LTSV - Harbingers of Change - 14 (Patreon)

Mira, Cecily, and Will were given first priority in the nap rotation and, as a result, Mira was the first one to wake up to a cloud of System Messages waiting right in front of her face the second she opened her eyes.

[You have completed: one short rest in a safe environment. Your accumulated experience will be applied.]

[Banked Experience: 2,150]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

“Augh!” she groaned as they all started dinging at her for attention.

“You OK over there?” Randall asked, coming over from the other side of the room where he’d been filling water bottles in order to check on her.

“System jumpscare,” she groused as she sat up, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. The window moved with her, maintaining its distance from her face. “Turns out we need to sleep in order for our experience to get applied.”

“Oh, thank fuck,” Randall groaned and sat back on his heels. He covered his face with both hands and swiped them back through his hair as he blew out his anxiety in a narrow, steady stream. “I was worried we were going to have to wait until we escaped to see if we could level up at all. How far did you level?”

“I’m level five,” Mira said, after she’d checked to be sure. She cleared the message windows one by one, until she got to the last one, which was explaining her new Class skills and attributes.

[Name: Samira Bellamy | Preferred Name: Mira

Titles: Goblin Slayer I 5% chance that a Fear effect will be automatically applied to goblinoid opponents.

HP: 80 | MP: 200 | SP: 140

Banked Experience: 150

Age: 23 | Sex: Female

Primary Class: Archmage | Level: 5

Spells: Elemental Darts: Fire, Ice, Jolt, Stone (Basic), Elemental Darts: Fire, Ice, Jolt, Stone (Advanced), Web Lightning

Sub Class: Summoner | Familiars: Ghost Drake Collective (Callname: Penelope)Subclasses do not level. Summons are limited only by your mana capacity and the willing participation of your contracted familiars. Please note: Only ⅓ of your mana reservoir can be used in a single summoning.

Attributes

Available Attribute Points to Apply: 2

Fighting: 15

Agility: 10

Strength: 8

Endurance: 14* | Base: 9 (+5 from Primary Class)

Reason: 20* | Base: 10 (+10 from Primary Class)

Intelligence: 20* | Base: 10 (+10 from Primary Class)

Psyche: 25* | Base: 15 (+10 from Primary Class)]

“Huh,” she said as she took in the changed sheet. “I have a title and some attribute points to use. Goblins have a 5% chance to run away from me now.”

“I’d run away from you too, after that last fight,” Alan quipped as he came over to join the conversation. Then he stopped and frowned. “Hey, are you still missing a shoe?”

Mira shook her head and wiggled her bare toes. “I’m missing both of them now,” she told him. “The other one fell off when Bryn was fire-carrying Cece and me out of the fight.”

“Shit,” Alan grumbled, “None of the rotted out stores I found when we were looking around had any merchandise in them so I don’t think we’re going to be able to find you replacements. I’ll check the store to see if there’s anything we can afford to buy.”

Randall turned to Mira as Alan started poking the air in front of his face. “Not to backseat drive your leveling decisions, but you might want to put those points into Endurance. Your stamina has been your biggest bottleneck so far.”

She didn’t mind the advice since that’s what she’d planned to do anyway. It was nice to have a second opinion to confirm her feelings, though. “I wonder if I’ll gain weight?” she said as she poked her screen.

Little plus signs appeared next to her base attribute values and she was able to sink all her accumulated points into Endurance, bringing it up to twelve for a total of sixteen with her bonuses included. As expected, her stamina points increased.

[HP: 80 | MP: 200 | SP: 160]

A wave of dizziness hit her out of nowhere and Randall caught her by the shoulder to steady her before she pitched backwards and cracked her head on the floor. Her body flashed hot and cold. Then the feeling passed and she felt normal again—at least, until she stood up.

“Woah…” she murmured as she looked down at the abs peaking out from the gap of midriff visible between her crop top and the high waist of her breezy pants. She peeled the waistband of her pants down and flexed. “Endurance is muscles.”

