Chapter 34: 1-up Bears

Overestimating your own strengths can be dangerous, and can get you into messes you can’t get out of. I know, I know. You are tired of me telling you to be careful. I get it. I grind that particular point a lot. That’s because it’s important. I’ve watched over-eagerness kill more people than any other single force, and I’m not going to be there to hold you back. I want you to be careful.

But, at the same time, I don’t want you to be too careful.

For almost every mistake, there’s an equal-but-opposite fault of overshooting the balanced, middle-ground correct choice by a mile. Being too careful means settling down on the far end of the wrong-right-wrong spectrum and, sometimes, causing every bit as much trouble.

Remember, always, that you are getting stronger. And not realizing that strength and using every facet of it is as big of a mistake as trying to use strength you don’t have and coming up short. If you let it grow, that lack of confidence allows non-threats to threaten you, lets the slow out-run you, and gets you dominated by the weak.

Never, ever mistake my demands for caution for me asking you to deceive yourself. Where you are weak, I want you to recognize it and protect yourself. Where you are strong, I want you to use it.

The Guide, Common Pitfalls, page 15

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Two minutes later, far from any watching eyes, the forest was the stage to a silent dance. Four participants were shining phantoms, silent simply because they lacked the ability to make sound as they moved. Two participants were impressive, full-sized bears with steps so careful and calculated that they made no noise even where they should.

And weaving in and out of them was Sean, so busy dodging blows that he couldn’t manage attacks of his own. The participants danced on a stage no bigger than a kitchen, possessed an enormous untapped hoard of potential destruction, and made the amount of noise as a midnight mouse in the kitchen’s pantry.

It was precise, fast, and only a half-step shy of looking choreographed. If Sean was watching from afar instead of spending every atom of focus on not getting torn apart, he would have thought it was beautiful.

In the few minutes since the bears sprung into action, Sean had learned several lessons. First, the ghostly bear apparitions could do real damage. On a few separate occasions, the ghost bears had missed Sean and hit something behind him, like a tree or a bush. Whatever they hit was scratched or shredded just as deeply and powerfully as Sean would have expected from the real bears.

Second, the bears were coordinated. Where one stumbled, the other moved in to cover it. Where one attacked, the other flanked to take advantage of the vulnerability or stood behind for recovery if the offensive failed. It was far beyond instinct, and far beyond randomness. These bears were social, and well-used to working with each other.

And third, despite their silence, they were pissed. The one-time Sean had heard the bears make noise, it was when one of them alerted the other to his presence at the campfire. Now, they were as clearly angry as a noiseless animal could be, silently snarling, flexing claws, and doing their best to let Sean know that they’d chase him forever.

Or at least that was how it seemed. And if Sean’s guess about the intensity of their anger was right, he had a good idea why. This was a dance the bears had meant for three, and he had removed the third member yesterday as it slept.

Now he had to survive two of them, both not sleeping and in perfect coordination, despite missing their third.

At that moment, the intensity of the bears ratcheted up. One of the ghost bears slashed at Sean’s neck, and he stepped back to evade. He had assumed the bears ran on a SAV-heavy build, but the more he fought with them, the more he found them surprisingly well-balanced. They were much stronger than he was, at least. As the bear missed its strike, it kept its momentum and more or less rammed Sean with its head, sending him flying backwards.

Sean followed the force of the strike as much as he could, but there was no chance he was going to keep his feet when he landed. And if he lost his balance, the bears would be on top of him, slashing and biting, and it would be over. He had been saving his Hard Time charges for the right moment, and now certainly looked like a good time.

But there’s something I can do about that, right? All this DEX isn’t just for show.

As his shoulder blades hit the ground, he pumped his muscles and tucked his knees, flowing out of the impact, rolling with it, and ending up back on his feet after a kind of recovery backflip. And the dance was back on.

As the bears came in ahead of the ghost doubles, they started to execute a move that Sean had seen before in the fight. One of them feinted an attack, only to break the timing and allow the other bear to surge forward. It was an absurdly precise thing, and they knew each other’s timings perfectly. It was too bad for them that Sean had noticed that move coming, and had just the way to disrupt it.

As the bear in the rear came forward to slip into the baiting bear’s spot, Sean sped him up, and the second bear predictably bashed into its companion in front. Sean imagined that such a crash would break both bears’ footing, and he acted. The Mystereamer flashed in the rising sun, and came down hard on the bear’s snarling head.

Just before contact, he was blown back. One of the ghost bears had vanished from the field, materializing over the living bear he had planned on stabbing like a glowing suit of armor. The real bear was completely unharmed, but the ghost bear didn’t seem to be, dissolving away like steam from a teapot.

Over the next few seconds of dodging, Sean didn’t see it return, either to the bear’s frame or to the battlefield.

Fuck. It’s an extra guy. Of course, it is. Fucking 1-up bears, and I have to fight all of them.

