I wasn’t sure why Bryan was in such a rush to get out of this building when it had proven to be such a great source of power-leveling so far—didn’t the regression character usually run headfirst into danger to get as strong as possible as fast as possible?—but his tone left no room for argument. On second thought, I realized, he probably knew not only exactly what to do to get stronger, but also exactly what to avoid if we didn’t want to end up digested as spirit-beast fodder before the sun rose on Day 1.
I was jogging as steathily as I could behind him when my vision became suddenly and overwhelmingly impaired. “Oh shit!” I blinked repeatedly and stumbled as my arms flailed in the air.
I felt Bryan grab one of my struggling arms to calm me, and he continued to pull me along, albeit a bit slower. “What do you see?” he asked, no hint of confusion in his voice. He knew something was going on with my HUD.
“So many red dots. Like, so many, I can’t fucking tell… hang on, I see. The map upgraded when it became a Qi skill.” One of my many notifications informed me of the change. Apparently subjecting myself to another beam of Cosmic Qi had not only integrated mall loot into my skillset, but also random items I'd already had on me. I supposed that made some sort of logical sense, given what had happened before with my stockpot and knives.
“Uh… how many red dots?”
I shook my head. “Too many to count. Coming this way. Should we—“
“Fucking run,” he growled.
I frowned, thinking we had been doing pretty well so far with the Sand Witches, but again, he knew what he was doing. Probably. Maybe.
We abandoned any semblance of stealth and ran like hell for the back of the store and burst through the doors into the employee-only space in the back. It was dark and we both stumbled a bit, but a streak of gray light shone off to the side. We made a beeline for it and discovered a plain-looking metal door with a little window up at head-level letting in the dim morning light.
“Come on.” Bryan shoved the door open and we were out.
Behind the mall, past the backlot, the ground sloped downwards toward the more urban center of town, providing us with a panoramic view of the mid-apocalypse cityscape. The sky was lightening from an eerie black with red at the edges to an eerie gray with red at the edges as invasion beams continued shooting down through the pre-dawn. I stood still a moment, gawking at the scene. It was just so... vivid, you know? Those beams. Holy shit. Even from a distance each one I could make out seemed to hum with so much energy it felt alive, like they were the appendages of some Lovecraftian nether-beast sent to suck the life out of the world. Or, I suppose more accurately, pump it full of Qi. An image took hold in my mind and wouldn't let go, that of a mosquito who comes to take blood but leaves behind that irritating anti-coagulate saliva. Maybe it was like that. Maybe all this fantastic space magic was nothing more than the cosmic spit from some giant world-eating monster.
Heh.
“Knife,” Bryan said.
I willed open my Bag’o’Knives but found the inventory no longer contained the assortment of short blades it had when I’d received it a few chapters ago.
“The fuck?” I looked again, no dice. I scrolled back through my message log, my frown deepening.
“They’re attached,” he said.
“Uh….”
Oh, fuck. That’s right.
I activated the skill Edward Breadknife Hands, and voila, each of my digits grew into a sharp, shimmering kitchen knife, including a couple of wicked-looking 9-inch serrated breadknives (from my middle fingers, naturally).
“What am I cutting?”
He shook his head and pointed at the door from which we’d just come. At the handle, specifically.
“Shove it in there. One of the long ones.”
The handle was a C-shape against the door. I stuck the blade on the end of my right middle finger through, then looked at him. I was still frowning.
“Yeah, well… this helps how?”
He pulled my hand back so that the knife withdrew, opened the door again, and brought my hand up so that the knives were peeking just inside. Then he looked at me with an apology in his eyes.
Oh.
Hell no.
“Dude. Fucking no way. Can’t we just—“
Before I could make an honest effort to pull my arm away, Bryan slammed the door quickly and viciously shut. On my fingers.
Well, on my knives. But the white light that crept into the edges of my vision, the inability to breathe for a long moment, and then the sensation that started like ice and quickly transformed into fire from the pit of hell told me what I was worried about was true. I didn’t have knives attached to my fingers; I had knives for fingers. Or I had a moment before, anyway.
