Chapter 43: The Shankturary

The night was darker than Sean remembered. As he picked his way across the garbage that now filled a good portion of the crater outside his bunker, Sean realized why. The Rathound set, starter equipment that it was, had an attribute that improved his vision in low-light environments. Now that was gone.

Like a lot of good things, night-sight was the kind of thing you didn’t really think about until it was gone, and you found yourself stepping squarely on a monster slime. With the moon covered by clouds, Sean had assumed the big round lump of goo was just another rock. Now, the moon emerged from its cover as if trying to maximize for comic timing and revealed Sean’s foot was stuck almost all the way to the uppers in one of the sticky little bastards.

Luckily, the slimes were harmless. Just surprisingly hard to get away from. He tried shaking it off, only to find that this jiggled the slime higher on his leg and gave it a better grip. Repeated stabs with Mystereamer failed to damage the slime in any way it appeared to care about. He could probably rip it off with his hands, but that would mean getting the stuff all over his gloves, and they’d be tacky forever.

The Spectral Sticker ended up being the solution to his problem. Whatever ghostly magical force it used to project damage seemed to immediately find the source of whatever made the slime tick, and on the first jab the slime stiffened before immediately falling apart into a puddle of goo. Sean’s boot would still have to be cleaned, but he could walk again.

He had just started to move on before a thought occurred to him. When a quick glance around the junkyard revealed a few more slimes and no real threats, he ran with the idea. Scooping one of the slimes carefully into a trash bag, he gave it a quick poke with the sticker to kill it, then tied the bag shut and carried it with him the rest of the way home.

Might as well get everything done at once.

—

Sean settled on the floor of his room, ready to finally deal with what felt like a hefty stack of notifications. But first, he had to deal with the biggest elephant in the room. He gained some levels, and they had been buzzing around the back of his head for most of the afternoon and the better part of the night. He could hardly think through the distraction anymore.

With determination in his eyes, he brought up his status screen, then gasped.

Sean Lawrence
Level 25 Human (Prisoner of Time)
EXP: 14002/65000

Assignable stat points: 66

STR: 6 (10)
DEX: 40 (42)
VIT: 17 (19)
SAV: 30 (31)
MAG: 25 (31)

—

Abilities: Shankmaster LV3, Adhesives Mastery LV2, Stitch Up LV4, Hard Time LV3, Cellblock Brewmaster LV1
Achievements: E-Raticator, Uncommon De-nominator, Three Spectral Bears, Make-shift Ranger, Forest Dragon-kin, Mini-boss Massacre, High-Proof

Eleven Levels. From one fight. Eleven.

It shouldn’t have been surprising. In fact, it would have made sense if he had gotten even more levels. But sixty-six damn points was a ton, and getting them all in a lump like this presented a unique problem. During his fight with the Goliath, Sean had “wasted” eight points on his DEX. While eight points was a lot, he could fix his distribution now.

He first had to spend the points he had. No question about that. Leaving stat points sitting around for more than a day was tempting fate to come in and mess him up with a sledgehammer, and that wasn’t the kind of risk he wanted to take. But at the same time, he was dealing with a huge amount of points here. If he spent them wrong, it would take much, much longer to correct.

The way to mitigate some of that risk was to spread them out. Sean was fine with that, at least for a few of his points. He was overdue to soften the corners of his build, and there were a few stats that he could mine for undiminished returns.

Sean Lawrence
Level 25 Human (Prisoner of Time)
EXP: 14002/65000

Assignable stat points: 49

STR: 15 (19)
DEX: 40 (42)
VIT: 25 (27)
SAV: 30 (31)
MAG: 25 (31)

—

Abilities: Shankmaster LV3, Adhesives Mastery LV2, Stitch Up LV4, Hard Time LV3, Cellblock Brewmaster LV1
Achievements: E-Raticator, Uncommon De-nominator, Three Spectral Bears, Make-shift Ranger, Forest Dragon-kin, Mini-boss Massacre, High-Proof

After spending the “extra” points he got from High Proof’s buff to his stats-per-level rate, his strength and vitality were much improved. Sean immediately felt the effect of the VIT on his healing rate. He sighed in relief and rolled his shoulders as the last lingering bits of injury evaporated.

DEX had just got a big influx of stats, but Sean threw another six points at it anyway. Raw speed had proved to be pretty hard to get anywhere but DEX, and having a bit extra would help. That left his two primary class stats, SAV and MAG, and 49 points to split between them. The easiest thing to do would be to put 24 in one and 25 in the other, keeping them relatively even. In conventional times, that’s what Sean would have probably done.

But Sean didn’t have the benefit of a conventional stat-growth lifestyle. The system had said the average level of people going into the competition was 35. Even if he didn’t go, he had to consider that the average threat out in the system planet probably still had him badly beat in levels. He couldn’t compete in terms of average stats. The level gap wouldn’t allow it. Which meant he had to lean hard into specialization, tank whatever vulnerabilities that were left unprotected, and roll the dice.

