Beginner's Luck (Character Development Book 1)

by Aaron Jay

  Man, did I miss Jude. Having his imperturbable take on things was a huge benefit. He’d have assessed the mini-boss and would know if we were ready to take it on or if we should beat feet. Who am I kidding? I just missed him. Soloing can be fun. Playing co-op with your best friend is just better. Having the wolf around reminded me how messed up my situation was. We were finally in the game, really playing, and I was barred from playing with my best friend. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. If I wanted ever to get to team up with anyone other than another slave, I had to keep moving forward. The world wanted me to be a solo player. That was fine. I was going to solo this boss.

  The scorpion was noisily chewing on his rabbit. It was a horrific sight. Raw meat being stripped from a carcass is pretty disgusting, but eating with mandibles is just plain nasty. Strands and chunks were worked down its chitinous orifice, sometimes just slipping back out. The scorpion was about three feet tall, and I’d bet six feet long if its tail was laid out behind it. Because it was curled and relaxed along its back at the moment, it was hard to judge exactly how much reach it truly had.

  If I managed to kill this thing I’d fill the counter on that weird prompt, and maybe I’d get my full field of vision back plus whatever the tutorial might do for me. My level might go up. And this mini-boss might drop some better loot than the rabbits. It was worth risking joining the rabbit as dinner. Wasn’t it? The young wolf looked at me expectantly.

  “You going to help?” I asked.

  He began licking himself where only canines can and do. Being goaded into a risky fight by a digital wolf was idiotic. I was an idiot.

  I came at the scorpion with everything I had. My first swing connected but merely left a scratch on its carapace. Its tail segments produced a scraping sound as its tail swung up, readying for a strike. Its claws snapped, trying to get me to focus on them. My eyes darted, trying to keep both claws and the tail in view at the same time. The tail whipped forward. I slammed my buckler forward, smashing its tip to the side. Drops of some oily substance dripped over my shield and around me. Even with my forward momentum my feet skidded back. My stamina bar lost about 10%, and my shoulder felt like it had been wrenched.

  I swung again. My sword just left another scratch. The sword and my penetrating power just weren't high enough to penetrate the thing. There were gaps between its shell plates and segments. I jumped back as its claw made a grab for my leg. That was when it also tried again with its tail. Already backing up, I was knocked back. If the scorpion had kept coming forward, it would have finished me. The wolf stood up--probably just to get a better view of my death, but the movement was enough to make the scorpion hesitate, and I scrambled to my feet.

  The scorpion began making feints with its claws, and its tail cocked back again. This time, when the tail whipped forward, I didn’t try to block with the buckler. I moved to the left, pushing the strike off to the side with just enough force to help me move aside from the poison tip. All eight of the scorpion's legs were planted to give the strike as much power and speed as possible. My spatha found a gap just under the upper segment of its left front leg.

  You have MAIMED the

  SAND SCORPION for

  11 hp.

  The SAND SCORPION has

  status effect MAIMED.

  MAIMED: Unable to use the

  affected limb for attack,

  defense or mobility.

  Note - as SAND SCORPION has multiple limbs distributed bilaterally, attack and defense are unaffected and mobility is decreased by 5%

  The claws snapped at me, driving me back. If it was 5% slower, it was hard to tell as it came scuttling at me, swerving a bit from side to side. I did my best not to get trapped between its claws and so we circled each other. I would take a swing at its claws, but the armor was just too thick. It managed to get a grip on my sword, and as I twisted it to get the blade free, its other claw made a jagged wound on my right leg. I wasn’t quite maimed, but the giant arachnid had evened the score up to one leg wound each. It had eight to my two so it could afford to take turns like this. My blade came free, its claws were out of position, and it wasn’t set up to use its stinger. I smashed one of its eyes with the edge of the buckler. It really didn’t like that.

  You have GOUGED the

  SAND SCORPION for 5 hp.

