*Boom* *Boom*
The second blast clipped me and stripped what remained of my budding Aura proficiency. At least that should be the last hot load heading my way.
“Fuck you old-timer!”
I mean really, he had it coming, I was stealing his bike, but he lived on a farm for fuck’s sake, what was he gonna do with this old rusty piece of shit? To think, I used to get along really well with the old-timers, I guess as much as things stay the same in the apocalypse, some things chang-
*Boom*
“Agh!” I, somehow, maintained my pedaling as buckshot peppered me at max distance. I thought he only had two, no that was my shotgun that only had two-
*Boom*
I was too far now, thankfully so as the scenery continued to whiz by. I burned some of Pookie’s heals and felt the lead squirm its way from my flesh. Shit that hurts.
If I didn’t have a heal skill I’d be much more worried about all of this… as it was, the last hours after sunrise had just been a mind-numbing cycle of running, stealing bikes from farmer’s and endless farmland. Why was their bicycle maintenance such shit? In the distance I could see… something.
It looked like it might be the freeway, but I wasn’t quite sur- Yup it was. The farmland went right up to the highway? I guess that sounded right, though we had taken a different path in.
There was still some more time to think. Great.
Actually, I had a better idea.
“Display Status.”
Nothing.
“Display Status for User: Doubting Thomas.”
That was weird. Whatever.
Feats were cramped, cut off, there were several Feats that only the tops were barely visible. No. Not ‘no’. Fuck no. I’m not reading it like this forever. This wasn’t working for me.
“Hide Previous Feats.”
Oh come on.
“COME ON GABBY CAN’T YOU DO A FUCKING THING?!”
I waited silently, alternatively staring daggers between my status page and the sky. I even slowed down my bike so I could properly glare. Fuck him, I could wait this out.
“Gaaaaabby. Gabby. Gabby. Gabby. Gabby. Gabriel. ArchAngel Gabriel.”
OH JUST SHUT UP WILL YOU ALREADY? ASK IT AGAIN.
I smirked and flipped him the bird. I probably wouldn’t regret that.
In a sudden moment of self-consciousness I decided to word it a bit better. No harm in meeting him halfway.
“Hide Previously Earned Feats on Status Screen.”
Wait, why did I need to ask again? It seemed like Gabby had fucked off to wherever he had been and I really didn’t want his attention more than absolutely necessary. Last time I had his attention he had fucked my Class Advancement and Quests.
Looking back to my Status… There we go, much better.
Doubting Thomas
Class: Ghetto Hedge Knight
Rank: Above Average Human!
Level 6/20
*Knightley Duties
Earned Feats:
Bonus Feats:
Unspent
Feat
Points: 2+ 22!
Body
10+ 13!
The Strength of your Body.
1v1 me hoe: 1
Battle Royale: 2
Mah Body: 1
Eat the Pain: 1
My Body was a Temple: 1
Mind
10+ 14!
The Strength of your Mind.
Ambush Predator: 1
Solved the Mystery: 1
Man with a Plan Electro Boog: 2
Contact: 1
Soul
10+ 12!
The Strength of your Soul.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Save a Soul: 1
Showed Mercy, Avoided a Nemesis: 1
Good Boy: 1
External Will
10+ 14!
The inner spark of Man manifest, the Will to Shape Reality
Inspiration: 1
My Own Moves: 2
Exerted Mine Will: 1
Friends in low places: 1
Internal Fortitude
10+ 13!
13/13
How do you carry on when all is lost?
Not like this: 1
Fuck that and fuck you: 1
Whatever it takes 1: 1
Back from the Brink: 1
*Delayed Gratification 2*
Divine Spark
1/2
Do you believe in miracles now, heathen?
Curtail A Mini-Apocalyptic Event: 1/2
Luck
10+ 13!
To clarify, Humanity has an average luck of 20. Losing His Favor was your choice but regardless, you can't call that 'good' luck. Humanity’s luck reset to (0)
Wrong Place, Right Time: 1
Missed Out on Nemesis #2: 1
Right Lady, Wrong Time: 1
Fortunate Son: 1
MisFire: 1
Found You!
*Juicy Sacrifice: 1
Potentiality
-9.96 →
-9.57!
Ranges between (-10 and 10). Losing Status as Most Favored is pretty bad on a potentiality curve, don't tell me that surprises you?
Nice. Some of those had been at 9 before but read 10 now so it looks like my Law of Averages had given me a few freebies. For the trade, I think I had lost one in Fortitude but gained more overall.
Maybe this shit was super OP for someone who could game it but I wasn’t a math nerd so it seemed like the most I could take advantage of it was by accident. Having the Ren-Faire skill had literally been the difference between me riding a shitty bicycle down the road and being some necromancer’s reanimated sock puppet. Thank God for Duck. Shit a wave of missing her hit me right in the feels.
I was tempted to clarify each of the Feats to distract myself but I heard a groan before stopping again and pulling out my baseball bat and took a few steps to tee off on yet another zombie. There were A LOT of zombies in this apocalypse, almost beyond what you would think as a critical mass for this being defined as a Zombie Apocalypse TM.
Though that was well tempered by being pretty significantly stronger than my baseline, pre-apocalypse self, and most of them were relatively easy to kill. Uh, re-kill, I guess. Sometimes if there were clumps I’d draw my sword, but that took all the challenge out of it. Plus, my sword was getting all heart stabby and it was making me uncomfortable.
It was interesting, the zombies in Ontiveros were definitely more dangerous than these run of the mill ones. The… cleverness and general sneakiess of the zomboys, it was still there, it just wasn’t really… dangerous. I wonder if that has to do with the whole evil necromancer thing. Did they provide a passive buff on overall zombie intelligence or was it just a case of carving through starting zone enemies?
