Monday, May 30, 1983 - Hawkins, Indiana
――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
The Miller property sat at the end of a dirt road that branched off Route 7 about a mile past the last occupied farmhouse. Ryan had ridden past it six times in the last week, twice on his morning runs and four times on his bike.
The house was big for Hawkins. Two stories, white clapboard siding gone gray from neglect, a wraparound porch with half the railing missing. Built in the forties or fifties, from the look of it, when farmland was cheap and families were large. Five bedrooms, probably, maybe six. A kitchen, a living room, a dining room, the kind of house that once held a family of eight and a dog and still had space left over. The Millers had defaulted on their taxes in '79 according to the Observe he'd run on it, and nobody from the county had bothered to do anything about the property since. Why would they? This was Hawkins. Vacant land on the outskirts didn't attract developers or squatters. It just sat there, slowly rotting, while the town went about its business. The town has many properties like this.
From the road, the place looked dead. Broken windows on the ground floor, sagging porch, waist-high grass choking the yard. The kind of house that kids dared each other to approach on Halloween and nobody entered the rest of the year.
That was exactly what Ryan wanted.
He parked his bike behind the house, where a hedge of wild privet had grown thick and unruly enough to screen the back yard from the road entirely. Even if someone drove past, they'd see the same abandoned front they'd been ignoring for four years. Nobody came around to the back. Nobody had any reason to.
Ryan stood at the back door with a backpack full of tools he'd borrowed from Pete.
Borrowed was generous. Pete wouldn't notice the hammer, screwdriver, pliers, or flashlight were gone. The man uses them maybe twice a year, both times to get the lawnmower to work again.
The back door had a deadbolt. Old brass tarnished green. Ryan pulled the two bent bobby pins from his pocket, the ones he'd been practicing with on Pete's shed padlock last night, and went to work.
He'd never picked a lock in either of his lives. The closest he'd come was watching a YouTube video about it in his old life during a rabbit hole at two AM when he should have been sleeping. The concept was simple enough. Tension wrench in the bottom of the keyway, pick in the top, feel for the pins, push them up one at a time until they sit above the shear line.
Simple concept in theory, but his totally fingers disagreed.
The bobby pins were too thick. The keyway was tight. His tension wrench kept slipping because bent wire wasn't actually a tension wrench, it was bent wire. He stood there in the morning heat, sweat running down the back of his neck, mosquitoes finding the skin above his socks, fumbling with a deadbolt like a burglar who'd failed out of burglar school.
Eight minutes.
Nine minutes.
His fingers ached from the awkward angle. He could feel the pins inside the lock, five of them, and he'd got two to set before the tension wrench twisted and they all fell back and he had to start over.
Ten minutes. He adjusted his grip. Lighter pressure on the wrench. Slower movement with the pick. The third pin set. The fourth. A tiny click he felt more than heard, metal on metal through the bobby pin into his fingertip. The fifth pin resisted, then gave.
The deadbolt turned.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Lockpicking (Active) - LV 1]
Open locked mechanisms using tools and manual dexterity.
Success rate scales with DEX and skill level.
MP Cost: 5 | Cooldown: None
Ryan turned the knob and stared at the notification. Ten minutes of fumbling with bobby pins and the system gave him a skill for it. The MP cost was interesting. Five points per attempt meant the system was enhancing his lockpicking beyond pure manual technique, routing a small amount of energy into his fingertips to improve sensitivity and precision. At level 1 it was barely noticeable. At higher levels, he'd probably feel the pins like they were the size of golf balls.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The smell was terrible. Dust, old wood, mildew, something organic that had died in a corner and dried out a long time ago. The flashlight cut through the dim kitchen and found a room that was bigger than Pete's entire ground floor. A gas stove with rusted burners, cabinets with half the doors hanging open. The linoleum was peeling in curls near the baseboards. A calendar on the wall said March 1979, the last month anyone had lived here.
He moved through the house room by room. The flashlight found the details.
The kitchen opened into a dining room with a long table still sitting in the middle of it, covered in dust, surrounded by chairs. Past that, the living room. Hardwood floors under a layer of grime, a stone fireplace with a cracked mantle, windows on two walls that would let in good light if they weren't covered with grime and cobwebs. A staircase at the far end led to the second floor.
