"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." — Abraham Lincoln
Joel Carrow had never once in either of his lives made a large purchase without checking the inventory first, so he sat in the cold dark of the cave and did the accounting before he spent a single chip.
The barricade of Crawler chitin held across the entrance, the ash fell silently outside, and the pale blue screen lit the rock around him like a very low-wattage reading lamp.
His day had ended with three Fate Points, one dead elite, and a body that had been broken and rebuilt more times than any seventeen-year-old should be able to say, and he reviewed all of it the way he used to review a chart at shift change, line by line.
He found it within a minute, because he already knew where it was.
The Blood-Brute had died for one reason, and that reason was that it had leaned over to inspect a meal that refused to stay dead, and it had gifted him two confused seconds at eye level.
The Stratum Boss would not be gifting him anything. The borrowed memories put the Gore-Ape Chieftain at the heart of the Barrens, a Level 15 monstrosity with four arms and a camp of armored Brutes around it, and nothing in that description suggested a creature that paused for quality inspections.
Against a target like that, his survivability merely determined how long the beating would last, and his damage output determined whether the beating ever ended, and the ledger said the beating would outlast him.
’In pharmacology terms,’ Joel thought, ’I am an excellent IV drip with no active ingredient. The tank is built, the cannon does not exist, and the buff has already run out.’
The system chose that exact moment to confirm it.
[Ding!]
[Undying Vigor has expired.]
[Host has returned to baseline mortality.]
[System Note: it was fun while it lasted.]
He flexed his hands in the dark and felt the truth of it, because the fingertip scars from the afternoon were still there now, healing at the speed of ordinary flesh instead of the speed of miracles.
His Physique of 18.4 and his passive Flesh Mending would carry him through minor wounds, and the Wheel could always sell him another round of regeneration if the math demanded it, but regeneration was a defense.
He needed an active ingredient, and the menu had three options.
Option B, Cellular Regeneration, was pointless while he sat unwounded in a cave.
Option C, Body Evolution, was a long-term project, and an expensive one, and his Strength of 11 was not the emergency.
Option A was Skill Proficiency, and unlike yesterday he actually owned a skill to multiply, because Thrust had climbed to Level 3 across eighty-one corpses, and a multiplier applied to a Level 3 skill was decades of training arriving in a single installment.
The multiplier itself was random, and that was fine, because multiplication was compounding, and compounding had been the one miracle that pharmacists had always believed in without irony.
Even a modest roll would take a Lv. 3 technique past mastery and into whatever came after mastery, and what came after mastery was, if the webnovels of Earth had taught him anything, the part where the skill stopped being a skill and started being a problem for the physics of the world.
’Spin,’ Joel thought, and he pushed a point across the felt.
[Ding!]
[Fate Point Consumed. The Wheel of Fate spins...]
Click... click... click... click... clack.
[Result: x5,000 Multiplier Achieved.]
Half of yesterday’s miracle.
[Ding!]
[Multiplier x5,000 Locked.]
[Please select an application for Fate Energy:]
[A) Skill Proficiency - (Apply to a known skill or unlearned Skill Book)]
[B] Cellular Regeneration - (Apply to physical trauma for instant/sustained healing)]
[C) Body Evolution - (Apply to genetic structure for permanent stat/trait mutation)]
[Awaiting User Input...]
’A,’ Joel answered. ’Target: Thrust.’
[Selection A Confirmed: Skill Proficiency.]
[Target: ’Thrust’ (Common) - Lv. 3.]
[Applying x5,000 Proficiency...]
The injection did not begin as pain, because it began as curriculum.
His fingers twitched through a grip adjustment that he had never learned, and then his wrist rolled the spear shaft through a rotation that belonged to somebody with thirty years of experience.
Joel understood that the system was not teaching him the way an academy taught, because the system was installing, and it installed the way a flood installs water.
Ten thousand repetitions of a simple thrust arrived as a single remembered afternoon. Then ten thousand more arrived, corrected, with a drill instructor’s phantom bark attached to every one of them.
He remembered a training yard in the rain that he had never stood in, and a sparring hall with a cracked floor that he had never bled on, and his shoulders drilled guards in the dark against opponents made entirely of muscle memory.
Decades poured into a seventeen-year-old skull and the pressure built behind his eyes.
