Nightfall couldn’t come soon enough. Until then, Benate had time to kill. And also time... to kill.

No, he shook his head, that sounded too dramatic. He was just anxious, and impatient for the chance to chat with his friend.

Standing alone as the sound of clean water trickled nearby, Benate regarded the stone he had used to ruthlessly take a life. It was almost more of a clod of compacted earth than rock, really. The item.material had reclassified into an item.tool the moment he smashed it into the floppy body of his prey, but it was already starting to crumble. With a serious flaw like {fragile}, its durability and effectiveness had greatly reduced after only two firm [Strike]→5s. He let flakes of it come loose and fall between his fingers, and then [Discard]ed the whole {damaged} pebble-0. He cast it off into the grass so that the system wouldn’t spend a lot of effort to remember it.

He had only taken a single hit, for 5.1 damage. His two attacks had cost 10 stamina total, and his [Discard] exploit has cost 4.2 stamina, because he’d needed to {fumble} the action in order to control its trajectory. He felt fresh and full of energy; scant seconds after the fight’s conclusion, he had been restored by his out-of-combat regen.

Normally, Benate liked to sing to himself a little while he worked. But he wasn’t really keeping track of when his chat suspension was lifting, and didn’t want to bother AutoMod for a little while.

The remains.beast-0.24 lay in a loose, tragic tangle, with its belly-scales up. Benate looked out over the grass in case of scavengers, then squatted next to his prize. The dull luster of its purple scales invited his touch, and he felt the smoothness of the material. The late slinky-noodle had a tiny face, and little bitty eyes, and its small mouth didn’t really have a jaw. He poked at it, considering the best way to collect what he needed.

Then Benate gripped the back of its tail with two hands together and a firm grip. Using pinching force, he slid one hand upwards, like squeezing out a tube. There was a sucking noise, a pop, and then the remains puked up its little guts in the shape of a wobbly, irregular sausage.

Meat (beast)

Class: (item.food.meat.beast)

Quality: 0.18

Durability 2 / 2

WSI: {0.3, 0.3, 0.0}

💪🧠👄 {0.2, 0.5, 0.3}

⚗ Hidden

Properties: {messy}{unprocessed}

Food Slots: 2

Food Durability: 9/9

+💪Physical: 5.52

Not a bad haul. But he fought against quiet little doubts about whether the durability cost to his higher quality meal was worth the gains of a lesser one. He focused on the two-slot meal in his belly screen, just to check how it was holding up.

meat.beast-0.35, nutrition→durability 8.6/9

As far as he could tell, Benate thought that 0.4 was a pretty cheap cost to pay for a fight. It really helped that his cobble-0 strategy worked so effectively. Not only did the cheap shot start off the fight with serious spike damage, but it didn’t even trigger his attack cooldowns, or even the beast-0’s normal aggro behavior. That let him get in an additional strike before the noodle could even think to retaliate. By his rough estimation, he had been able to avoid a potential 5.1, or even 10.2 vitality damage this way. Nor had he even needed to deal with the onerous cost of combat regeneration penalty.

Benate placed his hands on his hips triumphantly. Then he picked up his battered, heavy cobble-0. There was some light crumbling, so he took a quick look at the object’s WSI values to make sure that its overall weight hadn’t dropped too low. Happily, he noted it was still in pretty good shape. It looked like he could get one more good [Discard] cheat attack out of it before the damage started compounding into a flaw property.

However! Before he tackled practical matters, Benate needed to treat himself to something nice. Sure, his hands might be stained in blood, and there was more yet to come. But a person had to spoil themselves every once in a while, right? Dipping his hands into the little stream of running water, he cupped them excitedly and splashed chilling refreshment over his face and default_hairstyle_1. Grinning, he washed himself until a tiny notification appeared.

Buff: +❂ Social 0.2, Duration: 15:00.0

Honestly, Benate didn’t know what ❂ Social even did. All he knew was that he liked it and it made him feel happy. Shaking his hands to dry off, he stood up with satisfaction.

Now that he’d collected what he came for, that just left him needing to find a new primary weapon. With his steadily rising 💪Physical stat, even his weapon.fist was starting to get pretty effective. But he’d rather rely on a decent item; most normal tool.stick-0s or tool.rock-0s should start at 💪1, as long as it didn’t have any particular flaws. Even more than that, he suspected that relying on his {Scrounger} title or its benefits would only reinforce its hold over him. That was because, as much trouble as the system could give him, he had to admit that it was still giving him little hints to pick up on.

The delta screen showed him that his bad habit of strolling under-equipped into danger was somehow part of the calculation for his title. Logically, he hoped that diligent use of tools could be a key breakthrough in moving past {Scrounger} and earning something new.

