Power Fantasy

by Scottie Futch

  Scaling Attributes: Endurance, Strength

  - You now gain [25] hit points for every [1] point of endurance

  - You now have 150% damage resistance.

  - You now have 125% increased resistance to the following status effects: Bleeding, Bruised, Poisoned, Diseased, Inebriation

  - You will now improve your Strength development training time by an additional 100%

  - You will now improve your Endurance development training time by an additional 100%

  “That’s pretty bad ass…” The training bonus alone was worth the five hundred points spent to initialize the costume. That bonus would remain regardless of what he did.

  Curious, he tried to take his new outfit off. He did so with no trouble at all, but the clothes disappeared a moment later. A message window appeared that informed him that his costume effects had been removed. So, he followed the directions to put his clothes back on. He slapped his fist to his chest and called out, “Barbarian Set!”

  A new window appeared that told him the opposite effect had occurred. His costume status had returned.

  He spent a bit of time fiddling with his costume and discerned that he had to take off everything to remove his costume. If he removed a piece and it disappeared, he could just re-equip with by beating his chest a little and calling out the words, Barbarian Set. This research led to one inescapable conclusion. “I can still have kinky cosplay sex. Nice.”

  “I’m definitely going to have to get a set of these for Summer and Saiko… A slight hint of drool escaped his lips as he thought of those two girls dressed in barbarian finery. “Mmm. Savage Saiko and Loincloth Summer…”

  Traits taken care of; Scott began to investigate his new costume skills. He noticed that there was no number next to the skill names but did not think anything of it. The skills were supposedly upgraded with costume points whenever the costume gained a level.

  The weapon masteries were all straight-forward. They provided bonus damage and protection when he had a weapon of that type equipped that was roughly the same as his edged weapon mastery. The edged weapons would even stack their damage with his edged weapon mastery for a healthy attack and defense bonus.

  Rage

  Unleash the beast inside your soul. A primal power that relies on adrenaline and energy points, when you have this skill activated you will lose [20] points of energy per second. However, all damage dealt will be doubled. All status defenses outlined by the ‘Powerful Frame’ trait are doubled. All basic defense is halved. However, you will not feel pain during this skill’s effective usage time.

  This skill does not work properly with the trait ‘Cool Under Pressure’ in effect. The effects of the rage skill with override the benefits of this trait when activated.

  Shout

  Your voice has been honed by many years of life spent living upon the vast grassy plains. In order to be heard, you have learned that you must speak loudly and with great authority. The shout skill produces a sonic attack that blows away enemies and inflicts various status effects such as deafened, stunned, unconsciousness, and bruising.

  The strength of your shout is dependent upon your spirit and strength attributes.

  Scaling Attributes: Strength, Spirit

  Frost Resistance

  Having survived the harsh climate of the plains and mountains, your body is highly resilient. You can resist climatological effects better than the average man. The icy winds of the high mountains and the winter plains, however, are especially biting and many children die before they grow to be of age. Having survived until adulthood you are far more resistant to freezing cold temperatures than the average man.

  Scaling Attribute: Endurance

  - You have 110% temperature resistance.

  - You have 150% resistance to freezing cold temperatures.

  - You are 130% more resilient when facing ice-based energy attacks, whether magical or otherwise.

  - You are 200% resistant to the status affliction: Frozen

  That all seemed quite useful, especially the frost resistance. Having an improved resistance to being frozen might not come into play any time soon, but it was nice to know he could manage it!

  The final skill, Weapon Appraisal, seemed like it would be useful at first glance. Prior to reading its blurb, he figured it would merely allow him to appraise weapons. He could already do that with his identification skill. Reading the blurb, however, made it seem to be slightly different from what he thought it would be.

  Weapon Appraisal

  Your keen eye for steel has led you to understand the basic tenants of what is required in a proper weapon. Grey weapons will appear more often now that you know what to look for when you attempt to identify them. Increase the level of this skill, and your mind attribute, to further increase this probability and to improve the odds of more valuable weapons being discovered.

  Scaling Attribute: Mind

  “I won’t say no to that!” In his estimation, more grey weapons would be nice. Any weapon would be wonderful. As much as he liked the new barbarian suit that he was tooling around in now, it would have been better with an axe for a prop.

  He farted around with the monitor for a moment then sighed. It was time to head back to the woods. He had a fish to subjugate.

  Scott returned to Nowhere and shook his head slowly. He returned to the moment just before he started messing with that fish, and immediately made a new quick save.

  “Alright, so the fishing spear is useless…” Scott started to store his spear but realized that he was no longer wearing his pants!

  “The hell?” Scott fiddled around his waist a bit then frowned. “Did this thing eat my pockets?”

  It was by shear happenstance that he happened to notice that there was a slit in the back of his loin cloth. Scott shoved his hand into his slit, heh, and wiggled it around a bit. “There it went!”