Did ALL dead people throughout history get revived? Were certain zombies from particular time periods stronger or weaker? I really had no idea how any of that worked. What about zombies that were buried under parking structures? Did they get teleported above ground, burrow through the ground, or would they just be eternally trapped under thousands of pounds of concrete?
Dismissing the thought, my mind inevitably drifted back to the situation at the winery. Not the most pleasant set of memories but I wanted to take a few lessons from it, then I could comfortably bury it back down deep until the end of the wor- until the end of the apocalypse. There were a couple of phrases that needed to be reworked now that we were, in fact, in the apocalypse.
Was I gonna learn anything from the winery? If I paid the price of going through all that shit, I’d like to at least ‘get paid’ for it. So thinking in that vein, I thought even harder.
Dark Affinity. Never trust that shit, always look for it. I’d been underestimating it since I did now technically have the damned thing and I hadn’t been going right off the deep end like literally everyone else I’d seen with it. Was that because of some balance with Light Affinity? Who the fuck knows? Still on that note, I probably wasn’t going to be diving deeper into that specific Affinity.
Okay, keep the skeevy eye stun glare and the curse-transfer and call it a day on Dark Affinity.
What else… Oaths! Sweet fuck, Oaths. I was torn on these, they really were the definition of a double-edged sword. One of them had kept me on the estate long past when I should have left, another had saved my ass when I made it between myself and Pookie.
Solo traveling and not using Oaths was kind of a non-starter, but at the very least I’d be smarter about using them. Probably. I’d definitely try to be smarter about them. Maybe shorter term Oaths or more limited ones. If I stumbled across someone and we ended up traveling together then I’d definitely need an Oath. So they were useful for all types of travel really.
They seemed like okay lessons for the cost of all that bullshit, though the price had been steep for some shit I could have realized by just spending 10 minutes thinking about it all.
I continued to close the distance down the barely maintained road and moved on to focus on what Pookie told me, ‘wrap your intent around you’. It seemed easy as a concept but there was this… leaky feeling that hit my Fortitude tank when I tried to externalize my Will. Intent was the key…
Still struggling, I recalled Pookie’s words.
‘Cover yourself in your Will. Intent is the key. Protection, autonomy. Dominion of self over yourself’.
It sounded like some sort of personal protection. Okay, I needed to cover what I already knew. Fortitude was both my ‘will to live’ and my magic tank. If I drained it completely, I would literally stop caring about anything, including my own life. Will, or External Will was… well, what was it? My Will blasts formed by my… intent? Yeah, that’s true I guess. I mostly thought stuff like ‘fucking get this shit away from me’ when blasting them out. That seemed pretty… intentful. Will was externalized Fortitude that was shaped by Intent? That didn’t feel quite right, but it didn’t feel wrong either.
Intent… Going fast while riding a bicycle through farmland was a good meditative experience.
Intent. INTENT. What was ‘intent’? ‘Doing what you want to do’ was the first thought that came to mind. Purpose, resolve, intent. Yes I know you can’t use a word to define the same word.
Speaking of resolve, having that or being in an experience where your resolve was ‘reaffirmed’ did speed up the regeneration rate of Fortitude. Okay, Intent was important, I got that. How the fuck was I going to ‘cover myself in my Will’?
After wasting some time thinking about that, I rolled my thoughts back. When had I ‘used’ Intent? I guess when I decided to help Ontiveros was one. Fighting for my life was easy, kill the other thing/person/creature and ‘don’t die’. I definitely found it way easier to use Will when in those situations, and a minor revelation hit me, that’s because I had clear ‘Intent’. ‘Oh fuck I’m gonna die GTFAWAY FROM ME was pretty damn intentful.
Intent. It wasn’t Fortitude and Will. It was Fortitude, Will, and Intent. It was a triforce, not a… duoforce or whatever.
So if Intent was right there with Fortitude and Will, what was its purpose? Fortitude was the tank, Will was the expression… Intent was the direction? The goal? Wait. There was something there, I could taste it.
The next part of Pookie’s advice, ‘Protection, autonomy. Dominion of self over yourself’.
What the hell was that supposed to mean? Protection? I thought over it a bit but when it refused to reveal its secrets I moved onto ‘autonomy and dominion of self over yourself’. Autonomy, that’s… I was seriously resisting just purchasing Aura to skip all of this crap but doubted that I could even afford it at this point, well actually, maybe I could.
I realized that there were several zombies ahead of me and zigzagged through them before continuing on. Maybe I’d wait until I was somewhere safe-ish to do Feat cost-calculations.
If I was going to think, I needed to see. I couldn’t think and simultaneously have most of my vision filled with blue boxes.
As the scenery continued to blur my mind drifted back to my last thoughts, ‘protection, autonomy, dominion of self… over yourself’.
I was tossing those three words in my head for a while and combined with a few attempts to put a layer of Will over myself… didn’t work out great. I just ended up wasting Fortitude and the freeway was fast approaching and clearly visible now. The road underneath me had even turned back into asphalt at some point. The bike chain snapped, dammit, not again.
This was the third bike I’d gone through. I guess they weren’t built with the amount of force or speed I was putting them through. I maintained my speed as I approached the on-ramp and a sinking feeling entered my stomach as I wove between crashed and abandoned cars. The bike lost speed and I dismounted and dropped it to the ground as I neared the end of the on ramp.
There were cars… EVERYWHERE. I wove my steps between, over, and through the mess of crashed cars to cross the final distance onto the freeway proper.