Chapter 32: Hard Time

Sean couldn’t change any of his tactics. He simply flared Hard Time as much as possible and hoped that it would be enough to buy enough time that his strike would land first. In that moment, the skill seemed to be working better than it had before. It wasn’t a massive difference, and he didn’t break the sound barrier. But his knife simply moved faster than it had in the past. With impending death hovering over him, he didn’t have time to understand why yet. But he was thankful, either way.

Relative to his sped-up perception, the cat seemed to move a bit slower. In the extra fractions of a second this delay bought, a couple of pieces of uninvited information popped into his mind. First, the layer of leather around his neck would probably not be enough to keep the giant feline from ripping his throat out. Brett really was a master, so there was always a chance the collar would surprise him, but given the leather’s performance against the animal’s claws so far, it wasn’t a bet he wanted to make.

Second, the cat was significantly weaker than he had expected it to be. It had better leverage, better positioning, and was heavier than Sean. By now, with one of his hands tied up in the stab, it should have already been able to move forward and bite him. While it was still closing in, that unexpected weakness meant Sean had more time than he had anticipated. It wasn’t much, but it just might be enough.

Straining his neck to angle it as far away from the teeth as he could, Sean willed the point of the knife forward. Finally, the Mystereamer hit home. The jagged edge cut right through the animal’s fur, and he pressed as much of his limited leverage as he could behind it, pushing it through the hide and between the cat’s ribs.

Before he could get it far enough in to hit anything more vital than hide and muscle, one of the Mystereamer’s jagged edges caught on bone and stopped. The cat was apparently not immune to pain and winced back, and Sean took the opportunity to re-up his grip, dropping from the head to a better leverage point where the beast’s lower jaw and neck met. Pulling the knife back, he shifted in his hand in search of a better angle and drove it back towards the general area he assumed the animal’s heart would be.

Instead of hitting flesh and bone, the Mystereamer caught nothing but air as Sean felt all the weight holding him to the ground disappear. Apparently, the cat knew enough to recognize a disadvantaged position, and had bailed.

Sean fought through the pain burning through almost every part of his body as well as the incredulous thought that his plan had actually worked and got back to his feet. The cat was several yards away now, favoring its side and looking much, much more wary. Sean took a defensive stance and let his regen work, glancing momentarily to see what he could learn about the animal before it started moving again.

Wind Panther (Level 15)

Few enemies you face go truly all-in on speed. It’s understandable why. Being truly fast is a dangerous game. Full-tilt speedsters have to hit first, hit hard, and win before retribution comes, or else find themselves crushed in a ditch.

The wind panthers count on their superb prey-selection instincts to find animals that are slow enough and weak enough to take down in a single, shredding pounce. Anything that is far enough outside of their will-die-quickly safety zone generally can’t catch them, and they do just fine in any environment that allows stealthy hit-and-run tactics.

With a few quick licks to its wound, the cat got back into motion, this time circling Sean in a much slower, more deliberate fashion. He wasn’t fooled. He had seen the thing pounce with almost no wind-up, and didn’t believe for a second that he had injured it enough to keep it from doing it again. Sean started circling with the cat, being careful to keep a solid footing and changing directions slightly here and there to keep it guessing.

The next time the cat pounced, he got lucky. He had just changed directions, and the cat had been aiming not for where he was, but where he would be. In essence, the timing meant he got a bit of a free dodge, like he had predicted the future. Without that bit of luck, the cat would have hit him for sure, leading its pounce ahead of the target like a shotgun leading a clay disk. It made sense. Sean wasn’t as fast as the cat, but he was plenty quick, and now that he was moving, aiming directly at him would be a sure-fire way to miss.

I can use that. Maybe.

Sean dropped his hand to the Trash Compactor’s fabric grip and choked up on it to shorten the arc it would take when swung. At the same time, he started edging away from the cat as he circled, trying to give it the impression he was thinking of running away.

Step one of his plan was to try to survive.

Every ounce of his attention was on the cat’s legs, looking for the slightest twitch that might indicate movement. When the muscles finally contracted, Sean pulled as hard as he could on the Trash Compactor, then fired off Hard Time.

Between rats and garbage men, Sean had built up a few rules of thumb on how to use his unique skill. The most important was that, since slowing enemies down and speeding himself up tended to be roughly equivalent to each other in terms of relative speed, it almost always made sense to speed himself up.

In situations with multiple enemies, this meant he moved faster than all of them, instead of just one. And if he ever stumbled into an enemy that could resist the slowing, he’d be able to bypass that resistance and still maintain the advantage Hard Time was designed to give.

But he could imagine situations where that wasn’t true, like if an animal was attacking a friend, or if he had to stop an attack that would hit a group of allies. No rule was absolute, and some situations would demand weirder actions if he wanted to walk out alive.

This was something new. The first charge went to the cat, speeding it up. In theory, accelerating the cat would have usually been a dumb move. It would just enhance whatever impact the bigger, sharper cat had planned.

Instead, the extra speed forced an error on his enemy’s part. The cat had been calculating a certain timing to hit Sean, and the extra variable meant it arrived much, much sooner than it had expected. With a hiss, it clawed at the empty space and landed without laying so much as a claw on Sean’s delicate human skin.

The next and probably last charge of Hard Time Sean could handle went to something much more fun. It was for revenge.

Before the cat had finished its pounce, Sean was swinging Trash Compactor as hard as he could, not spinning it like a flail but instead going for a straight, direct shot like he would have with a hammer or mace. As the acceleration from Hard Time wore off on his opponent, Sean used the second charge of time-manipulation to quicken his blow. It took significantly more to release the last charge, and he didn’t know if he had enough in him to use the skill again.