His nose started bleeding at some point during the second rush, and he held a sleeve against it and stayed seated, because the download was non-negotiable now and the only way out was through.
Somewhere in the flood he understood why the heroes in the webnovels never mentioned side effects, because side effects did not fit on a triumphant page, and he filed a quiet complaint with the entire genre while a forty-year career in the spear arts finished writing itself into his cerebellum.
Then the flood stopped all at once, and the silence inside his skull rang like a struck bell, and the system spoke into the ringing.
[Ding!]
[’Thrust’ has reached MAX Level.]
[Proficiency overflow detected. Skill is mutating to accommodate excess Fate Energy...]
[Ding! Skill Mutated!]
[You have learned: ’Meteor Piercer’ (Rare).]
[Meteor Piercer: accumulates kinetic momentum through footwork and form, then releases it through the weapon in a single thrust, bypassing a portion of the target’s physical defense. No mana cost. Cooldown: none.]
[Cost: structural strain on host body and weapon.]
Joel read the last line twice. The technique now living in his nerves was grandmaster-grade, and the body executing it was factory stock, and a cannon mounted on a factory chassis did exactly what the mount allowed and no more.
He slept for two hours against the cave wall after that, because the install had emptied him like a double shift.
He ran the quality check at dawn, at the cave mouth, on a half-buried boulder the size of a washing machine.
The form assembled itself without his input, which was the strangest sensation of the entire morning, because his feet had already begun the accumulation before his brain had finished deciding to attack a rock.
His hips rotated through the drilled sequence, every joint aligning along a line that three phantom lifetimes had burned into him, and the spear came forward as a single release of everything the rotation had gathered.
The air cracked like a whip, the impact point vanished into a spray of powdered stone, and the boulder split into three pieces with fracture lines running back through solid rock.
Joel stood in the settling dust with his right shoulder screaming at him, because the discharge had wrenched the joint at a load his Strength of 11 had never agreed to carry, and his passive Flesh Mending began addressing the sprain at the speed of ordinary flesh, which was to say, slowly and with no sense of urgency.
[Ding!]
[Meteor Piercer executed (x1). Target destroyed.]
[Kinetic discharge: 11,200 units. Host structural tolerance: 4,000 units.]
[Warning: recurrent discharge will cause recurring micro-injury at current Strength.]
[System Note: the cannon has been installed. The mount is still factory stock.]
’Noted,’ Joel thought, rolling the aching shoulder. ’So I farm the mount next, and the farm pays me to do it.’
The spear had opinions of its own by then.
[Item Status]
Name: Rift-Iron Spear (Standard Issue)
Durability: 2/80.
[System Note: the pointed stick would like to retire.]
He sat down on the rubble and opened his field kit of sinew cord and Crawler chitin, and for half an hour he worked like a pharmacist splitting a pill, binding the splintering shaft with tight cord and grafting chitin plates along the stress line until the weapon resembled something a survivalist would be arrested for carrying.
The system reviewed his craftsmanship with visible reluctance.
[Ding!]
[Field Repair logged. Durability: 2/80 → 16/80.]
[System Note: congratulations. You have reinvented the splint.]
[========== STATUS PROFILE =========]
Name: Joel
Level: 8
Class: [Flesh-Guide] (F)
Fate Points: 2
[--- Core Attributes ---]
Strength: 11
Agility: 14
Physique: 18.4
Mana: 4 / 4
[--- Active Skills ---]
• Meteor Piercer (Rare) - Lv. 1: channels accumulated momentum into a single armor-defying thrust. Strains host and weapon.
[--- Passive Skills ---]
• Flesh Mending (F): accelerates natural recovery. Negligible.
[--- Inventory ---]
• Rift-Iron Spear (Standard Issue, splinted), failing politely.
• Rift-Core (Fragment) x46.
• Rift-Core (Standard) x1.
• Sinew Cord: 9 meters.
[================================]
Joel Carrow stepped out of the cave into the grey snowfall of the Barrens and looked north, toward the heart of the stratum where the ash thinned into packed red earth and every hunting memory in his borrowed skull had always turned back.
The Chieftain’s camp sat in that direction, with its guards, its walls and its four-armed landlord, and he now owned exactly one attack that could introduce itself to a Level 15 hide, and a battered spear that would argue about it.
He had spent the night sharpening the axe, and now he set off across the dunes to go and meet the tree.