meta’ for energy weapons.
Fake matter was – from what Richard could tell – something like reinforced aerogel. If you filled an area with 0.001% or less of a solid and then boosted its durability with aether you could make something that looked a bit like real matter. Alternatively, if you made an illusion of a brick, kinetically manipulated your hand away from the illusion, gave it some energy dampening so it blocked heat and cast a shadow and every other way you might easily check if it was real…well then even if the brick didn’t actually exist it certainly acted like it did.
If it looked like a brick, felt like a brick, tasted like a brick…well then it might as fuck be a brick.
Anyways, energy-based weaponry.
Technically energy wise the cost to process a bullet and then propel it further was a small bit cheaper than throwing plasma…but good materials weren’t endless and energy was. Add in less logistic steps and the whole system was more robust.
In a similar vein there was a practical reason to toss ranged superiority and use a lightsaber or other enhanced short ranged weapon. A gun gathered energy into shots and ‘threw it away’ while a lightsaber kept all that energy close and potent. Each aether based charge shot that was sent away was ‘wasted’ when you thought about it. A device that kept energy close by could do so indefinitely – especially as aether stayed together better the closer it was to a living creature and its source.
A rod that superheated the air into a plasma cutter then manipulated that plasma into a certain area? A whip of electrons a haze of billowing death? All complicated to make but incredibly efficient power-wise for those who could afford it.
There were more scaling issues with guns trying to tempt Richard away from them – kinetic defensive stats were more efficient and more common than esoteric types of damage. Plenty of boss level monsters wouldn’t even feel a small gun and scaling the payload up had a different sort of problem unique to kinetic weapons.
It wasn’t just boss monsters – considering the number of stronger monsters in general seemed to think the square cube suggestion didn’t apply to them….well to damage them you’d have to hit them with the equivalent of a cannonball or add in something extra to each tank piercing round.
If – as common sense dictated – you had a large gun, its ‘kick’ would be a lot higher than a small one. If you tried to remove the kick using aether based kinetic dampening…well chances are you’d reduce the speed a shot could take. It was theoretically possible to get around but not cheaply and in all simple cases you’d lower the speed and damage of the weapon to be able to hold it. If the gun was braced against the ground using a tripod or similar your options for support were better…but those options tended to be harder to move about with even with fast deploying options and weren’t popular in dungeons.
So that was the problem Richard was facing.
Unlike the shitty business with the guild this was a fun set of logic to break.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
The difference between Richard and the average efficiency based weaponsmith was twofold. For one he could shape stone – and while it wasn’t nearly as good of a bullet material as metal it was certainly more plentiful.
As simple as that sounded it was actually game changing. His skill – despite forming from an experimental item he’d gained in the last area – was completely unique in this zone. Sure some stuff came close – the capture tools he’d witnessed that liquified the ground for example sounded the same…those did not allow shaping and solidifying however.
in fact the more stats he gained, the more he used his hands to make bullets, the more skills he wasted by shoving into his body instead of skill slots…well his stone manipulation was actually relatively unique.
There were tools that could damage or alter physical matter – the capture tools he saw that liquified the ground were an example of that. Those tools were not able to re-solidify materials to the degree that Richard could. There was also specially designed materials that could liquify and resolidify on certain triggers – apparently the moving sidewalks worked on a principle like that to turn them rubbery at each bend and stiff during the rest of the time.
What Richard had was a way to manipulate something common. The ability to shape a resource that was everywhere – something in the realm of unique super powers...at least in this zone. Fuck if he’d known how rare it was he’d have tracked down the geinus who made it and get them to write their priceless research down!
Anyways, production was half solved – and nearly fully solved if he was willing to buy stuff. Stone bullets were so so but if he could deliver explosive or chemical payloads then they were pretty good ammo all things considered. Really filling them with toxic shit worked great for single targets – it wasn’t endless however even using the cheapest weight to effect materials he could.
