A light splashing sound flitted into Mike’s ears as he slowly woke from his medicated sleep. Sunlight filtered through the branches above him, gently warming his face.

“What a pleasant morning” he thought to himself, deeply inhaling the morning air. The foul smell that permeated his lungs roused him completely.

“Not again!” He screamed as he used his axes and enhanced strength to instantly break free of the burrow that he had collapsed in the night before. All other thoughts erased as he methodically checked his person to make sure he wasn’t wet anywhere, not caring that the culprit ran screaming towards the village. Nothing was more important than verifying his cleanliness at that moment.

Realizing that the man may give away his location, he made a split second decision and took off after him. The man still hadn’t rounded the corner of the store when Mike got to the edge of the treeline and he threw two axes at the fleeing form. As he stepped forward to throw the axes, his foot landed in a previously unnoticed pothole, flinging his body forward, his head careening towards the ground. In the instant before impact, his body contorted as his shoulder tucked forward and he managed to roll out of the clumsy nosedive and back onto his feet. Glancing around, he found himself standing outside of the treeline and within the town boundaries, and he knew the town had been alerted to his presence.

“I guess this is a sign” he said aloud, and made a break for the store.

Not fully adjusted to his own strength, the back door was ripped off its hinges as he went to pull the handle, and he flung it aside as he ran through the now empty hole in the wall. He rounded the corner to the merchandise area and was shocked to find that the store was packed with customers. Several workers stood behind the large front desk, doing their best to manage the long line of customers that went out the door. The cacophony of voices faded as his presence was noticed and everyone stared at him with a mixture of shock and terror.

I really didn’t think anyone would be in here when Bart was in respawn. As far as I know, he ran the store solo before the System?

Seizing the quiet moment, Mike raised his hands in what he hoped was a peaceful motion. “I just need some garlic… and maybe some chives, potato sprouts and butter if it is in stock, then I will be on my way.” he said, projecting a voice that was far more confident than he felt, as he slowly sidled towards where the plants had been kept on his last visit.

As Mike passed a small Italian-looking woman, Damage Premonition warned him of a strike to his kidney, before the customer lurched forward, a dagger outstretched as her mouth emitted a wordless scream that reverberated loudly through the silent store.

Mike easily deflected the strike, twisting the dagger from the woman’s hand before using it to send her to respawn. For another moment, everything was still, but then the spell was broken and all of the townsfolk rushed him at once.

A myriad of itchy spots notified Mike of impending attacks, even as the pathway between himself and the garlic filled with the press of bodies. He briefly considered pushing his way towards it, before reason caught up with him. Even if he could fight his way through the pressing throng, it would cost him time, and more villagers were sure to congregate on his position if he didn’t get out of there as soon as possible.

Dodging the first few attacks, he lept backwards towards the back of the store where he had entered, uncaring that his sturdy body knocked over several shelves in his haste to get away.

“I guess I will try back later!” he called over his shoulder as he ran out the backdoor and into the forest.

…………………………………………………………………………………………

Mike was now easily three times as fast as the majority of his pursuers and twice as fast as the fastest of them, so after only 20 minutes of running, he stopped to have a bite to eat. He had saved quite a bit of the buffalo, but his endeavors the last few days, combined with a penchant for snacking as he wandered aimlessly around the edges of the town, had led to a drastic decrease in his meat supply. The thought of going back on a vegetarian diet churned his stomach.

“I guess I will be going back there tonight.” he absentmindedly said aloud. “Certainly that situation was less precarious than being chased by a herd of buffalo.”

Deciding that he wasn’t up to the task of hunting his pursuers, he instead chose to begin training Hardened Skin. He was itching to see what Skill Ability would be awarded to him from getting Dodge up to Level 3.

Surprisingly, the axes didn’t ricochet as often as they used too, and even though he was able to evade every single rebound, it took him two hours to get the last 50 points for Dodge.

[Congratulations! You have leveled up the skill Dodge.