  “So, when I have this thing on, I can’t wear the clothes I wore when I came here?” he asked rhetorically.

  He stored the spear and sent it to his storage box. However long that would take, it didn’t matter. What did matter was that he needed to secure food. There was no guarantee that he would be able to transport items across worlds, even if he believed it to be possible.

  There was plenty of time left in the day, so he grabbed his knife and headed out into the woods. Along the way, he stopped to mark his trail by cutting tree trunks. There wasn’t supposed to be any sapient life around the area, but there was no guarantee that it would remain that way.

  Food proved to be a difficult prospect. There were berry trees all over the place, but little else of substantial merit. The few animals he saw mostly ran away from him or flew off.

  A few hours passed as he wandered through the woods. Eventually, he came to a small stream. Several creatures were drinking from that stream. They defied description. Something like a cross between a dachshund and an armadillo.

  They noticed him but did not seem to be particularly curious. So, he watched them for a while. They drank their fill and rubbed against each other now and then. Otherwise, they were not in any seeming hurry.

  Scott carved into a tree to mark his position, then followed the river in the opposite direction from the armor-dachshunds, or whatever they were. His identification did not want to work on them. No doubt due to him not thinking of them as waifu material.

  Along the way, he reached a pool of water that had several large fish in it. Scott shrugged and made a quick save then hunted around for a solid tree branch. He found one readily enough, then waded into the stream. The fish did not immediately attack him, but they did swim away. After a few minutes, they began to draw closer to him though not in any sense of urgency. They simply no longer seemed to think of him as a threat.

  Once a fish drew close enough, he whipped his stick down and bashed it on the head. He was pleasantly surprised to see that this fish was not a high-level murder fish. It wriggled around in the water drunkenly, obviously stunned.

&nbs
p; Still strong enough not to be brained by a barbarian, the fish did not die from the blow. Scott took a risk and snatched it up by the tail. It tried to struggle, but it could not form a coherent defense. He took hold of it and then yanked it out of the river. The thing was much bigger than it had any right to be given the depth of the water.

  He had his meal, so he decided to call it a morning and headed back. There were dozens of these fish in the pool, no doubt trapped since the connecting parts of the stream were shallower.

  The poor fish flopped listlessly as it air drowned. Meanwhile, Scott set out back for his camp at a slow trot. It was a few hours away.

  He wanted to make up time and cook a meal by noon. He got lost briefly and had to backtrack until he noticed one of his marks on the trees, but otherwise it was an uneventful trip home.

  Campfire lit, fish cleaned and fileted, he sat the tasty bits atop a rock near the open flame then made a quick save. It would take a while to cook his meal, and frankly he did not want to bother if it ended up being some sort of poison fish or whatever. If his meal killed him, he could use the fish flesh another way.

  While he waited, he experimented with his new body. He did not do so earlier because of his desire to secure regular meals, but now that he had lunch cooking it was time to see what his body could do.

  Scott clambered down the side of the little cliff he had camped atop. There was a perfect running trail nearby, the path he followed to reach this location. Scott set out at a trot then once he had a straightaway, he sped up and ran as fast as he could manage.

  He nearly cried out in joy as his powerful muscles propelled him forward with incredible strength. Even after having sprinted at top speed for nearly half a minute he had only barely just begun to tire. His enhanced endurance was incredible.

  Scott turned around and walked back to his starting point then sprinted down the straightaway once more. In this way, he performed the age-old tradition of the ‘30:60’. He sprinted for thirty seconds, walked for a minute, and repeated the process ten times.

  After his quick work out, he went back to check on his fish. It was taking a little longer than he had hoped, but he had not wanted to look for a large flat rock to sit atop the campfire yet. He would need to make a cooking pit with rocks t contain it soon, but for now he just wanted to test the fish.

  He turned the fillets over, then went back to his training. By the time he finished another ten rounds the fish was done enough for him to give it a try.

  No salt. No pepper. Nothing really to provide him with additional flavor. Yet, as he bit into that fishy flesh his eyes widened. “Damn… I don’t really even like fish, but this tastes pretty good…”

  Scott had grown up over an hour from the ocean, and the fishing in his local area was skimpy. Now and then he had gone an hour or two out of his way to find a good lake, but even those freshly caught fish tasted nothing like this one.

  “I guess it just tastes better when you beat it to death with a stick,” he said seriously.

  He gorged himself on his catch, as he had not eaten much since he woke, and he was uncertain if he had a way to store it for later. There was only his storage box to try. Honestly, he did not want to risk making it smell like rotting fish if food did not keep. That was a test for another day.

  Scott rested under the shade of a tree for a while and waited to see if he would receive a poison status. He was supposed to be resistant to that sort of thing now, but who knew how strong that resistance would prove to be.

  Noon came and went. Scott fell asleep in the pleasant heat of the day due to the cool breeze, his stuffed gut, and the shade of the tree.