…
Richard spent a good part of the trip imagining ways to optimize the cost/time/quality triangle of his ammo. He continued to mould the stone, slowly proving a guess wrong and narrowing down how his skill worked.
One of his guesses for stone manipulation had been simple. All non metallic and hardened mineral matter was made weaker. At some point he’d suspected it had actually been something to do with homogenous crystalline structures…but then he’d manipulated cement. Even if cement was slower and harder…well it was a mixture. A mixture of sand and stone and all sorts of shit all together. Lime and clay and a dozen other things all thrown into a pot? It shouldn’t have worked if ‘stone’ was what he could manipulate. He’d thought non metallic because that made sense. Metal wasn’t stone – and the rebar in the cement hadn’t been affected.
BUT! Then Richard remembered stone actually had metals in it even if they were bound in compounds and his current tests showed he could slowly melt iron into the stone even if it took hours.
Honestly just guessing and trying different hypotheses, Richard couldn’t prove anything about what was happening. All he was relatively positive was it wasn’t something specific in the stone. I just couldn’t be a single element when there was so much variation.
…
The other problem with his weapon of choice had a solution in an unlikely place and one he was heading to now. Richard’s ‘toss everything into defense and forget about it’ strategy to stat allocation had a potential side effect. One that would play nicely if he could play into it.
The thing was…stats were weaker than they could be. All stats were weaker – and honestly if Richard had more control over his rewards, he was positive he could do better.
Richard hadn’t figured out exactly ‘what’ a stat was yet – but how they worked and what you could do with them was slowly becoming something he could confidently describe.
To start, each and every stat was almost like an incredibly weak aether slot continuously pumping its juicy stat juices into his body. Those stat juices were doing quite a bit more than simply their job however – they were unoptimized in terms of effectiveness.
Defense stats for example…well besides the obvious inefficiency of specialized defenses being useless against damage they aren’t blocking and generalized being useless for trying to block things that weren’t happening. His adaptive body helped remove that weakness on a ramping up time…but that lead in was still a danger and it took a while for the skill to start pulling its weight.
All that was hide one fundamental problem he’d only learned recently.
Richard's defensive stats were specifically weakening themselves to reduce negative side effects. Kinetic defense for example increased his inertia…if the full weight of Richard's status was held against him he wouldn’t even be able to move – his body ‘defending’ against him taking a step forward. At least half of the stat juice went into removing that negative side effect. His defensive stats were also making him heavier…but a portion of their ‘energy’ was diverted into weakening his weight so the extra weight wasn’t painful or inconvenient.
All stats had this self-correcting energy allocation – otherwise speed and power stats would let someone rip themselves apart if they pushed themselves.
The dumb answer to this ‘problem’ was to balance his stats more. With power and speed it certainly sounded like one could all offset the weaknesses from defense. Just free up the energy to defend better. Makes sense. Too bad it was wrong – man Richard had felt dumb reading up on that.
The three different ‘types’ of stats did not play nice with each other. Most pure forms of aether didn’t like overlapping when you got into the nitty gritty – and while there was no proof stats were the same as aether they did have some similarities.
There was a reason the specialized body forced each part of the body to have only a single stat type in it for optimization – all three of the pure stats fight each other and reduce efficiency where they overlap.
Defensive stat juice was actually better at reducing the side effects of defensive stats than power or speed. Just one of those things – proof of this law was seen in some capacity with slimes. By reaching some perfect degree of defense they were forced to a single fracture point.
So…what did that mean?
If Richard somehow modified his defensive stats to be less helpful and more efficient…a side effect would appear. The buffer that prevented him from moving would negate the problem of recoil. Even if Richard walked around with an anti tank gun on one shoulder he wouldn’t be knocked backwards.
Didn’t that sound cool? Fuck, Richard really wanted a big ass cannon fed by stone cylinders the size of his arm.
You had to be honest with yourself – all this studying and problem solving were really second to the most important point.
BFC’s are fun. Explosions are fun. Richard wanted a cannon to make his current repeater look like a water pistol.