Looking around himself for ideas, Benate’s eyes fell on the {stripped} remains.beast-0.13 again. This type of creature didn’t seem to have a [Bite] style attack at all, instead it relied on the specialized slashing claw at the end of its tail. A fiendish idea struck him.

“🐍🖐🤠, 👊. 🤪🤜➰💫💥, 💥,” he giggled, having forgotten about his chat ban already.

Unfortunately for him, the remains were in pretty rough shape after being {stripped}. He flopped it once in his hand to test it out. But as hard as he tried to consider the remains as if it was a tool object, while he did, he started to sense it was already {broken} for serving that role.

“🤔,” he considered. Snapping off the claw might work, but experience had taught him that repeated destructive harvests on the same object would produce extractions of worse and worse quality.

For a long moment, he didn’t know what he was looking for. Then his eyes fell on a dried, withered up patty of material lying in a nearby clump of grasses. Lying on top the lumpy, {putrid} offal-0.0, Benate spotted a long, white stick. He dropped the limp noodle and walked over to pick it up. It was about half the length of his forearm, fit snugly in his hand, and had a knobby end.

tool.rod.bone.beast-0.20, 💪1.58, Durability 2/2

His eyes widened as he swung the weapon carefully through the air. He had no intention of wasting any its precious durability. What a find! The raw... lethality of the item practically snarled from the primal legacy of the creature which had left it behind. Benate looked closer at the offal he had rescued the bone from, and realized that it must have come from the original victim of the beast he’d faced back in the cereal patch. He frowned a little bit as he looked back down at the offal-0, then at the remains.noodle-0.13, then finally at the bone-0.2 again.

“🙄, 😅. 🤴🖥, ❌🧠.”

The bone was obviously wrong for the beast it had come from. He /laughed out loud. Silly system, it was so forgetful sometimes.

Benate strode into the underbrush, cradling his cobble-0 under one arm and eager to try out his new rod.bone-0.2. He was ready for the hunt; there was no use losing sleep over something as unimportant as object permanence.

Over the course of the next hour and a half, Benate tore through the local fauna. He broke his cobble-0 against a squishy-poof beast-0.3 and slew it for meat. He found a pretty bush.

When a clutch::beasts-0.2x4σ0.2 appeared out of some nearby brush, he fell back and hid in the grasses until they passed. He watched them with a sense of awe, as their floppy, tortilla shaped bodies and loose icky skin sprang up into the air. They flapped their little sides frantically, fluttering briefly as they drifted back to the ground. As they foraged, they bumped into each other and circled, chasing one another as if they were playing.

He chomped down three more wild cereals and snapped a stick-0.0 off from a stray growth. Once he had it, he conserved his good bone by supercharging savage blows with the stick, ruining it to power his [Tool Arte: Strike→15]s. He tore the knife-butt off of the dead slinky-noodle, and left its {damaged} meat behind.

When he found a {nauseous-potency} flower, he ate it and discovered that some special properties were neither good nor bad, but both at the same time. He stabbed the tool.knife.claw-0.15 into a shelled ground nut to pry it open, and chewed meaningfully on the earthy, bitter core inside.

It was a day of great adventure, and of informative experiences. He had wandered haphazardly: almost without thinking about his course, except for the direction of the creek and how he might return to it.

Finally by chance or by fate, Benate returned to the scene of the cereal patch. The sun hung low in the west, the red-orange color of sunset made ringed layers in the sky. At first he stood confused, then once he recognized how it had changed, he glared with suspicion. The little area had been marked as a {point-of-interest}, and its transformation had been profound.

A stretch of bare, clay was empty except for some scattered, {fragile} stones. The clearing was like an entrance, or an outer ring, and it wrapped around a tall copse of thick grasses in its middle. The patch itself was spread out in a broad horse-shoe, with stalks sprouting up in a dense thicket. The leaves had developed the faintest tint of red along their veins, and hissed as their razor sharp edges cut the restless wind. Any tier-0 fool that walked through that wall would be sliced to ribbons within a handful of strides, the deadly hazard verdure: {razor-leaf} cereal-0.15.

Benate circled around the edge of the patch, peering from a distance into the narrow path which led to its center. There, a skeletal jaw lay exposed on a bed of rich, black soil. Its shape was wide, and its buck-teeth curved like trowels. It gaped mournfully up at the sky as if shouting for to the heavens for revenge.

Zone::Local Delta: 0.2442 (Hunting, Stalking, Zoology, Harvesting, *)

Point-of-Interest: { sword-grass-grave: t0.17 landmark }

The deltas had resolved. It had already begun.