Combatant Stat Screen
Name: Quart
Level: 11
XP to Level 12: 200
Class: Battlemage Cultivator
Class Traits: Combat warrior (pugilism; blades);
Cultivator (Cosmic Qi, spirit);
Qi Magician, Journeyman (ambient and cultivated Qi);
Auramancer (projection, control, consumption)
I leveled again just as the fighting ended. My blade severed the head from a low-level Shayathar Vessel and my HUD flashed with the notification even as Bryan felled his final foe, and just as quickly as it had started, it was all over.
My stats were progressing nicely but I didn’t have the stomach to enjoy them. Not after what we’d just been through. I turned my gaze to Bryan who was striding across the roof past me. He stopped to look at the dead body that had once been Sam.
He sighed quietly.
“We have to move,” he said, his voice a hollow grave.
My head went on a swivel. “More on the way?”
He shrugged. “We have work to do.” He nodded off in the distance, not back toward El Zarape and downtown but in the opposite direction, toward the urban sprawl that continued along the interstate. I saw two freshly arrived beams of Cosmic Qi shimmering over the town.
“I didn’t get it,” I said. “The thing… whatever. The base thing. The thing he gave Sam to give to us.” I felt dirty saying it out loud. Not because I’d fucked up, but because of the sheer audacity of bemoaning the loss of a material resource in the face of the loss of human life. I was disgusted with myself. But I knew it’s what he meant; we were supposed to chuck me into another beam with it, get me some new Qi skill or superpower or whatever.
Bryan held out a hand. I thought for a moment he was trying to offer emotional support, and I looked up, confused.
A small, black object that looked something like a hockey puck rested in his palm.
“You did,” I said.
“I did.” He put it back in one of his many jacket pockets. “This was… rough. But we have to get moving now, and we can sort out our feelings later. More people will die that need our help if we don’t get stronger. That need your help, Quart.”
I nodded numbly.
The night was brisk. Where initially there had been a full moon illuminating the cityscape around us, now cloud cover started moving in from the west. A strong gusting breeze blew in ahead of it.
“I don’t want to get caught in the Qi storm when it hits,” Bryan said quietly as he lowered himself over the roof and onto a fire escape.
I followed him and asked, “Qi storm?”
He nodded at the sky. “Rain’s coming, yeah? Anytime for the next couple of weeks there’s precipitation, expect it to be magical in nature. Has to do with all the Cosmic Qi being pumped into the earth; the atmosphere will eventually saturate and reach a sort of healthy equilibrium, with a far higher Cosmic Qi content than before the invasion, but at a kind of stasis, if that makes sense. Right now though?” He frowned as a strong, cold gust rattled the rusted metal of the staircase we stood on. “There is no stasis, no balance. The atmosphere is being violated and will respond with violence. Qi storms are unpredictable and dangerous.”
“Where are we going?” I asked as we reached the paved ground. “Find that first person I was meant to meet?”
Bryan shook his head. “I don’t know where she is now; that strand, it seems, has been cut. Let’s just hope enough of it remains that not all of my knowledge of the future is wasted.”
I stood up a little straighter, hit with the full implications of having partied up with him. In the best regression and time-loop stories, the MC was able to drastically change the future in their favor due to their intimate and immense knowledge of everything that would happen.
“What’s next, then?” I asked.
Bryan gazed into the distance.
Not for the first time, I was taken by the veracity of his character. This was a man who had fought real battles, fought and lost. I waited in silence.
“The Guild Hall,” he finally said. “It isn’t up and running yet but it may be by the time we get there. It should be just south of town.”
“Guild Hall. Is that what it sounds like?”
“It’s exactly what it sounds like. Well, sort of. I mean, it’s a barn. A Cider Mill, specifically. Look, I’ll tell you all about it on the way, but first we have a few things to take care of.”
I followed his gaze toward what looked like the nearest of the beams.
“You want to magick me up a bit more.”
He nodded.
“Should we sand-storm our way over?”
“No. Too dangerous. Something’s… off with that skill. I mean, trait. Did you notice?”
“You mean the Shayathar Vessel speaking imperiously into my mind every time I activate it? Yeah. I did. So what’s up with that? Am I possessed or something?”
He shook his head. “Too much to get into right now; we have to move. C’mon, use your scooter.”
I activated Scoot On By with Ride-Along, and we were on our way.
