《Starlight Mercenary》 The Swordsman At that moment, Nick would have sold his left nut to be fighting something else. Maybe the right one, too, if the price was right. The other day, he had heard a customer talking about a dungeon where the monsters psychically mined images of your worst childhood enemies from your brain, then transformed into them to try to intimidate you. It was supposed to be scary, they said, but in effect it was just a two floor romp through beating the shit out of all your schoolyard bullies. The grand finale, the guy had said, was him drop-kicking the hell out of the psychic image of his own absentee father. Nick could almost see the catharsis steaming off the guy before he bought half the booze in the store, guided his good-looking girlfriend back to his expensive-looking spaceship, and rocketed back out into the stars. He didn¡¯t say any of this directly to Nick, of course. People like him barely saw guys in paper hats behind counters, especially when they smelled like a combination of off-brand liquid soap and the remnants of explodings monster it had almost but not quite entirely cleaned off. Another monster was exploding in his face now. That was what you got when you stabbed a floating green bubble with teeth with a sword, it turned out. ¡°Work as management in a rewarding retail environment, they said.¡± Nick swung his sword and chopped another bubble in half, once again trying to find a magic angle that would kill them without dousing him in ichor. He failed. ¡°Perks include rapid advancement in a quick-moving management-track position, an exciting work environment facilitating the travel of a high-end clientele at the edge of the known universe, and unlimited access to an on-site training dungeon, they wrote.¡± Nick should have known. If there was one thing he should have learned by now, it was that anybody who would hire him to do anything that sounded fun was up to no good. Spitting out a bit of monster juice that had happened to land in his mouth, he called up the info for the monsters for the thousandth time, reading it as if it might have changed some time in the last few hours. It had not.
Stink Wraith Born of weak ambient energy and the hastily dumped by-products of a starliner engine, Stink Wraiths are one step away from not being considered a dungeon monster at all. Their two pathetic forms of defense consist of a weak, almost insignificant ability to bite opponents and exploding into foul-smelling liquid when killed. At most, these monsters represent an annoying early-floor threat in a dungeon, something to avoid or mow through on the way to the boss. Accumulation Rewards: 1 Loot drops: None Mastery Reward: None
No matter what the system said, there was no boss these things were getting in the way of. There weren¡¯t even more floors. This dungeon was so underpowered it was teetering on the edge of not existing at all. The stink wraiths he fought simply materialized through the walls of a cave no bigger than a storage shed, floated slowly towards him in the air, and tried their hardest to bite him before he sliced them in half and claimed a single pathetic point of accumulation for his trouble. With nobody around to hear him and nothing better to do, Nick continued whining. ¡°Nick will take that job, of course. He won¡¯t ask a lot of questions. He never does. Once he figures out he¡¯s been scammed, he won¡¯t even quit. Good old Nick. Life¡¯s biggest sucker. Just dangle that carrot in front of him, and he¡¯ll run right into the stick every time.¡± After another half hour of killing, the last wraith of the day floated through the wall barely formed, failed to keep aloft in the air, and smashed itself on the floor before Nick could even get to it. The dungeon was spent. It had never been good for more than a couple dozen a day, and today it wasn¡¯t even up to that low standard. Still, the job ad hadn¡¯t technically been lying. His dungeon access was unlimited. The dungeon itself wasn¡¯t, but his employer didn¡¯t consider that to be their problem. ¡°Ten points. Almost there.¡± Nick swung his sword, sending fluorescent green juice flying through the cave as he stabbed it down into the dirt, left it stuck there, and brought up his status screen. Most days, he was lying when he said he was almost there. Today it was almost true.
Level 4 Swordsman Accumulation: 3992/4000 HP 300/300 MP: 0/0
Strike: 20 Block: 15 Dodge: 10
Skills:Short Swords (Level 3)
Once again, Nick bemoaned not spending a single point of his stats on the ability to get out of the way of the sludge the exploding monsters put out. In his tutorial run, it hadn¡¯t seemed important. The levels were coming quickly, at that point. The universe was his oyster. He might have been yanked out of his own universe without warning, but he had what looked like a classic hero class and it was progressing just fine. When he completed the tutorial and was warped to the refugee center for those yanked from their home universes, the first worker there had been so shocked to see Nick''s class and level that he could hardly look him in the eye. Good classes were almost always out of the ordinary. Simple classes were almost always bad. They did grunt work. There were exceptions, but Swordsman wasn¡¯t one of them. Especially not when the average level off-universe travellers got to in their tutorials was over ten, and Nick had barely gained three. His situation was so bad that people thought he was joking when he told them about it, and avoided him like the plague once they found out he wasn¡¯t. Nothing had been what he expected past that point, but after months and months of grinding he was almost there. ¡°It¡¯s going to happen tomorrow, Nick. You can do this. One more day, Nick. You¡¯ll make it.¡± He had a sinking suspicion he had been going a bit crazy, lately, but that hadn¡¯t stopped him from talking to himself. It wasn¡¯t like there was anybody else to talk to, around here. He slapped his face to help the words sink in, and immediately regretted stirring up the remnant monster-goo on his skin. Pulling his bottom-tier Learner¡¯s Sword out of the dirt, he stumbled towards a lukewarm shower in the literal shed that served as his living space. If he hurried, he could even get in a quick nap before it was time to open the store.
Ding-dong! The door to the Astramart swung open with the usual chime, letting in the usual breeze of slightly-warmer air from outside the shop. Everything in the shop and the breathable air outside of it were all sealed under the same force-field, so it would have been much cheaper to simply keep both spaces at the same temperature. Astramart, Nick''s handbook said, was better than that. There were four entire pages on the importance of those two temperatures, of the customer¡¯s expectation that entering the interior of the store felt like entering an entirely different kind of area than the outside dome-protected area. Customers could refuel spaceships anywhere. They could buy snacks a dozen places, or rely on their ship¡¯s food constructors. They came to Astramart, the handbook said, because it represented a higher level of service. ¡°No, man. You don¡¯t get it.¡± Nick couldn¡¯t tell if the two kids entering the store were assholes, if he just envied the mountain of credits worth of gear they were wrapped up in, or both. ¡°Broken dungeons. That¡¯s what¡¯s up.¡± ¡°Broken dungeons are broken, right? You can¡¯t level in them.¡± ¡°You want to level?¡± The first kid waved his arm and opened up a green rift in the fabric of space, then started shoveling bags of snacks into it. Nick watched the store¡¯s auto-merchant function count up the purchase. It was working just fine. ¡°I¡¯ll take you somewhere to level after. I know good places. Broken dungeons aren¡¯t about leveling, man. They are an experience thing.¡± If the temperature differential between the outside and interior air was ever to equalize, Nick had ten pages of employee handbook on how to handle that emergency, all of which boiled down to something like wait around until the automated repair function fixes it. If that failed, he was to move on to wait around even longer until a repair ship arrives, then stay out of the way while they fix both the temperature and the automated repair function. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. ¡°I don¡¯t understand.¡± The second guy picked a hundred-can cube of beverages out of the freezer and hefted it into his friend¡¯s storage one-handed like it weighed as much as a tennis ball. His stats were apparently somewhere past the level five threshold. ¡°I don¡¯t get it.¡± ¡°I know you don¡¯t. You can¡¯t. I¡¯m telling you, you go into a broken dungeon, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it¡¯s just broken. Worthless. But if it¡¯s broken just right, you see some shit. Real shit. Colors and shit.¡± Nick''s translator was actually pretty good, one of the few real perks of working at an Astramart Spacestop location. His appraisal skill told him it worked by digging into his brain, finding the closest cultural equivalent to whatever he was hearing that his experiences could provide, and then translated whatever alien language he would have otherwise heard into that dialect. The translator was almost always reliable, and it had pegged these two guys as bros. Perhaps the broiest brosephs to ever bro, in his store, paying for things with the fruits of classes and levels their fathers had bought for them. Or, hell, maybe just their father¡¯s money outright. Astramart was a convenience store, but it also was a convenience store on the edge of everything. Shipping costs added up. Maintaining a clean, bright building millions of miles out in the boonies cost something, too. The purchases they were making today were worth more than Nick''s salary in a year. To these guys, it was chump change. If dad¡¯s bank account was the reason why, he wouldn¡¯t be the least bit surprised. Nick stood behind the counter with a blank smile on his face. He was another one of the reasons Astramart cost so much, even if he was probably the cheapest thing in the store. In the event that bro one or bro two needed him, he had a total of forty-seven pages of employee guidebook on hand to tell him exactly how to meet their needs to the Astramart standard of service. That had never once happened. In his long, lonely service to Astramart, nobody had ever once actually spoken to him. These were people of means and distinction. They had no reason to. Since he had climbed onboard the first of many budget transports that took him from the off-universe refugee center to the store, he had a lot of time to think about that. In the end, the conclusion he came to was as simple as it was depressing. He was here specifically to be ignored, a kind of low-class window dressing that reassured the customers they had made the right choice for their preserved convenience store purchases. For the next sixteen hours, he¡¯d stand behind the counter, strictly prohibited from accessing any universal network entertainment while customers were in the store. They¡¯d walk past him without a single sign of recognition. That was the deal. It was as constant as the artificial gravity holding him to his asteroid home. ¡°I don¡¯t want the deluxe soap. I want the ultra-deluxe. I have sensitive skin, I always have¡­¡± That was a big, unarmored reptilian man. One the system chose to portray as a whining british aristocrat in tone. ¡°If we get some booze here, we can skip out once we''ve made an appearance. You know that Thelsa will give a dozen speeches, once she¡¯s going. We can hit up the slipstream to the sea of stars and do our drinking there with whoever else has the sense to sneak out.¡± A couple of well-dressed young women, each wearing a suite of self-defense mechanisms containing jewelry that could either purchase or destroy Nick a hundred times over. The translator played them fairly flat, a couple of average post-university women of means whose assessment of their own value hinged on a low appraisal of someone else¡¯s. They milled in and out, spending fortunes and hardly registering the expense, and each carrying a small, depressing fragment of a story with them. ¡°Well of course father thinks so. He¡¯s a fool.¡± ¡°Well, damn. My wildcatting days are done, or else I¡¯d love to join you. How big did you say the deposit was? Well, I suppose I could¡­¡± ¡°Oh, he certainly doesn¡¯t know. I have my fun where he can¡¯t see. Even if he found out, what could he do? He couldn¡¯t replace me unless he was willing to settle for gutter trash, and his parents would cut him off at the first hint of that.¡± ¡°I¡±m sorry. Son? You there? I¡¯m just looking for Whaltey Sausage Meal. You¡¯ve heard of it?¡± That last one threw Nick off. It sounded like it was addressed to him. That happened every now and again. It always turned out to be something else. Even so, it almost always managed to break him out of his deep, almost meditative zoned-out state. Sometimes it would take him hours to get back in. It was annoying, but it was part of the job. When his eyes came back into focus and landed on an older, rougher-looking mustached man in black and red clothing, he realized this time was different. The man was standing right at the counter, looking Nick straight in his glassy eyes. ¡°I could go get a medkit if something¡¯s wrong, son. Are you on something, or hurt?¡± Allowing a customer to help him in any way would violate at least six pages of customer service protocol that Nick could remember off the top of his head. Luckily, the absolute impossibility of the offer shocked him the rest of the way out of his stupor and woke him up enough to finally respond. ¡°Oh, no, that won¡¯t be necessary, sir.¡± Nick smiled big and fake, as the handbook demanded. ¡°I was just a little distracted.¡± ¡°That¡¯s one way to say it.¡± The man smiled in a tilted-mouth, wry sort of way. ¡°Another way to say it was you were zoned out so hard your soul was about to leak out of your nose.¡± The translator was having trouble with the man at first. It did that, sometimes, when someone was hard to read or when a language was particularly obscure. It got it after a moment, transitioning from a flat, almost robotic voice all the way to portraying the man as an old wise ranch hand type. The kind of guy who would lean on a fencepost watching the sunset, then offer you homespun wisdom about the important things in life. ¡°I¡­ yes.¡± Nick decided to trust this guy was different enough that actually talking to him wouldn¡¯t be a disaster. He let the huge, fake smile down. ¡°You wouldn¡¯t believe how long it took me to get the hang of that. I¡¯d never get through my days if I was fully awake for them.¡± ¡°Ha!¡± The man slapped the counter, hard. Whatever alloy the tabletop was made out of held up, but Nick could tell the same slap would have turned him into jelly. ¡°I guess so. Anyway, do you have any? I¡¯ve been looking all over. No luck yet.¡± ¡°Any¡­ what? I¡¯m sorry. Whatever you asked for, you asked for it while I was still not quite here.¡± ¡°Whaltey Sausage Meal.¡± ¡°That¡¯s¡­ food?¡± ¡°Almost, son. Almost.¡± The man held his hands apart about six inches. ¡°Comes in a foil bag about this big. Smells like processed rat and sulphur when you open it up. I¡¯ve been to ten stores and haven¡¯t found it yet. It used to be all over.¡± ¡°I¡¯ll check.¡± Nick had never actually had to check anything in the system, and it took him a second to figure out how to get the mental link to the store¡¯s inventory running. A query for Whaltey brought up three different sizes of the same unhealthy looking bagged slop, all of which were out of stock. ¡°I¡¯m sorry. It looks like we don¡¯t have it. We do have¡­ Tail-Slap Meatslop. Which looks almost as bad, if that helps.¡± ¡°No, no. It¡¯s alright, son. If you don¡¯t have it, you don¡¯t have it. I don¡¯t want to get used to some new kind of crime-in-a-bag. It was the old kind I wanted.