In some ways, the clock was already running down on Benate’s good fortune. That was the weird thing about gaining power. The moment you got it, its durability couldn’t do anything else except slowly decay. A good stick would break. A tasty meat would digest. Unless you wanted to sit still forever, sooner or later the stamina cost of living would drag you back down to zero.

The trick was: you had to take your power while you had it, and spend it wisely to get more. It took planning, ambition, and smart decisions. As far as Benate saw it, the only way in life to keep what you had, was to always be working towards what was next. The only problem with that point of view, was that the world wasn’t about to sit back and let you rise to the top; not without fighting back.

Zone::Local Delta: 3.2051 (Close Call, To the Death, Under-equipped, Hunting, Survey, Harvesting, Point-of-Interest, *)

Benate threw his head back and steeled himself. “😬😔. 😤, 💂⚔👹. 👻💃!” He lived the path of the warrior. It was his fate to dance with mortality itself, time and time again. That’s what it meant to live. He would survive whatever the world could throw at him.

...recalculating…

Zone::Local Delta: 2.7835 (Scrounging, *)

Point-of-Interest: { vegetation.weeds.assorted→area.small^Delta:0.4216 }

“😡, 🤬🤡!” He crafted his fist weapon and unleashed a [Fist Arte: Strike]->10 on a nearby shrub. It didn’t break, but he reduced its durability pretty low. “💩🤡, 🧐🤴🖥, ❌🧠, ♿🚮🚼, 🤬🤬🤬!”

Was this the kind of disrespect that he was going to have to face? Benate had faced danger every day, and every lifetime. He was more than just some... {Scrounger}. Who did system think they were, anyway? Belittling him, making light of his accomplishments. Maybe he wasn’t some hopped up Tier 1 bigshot, but he had dreams. And he’d only failed six times! That wasn’t even a lot of times to have died.

But before long, his chat notifications captured his attention.

AutoMod→CodeOfConduct: Using emojis to evade the TAO profanity filter may be considered harassment according to the Player Code of Conduct (PcoC).

AutoMod→ProfanityFilter: Potentially offensive symbol combinations have triggered automatic moderation policy.

AutoMod→EventReport→UserFeedback: Did you intentionally use profanity, slurs, sexual or explicit content, hate speech, or other prohibited language in public chat? This will help us refer your case to the correct team, as well as improve our tao-for-everyone civility-satisfaction algorithms.

AutoMod→CodeOfConduct: Dishonest responses provided to automated feedback may be considered violations of the terms of service. Honesty is always the best policy!

His anger deflated in an instant. AutoMod was right. Benate was letting his temper get the better of himself again. He was always doing this. He didn’t need the system’s approval just to stroke his ego. It was up to him to earn his own place. This lifetime, he would reach Tier 1 for sure – he knew it. Then, either the system would finally acknowledge his effort, or else it was simply not worth listening to at all. Besides, it basically spent most of its time trying to kill him anyways.

“🔮, 💻🚗. 💆. 🙏👍,” he said.

AutoMod→EventReport→UserFeedback: Sorry, that doesn’t appear to be an answer to the previous query. Please respond with ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

He put his hands on his hips, and shook his head. He’d learned the gesture from one of the emotes, but it always had felt so genuine to him. AutoMod and him had been through so much together, they were long past putting on facades with each other. He felt like he could always be honest with her, and she would understand.

Unfortunately, she did get hung up on things like bad language a lot. He understood her point of view, of course. But he just wished she would be more appreciative of his situation. He was stressed out. He’d nearly died.

“👍,” he eventually replied, truthfully. He hadn’t figured out how to roll his eyes for real, yet. He was working on it though, this would have been a good time for it.

AutoMod→EventReport→UserFeedback: Thank you!

AutoMod→Chat Harassment Infraction→Warning: Chat disabled for 5 minutes due to toxic behavior. Repeated infractions may be cause for more severe consequences.

See, this is why they broke up.

When he was younger, Benate might have gotten into a fight with AutoMod and made things worse. But now he knew that both she and he would be better off if he gave her some time to cool down.

