Chapter 29: With or Against the Current

Eating Capon was entirely out of the question. There was something uniquely off-putting about a truly jacked rabbit that Sean just wasn’t about to get around. But he still had to eat, and lentils weren’t going to cut it after the day he had. Keeping the fact that apocalypse beasts were never truly harmless in mind, he tried to make the end of the glutton rabbit as painless as possible.

There was plenty of wood to be had, and even kindling by virtue of the chewed-and-exploded log. Sean started a fire, cleaned the rabbit, put it up on a rough spit, and set some lentils boiling before he got down to examining the weird, furry loot the named monster had dropped.

Plucky Rabbit’s Foot (Apocalypse Jewelry)

A lucky rabbit’s foot is good to have around, but in the end, it’s just a conventional foot from a conventional animal. The Plucky Rabbit’s Foot is the foot of a verified, official rabbit hero, and goes beyond mere good vibes from the universe to provide more substantial, quantifiable upsides.

The Plucky Rabbit’s Foot is indeed lucky, to the extent anything can be. But only fools rely on luck when things like strength, speed, and a can-do spirit in careening towards your enemies exist. It helps with those things, too.

This particular piece of loot carries the “Apocalypse” title, indicating that in some ways, its power exceeds what would usually be possible for a piece of equipment gained in the conventional universe.

Effects: A small chance for a highly randomized, unusual drop from loot-bearing Apocalypse Beasts. +2 STR, +2 DEX

As Sean watched the rabbit slowly roast, he considered his stat allocations. Savvy was still all important, even though he would have been hard-pressed to explain to anyone all the ways it was helping. He sort of understood the designation now, at least. It had two parts. The first part was better named finesse, where he could move better physically and more accurately than before. The second part was something like cunning, which helped him make better choices and be trickier.

Having high Savvy was a bit like being really good at pool, but for everything. A good pool player, and Sean had known some, didn’t only know how to make an individual shot. They had an improved sense of the kinds of shots they could make, which ones they’d miss, and how to ensure they had access to the former while avoiding the latter a couple of shots into the future.

He wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea that the Apocalypse System was messing with his mind, but it at least seemed entirely restricted to how his physical body negotiated the world. He didn’t have much of a choice at this point, anyway. There were a lot of options for how his build developed, but a re-spec wasn’t in the cards.

As much as he was enjoying the actual lived experience of having high SAV and DEX outside of the mind-bending implications, Sean was beginning to get to a point where it would take bigger and bigger investments in those stats to make noticeable increases in his performance. And considering that the new loot was buffing his stats for the moment, he felt like he had a few points to play around with.

Sean Lawrence
Level 10 Human (Prisoner of Time)
EXP: 122/3000

STR: 6 (8)
DEX: 26 (28)
VIT: 9 (10)
SAV: 29 (30)
MAG: 6 (8)

—

Abilities: Shankmaster LV2, Adhesives Mastery LV2, Stitch Up LV2, Hard Time LV2
Achievements: E-Raticator, Uncommon De-nominator

Sean went a bit crazy, fixing up a few problems he perceived with his build. The largest chunk of stats went to SAV, his primary stat, with a slightly smaller investment in DEX for the same reason. He dumped a few points into VIT, having learned that a little bit of extra durability, regen, and stamina would mean a lot now that he was fighting enemies that could hit him. He ignored STR, since it was already growing more than he expected from equipment.

With one point left, he sighed and dumped it into MAG. It was entirely possible adding MAG was pure waste, beyond the slight resistance to magic attacks the guide claimed the stat would provide. But something about his recently leveled Hard Time skill was becoming more apparent: nothing seemed to have any resistance to it. Whether he sped himself up or slowed someone else down, it seemed to have a very similar effect regardless of his opponent.

Right now, that amounted to a tiny stagger, but that had made a big difference. What if it could do more? Supposedly, the skill scaled with his understanding of time. The problem was, there wasn’t any real way he could study up on time itself. Maybe some of the offworlder planets had research into it, but Earth had only started to make the tiniest pokes into time-as-a-force before he had gone into his explosion-driven stasis.

And after I froze, I became the main avenue for research in that field, and that ended up being a bit of a blind alley. In terms of humans that have actually influenced time, I’m probably the one that’s done the most.

Matt pulled the rabbit from the spit and salted it, then peeled off meat into the lentils. He didn’t have to wait long for them to cool, since VIT granted him a bit more tolerance for heat. The lentils were fine, as always, improved by salt and rabbit-fat dripping into them. The rabbit itself was a different story. Apparently the system had gone all-out with the concept of a very fat, very lazy rabbit. The meat was delicate, oily, and beyond delicious, carrying its own woody flavor that may very well have been from the consumption of actual wood.

If you think about it, that rabbit meat is actually sort of similar to what happened to me. It doesn’t matter if the rabbit meant got the flavor from the fire or from eating wood. What I do, and what the machine did to me. It didn’t remove me from time, or make me travel in it. It’s more like swimming with or against the current.