¡± ¡°Nostalgia?¡± ¡°Something like that,¡± The man pursed his lips wistfully, ¡°but if you don¡¯t have it, you don¡¯t have it.¡± Quick as lightning, the man¡¯s hand dropped to his hip, then came up with a coin. He flipped it through the air to Nick, who was so out of practice dealing with actual people that it clattered on the table. He winced at the noise and reached to pick it up, then reached out to hand it back. ¡°No need for currency, sir. Any purchases you make are automatically deducted.¡± ¡°No, son. That¡¯s a tip. For your help.¡± ¡°A tip?¡± Nick looked at the coin in his hand in shock. ¡°Sir, this is a hundred credits. It¡¯s more than I make in a week.¡± ¡°Really? Son, you need a different line of work.¡± The man tapped the table. ¡°Anyhow, have a good day there. And thank you for taking the time to check for me.¡± It was the thank you that did it. Somewhere deep in Nick''s soul, it opened up a long-closed closet of memories of real, significant human interaction. He suddenly remembered what it was like to have peers. Or even to have friends. He could barely, just barely, remember what it was like to be a person instead of expensive window dressing in a convenience store. People did not act like Nick was acting. Not happy people, at least. He made a split-second decision to be different. ¡°Sir?¡± Nick called. He half-expected the man not to stop. He did, though, and turned to face the counter again. ¡°I think I might have a possibility for you, if you are interested.¡± ¡°A possibility?¡± ¡°A way to get the product you want. I figure if you¡¯ve checked so many stores, it might be discontinued. But we have a sort of¡­ I don¡¯t know what you¡¯d call it. A storage-hole, out back. Carved into the asteroid. When products are discontinued, the store usually chucks them back there. No guarantees, but¡­¡± ¡°Say no more, son. It sounds like a good bet. Can you take me there?¡± ¡°I would, but the store would notice. I¡¯m on shift for the next eight hours. I have to keep this job, or they kick me out of the dome.¡± ¡°That doesn¡¯t sound so bad. Somewhere else, you could find a better job, maybe.¡± ¡°No, you don¡¯t get it. They don¡¯t ship me off to some other place. They just kick me out of the dome.¡± It wasn¡¯t an exaggeration. It had been a banner day for Nick when he had found that little tidbit in his employment contract. ¡°Just pfft, and then the vacuum of space.¡± ¡°Ah. I see. I think I can help with that.¡± Nick watched with interest as the man pulled a small communicator-like device out of his pocket and punched a few buttons. There was no guessing the exact purpose of the device. Every class had its own gadgets and gizmos, as well as access to a thousand class-generic utilities that could be purchased by anyone who could afford them. This particular one took in the man¡¯s input, sat quietly in his hand for a moment, then pinged. ¡°There. That should do it. Store, shut down to outside traffic.¡± With no ado, the dome outside turned opaque as the various maintenance drones that maintained the store all lurched to life at once. ¡°Okay, let¡¯s go.¡± Nick liked the man, but didn¡¯t want to fall into a trap just because he hadn¡¯t checked all the boxes he should. ¡°What did you just do? Did you hack the store?¡± ¡°Son, do I look like I know how to hack a store? I bought the place.¡± ¡°Wait.¡± Nick put his hand to his head. ¡°What? The whole store?¡± ¡°The whole asteroid. But only for the next four hours, so let¡¯s get moving.¡± Nick watched as the man walked towards the front of the store and the double sliding automatic doors that would lead him outside. ¡°Kid, I might be your boss, but I¡¯m not gonna order you to do anything. You coming?¡± Nick snapped his mouth shut, then used every bit of the meager enhancements he got from his class to vault over the counter in chase. Meat and Memories ¡°That¡¯s them. Kid, you did it. That¡¯s the damn bags.¡± The man reached out and grabbed three of them at once, waving them in front of Nick''s face. ¡°I can almost smell the stink.¡± It took an hour to find them, even with all the store robots working together to excavate the tons of out-of-date goods in the storage hole. But now they had found it, and the man was as giddy as a schoolboy. ¡°Come on, kid. I¡¯m making us dinner. Grab some beers and things from inside the store and I¡¯ll gather the rest of the ingredients off the shelf.¡± ¡°I can¡¯t afford¡­ Oh. You own them.¡± ¡°I could loot the whole store if I wanted. Just grab all the stuff you want with dinner and I¡¯ll get cooking.¡± When Nick had gathered all the beer, wine, and travel-sized liquor he could carry and made it outside, there was a ship. He could have sworn there wasn¡¯t one there before. Even as distracted as he could sometimes be he would have noticed the enormous, two-story tall fighter ship sitting in front of the store, sleek and deadly as an assassin¡¯s dagger flashing out of the dark. ¡°That is very cool.¡± ¡°It is, isn¡¯t it?¡± The man looked at his ship with appreciation. ¡°I forget that sometimes. Me and her sort of grew up together. It¡¯s easy to forget how lucky I am to have her. Now, come on in. Make yourself comfortable and pop some of those drinks open. I¡¯ll make us a feast.¡± Nick followed him into the ship, which was just as impressive inside as it was outside. There were screens everywhere, displaying information he had no idea how to interpret. The furniture was stripped down and functional, but clearly top-notch. There wasn¡¯t an inch of the whole thing that wasn¡¯t clean, polished, and perfect. ¡°Have a seat over there. I¡¯ll pop open these bags.¡± The man ripped open packages at once, then recoiled from them. ¡°Whew, that¡¯s ripe. We never could figure out if it was a sausage meal, like a whole meal with sausage in it, or some kind of ground up sausage they classified as a meal. Or if it was really food. Lots of mysteries there.¡± ¡°That¡¯s a really horrible smell.¡± Nick felt a pang of sympathy for the man. ¡°I guess they¡¯ve gone off. I¡¯m sorry, sir. I did my best.¡± ¡°Naw, kid. That¡¯s how this stuff always smells. Something about the preservative we use. Rumor was that they were army rations for a destroyed planet . The company got them at a discount and tried to move them as a civilian product. I never knew anyone dumb enough to actually eat it, except us.¡± ¡°Couldn¡¯t you afford better?¡± ¡°Now? Of course. I have more than I can spend, now. Back then? This stuff kept us alive. That was good enough. Now my buddy Tallow, he was the one who figured out how to make this edible. The first trick to it is, you can¡¯t be gentle when you slop it out. It needs to have the chance to fart off some of that sulphur, so you kinda have to sling it into the pan.¡± He did just that, catapulting the mystery food into a big pot with a polished grace that had to be the product of a mountain of stats, levels, and skills. The food plopped into a hideous pile at the bottom of the pot, looking like some kind of dark-dimension chili set to wreak havoc on a gentler realm. ¡°That¡¯s edible?¡± Nick realized after-the-fact that the question might be construed as rude. He decided that given that he had already said it, he might double down. ¡°It won¡¯t kill me?¡± ¡°It¡¯s not edible yet. Now that we have it out of the bag, we have to heat it up. Hotter than you¡¯d think. If it¡¯s not boiling, it won¡¯t burn off the stuff that you don¡¯t want in your body. Got it? Good.¡± The man turned up the heat on the stove as high as it would go, and left it cooking while he took his fifth long, hard draw off one of the liquor bottles Nick had brought. ¡°Now, guess at the real trick. This is space food, see. Nobody on a respectable planet would buy it, let alone eat it once they saw what it was. It¡¯s probably got all the parts food should have, but they are jumbled. What do you do?¡± ¡°Don''t eat it?¡± ¡°No. Because if you don¡¯t eat it, you starve. You need protein. What you need to do is cook off as much of the fake as you can, then combine it with something real.¡± Nick had seen what fake food cost, way out here, economically packaged and preserved to last decades. He couldn¡¯t even imagine what something real cost. ¡°I see that look, but you¡¯re wrong. There¡¯s a couple kinds of real food that don¡¯t cost anything. Beans, grain. Dried and thrown into bags. See that?¡± The man pointed at a burlap sack on the ground. ¡°Paid five credits for that on some nothing agricultural world. Bioengineered to hold enough calories to feed you for six months. I¡¯ve got twenty of them below decks. Lentils, beans, rice, grains, all mixed. As real as anything gets, anymore.¡± He threw a few cups of the grain in the pot with the meat and a bit of water, then covered it. ¡°There. I¡¯m going to let that cook up. You sit here and enjoy yourself while I go check on some things. We¡¯ll eat when I get back.¡± Waiting alone wasn¡¯t hard. Even if all he had done that day was sit inside this spaceship taking in the sights, it still would have been the most interesting thing to happen to him in months. Before too long, the man came back. Popping open another beer, he served two servings of the food. ¡°There. Let it cool for a minute. You don¡¯t want that hot grease hitting your stomach too fast. Causes problems.¡± The man sat across from Nick and threw his feet up. ¡°So what¡¯s your story, kid? What kind of scam did you fall for to get way out here?¡± ¡°Who said I got scammed?¡± ¡°Because the only other way people get into your kind of job is by getting into a bad, deep kind of debt. And you don¡¯t look the type.¡± ¡°Right. Well, I did get scammed. A job ad that promised the world. This turned out to be the world it was talking about.¡± ¡°Damn.¡± The man swigged his beer and stirred his food, still not digging in. ¡°You didn¡¯t know any better?¡± This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. ¡°No, I did. But I didn¡¯t have much choice. I¡¯m an off-universe refugee, you see.¡± ¡°No shit?¡± ¡°No shit.¡± That was probably the only truly interesting thing about Nick from this man¡¯s point of view. Most people in the universe came from entire worlds that had been yanked into it as a whole after going through trials and tribulations meant to ready them for life in the great, infinite everything. People who had come to the universe that way got to take advantage of the process. They were a cut above the pack, in terms of potential. A few people, Including Nick, came in another way. Instead of riding their planet as it shot out of the protective womb of their old universe, people like Nick just fell out by themselves. Nick had been walking across his yard to throw away a bag of trash when it happened. At the beginning of one step, he was home. At the end of it, he was somewhere he didn¡¯t recognize surrounded by things he didn¡¯t understand. ¡°I guess you would have to take some kind of job, even with a fancy class. What did you get, anyway?¡± ¡°Your appraisal skill doesn¡¯t tell you?¡± Almost everyone got some kind of appraisal skill eventually. Even if this man¡¯s appraisal skill was trash, he had enough levels that there was no chance Nick could block it. ¡°I never appraised you. Seemed rude, once we got to talking. What did you get?¡± ¡°Swordsman.¡± ¡°Which one? I¡¯ve seen sword dancers do good work.¡± ¡°No. Not a swordsman class. Just swordsman. The actual swordsman class.¡± ¡°Oh. I didn¡¯t even know it got that basic. Is it as bad as it sounds?¡± ¡°I checked the guidebook on it the day after I arrived. The only entry on the class said ¡®Uses a sword. If you have this class, the universe probably finds you boring.¡¯ I haven¡¯t seen anything to contradict that since.¡± ¡°No use dwelling on it now. Food can take your mind off it for a little.¡± The man dipped into his, ladling a spoonful of radioactive-looking food into his mouth. He sighed with satisfaction. ¡°That¡¯s it. That¡¯s just how it was, back then.¡± Nick took a bite himself. It was about as bad as he expected it to be. On Earth, he would have spit it out. Since then, he had managed to get a lot of practice hours in eating the cheap slop the store generated for its captive workers. This wasn¡¯t better than that, but it was different enough that Nick was just barely motivated to eat it. ¡°Don¡¯t make that face. It¡¯s an acquired taste.¡± ¡°Not to argue, but there¡¯s not going to be much chance to acquire it now that the main ingredient is out of production. I will remember what you taught me about grains. Should be useful if I ever get out of here.¡± ¡°What¡¯s the plan for that?¡± The man kept shoveling the food into his mouth, clearly enjoying himself as he downed all the cheap calories and expensive, convenience store liquor his body could handle. ¡°You could get an emergency evac.¡± ¡°I could. But there¡¯s not much use in it if I don¡¯t have anywhere better to be, and nobody is going to hire a level four swordsman for anything. It¡¯s not a strong enough class to go it alone in the dungeons unless they are truly bottom-tier, and no team is going to waste their time developing something as generic as Swordsman.¡± ¡°What about your class evolution?¡± The man finished off his bowl and popped open another couple bottles of booze, handing one to Nick. ¡°Real close.¡± Nick took a swig of the booze. It was strong. Between that drink and what he had consumed before, he was beginning to feel the alcohol take effect. ¡°Thirty points. As soon as the dungeon recharges tomorrow, I¡¯ll have it.¡± ¡°What¡¯s the most likely evolution?¡± ¡°Swordsman II. If I get that, it¡¯s all over. I¡¯ll be locked into vanilla swordsman forever.¡± Nick took a bigger bite of his food than he had before, finding the alcohol made it a bit better. Not good, but better. ¡°The other direction is Magic Swordsman. It¡¯s better, and if I get lucky again after that I might get into something really worth having.¡± ¡°Sounds like long odds.¡± ¡°It¡¯s the odds I have.¡± Nick would have liked to have a different bet to make. Even if he got lucky, he was just moving from bad to mediocre. ¡°Sometimes you just have to roll the dice. It¡¯s why I came out here. Not a good gamble, but better than laying down and dying.¡± ¡°I¡¯ll drink to that.¡± The man took another swig from his bottle. ¡°Finish your food, and then help me get rid of some of this booze. I¡¯m never going to drink this much alone.¡±
A few hours later, the man and Nick had put down enough liquor to pay his salary for a year and the man¡¯s temporary ownership of the store was almost up. ¡°You have to go back to work after this? Are you going to be alright? You had a few.¡± ¡°I¡¯ll be fine. Just a few more hours. Nobody ever talks to me anyway. Only you.¡± Nick stepped down the hatch ramp from the ship, hoping the asteroid surface would feel steadier under his feet. It didn¡¯t. ¡°This whole time? Just me? That¡¯s dark, kid.¡± There wasn¡¯t any judgement in the man¡¯s tone. He was stating a fact. ¡°Listen. I¡¯ll tell you something I learned from Anna.¡± ¡°Anna? From your crew?¡± ¡°Anna. My ship. The Anvil.¡± The man patted a landing strut affectionately. ¡°What I know from her is, sometimes pushing through at full power gets you through where all the odds say you shouldn¡¯t make it.¡± ¡°Sure.¡± Nick held his tongue on the subject of just how far the odds could be stretched in favor of a vanilla, no-frills swordsman. ¡°Thanks, by the way. For talking to me. It meant something.¡± The man clapped his hand on Nick''s shoulder and nodded. ¡°No problem. You better get in there, son. I¡¯ll take a quick once over of my domain one last time, before it becomes someone else¡¯s domain, again.¡± Nick was back behind the counter and clocked back into his post when the dome suddenly went transparent again, opening the store to outside traffic as the old man¡¯s ship finally rocketed away.