I didn’t ask any more questions. We didn’t speak again until we neared the beam. With that moment Sam had turned around and shown her macabre death-mask, everything had changed. Everything hit different.
We zipped down abandoned streets, keeping the elevated freeway on our right as we followed it south, but not getting so close to it as to approach the denser parts of town. I could hear there were people there, but monsters, too.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
We steered by the screams.
Fuck, I thought to myself, my knuckles tightening around the handlebars. For as many freakish little aliens I’d driven a blade through so far, every cry of anguish still sent fresh waves of horror through me.
The wind grew strong and it carried a chill. Bryan’s face tightened, and that made me more nervous about the impending Qi storm than anything he’d said about it. If he looked scared, something scary was coming.
But then we were there, finally, at the beam.
“Lay low,” Bryan whispered. “I’m going to scout it out.”
We were pressed up against the side of a Seven-Eleven. The beam looked to be touching down just across the street.
“Ok.” I crouched, trying to make myself small, and Bryan trundled off into the darkness.
It was odd. With my level, my cheat-build, and all my magic powers, I was ostensibly much stronger than Bryan. Maybe stronger than any other human on earth now. But he was the one with the experience, the cold eyes, the steady hand at the till.
I was the one who had just seen someone I knew die in front of me for the first time.
Until that moment everything had felt like a game. Like I was just LARPing my way across town, or maybe immersed in an MMORPG, killing time by killing orcs. It had been weird and a little gross in the worst moments, but mostly just fun and vaguely entertaining, the way my dreams often were but with an unprecedented verisimilitude. I’d been having fun solving the problems, leveling up, getting magic.
It wasn’t fun anymore.
“All clear,” Bryan’s voice called from out in the parking lot in front of the store. I jogged out, staying low, and followed him through the lot and across the street to the beam.
This felt different, too. Not in a tangible “this beam is different from the other beams” way; it was, so far as I could tell, identical to the beams I’d been exposed to. But the thrill of it, the shock of it—that little bit of borrowed horror you pay for when you go on a roller coaster, or see a scary movie—that wasn’t what I felt this time. I gazed up at the beam stretching high into space, higher than my sight could follow, and a voice inside me finally said what I hadn’t been allowing myself to hear.
This isn’t a dream.
I quashed it immediately. Stupid. Of course it was a dream. One big fucking drugged-up psychedelic experience. What else could possibly be going on? My rational mind was quick to batten the hatches down and reinforce my coping mechanism. Yes, I was dreaming. As I had many times before. My dreams were strange, unique, even, in their vividness and lucidity, but that’s all it was. It didn’t matter what happened here because eventually, no matter what, I would wake up, and here wouldn’t exist anymore, and who I was right now wouldn’t be who I was anymore; I’d just be… well, me.
Henry. Henry Sanders. Henry Sanders the nice but reserved, competent but unambitious medical assistant who lived alone in a tiny house on the far north side of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, working long hours in a thankless and chronically underpaid position, paying too-large payments on an old home and an aging sedan, trapped in a cocktail of medications to stay functional enough to continue to work long hours and pay too-large payments.
“I want you to try something,” Bryan said.
I waited.
“That, uh, lightning ball thing. It stores Qi?”
I nodded.
“Pull it out. The other balls, too.”
I did as he asked and summoned both spirit balls and the Qi-storing Storm Globe. I tapped into Storm Globe with a mental command, rousing just enough curiosity to see how much Qi it had gathered.
Raw Cosmic Qi: 16,439
I pursed my lips and shrugged at myself. What, was I supposed to be impressed? It didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t real.
“I’m going to try to use these to pull you out,” he said. “After. I don’t know what will happen for certain. It’s, uh…”
“New territory?” I said, one eyebrow raised.
“Yeah. That. Better than sitting around with my thumb up my ass waiting for a baddie to come down and push you out before you explode, though.”
I shrugged again, ceding his point.
He reached out and placed a hand on my shoulder. Surprised, I flinched. Then I met his eyes.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s ok to not be ok. This is all fucked up, every part of it. And it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets so bad we all just die. And then I’ll get to give you this speech again.” He patted me once, then removed his hand.
“That has got to be the single worst attempt at cheering someone up that has ever been attempted.”
“Who said I was trying to cheer you up?” He handed me the base building node. “And here. I have a hunch about this; call it insider information. I knew a Qi Magician before who used something like this. He wasn’t a human… that’s not important.”