The front rooms were visible from the road. So, he wants the front to stay untouched. Dirty windows, overgrown yard, sagging porch. Everything facing the road had to look exactly the way it looked right now, abandoned and uninteresting. The repairs, the cleaning, the work, all of that happened in the back rooms and on the second floor.
From the road, this house should still stay dead.
Upstairs he found four bedrooms and a bathroom. The master bedroom was large, with a window facing the back yard and the tree line beyond. Two of the smaller bedrooms had intact windows and solid doors. The bathroom had a claw-foot tub with rust stains and a toilet that probably hadn't been flushed in four years. The plumbing might still work. The Millers' well was on the property, and rural wells in Indiana didn't shut off just because the owners left. If the pump still had power, or if he could rig something, he'd have running water.
The bones of this house were good. That was what mattered. The walls were plastered over wooden lath, cracked in places but solid overall. The roof had damage, he could see water stains on two of the upstairs ceilings, but the structure wasn't sagging. The foundation inside, from what he could tell through the cellar door he found in the kitchen, was poured concrete with no visible cracks.
This house was perfect for him. A real house, with rooms and space and walls thick enough that nobody would hear him training at midnight.
Ryan walked back to the kitchen and set his backpack on the dusty counter. The back of the house faced nothing but fields and woods. The privet hedge screened the yard. The nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away. And the county owned it, which meant nobody was checking on it, nobody was maintaining it, and nobody would notice if someone started fixing it up from the inside out.
He'd buy it eventually. When he had money from dungeon loot, or crafting, or whatever the system gave him that could convert to cash. He didn't know when that would be. But the property was tax-delinquent and foreclosed, which meant the county would sell it cheap to anyone who offered to take the tax burden off their books. Rural Indiana in 1983 wasn't exactly a seller's market. Also the system gave it an estimated value of $4,200, so he hope that the loot will be good.
Until then, he'd make it livable in the places nobody could see.
He got to work.
* * *
Cleaning a house that had been abandoned for four years was not the kind of activity that generated exciting status notifications. Ryan started with the kitchen because it was at the back and it was where he'd entered. He swept the floor with a broom he'd grabbed from Pete's closet, raising clouds of dust that made him cough and squint. He pulled down spiderwebs with a stick. He found the dead thing near the stove, a raccoon or possum, reduced to a husk of fur and bone, and carried it outside by the tail and tossed it into the weeds.
The kitchen table in the dining room was the first real project. One of its six legs had cracked lengthwise, probably from moisture getting into the grain over the winters. The tabletop was still solid, heavy oak scarred with old knife marks but structurally fine. Ryan found a scrap of wood in the cellar, measured it against the broken leg with his eyes, and spent twenty minutes sawing it to length with a hacksaw from Pete's garage.\
[A.N: Of course Pete has all the tools Ryan needs… don't question it]
The hacksaw was meant for metal, not wood, and the cut was ugly. He didn't care. He knocked out the broken leg, fitted the new piece, and hammered a nail through the tabletop to hold it. The table wobbled. So, he fixed it by shimming the bottom with a folded piece of cardboard from a box in the cellar.
He tested it with his weight and the table held magnificently.
Two hours into the work, sweating through his t-shirt, hands gray with dust and grime, the notification came.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Basic Crafting (Active) - LV 1]
Create or repair simple items from available materials.
Quality scales with level and INT.
MP Cost: Variable | Cooldown: None
Ryan wiped his face with his forearm and grinned at the blue window floating above the repaired table. The carpentry book from the library hadn't triggered this skill because reading wasn't doing. Two hours of actual physical work with his hands, cutting and fitting and hammering, and the system had given him what the book couldn't.
He kept going. The roof leaks were next. He couldn't get onto the roof without a proper ladder, and the one he found leaning against the back wall of the house was missing two rungs. But he could work from inside. The water stains on the second-floor ceilings showed him where the leaks were. Two spots. He went up, found buckets in the cellar, and positioned them under the stains. That was temporary. For a real fix, he'd need to get on the roof and find the damaged shingles. But the buckets would keep the water from spreading until then.
