Nathan headed out toward the northeast. The sun was overhead, beating down on him, but he didn’t mind. He guessed that his high Constitution was protecting him from the sun’s rays.
He looked at his hand. Upon closer inspection, Nathan had tanned quite a bit, hadn’t he? He shrugged and ignored it. There wasn’t any point in looking at his skin like some kind of weirdo.
After walking for a bit, he came upon row after row of dark brown, shriveled grass that stretched onward for miles.
Finally, something other than dead soil.
Nathan crept through the plants, his feet crunching against them with loud cracks.
Wind swept across the reeds, waving them in a hypnotic pattern. Nathan paused. He pulled out one of the grapes he’d harvested from his plants and ate it. Afterward, he saved the seed in his inventory.
He opened his menu and reviewed his stats.
Stats:
Strength: 10 (+27) = 37
Dexterity: 10 (+3) = 13
Constitution: 30 (+5) = 35
Magic: 3 (+5) = 8
Luck: 12 (+31) = 43
Available Stats: 18
He wasn’t sure what the right makeup of stats was. This wasn’t a farming game.
It wasn’t even a game, period.
In the end, he decided to continue what he was doing and keep it balanced—except magic, given that he hadn’t been using any spells.
He idly noted how high his luck was.
Yeah, well, I don’t feel lucky.
He put his 18 points into Dexterity, bringing it up to 31. He experimentally flexed his fingers. Nathan wasn’t noticing any major differences, but it would become more obvious with usage, right?
A noise caught his attention. He summoned his harpoon to his hand from his inventory.
Silence.
He stood to his feet, harpoon at the ready. A moment later, dirt flew into the air. A furry head slowly rose out of the ground.
Nathan blinked and his weapon lowered. “What?”
A gerbil stared back at him.
He used [Inspect].
[Gerbil] (Copper) - Lv 10
Description:
A small but surprisingly resilient rodent that has survived the apocalypse by sheer stubbornness. It's not the most intimidating creature, but its sharp teeth and intense need to chew through anything in sight might make you rethink leaving it unattended. Rumor has it this particular gerbil is planning a hostile takeover of your pantry.
Nathan breathed a sigh. It was nice to not be assaulted by some freak of nature. Instead, he was just looking at a nice, perfectly normal gerbil with no weird powers or features whatsoever.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
The gerbil held its hands out, and two absurdly huge, sharp teeth shimmered into its grip. The teeth dwarfed the gerbil, their tips almost reaching up to Nathan’s height.
It swung out the left tooth.
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Nathan screeched and ducked down. The tooth swished through the air before crashing into the ground with a loud bang.
“Goddamn it, what the hell is my luck!?” he said. “A gerbil!? Am I going to get killed by a dual-wielding gerbil!?”
The gerbil screeched and waved around its other tooth-sword like a flag.
Nathan spotted a shade of green behind the gerbil. It was a leaf with five leaflets on it, branching from a central stem. Nathan felt like screaming from frustration.
Of course, the gerbil has the weird leaves that I’m probably looking for.
The gerbil lifted the tooth-sword out of the ground and stabbed at Nathan with it. Nathan rolled to the side and threw his harpoon forward. He failed to hit the gerbil, instead destroying one of its tooth-swords.
It screamed in outrage and swung its other tooth-sword at Nathan. Too close to dodge, Nathan was hit head on by the tooth-sword and tumbled to the ground.
He coughed and pushed himself up. He reached into his inventory, pulling out his fishing rod.
The gerbil swung out its tooth-sword. Nathan blocked with his fishing pole, then cast out his hook. The hook flew through the air like a missile, but the gerbil dodged underneath it.
Unfortunately for the gerbil, the tooth-sword was not spared from destruction. Like its brother-blade, the tooth-sword was shattered into dozens of pieces.
The gerbil stared at Nathan, its eyes wide.
“Yeah, that’s right!” Nathan said. “Take that, you stupid rodent!”
The gerbil screamed and jumped at Nathan’s face.
Oh shit!
Nathan tried to swing the tip of his fishing pole up, but he was too slow. The gerbil slammed into Nathan’s face and started scratching at his face.
Nathan stumbled backward and fell to the ground. Several long cuts swept over his skin and he screamed. On instinct, he grabbed the gerbil and threw it as hard as he could. It flew through the air before tumbling to the ground. The gerbil stood up and screeched again. Nathan ran for his harpoon and threw it at the gerbil.
The air around the harpoon cracked and it exploded toward the gerbil. It crashed and dirt flew into the air from the landing.
Nathan breathed a few deep breaths. He’d grabbed his fishing pole and was ready in case it was somehow still alive.
The dust cleared away and revealed a mangled body.
[You have leveled up!]
Nathan rubbed away the blood dripping into his eye.
“Whoever’s designing this shit needs to be fired,” Nathan said.
He walked over to the burrow that the gerbil had come from and picked up the leaves. They seemed to be the right type, so he put them in his inventory and began the long trek back to his cavern.
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Once Nathan arried back, he set up another fire.
“So I just need to burn it?” he said. “Sounds easy enough.”
He chucked the leaf into the fire. Instantly, a purple cloud of dust poofed out of the leaf and into the air. Nathan instinctively gasped and breathed it in.
Nathan's vision began to swim. The cave walls seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting like a giant stone lung. He blinked hard, but that only made things worse.
"Huh," he said, his voice echoing strangely in his ears. "That's... that's not great."
The Status Window popped up in front of him, but instead of staying put like a normal menu, it started doing backflips. The numbers danced around, rearranging themselves into little stick figures that waved at him cheerfully.
"Stop that," he told his stats. "You're being unprofessional."
His Luck stat winked at him.
Nathan sat down heavily, watching as the fire transformed into a tiny dragon that was having an animated conversation with his fishing rod about the economic implications of fish-based currency. The fishing rod seemed skeptical.
"I should write this down," he mumbled, reaching for his inventory. Instead of items, he pulled out what appeared to be a very concerned-looking butterfly made of pure mathematics. "No, you're not what I wanted. Go away."
The butterfly fluttered off, leaving a trail of quadratic equations.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice that sounded suspiciously like his old high school chemistry teacher was saying, "And this is why we don't inhale random purple smoke from apocalyptic plants, Nathan."
He looked down at his hands, which had apparently decided to become transparent. Through them, he could see his Constitution stat doing jumping jacks.
"At least I'm not getting killed by a gerbil with sword-teeth anymore," he said philosophically. "Unless... oh god, what if the gerbil comes back as a ghost?"
He spent the next twenty minutes hiding from imaginary ghost gerbils while his inventory contents performed an elaborate musical number about the end of the world. The harpoon was a surprisingly good tenor.
[Achivement get: Highest Level]
[Quest Complete: Suspicious Gathering]
[You have leveled up!]
[Your Luck stat is very amused by this situation]
[Your Magic stat would like to remind you that this is not what it signed up for]