But the secret was out, and at least some fraction of the pressure was now off Sean. He wormed his way around trees and bushes, abusing cover to keep himself as safe as possible until he felt the empty feeling from Hard Time wear off, then fired it again. It wasn’t as good of a result as the first time, but it bought him a few more seconds of dodging.**

And even better, the bears were worried now, in a confused way. They had no idea what was disrupting their timing, but they became more cautious. They gave each other more space, avoiding Sean-induced-collisions at the cost of sacrificing teamwork. The next time they did their little feint maneuver, Sean didn’t even need to expend a charge to exploit it. As the feinting bear moved out of the way, he used the opening as a temporary blind spot, bringing the Trash Compactor down hard at the very edge of its range. And just like that, one of the bears no longer had ghost bears backing it up.

Despite their ability to adapt on the fly, it was clear the bears weren’t used to being vulnerable, and could show fear. Sean moved forward after the ghost-less bear, and although it didn’t panic, it also didn’t stand firm. It backed up, slashing and snarling, just long enough for the other bear to get its ghosts in front of the vulnerable bear like defending knights.

Sean didn’t mind. He was counting on it. As the defended bear backed up, he got the Trash Compactor swinging, building up momentum as the weight whipped around in an orbit centered around his wrist. He jerked towards the group of three bears, smiling as they moved backwards away from him. Then he turned on a dime, waited a split second, and let his flail go on a beeline for the other bear.

Under normal circumstances, the bear could have dodged it easily. But Sean was no longer allowing normal circumstances. Sean himself was not a normal circumstance, anymore. Hard Time had upgraded from a split second stagger or speed-up into a much longer effect. The bear didn’t hold still by any means, but between its surprise and the slowing effect, the bricked weapon found its mark. The bear was brave, maybe, but not that brave. After a quick teleport and dissipation, another ghost was down.

The neat thing about a group of six, Sean thought, was when that same group was reduced to three, they’d panic. The bears froze in place, as if deciding something. Sean didn’t normally talk during fights, but as he saw one of the bears glance away from him and to possible escape routes, he couldn’t help it.

“Nope, sorry. That’s not an option anymore,” he said. Then he sprung.

The bear with a ghost left was a team player. Sean didn’t doubt it. But very few people could still be team players when a maniacal human with an improvised shank was darting towards them. The bear dodged as Sean stabbed at it, and he could have kept chasing it and maybe clipped it hard enough to get the last ghost out of play. But he didn’t need to.

As he turned, he saw exactly what he had hoped would happen. The bear had withdrawn its double from guarding the ghost-less bear, and the specter was now galloping towards it as fast its ghostly feet would move it. The other bear was running in the opposite direction, apparently having had enough of Sean as prey.

Sean had spent the better part of a few days in the forest, but only a small fraction of that time had been spent in combat. Finding a source of water alone had taken hours. To pass the time, he had been practicing something he always thought was possible with his build. And while he wasn’t perfect at it yet, it appeared some combination of his SAV and Shankmaster were working with him to help him realize his goal.

Basically, he had been throwing his shank at trees. Hundreds of them, in fact, each one selected to be further and further than the last. He had gotten pretty good at it after a while, consistently able to punch the surprisingly sharp shard of metal through several inches of wood, so deep that it took all his enhanced strength to get it out again.

The bear was a moving target, but it wasn’t looking at Sean at all anymore, and the knife didn’t make much noise as it cut through the air. By sheer coincidence, the bear caught a glance of the incoming knife as it turned to go around a tree. But before it could dodge, Sean put that chance to bed with an immediate application of Hard Time to speed up the already fast-moving missile.

The bears might have been pretty balanced on stats, but however much VIT they were packing wasn’t nearly enough to mitigate a shank straight through their neck. It fell, clawed at the knife for a few seconds, then fell motionless on the floor.

The other bear stood on its hind legs, trying to make itself look as big as possible, while Sean stooped to recover the Trash Compactor from the ground. Sean wasn’t worried by it, or by its ghost.

“The experience probably won’t be worth the trouble, you know,” Sean said as he walked forward towards the ghastly bear and its last ghost. “But I think not having to worry about you silent bastards stalking me anymore will make up for some of that.”

With his mobility slightly hampered by the weight of his spinning makeshift flail, Sean tried to sprint toward the real-deal bear and got caught by the edges of the ghost bear’s teeth. He felt a sensation of weird, unnatural cold mixed in with the burning heat of the pain, but managed to keep his leg moving fast enough that the ghost couldn’t fully catch and clamp him.

As he got into the striking range of the standing bear, it dropped its foreleg hard, trying to slash him. Trash Compactor was having nothing of it. The sheer weight of the block blew the arm back up and out of the way as the spikes sped onwards, burying themselves in the underside of the bear’s chin. Sean worried they wouldn’t be long enough to hit anything vital, so he ripped downwards after finishing the blow, trying to free the compactor before the bear jerked and ripped his last weapon out of his hands.

As the weapon came free, it turned out his caution was unnecessary. The bear stared at Sean for a moment, as if confused, then dropped to the ground. A quick glance showed the ghost bear was gone as well. It was over.