by Arthur Stone
The first option was to use his primary inventory, which possessed 27 cells for single objects. Items of any kind could be placed inside, including trophies from the Continent’s variety of monsters. He had to remain mindful of his weight limit, however: 325 grams. This was his most secure option, as all items in a primary inventory remained with a player in the event of their death and were immediately available upon respawn. Not everyone could access this option, however—you had to do something special to earn it. Experienced players avoided announcing whether they’d unlocked this feature and never gave away their primary inventory’s cell number or weight limit. Once again, he found himself thinking about Kitty. When Romeo’s people took them out at the sawmill, she and Cheater respawned in the same city. It was odd to him that Kitty possessed enough spores to make lifejuice even after her respawn, but she avoided explaining it.
While this first option was the safest, 27 slots wasn’t going to cover hundreds of valuable items, plus the loot he’d gleaned from the last elite. Cheater would have to prioritize the most valuable items, specifically the golden pearls—the single most valuable item the Continent had to offer. The second option, however, was to consume them. This plan was dodgier: first, these items belonged to the party, not Cheater alone. They had agreed to divide the loot three ways, but this changed to a 50/50 split with the jettisoning of one partner. While the last two partners hadn’t discussed this split, he was likely to hear no objection. Where, then, could Cheater keep March’s portion?
Cheater was stymied: he had to safeguard a massive amount of items for his friend, but he couldn’t exactly gulp down his half in a single sitting. Each trophy type had a cooldown period that might last for days, so doubling up could have potentially fatal consequences. Cheater began to hastily sort the items by cooldown period. He checked the clock; it ticked away as expected. The alarm was thankfully functional, so he set it to ring every 72 minutes—twenty alarms per day. An alarm would wake him, he’d consume the right items, and then he’d return to sleep. Easy! In this way, Cheater’s body might recover for a day while he simultaneously invested heavily in his most important asset: himself. The trick was keeping his mind un-muddled, for there was no room for error. He’d better not mix anything up.
Chapter 2
Life Nine. Hunger and Thirst
Upon waking, Cheater realized two things. Firstly, he had roused himself without the alarm’s ding. Secondly, while he was asleep, someone had taken a dump in his mouth. Well, so it seemed—everything smelled so bad he could barely choke back a wave of vomit. As his tongue probed around his mouth, he realized that it was actually filled with paper and plastic. Oh, no…he was sleep-eating! Despite their depiction in cartoons, sleepwalkers did not often roam the rooftops. In fact, it was more common for them to nocturnally migrate from bed to refrigerator. Some somnambulists might even visit their pets’ food bowls. Hey—when you’re conked out, you can’t really be picky. Cheater fit this bill, as he’d eaten literally everything he’d stuffed into his mouth.
Even with considerable straining, his eyes could only sense monochrome silhouettes. He could be driven to servitude or slaughter for a sip, he was that thirsty. He rummaged through his vest to find a tiny flashlight, a cheap plastic memento from the mall. He had wrapped the lens with opaque tape, leaving a tiny pinprick to concentrate the light. This reduced its usefulness, yes, but also the risk that someone might notice the beam from afar. The second he turned it on, however, he regretted it: the beam illuminated an absolute disaster zone of torn packaging and empty bottles. One upended container still held a meager dribble of lifejuice. Cheater wanted to scream. Scrambling through every square inch of his shelter, he came up with nothing, meaning he’d eaten a week’s worth of food in a single night. Worst of all, he had chugged every last drop of water. All of his desert rationing, ruined in an instant!
Suddenly, a familiar grumbling from outside caused the man’s blood to run cold. A muffled growl, blended with notes of otherworldly screeching: it was the sound of the infecteds. Idiot! You’re done for! They’d seen his flashlight, after all. All he could do now was take some of them with him. A huge mass filled the narrow passage, reaching for Cheater with its knobby paw as it fidgeted and wriggled and ground against the stones. Eyes locked on the monster, Cheater reached for his rifle, when…
…SQUEAK! With the sound of a squashed mouse, the ghoul drew back sharply to tear off across the wasteland. All fell still. What was that? Had the poor dear left its oven on? Was Cheater’s appearance gross enough to spook him? Sure, he’d win no wasteland beauty contest, but he wasn’t sure ghouls cared all that much about appearances. Well, perhaps obesity mattered—they seemed to be partial to fat victims over skinny ones—but they were no pageant judges.
What got this ghoul to flee the scene? Cheater’s visual acuity might have been limited, but he believed the beast to be a mature raffler: a medium threat, all things considered. It suddenly occurred to him what caused the beast to dart away. It wasn’t the shelter’s pungent, fecal smell. It was the Unnamed One…or, more precisely, the fact that Cheater’s skin was soaked with its mucus. Cheater tried to quench his burning skin with whatever fluid he could. Whole slabs of the creature’s flesh had fused to his skin like streaks of molten plastic. Even in the patches to which they weren’t baked, the melted flesh had dried into a sticky crust in the desert air, irritating his chafed skin. The stench of the decomposing Unnamed One beat out warehouses of homeless people’s weeks-old socks; blended with Cheater’s own fabulous aroma of scorched hair and charred meat, the cocktail was thrilling. Cheater couldn’t be happier. The infecteds wouldn’t know what hit them!
