Book 2 - Chapter 16: Good Deal Stickier

I’ll always be kind of thankful to that squid.

Here I was, alone in a building with no entertainment besides that weird guide, on my third shower and second nap of the day, and Sean was out there fighting for his life. I had no idea what was wrong, outside of the fact that Sean hadn’t come back in a really long time. If you asked me what was probably going wrong, I would have probably guessed he was dead, or had a broken leg, or something of that nature.

A tricky little squid bastard was not high on the list.

And then I started getting pings from the system. That’s when the blueprinter stuff started hitting. I started picking up achievements for designing items that were now being used successfully in a battle. They weren’t much, just little buffs to designing and improving stuff other people had built. It wasn’t a class skill or anything, and I figured it might just be the system’s way of keeping me informed, and keeping things dramatic.

Then they stopped, and I was bored, and the system made the mistake of giving me a fucked up Toyota engine when I finally figured out how to recycle that big dumb time-pod of his. It wouldn’t be important until later, but you don’t leave a bored old craftsman alone with that stuff and expect him to do normal things.

The part where we had so many matches was the kid’s fault. He never learned to make a fire, and I over-prepped, I guess.

The Big Book of Brett, PG 20

—

Shit. Shit. Shit. Dammit.

At least one of the archers freed themselves and started throwing apples again. After a few moments, Sean was stuck between three arrows whistling in on his tail and an entire boxer who looked suspiciously like Carl Weathers approaching from the front. Normally, he’d sidestep or dodge in some way, but he had accumulated too many broken bones to make that idea turn into reality.

Fuck it. Let’s go for broke.

Sean brought his shield into play, and while he still suspected it was too flexible to do much to protect him, he was willing to bet on it for one big push. He ran at the boxer, who had taken several good shots earlier before re-upping its own health.

As the boxer threw a power punch forward, Sean shunted his shield across his body, pushing the punch to the side as hard as he could and turning the boxer’s torso further than he had planned. He felt his ulna crack a little under the force, but the boxer was thrown just enough out of position that Sean was able to land his lead foot behind it and spin into its blind spot, keeping so close to the fighter that his armor scraped the boxer’s skin as he maneuvered into place.

All three arrows struck true. As many defenses as the boxers had against melee weapons, their fighting style had almost no answer to ranged attacks besides tanking them and continuing forward towards their targets. And, to Sean’s relief, the only enemy he had ever fought that was almost entirely immune to flinching were the garbage men. These boxers were tough, and hard to scare. But when they took damage, they jolted and flinched away from it, the same way any animal would.

That gave Sean a moment to turn. Rather than going for the legs, he put his full momentum into an uppercut stab with the Mystereamer, jamming it in under the boxer’s ribs diagonally through its rib cage. It was, frankly speaking, the shankiest shanking that he had ever shanked. The shiv stars were aligned such that the Mystereamer sunk in entirely up to the handle, held back by Sean’s own gripped fist more than the anatomy of the weapon itself.

And then it started to glow black. Some of Sean’s weapons had more reach than the Mystereamer had, and almost all of them had more pure destructive power. The reasons the Mystereamer **was still in his build these days were that it was easy to use, maneuverable, and difficult to drop accidentally. But the more important reason was that whatever features his other weapons had, and there were many, none of them brought sheer, unbridled chaos to the table like the Mystereamer **did.

Was it consistent about this? No. Could Sean plan for it? Also no. But occasionally, it shone. At this exact moment, it shone black, which wasn’t a color Sean really thought of as a possible shining hue. He had no idea what element it was, but that was normal. What was more important to him was what his stabbing target thought of it, how little they liked it, and how much room it gave him to breathe.

In this case, the boxer had no opinions on the damage type at all. Sean immediately forgave it for this, as it was reasonable for a monster to not hold an opinion when a cloud of black energy reduced it to a pile of loose, odd-smelling powder in the blink of an eye.

Sean clutched his broken shield arm to his gut as he ran back towards the archers. As he had hoped, one of them had been put out of commission by the Trash Compactor shot. The Tell that was pelting apples in his direction now was the one that he had hit with his sticky whip, and managed to shrug its way out enough to throw and shoot again.

Sean weaved in and out of the apple strikes just well enough to make it to the archer without further wounds. By the time he got there, the weight of his sudden bad day had begun to settle in, manifesting less as frustration and fear and more as a dark, primitive sort of rage.