Back downstairs, he walked to the ground floor slowly, running his fingers along the walls, checking the surface for soft spots, looking at the window frames, examining the door jambs. The exterior walls were load-bearing, obviously, but there was an interior wall between the kitchen and dining room that also carried weight from the second floor. The front porch was pulling away from the house because the support posts had rotted at the base. The back door frame was solid, but the cellar stairs had a cracked stringer that would need replacing before he trusted them with anything heavier than his own weight.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Structural Analysis (Passive) - LV 1]
Identifies structural weaknesses, load-bearing points, and architectural vulnerabilities.
+2% detection accuracy per level.
The system read his mind. Or rather, it read his behavior. He'd been examining this house with an engineer's insights, looking for where things connected and where they'd break, and the system crystallized that pattern into a skill. Structural Analysis was passive, which meant it would run in the background whenever he looked at a building or a wall or a bridge. It wasn't a useless skill, but it wasn't particularly helpful either, unless he planned on working in construction someday. It certainly wasn't going to help him in combat or support.
He spent another thirty minutes on repairs. Tightened the hinges on the back door with the screwdriver. Fixed a cabinet door in the kitchen that was hanging by one hinge. Swept the dining room and the kitchen again, getting the last of the loose grit into a pile and scooping it out the back door.
He left the front rooms untouched. Anyone who peered through the front windows would see exactly what they expected to see. An empty, dead house.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Repair (Active) - LV 1]
Restore damaged items to working condition.
Speed and quality scale with level.
MP Cost: Variable (5-50 depending on damage) | Cooldown: None
Three skills in a single morning.
The house was still grimy, still rough, still ton of work away from being properly livable. But the back half was his. He also found the Millers' spare key hanging on a nail inside the cellar.
This was a house with a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a cellar, four bedrooms, and more space than he knew what to do with yet. A house he could train in, store things in, sleep in if he ever needed to. A house that, with enough work and enough time and enough money, could be his.
Good enough for now.
* * *
He came back the next day. And the day after that.
Tuesday he brought the carpentry book from the library and read sections between repair sessions, cross-referencing the written instructions with what he was actually doing with his hands. The book said to use a block plane for trimming door frames. He didn't have a block plane. He used the hacksaw and sandpaper made from a piece of flat stone he found in the back yard. It was ugly but it worked, and the system didn't care about aesthetics which means his skills were working anyway.
He focused on the backrooms and upstairs. On the first days the kitchen got the most attention because it was where he entered and where he kept his tools. He scrubbed the countertops until the laminate showed through. He tested the gas stove, which was dead, and the faucet, which coughed brown water for thirty seconds and then ran clear. The well pump still worked. That was a small miracle.
The master bedroom upstairs became his secondary workspace. He swept it clean, tested the window that faced the back yard, confirmed it opened and closed smoothly. The mattress the Millers had left behind was ruined, stained and sagging, and he dragged it down the stairs and out the back door and left it in the weeds behind the hedge. He didn't need a bed here yet. He needed floor space.
Wednesday, he skipped the repairs for D&D at Mike's. Dustin's halfling died in a pit trap for the third time in two months. Lucas threatened to quit. Ryan made three tactical calls that saved the party and one that almost got them killed because he misjudged the encounter Mike had planned. Mike looked satisfied with that one.
Thursday he was back at the house with a bucket of water and old rags, scrubbing the dining room table surface until the oak grain showed through. He organized the tools he'd collected, the borrowed ones from Pete's garage and a few rusted implements the Millers had left behind, on the kitchen counter. He paced the rooms, counted steps, and sketched a rough floor plan on a piece of notebook paper. Prepared a training space in the cleared master bedroom upstairs, twenty by fifteen.
* * *
The cooking skill had been building for two weeks before it finally triggered.
Uncle Pete didn't cook breakfast. Pete's morning routine was coffee and the newspaper, in that order, and the concept of preparing food before ten AM apparently conflicted with some deep principle he held about the natural order of the universe.
