Chapter 109: Pure Timing

Sean tumbled down the stairs, wrapped up in the unloving arm of a guy who had made it clear he wanted him dead. Worse, that arm wasn’t idle. The man didn’t have the best leverage in the world, sure, but he was actively and angrily working on killing Sean by means of some sort of claw weapon that ripped through Sean’s skin as he flexed and unflexed his hands.

And yet, somehow, it wasn’t as big of a deal as it should have been. Sean had been in a lot of fights now, and had somehow gotten a sense of how big of a threat individual enemies posed to him, one that was usually accurate after the first several seconds of battle.

This guy was strong, sure, and Sean wasn’t wearing armor, which made it that much worse. But the level of damage he was taking wasn’t that big of a deal, anyway. It hurt like hell and there was a possibility that if he couldn’t get away the damage would add up to a level that actually meant trouble. For now, though? He was fine.

On the third to last stair, Sean kicked hard, flipping as he pushed away from the stairs, throwing himself and the man out into the hallway at the same time he spun to put his enemy on the floor-side of the collision rather than bashing into the concrete himself. It wouldn’t hurt the guy, at least not seriously, but impacts were impacts. Without a skill to absorb them, physics still reigned.

Sean heard the guy make a forced exhalation as they hit the tile, and felt his arms slacken very slightly. He threw everything he had into pushing his arms out, managing to break the hold enough to throw an elbow back at the guy’s ribs. He heard one of them crack from the force. Whatever else the guy was, it wasn’t tanky, apparently. The pain of the broken rib gave Sean enough space to get entirely out of the hold, where he scrambled to his feet and back to the stairs just in time to keep the man from running.

It all seemed a bit too easy, until Sean realized he was experiencing the benefits of his home-base stat increase, probably starting when they broke the border of the shanktuary

“Oh, hey. Good to see you again,” Sean said. “I think there was a bit of a mixup with my payment from the last job.”

“Screw you. Do you know how hard it was to find those eggs? They don’t just lay them on the ground. I had to mine them. Now the whole mine is locked down, and the police have the eggs. What the fuck kind of job was that?”

“You didn’t exactly give me full information.” Sean pulled the Mystereamer out of his weapons bag, advancing on the man, who kept a defiant look in his eye even as he backed up. “And I notice you aren’t wearing that respirator now. That was a lie, too?”

“Sure. Makes things a bit easier on me when one of my flunkies gets caught. The cops here fixate on the most obvious thing in the description. Nobody looks for the respirator-less respirator guy.”

Sean eyed the guy’s hands at the same time he did a quick survey of his own body to try and figure out if he was poisoned. Claws screamed, “load us up with toxins” to him. But he felt fine and he had no system notifications to speak of telling him otherwise.

“No poison?”

“No. Why would I? You are a new integration from a shitty planet. You aren’t supposed to be this strong. Why are you this strong?”

“Oh, you know. Lots of day labor.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true. I live on apples and work. Does wonders for the physique.”

The man was glancing around the hallway now, looking for possible escapes. Knowing there weren’t any, Sean let him glance.

“Don’t think I’m fooled, though,” Sean said, rubbing the rapidly closing claw marks through his now-ruined work shirt. “You didn’t come here for that. I had no idea where to find you. I wasn’t any danger to you. And you weren’t that pissed about a botched job, especially since you knew it wasn’t intentional. What’s the real reason?”

“The real reason? That’s the real reason. I told you.”

To this day, Sean didn’t love combat. He could imagine some people did, but for him, it was cardio mixed with even more pain than what cardio normally provided. He didn’t like being in danger, and he didn’t like being injured.

He tolerated it because he didn’t have any choice. But all that dislike for combat came with the advantage of spending a lot of time thinking about where exactly he liked getting hit the least, and the kind of injuries that had hurt him the most. Armed with that knowledge, Sean knew what to do.

“Dammit!” the man screamed. He now had a spear sticking out from underneath his kneecap. Sean had taken some injuries there in the past, especially during the competition race. He found they were a perfect mixture of pain, killing mobility with all the fiery agony of a flesh wound and all the sickening nausea of a bone break. Whatever armor-piercing damage the Spectral Sticker was doing was just a bonus.

“Yeah, that’s a good trick. Glad I learned that one,” Sean said. “Do you want to talk now? I have plenty of sharp things.”

“Okay, fine. I’m a thief, right? I steal things. I have skills related to stealing things. You understand that much?”

“Got it.”

“The skill said you had something worth stealing. That’s all. I don’t get more details than that. But something worth stealing on a newly integrated being means weird loot. Apocalypse loot. People pay a lot for that.”