For a second I just stood, cradling my hand, my mouth open in a silent scream. The damage notification flared red in my vision, and I began to hop up and down trying to escape the overwhelming pain.
“Jesus FUCK!!!!!!” I screamed. I wasn’t sure if it helped or not, so I began again. “FFFFUUUUUU—“
“Shhh!!!” Bryan clapped a hand over my mouth. He looked me in the eye and the battle-hardened look on his face softened just a little. “I’m sorry, Quart. Really. I know that hurts. You’ll get used to it, believe it or not. First time?”
I glared at him, but he waited patiently, hand still over my mouth. My cry died out in my throat and I nodded.
“First time is the worst. But you’ll do it again. And again. Eventually you might even like the way it feels, a little bit. The rush.”
I quirked an eyebrow at him. He must have seen the change in my temperament, because he finally removed his hand.
“Why the fuck?” I whisper-growled.
He nodded behind me and I turned to see the broken-off breadknife blade now wedged through the door handle, acting as a lock.
“Those red dots. Where are they now?”
I pulled the map back into focus and slowed my breathing.
“They… oh fuck. They’re grouping up again.”
He nodded. “How many?”
“Looks like three… no, four. Four clusterfucks of red.”
We shared another look, knowing what it meant.
Playtime was over. The real enemies were on the way. Bryan turned his back and started jogging away. I spared a glance at the bleeding nubs where once fingers had existed on my right hand, winced, and followed him into the backlot.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t you bandage them up? Weren’t you bleeding out? Why didn’t you ask that asshole for another healing potion?
Well. Good questions. I did ask, and he called back that he was out. Fucker. And I did have a bleeding debuff ticking away for a few seconds, and I did think at first that I was going to have to do something fucked up like rip up my shirt to try to staunch the bleeding so I didn’t pass out and die while lightly jogging. But then I got a new notification.
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Debuff: Bleeding negated; secondary effect of Edward Breadknife Hands, Blade Maintenance Takes Effect.
Blade Maintenance:
Your Qi-formed blades self-heal and repair using either ambient Cosmic Qi or Cosmic Qi you have cultivated as spirit. You are unable to retract your blades until Blade Maintenance completes. Current progress: 10%... 11%... 12%...
My maintenance progress ticked up faster than a percentage per second, so I figured I probably had less than a minute before the damage was undone and I could have my normal hand back. I hoped. I assumed I would still have fingers; we would see, I supposed.
This proved true when we came to the main thoroughfare past the parking lot exit and Bryan paused, turning to face me. He nodded at my hand and smiled a little.
“God, that was fast. I’m really going to miss this week. I always do.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“The ambient Cosmic Qi,” he explained. “We’re about to be lousy with it. Those invasion beams are composed of the stuff. Every time a new beam descends, more and more of it bleeds off and blends with the Earth’s aura. And every time a beam fulfills its purpose and winks out, its Qi is dissipated here. For the next week or so, the entire planet is going to be a sort of Cosmic Qi sauna. Just fucking filthy with magic. It’ll start to thin out after that, as it all gets gobbled up by the invaders, the handful of humans who get with the program, and magic infrastructure. Mostly alien stuff.”
“So it really is like origin Dao.”
“I don’t know anything about Taoism.” He shrugged. “All I know is that every time we die this fucking nightmare starts over, and every time I say to myself, dammit. Should have done more with all that nascent magic at the beginning. Well, here we are. This is the first time we’ve been together before it dissipates, so this is new territory, even for me. We’re going to power-level the ever-living fuck out of you. Out of both of us.”
“I guess that’s the dream,” I said wistfully. I remembered when it was cool to downplay liking overpowered MCs. But the truth was every halfway descent story at least ended up with a massively OP’d lead, even if they didn’t start off that way. Otherwise, what was the point? What the hell were you fantasizing about if it wasn’t getting fucking better? Sure, better than everyone else in the game system, or the alien invaders, or the gods, or the System, or whatever the fuck. But also better than your beater car. Better than your tiny, overpriced house, the stale bread on the counter, the dying HVAC system. Better than the soul-crushing nine-to-five and the growing sense that you’d wasted your youth and all the potential you had left was the possibility of maybe one day paying off a mortgage before dying alone.