To make a gun as fun to fire as he was imagining, he first had to figure out how to modify stats.
Richard wasn’t starting from scratch with this problem – he didn’t have to figure everything out from nothing. There was enough information on natural skills that did something like what he wanted. There was already some examples of technology that did similar things – the closest were pills that super charged power stats with several nasty side effects.
There was also information on how to reflect stats onto items. That was an entirely different beast altogether – scientists had figured out how to direct the stat juices into armour in exosuits or prosthetics on the low end, or mechs on the high end. Defensive stats fortifying a squishy body had nothing on strips of metal and rubber fortified by defense.
But what Richard wanted wasn’t a simple google away either. It wasn’t a solved problem – it was just a personal goal. One that would mean something once he completed it. Proof he was good at this shit.
Richard's current three step plan was as follows. Step one: reach the capital – easy enough, he just had to jump on a transport vehicle and was on route right now. Easy, Barely an inconvenience.
Step two: apply for access to the advanced diagnostic tools – he’d found an advert for a promising option. You could rent a super computer and lab specifically designed to measure your body and aether constructs. The only requirements were you had to provide the energy to run the lab and donate all the information you found out when you did so. Considering this world was…fake ish, Richard wasn’t sure there was a negative to them finding out about his body.
Step three: depended on what Richard found. His current plan leaned towards some sort of nanobot solution but that could change. Richard's imagination included little robots that interfaced with stats and let his AI mess with how they were enforcing him.
Step three was a work in progress obviously. “Do everything else” was a big ask…but hey, at least he had a goal?
…
Richard finally arrived at the central city after nearly a day of uneventful travel. The driver knew the nests to stay away from and the transport vehicle's defenses took care of the wandering riff-raff – even taking into account Richard’s taunting.
The city itself was definitely different – bigger somewhat and with more infrastructure. A bit cleaner, a bit of a different vibe…but it was the same in all its stand out ways. The skyscrapers were triangular prisms. The streets had those lanes of airport style moving sidewalks.
Basically the same city as far as uniqueness goes.
Heading to the lab he had researched, Richard only had to share a tiny bit about his advancement level and relatively clear criminal history before suddenly an invite arrived. He could use the lab right away – its last user had been a few days beforehand and he was definitely invited no charge.
Stepping into the lobby of a relatively normal looking building, Richard was led by a robotic guide towards an elevator that headed down into the earth. A short walk through an airlock and insulated corridor had him in the nicest looking lab he’d seen before.
Beautiful.
Richard immediately wanted to touch everything. Familiarizing himself with the setup, Richard waved his hands through a few devices in curiosity connecting his free slot to random devices powering them up and down as he played with them. Spying a microscope, Richard jogged over and tried to scan his finger. Oh! That’s even better. Sliding sideways Richard inserted his entire arm in a box watching as a layered image slowly rendered on the screen above.
Fascinated Richard zoomed inwards and started turning different parts of his body transparent in the view – his AI connecting and taking control of the device controls.
Let's see if I can find my stats.
…
Richard spent roughly an hour in the lab and figured out two main things.
One, his stat ‘slots’ were small. Several atom’s large and strange…they were fuzzy holes in the monitor and spread miniscule lines of themselves into the atoms about them like little tentacle monsters.
The device didn’t have good fidelity at this low of a resolution. It was almost as if it was enhanced using AI – upscaled using a neural network or something. Atoms didn’t look nearly as clean as they did in this view.
Two: completely off track, his hypothesis about his ability not being something in stone he affected was wrong.
His stone manipulation actually only worked on silica and other elements with silicon. The skill broke silicone bonds in reverberating pulses. Vibrations that oscillated at different frequencies as instinctual manipulation worked its magic. The resonating silicon would bond and unbound with all the elements surrounding it in one moment stronger than all other bonds in the next rejecting everything and snapping back to itself. This atomic churning caused a material to become unstable and malleable a haze of aether keeping the entire chunk of stone stable in its unstable state.