The next hours of work took forever. Hardly anyone came in, and Nick slowly sobered up as the people who did stop ignored him in the usual way he was accustomed to. When the shift was finally over, Nick picked his sword up from behind the store¡¯s air conditioning unit and got halfway to the dungeon before reconsidering. There was a good chance it hadn¡¯t fully recharged yet. Hitting the anemic monster generator when it wasn¡¯t good and ready for action sometimes meant only one or two enemies popped out before it quit again, and Nick wasn¡¯t willing to roll the dice on waiting another full shift before he knew. Leaning his sword on his shoulder, he walked to his sleeping shed, kicked off his shoes, and face planted into his bed. Talking to a real, live person after so long had taken it out of him. With visions of a marginally better future dancing in his head, Nick made a futile, doomed attempt to study up on his potential new classes before sleep and boredom pulled him in. That night, he dreamt of preserved meat glop and open, starry skies. The next morning, he didn¡¯t even take the time to put on his shoes before rushing across the rough surface of the asteroid to the small, ramped entrance into the dungeon. It was as depressing as always, a fact that barely registered in Nick''s brain. With any luck, this would be the last time he saw it. The dungeon always took a few minutes to realize he was there. Nick stretched out while he waited. It wouldn¡¯t do to get injured this close to the end of things after avoiding anything worse than a scratch for months. He could not let anything go wrong. He would not. Once he had his level, he still had enough time to go update his job-seeker¡¯s profile on the network before he went to work, and then things would start to change. He just had to not ruin anything in the meantime. Fully stretched, Nick rested his sword on his shoulder. He had once thought swords were cool, but that was before he ever held one for longer than a few seconds. A day with the bladed weapon after he got his class was enough to convince him he hated the tennis-elbow inducing, awkward lengths of metal. The mere presence of the thing made his impatience worse as he waited. And waited. And waited. Something was wrong. The delay had just shifted from being particularly slow to a sure indication of trouble when the system made it that much more official.
Dungeon Non-Functional
The Suitcase
Dungeon Non-Functional! Through direct damage to the dungeon itself or due to a problem with the environment it inhabits, this dungeon no longer functions properly. While even the smallest and weakest of dungeons will correct this type of problem over time, the natural process of healing might take longer in a low-quality or energy-starved environment. Estimated Repair Time: 11 Days
Nick spent some time looking at the message, reading it and rereading it. Then he screamed, filling the unpopulated dome with echoing sounds of suffering. ¡°How does it break?¡± Nick kicked rocks all the way back to the main building. ¡°Sputtering? Sure. Creaking while it generates monsters? Of course. But breaking? Breaking?!¡± He shifted quickly from anger to denial. It wasn¡¯t, he told himself, that big of a deal. It was just one more week. Plus some days, sure, maybe closer to two weeks. He¡¯d waited much longer than that to get to this point. He would, he told himself, be able to zone out again. He¡¯d close off his mind to the passage of time, and it would whip by. As soon as he got back on his shift, he couldn¡¯t hide how big of a lie that was. Every moment was suddenly experienced in real-time again, every second vibrantly its own and existing for its own painful eternity. Every customer¡¯s stupid rich-kid voice grated on his nerves. Every menial task was now its own sisyphian boulder-pushing event, dull and endless in and of itself. Halfway through the eleven-day period, he threw his sword on the roof of the store. He could send a robot to get it later, but the process would be a pain. There was no use keeping a big knife around himself in a depression if he didn¡¯t even have a use for it. He almost hated the robots themselves as they whizzed around taking care of almost every task that could have broken up the monotony of the waiting. He checked the dungeon every day after his shift, hoping something might change and hurry the process of recovery. He knew it wouldn¡¯t and it never did, but he did at least end up knowing about the passage of every single second, and every moment that remained until he could finally move on. Finally, after what felt like decades of waiting, he was in his final shift before the dungeon would reboot. After a few more entitled customers ignoring every aspect of his being filtered through the store, he would finally be able to move on from his bad class to a still-bad but slightly better one, throw his hat into the job recruiting pool, and hope for an opportunity to do literally anything else. Then it happened. As what would probably be the final customer of his shift left the store and blasted away to adventures he could only dream of having, the dome went opaque. ¡°The hell?¡± Nick ran out of the store and verified that there was absolutely nothing of interest for him to see in the landing area. No ships were present that could have caused this. There was no apparent damage to the buildings or the asteroid that the robots needed to take a break to repair. ¡°Why now?¡± The answer came in the form of a small blur of motion as a suitcase-sized metal box flew into the dome. Nothing could do that without clearance from the dome itself, so the connection between the box and whatever was happening was undeniable. Nick stood still as the box took a lap around the dome, leeched off its own velocity into the synthetic atmosphere, then settled just in front of him, hanging in the air in a way that defied every speck of the asteroid¡¯s fake gravity. The box creaked and hissed as a small portion of the metal top slid back into the lid itself, exposing what Nick recognized as a holocrystal. ¡°Hi, kid.¡± The black-clad mystery man¡¯s face projected up from the crystal, lifelike outside of some pixilization and distortion that marred the image here and there. ¡°Are you surprised?¡± ¡°Of course. What¡¯s going on?¡± ¡°If you just replied, I can¡¯t hear you. Where I¡¯m at, one-way messages are about all I can manage.¡± The man coughed, a truly unhealthy-sounding hacking that immediately shifted Nick from annoyed interest to worry. ¡°First, I want to apologize for breaking your dungeon. I can¡¯t imagine how pissed off you must have been about that.¡± ¡°Asshole!¡± Nick yelled, knowing the hologram couldn¡¯t hear him. ¡°I knew it. I knew it wasn¡¯t a coincidence.¡± ¡°No, it didn¡¯t just break on its own. In my defense, it was the only way I could have possibly got you to wait before you locked yourself into that path. You weren¡¯t gonna listen to some old man you didn¡¯t know.¡± The man coughed again, wiping his mouth with a hand that came away with a small streak of red. ¡°But I figured that if there was one thing this universe screwed you out of, it was choices. Where I was headed when I left you, it seemed like there was a good chance I might be able to give you one, for once.¡± Just then, there was no universe to Nick. As soon as the man mentioned a real, actual choice, his focus locked in like the bolts on a safe. ¡°So you know, when an old man like me starts chasing the past like you saw me do, it¡¯s usually because he doesn¡¯t see that much future ahead of him. That¡¯s the kind of thing you have to pay attention to when you are in my line of business.¡± The man¡¯s words started to slur a bit. His eyes, which were sharp and focused at the beginning of the message, seemed to be losing their piercing qualities. ¡°Shit. I thought I¡¯d have more time.¡± The old man¡¯s hand moved forward unsteadily to hit a few keys that Nick could hear but couldn¡¯t see, then came back. ¡°Point is, that crystal in front of you is more than a message. It¡¯s a choice. It¡¯s not a safe choice, or an easy one. I made the same one a long time ago.¡± The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. The old man coughed again. It didn¡¯t sound better, despite being much weaker now. ¡°Don¡¯t feel obligated. If you can¡¯t tell, I probably won¡¯t be swinging back your way after this. I just¡­¡± The man seemed to forget where he was for a moment, staring blankly ahead of himself for a few beats before pulling things back together for one last sentence. ¡°You gave me company when I needed it, back there. I just wanted to thank you by giving you another path to follow. After reading this, you should have about another two minutes to make your choice before the dome goes clear again. It¡¯s your game, whether you call or fold. Good luck either way, kid.¡± The message cut off. Nick stood there staring down at the crystal, which didn¡¯t give any obvious signs of activity. Slowly, his curiosity pulled his hand forward until his fingers barely brushed the hard surface of the jewel. It react instantly
The Outlaw Brody McCann is offering you succession rights to his path. Do you accept this offer?
Nothing in any of the books Nick had read mentioned anything like this. Whatever was happening here was either a secret, or rare enough they didn¡¯t consider it interesting. ¡°Not a lot of information to go on with, Brody. How dangerous and hard are we talking?¡± The crystal sat there, silent. The system, however, chose that moment to make things more complex.
Dungeon Repair Complete You recently visited a dungeon in disrepair. It is now functional again, and, barring further interference, will behave as usual on your next visit.