Sean took a deep breath and held it, then dumped 15 points into SAV, and the entire 34 point remainder into MAG. If he was going to have a chance of laying hands on someone who was legitimately faster than him, or keeping them from laying hands on him, he’d need a pretty serious edge. Hard Time provided less total speed over the course of his entire day, but in bursts, it made a much larger moment-to-moment difference than a point in SAV would.

In a way, Sean thought, it was similar to how the system thought about the potential of time. The same amount of time passed in a battle. It was just redistributed, similar to how the system let experience flow to various people who did what it took to grab at them. When Sean slowed down an enemy, he seized a fraction of the potential that each second of time offered and stole it for himself. Or, another way to think about it was that he was emphasizing the time potential in a way that directly opposed the outcome his opponent wanted.

And whether it was just thinking about the way time worked, the massive stat dump into MAG, or some combination of the two, the potential behind the skill suddenly got a lot better.

Hard Time has attained a new aspect!

Due to a combination of factors, your Hard Time skill has evolved to allow for dual-targeting. At the time of a casting, two charges can be expended to speed up a target at the same time another is slowed. Each charge expended is weaker, but the cumulative time-flow difference of the two relative objects is much larger overall.

The two objects or organisms affected must be affected in opposite directions, i.e. “both things move faster” and “both things move slower” are not possible at Hard Time’s current level.

And with that, all the stat points were spent. Sean was now a mage-rogue in a proper sense, and in that specific order. It might help him live or assure that he’d die, but he was committed either way. That left a big pile of notifications to get through. Luckily, several of them turned out to be related to the mechanics of how the Junkyard Goliath had tracked him and that he could disregard. One was a duplicate of the notification not-Jeff had fed him during their time together, and he dismissed it after a quick scan showing nothing had changed.

That left several big, relevant messages to file through.

Field Boss Defeated! (Level 50 Junkyard Goliath)

You have leveraged knowledge you shouldn’t know, weapons you shouldn’t possess, and a plan that really shouldn’t have had even a small chance of working to take down a much larger, much stronger foe. By bypassing the significant defenses protecting the Junkyard Goliath’s only weak spot, you have freed the junkyard from the influence of the garbage men forever.

Did you know there’s only so much experience you can get from a single battle? The Apocalypse System is forced to limit the gains to prevent exploits. You didn’t exactly use exploits here, so the system will try to make it up to you through achievements.

Rewards: Late-Start Long-Shot (Achievement, already seen), Junkyard David (Achievement), Front-Yard Defender (Achievement), Chaotic Alloy (Weapon enhancement)

Given that the system was saying it was trying to make up for missing experience with these achievements, Sean expected a lot. The achievements didn’t disappoint.

Junkyard David (Achievement)

You have slain your own personal Goliath, at a bigger size and strength disparity than the original that David fought. You know how you walk around sort of expecting a very ambitious ant to one day shoot up your body and murder you by driving a thumb tack through your eyebrows? No? Well, the Junkyard Goliath didn’t expect that either.

Effects: +5 STR, increased efficacy when attacking the weak spots of enemies more than five times your size.

Front-Yard Defender

You have a home base, and a superior force decided to camp out on your lawn. You could have just abandoned your home, but instead you spent your lifeblood defending it. And guess what? The home appreciates it.

Your home is now attached to you (more technically, soul bound) and will follow you through various planes of existence, establishing a safe haven you can find, use, and enjoy. Will it always be easy to locate? No. But it’s much better than nothing.

Rewards: Soul-bound Base Camp, Base Camp Improvement Interface, 500 Base Improvement Points

The Junkyard David achievement was incredible, but it wasn’t anything that Sean hadn’t seen before from his achievements. This base camp interface **was a different story. Sean mentally flicked the interface open and quickly scanned the contents. Luckily, it wasn’t that complex of a system to figure out, being mainly divided into comfort improvements and functional things like crafting workshops. Making it even simpler was the fact that all the crafting-type improvements were locked and un-purchasable at the moment, for reasons the system didn’t see fit to explain.

Sean flicked through the menus, surprised to see that some of the most basic upgrades were already marked as purchased. “Basic power source” and “Water source” were both cheap, but either had been bought by the mysterious author of the guide or just were automatically included because the space already had them. Sean decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Sean’s better judgement advised him from burning very many of the base improvement points, but he allowed himself to spend a total of fifty points on what the system described as a “single person bed” and a “basic shower.” He had about ten hours before he’d either probably die or would be in relative safety. He’d be damned if it turned out to be the former, and he met his untimely end covered in faint traces of garbage residue and slime.

The only other thing worth doing in the interface was something that it actually demanded of him, something he couldn’t skip. Before it would let him buy a single shower or budget-brand cot, it wanted a name.

If there was one thing that wandering through the future mostly alone had given him, it was a lot of downtime. Between life and death fights, he had a significant amount of time he filled with simple, old-fashioned thinking, and his ownership of a weird survival bunker had not gone completely ignored during those moments. He already had a name ready to go, one that he only kind of hoped that he wouldn’t ever have to share with anyone.

He had no idea how long he’d have to enjoy it, but it only took a slight application of intent to name it. With a single thought, The Shankturary was born.