“Aaaaand you’re doing it.”
“What?”
“That thing you do. When you get all in your feelings. Usually it results in a monologue about how shitty your life was before the invasion and how reading stories that somehow resembled what’s actually happening now was your escape.” He shook his head once, then turned back to the road. “We need to keep moving. I have a project for us.”
“Oh?” I shook off my funk as best as I could, helped somewhat by the sensation of flexing the newly regrown fingers on my right hand. Man. This shit was vivid.
“Gonna be a lot more invasion beams in this area in the next few hours, but they aren’t bringing more Sand Witches. They’re bringing one of the invading races.”
“Which doesn’t include Sand Witches, right. Because they’re just lowly Spirit-Beasts sent through first to soften us up. You know, I’m getting really big DOTF vibes from a lot of this, but maybe that’s to be expected in any halfway decent system apocalypse story? I mean, what are we going to do, actually reference System Apocalypse the whole time? Like, I get how that could be—”
“We don’t have time for this, Quart. Activate your scooter.”
He knelt, then sat on his ass on the pavement. Taken aback, I did as he asked and activated the skill. Cosmic Qi, of which I had no shortage, flooded through my limbs and the magical scooter grew from my body. By the time it finished Bryan had stood back up.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
He kicked off and glided a few feet before coming to a stop and pointing at his shoes. “Heelys. Now check this out.”
Party Member: Bryan Todd has requested use of the skill Scoot On By’s secondary skill: Ride-Along.
“Uh… ok?” I mentally assented. I felt a bit of the Cosmic Qi I’d collected lash out and attach itself to Bryan, like a string, and I gained awareness of him as well. Not nearly as intimately as my knife fingers or my scooter; it wasn’t like he was an extension of my body. But I felt like if my eyes were closed and he wasn’t making any noise, I would still know where he was, if that makes sense. Like a sort of, eh, to be cliched, yeah… sixth sense.
“I Qi dead people,” I whispered.
“Cut that out.” Bryan snapped his fingers in front of my face and I opened my eyes. “Time to get a move on. You have that map open?”
I nodded.
“Find us an on-ramp if you can.”
“On it.”
The mall was, as it turned out, fairly close to the freeway. I started pedaling my scooter in that general direction. The invisible Qi connection between Bryan and I pulled taut, and he was pulled along beside me, rolling on his heelys.
“Alright, Quart. Let’s move.”
“Uh… we are?” We’d been pushing and coasting along at a respectable pace for a Razor scooter for about a minute.
He shot me a glance, brows furrowed, then relaxing. “Oh. Oh, that’s adorable. But I’m sorry; I keep forgetting. You somehow seem to know everything, while also actually knowing fuck-all. Quart. You have to really use the skill, not just the scooter.”
He must have been able to read the confusion on my face, because he went on, “You have to pour some spirit into it.”
I pulled up the skill and looked for some sort of option, but I couldn’t find anything. I told him as much.
He shook his head. “It isn’t so plebian as a yes/no option. It’s more like… magic, yeah? You have to will it. You have to just sort of—”
His voice trailed off into a wordless scream as I did as he asked; we took off like a fucking bullet train. I am not kidding. One moment we looked like a couple of high-school dropouts practicing kick-flips off the parking lot bumpers; the next, we were a couple of X-Men. Our surroundings blurred and I, aware of Bryan’s decidedly high-pitched caterwaul, eased off how much spirit I was willing into the skill. We slowed dramatically.
“What the bloody fuck was that??” he demanded.
I laughed, exhilarated. “I don’t know, I just did what you told me!”
“Jesus,” he muttered. “It’s never, never been that fast. Not even when you’d leveled up significantly. How much spirit do you have? No, that’s not it; it’s not like you’re some level 50 monster.” Realization dawned on his face. “Do you have a Cosmic Qi pool?”