Just like the man had said, there were two choices laid out in front of him. Nick glanced behind him at the cavity in the rock of the asteroid that held its dungeon. He could run over there, kill a few wraiths in half, level, and transition to his new class evolution within the next five minutes. Or he could try to get this crystal to work, abandon all that, and move forward in a different direction that he had no information on. The thing holding him back the most was the sheer amount of time he had sunk into waiting for his swordsman evolution. He was surprised just how much value the waiting seemed to have added to it. On some level, he knew it wasn¡¯t much. On every other level, it was the focus of his entire life for the last several months. It was hard to think of giving it up. Somehow, it even mattered that the crystal in front of him wasn¡¯t a pretty color. It wasn¡¯t obsidian black or crimson red. It was just a dull brown thing, a boring color that didn¡¯t give off much of a feeling of adventure. On the other hand, he could remember what it was like to be around that man, who he was only starting to think of as Brody. He had been a little goofy, and willing to eat things that weren¡¯t exactly food. From what little he had told Nick of his past, he hadn¡¯t had an easy go of things, at least at first. Nick knew absolutely nothing about what his class was or how it worked. If there was one thing for sure, though, he hadn¡¯t been boring. To Nick, that was enough to overrule any other considerations. He reached out and touched the crystal, focusing his desire to take what Brody had given him and make it his own. Opening his very soul to it. Nothing happened. ¡°Oh, yeah. The system interface. Right.¡± Opening back up the window, Nick indicated the Y portion of the Y/N choice, and immediately collapsed to the ground. When Nick had first started leveling his class, the feeling of growing stronger had been addictive and exciting. It was the feeling of liquid power being injected directly into every inch of his muscle and bone. This was the same process in reverse, only worse. It was like a wolf was latched onto his soul, shaking. The power he had gained was ripped off like scabs from a wound and he writhed screaming on the ground. In a blink, the pain stopped, gone like it had never been there at all. In its place was sweet, addictive information.
Level 1 Starlight Mercenary Accumulation: 0/500 HP 50/50 MP: 10/10 Proficiencies: Gunslinger (Level 0) Knife-fighter (Level 0) Tinker (Level 0)
Skill: 10 Toughness: 10 Quick: 10 Psyche: 10 Traits: | Stranger | Bound Captain |
¡°Shit." Nick grimaced at his status screen. ¡°Level one, again.¡± The screen was similar in some ways to what he had before. Every class started with fifty health points, unless they had some skill that pushed the number higher. He had stats. He saw things listed that at least looked like skills, even if the switch to proficiencies was not lost on him. The biggest superficial change was the ten points of honest-to-god magic power gracing his resources. That almost justified the switch, but only almost. He would have had magic power as a magic swordsman, too. The traits were a mystery, though he knew some classes could pick up qualities that didn¡¯t qualify as skills but still provided benefits. That was where his understanding ran out. Everything else was a mystery that would require a deeper look, but status screens were built to accommodate that kind of zoomed-in examination. Focusing on the class name, Nick brought up every detail the system would give him. The attempt came with another wince-inducing wave of pain as the system protested what should have been a routine action.
Warning! Class host incompatibilities detected. Resolving¡­ Incompatibility resolution successful. The previous errors detected are attributable to the class host¡¯s origins in a non-integrated universe. A lack of cultural context regarding Actolia and the feats of historic Actolians of note has been mitigated by adjusting the aesthetics and superficial touchpoint references of the class to fit the most similar cultural archetype from the class host¡¯s home world.
That was nonsense, as near as Nick could tell. He stared at the message for a bit without making any sense of it at all. Shaking his head, he moved back to the class description screen, hoping what he read there would help him decode the system-provided nonsense.
Starlight Mercenary (Ancient Actolia Heritage class, Heritable) The stars, they say, stretch on forever. Each holds entire worlds captive, full of people and places. Each is waiting for you to explore it, filled to the brim with both opportunity and danger. Each features a potentially infinite list of problems to be solved, and promises riches to those with what it takes to solve them. As the Starlight Mercenary, you are as well equipped to resolve these issues as anyone in the greater universe. Whether assigned to you by individuals or the system itself, some tasks and jobs will present themselves to you as bounties, specialized class missions that carry system awards above and beyond any negotiated pay. Starlight Mercenary is a pathed class, one that progresses not only in terms of levels. As you mold yourself to fit your newfound title and contemplate the concepts related to it, you will find strength that both amplifies and surpasses that granted to you by stats.
That was all the system had to say, but it was a lot. Class descriptions were starter knowledge, at best. The fact that he got three full paragraphs was a far better sign than the bare Uses swords in combat and may progress to more advanced classes description Swordsman had come with. Escape The stat categories were different, but the description for those cleared them up in a jiffy.
Skill: Every move you make with a weapon or your body is controlled by Skill. The sureness of your steps, the aim of your gun, and the deftness of your knife-hand are all enhanced at once by this stat. It also indirectly influences the damage you deal with your weapons, both by passively increasing their effectiveness and by helping you select and strike more vulnerable targets.
Toughness: When you take a hit, toughness works to mitigate it. At a simple level, more toughness allows you to survive more damage with the same amount of health points. As time goes on and you acquire resistance or regeneration proficiencies, they will draw their power from toughness. The amount of points in tough dictates your baseline health regeneration and hit points, both by itself and by empowering skills that augment its effect. At a given level any skill that either prevents or heals injuries will function better with a higher toughness stat to rely on.
Quicken: There¡¯s what you can do, and then there¡¯s how fast you can do it. Quick is a speed stat that enhances any movement you make. It does not affect accuracy or power in most cases. It is additive to Skill in most respects, making it possible to shoot faster and dodge quicker blows. It may interact with some movement and footwork skills and certain very specific combat skills in the future.
Psyche: As a Starlight Mercenary, many of your skills can be augmented by mystic force. Psyche helps this process in at least two ways by determining the refill rate of your MP bar and by augmenting any skill that empties it. Psyche also functions as the baseline of your mental and spiritual defenses. As your psyche levels climb, curses and mental attacks that would have once put you down will slide off like water from an aquatic fowl¡¯s feathers. As with Tough, Psyche can power a number of proficiencies that increase these defensive effects even further.
Nick had heard of classes with as few as one stats, but his impression of the general class system was that both too few and too many stats tended to bode poorly for progress in a particular class title. Too few, and you were likely in a class like Tailor or Rager, and either condemned to a lifetime wrangling buttons or dying in a blaze of glory in a fight a more rational class would have won. To many, and you found yourself with too little strength in any one category to ever be overpowering in any way. Four stats seemed to be just about right, but the shift from swordsman¡¯s simple, clearly related stats to these was a lot to take in. It wasn¡¯t really possible to understand the stats without the skills, anyway.
Gunslinger You have Skill-dependent proficiency with both revolver and repeating rifle-style blaster pistols specific to your class, and a lesser, more improvisation-level understanding of other single-shot weapons. These weapons will be available for acquisition shortly, and are capable of firing an unlimited amount of times without ammunition or magic enhancement. When enhanced by your magical power, individual shots can either be strengthened, transformed into trick shots capable of moments atypical of normal handgun or rifle fire, or both. The amount each shot can be manipulated in these ways is limited by the amount of magical power you supply to each, which is in turn capped by Gunfighter¡¯s level. Your gun can also be loaded with consumable ammunition to create other effects. See Tinker and your weapons¡¯ descriptions for more details.
Knife-fighter (Starlight Mercenary Variation) You have increased battlefield competency with any single-edged, metal-bladed fighting knives. LIke Gunslinger, Knife-fighter relies on your skill stat to determine how well you handle the knife, how well you exploit weakness and gaps in defense, and how much damage you deal above and beyond what conventional physics would predict. Although knife-fighter is a skill that appears in a variety of classes, the version you possess is altered to interact with Starlight Mercenary¡¯s Tinker, and will continue to differentiate itself from the standard version as both it and your class progress.
Bound Captain was calling his name from the traits section, but Tinker had so many mentions in the other skills he felt he had to address it first, especially with the time that McCann said he had allotted for all this introduction rapidly running out.
Tinker Your class is special, and requires specialized arms to function properly. Tinker is the skill that makes this possible by granting you the skill required to make, modify, and enhance the weapons you require. With Tinker, you will create soul-bound, class defining firearms and to update them with new materials and mechanisms as you advance in your class. You will pound mundane and legendary metals into finished blades, then mount them in wood and bone to create fighting knives that know no equal. Tinker can be used to pack ammunition with everything ranging from venom to the dying heart of a star, although most things like the latter are gated behind a proficiency most never reach. Not every material is suitable for ammunition, but all of those that are grant significant buffs over and above what your firearms can already do. Unlike most proficiencies, Tinker is not bound to a particular stat. Instead, your level in this proficiency determines the type of materials and complexity of upgrades you can currently work with. In turn, the primary means of increasing this proficiency¡¯s level is integrating the highest-quality materials you can into your guns, ammo, and knives.
Nick''s eyes darted up to the dome, which was still opaque. He thought he understood the gist of the class well enough so far. It was a pathed class, one that seemed to lean towards ranged weapons while still allowing for some flexibility at melee range. That suited him just fine. His time as a swordsman had given him both tennis elbow and an understanding that fighting from a single predetermined range absolutely, positively sucked. Having the option of hanging back and firing a ranged weapon at things until they forced him into melee seemed much better, especially if he had system-provided options to deal with problems once they were up close and personal. he didn¡¯t understand anything but least specific parts of Tinker. He had no idea how he¡¯d get one of the class-bound guns the system mentioned, or any clue where to get metal for a knife besides cannibalizing the bargain-basement sword strapped to his back. Getting what was going on there in anything like a complete sense would hopefully come with time and actually putting the proficiency to work. The Actolian Heritage Class descriptor was still unexplained, but he at least had a gist of what kind of culture the system was adapting things from. If he was reading between the lines correctly, they were some kind of frontier outlaw. Every proficiency he saw dripped with hints of someone riding into town on a dark horse and getting into gun trouble before he rode out again. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Which was kind of cool, at least in Nick''s eyes. If he had to choose between this and the melee footsoldier class he had abandoned, he¡¯d take this approximately ten out of every ten times. And that was before he finally got to Bound Captain. It had been calling his name since he had opened his status screen, and he was finally able to read the description. Unfortunately, another notification opened before he could. Nick scanned the message with the blank, abuse-adjusted eyes of a longtime retail employee before taking a deep, depressed breath. ¡°Well, that sucks.¡±
Astramart Employer Communication Contract Violation Detected. As per your signed agreement, your employment as an Astramart is contingent on a minimum class level of 3. Your employment with Astramart is hereby terminated. Please make a purchase or else prepare for immediate expulsion from Astramart premises.
Nick''s hand dropped to where his wallet would be if he had one. This new universe ran on credits, a system-enforced fiat currency that operated out of a status screen all its own. He didn¡¯t have to check that to know that he didn¡¯t have enough in his virtual wallet to buy so much as a bag of chips in this place. A simple beverage here cost more than a year of his wages. As if sensing his hesitance, the dome chose that moment to blink back to transparency as the robot staff that actually ran the place began to lurch towards him. He prepared to start running. The dome would stop him soon enough, but getting some distance on the robots would at least buy him a few seconds of life before they catapulted him out into the cold vacuum of space. ¡°Wait.¡± A robotic, feminine voice sounded from nowhere. Nick could not tell where it was coming from. ¡°I have detected a threat to your person in the local environment. Would you like to flee?¡± Nick may not have understood what was going on, but some questions just weren¡¯t that hard to answer. ¡°Yes, please.¡± ¡°Acknowledged. Please wait a moment.¡± With another hiss, the box in front of Nick began to crack at previously invisible seams, spreading and growing in an impossible way as each new emerging segment morphed in shape and color. Luckily, the tons of moving metal that were suddenly in motion seemed intent on avoiding him. An approaching robot wasn¡¯t as lucky and caught a rapidly expanding wing to the face that blasted it clear to the other side of the dome. ¡°Expansion complete.¡± Nick watched in stunned awe as a small hatch opened in the brand new, jet black ship in front of him. ¡°Enter quickly, please." The woman''s voice was firmer and more impatient now. "I have no tools with which to protect you when landed.¡± Nick sprinted up the extended hatch-ramp into the ship. The door snapped closed behind him, and he stumbled towards the only chair he could see as the craft¡¯s engines whirred to life somewhere behind him. He barely had his butt in the seat before the ship lifted off the ground, putting six or seven yards of air between it and the pursuing mob of robots on the ground. ¡°No apparent points of exit are available.¡± The ship¡¯s voice was calm as it informed him the dome was sealed shut. Through the front viewport, Nick had just the right angle to see one of the more distant robots level an arm towards the ship and fire a bolt of energy at them. The ship rocked unhealthily in the air as it made impact. ¡°We are currently under fire. Would you like me to pursue more creative exit strategies?¡± ¡°Yes. Do.¡± Nick looked around for a seatbelt and found nothing. ¡°Wait. What do you mean by creative?¡± ¡°This.¡± The engines suddenly roared as the ship shot straight towards the dome. ¡°Please brace yourself, captain.¡± Contrary to his expectations, Nick was not pulped into jelly a second later. Instead, every joint on the ship started to creak as it struggled against the force dome, inching forward against its resistance until something snapped and the ship shot forward into space. ¡°Hey, ship?¡± ¡°Yes, captain?¡± ¡°Were you planning on the dome breaking down entirely like that?¡± Nick stared out the viewport as the maintenance robots struggled in vain to swim back toward the Astramart through the vacuum of space. ¡°Just curious.¡± ¡°No,¡± The ship paused for a moment, ¡°Although it was enjoyable. Creative exits are fun, I think. Did you enjoy it?¡± The question caught Nick off guard. Things like having fun hadn¡¯t been part of his relevant experiences for months. Even so, some questions just came stock with easy answers. ¡°Yes. Hell yes.¡± Nick patted the wall of the ship affectionately. ¡°Let¡¯s be creative more often, ship.¡± ¡°Why are you calling me ship?¡± The voice sounded pleased with Nick''s approval, but eager to correct the misunderstanding. It didn''t like being called ship, which made sense. Nick hadn''t liked being referred to as human. That had happened a few times. ¡°You have a name? Great. What is it?¡± ¡°I am an Actolian Retaliator Class extraction shuttle designated as The Anvil. A quick scan of my records seems to indicate that most of my previous owners called me Annie.¡± --- ¡°Annie? I thought Brody called you Anna.¡± ¡°He might have. My records do confirm that Brody was my last captain, if little else. In any case, I prefer Annie in this incarnation.¡± ¡°Wait. You''re the same ship? You are my ship?¡± Nick wheeled around to get a better look at Annie¡¯s interior. The floor plan of the ship was about the size of a cargo van back on Earth, though the ceiling was thankfully a bit higher than a van¡¯s would be. The impossibly expensive looking shine of Brody¡¯s ship was gone, as were any number of fancy head-spinning bells and whistles Nick had taken in while getting blasted with the old man. Still, there was something about the overall stripped-down utility that remained that reminded him of what it once had been. ¡°You have the directionality wrong.¡± Annie somehow managed to sound mildly offended and pleased at the same time. ¡°Please review your Bound Captain skill. It should shed some light on things.¡± As the ship rocketed through space in no direction in particular, Nick opened his status screen once more.
