"It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up." — Vince Lombardi
The Blood-Brute came over the dune line at dusk, and Joel’s first observation was that nobody had ever mentioned how fast it could move.
The borrowed memories supplied the classification because every child of Caelmont learned the elites of the First Stratum the way other children learned nursery rhymes.
A Blood-Brute, Level 8, the pack master of the northern Barrens, and it looked like evolution had taken a gorilla, a rhinoceros, and a personal grudge, and merged all three onto a single payroll.
It stood just under three meters tall on two backward-jointed legs, with a hide the color of dried blood stretched over slabs of muscle that shifted like cargo under a tarp.
Its skull was crowned with a ridge of black horn, its arms were longer than Joel was tall, and in its right fist it carried a weapon that Joel’s
eye identified, with distant professional horror, as the femur of something that must have been truly enormous in life, worn smooth by years of percussive maintenance work.
It crested the dune, planted the femur in the sand, and surveyed the field of sixty-nine missing employees, and Joel watched it do the arithmetic.
’Sixty-nine carcasses,’ he thought, calmly cataloguing his own heartbeat. ’Somewhere in this monster’s tiny skull, a middle manager has just discovered the entire stockroom is missing, and it has come down to the floor to speak with the night shift personally.’
[Ding!]
[Hostile detected: Blood-Brute (Lv. 8, Elite).]
[System Note: Running is also a strategy.]
He read the note with genuine appreciation, because the system had developed a personality somewhere between a dealer and a disapproving insurance adjuster, and it was rapidly becoming his favorite coworker in two worlds.
He ran the numbers anyway, and the numbers said that the Brute was faster than him in open sand, that his Undying Vigor had fifty-four minutes left on the meter, and that the Wheel paid its highest rate to survivors of statistically superior entities.
’Fine,’ Joel decided, planting the butt of his spear in the ash. ’The customer wants to file a complaint. I will take it at the counter.’
The Brute opened the negotiation by crossing forty meters of sand in what his eyes insisted was three steps.
The speed was insane, because nothing that size should have moved like a whip-crack wearing a blood-red coat, and Joel’s academy reflexes chose that exact moment to remind him that he was a support class with a fence post.
He abandoned dignity immediately and kicked a huge sheet of loose ash into the thing’s face as it closed, because pearl-buried eyes were eyes no matter how elite the monster, and a blinded charge was a charge he could sidestep and counter.
The Brute closed its eyes before the ash arrived.
It did not slow down, did not flinch, and did not care, because the elites of this floor had survived long enough to know every trick that bled, and Joel’s clever blinding cloud turned out to be the single most anticipated move in the Brute’s entire playbook.
It read his sidestep through the sand, adjusted its swing with the casual accuracy of a man swatting a fly, and the femur caught him across the chest at full extension.
Joel left the ground with several of his ribs traveling inward, and the world went white and rotating, and he landed in the ash fifteen meters away with blood in his mouth and a strong internal conviction that his heart had just been introduced to one of his own vertebrae.
He knew the anatomy of the injury even as he lay there tasting it, because a pharmacist could diagnose his own pneumothorax from the inside, and the diagnosis was that the Brute had caved in the left side of his ribcage with one swing, and that a fraction more force would have pulped the cardiac muscle behind it.
’That,’ he thought, through the white, ’was the strongest customer review I have ever received.’
Then the healing arrived, and it arrived with the specific enthusiasm of a x10,000 refund.
Heat flooded his thorax, and Joel lay in the sand and listened to his own skeleton conduct itself, because his ribs snapped back into alignment with a sequence of wet percussive cracks like knuckles cracking in a stairwell, and the bone that had been leaning on his heart withdrew politely, and torn intercostal muscle re-knit itself in seconds while the blood in his mouth thinned and cleared.
The pain did not so much vanish as get processed at a speed no pain had ever been processed before, and Joel stood up out of his own crater roughly nine seconds after being hit hard enough to kill three of him.
The Blood-Brute had come over to collect its meal, and it stopped with the femur half-raised.
It leaned its huge horned skull forward over the healed boy, sniffed him once, and prodded him in the sternum with the femur the way a quality inspector prods a product that has failed to die.
Sixty years of hunting had taught this animal exactly what a crushed chest did to humans.