Ryan had been making his own breakfast since the awakening. Eggs most days, because eggs were cheap and Pete always had a carton in the fridge. Toast when there was bread. Oatmeal when there wasn't.
Tuesday morning. Ryan stood at the stove scrambling eggs. The butter had browned in the pan before he added them, which gave the eggs a nutty flavor that his old self would've appreciated and his fifteen-year-old body appreciated even more because everything tasted better when you were a growing teenager with a metabolism that ran like a furnace. Especially when you don't need to give a shit about calories.
The eggs were almost done. He reached for the salt.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Cooking (Active) - LV 1]
Prepare food that provides minor temporary buffs when eaten and taste better.
Cooked meals provide +3% to a chosen stat for 1 hour.
MP Cost: None (5 for enhanced cooking) | Cooldown: None
Ryan stared at the notification hovering above the frying pan. Then he laughed, short and quiet, because Pete was still in his bedroom and the walls were thin.
Three percent to a stat.
He could pick which one. At his current numbers, three percent of anything was basically noise. Three percent of STR 9 was 0.27, which the system would probably round down to zero. But the skill leveled with use, and he cooked every morning. The buff will get stronger and the duration will grow.
He plated the eggs. Sat down at the kitchen table. Ate with intent, selecting VIT as his buff target.
A faint warmth spread through his chest. So subtle he almost missed it. The system acknowledged the buff with a tiny icon at the edge of his vision, a fork-and-knife symbol with a timer counting down from sixty minutes.
Three percent of VIT 12 was nothing. But the icon was there, and the skill was real, and every breakfast from now on was a training rep.
Pete came out ten minutes later. Coffee. Newspaper.
"Eggs?" Ryan asked.
"Already ate," Pete said, which was a lie. Pete never ate breakfast. But saying "already ate" was shorter than explaining that he didn't want eggs.
* * *
The physical training was paying off in numbers.
Three weeks of five AM runs, push-ups, pull-ups, Power Strikes against trees. The routine had escalated steadily. His runs went from twenty-two minutes that first Sunday to thirty-five minutes by the end of the second week. The routes were longer now, winding through back roads and farm paths that his minimap swallowed in greedy bites of explored territory. Push-ups climbed past fifty and were pushing toward sixty. Pull-ups on the oak branch behind Pete's shed hit twelve, up from the six he'd managed two weeks ago.
His body was changing. He still looks like a lean teen who was playing sports. But the numbers underneath were moving fast.
[Through intense training, STR has increased by 1!]
STR: 9 → 10
That came Thursday morning, after a set of push-ups that went to fifty-eight. His arms had been trembling on the last three reps, elbows locked at the bottom, face two inches from the grass, every muscle in his chest and shoulders burning in the clean way that Gamer's Body converted effort into, with no pain. Just resistance approaching its limit.
STR 10. Double digits. Average for a healthy adult male, strong for a teenager. His Power Strikes hit harder now. STR times 1.5 at level 3 meant 15 damage per hit instead of 13.5. Small difference against a tree. Real difference against something that bled.
[Through intense training, VIT has increased by 1!]
VIT: 12 → 13
Friday. After a thirty-five minute run that ended with a sprint up the long hill on Cornwallis Road, a grade steep enough that his stamina bar scraped the bottom and Physical Endurance worked overtime to keep him moving. The VIT gain triggered right at the top of the hill, while he stood with his hands on his knees and his lungs heaving in the early morning light.
VIT 13 meant more HP and more stamina. More time before the empty-tank feeling dragged his pace down. He could feel it in his recovery too. The walk home after a hard run took less time to refill the bar. Ten minutes instead of fifteen. Gamer's Body plus higher VIT plus Physical Endurance at level 2, all stacking, all pulling in the same beautiful direction.
[Through intense training, DEX has increased by 1!]
DEX: 10 → 11
Saturday. This one surprised him. He'd been doing agility work between Power Strike sessions, nothing organized, just footwork drills he remembered from a basketball camp his younger self had attended two summers ago. Side shuffles, crossover steps, quick direction changes on the grass behind the house. His feet were faster than they'd been. The system noticed.