Bound Captain Many races in history have lost their home worlds. Of them all, only the Antolians were known to have done so willingly. From the first moments they acquired means to escape the grasp of their planet¡¯s gravity, the call of space proved strong enough that no planet¡¯s soil would ever again satisfy them. Within startlingly few generations, the stars became their home. They built great ship docks in orbit around young stars, harvesting their energy to build ships ranked among the finest the galaxy had ever known. They took what work they could find, braving dangers of all sorts and accepting only such pay as would allow them the freedom to improve their spacecraft and roam further and further into the unknown. Then, like many races before them, they angered forces greater than they expected, stood firm where they should have retreated, and were wiped from the face of history. At the last breath of their people, the remaining survivors banded together to create an indelible record of what they had once been. Half that record is your class. The other half is composed of The Anvil. As The Anvil¡¯s bound captain, your role is to act as the hands and feet of a living piece of history, furthering the legend of the Antolians through every mission you complete together. As a class-bound ship, The Anvil will grow more powerful as you do. Every level you gain will add something of what was lost when the last Antolian fell, integrating lost technologies and capabilities into the ship¡¯s structure until it once again stands as a testament to the greatness of the Antolians¡¯ achievements. Unlike a conventional ship, The Anvil requires no fuel to travel and can to some extent maintain its own functions. These capabilities are limited, however, and will benefit from supplements of the normal supplies and maintenance other ships require. Upgrades to The Anvil outside of its normal class-connected growth are possible, and will sometimes be offered among your bounty rewards.
¡°You see? I am not yours.¡± Nick could almost have sworn he heard a self-satisfied nod as Annie once again confirmed she was not an owned thing. ¡°You are mine.¡± ¡°I see. I don¡¯t suppose I have any problems with that, considering that without you I¡¯d just be out there.¡± Space looked like a cold place, and Nick wasn¡¯t going to spend a lot of time arguing the intricacies of his relationship with the ship keeping him out of it. ¡°So how does this work? You order me to go places, and I go?¡± ¡°No, no. You are the captain. You decide where we go, and what we do. I¡¯ll assist you in any way I can, up to and including the destruction of both of us.¡± Annie paused. ¡°I just wanted to be clear what I am. And what I am not.¡± Nick took a mental note then and there that whatever else Annie might be, she was not his slave. He was happy to find that despite his lack of choice in the matter, he liked it much better that way. He was nearly ready to move on to the hundreds of questions he wanted to ask when the ship rocked violently again. Unbidden, a system screen appeared before his eyes.
Emergency Bounty! (Compulsory) Survive and escape Through wanton destruction of property, you have managed to anger the automated defensive drones of a nearby Astramart. They are in close pursuit of your ship, and are attempting to recoup the financial losses you forced on their interstellar parent company by scrapping your ship and corpse for parts. Completion Parameters: Through combat or evasion, survive the encounter and escape the sensor range of the nearby Astramart. Rewards: Accumulation, Equipment Assortment Failure Penalties: Death
Best Move ¡°It appears we are under attack, captain. What are your orders?¡± ¡°My orders? I thought you owned me. Why am I giving orders?¡± A few lights flashed in a quick pattern on the console before Annie¡¯s voice returned. ¡°You are my captain. Whom I need to give me orders. I can¡¯t be expected to provide my own direction. It¡¯s improper.¡± ¡°Fine. Fine.¡± Nick peered out the windows. There were a few small white dots quickly becoming larger as they closed the distance between the wreckage of the dome and the ship. ¡°Can we outrun them?¡± ¡°For a time. I am already moving away from the threat as quickly as my engines will allow. Any more is unlikely, unless you have a ship navigation skill that will allow me to go faster. Do you have that?¡± ¡°No. Not that I know of, at least.¡± ¡°Darn.¡± ¡°Then open fire.¡± Nick leaned back in the chair and pointed at the dots. ¡°With all guns.¡± ¡°I am already doing that.¡± Annie said. ¡°But I don¡¯t see any fire¡­ you don¡¯t have any guns.¡± Nick tried not to bang his head on the console. ¡°What kind of mercenary ship has no guns?¡± ¡°The kind bound to a captain who is only at level one.¡± ¡°Right. So I don¡¯t know what else to do. If you can¡¯t fight and you can¡¯t run, what else is there?¡± ¡°Analysis. You could ask me to analyze the situation and present you options.¡± ¡°You said you can¡¯t give orders.¡± Some lights flashed on the console in what Nick suspected was an exasperated pattern. ¡°I can¡¯t. I can give options that you decide on. Captain.¡± ¡°Then do that. Please.¡± Nick expected the analysis to take a bit of time. It didn¡¯t. Annie, apparently, had known what to do the entire time. He also expected to have to do the whole get-Annie-to-tell-him-what-to-do song and dance a bit longer, but that wasn¡¯t true either. He got his first on-the-job insight about his class instead as a screen popped open in front of his eyes.
Strategic Analysis The Anvil is fleeing from a threat with superior combat abilities and capable of a greater top speed than the Anvil can reach. With evasion and ship-to-ship combat both promising little but death, other options must be considered. Currently, the loadout and resources of the Anvil are as follow: Armaments None. Rations Whaltey¡¯s Sausage Meal (1 Bag) Explosives (Conventional, Improvised, or Potentially Createable) None. Energy Manufacturer Stock 100 points
¡°I could chuck the sausage meal at them. It just might burn through the metal.¡± ¡°Captain, I should stress that the time remaining until our destruction becomes sure is rapidly dwindling.¡± ¡°I know. Just trying to lighten the mood. So what can you manufacture with this?¡± The energy manufacturers at the Astramart had been fairly simple, handling just a few very simple materials needed for some of their pre-prepared food on top of the simple, nearly tasteless slop Nick had lived off of. The one in the wall looked a little better, if smaller. It was about the size of a medicine cabinet, if a medicine cabinet came equipped with blinking lights and a glowing white interior. ¡°We can currently manufacture a number of simple food items, several types of toiletries, and some basic decorations for the ship. Most relevant to our situation, the amount of energy preloaded into the system is just enough to create two basic weapon kits relevant to your class.¡± ¡°Quite the coincidence.¡± ¡°Or else my previous captain invested some wealth towards it. Although the cost would have been high. Enough to buy the store from which we escaped.¡± ¡°For how long?¡± Some lights blinked for a moment. ¡°Forever. Outright. Indefinitely. Please give me an order to replicate the weapons, sir. Before we are blown to bits.¡± Nick gave the approval, and two small boxes blinked into existence in the manufacturer. It was always disappointing to him how quickly the machines worked. The first time he watched one work, he expected glowing lights and a slow, dramatic transition from pure energy to matter. Instead, stuff was just there, disappointingly quickly and with no fanfare at all. He grabbed the boxes and activated them, scanning the system window attached to each as he did.
Basic Weapon Construction Kit (2x) Each of these weapon kits contains the basic components necessary to assemble a class-appropriate weapon. The weapon assembled will be random, unless you already own a superior weapon of the same type, in which case that weapon type will be ruled out as a possibility. The basic level of this kit creates the lowest-possible grade weapon, on par with the first and most easily discovered weapons available to a class holder during their tutorial.
¡°I¡¯m getting to work on these. Do I just open the door and shoot once they are done?¡± ¡°No, captain. Small arms fire is disallowed during space flight. We will have to land. I¡¯ve identified several suitable asteroids nearby. We can land there to give you room to fight.¡± ¡°Won¡¯t I suffocate?¡± ¡°I can generate a small amount of atmosphere within several steps of the ship. It will be sufficient to keep you conscious for a few minutes.¡± ¡°Then do that.¡± Nick broke open the first kit, finding what appeared to be a steel knife blade, a pommel, a crossguard, and some handle components. By now, his hands were shaking enough that what should have been a simple task of sliding pieces into place and screwing down fasteners took the better part of two minutes to complete. As soon as it was done, he shoved it to the side without bothering to check the class description and broke open the second box. The contents of the new kit were a nightmare. There were springs, little curved pieces of metal, pins, and dozens of small parts he couldn¡¯t identify at all. He felt panic clutching at his throat a few seconds before he noticed his hands were moving by themselves, sorting the parts out into the rough shape of what was clearly a revolver-style pistol. ¡°How am I doing this?¡± ¡°Unless you are a skilled gunsmith, it¡¯s likely one of your class proficiencies at work.¡± ¡°Like Tinker?¡± ¡°Likely so. Let it guide your hands. Later, as you learn more, it will be worthwhile to take more active control of the process. For now, you just need something that can deal damage as quickly as possible.¡± Nick obeyed and gave his hands free reign to do their work. The gun slowly took shape, but the process slowed up some as the scattered fire from the drones became more and more accurate. ¡°Are we in trouble?¡± ¡°We should still make it to the asteroid, captain. You¡¯ll have to get into action right away once we do if we are to stand a chance.¡± Nick watched as his hands kept working on the gun. As the process continued, he started to understand more and more of what was going on, but as each realization came to him his hands were already onto the next step. There was no assistance he could give besides keeping out of the way of his own class and trying to keep his body as stable as he could. As the ship took more and more frequently, the last piece of the gun finally clicked into place. A moment after, the ship bumped into something solid, lurching to a hard stop. ¡°I¡¯m opening the doors, captain. Good luck.¡± ¡°Thanks.¡± Nick held his new knife and gun in his right and left respectively, hoping his class could help him use them right off the cuff. ¡°I¡¯ll do my best.¡± As the door hissed open, Nick had just a few seconds to peruse the descriptions for his weapons. They were pretty barebones.
Mercenary Revolving Blaster (Growth) This weapon is a part of your standard equipment loadout. It is a basic revolver that can be fired without loading, or with enhanced performance when ammunition is added. By swapping parts, the Mercenary Revolving Blaster can be incrementally upgraded. Barrel and chamber upgrades have the largest overall effects, but each smaller component has its own unique effect on the gun¡¯s function.
Single-Edged Mercenary Blade (Growth) This weapon is a part of your standard equipment loadout. It is more effective in combat than a mundane, class-agnostic knife, but only just. By upgrading components of the knife, The Single-Edged Mercenary Blade can be incrementally upgraded. Only upgrades to the blade have an effect on damage output, while other component upgrades increase various functions related to handling.
