By the time I set forth on the road, the morning had turned to afternoon, and I couldn’t help but feel the ticking of the timer in my head. The harness I continued to wear provided me with some sense of comfort, but an incomplete one. I remembered well the humiliation of my fight with the beast, and the difficulty of delivering that final blow.

I had no desire to engage in violence again, but I had a growing fear that it would prove inevitable. For this reason, I kept my senses as I continue to walk, activating my erg sight in a hope that any monsters, or any other intruders, would show up more vividly to that vision. Everything alive was flooded with erg now, and those that had more were greater threats.

With my latest level up, my flesh glowed even more brightly to that vision, almost as if though the erg inside was not just increasing in quantity but in quality, refining itself under the process of leveling up. My body remained the same though, but if I wasn’t chosen, I would be gaining new abilities with every level up. I would be in the process of becoming something other not through a fundamental shift but through an opening of my path. In my case, though, those changes had already started.

Maybe I would feel more different as the process continued, but right now, I still felt uncomfortably like myself. If my path had magically made me into a hero, someone powerful enough to stand against the evils of the hero, then maybe I’d feel better. As it was, I could only feel my weakness, my flaws, my doubts, the thousand and one ways that I had messed up everything. I remembered Sam.

I remembered intro to materials engineering. I remembered calc four. I remembered my mother telling me that I had to rise. I remembered the weight, the incredibly crushing weight, of the expectations that was before me. I remembered how I faltered then.

The stakes were so much higher now.

The trees seemed to loom in closer, the blue of their erg mixing with the brown of the bark and the green of the leaves. The path was so unfamiliar, despite having been walked before. I suppose I was distracted at the time, caught in a different set of thoughts. At least there was no sign of a beast now, I was safe, for at least some definition of safe.

I wondered what things were like on campus now. With my car in its current shape, there was no way that I’d be able to make the trip there, but I still worried about those that I had left behind. The friendships were not particularly strong ones, especially after I took on a hermitage and locked myself away from campus society, but they were friendships nevertheless.

The campus should be relatively secure though. It had enough buildings to seek shelter in, and the population had enough battle ready people to help support those that were not. Which wasn’t even going into the athletes, who were damn near professional level, and who could probably make good use of their new paths. These powers, they had to work better together. My powers were purely support in nature, but if I was able to provide weaponry for more combative types, we’d all be stronger.

I couldn’t think on what was not, though, especially as the trees peeled back to reveal my car, where I had left it. The damage seemed consistent with what I remembered, though I moved in swiftly to check out the trunk. Fortunately, it had not been broken into, leaving my food and my clothes and really everything that I owned still intact. I remembered the librarian’s instructions and concentrated on the supplies, imagining pulling them into my inventory. They disappeared in a blink of an eye.

Checking my inventory showed that everything had deposited without any issues, which led my thoughts to wander. What was the size limit of what I could store? So, I turned my attention to the car as a whole, and concentrated more firmly on it. I could feel a strain growing inside of me and my brow furrowed from the exertion, my hand reaching forward as to grasp the vehicle. My vision and my reality focused down onto the car alone.

Finally, and here with an audible pop, the car disappeared.

Then I realized that I had been watched during the whole process. On the other side of where the car once was, a group of six creatures were watching me. They closely resembled deers, except that their legs were twice as long, leading them to tower over me. As I noticed them, they as one bared their teeth, showing their mouths to be filled with sharp, carnivorous teeth. That just wasn’t right.

The deer-things charged in, galloping over the empty ground towards me. I could tell from their speed that I wouldn’t be able to outrun them, and they were hungry for my flesh. Or maybe my erg? The librarian had said something-

My thoughts were interrupted as one of the deer-things slammed into my torso, sending my frame off-balance. While the other five worked on circling around me, I leaned forward and centered my balance on the ground. The deer-thing in front of me moved in for another charge but this time I was able to bring my left arm up to block. It bounced off of my armored arm, dazed for a moment. A moment was all I needed. My drill whirred to life and I brought it forward as a hook at the deer-things head.

The blood spray once again coated my face, but I turned away swiftly to see the other five prepared to move. Again, they moved as a coordinated group, knocking me back and forth as they rammed at me. This time, I was not able to recover my balance before their teeth latched onto my harness, tugging in every direction. The harness creaked under the assault and I kept swaying. I tried to swing with my arms, but teeth on them kept them from being able to control them.

I threw my weight to one side, allowing the teeth to keep me from falling over, and lashed out with a kick at the forelegs of the deer-thing that had my right arm. The legs crumpled like matchsticks and it let out a cry of pain. With my arm suddenly free, I twisted my torso to bring the drill into the side of one of the deer-things holding my left arm. It released me and stumbled away, the blow having drilled a hold into the muscle of its shoulder, but not fatally so.

With only three remaining with grips on me, I was able to throw my weight to the other side, sending two of the deer-things struggling to hold me tight. Meanwhile, I swung wildly with my right arm, hitting the remaining stable deer-thing with the side of the drill, causing it to bellow out as the bit twisted at the flesh. With that side now fully free, I set my foot into the ground and spun to attack the remaining two. Promptly, they released me and backed up.

The four of the five survivors that could walk backed slowly away from me and I did the same, keeping my eyes on all of them. Seeing that they weren’t going to attack again, and that most of them were in fairly bad shape, I stepped backwards down the trail that I came along. Once I was out of sight, I turned and ran, heading back to the factory.

My speed couldn’t last too long, not with my stamina where it was. I’d definitely need to start up an exercise regime. Maybe one of the facilities left to be opened up was a gym? A few notifications blinked in the corner of my attention, demanding my attention, so I swiftly brought them.

War Drill 10->15

Battle Harness Proficiency 10->20

Erg Sight 5->15

I slowed my walking then, though I did keep my attention peeled to the side of the path, in case anyone or anything was planning on ambushing me along the way. Those deer-things didn’t seem like custom-built monsters, they seemed more like normal deers that had mutated somehow. Their structures were still too similar to normal deers, just twisted and altered. I had read somewhere that deers would eat bones to provide them with nutrients that they couldn’t get elsewhere, upgrading that aggressive to higher levels seemed perfectly possible.

Most importantly, though, they didn’t have the degree of recklessness that the first monster had. Here, they recognized when a battle was going to cost them more than they might potentially gained from it, and backed off. Thankfully too. While my wild flailing had done quite a bit of damage, I couldn’t have kept it up for much longer. I didn’t fight smart, I fought like a trapped beast, which, to some degree, I was.

I couldn’t continue being such a beast, though, I needed to master my instincts, I needed to train. I needed to find some way of actually fighting, or else I’d die to the first real threat I came across. The best equipment could only do so much when face to face with things of that terrifying power. As my thoughts drifted, I opened up my inventory and searched through swiftly for one of my protein packs, then popped it out into my hand.

I unwrapped the bar and dug into the weirdly clay-like texture of the bar. It tasted terrible, but felt so good in my stomach. I hated these things, but when going to the dorm cafeteria felt like too much of an effort, they were a god-send. Now, without the option of cooked food, they were what would keep me going in spite of it all. The thought of rest called so strongly then. All I had to do was build those walls and then I could actually rest.

In anticipation, I sent two of my ingots to screw joiners, which completed with the speed of the other joiners. Then, I combine them with the remaining ingots to begin making the walls. I nodded at the progression bar, happy that it would be complete by the time I returned to the crater. Finally, I allowed my thoughts to drift away, my world reducing to the path, its surroundings, and the power bar filling my stomach.