“Yes. It’s like twelve-thousand or something. Only I guess I’ve been using it, so less now? Hang on…”
I pulled it up. And immediately slowed down.
Raw Cosmic Qi: 13,012 (stored)
“Quart? Did you say… twelve thousand? Or am I magically hearing you wrong?”
“Um… yeah. No, yeah, I did. But maybe I was wrong? Now I’ve got over thirteen thousand. That doesn’t make sense. Unless…”
“It’s the Qi saturation in the ambient aura. You’re cultivating it. Probably after cultivating a metric shit-ton of it from the beams themselves. You motherfucker.”
“Oh, sweet. But you said that’ll drop off, right? So why is this a surprise, again?”
“Because you’ve never been a cultivator before. Usually you have your spirit pool and its size is determined by spirit and wisdom attributes, and usually you top it off every time you interact with one of those beams, sure, but this pool thing... I'll say it again, this is new territory, Quart. You are significantly fucking with my whole time-loop edge.”
“Sorry about that. Sounds like it’s only a good thing though, right? I mean, magic powers make scooter go zoom? Bigger magic makes bigger zoom, it go reeeeal zoom?”
He chuckled beneath his breath. “Yeah, I guess so. Real zoom. Only, let’s maybe aim for about a third of that speed, ok? I practically shat my trousers.”
“Can’t have that. The only scat I’m interested in is in jazz.”
We had to backtrack a little, having overshot (or overshat?) the on-ramp, but with my newfound appreciation for my scooter power it didn’t take long. I noticed as I used it that the benefits of the skill scaled to how much spirit I willed into its use. Instead of +2 Agility, +10 Speed I was seeing up to ten times on both attributes if I poured enough spirit in. While doing so I also monitored my spirit pool and noticed that while it did tick down, it ticked up too quickly to ever dip below 96% or so, thanks to my outrageous pool of raw Cosmic Qi. And speaking of which, that pool kept ticking up no matter what I did, though it slowed a bit when my spirit was being constantly refilled. Made sense, I supposed, but damn. What a broken hack! I felt the value of it all the more for the knowledge the ambient Qi wouldn’t last more than a week or two. I was sure the number would cease to tick upward after that, but I couldn’t help but wonder just how high it would get before that happened.
Was I going to have a Ruwen situation on my hands, here, without even needing to harvest a dungeon or steal some god secrets?
The on-ramp was deserted, but the scene it brought us to was even more grim. Cars lined the highway into the horizon, where the modestly tall buildings of a Midwest downtown loomed against the morning sky. Most of the vehicles looked abandoned, though occasionally we’d scoot past a car with an occupant or two.
A dead occupant or two.
The apocalypse had been a very sudden and jarring event for anyone relying on computers, electronics, probably even non-electric mechanical engines. Regardless, none of these cars were going anywhere with their chips fried. I imagined planes must have fallen from the sky, and the thought frightened my mind, but what twisted my guy was the sight of cracked windshields and slumped shoulders sagged into unnatural positions.
“Keep moving, Quart,” Bryan muttered. I’d slowed us down without realizing as I gazed around us, taking in the carnage and bleakness of the morning after. “They’ll be along soon.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
My hands shook as I twitched, just once, but violently. I nearly lost control of the scooter but managed to hang on, my fight-or-flight instinct causing me to flood my arms and legs with cultivated Qi in the form of spirit. Bryan looked my way in alarm.
“What was that?” he asked.
But before I could give it a thought, a wave of absolute despair crashed over us like high tide. The sky didn’t darken, but it felt deep in my soul as though it had, as though the sun would never shine again. Like I’d laid down in bed for an all-night orgy with a flock of Dementors, and no one, not a one, would ever be cheerful again.
“No,” I said, my voice strained, “what the fuck was that?”
“That’s them.” Bryan was all business now. “Better speed up. We don’t want to be on the highway when they start to wake.”
“When who starts to wake, Bryan?”
The wave of death swept past us, all the way down the highway, washing over every car. In the utter silence it left behind, I began to hear noises.
The sounds of seatbelts unclasping. And car doors creaking open.
“Speed the fuck up, Quart!”