The SAV probably helped the cat almost instantly recover from its surprise at missing and began to spring away to safety. It almost made it, too. But almost making it away just meant that Sean could release his hold of the Trash Compactor to give it a few more inches of reach. And the mace hit **at the very farthest point in its arc. The big cat mrowwrrred loud enough to crack glass and pulled away, but not nearly as far as it had before. The lizard spikes were stuck in its side, and the weight of the weapon was now pinned to the cat, slowing it down both with pain and a heavy unbalanced weight.

Confused and enraged, the huge cat thrashed around, trying to reach the weapon to yank it out. That was a delay and distraction it couldn’t afford. By the time it saw Sean rushing forward, it was too late. He came down hard with the Mystereamer, punching it through the animal’s back. Then, he pulled the weapon back out and danced away, but it turned out to be unnecessary. Whatever he had pierced inside the cat had been vital. It no longer had the ability to attack, let alone chase him. It took just a few more seconds before it collapsed to the ground, dead as could be.

Between the cat having an absurdly high level compared to Sean and a higher base experience than most things he had fought, Sean got the better part of a thousand experience points from the one fight. The animal didn’t seem to drop anything specific, but Sean did take the time to skin it and let his wounds heal before moving on.

I have to spend more resources on Hard Time.

There was an argument to be made that continuing investments in DEX might be more beneficial than improving his MAG. There was a saying to lean into strengths rather than shore up weaknesses. But so far, DEX hadn’t been the reason why Sean came out on top in the fights he should have lost.

He had to thank two other elements for that. The first was that, even with just two improvised weapons, Shankmaster was doing a great job of showing that versatility was a key part to survival. If he could keep finding materials for weapons, that should only get better.

But the second and bigger difference was Hard Time. It had taken Sean a while to really understand it, partially because he had only recently begun to use it in more creative ways. He could take on rats without the skill, but it had made killing garbage men significantly easier. And he flat out wouldn’t have been able to survive the Wind Panther or Capon without the skill. In both cases, the skill had bought him enough time, literally, to think of a counter against overwhelming odds.

He had no idea how far his time manipulation abilities would scale, but he had a hint in the form of how well it had worked during the fight with the panther. It had been more effective than it ever had before, improving a tiny staggering or acceleration effect to something significantly stronger. The only thing he could attribute that difference to was that he had recently thought about how the skill worked.

When the description of Hard Time had stated that it would scale with his understanding of time, he had begun to keep a lookout for physics textbooks, subconsciously assuming that the understanding would have to come in a form similar to understanding equations or scientific knowledge of time. But those textbooks were hard to come by in the end times. Instead, his understanding had come from life-and-death fights when his mind was trying desperately to help him stay alive. And that understanding was paying off.

Probably, that is. But if it was something else, he couldn’t imagine what it would be.

The description also said that the skill scaled with MAG. There was a chance that increasing the stat didn’t have a huge per-point effect, which had made him hold back on heavily investing in it in favor of moving faster and hitting harder. If it was multiplying against his understanding of time itself, the chances he was wasting precious stat points were significantly smaller.

And maybe there were other things that MAG could do. Would it increase his capacity to activate his time-manipulation, letting him use it more often in a fight? It might!  Would he eventually have better control over how long-lasting or intense the effect was? Maybe, but the possibility was there!

At the end of the day, Sean was on a mission to punch as far above his weight class as he could for as long as he could without dying. Small wins weren’t enough. He needed a long-shot payoff, and Hard Time was the highest odds he had at hand.

—

If there was one upside to the day, besides not getting eaten by a dragon, it was that panthers weren’t the type to hunt in packs. More than that, the system seemed to have no qualms about using the infinite space that the forest provided to make sure encounters were well-spaced. Not only did Sean not have to fight another panther, it was hours of working the area around Cedarhelm’s grove before he found any more beings of any kind whatsoever.

What he did find was an absolute jackpot.

Titan Sloth (Level 11)

The Titan Sloth is slow, huge, and incredibly strong. It does not possess a single shred of artistry. It is built for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to humble the strong. Relative to its level, there’s absolutely nothing stronger. There can’t be. It has every single solitary point in strength.

Usually, this wouldn’t be the end of the world. After all, it really isn’t very fast. It doesn’t take that much to kill. But look at it. I mean, really take a look. Mass matters. There’s no shortage of that here.

For once, the Apocalypse System was on Sean’s side. The text had popped up as he was clambering up a moss-covered boulder. It had been roughly forest-colored and motionless, leading to Sean’s mistake. As he jumped back, the mammoth animal stood, let out a long, groaning roar, and swung its tail straight at him.

If he were much slower, he wouldn’t have been able to get out of the way in time, and would have been flattened with the dozens of trees that the attack took down. But he had spent enough points in DEX that he was fast, and the level disparity wasn’t that big compared to the other animals he had been forced to fight in this forest. The monster only had a few moves, and he couldn’t touch Sean with any of them.

The sloth ended up being so easy to take down that Sean thought it was faking when it fell. He didn’t believe his victory until he got well out of range, checked his experience, and saw that it had gone up. It wasn’t nearly as much experience as the Wind Panther had granted, but it was a good chunk.

When he moved forward and into a nearby clearing, it got even better. There were dozens of them living slow, harmlessly violent lives over acres and acres of sloth-tail-attack flattened field, just waiting to be harvested.

After a bad night and a mediocre morning, it was shaping up to be a hell of an afternoon.