The branches weren’t working out. Luke spent half his time making new clubs, and it was slowing the whole process down. He did make it to level 6, but it took way longer than he wanted it to. Luke spent 3 points to bring strength up to 8, which was an insane rush. His body felt weirdly light and heavy at the same time, a feeling he found extremely disconcerting until he got used to it.
Once he did though, he felt amazing. The jump from 4 to 5 hadn’t been that much, but with a much larger boost, it was easy to feel the difference. He crouched down, braced himself, and leaped straight up. His feet easily cleared the ground by four feet, and he landed hard enough to stamp deep footprints in the earth.
“That was fucking awesome. I could dunk on anybody back home.”
He started laughing. It was tempting to put the other 3 points into strength as well, but he split them up instead, 1 to each other stat. Agility, more than anything else, was where he noticed the biggest changes. Luke wasn’t a clumsy guy, but he was pretty sure at this point he could do a handspring onto a balance beam and cartwheel across it. He hadn’t missed a swing at a marmot in the last twenty he’d killed.
One of the problems he was running into though was that his new strength was making it hard for him to gauge how hard to swing the clubs he was crafting. He suspected that was playing a part in how quickly he was going through them, though to be fair, his baseline strength of 4 was more than enough to break them as well.
Luke wasn’t a scrawny guy to begin with, but now he had an athlete’s build. His muscles were rock-solid, toned without being bulky. He was coordinated enough to juggle the pine cones he’d picked up off the ground, and he threw them hard enough that they practically exploded when they hit something. And he always hit what he was aiming at.
He couldn’t even imagine what having 20 or 30 in a stat would feel like, or what his body would look like. He could just imagine himself looking like some giant bruiser straight out of a comic book, nothing but muscles and size. Luke shuddered at the thought.
“System, what happens to my body when my stats get higher? Like, really high?”
“As long as you keep your stats somewhat balanced, there will come a point where you stop physically changing. Once you’ve reached your physical peak, your body will shift depending on the ratio of strength to agility to stamina. If you favor agility highly, you’ll become leaner. If you favor strength, bulkier. Stamina will shape you somewhere in the middle.”
“So I could get a rough guess of someone’s stat spread based on their physical appearance?” Luke asked.
“More of their ratios than the hard numbers,” System replied. “Someone with 100 strength and 20 agility would look very similar to someone with 200 strength and 40 agility, all other things being the same.”
“Okay, okay. I gotcha. Still, it could give me an idea of what kind of fighting style something favors.”
“Possibly, though I would caution you not to make too many assumptions based on physical evidence. You have not accounted for the skills someone might have access to.”
“Of course. The skills. How could I forget about those?”
It didn’t mean much to him right now, but it could be important in the future. So far, he hadn’t been able to tell what level a marmot was until he killed it and got the notification. The best he’d gotten was a feeling of pressure and dread from that matriarch, which didn’t tell him much beyond that it was a higher level than him. Now that he was level 6 though, he was willing to bet he’d be able to smack the next one he found a lot harder.
The sun was falling down the western sky a lot faster now. Or, at least Luke decided it was to the west. For all he knew, it rose and set in a different direction on this world. Until he saw evidence otherwise though, setting suns did so in the west. The fact that he was in a valley with tall mountains all around just meant it set early and probably rose late.
Fortunately, he supposed, his uncle had stuffed a few things in his pockets, and one of those was a nice flashlight which hopefully had fresh batteries. Luke was happy to find it, especially since he didn’t have his phone on him. The last he remembered of it was sitting it on the kitchen table when he picked up his beer. He hoped the cops found it and used it as evidence to pin his disappearance on Uncle Duncan.
“I should probably find a place to sleep soon,” Luke said. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to help with that?”
“I can direct you towards several cave systems, but I am unable to tell you which ones are unoccupied. You will have to explore and discover that for yourself.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic. Well, which way?”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
With System’s guidance, Luke fought his way through a mile of forest and fields until the ground turned rocky and the plants grew sparse. By then, it was late evening and the shadows were long, but Luke found that a combination of a full moon and his enhanced perception let him navigate well enough to spare the flashlight’s batteries. He was sure he’d need that soon enough, and he decided the only reasonable thing to do was proceed as if it were going to die any second. That way, he wouldn’t be surprised when it did.
The first cave he found stunk like a wild animal lived in there, and Luke decided to pass on it. Even if he could kill whatever it was, he just didn’t want to spend the night in a place that smelled that strong. The second cave was home to a colony of bats, and the floor reflected that fact.
“Do bats shit on themselves while they’re hanging upside down?” he wondered. “How does that even work?”
Either way, it wasn’t a place he wanted to sleep in. The last thing he needed was to wake up covered in bat guano, or maybe getting chewed on by one. He shuddered at the idea of a thousand level 1 bats swarming him.