+2 to Dexterity]

[Congratulations! New skill ability unlocked: Footsteps of the Wind

For 10 seconds, triple your Dexterity. Followed by 10 seconds of decreased Dexterity

Decreased Dexterity percentage determined by Luck score.

Cooldown: 10 minutes]

Eager to test out what sounded like a very strong ability, he wasted no time in activating it, whooping in delight as he, he took off like a rocket… for about 2 seconds, at which point he overcorrected to avoid a tree branch and found himself skidding to a halt across the rough, forest floor. As he lay with his mouth full of dirt, he couldn’t help but try to estimate his speed. An average human pre-System could sprint at about 15 miles per hour, and that was equivalent to a person with about 10 Dexterity in this world. With his Dexterity now at 120, he figured he was going around 180 miles per hour. He marveled at the ability and the way Dexterity enabled him to both go faster and have better coordination. True, he had just dug a 10 foot furrow in the ground with his body, but he had avoided the branch, something he definitely shouldn’t have been able to do at that speed. He could feel that the drastic increase in Dexterity made all of his movements faster, not just running. It would take some getting used to, but this skill would definitely come in handy.

When he tried to get up, he found that he couldn’t quite get his hands to cooperate. Checking his Character Sheet, he found that his Dexterity had plummeted all the way to 4. That didn’t make any sense. He got an increase of 3 times but a decrease of ten times? Then again, it was based on his Luck, just like every other Skill Ability he had so far. The 10 seconds of decreased Dexterity slowly dissipated and he was able to stand back up, already eager for 10 minutes to pass so he could test the skill out again. Training was going to be fun today.

…………………………………………………………………………………………

A few hours later, Mike took a break to look at the requirements of leveling up his other skills. Rebounds had continued to be hard to generate over the last few hours, unfortunately making his progress in Hardened Skin extremely slow. He had activated Footsteps of the Wind every time it came off of cooldown and was getting closer to being able to use the full 10 seconds, but he was still having a hard time thinking fast enough to keep up with himself. He had learned that if he timed his axes to hit a tree right as the skill wore off, it resulted in a rebound every time, and with his low dexterity, he had no way of dodging it.

This got him ruminating about how his attributes worked in tandem together. He knew that Toughness and Strength led to Endurance, but all of the other combinations were a little bit fuzzy still. What he knew for sure was that after making Dexterity much higher than his Strength in the fight with Fen, he very rarely got a rebound from his ax. Conversely, when Footsteps of the Wind wore off and his Strength was way higher than Dexterity, he got a rebound every time. Was it possible that somehow the ratio between Strength and Dexterity determined his control? The ax description said it was based on Luck, but maybe there was more to it than that. It made sense in a roundabout way when he philosophized about it, but he didn’t have a good way to know for certain, other than threatening another villager with torture, which he was loath to do. He also couldn’t help but wonder if the disparity between his Intelligence and Dexterity was causing his lack of control when he was moving at top speed–he definitely felt that it was his brain and not his body holding him back.

He had no way to prove his theories, but he liked the idea of staying well rounded and decided he would focus on assigning stat points to attributes other than Dexterity for the next few levels.

Changing gears, opened his Menu and sifted through the dense blob of text that detailed the requirements for each skill. After struggling for several minutes, he worked to format the way the text appeared so that the information would be more accessible in the future. With some finangling, he was able to make the text much easier to read:

Ability/Skill Ability Level Requirements:

Dodge: 1/10000 dodges

Hardened Skin: 4700/10000 hits by a blunt object

Ax Throwing: 55/1000 kills

Tumble: Fall from 10 feet on accident and recover

Beast of Burden: 10000 pounds 3/100 miles

First Aid: Amputate a limb

Damage Premonition: Raise Damage Mental Acuity

Smithing: Create a tool with a metal better than steel or of Apprentice Quality and High Durability