As soon as the door opened, Nick sprang out. The drones were nowhere in sight. He ran around the ship before he finally saw them, hovering through the lack of air before hitting the synthetic atmosphere of the ship and dropping like round, disk shaped rocks. ¡°You have to be kidding me.¡± The gun sat uselessly in Nick''s hand as he gaped at the robots. ¡°You absolutely have to be shitting me.¡± They were vacuum cleaners. Out of all the objects at the store, they had been some of the most familiar. On Earth, they had small, flat, disk-shaped automatic vacuums just like them. These could do a little more, but they were one of the few familiar objects he had to anchor him in his new home. He had never known they had laser guns, and he would have never guessed he would eventually have to kill them. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. He would have never named them if he had. It took a near-miss bolt of laser fire from one of the robots that singed his side and left a black mark on his clothes for him to snap out of it and begin firing the gun. The vacuum cleaners scattered, whirring as they spread out to make for a less compact bundle of targets. The gun made a pleasing little Bloo! Bloo! sound as it fired, not entirely unlike what he expected from a sci-fi blaster pistol. The first two shots went wide as reddish flashes of light slammed into the surface of the asteroid and blew off a hail of rock chips and water vapor. The next one hit, flipping the room cleaning robot end over end. It landed and whirred one last time before all the lights on its casing went out for the last time. ¡°I¡¯m sorry, Kevin. I¡¯m really sorry.¡± Nick held back irrational tears as the hope that this might all turn out to be easy built up in his breast. A burst of laser fire focused straight at his chest shaved off three quarters of his health points in one go. He reeled back coughing blood and returned fire. There were four more of them that he could see. His next shot took another one out, and the shot after that missed by hitting the ground just in front of the next vacuum and blasted it out into the vacuum, alive but temporarily disabled as it vented air in an effort to stabilize itself. The remaining two vacuums blazed laser fire at him as they closed into melee range. As far as Nick knew they didn¡¯t have melee weapons, but that morning he would have told himself they didn¡¯t have laser guns either. He shot at them repeatedly, missing again and again as they whirred towards his feet, rolled over them, and shredded the skin on the top of his foot with blades he hadn¡¯t even guessed they possessed. Breathless with agony, Nick dropped down and stabbed one through its back with his knife, then dropped his gun barrel to shoot the other at point blank range. Both were disabled, but Nick only had two hit points standing between him and death now. It was a universal law of this place. Zero hit points meant the end. There were skills that could keep you from zero longer, or could keep you functioning for a little while after you hit zero. But once you hit zero, your fate was sure. Sooner rather than later, you¡¯d be dead. Nick didn''t give the recovering vacuum out past the artificial atmosphere a chance to get its bearings. Holding his pistol aloft, he fired it as fast as the hammer would drop until he got lucky with one of the shots and put the last vacuum down. ¡°Annie, I think that¡¯s it.¡± ¡°No, captain. Behind you.¡± Nick instinctively jerked his body to the left, almost but not quite avoiding the next shot. It was the furthest one of the laser bolts could have been from his body while still affecting him. The splash of the bolt took him down to one health point as he spun to see the shiniest, best vacuum that had ever graced the Astramart. ¡°Carl. No.¡± Nick watched as his favorite of the cleaning bots hovered down to the surface of the asteroid. It was like being betrayed by his own son. ¡°I can¡¯t do this.¡± Carl opened fire, and Nick found he actually could do this, and needed to immediately. Sidestepping the first few shots, Nick hit a lucky streak and pounded Carl with several shots in quick succession, all of which seemed to stun the robot for a fraction of a second after they hit. None of the, however, seemed to do any damage. ¡°Annie, what do I do?¡± Nick used up the last bit of the robot¡¯s discombobulation to sprint around the front of the spaceship and kneel down. ¡°I can¡¯t hurt it with the guns, and there¡¯s no way I can get close enough to stab it with the knife.¡± ¡°One moment.¡± Annie went silent while Nick tried to hug a corner of the ship as tightly as possible, hoping to get the robot stun-locked again when it came around the corner. ¡°Do you have any skills, captain? Anything that would amplify your damage? ¡°Come to think of it, yeah.¡± ¡°Then use that. You are facing an issue of armoring. Overwhelming the armor, even a little, will result in the same effects the lesser robots exhibited.¡± ¡°Got it.¡± Nick focused on his skill¡¯s individual shots can either be strengthened language and willed it so. His gun made a pleasing little charge-up sound, and he felt his magic resources empty slightly as two MP slid into his next shot. That appeared to be the maximum he could dump for the moment, and the system interpreted his frustration at this fact by dumping the remaining eight MP into his next four shots, leaving him cold and shivering as his pool of magic points bottomed out. When Carl finally whirred around the corner, Nick let him have it with all four shots. The first one was almost enough, knocking a big piece of armor plating loose and sending it out into the nothingness of space. The next three reduced it to a pile of gears, wires, and weird system devices Nick had no interest in identifying. ¡°Is that all?¡± Nick felt an HP point tick back into being, courtesy of his regeneration. It didn¡¯t make him feel much better. ¡°No more robots?¡± ¡°Not for now. Collect the salvage, Captain. Do so quickly. We must flee before more forces arrive.¡± ¡°That sounds a lot like an order.¡± ¡°Just consider it a very important option. Now move, captain.¡± Nick picked up what parts of Carl and the other robots he could quickly scoop up and ran into the ship, barely staying off the ground when Annie immediately lurched forward back into space. ¡°It looks like that worked. Good.¡± Annie sounded smug. ¡°They were a lesser class of computerized life. Barely worth mentioning. We should be clear of them now. They were¡­ friends?¡± ¡°Kind of. I was alone on that asteroid. I guess I thought of them as pets. Now what do I do with their parts?¡± ¡°Load them into the replicator. In the meantime, I will try to find another asteroid cluster to hide in.¡± Nick lifted the broken robots into the replicator, which sucked in the resources with the same unsatisfying quickness it used to create things. Sitting down with a thump, Nick brought up his system interface. If he wasn¡¯t wrong, he had accomplished something out there. It was time to see what he got from it.
Bounty Complete! You have destroyed the threat to you and your ship and completed the first combat encounter since the acquisition of your new class. You destroyed: Lesser Vacuum (5) Slightly Lesser Vacuum (1) For the killing of the non-system threat, you gain a minimal amount of accumulation. A greater amount of accumulation will be awarded for the completion of the bounty, and at your signal a small pack of beginner¡¯s equipment will materialize near you. Due to the relative ease of the encounter, non-equipment rewards will be minimized.
Level 2 Starlight Mercenary Accumulation: 130/1500 HP 50/50 MP: 10/10 Proficiencies: Gunslinger (Level 1) Knife-fighter (Level 1) Tinker (Level 1)
Stats: (4 unassigned) Skill: 10 Toughness: 10 Quick: 10 Psyche: 10 Traits: | Stranger | | Bound Captain |
The amount of unassigned points Nick was looking at could have been a lot or nothing much at all, depending on how much each of them were worth. There were enough of them to put one point into each stat, and he briefly considered doing just that so he¡¯d have a working knowledge of the size of that effect for each of his characteristics. He quickly ruled that out. It seemed obvious where he had the most trouble in that last fight, and where he needed the most help from his new power. ¡°Annie. Can you look at my status page?¡± ¡°With your permission, yes. Why?¡± ¡°I wanted some advice, and I think you probably know more about the world than I do right now. Are there any downsides to giving you permission?¡± ¡°Not unless the thought of me seeing something so private makes you uncomfortable.¡± ¡°It doesn¡¯t. Take a look. I was thinking about putting two points into Skill, one into Toughness, and one into quick.¡± ¡°Hmm. I can see why. You were hurt, you failed to do enough damage, and a bit more speed is always good. May I make a suggestion?¡± ¡°Yes. Absolutely.¡± ¡°You may have noticed that your Gunfighter and Knifefighter skills each gained a level. Both of those levels will work towards enhancing your damage output. Were you considering this when you decided to double points into your Skill?¡± ¡°Not entirely.¡± ¡°Then in some ways, you likely already have the effect you expected from both stat points already. I still recommend you leave those stat points in, however. This is relevant mainly because I am going to advise you from putting a point in toughness.¡± ¡°What? That felt like a no brainer.¡± ¡°With a more usual warrior class, it would have been. You are different. At this time you have no regen or damage mitigation skills. Every point you put into toughness is one you get minimal value out of until that changes.¡± ¡°I must be very fragile, though.¡± ¡°You are. Which is why it¡¯s imperative you find a way to avoid damage, rather than tolerate it.¡± Nick thought about it for a moment. It made good enough sense. Having more points in skill would let him take down enemies faster, and having more in quick would amplify that effect while making it possible for him to dodge at least some things. ¡°Done.¡± He nudged the stat points into place, placing two into both skill and speed. He shuddered as he became faster and better at things. It was something he could feel and know about just sitting there, an immediate change to who he was that he couldn¡¯t have ignored if he wanted to. He sat still until the wave of quasi-euphoria passed, then let the system deliver his box of beginners gear. The box hit the floor hard. It was bigger and heavier than he had thought it would be, a plain cardboard box about the size of a microwave oven. He took his knife and cut it open immediately. ¡°What is this stuff?¡± ¡°That¡¯s a beginner¡¯s gear box. Not every class has them. The more nonstandard the class, the more often they are found. It¡¯s likely an effort by the system to compensate for the fact you will only rarely find relevant equipment on store shelves.¡±
Basic Outlaw Set This basic set of clothing offers minor protection and only the most minimal levels of stat enhancement. Even so, it is durable, easy to move in, and will insulate your body from all but the most extreme forms of weather. As is true of all forms of system clothing, it can be cut, torn or burned, but not destroyed. Once out of combat, equipped items will quickly regenerate in appropriate positioning on your body. Set components Outlaw Hat Outlaw Shirt Outlaw Pants Outlaw Boots Set Effects: System Durability, +1 Quick, +1 Skill
Outlaw Duster This coat represents your overwear, the equivalent of plate armor to a knight or cloth armor to a rogue. It provides much more substantial protection than your clothing set, and grants that protection to anything you might be wearing, or even your bare skin. Unlike non-system coats, it does not consistently provide warmth, and often works in the other direction to help you self-regulate your temperature. As with your clothing, this coat cannot be destroyed while equipped. Be aware that while sensitive or vulnerable areas such as your face and throat are now armored, they are still proportionally more vulnerable than other body parts.