The third try was the charm. The cave was empty, it didn’t smell like anything, and it was as clean as a cave floor could reasonably get. The only problem was that the cave didn’t seem to end. Luke followed it in about a hundred feet, even wasted precious seconds of battery life on his flashlight to look around for a bit.
If there was a back end to the cave, he couldn’t find it. By now he’d been working and fighting and walking all day though, and he was just too tired to care. His plan was to sleep near the front, far enough in to be undetected by whatever predators hunted at night, but hopefully not so far as to disturb anything that lived underground.
The only other option he thought might be feasible was to sleep up a tree, but that sounded like a good way to wake up to a broken arm when he fell out of it. So it was the cave or nothing, and since it was already late and he was exhausted, he settled in, his back against a wall and leaning up against a rounded rock outcropping.
Dinner was a bag of jerky and the last of the bottled water, now lukewarm from being carried around all day. Tomorrow he’d be relying on [Survivalist] to help him forage. He needed to find a source of fresh water and figure out how to butcher something and cook it. Luke was hoping [Survivalist] would fill in the gaps in his knowledge there. He’d never butchered anything in his life.
Luke settled down for the night, his makeshift clubs close at hand, and dreamed of seeing his family again. They all stood around in a circle surrounding Uncle Duncan and took turns beating him with tree branches. Mom was even there, though she’d died a decade ago to cancer.
He woke up with a small smile on his face, one that quickly vanished when he realized that the reason he’d woken was a sound coming from deeper in the cave. It was a soft scuffing sound, close enough that sudden fear seized Luke, but far enough off that he still had a few seconds to decide what to do.
It was either an animal or a goblin. Luke was hoping for animal, but either way, getting caught literally lying down wasn’t going to do him any favors. His hand tightened around the club and he climbed to his feet as quietly as he could. With 6 agility, that was pretty damn quiet. Whatever was coming up from the back of the cave must have had an even higher perception though, because the scuffing sound paused.
Something spoke in a hoarse voice, weirdly high-pitched. Luke did not recognize any of the words, which he supposed meant he was about to meet his first goblin. If it was only level 7, he might have a chance of beating it. If he was lucky, it’d be just one goblin.
A second voice answered the first one.
Luke stared into the darkness, his knuckles white as he squeezed the base of the club he’d made. Slowly, he reached into his pocket and grabbed the flashlight. If he was really lucky, goblins would not handle the introduction of a sudden bright light to their eyeballs well. He could just barely make out the shadowy forms of two figures approaching him.
They were maybe four feet tall, with thick, wild shocks of hair sprouting from their skulls. It was too dark to make out their features, but not so dark that he couldn’t see the weapons held in their hands. They were metal and, probably, sharp. Luke wanted them.
He wasn’t getting an overwhelming feeling of dread, so he assumed they were close to his own level. They barely came up to his chest, and he was hoping they’d see better in the dark than he did, just so the flashlight would properly blind them.
The two goblins were getting closer to him now. They’d obviously seen him and were heading his way. It was time to move. Luke held the flashlight up like he was a cop looking into a car window, aimed it at the closer goblin’s face, and clicked it on.
The reaction was immediate and visceral. The creature hissed in pain and stumbled backwards. It dropped its weapon and held one clawed hand up to shield its eyes, while its companion recoiled from the light and faced away from it. It burst into a run to close the distance to Luke, weapon raised overhead to strike at the flashlight.
He flicked the light into the face of the oncoming goblin, causing it to flinch and growl in pain, but it kept charging even blinded. Luke sidestepped its wild rush and brought his club down on its skull as hard as he could. The club shattered, but the goblin collapsed on the spot. Luke was half-sure it was already dead, but he didn’t get a notification. That didn’t mean it was still alive since, in his experience fighting multiple enemies, he wouldn’t get any notifications until the last one died.
With that in mind, he turned to the second goblin. It was grinding the heel of its palm into its eyes, and when Luke pointed the flashlight at its face again, it scrunched his eyes closed and began swinging wildly in his direction. He finally got a good look at its weapon: a sword with a blade maybe two feet long, covered in rust and chipped up and down its length.
Luke threw the remains of his club at the goblin’s face and scooped up one of his spares. He watched the sword swish back and forth for a moment to get the timing, then smashed the goblin’s hand with it. The sword went flying, narrowly missing Luke as it did, and the goblin howled in pain.
A second swing to the face knocked it down. Luke retrieved the sword and coldly stabbed it into the goblin’s chest.
[You have slain Grimshard Goblin (lvl 8). 65 XP awarded.]
[You have slain Grimshard Goblin (lvl 7). 50 XP awarded.]
“Huh. That was way easier than that fat-ass marmot. Better loot too!”