He looked out over the green fields, at the distant creek which he had wanted to visit, and at the sun as it slowly began moving towards the horizon. In the meantime, he didn’t mind a little time alone. There was plenty of work to do.

Benate [Search]ed around his immediate area to see if he could get lucky and spot a decent stick-0. He didn’t spend a lot of time on the problem, instead he made a beeline over to the dirt clearing he had spotted earlier. Since his [Discard] rock trick didn’t really take the quality of an item into consideration, he was satisfied in simply finding a stone that was heavy.

{size: medium}{fragile} cobble-0.0

He picked up the stone and hefted it to check that it wouldn’t affect his walking endurance. As long as his carried items were under his {encumbered} threshold, walking would never drain any stamina. The nice thing was that his current bonuses to Physical would actually make his carry capacity even higher.

He tucked the cobble-0 under one arm. After a quick thought, and seeing he had a little wiggle room for more weight, Benate leaned over and grabbed a smaller rock. His weapon.fist generally did decent enough damage due to – well, due to a bonus from {Scrounger}, actually. But it wasn’t all that hard to find items which started with a better damage stat than his unarmed 💪 0.75.

{size: large}{fragile} pebble-0.0

💪 0.8, Durability 2/2

Satisfied with his finds, Benate carried one rock in each hand and made his way back towards the water. Every so often, he stopped to round out his diet. He didn’t go out of his way, he just set his rocks down when he found something interesting. There was a nice herb growing along his path. It grew a broad, dark leaf which would provide some mental stats. A cereal plant nearby revealed a tiny surprise: a caterpillar was nibbling on a leaf. Benate had hoped it would be the same {fast-digest} type as the last one. He stooped down low and scooped up a bright, cup-shaped yellow flower and slurped on it rudely to get at the sweet liquid inside.

herb-0.0, Nutrition: +🧠2

meat-0.0, Nutrition +💪2

nectar-0.0, Nutrition: +⚡ maxStamina 3, +⚡⏫ staminaRegen 0.2

By now, Benate was comfortable changing up his display preferences quickly to focus on the information which was most important to him. There was value in looking at the extended information panels - especially when discovering something new. But a lot of properties or attributes were pretty standard out in the wild; that is until perks started making things a little crazy.

The ground underfoot began to crunch with dry, twiggy brush. Benate wouldn’t have noticed these plants before, not until his equipment ★ action combined with the high delta. Just like he had predicted, most of these plants would only yield fragments.wood or {broken} branches at best. It was annoying, but he still kept an eye out for some {thorns} just in case.

By the time he had gotten to the water, Benate spied a figure moving at its edge. He still suspected that beasts might be drawn to water, and he counted this as further evidence to support his guess. The beast came into clearer view as Benate approached. He recognized its color and slender, coiled shape. It was another slinky-noodle type beast, just like from earlier in the morning. He inspected its tier with a cursory glance, just in case.

t0.24

It would be acceptable. Since the beast wasn’t in active combat, its aggro radius was pretty low. So Benate simply strode confidently towards it until he was only a few units away.

Checking the distance, and eyeing the beast-0.24 in case it made any sudden movements, he brought his cobble-0 up under his chin. Palm facing up, he heaved the stone as hard as he could, cheating a bit as he modified his basic [Discard] action to impart as much vertical motion as possible. The stone arced until the free-body physics engine took over and flagged the object as a falling hazard.

Benate felt a little guilty, but it didn’t cheapen the sweet, sweet catharsis that swept over him. He watched as the stone landed on the beast-0’s head with a sickening 12.4 damage thump. The sound of it suddenly stirred up an intrusive memory, as the nature of his title came unbidden into his mind.

{Scrounger}: The desperation to survive at any cost.

+20% +maxVitality, +25% unarmedAttack, -15% [harvest]::stamina_cost

He shook the thought away. Then he advanced with his pebble-0 equipped, his [Tool Arte] [Plan]ned, and ready to finish the job.