¡°Annie, do you have any problems with me changing into these right here?¡± ¡°I am not sensitive to such things.¡± ¡°Good. I thought so.¡± It would have been a weird life if his ship had turned out to be shy. ¡°Are we still all right? No pursuers?¡± ¡°We are fine.¡± Nick slipped out of his Astramart ware, looked at it disdainfully for a moment, then hucked it into the replicator. The clothes had never been comfortable, and he had never been able to acquire an actual set of armor to augment his warrior class with. He suspected that however the clothes he had just obtained would feel on his skin, they¡¯d be miles past the budget synthetic fabric his old job had provided. He was right. The clothes felt great on his skin. They didn¡¯t look too bad, either. He had been afraid the hat would look huge, or that he¡¯d end up looking like a theme park cowboy. Instead, he looked more like what his class said he¡¯d look like. He had a hat, but it was flat-brimmed and low. His coat was long and covered most of his body, and everything was colored in black and highlights of dull, rusty red. It wasn¡¯t the coolest thing he had ever seen, but it was cool enough. He looked more like a classer now than he ever had with his swordsman skill. The only problem was that his class was still at an insanely low level, lower than was even supposed to be possible in the outside world. He was armed and armored, but everything about him wasn¡¯t up to snuff yet, even considering the new stats and stat buffs from his equipment. ¡°So what now?¡± Nick laced up his shoes and pulled them tight. They fit perfectly, like everything else. It was like they were tailored to fit his exact measurements, which he supposed after a moment was probably actually literally the case. ¡°What¡¯s my best move from here?¡± ¡°Best move? I¡¯m not sure, captain. I suppose that depends on your objectives.¡± ¡°I get what you are saying. I really do. But if you want an order, it¡¯s this. I don¡¯t know how anything works. I¡¯m not only new to this class. I¡¯m new to this universe. I order you to treat me like I know absolutely nothing, okay? I¡¯m just giving you a standing order to tell me what you think my most important objectives are, and what I should probably do about them. At least for a while.¡± ¡°I don¡¯t think that¡¯s a good idea.¡± Nick could tell he was only going to bang his head against the wall trying to get Annie to do what he wanted unless he tried something different. As soon as a change of tactics occurred to him, he ran with it. ¡°Okay. Then take us to the core worlds so I can find a bunch of bounties and complete them as fast as possible.¡± Nick didn¡¯t know for sure that this was a bad idea, but the chances of it being a good, safe choice were probably low. ¡°Take me to the biggest city that¡¯s pretty close.¡± ¡°I have to advise you that this would take weeks in travel alone.¡± ¡°Would it?¡± ¡°Yes. And the likelihood of finding a truly low-level bounty in that area would be very low. They tend to reserve them for their own trainees. You¡¯d have to¡­¡± ¡°So you are saying it¡¯s a bad idea.¡± Some lights flashed in apparent frustration. ¡°Yes. I suppose so.¡± ¡°That¡¯s progress. What¡¯s a better one?¡± ¡°I suppose¡­ oh, to hell with it.¡± Annie¡¯s demeanor changed on a dime. Nick was talking to an entirely different ship, all the sudden. ¡°You want to know what to do? Don¡¯t do stupid things like you just suggested. We are going to find a nice, calm planet. A tiny one. A planet that barely has the power to generate a threat to anyone at all. Once we are there, we are going to find the smallest, most boring town in it, and we are going to pray they have something for you to do to get a few levels that doesn¡¯t get you killed.¡± ¡°Right. I guess I need to get back to level four.¡± ¡°Level¡­ four. That¡¯s it? That¡¯s as far as you got?¡± ¡°I was working at an Astramart!¡± ¡°Nick, I know only what I¡¯ve been able to download from the galactic net way out here in the sticks, and even I know that¡¯s a children¡¯s level. No wonder they came after you when your levels dropped. They must have thought you were running some kind of loophole scam.¡± ¡°Anyway.¡± If Nick didn¡¯t get on top of this conversation, he had the feeling Annie would bag on him all day. ¡°Where would we even find a planet like that?¡± ¡°You just fly along and smell for the dust. It¡¯s special planets that are hard to find. Planets like we need are a dime a dozen.¡± You did what? Whether they were a dime a dozen or not, the nearest planet that fit Annie¡¯s bill was a week away. When she showed him the relative positions of the two star systems on her charts, he figured they¡¯d be there in an hour. They were so close he could hardly see the space between them. She patiently explained how galactic distances worked, how limited they were in terms of what they could feasibly reach at all, and how fast he could expect a ship to go when it was manned by a single level two nobody. None of it was as exciting as he thought it would be. It got even more boring when she explained exactly how much slower she¡¯d have to go to avoid threats before he gained enough levels to convince the system to equip her with historic Actolian armaments. Even so, the first day in space was exciting. Stars whizzed by the windows, and every now and again Annie would maneuver past some sort of anomaly that she said would increase her speed. After months of nothing working as a cheap imitation of a gas station employee, it was down right spell binding. At least for a while. ¡°I¡¯m bored. God help me, Annie, I¡¯m so bored.¡± ¡°Just keep sitting in that chair. If you manage to get a piloting skill, you¡¯ll cut days off our travel.¡± ¡°I already told you I don¡¯t understand anything on these screens.¡± Annie was insistent that every second he spent in the captain¡¯s chair came with a small but real chance he¡¯d gain a piloting skill, which was apparently distinct from him being a Bound Captain. The skill he already possessed had to do with binding his levels to Annie¡¯s capabilities, and had nothing to do with amplifying them any further from that baseline. For that entire day, she had him contemplating a dozen screens that were, to his uneducated eye, no better than pure, unfiltered nonsense. If Annie said it had a chance of giving him a skill, it probably did. Given that there was no limit on the number of class-relevant skills someone could get, it would be an incredible upside with no downside. It hadn¡¯t happened yet, though, which meant he was going out of his head with boredom. ¡°Sigh.¡± Annie pronounced the word. Nick did not correct her. ¡°You might as well do something different, now. I¡¯d imagine you aren¡¯t even trying to understand it, now. That¡¯s no good.¡± ¡°Different like what? I¡¯ve already looked out every window.¡± ¡°You have a hybrid class, Right? Heavy on the path? Well, get walking already.¡± Nick didn¡¯t know how to do that, but he didn¡¯t say so because it didn¡¯t matter. Every path was different, even the same path as experienced by two different people. He didn¡¯t know exactly what that meant besides what the system¡¯s beginner¡¯s guidebook said about it, and that wasn¡¯t exactly detailed.
Class Types System-granted classes come from a variety of different heritages, built from different foundations. Every class typ follows a few common rules, and no type is correctly thought of as superior to another. Instead, they simply manifest the same general rates of growth in strength and capabilities while accessing that growth and progress in different ways. Work-based Classes Sometimes referred to as Grinding or Questing classes, work-based classes grant progress based on individual accomplishments. Every monster they slay or sword they craft creates a distinct portion of accumulation that pushes them forward towards their next level. Their strength can be accurately estimated by simply looking a their current level, which in turn accurately reflects the experiences and dangers they have faced. The most relevant exception to that kind of estimation comes in the form of titles, which acknowledge certain very rare or very difficult accomplishments by granting stats and capabilities beyond what their level implies. A person holding a work-based class will find their strength grows most when they consistently push themselves to defeat the toughest foes or create the most exceptional items, especially when they do so in the greatest quantity possible. Path-based classes Differing in their method of progression from work-based classes, path based classes generally advance based on insight into the class itself. As a path-based class holder moves around the universe, they can use their own observations and experiences to pursue understanding, which in turn pushes their class forward. Estimating the strength of a pure path-based class is a more difficult task than determining the strength of a level-based class. Though their power still receives a system estimate in the form of levels, how they perform at any given level can vary wildly depending on how much they¡¯ve practiced and meditated on their skills, their philosophy, and their goals. Work is still very much a part of path based classes, just as practice and thought can be part of a work-based class. Advancing in a path based class is often a process of absorption and digestion of experiences. Often, the fastest growth of a pathed class comes after some period of hardship, danger, or especially relevant experience. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. Seeking out experiences and allotting an appropriate amount of time and effort to thinking on them is vital to the continued progress of a pathed class. While tutelage and guidance can be a benefit to those with a pathed class, any teaching that moves them further from their own path in favor of someone else¡¯s comes with a risk of stalling or even setting back their own understanding. Hybrid Classes Representing a slow drift to unifying the two major types of classes, hybrid classes benefit both from hoarding accomplishments and from meditating on them. The hybrid class holder benefits in an absolute way from accomplishments, just as a work-based class might. They also benefit from the understanding those accomplishments drive, just as a path based class holder would. The exact balance of these two sources of growth differs between each hybrid class.
If all Nick needed was general understanding, these descriptions would have been great. Now that he was in the worst explained category of class and his survival depended on understanding it better, he found them utterly wanting. Flawed as they were, they still gave him some guidance on what to do here. Avoiding Annie¡¯s directions would benefit him, even if she clearly knew more than he did. He had to do the work himself. He took his knife in hand and started swiping with it. Even with his class feeding him information on how to hold the weapon and strike, it still felt awkward. He hadn¡¯t been a knife fighter back on Earth, which hadn¡¯t seemed weird at all there. He now wished he had at least taken a few self defense classes, or something. He needed to understand as much as possible as soon as possible and he had almost no experience to feed into that process. After playing with the knife a bit, things still started to get a little better. Pulling his gun was a big part of that. He couldn¡¯t shoot it inside, but it still reminded him that he¡¯d be holding that weapon in his right hand if he wanted any chance of hitting his targets at all. That meant the knife would have to be in his left hand, which got him thinking about what he¡¯d do with it when it was there. Nick imagined a stink wraith was coming for him, something that was easy enough to do after fighting thousands of the things. With enemies like the wraiths, the best thing to do would be to shoot them while they were far away. If there were a lot of them, he doubted he could do that. In that case, he¡¯d have to either kill them with his knife or at least keep them far enough away that he could still use his gun effectively. ¡°Keep the knife forward. That¡¯s simple enough. The gun is doing the work, and the knife is giving it space. Easy.¡± Except it wasn¡¯t. Coordinating knife-slashes with gunfire was hard. Doing anything with his knife made doing anything with his gun difficult, and he kept finding himself either clubbing at pretend monsters with the barrel of his gun or aiming his knife like it could fire projectiles. It was hard work just to keep from accidentally slashing his gun arm with his knife when he tried to do more than that. For now, he¡¯d be choosing between one type of attack or the other, and he couldn¡¯t imagine that was how it was supposed to work. Nick stopped moving and thought more about that. He had seen enough movies to know what this all should look like. He¡¯d slash and dodge, then fire his gun at point blank range. He¡¯d hit someone''s eyes to make them move back as he dove behind cover then unloaded on his target. It would all flow. Best of all, he¡¯d always have an option. Once he got his long gun, he could use it to shoot things from far away. As things closed in he could drop it and use his revolver, keeping his knife up until they got to melee range. Depending on what he was fighting, he could lean on the option that worked best. It wouldn¡¯t be like a swordsman, who had to take face-fulls of stink wraith juice because they could only fight one way. He could fight however he wanted, whenever he wanted. Or at least he could if he could just work out the problem of being an uncoordinated slob. Frustrated about that one limitation, he decided to give up and just think about what could be, if he could just pull off all the flips and spins he couldn¡¯t do. If he could stab someone in front of him while shooting someone else under his arm without even looking. This went on for a while. The only thing that stopped it was the system itself surprising him with a reward he had no idea he was earning.
Essential Class Concept Discovery Through meditation, you have discovered and solidified your connection with the concept of Freedom. A strong resonance with the concept is present in both your class and your own psychological make-up, indicating a clear compatibility with your personal path. The simple ideas of being able to go where you like and of doing what you like once you get there are only small facets of freedom, a casual understanding that puts only the barest of scratches on the surface of the subject. Your contemplation of the concept has granted you some progress towards a new class skill. As you continue to ponder freedom, you may discover related sub-concepts that open new doors to progress in distinct, related directions. While this concept has been automatically linked to your class, the decision of whether or not to pursue understanding of freedom is fundamentally yours. There are no direct, guaranteed downsides to choosing to abstain from further meditations on freedom. The initial discovery of this concept has added five points to your quick stat. New Skill Development In Progress You have taken the first steps in the development of a new skill, which will for the time being be represented in your status as a series of question marks. A developing skill has an uncertain form. It may become a variety of different things depending on the situations you encounter and the choices you make during its creation. No direct guidance on how to complete the skill or what eventual form it will take is possible. Over time, continued meditations or activities like those that led to your current state of progress have a high likelihood of completing the skill.