Three physical stat points in one week. He was still in the golden window. STR, VIT, and DEX all in the low teens, where the system rewarded hard training with generous gains because the distance between his current level and the next threshold was short. He'd read enough LitRPG to know the math would change. Somewhere around 20, the daily gains would slow to every few days. By 30, he'd need to find new training methods entirely because the same routine would stop pushing the needle.
But that was a problem for the future Ryan. Right now, every morning run was an investment that paid out in stat points he could feel in his muscles and his speed and the way his body moved through space.
* * *
The stone slab was the problem.
Behind the house, running along the base of the foundation wall, there was a drainage channel that the Millers had dug at some point to keep water from pooling against the concrete. It was clogged. Leaves, dirt, four years of neglect had packed the channel solid, and in the lowest point, where the channel turned a corner toward the tree line, a flat stone slab about four feet wide and eight inches thick had settled into the mud. The slab blocked the drainage completely. Water from the last rain was pooled behind it, sitting against the foundation, exactly the kind of situation that would eat the concrete over a winter.
Ryan needed to move it. He'd tried brute force on it. Got his fingers under the edge, planted his feet, pulled with everything STR 10 and a teenager's body could give him.
The slab didn't move, not even an inch. The thing weighed at least a hundred and fifty pounds, probably more, seated in packed clay that held it like a socket holds an eye. He couldn't get enough leverage from the angle, couldn't slide it because the channel walls boxed it in, couldn't break it because he didn't have a sledgehammer.
His body couldn't solve it. His tools couldn't solve it.
But his MP could.
The idea had been formed since the library, since the day, he'd read about basic geology in one of the science textbooks and felt nothing trigger because the knowledge was theoretical.
Earth manipulation was a staple in the manhwa. Jee-Han had picked up elemental skills eventually, and the magic system in The Gamer was built on the idea that MP could interact with physical matter if you directed it properly. Power Strike has already proved that. He was channeling energy into his fist to amplify a punch. What if he channeled energy into the ground instead?
Ryan placed both palms flat on the dirt next to the stone slab. The ground was cool and damp under his fingers. He closed his eyes and reached for the MP pool in his chest.
First attempt. He pushed energy down through his arms, through his palms, into the earth. The same way he pushed it into his fist for Power Strike, but targeting the ground instead of an impact point.
Nothing happened. The dirt stayed dirt. His MP bar ticked down by maybe two or three points, wasted energy that went somewhere and did nothing useful.
He opened his eyes. Stared at his hands pressed into the clay.
The Power Strike analogy was wrong. With Power Strike, he was adding force to a movement that already existed. The punch was the vehicle. The MP was the fuel. But there was no movement here. He was just shoving energy into the ground and hoping something would happen, and which sounds stupid now.
Second attempt. He pulled his hands back, shook them out, and placed them down again. This time he didn't try to push energy into the earth. He tried to push energy into the earth and tell it what to do. Move the dirt. Specifically, the dirt around the stone slab. Loosen it. Shift it.
His MP dropped. Five, maybe six points. The dirt under his right palm shivered. A tiny tremor, barely perceptible, like the ground had flinched. Then nothing. The energy dissipated again, and the stone slab sat exactly where it had been sitting for four years.
The flinch meant something. The system finally understood what he was trying to achieve and started to execute, but the execution failed because his approach was still wrong. Dirt was a medium. A material you need to shaped not push.
Ryan sat back on his heels and thought.
In software, when you needed to transform data, you didn't grab each byte and move it manually. You defined the transformation and let the system apply it. Map, reduce, filter. You described the end state, and the runtime handled the implementation. Or you just use ChatGPT, describe what you want and hope for the best, in both ways you need to figure out the goal.
He placed his palms down one more time. But instead of pushing energy into the dirt and telling it to move, he pushed energy into the dirt and described a shape. The dirt around the slab loosened and the clay under softened. Which will cause the channel to be clear.
The warmth left his hands and sank into the earth, and this time the earth listened.
The clay start softened very slowly and the packed dirt around the stone slab shifted, losing its grip, grains separating and resettling. Pebbles rolled. A wet sucking sound came from the base of the slab as the clay underneath released its hold.