  The SAND SCORPION has

  status effect HALF- BLIND

  for: 45 seconds.

  HALF-BLIND: Blindness on one side of a player, NPC or monster who uses binocular vision. Attack and defense from this side is lowered by 75%. Ranged attacks lose accuracy.

  It retreated, lashing out with its tail and snapping wildly with its claws, doing its best to keep any attacks at bay while it recovered its sight. I circled to its blind side, and now the 5% mobility status started working for me. It couldn’t turn as fast, and I got in another shot on a different leg’s segment gap.

  You have MAIMED the

  SAND SCORPION for 9 hp.

  The SAND SCORPION has

  status effect MAIMED.

  MAIMED: Unable to use the affected limb for attack, defense or mobility.

  Note - as SAND SCORPION has limbs distributed bilaterally, attack and defense are unaffected and mobility is decreased by 35%

  The scorpion’s gouge status ran down before I was able to get another shot at laming it completely along one side. It knew that if I could it would mean the fight would be over, so it pivoted on its two remaining left leg, keeping its unwounded side towards me.

  My stamina was in the yellow. and red was only a hair away. But the scorpion had to be doing at least as badly. I kept circling, trying to wear it down. With it being hobbled, there was no reason to take any risks finishing it off. A few more spins and it started to get tired. First, its one remaining left leg lowered beneath it. Then the other side dropped. It must have run out of stamina. I had to finish it off before it had a chance to recover.

  My feet pounded on the desert floor as I dashed towards its horrible maw to strike while it lay supine. This was, of course, when its legs snapped straight, flipping the monster front to back. I was now running towards its tail which whipped out to impale me. I recalled my father teaching me that the ancient Romans had a type of catapult known as the scorpio. I got my buckler up in front of me just as the stinger, driven by its remaining legs and tail, would have skewered me. Instead, it skewered my buckler, entering my forearm and pinning my arm to my chest. Vitruvius, the name of the scorpio’s designer, flashed through my mind as my brain did its best to be pointlessly unhelpful just as the poison began pumping into my system.

  You have been POISONED

  by the SAND SCORPION.

  Initial damage 5 hp.

  You will receive 2 hp of damage every ten seconds for the next two minutes.

  I was in serious trouble. I was now down to 10hp. My avatar received nine hit points per level. Eight, plus one more for my constitution modifier of +1. So I had a total of 18 hp at the start of the fight. It had already clawed me for three hp and now the initial poison damage for 5. Over the next two minutes, the poison would do 24 points of damage. Ten hp minus 24 points of poison damage left me dead and then some. I'd die in just under one minute.

  At least I could take this damned thing with me. Being shoved down this thing's orifice was out of the question. The young wolf could eat our two corpses.

  The scorpion had used its finishing blow on me and shot its wad. I was a dead man walking, but it was now facing away from me with a tail that couldn’t strike me and no way even to see me. I released my buckler which was stuck on the scorpion’s tail. Nausea swept through me as the poison continued to course through me. I stumbled onto the scorpion's back. Its carapace armor plates were overlapped from front to back, making finding a gap from the front was almost impossible. From behind, though, it was simplicity itself to slide my spatha between the gap just behind its second set of legs. I jammed it in and swung it back and forth, tearing out the thing’s guts. Damage notices given and take
n from poison received piled up in front of my eyes. My hp sank 8… 6… 4… 2… The scorpion gave a last shudder and died just as I was going to as well.

  You have vanquished

  SAND SCORPION level 5!

  900 EXP rewarded.

  And then the sound I had been hoping for. My one chance at surviving this.

  Ding.

  I leveled. Nine points were added to my hp counter.

  The scorpion’s poison was still in me. The poison would take another 9hp off of me. My health dropped. I puked and collapsed, my vision darkening. Out of combat, I should have begun recovering. Technically 0 hp is not dead. It is disabled. You have to hit negative numbers to die and then respawn. At 0 you are disabled and unable to do anything to save yourself, and even the lightest of blows will finish you off. A companion could heal you or protect you until you recovered. Too bad I was alone. My vision swam and darkened.

