Book 2 - Chapter 10: Octopus-Man

Sean was so far into the process of admitting that he didn’t really understand how his leveling worked that he didn’t even think about it much anymore. Cowering under a Tell, he felt the gnawing feeling of a pending level and checked it out. Not only did he have another six stat points to work with, but both his healing and alchemy skills had kicked up a notch.

Sean Lawrence

Level 36 Human (Prisoner of Time)

EXP: 37,800/3,040,000

Free Points: 6

STR: 20 (24)

DEX: 50 (52)

VIT: 25 (27)

SAV: 60 (61)

MAG: 85 (91)

—

Abilities: Shankmaster LV7, Adhesives Mastery LV4, Stitch Up LV6, Hard Time LV3, Cellblock Brewmaster LV5

Achievements: E-Raticator, Uncommon De-nominator, Three Spectral Bears, Make-shift Ranger (Active, imrpoved stealth in wooded areas), Forest Dragon-kin, Mini-boss Massacre, High-Proof, Late-Start Long-Shot, Junkyard David, Front-yard Defender, Chaotic Alloy

The healing skill made sense, in that he was healing from one of the worst injuries he had ever sustained. The alchemy skill, on the other hand, made no sense. He hadn’t made any new creations or anything like that. Maybe he needed to be a certain overall level before the skill would level up or that he was grinding enemies he had used for regents. Or something. If the system knew why it had chosen this moment to increase Cellblock Brewmaster’s level, it wasn’t telling.

Not that he was complaining. In the past, all his skills had only gotten better in a linear sort of way when they leveled. His adhesives skill made stuff even stickier, and his time skill did screwed-up time stuff that much better. But for the first time ever, one of his skills had evolved, or at least changed in a beneficial way that wasn’t just more-of-the-same.

Stitch Up

You’ve recovered from a variety of untreated wounds though sheer grit. You will now recover much faster after fights, and have a quick-working regeneration that kicks in during fights to keep you on your feet longer.

The strength of the regen is a function of your VIT, and works better the farther away you can get from an enemy during combat (Maximum effectiveness reached at distances of five meters or greater). In addition, ending a fight by either clearing your immediate area of foes or losing all pursuers will trigger an especially intense post-fight burst of healing that operates at ten times the speed of normal regeneration for fifteen seconds.

As soon as Sean had finished reading the description, the healing burst kicked in. He groaned as a sudden, intense wave of pain washed over him.

Hooking back up a spinal cord is a hell of a thing, I guess.

Soon enough, the pain gave way to relief. The last five seconds of the burst healing managed to close up most of his wounds to the point where he was at least pretty sure he could walk reasonably well. Shifting the Tell off him, he stood up, dusted off, and started snapping arrows out of his shield.

He’d get the apples off later. They did make the shield heavier, but he wasn’t done hunting for the day. He had spent a lot of time doing fun crafts and base upgrades lately, to the point where he had a sinking suspicion that the Apocalypse System might be getting a little bored with him. And given what he knew about the Apocalypse System in general, that wasn’t a particularly safe way for it to be.

I’ll fight bigger and bigger groups, to start out with. Three didn’t go so well, but I also didn’t do very good with the whip. If I was just a bit better at that and paid better attention, I should be able to speed run groups of two and three. That should hopefully keep it entertained.

He dumped all six of the free points from his upgrade into MAG, then jogged off into the woods. He wasn’t incredible at killing these Tells yet, maybe, but at the very least he could be interesting.

—

Sean’s luck wasn’t having any part of his plan. The next archers Sean found were groups of exactly one, and it took him hours to find them. He easily dispatched them, picking up some Tell Apples and moving on as fast as he could. When the notification hit, he couldn’t help but think that despite all the different reasons the system might have for changing things up, it was mostly just that his efforts to be exciting were too little, too late.

Zone shift!

Your attempts at clearing your zone have been effective so far. But it’s been getting a little dull, right? You’ve probably been asking yourself where the spark has gone. When did all the excitement fall out of this relationship? What's happened to how we used to be?

Well, wonder no more. Here are two fun changes to shake things up, rekindle the fire in our relationship, and help us move forward just like we did when we were two young kids just starting out in this big, crazy world.

The first change is to the zone itself. Previously, the zone stretched out into a sort of procedurally generated eternity. You could have walked forever and never found the end of it. Now it’s fifty square miles. If that sounds big still, bear in mind that on average, there’s going to be at least one Tell pretty close to striking distance from now on.

The second big change is that you are no longer alone. And I don’t mean Tells. I’ll leave that bit up to the imagination.