He handed me a book. I looked at it and blinked.
“You non-human Qi Magician friend had a Barnes and Noble journal?”
“He wasn’t a friend! I mean, not exactly. It was… look. He had a book he kept his spells in. Or skills, I guess you’ve been calling them.”
“A grimoire?”
He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “That’s the word. Made his life a lot easier; he had pages and pages of Qi spells, didn’t have to keep track of them all in his mind. Just take this with you and we’ll see if we get lucky.”
I spun cultivated Qi out of my channels in the form of spirit, sending it to top off the two floating wiffle balls. Then I walked willingly into my third beam of Cosmic Qi, leaving Bryan in charge of my balls.
Congratulations combatant! You have discovered a source of cultivatable Cosmic Qi. Would you like to cultivate? Y/N
“Yes. Yes I would.”
Qi flooded my channels again, filling them nearly instantly to capacity. I felt it cycle without losing momentum, and I was aware with certainty of what I had suspected the last time this had happened.
I churned out pure, cycled spirit immediately.
Then the all-too familiar pain began bearing down on me as Cosmic Qi threatened to overload my system.
“Shit,” I heard Bryan yell. I thought maybe he was trying to pull me out, but I couldn’t be sure; I was frozen in the beam and couldn’t so much as turn my head to look at him. Then I remembered the balls because I sensed him try to grab one and I felt energy escape it, weaponized, to defend itself from him. I mean I literally felt it happen like I had lifted one of my fingers, it was fucking wild.
The pain and discomfort, the overwhelming magical pressure, was no different than either of my first two beams, but I gritted my teeth and told myself I had to do this. I had to make something happen now.
People were dying now.
With every scrap of will I could muster I reached out to my Storm Globe and Ballers Be Balling vessels, allowing Bryan to handle them. When he tried again to touch one of the wiffle balls, it allowed him.
Then he heaved the ball into my gut.
“Oooof!” I yelped, coughing up vomit as I was flung free from the beam. I landed in a heap, rolling once. I scraped my knees and dinged an elbow.
“Sorry!” Bryan called, running over to me. “I didn’t mean to sucker-punch you; I was just so surprised it didn’t zap me that time, and I didn’t really know, truth be told, whether or not it would let me do anything to manipulate it at all, so, I guess I sort of figured, you know. Go big or go home. As the yanks say.”
I sat up and wiped my chin. “Hold that thought,” I croaked. Then I pulled up my stats.
Combatant Stat Screen
Name: Quart
Level: 11
XP to Level 12: 200
Class: Battlemage Cultivator
Class Traits: Combat warrior (pugilism; blades);
Cultivator (Cosmic Qi, spirit);
Qi Magician, Journeyman (ambient and cultivated Qi);
Auramancer (projection, control, consumption)
Subclass: Spirit Beastmaster
Subclass Traits: Spirit servant (Sand Witch)
Sprit companion (Tommy)
Physique
Copper, Expanded Pathways. 61%.
My eyes bugged and I expanded my physique to show more detail.
Current Cultivator Physique: Copper
Progress to next Cultivator Physique: 61%
Pathways: Expanded (Tier 2)
Meridians: Locked
Core: N/A
Cosmic Qi capacity: 200
Bryan looked at me. “Man, look, I’m really sorry. We don’t have to do the ball thing if you—”
“Oh we’re doing it again.” I struggled to my feet and, with a thought, called up a skill.
You have activated skill: Sweater Weather!
A bougie suburban northeast seaboard sweater, complete with high-buttoned collar, appeared on my body. It was navy blue and ribbed.
“Oh, that’ll do nicely,” I said. I deactivated the skill and reactivated it, this time focusing on routing it through Ballers Be Balling and Storm Globe, both of which remained activated. Then I suborned Sweater Weather to the other two, yielding a summoned sweater that could store and channel Cosmic Qi or spirit. I dumped all of my spirit into it and deactivated the skill.
“Bryan,” I said, nodding at the wiffle balls that still hovered nearby. “Get ready to do it again.”
“Something happened in there?” he asked. “You get a new skill?”
“No skill yet. But something indeed.”
I stepped back inside and let my channels expand to the benchmark for a bronze cultivator physique.
Cosmic Qi flushed through me, transforming into spirit in an instant, and I breathed in the pain. If this system wanted to try to break me, I would break it.
I would break everything.