“Probably this, then.” Sean held up the Mysterreamer as he lied. “Most valuable thing I own.”

“Oh, not by a long shot. This base alone… damn. Why are you so strong?”

“I drink a lot of water.”

The man glared at him, reaching down to pull the spear out of his leg.

“So I can leave?” he said. “You shouldn’t turn me into the cops, you know. It will make them suspicious.”

“Nope. I think you need to stay…”

The man rushed Sean, moving faster than the human eye could track. But Sean’s eyes were no longer entirely human in most ways. He could track every inch of progress the man made, especially after dumping a hard time charge into slowing him down. Sean had so much time, in fact, that he decided to try something new.

Hard Time now allowed for him to clad his weapons or armor in energy, something he could kind of do, but sucked at. It took enough power that he hadn’t wanted to use it in combat, even the shitty, low-level animal-extermination type combats he had been in since coming to this new world.

But here, in his own house, with a guy he had already dominated who was attacking him again anyway? It seemed like the time.

He coated his dagger with the pure, raw energy of time, making it look for all the world like he had dipped it in Pepto-Bismol. Then he stabbed. The stab itself caught respirator guy in the heart, which should have been enough to kill him by itself. With the time energy in the mix, things got weirder than that. Much weirder.

The moment Sean’s stab hit, the man stopped. Sean braced himself against any counterattacks the man might through, only to find he was just sitting there on the end of his dagger, limp. When Sean pulled his dagger out to strike again, the man just flopped over. It wasn’t weird that he had died, exactly. But why had he done it so fast?

A system notification popped up to helpfully explain the weirdness.

New Skill Attained! (Timed Strikes)

You have clad your weapon in pure, unfocused time energy. Just as you learned from hobbit riddles, time can do a lot of things. It’s one of the most powerful forces in the universe, sure, but it’s endlessly versatile. In the hands of a master, it can accomplish powerful magics far beyond the reckoning of the average mortal.

You, however, didn’t screw with any of that potential. Instead, you just slathered it on your weapons like a thick layer of butter over a dill pickle. In case that subtext is lost on you, it’s gross. It’s gross how you do things. Be better.

All that said, now your strikes deliver all their effects in a much shorter amount of time. And I mean all of them. Would they have bled for a certain amount of time? They are now missing that much blood. Would it have killed them? They are now dead. All the pain is condensed into one super-sharp jab, so long as you put enough time energy into the blow. If you didn’t, you still get some of the effect.

What this means, in a practical sense, is that all the future effects of a wound are moved forward in time somewhat, gathering around the moment the wound was inflicted. All that blood loss, poisoning, and pain you planned on occurring over several seconds or minutes is now happening all at once.

It’s sort of neat, at least to the extent a completely unrefined use of a beautiful force of nature can be neat.

Oh, neat. Probably. Sean could see a lot of ways this could go well for him, but it also sounded pretty janky and undesigned compared to most of the stuff the system put together. If all the effects were delivered at once, did that mean the person was still left with a cut afterward? If not, it would ruin his ability to build up cuts and injuries that hurt someone’s ability to move. It was the kind of thing he’d need to test.

For now, he had a corpse to deal with. He envied guys from the fantasy novels he had read pre-apocalypse because they pretty much always just left corpses laying wherever. If he did that, he’d have rotted bad employer juice all over his floors before he could say “bad living environment”. And that wouldn’t be okay.

The guy did have some neat stuff on him at least. Money was the most normal thing, and although he didn’t carry an absolute fortune, Sean managed to get paid for his daily work about ten times over, which he felt was fitting. If he was going to have surprise job duties involving the murder of an entire person, he wanted to get comped for that.

Other stuff was weirder. The little hand-blades were basically useless to him. Maybe he could have sold them under normal circumstances, but he really, really didn’t feel like dealing with the kinds of questions that would generate, especially since he guessed the police were now keeping a closer eye on him than they had before. The armor the guy wore under his clothes looked decent, but nowhere near as good as his own Brett-built super-suit.

That left a few dubious looking potions, some things that might have been cool if he had any idea what they did, and a pile of what appeared to be galactic fake IDs. For the weirder stuff, Sean would have had no way of identifying them under normal circumstances. But today had been a weird day, and normal circumstances these weren’t.

Baser Instincts

Someone decided to do the whole home invader thing. For a moment, you were the protagonist of your very own Lifetime movie, forced into a corner with nowhere to run. But you reached deep inside, found a deep source of feminine rage, and fought back to protect what was yours.

And guess what? That comes with pay, of a sort. Bases grow as they are used well. Defense counts for that.

Reward: 500 Base Upgrade Points