  When he awoke it was the middle of the afternoon as far as he could tell. A feast of berries added to his previous meal, as he already had room for more.

  “Guess I should get this place more organized,” he decided. Scott used his pickaxe to dig out a bit of ground and then scooped the dirt up with his hands. Seeing that it worked, even if it was tedious, he slowly made a few holes for his purposes.

  One hole was slated to become his cooking pit. Another would become his bathroom, and another would be for storing items that would not fit in his box. Once the holes were dug, he set about finding and lugging around large mostly flat rocks.

  Dusk was setting in by the time he finished the basic setup, but now he had a contained cooking spot, with its own flat rock for a grill. His bathroom was a hole with some rocks around it and some relatively comfortable looking leaves piled nearby. The storage hole was ringed and lined by rocks and it had two larger flat rocks covering the top. He had nothing to store in that pantry for now, but it existed at least.

  “Home, sweet home…” he said lightly as the sky continued to darken.

  He climbed up a nearby tree and tied himself in with some vine ropes that he had made earlier. They were not exactly high-quality craftsmanship, little more than vines twisted together, but it would help to keep him from falling out of the tree. He did not want to risk being on the ground the first night should a predator come calling.

  A long, tense, night passed for Scott as he sat up in that tree. The vaulting wheel of the heavens overhead painted a picture of alien stars, three moons, and all manner of beautiful colors that lit up the world below like a neon rave.

  No wild animals came to devour his succulent man flesh. In truth, despite the glory of the heavens he eventually grew bored and fell asleep. His dreams were fitful due to the newness of his location. He could not get comfortable in his tree, and he was certain something would devour him the moment he fell asleep. Yet, he had done just that.

  When he awoke, he was once again in the white room. The night was passed, and a new day had dawned. There was nothing to do in the room, so he returned to Nowhere.

  His first duty to his bladder among other body parts, Scott meandered over to his rest room. He soon realized that peeing was no more of a problem than usual, but he was not accustomed to squatting over a hole with his ass hanging out. Worse, the little present he left to himself would need to be covered over with dirt each time.

  “Yeah,” he said while eyeing the hole. “That isn’t going to work for me.”

  His restroom was down the cliff a short distance into the woods. This allowed him a considerable amount of leeway when it came to materials. Scott tore down his small rock collection that bordered the hole and then found a space nearby to begin new construction. He dug around a bit with his pickaxe to get started. It took a while, but he managed to make a flat bit of terrain to act as a foundation

  In the center of that foundation, he began digging out a much deeper hole. Hours passed while he dug and shaped out a proper hole with his limited tools, and soon he grew hungry.

  Scott washed his hands in the pool, then gathered enough berries for a short meal. Some time later, he went back to work. This time he gathered wood and stone. He made a makeshift seat with branches, vines, and stone then built up the area around that seat to give him a modicum of privacy. That last part was no necessary, but he didn’t want a random fish or whatever to look at him while he did his business.

  A large flat rock was used as a sort of capstone for this most unholy well, and his work was done. Scott sat down atop his forest throne and nodded.

  “Behold!” he called, his out outstretched in an authoritative gesture. “The king sits upon his throne. Who dares seek justice?”

  No one answered him, of course, but he could not help but smile to himself. It had been a fun little diversion and quite exhausting. Another quick clean-up and a few berries later, Scott was ready to hit the trail.

  He trotted through the woods with his fishing spear. He had made it, so saw no reason not to try it on a fish that made sense.

  It was well past noon by the time he returned, two big fish in tow. It would be his first test of his new rock grill, and he was ready for it by now. Berries were nice, but a man needed more than that!

  While his fish were cooking, he set about gathering raw materia
ls from the surrounding area. It was time to make an arsenal. The best he could do at the moment was to sharpen rocks and perhaps make a stone axe or spear. So, that was what he worked on.

  The day wore on. He ate his fill of fish, and after a bit of trial and error he managed to craft a decent spear.

  Scott sighed then looked up to the sky overhead. The sun was already hanging low on the horizon. “Man, the entire day is gone already?”

  It was surprising, the speed in which one might lose an entire day when they were busy throughout. He had performed a great deal of heavy labor that day, but other than trying to make a spear and a bit of fishing he had not really trained anything.

  He checked his status then blinked. Surprisingly, he’d gained a little over thirty skill points for his efforts.

  “It makes sense that I would gain those somewhat fast, I suppose.” Skills cost points, and training acceleration cost even more points.

  He washed up a bit in the pool of water below then headed back to his campsite. The night would soon be upon him once more.

  Time passed, as did the days. Scott spent his time upgrading his camp, fishing, attempting to craft tools, and exploring the area in general. He gained a level or two in some of his skills, but it was not until the fifth day that a long-awaited moment had come.

  Strangely, that moment came without fanfare. He only realized it had happened because he had chosen to check his skill point totals.