“Holy shit,” Randall muttered and Alan nodded along with him.

“You look like you were body training for a movie,” Alan added. An idea visibly occurred to him. “Hey, should I…”

“Agility, Fighting, Strength,” Randall told him flatly and without looking. “Don’t fuck up your build for abs.”

“Hey, I have abs, okay,” Alan defended himself and pulled up his shirt for emphasis. “I earned these abs the hard way!” He did have abs, but also had an appropriate amount of body fat to go with them so they weren’t as defined as Mira’s.

“Why isn’t strength muscles?” Randall continued thinking out loud, ignoring Alan.

That got Bryn’s attention. He perked up and came to join the conversation. By the time Cecily and Will woke up, they were taking body measurements with a roll of thin measuring tape that Bryn had as part of his gym kit in order to track any physical changes leveling up made to their bodies. Randall made a spreadsheet on his phone to keep track of their observations.

Cece blinked blearily at them and said, “I’m glad you guys are getting along,” sounding bemused.

That didn’t stop her from getting excited along with everybody else when the second shift nappers woke up with their new levels. Alan had leveled strength and dexterity. His arms and thighs were correspondingly just a little thicker. Bryn had gone for strength and endurance, so he’d bulked up on top.

“So, upgrading your attributes affects your body,” Mira summarized, once they were done comparing the before and after numbers. “Endurance is core strength, dexterity is lower body, and strength is upper body.”

“Oh? I was hoping the attributes would push us more towards an ideally healthy body,” Cecily sighed in disappointment. "Like, holistically—the literal definition, not the pseudo-science one."

“I think it’s working more towards supporting your specialization,” Mira replied.

Almost all Systems did. Physical changes were usually limited to the musculoskeletal systems, though.

The System chose it's hosts for their personalities and growth potential, so it rarely made any changes that would affect their host’s cognition beyond insulating them from traumatic stress or reversing pre-awakening neurological damage from things like meningitis or lead paint. Any points the host chose to put into mental or will categories was more like investing in psychic shielding. Charisma attributes only made the host more attractive and their System hadn’t even bothered with that stat.

She’d once seen a guy in a similar System world go all-in on strength and he’d ended up with an enormous ripped torso sandwiched between his tiny head and toothpick legs so there was a point past which there was no real return from leveling a single physical attribute. It took that guy years and a ton of support to fix his build. Even the least magical tank needed some mental resistances.

“We’ll have to level carefully. Min-maxing could have some really weird results if any of us go too hard in any one category,” she mused, following up on that thought out loud.

Alan choked on his spit, but was looking in the opposite direction when Mira turned to see what was the matter. She narrowed her eyes at his back. What was up with that guy? Were his shoulders shaking?

Cece looked confused. “What’s min-maxing?” she asked and glanced around the group. Suddenly, no one could meet her eyes except for Bryn, who also didn’t seem to know the term.

“Don’t worry about it,” Randall said, hurriedly. “Because none of us are going to do it.”

“I wish we’d managed to get eyes on this thing before we had to use the Safe Room,” Cece mourned as they stood, clustered on top of one of the few tall buildings sturdy enough to hold the weight of five adults.

They could see the exit gate. There was no mistaking it. It was a huge glowing disc floating vertically in the air. If any of them inspected it, they got the following message:

[EXIT GATE - Status: Sealed. Time to Dungeon Break: 00:03:43]

They’d lost a chunk of time just getting to the boss area. The roaming bands of goblins were appearing more often with bigger, better equipped groups. Randall had also spotted another Gévaudan in the distance and they had managed to avoid it. If Mira had to guess, they’d probably leveled as much as they could with the time and supplies they had available. The goblins were now appearing in huge groups. Fighting them would just bled off the group's spells, skills, health, and stamina ahead of the Boss encounter, so they were avoiding the goblins wherever possible.

