Book 2 - Chapter 17: A Good Friend

Sean’s first attempts at throwing the apples weren’t great. They were sticky, which was something he could deal with, but it made throwing with his gloved hands very, very hard. However, the same wasn’t true of his spear. The tooth that made up the tip of the spear could pierce the apples just enough to hold them in place and Sean whipped them loose by swinging the spear as hard as he could.

The effect of this wasn’t entirely unlike those tennis-ball launchers people with poor throwing abilities used to exercise their dogs, in that it essentially extended his arm length to give him truly ridiculous multipliers on the speed of the apples. Thanks to SAV, he could somehow use his spear as an apple-flinger.

But even with SAV, the apples were impossible to aim outside of getting them to fly reasonably straight and level. Since he couldn’t actually see what he was aiming at, this hardly mattered. For the last minute or so, he had been running like a jackrabbit, zigzagging through the trees, and turning every now and again to send an apple on a return path roughly the same direction an attack had come from.

It seemed that one more thing that the squid had miscalculated was Sean’s speed. The boxers had been exceptionally quick in melee, but not all that fast of sprinters. The archers hardly moved during combat at all. So, Tentacles had probably banked on Sean being both slow and badly hurt at this point in its pursuit, and it would have been right if not for Sean’s alchemy. The kind of speed Sean could achieve under fire was arms and legs above the monsters they had been fighting.

Not that it was a huge increase at this point, but having leveled at the end of the last fight meant he was just slightly faster than before as well.

Sean Lawrence
Level 37 Human (Prisoner of Time)
EXP: 122,000/6,080,000

STR: 20 (24)
DEX: 53 (55)
VIT: 25 (27)
SAV: 63 (64)
MAG: 89 (95)

—

Abilities: Shankmaster LV7, Adhesives Mastery LV4, Stitch Up LV6, Hard Time LV3, Cellblock Brewmaster LV5
Achievements: E-Raticator, Uncommon De-nominator, Three Spectral Bears (Active, Situational stealth in dark, natural environments), Make-shift Ranger (Active, improved stealth in wooded areas), Forest Dragon-kin, Mini-boss Massacre, High-Proof, Late-Start Long-Shot, Junkyard David, Front-yard Defender, Chaotic Alloy

Sean had to throw out his assumption that the squid couldn’t move very fast. Whether his opponent was warping to him, flying or just plain much better at running than he had let on, the bastard was keeping up. So although Sean appeared to be maintaining at least some distance between him and the invisible enemy, the squid’s movement ability was good enough that any attempts to escape hadn’t worked.

Not that he really wanted to escape. Even if he could, it meant that he’d be getting stalked by an invisible enemy for the rest of his time in this forest. He could probably hunt at night, but even if the squid was telling the truth about the forced-sleep-in-the-dark elements of his physiology, Sean imagined he could probably still stealth before passing out.

That left hunting.

I swear I’m going to put this lying bastard down. One way or another.

And then, finally, one of his poorly aimed apples was knocked down. It stopped midair, as if it had hit a wall. It was a carbon copy of when the squid blocked apples thrown by the Tells.

Sean ducked another shimmering wave of energy, then put absolutely everything he had into an overarm swing of his spear. The sheer force of the swing left him reeling and vulnerable, almost stumbling after the spear as it slammed into the ground. The apple, however, had serious, serious heat on it, to the point where Sean would later swear he heard the Doppler effect in play as it rocketed away from him.

Being off balance mattered much less than it should have, as the impact of the apple on the squid’s face was so spectacular that he was also staggered. His invisibility cut out suddenly, revealing his head whipped back so far that he had to lift one of his weird, sticky feet forward to keep from getting knocked over entirely.

Sean recovered first, raised his shield, and charged.

At first, the Sean’s serpentine approach was enough to dodge most of the squid’s psychic blade attacks, but within a few strides he closed enough of the gap to make himself much, much easier to hit. By the time he was in striking distance, he was getting absolutely shredded. Deep cuts opened up all over his body as the squid launched rapid-fire, unaimed strikes that very much couldn’t miss. Sean ignored them.

The shield was just enough, for now, to protect his chest, neck, and face. His armor wasn’t blocking everything, but it was doing an exceptional job at keeping him alive nonetheless. Tanking the pain, Sean stabbed his spear straight down, piercing the squid just to the side of its ugly, terrible neck.

For the first time since Sean had met him, the squid opened his mouth, screeching like a wounded animal. His tentacles started wriggling so fast they made an audible vibrating noise before he blasted Sean back with a wave of individual energy.

FURY. You cannot kill this entity without killing yourself, entity Sean Lawrence.

ANGER. You will have no other opportunities to try.

Sean’s mouth was filling with blood from the blast and the subsequent impact. His eardrums felt like they had burst. As blades of invisible energy started cutting at his legs, he scrambled and ducked behind a tree. Staying there a second, he waited just long enough for Stitch Up to stabilize whatever damage to his ears was throwing off his balance.