¡°Woo!¡± Nick yelled, pumping his fist. ¡°Woohoo! I did it.¡± ¡°Oh, you are awake. I wondered how long you¡¯d sleep.¡± ¡°Sleep? I wasn¡¯t asleep. I was thinking.¡± ¡°For eight hours?¡± Nick blinked. ¡°Wait, I was thinking for eight hours? No wonder I got a class concept.¡± ¡°YOU DID WHAT?¡± Meditator That was when Nick learned that Annie could and would yell, given enough reason. It seemed that getting a concept was enough to trigger it. After her outburst, she went into a five minute silence. He watched the clock and waited patiently until she came back. ¡°You should not be this good at meditation yet. It takes most path classes months to get the trick of it, just at the basic level.¡± ¡°Meditation? I was just zoning out.¡± ¡°No, you weren¡¯t.¡± Annie¡¯s voice got sharp. ¡°People do not gain major class concepts just from zoning out, as you put it.¡± ¡°Well, deal with it, spaceship. Because that¡¯s what this guy did.¡± ¡°No, you didn¡¯t.¡± ¡°Yes I did! I zoned out. I didn¡¯t meditate.¡± Nick tapped his head with his index finger. ¡°I was here the whole time. I think I¡¯d know.¡± ¡°Fine, then. Describe your zoning out to me. In great detail.¡± ¡°It¡¯s simple enough. You just stand there. Your mind goes blank. I did it all the time at work.¡± ¡°Blank, huh?¡± Annie took on a goading tone. ¡°And yet you comprehended something. Understood it. How, if you were blank.¡± ¡°Well, it¡¯s not completely blank. That¡¯s boring, and in my work you¡¯d have to stand at the counter for hours, hardly moving. You are going to think about something. Anything, so long as it was interesting enough to figure out, and¡­ Oh, damn.¡± Annie was immediately smug. ¡°Yes, keep going.¡± ¡°That¡¯s meditation, isn¡¯t it. Just clearing your mind of everything but one thing and pondering it.¡± ¡°Yes, and due to your¡­ unusual? Your unusual employment history seems to have given you several months of concentrated practice meditating for extended periods of time.¡± ¡°That seems good.¡± ¡°It¡¯s very good. What did it award you with?¡± ¡°Five stats, and an incomplete skill. Which seems like a lot.¡± ¡°It only seems like a lot because you shouldn¡¯t have it yet. You¡¯ve gained a single level, Nick. This is usually something that would come about around level eight or ten, and would seem like a consolation prize.¡±
Level 2 Starlight Mercenary Accumulation: 130/1500 HP 50/50 MP: 10/10 Proficiencies: Gunslinger (Level 1) Knife-fighter (Level 1) Tinker (Level 1)
Stats: Skill: 13 Toughness: 10 Quick: 18 Psyche: 10 Traits: | Stranger | | Bound Captain| | ??? |
A level in each of his fighting skills from his first combat, a level in his crafting skill for making his weapons, and a total of eleven stat points felt very different. He realized now that he had expected the extra speed his quick stat gave him to be hard to control, but now that he had spent some time with those points, he realized nothing could be further from the truth. He pulled his gun a few times and made a few more swipes with his knife, trying to keep things down to what he considered to be normal human speeds. At that level of quickness, there was no difficulty keeping himself from going too fast, or controlling his own motions. He wouldn¡¯t be accidentally running into walls while getting the hang of it, anyway. It seemed that Quick got its own hang all by itself. At greater speeds, he felt as much in control. The enhancement to his speed, it seemed, came with a suite of unspoken abilities that made him able to manage them, as well. ¡°If you need something else to do, I say probably take a look at loading some of that¡­ damn. Hold on.¡± All the control panels near the front suddenly lit up as Annie suddenly lurched to a stop. ¡°Anything I should know?¡± The lights on the consoles were blinking silently for several seconds before Nick prodded Annie, then continued blinking for a split second more before her voice came back online. ¡°Yes. Do you remember how I said not to touch the consoles, because I had plotted the perfect route? It turns out it¡¯s not so perfect.¡± Annie sounded infuriated and apologetic at once in a tone so in conflict with itself that Nick wasn¡¯t sure a purely human voice could have pulled it off. ¡°We are stuck.¡± Nick looked out the windows. They were still in deep space, begging him to ask the question of what they could possibly be stuck in. ¡°None of this will make sense to you, especially without a piloting skill.¡± ¡°Give it a shot.¡± ¡°Imagine a black hole. You know about those, right? Good. They have a certain level of gravitational pull. If you go closer to one than your ship¡¯s engines can pull you out of, you get stuck. You can keep yourself from getting pulled in further, but you can¡¯t get away.¡± ¡°So we are stuck in a black hole?¡± ¡°Worse. We¡¯re in a dungeon.¡± Annie huffed. ¡°Or at least my nose is. Just a brand new dungeon that spawned out in space, and I had to fly into it.¡± ¡°So fly out of it. Hit the escape rockets, or something.¡± ¡°Can¡¯t, because I don¡¯t have those. I have a low level captain, remember? I got just about enough equipment to keep a single passenger alive and to move around the universe. It¡¯s worse than that, too. This damn thing is trying to claim me.¡± Nick sat down at the captain¡¯s chair, still unable to see anything out the front viewport that would give him context for what was happening. There was nothing. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings. ¡°Claim you?¡± ¡°It¡¯s a dungeon floating out in space. There was probably just enough energy out here for it to spawn in the first place. If it doesn¡¯t find something to latch onto, it¡¯s going to use up that energy and dissipate.¡± ¡°So it¡¯s trying to turn you into a dungeon? Can that happen?¡± ¡°Derelict ship dungeons are a dime a dozen, so yes. It would take it some time because it has to contest your claim.¡± ¡°What happens to me then?¡± ¡°My interior gets turned into a shell for the dungeon, and you stop existing. You are going to have to clear this thing, Nick.¡± Nick looked down at his gun and knife, hyperconscious of their barebones, starter-weapon status. ¡°Am I ready for that?¡± ¡°I can¡¯t say. Probably not. But it¡¯s your only choice.¡± Nick took a deep breath and gave his equipment a once-over. Everything was in good working order, strapped down and secured. ¡°How do I get there? From the ship to the dungeon, I mean.¡± ¡°Give me a moment.¡± The engines of the ship flared as it ground against some kind of invisible something, turning its nose 90 degrees to the left. ¡°You open the door and walk out. Every dungeon is its own space. It will take you in. If you clear it, the act of paying you for your reward should drain it of any energy it has left and destroy it.¡± ¡°And me?¡± ¡°You get your reward and we both hope the dungeon has enough power to teleport you back in here. If it doesn¡¯t¡­¡± Annie paused. The lights on the console all flashed a bit redder than usual. ¡°Just take a big breath before you actually clear it, if you live that long. And Nick?¡± Nick was already feeling vulnerable and alone heading towards the door when she stopped him. He turned back to the ship¡¯s panel, curious. ¡°Yes?¡± ¡°It¡¯s dangerous to go alone. Take this.¡± There was motion at the ship¡¯s manufacturer as a small, rubber banded watch sprung into existence. ¡°What¡¯s this?¡± ¡°A watch, and a means of me staying in contact with you. At least for now, that¡¯s all it can do. As long as you don¡¯t go too far or get yourself mixed up in a jamming signal, I¡¯ll be able to talk to you through that, and see some of what you see.¡± So he wouldn¡¯t be completely on his own. He¡¯d take it. ¡°Thanks, Annie.¡± ¡°It¡¯s what you are owed, at your level. No need for thanks exists. Good luck, Nick.¡± The ship¡¯s hatch opened with no fanfare or explosive decompression, revealing what appeared to be nothing but empty space. Nick clenched his jaw, drew his weapons, and stepped through it. The next thing he saw was what looked like a badger, leaping claws-forward straight at his face. His reflexes kicked in, bringing his dominant arm up in an awkward uppercut. Unluckily, that was his gun hand. He made contact, but the force of the blow did nothing more than to bounce the blur of fur and teeth further into the air. The mystery animal snarled and clawed desperately as it flew over him, scattering dust as it caught itself on the ground behind Nick''s back. Nick wheeled around to face it before it could get its bearings. Annie was gone, replaced by miles of canyon-lined riverbed, dry outside of a trickle of water. Nick fired his gun at the badger thing. He managed to wing it twice as it circled him, giving it a limp that slowed it down a bit before its next attack. ¡°Stand up to it, Nick.¡± Annie¡¯s voice blared out of his watch as the animal set itself up to pounce. ¡°It can¡¯t change direction midair.¡± Nick kept firing his gun, working the trigger as fast as the gun would allow as the bolts of light from the barrel singed the sides of the animal. He wasn¡¯t hitting center mass, but the damage was starting to build up when it launched at his face again. He ground his feet into the dust as he pivoted, driving his knife to his right on an intercept course with the dungeon dweller¡¯s face. He got it. The knife took much better advantage of his new speed than his gun did, rocketing through the air, then the skull of the animal. It jerked midair, then slipped limp off the knife as it plopped on the ground. Nick examined it. Like most things, the system didn¡¯t keep secrets about the animal once he proved he could handle it.
Aridiac Drone Aridiacs are social colony mammals. They survive off whatever organic matter they can gather, collecting all edible material they find into a communal supply shared with the group. Aridiacs are like most rodents in their ability to survive almost anywhere, but spread fastest in desert environments with little competition from more effective predators. Their primary attacks are physical in nature, coming in the form of claws and bites that bear no venom or elemental force. Accumulation Rewards: 20 Loot drops: Aridiac Pelt, ??? Mastery Reward: Trait
¡°That¡¯s a lot of accumulation.¡± ¡°Compared to what?¡± ¡°Stink Wraiths. They were one apiece.¡± ¡°I will not spend the time it takes to explain to you how incredibly rare a reward a single point of accumulation is. In the greater universe, twenty points is absolutely nothing. It will add up quickly for you because your level is so low. Now harvest the pelt before it despawns.¡± Nick bent down and touched the aridiac corpse. It flashed with light at the contact, shifting its form into a small, folded square of hide and fur he shoved into his pack. There hadn¡¯t been any question of what he¡¯d get from the carcass, since the system had revealed just that one item of loot for his first kill. ¡°I¡¯m going to have a lot of these pelts by the time I¡¯m done, aren¡¯t I? ¡°As many as you have aridiacs to kill. Take them. Even if you don¡¯t find a use for them, we can feed them to the manufacturer. Now check your dungeon description, Captain. You can¡¯t just walk around blind.¡±
Carnivorous Canyon You have entered a canyon with little water and even less plant life. Behind a bit of brush, you see a flash of tan you would have missed if it wasn¡¯t moving. The next thing you know, your neck is ripped out. That¡¯s how life works in this kind of place. This canyon is infested by Aridiacs, a hardy carnivorous predator rodent that has established itself on millions of system worlds, disrupting local ecosystems and generally making a nuisance of themselves. You are tasked with cutting down their numbers to a more reasonable level, giving the local flora and fauna some ecological breathing room in the process. Objectives: Destroy 50 Aridiacs Rewards: Class Equipment Choice
Alert! The system has issued a bounty on this dungeon. Completing the bounty will result in increased rewards. Bounty Objective: Destroy Local Aridiac Breeding Capacity Rewards: Class Equipment Choice, Accumulation Bonus
¡°What¡¯s this Class Equipment Choice?¡± ¡°It¡¯s a choice between several pieces of standard class-related loot. It¡¯s worse than an assortment, which gives you every choice you might have made. It¡¯s still better than a bare Class Equipment reward, which offers no choice at all.¡± ¡°Is it worth it to go after?¡± ¡°That¡¯s the bad news.¡± Annie¡¯s voice got a little more serious. ¡°If my guess is correct, the system couldn¡¯t offer that reward unless this dungeon had the energy to offer it. Which means it likely won¡¯t break apart after being completed like we had hoped.¡± ¡°It might if I complete the bounty, so I have to? Regardless of the danger?¡± ¡°I¡¯m not sure. I may be able to break free if you only weaken the dungeon. I request that you don¡¯t put yourself in any unnecessary danger until we know.¡± Nick took a look at the canyon he found himself trapped in. It was steep, at least steep enough that he didn¡¯t think he could run or climb out. That made him feel a little trapped, but it also simplified things. The only real option he had was to walk forward, whether he was pursuing the extra bounty or not. The next Aridiac almost managed to hide from him. In the distance, he actually did see the flash of tan movement the system had described, then nothing. He carefully leveled his gun and waited. It seemed like he should have more patience than a starving rodent, at least. It ended up close. His arm was aching by the time the animal finally showed itself, snarling and charging in his general direction. This time it was much further away than the first attacker of the day had been, which for the first time let Nick get the most out of his ranged weapon. He pumped the trigger, missing most shots but catching the animal flush a couple times. The aridiac had to face him to charge, which made it harder to hit at the same time it assured every shot hit a relatively vital area. Before the aridiac had covered half the distance, it was kneecapped, headshot, and planted in the dirt. Nick almost felt bad for it as he walked up to it and put it to ground permanently with a single, dead-center shot to the back of its head. He stood over it for a moment looking from it to his gun, trying to figure out the odd feeling in his gut. ¡°Annie. My stomach feels warm.¡± ¡°You are ill?¡± ¡°No. It¡¯s not unpleasant. It¡¯s just something that''s been happening since I killed the aridiac. It¡¯s not the same as adding stats, but it feels kind of good in the same way. Do you know of anything that works like that?¡± ¡°Ah. I keep forgetting you are stupid and sad.¡± ¡°Hey!¡± ¡°It¡¯s all right. We can fix both. We¡¯ve even already started. That feeling is pride, Nick. You feel proud of yourself.¡± ¡°No.¡± ¡°Yes. We have a bond of sorts. I can¡¯t feel everything about you, but I can feel a bit. You did something good, Nick. It¡¯s OK to feel good about it.¡± Nick stood very still for a minute before dropping to the ground and converting his prey into another hide. Annie was probably right, but even if she wasn¡¯t he wanted to feel that feeling again. The only way he knew to do that was to take down more of the threats in this canyon. He had some hunting to do.