Part of him shuddered at the thought of the decomposing flesh coating his body and clothing. It violated his basic human tendency towards cleanliness. The raffler’s utter terror, however, convinced Cheater: what’s a hot shower in the face of total power? Weaponized stenches were a battle-tested strategy, and he was in favor of whatever kept him alive in the face of the infecteds. He guessed his force-field of funk would last for several hours, perhaps close to a day. This protection, however, wasn’t enough.
He had zero supplies and little lifejuice. There was neither food nor water for miles. Desert stretched out in all directions, and Cheater was no camel, last time he checked. Every iota of what he consumed was burned instantly in the furnace of regeneration. His hunger and thirst would go from painful to fatal very soon. With nothing to eat, his body would devour itself to fuel the process, tearing through fatty tissue and muscle to arrive at his internal organs. This torturous death would leave his body stranded in the open and his loot unguarded against wandering thieves. If he was going to die, he had to do so in a spot far from the border, an area where he could access his chat and contact March. March could make his life a hell of a lot easier.
At first, Cheater’s plans were vague and contradictory, as would be expected from a man pushed to the brink of insanity by pain and thirst. He thought of planting himself in these parts until he could recover or contact March, but this wait might stretch on for far too long. Cheater had no time—his body was going to eat itself alive in a matter of days. He might be left praying for death, yet too weak to reach his rifle to put himself out of his misery. He had no choice but to keep moving, hopefully towards a greener, friendlier cluster. March had showed him which direction to go, so Cheater could manage as long as he read the stars. Cheater poked his head out briefly into the bright night and blinked hard at the sky. His eyesight at least allowed him to deduce enough to keep himself on track, a genuine comfort.
Ducking back under cover to check his condition one last time, Cheater placed his flashlight on a ledge and tried to delicately strip his clothing. Biting his lip to keep from screaming, he peeled his clothes off as gently as possible, as they had sealed to the massive, crusty wound covering his body. Thankfully, the Unnamed One’s mucus hadn’t hardened too intensely; he couldn’t imagine how painful that would have been for him to treat. Th
e flames of Tat’s attack had left his chest and some exposed parts of his body practically wrecked. His neck, jaw and hands had been baked so thoroughly as to drop into numbness. Numbness helped in the short term, but indicated severe nerve damage. His arms were singed, save for the patch of his left forearm he had wrapped with a bandage full of sharpened, toxic metal. The layers of bandage, charred on the outside, remained white as snow within. If only I’d mummified myself!
For a brief moment, a picture formed in his vision of a majestic pyramid, illuminated dramatically by sunset. The sun was polished copper, shrouded in the horizon’s haze. No, Cheater was remembering no postcard—he was recalling a time from his life before. He had been there. He knew it. They called him by some other name, then. What name? No idea. The System allowed him a brief snippet of memory from his former life, nothing more. This was a useless handout. Cheater didn’t need to jog his memory at a time like this—he needed to jog, literally.
Shaking this mirage from his mind, he returned to self-examination. His torso was streaked with wounds, the areas shielded by his vest relatively intact compared to those with only a light shirt to protect them. Cheater regretted removing his jacket before setting upon the Unnamed One with his blade, as it would have provided far more cover from the flames. The silver lining, however, was that the jacket was now immaculate. Tat’s ability apparently worked best when aimed at a single focal point; as a result, his legs were in the clear while his chest’s muscles had been cooked down to the ribs, some patches clumping together and others exposing his innards. Cheater had to override his nausea to look at himself. His First Aid kit had burn ointment with painkillers amongst its ingredients, which wouldn’t hurt; bandaging his palms was a good idea, too. Despite all his rest, grazing his fingers even lightly made him yelp in agony, as his digits had no skin on them at all.
As he treated his wounds, Cheater noticed there were no signs of infection or inflammation. This was unusual, as was the fact that some of his minor injuries appeared to have healed oddly quickly. He couldn’t check his back, but it seemed unaffected by the flames. In the real world, he’d be dead with or without the intervention of a specialized burn center, or at least utterly sedated. Here in the game, he wasn’t exactly spunky—but he could move. Being a player had its pluses, that was for sure. Among these benefits were immunity to most pathogens, explaining his lack of inflammation; all the bacteria died before they could multiply and activate an immune response.
Once Cheater had finished working over his external body, he knew his internals were next. In the Continent, that meant his digital stats and abilities. To do that successfully, he had to shake his brain awake.
Chapter 3
Life Nine. Mathematics
For the entirety of the following day, Cheater took a moment to pause and attend to himself every hour on the hour. The largest trophies had 60-minute cooldown periods which neatly lined up. Drops among his loot gave him distributable base and bonus stat experience points; others were random experience drops, also to both base and bonus stats. He had 293 of these drops in total, each restricted to once every hour. Half were Cheater’s by right, of course, to put towards his character. He was dazzled by the amount of experience he’d gained over the past day—he could kill an elite with a single bare-knuckled blow, he was sure of it! Beautiful.