The team had been forced to adopt a stealth approach in order to avoid drawing their attention, which meant they’d had to move slowly. Not to mention, the ground outside the safe room was littered with sharp things like broken concrete or glass and Mira hadn’t been able to recover her slides so she was even slower than the rest.

They hadn’t found Andrei’s dead body yet. They probably wouldn’t. They did find evidence of his ongoing existence in the form of dead goblins who’d been stripped of loot, more herb patches that had been picked bare, and a gutted convenience store that had a few mysteriously illuminated shelves and coolers that were already empty when they stumbled across the store.

The good news was that they found few new kinds of resources that he had either missed or didn’t have enough inventory space to store; Fire Berries, Glowshrooms, Icy Birch, and Rondel's lichen. They didn’t have time to take everything, but Randall was also a Survivalist and so he had all of the same harvesting cheats that Andrei had. If he took the lead then harvesting resources took seconds. Between that and the boys agreeing to adopt Mira and Cecily’s plan to reduce wasted inventory slots with redundant items, they were doing just fine on harvestable goods and would be ready if there was something around here that they needed in order to finish the boss encounter.

Mira was ready to be done with this shit and go back to where her husband had better be waiting for her. If Adra wasn’t on the other side of that portal as soon as she escaped, she would not be held responsible for her actions.

Speaking of the Boss, it was hanging out right in front of the exit portal.

It was a tall cloaked figure, roughly two stories in height, that looked a little bit like a bedsheet that had been draped over a fence post. The being underneath the cloak appeared to be tall and thin with no arms. Eight round lanterns made of glass and metal orbited around its midsection. The lanterns glowed with a sickly green light that cast a pall over the entire surrounding area.

The only good thing Mira could say about the situation was that the Boss was hostile to the other monsters in this dungeon. The ground at its feet was littered with piles of goblin bodies. Mira wondered, just for a moment, if that was meant to set up a mechanic where they ended up having to fight undead goblins—then a big pack of them tried to attack the boss and it curbstomped them all in one blow by firing a wide beam at them from one of its lanterns. The goblins dropped where they were and didn’t move again.

“So, that’s at least one of its attacks,” Randall sighed and they all nodded.

“It either has eight shots or eight different attacks,” Mira agreed. She pointed to the lantern that had just decimated the goblins. That one was obvious because its ghastly green glow had gone dark. The lantern was still lit, but the fire had gone down to an ember. “I’m willing to bet it only has eight shots at a time. Look, that lamp has gone dark. It’s probably on a cooldown.”

“I wish we’d had more time to observe it,” Randall gritted out as he started to pace. “There’s still a good chance that the lanterns do different things and it looks like the dungeon might have been set up to give us a chance to observe how it fights.”

“We would have had plenty of observation time if Assface hadn’t antagonized that wolf-thing,” Alan muttered. Louder, he said, “Look, we’re in survival mode and playing a game whose rules we barely understand. We also don’t know how trustworthy this System thing is or why we’re suddenly getting dragged into an alternate dimension that somehow manages to mimic a video game environment. There’s something too artificial about this entire scenario. The environment is following a logical structure. This isn’t a random natural phenomenon. A person planned this place. The problem is, people aren’t trustworthy so we can’t rely on the word of an unknown entity that the gate is going to behave the way they say it will.”

“Are you suggesting we let the timer run out?” Bryn asked. He was frowning and Mira could tell that Alan needed to pick his next words very carefully.

“No,” Alan said and shook his head. “That’s potentially putting people outside the gate at risk. I’m saying that we cannot be panicking about the timer. Panic makes you stupid and we cannot be stupid if we want to live. We’re not going to be at our best if we’re looking at that countdown every five minutes. That said, I agree with Randall that we need to observe more attacks, but because we’re in a time crunch, we’re gonna have to make that happen on our timeline.”

He turned to Mira. “How fast is Penny?”

Note:

Spoiler: REAL fast.