“Well, fuck,” Sean said, out loud this time. Not only was that the way he felt, but he wanted to make sure the system knew he was distressed. There was no use courting additional changes by looking like he didn’t mind these ones.

Beyond generally hinting that changes-of-the-bad-kind were on their way, the system didn’t give him information that changed his immediate plans. He decided if there was one thing he couldn’t afford to do at the moment, it was stop hunting. Any levels or skill upgrades he could pick up before the shit hit the fan might be the difference between life and death, and he wasn’t going to pass them up.

Whatever shenanigans the system had to do to shrink the forest, he hadn’t noticed them as they happened. But there was no denying that things had changed. Suddenly, there was an abundance of Tells to fight. Within the next hour, Sean took out three isolated Tells and one group of two. Whatever satisfaction he should have felt about easily winning against the group of two was eaten up by worry about what was to come, but it was still good experience.

He was also loading up on apples like a madman, and he couldn’t have too many of those.

It was after the group of two, looking for the next Tell, that he noticed the first big sign of the second change, charging towards him like an idiot.

You have to be kidding me. Sean thought. From the American flag shorts to the exaggerated boxing gloves, it was an incredibly silly outfit. He couldn’t completely rule out that the system had made a class like this. But it was so hard to accept that any sentient being had leaned into the concept that hard. He was actually relieved when the notification that the system was just fucking with him popped up.

Fairy Tale Underdog Come-back Boxer Man

You’ve seen these guys. They are down on their luck, making their living through a combination of grit, determination, and getting beat up at seedy underwater boxing venues. Then, through the power of love and the desire to impress their old, grizzled boxing coach, they become something more. Legends. Heroes. In this case, legends and heroes that are covered with blood and broken pieces of ribs.

These guys are melee-focused, if you didn’t catch that. Try to keep your distance if you don’t want to learn how a ruptured liver feels.

Sean instinctively dropped his shield and grabbed his darts from his belt. A flexible plastic shield wouldn’t do much good to protect him from the kind of blunt-force trauma this muscle-bound monster looked like it could put out. He’d hit it with the darts, then try to stay ahead of it with the spear. In no sense did he want to get up close and personal with the system’s new creation.

The only weird thing was that while the beast was technically charging towards him, it wasn’t exactly making a full bee-line for him. It was moving at a slight angle to his left, as if it didn’t know exactly where he was. And, then, suddenly, it started to pick up wounds. Here and there on its torso, it would pick up a shallow cut, then another one. Since this was happening several times a second, it wasn’t long before the front of the boxer was shredded with dozens and dozens of cuts.

It looked like it would go down any moment, which was when a new thing showed itself. By the trunk of a tree near Sean, there was a sudden rippling in the air as some sort of illusory bubble popped completely, revealing a tall, vaguely human shape.

Its torso and legs were more or less all right, if a little more leathery and shiny than Sean liked. Its head sat more or less necklessly on top of the torso, transitioning from the area Sean thought of as being its chin all the way to the outside of its shoulders in a gentle, slightly-slimy-looking slope.

The arms were a different story. Instead of anything resembling the forearm, bicep, and tricep arrangement Sean would have preferred, it had two relatively short and sharply tapering tentacle-like appendages that were, at the moment, wriggling wildly on its shoulders.

It hadn’t, for the moment, appeared to notice Sean. If it had, it was playing it pretty cool.

From what Sean could see, the new being was a sort of ambush predator, keeping its location a secret and laying down some sort of invisibly-sourced damage on approaching enemies until it was comfortable showing itself. It moved surprisingly slowly as it approached the boxer, still laying down cuts from some invisible power as it did.

Suddenly, it pounced. Kind of. It was more like a short-range blur of motion that Sean couldn’t quite track. The motion ended with the thing being more or less stuck to the boxer, who reacted to this by immediately twisting his body back and forth in a blur of short range hooks to the tentacle-man’s ribs.

Despite eating a lot of shots, the tentacles guy seemed to be doing pretty okay. The long-range attacks were a lot more intense from close range, and the wounds the boxer was taking went from shallow cuts to inch-deep gashes in its flesh. If Sean had to bet, the tentacle man was going to come out on top by a fair margin.

Suddenly, that margin closed. A lot. With a roar of determination, the boxer bashed his fists together and went into a much lower stance, many of his wounds closing or healing substantially as he did.

Shit. It’s a come-from-behind move. Dodge, octopus-man. Dodge.

It didn’t dodge. The boxer channelled all the potential from its crouch into one devastating uppercut that caught the tentacle-guy off guard, throwing it several feet up and out from the melee. It landed hard and wrong, and Sean thought he could hear important things breaking as it did.