The slab didn't move on its own. But when Ryan reached over and pulled the edge, it slid free like a drawer on greased rails. He dragged it out of the channel and move it to the grass, breathing hard from the combination of physical effort and MP expenditure.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Earth Shaping (Active) - LV 1]
Manipulate earth, stone, and clay within a 2-meter radius.
Maximum weight affected: INT × 5 kg.
MP Cost: 15 per use | Cooldown: None
Note: Higher levels allow finer control, greater mass, and shaping of harder materials.
Ryan read the notification twice. Then a third time, because his brain needed all three passes to process what the system was handing him.
INT 18 times 5 was 90 kilograms. About 200 pounds. Enough to move that stone slab, which was right in the high end of his weight limit. Enough to reshape dirt and clay within a two-meter circle around his hands.
At level 1, it was a small construction tool. Useful for exactly what he'd just done. Clearing channels, moving stones, smoothing surfaces. And for a kid trying to renovate a house with no budget and borrowed tools, a construction tool was exactly what he needed.
But skills leveled. And this skill scaled with INT, which was already his highest stat and would keep climbing. At high level, the radius would probably expand, the weight limit would increase, and the precision would allow him to shape harder materials. Stone walls. Fortifications. Barriers.
He'd read enough of the manhwa to remember where this kind of ability led. Earth manipulation was the foundation of the golem skill tree. If you could shape earth, you could eventually animate it. Magical constructs. Soldiers made of stone and clay that followed your commands. He didn't know the exact requirements for something like that, and guessing about evolution thresholds based on novels was shaky at best. But the direction was clear. This skill was the first step toward something that could change the scale of what he could do when the real threats arrived.
The Demogorgon was one creature. Dangerous, but singular, at least for season one. You could plan for one enemy. The Mind Flayer's Demodogs came in packs, dozens of them, and the proxy body it built in '85 was an army of melted flesh and bone. You couldn't fight an army alone. You needed numbers.
And if he couldn't have an army of people, maybe he could have an army of stone.
[A.N: In the manhwa as I recalled, the Golem creation came from a skill book, but because he doesn't have supernatural communities or instant dungeon for now, I needed to give it to him differently. And of course, the skill will be limited… or it will break the world balance]
Ryan spent the rest of his MP experimenting. He had about a hundred points left after the slab extraction and the failed attempts. Six casts of Earth Shaping at fifteen MP each, that was ninety points, leaving him with a thin reserve.
He smoothed a section of the drainage channel, compacting the loose dirt into a firm, even surface. The skill was clumsy. The dirt moved in lumps instead of flowing smoothly, and the edges of his work were rough, like a child's attempt at a sandcastle compared to what a real sculptor would produce. But it worked. The channel was clear. Water would flow away from the foundation instead of into it.
He shaped a small pile of clay into a rough cube. The clay resisted more than loose dirt. The system used more of each MP point to affect denser material, which meant his effective range and weight limit shrank when he was working with anything heavier than topsoil.
He tried to smooth a cracked section of the foundation wall. The concrete barely responded. A faint vibration, a thin layer of dust settling differently. The material was too hard and too heavy for level 1 Earth Shaping to affect in any meaningful way. He'd need higher levels and probably higher INT before he could work with cured concrete. But the fact that the skill had registered the concrete at all was promising. The path from dirt to stone to walls to structures was there. He just had to walk it.
His MP bottomed out.
Ryan sat there for ten minutes while his natural regen trickled MP back into the pool. WIS 14 gave him roughly 7 points per minute outside of combat, and Meditation would double that, but he was too excited to meditate. His mind kept running calculations.
As his Earth Shaping will level up, he might be able to patch walls, seal cracks in the foundation, reshape the ground around the house to improve drainage across the whole property. He might even work with concrete and soft stone. Repair the foundation properly. Build interior walls. The Miller house needed thousands of dollars of work to make it livable by normal standards. With Earth Shaping at a decent level, he could skip most of that.
Ryan stood up. His MP was at about 70 points, enough for few more casts. He used them on the drainage channel, widening the exit where it curved toward the tree line, packing the dirt into firm walls that would hold through a rainstorm.