’You poor creature,’ Joel thought, already moving. ’You have met a customer who returns every purchase.’
The spear was still in his hands, because his grip had been rebuilt eleven times today, the Brute’s skull was tilted down and forward with its eye level with his own, still waiting for an explanation.
In the webnovels he had read on Earth, this was the moment where the hero shouted the name of his attack at the top of his lungs, and Joel had privately always considered that a waste of good breath, but he owed the genre something for the last two days.
"Thrust," he said flatly, and put the Rift-Iron spear through the Brute’s eye and into its brain.
The elite died the way elites apparently die, which was enormously, swaying on its backward-jointed legs for a long second before crashing into the ash.
Joel stood in the falling grey snow of it and breathed, and his rebuilt ribs did not even complain about the breathing.
[Ding!]
[Blood-Brute (Lv. 8, Elite) eliminated.]
[Massive EXP gained.]
[Level Up! You are now Level 8.]
[+1 Free Attribute Point allocated to Physique (forced adaptation).]
[+0.4 Physique detected. Micro-adaptation logged.]
[Lethal encounter survived against a statistically superior entity. The Wheel acknowledges your gamble.]
[+2 Fate Points Earned. Current Balance: 3.]
Joel read the balance twice, and he sat down on the dead elite’s shoulder, and he laughed for the first time since arriving in this world, a short and genuinely amused sound that resounded oddly across the silent basin.
He had woken up two days ago with a poisoned body, a cheating girlfriend, and a best friend with a sword and poor impulse control, and the Wheel had now paid him three chips to survive all of it, which was, by any pharmacist’s arithmetic, the best malpractice settlement in history.
Somewhere far above, in a plaza he would never see again tonight, a fat bookmaker was paying out a fortune on the Carrow F-rank, and Joel genuinely hoped that the old woman with three teeth had put a little money on the grey boy after all.
He harvested by torchlight, because an elite was not a Crawler.
[Ding!]
[Item Discovered]
Name: Rift-Core (Standard)
Grade: Uncommon
Effect: Contains concentrated Spire energy. Valuable.
[System Note: the first item today that is not a body part or a stick.]
He also inspected the femur, out of respect, and the system declined to even price it for him, noting only that its wielder’s grip strength had exceeded the spear’s structural rating, which brought his attention to his own weapon at last.
[Item Status]
Name: Rift-Iron Spear (Standard Issue)
Durability: 6/80.
[System Note: the pointed stick has almost finished pointing.]
That note stopped being funny very quickly, because Joel sat in the ash beside the dead elite and did the accounting for the day, and the accounting exposed the actual flaw in his build.
His Physique had climbed from 9 to 18.4, his healing had carried him through a crushed ribcage, and his survivability was frankly illegal, but his damage output was still an F-rank spear technique and a fence post with six points of durability left.
The Blood-Brute had nearly killed him not because it was fast, but because he had needed the thing to stand still and be confused for two entire seconds in order to kill it, and the next elite would not necessarily offer him a quality inspection.
’I am very difficult to kill and very slow to kill anything,’ he concluded, pulling up the profile. ’That is a tank with no cannon, and the buff runs out in forty minutes.’
[========== STATUS PROFILE =========]
Name: Joel
Level: 8
Class: [Flesh-Guide] (F)
Fate Points: 3
[--- Core Attributes ---]
Strength: 11
Agility: 14
Physique: 18.4
Mana: 4 / 4
[--- Active Skills ---]
• Thrust (Common) - Lv. 3
[--- Passive Skills ---]
• Flesh Mending (F): accelerates natural recovery. Negligible.
• Undying Vigor: active, 39 minutes remaining.
[--- Inventory ---]
• Rift-Iron Spear (Standard Issue), failing.
• Rift-Core (Fragment) x46.
• Rift-Core (Standard) x1.
• Sinew Cord: 12 meters.
[=================================]
Joel gathered his loot, walked out of the basin with a spear that was dying faster than its owner, and found a crack in the black rock half a kilometer south.
A cave the wind had carved narrow and deep, with a floor of dry stone and a single entrance he could defend.
He dragged dead Crawler chitin across the opening to hide the light, sat down against the cold wall, and looked at the balance of three Fate Points glowing in the dark.
The wheel waited behind his eyes, patient as always, and tonight he intended to buy a cannon.