Sean had stabbed before. Lots. But as he hugged himself into the Tell and shanked it again and again in the ribs, he realized there were aspects of stabbing he had never really appreciated as much as they deserved. It was not only a great way to get rid of problems, but also an incredibly great means of venting frustration.

The Mystereamer seemed to agree, proccing much more often than the mere statistics of the thing implied it should have. By the time he finished, the Tell was stuck to him from its own panicked homing apples. He had to unstick each one individually so it could flop limply to the ground.

That was the end of the combat-efficient monsters on the field, at least under a certain definition of Monster*.* Under other definitions, there very well might be another one Sean didn’t know about, and he moved immediately to recover his weapons in advance of that.

Before he could recover them, however, the voice in his head stopped him cold.

Gratitude. This entity has collected sufficient information on Sean Lawrence’s combat capabilities to move forward.

Sean’s head whipped around to where he had last seen the tentacle monster before it cloaked itself, only to see an empty forest.

“Where are you?” Sean yelled. “Come out.”

Satisfaction. You looked where this entity was, not where it is.

Assertion. You believe this entity cannot move while concealed.

On a hunch, Sean ducked behind a tree just in time to avoid a shimmering in the air that flew by with the speed of a launched arrow.

“Why, though? Why do this?” Sean yelled, pulling one of the bottles from his pack. “You said you wanted to help the people where you came from. I could have helped you do that, squid.”

Humor. This entity did not express a desire to help others. This entity said that others abused their power, and expressed a desire for change.

“What are you talking about, you asshole?” Sean guzzled down on his concoction of energy drink and Tell apple as quickly as he could, choking on the weird combination of lemon and apple.

Condescension. The weak desire not to be oppressed. The strong seek to oppress. This entity desires power not to eliminate authority, but to assume it.

“Great. That’s wonderful,” Sean said. He was honestly impressed that the squid had managed to cover up his hatred of Sean this long. His messages now were soaked with it, leaking into Sean’s brain in a cloud of dark, disdainful emotion. “So why kill me?”

There might be an achievement.

“Okay, fuck you too,” Sean said, shifting sideways to his feet. As if in response, a shimmering section of air slammed into the tree where he had just sat. Wherever the squid was, he had managed to move around the tree fast enough to aim an attack at Sean after only a few seconds, which meant he was either very close or much faster than he had represented.

Or both, the liar. Sean thought, angrier than ever. Before the betrayal, he had even started to like the weird, terrifying squid thing a bit. He had put himself in danger to help him. And the whole time, the bastard had just been playing a role for information on how Sean fought, trying to uncover secrets to slit his throat with.

But he hadn’t got every secret. He knew about Sean’s weapons loadout, sure. He knew about Hard Time, even if he didn’t know all the details of how it worked. And he knew how much damage Sean could take in relation to how much he could put out, his maneuverability, and how he liked to approach a fight. In one way or another, the squid had found opportunities to learn ninety percent of what Sean was about.

But even with all that, there were some things he didn’t know. He knew Sean could speed himself up, sure, but not that the skill could also slow other people down. He probably thought it was a sprint skill, something that would let Sean get in and out of battles quicker, as opposed to something he could use to control the time itself.

He had no idea that Sean could do alchemy, either. Which shouldn’t have mattered, except for the fact that the only thing Sean could have easily made on the go ended up being a big, big winner in the great mixing-shit-together lottery.

Apple-Up

Sometimes mixing stuff together just works out. And it works out better, really, when the mixture doesn’t make perfect sense. Mixing two sports drinks would have made, well, two sports drinks. But mixing a super-nutritious apple with a recovery-focused magic thirst quencher makes something a bit more than the sum of its parts.

Apple does not go great with citrus, though, as beverage flavors. This tastes like pee from a diabetic lemon. We can’t do anything about that.

Effects: Skills refresh four times as fast for one minute, then three times as fast for three minutes, and twice as fast for fifteen minutes afterwards.

Sean could feel every arrow wound on his body virtually snap shut after the first several gulps of what turned out to be a gross, weird drink. Hard Time would take a little longer to recharge, but soon enough he’d have at least a few charges of that stashed too. The squid was expecting a broken-down, injured Sean, and he ran just hunched over enough to keep up the illusion that he was still in pain.

There was no way in hell the stupid, lying octopus had any idea about Sean’s more esoteric qualities. Specifically, Sean was confident that he hadn’t shown being especially good with adhesives.

And by now, it had probably forgotten about the dozens and dozens of glue-based apples Sean had stashed in a trash bag in his backpack. One way or another, the situation was about to get a good deal stickier.