It wasn’t surprising that the squid had also had dangerous secrets he had been hiding. It would have been weirder if he hadn’t. A suicide-switch explosion in response to damage wouldn’t have been Sean’s first guess as to what those secrets were, but it wasn’t entirely outside of the realm of strange events he expected at this point.

As his equilibrium returned, Sean shook his head.

All right, you calamari fuck. Let’s see who runs out of secrets first.

While the squid had been observing Sean fight, he had also been studying his new companion. He didn’t know exactly what senses or biological processes those little tentacles handled, but he was reasonably sure they were at least the source of the telekinetic powers that the squid influenced the world with.

The tentacles were always wriggling, but they moved much, much faster during combat, and that speed tracked closely with how intensely the squid was attacking. Given the self-defense explosion the squid had managed to put out and the fact that Sean had no idea how many shots the monster could take, he was very motivated to stop those little eels from wriggling.

Sean dropped his pack on the ground. He wouldn’t need it for this next part, and it was almost entirely empty of things he needed, anyway. Fishing a bottle out of the bag and wheeling out from behind the tree, he brought his leg up, planted it in an exaggerated pitcher’s wind-up, and chucked the bottle as hard as he could. With his STR and DEX as high as they were, that was more than hard enough.

The squid was incredible at knocking down thrown objects, to the point where Sean suspected he had a skill for just that. The earlier apple had made it through, but likely only because it came so soon and so very fast after another block. He was almost entirely sure that this bottle would be intercepted, but that was okay.

In that last batch of apple-glue making, he had been using whatever bottles were at hand. The fact that he had used an old sauerkraut jar for the experiment that produced the Sticky Apple Mash hadn’t been important at the time. Now it was vital because sauerkraut jars were glass, and glass didn’t absorb shocks like apples or bodies did. When up against a sudden invisible-force blast that decelerated it from a hundred-mile-an-hour velocity to zero in a split second, glass shattered.

It didn’t matter how good the squid was at blocking when it was getting completely misted with an atomized mixture of glass powder, sharp shards, and sticky applesauce concoction. Sean hadn’t skimped on the apples or glue for that jar, and the contents were sufficient to leave almost the whole upper half of the squid’s body dripping with the stuff.

Okay, little glue. Dry.

The Apple Mash was an intent-based glue, the system said, something his Adhesives Mastery communicated with. His own little sticky, gross telekinesis, as it were. Even before he commanded the glue to harden, he could see the tentacles beginning to slow as they stuck to themselves and the sides of the squid slightly. Once he asked the glue to cure, it almost immediately began to solidify into a honey-colored solid. The process was even sped along by every single application of Hard Time Sean had managed to recover.

The tentacles didn’t just slow down. They stopped, encased in Sean’s refuse-amber like the world’s grossest dinosaur mosquito. Almost immediately, Sean’s head was filled with communications from the squid, infused heavily with an emotion it had never sent along before.

Pleading. Pleading. Entity Sean Lawrence, I request mercy.

Sean decided, all things considered, that he didn’t feel much like granting that request.

—

“Long day?”

Brett had glanced up from his workbench, where he was hard at work filing a basketball-sized chunk of metal to powder, to take in Sean in all his mostly-healed, shredded-armor, apple-and-squid-juice soaked glory.

Say what you will about the guy, but he knows when to keep a conversation short.

“Yup. A pretty long day.” Sean tossed his pack over by the workbench. “There are a bunch of arrowheads, boxing gloves, hats, and squid parts in there if you want to convert them to something more useful. I’m going to take a shower.”

Sean walked into the shower fully clothed. He figured starting that way would save time.

An hour later, he was both reasonably clean and incredibly sleepy.

“Updates can wait?” Sean asked, walking past Brett towards his bed as quickly as he could without seeming actively rude. He plopped one of the full-days-ration apples on the table, and Brett immediately picked it up and started chewing on it absentmindedly before waving Sean off.

“Updates can wait. The big one was staying alive. The rest is details, I hope.”

“Something like that. You are okay?”

“I’m busy. We can talk about it in the morning. I had some interesting ideas while you were out earning me achievements.”

Sean nodded, too tired to dig into that can of worms at the moment. Brett went back to single-mindedly grating his lump of metal into sand. In the storage room, Sean had just enough presence of mind to put together several apple-and-sports-drink potions to steep overnight before he laid down.

Brett was a good guy, he decided. Not only was he here to help, he hadn’t complained about the terrible conditions a single time. He could die at any moment, for all either of them knew, but he hadn’t hung the moral weight of that on Sean’s shoulders at all. He was just a good, decent dude, doing whatever he could to make their shared mission work out.

Sean had tried to make a new friend, and it hadn’t worked out. But it was good to know that whatever else happened, he had at least one.