Once the lentils were finished, Matt wrapped up some of the meat in a trash bag for breakfast the next day before just absolutely ripping into whatever meat was left on the rabbit. Salting as he went, he ate until there was little more than a delicious-smelling skeleton, which he chucked towards the edge of his camp before packing up his pot, throwing up his tent, and collapsing.

—

It was still dark when Sean woke up, even darker than when he had gone to bed. It looked like the generous amount of wood Sean had left on the fire had mostly burned down. Sean knew some people who were heavy sleepers, and he envied them. Almost any sound would wake him up, and he had lived in enough shitty, noisy apartment complexes that it had been a real problem for him at some points in his life.

With that said, I sleep okay when there’s not any noise. What woke me up?

Slowly, Sean threw open the flap of his tent, looking as far as he could into the darkness. He didn’t see anything. Listening closely, he didn’t hear much, either. Whatever had woken him seemed to have either gone or hadn’t existed in the first place.

Slowly emerging from the tent, Sean fed some more wood into the fire. Not every animal was afraid of fire, and according to both the guide and Estesia, even less were in the apocalypse era. Still, few were actively attracted by it, and any slight increase in the probability that he wouldn’t be awakened again would be a benefit, even if his armor, tent, and bedroll meant he had little need for the heat.

Sean stirred the embers of the fire, loading kindling and wood above them. Smiling at how quick the dry kindling went up, he stood for a few more seconds to make sure the fire spread to the wood well before he went back to sleep.

As the light from the fire increased and the wood started to crackle, Sean took one last look around the camp in the new light, and finally saw something concerning. At the edge of the camp, near where he had thrown the rabbit carcass, there was a slight movement. And almost as soon as he saw whatever it was, it moved. There was the softest of possible footfalls as it turned and moved into system analysis range.

Ghastly Bear (Level 15)

Huge, strong, and not quite real, the ghastly bear walks lightly, draws only the most attentive of eyes, and stalks the forests looking for any source of food it can find in order to satisfy its substantial hunger.

Usually, the bears avoid attention at all costs. If you’ve gotten close enough to one to read this description, however, you probably have a fight on your hands. Pray there’s only one, and do your best to remember that you can’t kill a ghost.

As the bear advanced, Sean moved to the other side of the fire and looped his pack up off the ground. If this went poorly and he had to run, he didn’t want to lose more than he had to. Drawing his reamer, he tried his best to keep an eye on the bear, while not making it any more obvious he was watching it than he had to.

It was no use. After a few seconds of padding softly towards Sean, the bear stood up on its hind legs, towered a full foot above him, and screamed. Not roared, but screamed in a terrible, unearthly wail. As Sean backed away, he watched as two ethereal versions of the bear separated from it and slowly began to spread out to the sides as if to flank him, transparent and shimmering like fog in the moonlight.

Then, as two more screams answered from just outside the borders of the camp, Sean bolted in the only direction he wasn’t sure held another bear. Three level fifteen foes plus their clones was too much, even with his new levels in play, and especially when he had no idea what the bears could do or how to defeat them.

Sean bolted through the woods, hoping with every fiber of his being that he was faster than the bears. In a terrifying moment, he realized that if he wasn’t, he’d never know until they caught up, as his running was far, far louder than theirs. He activated Hard Time on himself, feeling the energy drain as he went slightly faster as a result, but once again bemoaning the fact that there was no way to know how much it would help.

He ran, as scared as he’d been since the beginning of his journey to the future, completely alone, with no idea where he was or what dangers he might be running into. At some point, he had lost all idea of how long it had been, and his recently raised VIT meant it could have been minutes or hours. His only hope was in holding out until the sun came up and he could see. Until then, he ran on in near total darkness, making out the trees in his path with only the slightest warning.

Eventually, he saw a light on the horizon that might have been the reflection of the sun off water or any of dozens of other things in these god-forsaken system-twisted woods. If it was just some random light, he’d run by. There wasn’t time to investigate. If it was, that meant a reprieve, so long as he could hold out long enough for it to rise.

As it turned out, he didn’t have the energy to carry out either plan. As he drew near to the light, he first realized it wasn’t the sun, but rather some sort of bioluminescence put out by the grove he had entered that cast the entire area in a soft, white glow. He then realized that his own estimates of his stamina were off. Very off. Not only did he not have the energy to get past the light, he didn’t have enough gas left to even get entirely to it. He felt the strength leave his legs as he collapsed just barely inside the range of the glow.

He had fallen more or less sideways, and now rolled over to look at the woods behind him. Slowly and terribly, the bears emerged. They had tucked in their ghost-selves for travel, but now the clones radiated out from them again, each dark figure flanked by two glowing, see-through companions.

Just as Sean gave up hope, they stopped. One of the braver ones stepped to the very edge of the light and poked his nose in before immediately jerking back, shaking its head in frustration or terror, and then padding off into the night. The other two bears watched it go, confused, then turned and slowly followed.