The more silica in his ‘rock’ the better. And…pure silica moved and flowed with a thought.
His arms themselves sucked in and replaced large strips of themselves with Richards testing quarts. They now looked mostly crystal – the stalks transparent and as fluid as liquid.
It was funny – if this was a story Richard would have needed a rare super material to enhance his item – something found deep in a dangerous area.
Turns out all he needed was common quartz! Funny how reality worked sometimes.
Going further he’d need to find crystals with unique aether properties if he wanted to enhance them past this point…
Wait…why leave it up to fate?
And so began a period of altering and forcefully creating crystalline super materials. His hands were picky eaters – they only consumed scraps of most materials no matter how much effort Richard put into them.
Still they did grow stronger. Weaking quarts and attaching them to light was the biggest jump as far as his skill was concerned but a few other combinations were appreciated as well. One involved creating a ceramic of crystal shards in heat infused copper rapidly cooled and shattered into flakes.
It almost felt like cheating with how easily Richard was strengthening himself.
Almost.
…
Richard played with bonds. He didn’t have specialized tools to manipulate or effect his stats – but he could see them and after consulting the research journals stored in the lab he began creating a solution.
Step one to affecting your stats was to create a material that contained parts of yourself that wasn't too denatured. Sort of like the stone hands.
All resonant machines started this way – with most having a slot you could slide your infused material into that then interfaced with the technology.
Taking a chunk of quarts and making a small box, Richard filled it with his blood and flesh – considering his skill blocked even the lab's devices after a few slices, this was harder than it sounded.
Next Richard placed the cup of flesh in a vacuum and slowly sucked all the air out of the surroundings.
Placing all his stone hands around the device Richard concentrated with all his might on effecting the stone he wasn’t touching. The only way he managed it was by shaking the cup over to rest against the wall – it seemed like his power to send vibrations broke down in the air but could travel through a solid at least a short distance.
Bending and completely enclosing his blood box, Richard then removed the container and began slowly folding and stretching the crystal. With a few short folds, a red sheen came to light as his fluids were seen through the crystal.
Fold, Fold, Fold. Richard was essentially baking with crystal – not meth. The current material creation felt a lot like laminating butter in croissant recipes.
After molding it to his liking, Richard let the red crystal set and then began creating several shapes for testing. He couldn’t shape a needle strong enough to puncture his skin but after stabbing himself with the strongest needle and quickly swapping it out for a Richard-Quartz the needle embedded correctly.
Watching the process through the digital micro-xray-scope, Richard saw how his flesh attempted to heal and expel the foreign invader. At this scale his regeneration looked positively alien – the void defense allowing his cells to melt and split hundreds of times a second.
And then as he watched his body began to get confused. It seemed like whatever intelligence was controlling his regeneration stopped seeing the crystal as an invader and started to see it as a broken part of itself.
Richard watched armies of cells attempt to ‘fix’ the foreign crystal drilling into it and running vines through the chunk before treating it somewhat like a bone and ignoring it.
Next Richard began to run tests on the protruding strip of crystal.
Connecting an aether plug and slotting in Richard infused his crystal before handing off control to his AI and attempting to brute force a change.
He continued to study and document the changes he experienced the lab, taking his findings as payment.
What was the chance this lab was shifty? Probably pretty high. A portion of Richard was ready for a swat team to jump in at any moment to capture him and start performing experiments. It just made sense right? They probably wanted to scope out what his powers were to try and see if he was worth kidnapping.
That was why he jumped when the door to the lab opened and a woman walked in. Hand resting on a scalpel he turned a tense flicker passing across his face as she slowly approached him.
Stab the neck as soon as she tries to capture? They probably know how strong my defenses are and worked around that…fuck I want to use the lab more can they wait till I finish this to start ‘napping?
The AI packet that arrived shocked Richard out of his murderous thoughts.
Hello, are you willing to do some volunteer work fellow seeker of the truth?
What?