His multipliers had also grown significantly, thanks to the random multiplier boost spheres working on both his base and bonus stats. He had 170 of these in total, and the spheres as a whole applied evenly to all of his stats. Cheater would have preferred to determine the targets of these boosts, but he made peace with their random nature. Smiling, he realized he now had a multiplier of 1 or higher for every single stat. No longer would any of his stats count as lower than their base values, an achievement boasted by few players. Spheres of Free Multiplier Increase were better, having no apparent downsides; each only gave Cheater +0.26, but he could distribute this wherever he wished. He left these untouched, however, knowing that he was in no fit state to select optimal stat distributions. In total, Cheater could boost any of his multipliers by 0.52 or divide this number among base and bonus stats.
The first option sounded tempting, as the stat he picked would rise 50% in one fell swoop. Imagine being a weightlifter with a record lift of 400 pounds, and imagine your thrill at kicking your capacity up to 600 pounds in an instant! It was irresistible, and it was far more than Cheater could squeeze from his numbers with distributable experience points alone. Spending one’s whole amount on a single stat would neglect the others, but splitting it across all twelve stats would barely make a difference. When stranded in the wilderness and close to starvation, you want your differences dramatic and swift. Everything that might come in handy as he crossed the open wasteland had to be prioritized.
After weighing his options, he pumped 0.35 into Willpower, bringing its multiplier to exactly 1.5x. This number corresponded with his abilities—their power, their range, their duration and their other stats. A higher Willpower made certain that his Chameleon ability would become far more effective. His Willpower was already stupefying in its power, so any boost to its value would take a serious number of distributable experience points. A small modifier boost achieved the same effect and then some, and Cheater’s abilities were the core of his character. He was fully willing to sacrifice the majority of his bonuses to improve them.
Cheater added another 0.1 to Reaction, another stat he had pumped significantly that had markedly improved his chances of survival. Responding quickly to a threat was often the difference between life and death. His remaining 0.07 went to Stealth, which approved his character’s ability to escape notice while under Chameleon and in normal circumstances. The open wasteland lay before him, so sneaking effectively would be of paramount importance. Those seven hundredths of a point might save Cheater’s life one day—and he needed saving now more than ever. He absolutely could not die. He had no right to abandon such wealth—his and March’s wealth—in this dusty, barren nowhere.
Heaving a sorry sigh, Cheater proceeded to dip into the universal experience points he’d received defeating the Unnamed One. No such bonus had ever come his way before, but the monster’s death had granted him an instant +40,000 units. It truly depressed him to have to blow through so much wealth rather than saving it. A little under 19,000 points went to Willpower, pumping it up to 90. This boosted his abilities in ways both revealed and concealed by the System, but which sharper players could infer. Chameleon, for example, might allow you to hide from an enemy 75 meters away or father if your Willpower was 30. With a Willpower of 60, however, that distance could shrink to 50 meters, assuming the same hiding conditions and opponent Perception value. The System hoarded these details—maybe because their explanation would be tedious, but likely because it loved to frustrate players by sowing uncertainty.
An example of this passion for discord could be seen in the act of farming infecteds. It was far from a predictable affair: one could kill the same level mobs in the same conditions and walk away with significantly different experience rewards. None of the factors involved in this tabulation could be found in the game logs. It appeared the personal history of any slain infected after turning mattered a great deal; carrion beasts feeding on meat from abandoned supermarkets would net you less experience than those killing their own meals.
Cheater spent less time on his bonus stats. He dropped a little towards Stealth to bring it up to 30 and kicked his Talent Rank to the same level. These points came from the free experience he gained consuming drops, not from the remainder of his +40,000. His selection of the number 30 was no mere whim—the System seemed to love that value. At levels 30, 60 and 90, stats often underwent surges in effectiveness or gained other bonuses. For Talent Rank specifically, hitting level 30 gave each of a player’s current and future abilities an additional property.
Once he concluded his stats, he closed them firmly, suppressing his itch to return and spend more points. It was far bette
r to save them; after all, Cheater had not yet consumed half of his drops of random experience. What he had left would take him several days to work through. Perhaps, he hoped, they might hit the stats he wanted to increase. His combat skills were at 0 regardless of how much he boosted his character, so there was simply no reason to keep spending. He needed to keep his bonus and main levels nearly equal, as the consensus among players was that these levels should be kept close. Cheater couldn’t fathom why, but he was the type to trust collective wisdom over his own.
Base Stats[1]
1.41x Physical Strength: 32
1.39x Dexterity: 25
1.24x Speed: 32
1.44x Endurance: 27
1.5x Willpower: 90
Level 41
Bonus Stats
1.19x Perception: 30
1.27x Stealth: 30
1.40x Reaction: 41
2.95x Accuracy: 39 (+30 bonus levels which do not count towards overall Bonus Level)
2.24x Luck: 67
1.17x Ward of Styx: 61
1.15x Talent Rank: 30
Bonus Level 42
Cheater moved on to his abilities. He did not plan to make any direct changes—these were technically impossible—but instead wished to see how dramatically his recent improvements had affected them.