Hands of Healing: 0/10 life threatening injuries healed

Unflinching Meteor: 0/10 kills

True Shot: 1/10 kills

Steps of the Wind: Break 200 Dexterity

Tracking: Follow a trail for 10 miles

Foraging: Discover a new edible

Tinkering: Creative and useful piece of technology that enables you to advance

Pottery: Create a vessel of Apprentice Quality and High Durability

Gardening: Manage a garden that feeds 1000 individuals

Smelting: Refine your methods of separating metal from rock

He eyed the impressively long list of things he could work on with a mixture of dread and pride. Very few of these things had required much time to learn, having already known many of the skills before the System but almost all of them would take serious time to increase. He would have to bring his base Dexterity up 27 points to get the next level in Footsteps of the Wind. It was really hard to get kills in Unflinching Meteor, being that it made him immobile, and he didn’t plan on amputating a limb anytime soon to level First Aid.

Still, he felt that he needed to keep training, and for now, training Hardened Skin and Dodge, which had been his defaults up to this point, seemed out of the question. Especially with the infrequent rebounds he was experiencing of late. His eyes kept returning to Tumble each time he read through the list. It gave him 3 stat points per level, and it was just one level shy of giving him another Skill Ability. He wasn’t sure that he was ready for any more yet though, as he still hadn’t mastered his current skill set. The other one that seemed to call to him was Beast of Burden, which would help decrease the gap between Strength and Dexterity through its level rewards. It seemed that carrying the buffalo the 30 miles back to his camp had given him 3 miles, which meant that the System would recognize smaller burdens over longer distances as meeting the requirement.

An idea to train both Tumble and Beast of Burden using Footsteps of the wind suddenly formed and he was eager to try it out.

“But where am I going to find another buffalo?” he wondered aloud.

…………………………………………………………………………………………

“Ok, the average density of Oak is somewhere around 65 lbs/cubic foot. Juniper is probably close to that” Mike rattled off, as his axes flashed through the air, trimming off branches and creating an area for his shoulders to fit into so that he could easily yoke the log.

“1000 pounds of buffalo was hard for me, and to get 1000 pounds of tree, the tree would need to be around 15 feet long, which may be unwieldy. Let’s say I only do a piece 10 feet long, that means I would need to carry this tree… 1537 miles. If I found a nice level space, and I managed to use Footsteps of the Wind without falling, I could do half a mile per use. I can use the skill once every 10 minutes, that means it would take me… 512 hours of nonstop work.” his voice trailed off and his shoulders slumped. That wasn’t going to work.

Still, he was cautiously impressed with how easily he could now do unit conversions with his high Intelligence score, until a thought struck him with dread. “Am I becoming a nerd?”

“I bet even my chemical engineer nephew that spent his evenings writing internet novels before the System integration would have needed a calculator for that math.” He surmised after some thought.

After a few more minutes spent trying to figure out a way to make his idea work in hilly Montana, he decided it was time to move on to his next venture.

…………………………………………………………………………………………

Mike crouched near the edge of the gorge, watching the throng of hobgoblins and couldn’t help but feel that there were many more of the creatures present than there had been last time.

What is the gestational term of these monsters? He thought to himself, even as his mind filled with images of his once untouched valley overflowing with the green monsters.

Pushing the unwanted thoughts aside, he managed to focus on the task at hand. His plan was simple: activate Footsteps of the Wind and sprint along the edge of the gorge. With his Luck, he was bound to trip on something and fall into the gorge. The fall was more than 10 feet, so it should count towards Tumble if he managed to land on his feet. Should he need to bail if he felt the fall was going poorly, he had Unflinching Meteor, which would likely not allow him to get the skill, but would prevent any serious injury.

Lowering himself to a sprinter’s stance, he pushed off his back leg and exploded forward, activating Footsteps of the Wind. The gorge became a blur of brown and green as he flew across the upper edge of its quarter mile length and continued past it into the forest, where he promptly tripped on a root and flew through the air.

This may take a few tries before I am lucky enough to be unlucky at the right moment.