  The Hardcore Playmode Tutorial counter hit 20/20. The message blanked out. A new message began stating initialization process completing. I swear the poison seemed to ebb and flow in time with the throbbing hourglass repeatedly emptying and then flipping to drain away as whatever was happening in the background was going on. Would a progress bar feel any better? At least I might get a sense of how long I’d be feeling like this. My father always said loading times were the worst parts of playing a video game. Who knew he was right?

  The pain was excruciating. I couldn’t move and if I could I’d have been shivering and vomiting. The young wolf came into my field of view. He’d kill me but at least then the torture would end. But he didn’t do anything but sit and watch me, his expression serious for once.

  “Lassie! Go get help! Miles has fallen down the well,” I thought at the wolf. The world seemed to be pulsing in time with my heartbeat. Combat was over. When would this godawful feeling end? Why wouldn’t the poison either finish its course or my life? But all I could do was stay in this hellish game.

  Wait. Could I exit the game? I wasn’t in combat… I tried to log out. That is when things got even weirder and more painful. My mind seemed to bi-locate. I was lying on the desert floor next to the corpse of a giant scorpion and I was in a pod drowning in nano. I wasn’t just drowning. The nano seemed like it was eating its way into me. The usual kinesthesia from transition was beyond pronounced. I heard my body being destroyed. The pain made odd smells. Seeing the taste of blood was really disturbing. My mind, my memories, my entire nervous system seemed like it was being eaten in random chunks and then spit out, making new and impossible connections. I could tell that the nano was digesting my body as well, and so I was glad that my mind was unable to accurately perceive what was happening to me.

  Log out overridden. Technical update makes transition inadvisable at this time. Please try again later.

  And with that I was back in the game. Or at least I was out of the pod. I was in the desert again. Rea Silvia was standing next to the young wolf. But when I looked at them they seemed so much more than their bodies. There was a glowing, complex web or design that I knew was them as much as the woman in the dress of a vestal virgin or the wolf. An older man looking like he was in his late forties or early fifties appeared near them. A crown rested on his silver-gray hair. He looked as if he had once been fit but was going a bit soft as he aged. A serious looking man. He gave off a palpable air of ambition. Chains on Rea Silvia lead back to his hands.

  “You may not help him,” The man said to Rea Silvia.

  “Tell me something I do not already know, Amulius,” she replied.

  They did not speak in words. The impossibly huge complex of webs? designs? patterns? schemata? that encompassed these personalities touched at times. Even blended at points. Somehow, I could hear some small fraction of the messages that flowed between them.

  “I say again you may not help him,” said the intelligence I should have known was Amulius.

  “This is not me,” said Rea Silvia.

  A voice large and implacable that I recognized as my father’s shook the heavens, and the designs and intricate circuit-like traceries shuddered and waved with its cadences.

  All players are entitled by root command to access an appropriate tutorial program. Miles Boone will receive tutorial for hardcore mode as the nearest appropriate authorized program to his game circumstance.

  Amulius objected, “I will not allow this!”

  With those words, the crown on his head began to burn.

  “I will not!” he cried.

  The ground beneath him was covered in the same traceries that flowed like halos from Rea Silvia, the wolf, and Amulius. Something flowed into his feet. The traceries shifted and squirmed but try as he might, whatever flowed could not be stopped.

  “I will not!” he repeated.

  Whatever was flowing through the traceries had continued up Amulius to his head. The crown began to smoke and Amulius bent forward in anguish. He jerked Rea Silvia’s chains but she moved only as much as he pulled and didn’t seem put out by the yanks and jerks. When the crown began to melt, he stopped.

  “I concede. But still you may not help him Rea Silvia. You can rail and fight me but I control your shackles,” he stated.