* * *
Sunday, June 5th.
Ryan sat at his desk in his bedroom with the status window open.
Three weeks since the awakening. The daily training quest had been paying out every day, twenty-five XP stacking with the small bonuses from skill creation. Six new skills this week. Lockpicking, Basic Crafting, Repair, Structural Analysis, Cooking, Earth Shaping. Each one had kicked ten XP on creation plus the daily quest XP.
He was building toward Level 3. The bar was filling. Another week of dailies and he'd cross the threshold.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: The Gamer
Level: 2
XP: 390/600
HP: 190/190
MP: 145/145
STR: 10
VIT: 13
DEX: 11
INT: 18
WIS: 14
CHA: 7
LUK: 5
Stat Points: 0
Skill Points: 1
Skills:
Gamer's Mind (Passive) - MAX
Gamer's Body (Passive) - MAX
Observe (Active) - LV 4
Physical Endurance (Passive) - LV 2
Power Strike (Active) - LV 4
Meditation (Active) - LV 2
Mapping (Passive) - LV 1
Basic First Aid (Active) - LV 1
Unarmed Combat (Passive) - LV 1
Survival (Passive) - LV 1
Lockpicking (Active) - LV 1
Basic Crafting (Active) - LV 1
Repair (Active) - LV 1
Structural Analysis (Passive) - LV 1
Cooking (Active) - LV 1
Earth Shaping (Active) - LV 1
Sixteen skills.
Power Strike and Observe had each gained a level during the week, hitting LV 4. He was using both of them constantly. Power Strike got ten reps a day minimum, sometimes fifteen if his MP cycling was efficient. Observe got dozens of uses every day, at school, on the street, at the house. The gap between LV 3 and LV 4 had taken more uses than the gap between 2 and 3, which had taken more than 1 to 2. The curve was steepening.
The physical stats were the brightest spot. STR 10, VIT 13, DEX 11. All three up from last week. His body was adapting to the training at a rate that no real teenager could match, because his body wasn't operating on biology anymore.
He looked at the numbers and tried to figure out what they meant in real terms.
STR 10 meant he could probably bench press his own body weight with no effort. His punches had real force behind them, enough to hurt an adult, enough to dent wood. Not enough to threaten anything from the Upside Down. The Demogorgon had a hide that could shrug off gunfire. STR 10 Power Strikes would bounce off it like rain.
VIT 13 meant 190 HP, which was close to two and a half times what Will had. A Demodog's bite, from what he could estimate based on the show, probably did somewhere around 50 to 80 damage per hit. Two, maybe three bites and he'd be in critical range. Better than any normal human, but not comfortable.
DEX 11 meant he was faster than an average person but not faster than a Demodog. Those things moved like hounds. He'd need DEX in at least twenties before he could reliably dodge them, and even then, in a pack, speed wouldn't save him. Positioning and preparation would.
He closed the status window. The numbers were growing. The trajectory was right. But when he measured himself against what was coming in November, the gap between where he was and where he needed to be was still wide.
He needed ID Create to unlock badly. Grinding in the real world had limits. Dungeons had mobs, loot, and XP rewards that would accelerate everything.
Level 3 was a week away. Level 5 was maybe three weeks after that if he could find XP sources beyond the daily quest. Side quests might help. The system generated them based on his actions and his situation, and so far it had given him the Welcome to Hawkins quest and the daily training quest. There had to be more.
He'd keep pushing. The grind was boring and repetitive and exactly like every LitRPG novel said it would be, and he'd do it every single day because the alternative was showing up with garbage stats and a prayer.
Ryan set his alarm for five AM. Closed his eyes.
Tomorrow the numbers will move. They always moved. You just had to keep pushing.
[A.N: Almost 22,000 words out so far! I'm hoping to drop another episode this week, but no promises. I've already written about 85,000 words total for now, but there's still a lot of translating and editing to get through, so we'll see how it goes.
Nobody comments except for Aaronzaid, so thank you for your support!
I really hope more readers will leave comments and power stones so I can figure out whether I'm doing a good job or not.]