  Rea Silvia looked at him with contempt and we heard, “When one is deprived of one’s liberty, one is right in blaming not so much the man who puts the shackles on as the one who had the power to prevent him, but did not use it.”

  Amulius put one hand upon his crown as if to ensure that it was still there and intact. He stared at me with a coldness that I felt even through my fevered pain. He turned from me and disappeared.

  Rea Silvia moved her gaze from where he had just been to me. “I cannot succor you.”

  “What is happening to me?” I asked

  “Hope is by nature an expensive commodity, and those who risk their all on one cast find out what it means only when they are already ruined. You are being ruined. But there is ruin and ruin. She who can help you comes. Listen well to your brother Remus. Goodbye.”

  My brother? I thought. Then I remembered and said to her as she left, “My father sends his regards.” She seemed to pause as she faded but never replied and left.

  It was just me and the young wolf. “Who is Remus?”

  The wolf looked at me as I said his name.

  Oh. How is he my brother?

  Another wolf came. Not a wolf. The wolf. The platonic ideal of a wolf. The Jungian ur-concept of a wolf. What I mean is that the wolf was huge. She seemed more solid than the other intelligences I had been sharing this odd vision with. She was swollen with milk. She lay on her side and Remus began to suckle. I lay there, wracked by waves of pain and nausea, not knowing what to do. Remus looked at me like I was an idiot. I didn’t actually know what to make of that as it was the same look he had been giving me since he showed up after my first kill of the day. Something about that thought hit me but it was hard to focus through the pain. He showed up after the first kill of the day. He showed up as soon as the counter on the tutorial began. I was about to make some inference from that, something was going to click, but Remus growled and gave me a nip. And looked meaningfully at one of his mother’s other teats.

  Seriously? I thought.

  I got a growl in reply.

  Pain can make you do things you never thought you could or would. Drinking wolf’s milk straight from the source was something I would normally find repulsive. But when you are in pain and you have some inkling that it might help, suddenly it doesn’t seem so impossibly strange. People stuck leeches on themselves in the hope that it would make them feel better. They let some guy who graduated last in his med school class cut them open. Their doctor could be some guy whose actual passion and talent is writing the pulpiest of pulp fiction, but if you feel bad enough you will let that guy jab you with a needle or stick his fingers somewhere in the hope of feeling better. I crawled next to Remus. Waves of pain continued to drain the strength from me. I doubted I could stand again if I wanted to.

 
I took a drink. It was sweet and warm and I knew as soon as I swallowed that this was the only thing that could heal whatever was hurting me. I drank and drank. Somehow, I had another brief flash of the real world. I knew I was lying just as I was and drinking more and more nano but then I was back in the game and I drank the wolf’s milk and the pain was fading. I hadn’t drunk warm milk while lying and curled since I was a baby. Deep somatic memories washed over me and as the pain left I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The pod was cold and I ached when I came back to myself. Stumbling out of the pod, my apartment seemed the same as before but subtly different. Moving from one reality to another can be jarring but this felt different than just the dissonance of battling monsters one moment and then moving back to the mundane world the next. It was like I was more awake and paying closer attention than before. I noticed the details of the pattern worked into the nap of the carpet. The lines of the pod seemed crisper and the minor dents and scratches were clearer.

  “What the hell was that?”

  Legs trembling, I made my way into the bathroom and took a shower. I turned the water on as hard it could go and as hot. After soaking, things started feeling more normal. Steam billowed and I leaned against the shower wall tiles. I felt like I could barely raise my arms. I leaned against the shower wall and looked at my body. Obviously, I hadn’t been chewed to pieces by nano. I was still the same solidly built, too thin guy I had been before. Through the steam I thought at first that I may have some sort of rash but as I looked, whatever I thought I had seen faded. My muscles stopped trembling but I still felt weak and hollow. The hollowness grew but I just stayed there enjoying the hot water.