Hours later, the ship pulled up to what Itto swore was not a planet at all. Itto said that to be a planet, something not only had to be big, but also needed to orbit a star. This was not a planet. It might have been the remains of one, but for all intents and purposes it was just a very, very big chunk of orphan rock sitting in space.
You couldn’t have figured it out otherwise, though. It was big, round, and built up with all the cities and lights you could want. It had its own satell...
2024-03-16 04:17:08 +0000 UTC
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“Are you insane? And break up the set?” Itto said. “No. Not a chance. Now get on that squat bar. I want to see how much you can lift.”
“Too bad. I had a weapon that wanted one of those.”
Sean lined up under the squat rack, ready to lift.
“Before we get started here, what’s your strength score? Just generally. To the nearest 20.”
“With equipment? Forty. On the dot.”
“Any skills that enhance it? I’m talking “lets you lift heavier weights...
2024-03-12 12:54:18 +0000 UTC
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I never actually figured out how to land in Sean’s time-line out of order. It’s like he’s blasting through time in a straight line, and I’m corkscrewing around him. If he isn’t around, I might jump ahead ten years. If he’s the destination, it’s always a few weeks or months after the last time I saw him.
I’ve never seen him in the future, so I don’t know for sure that he gets tough. But given how many people are looking for him every damn place I go, I susp...
2024-03-11 02:23:19 +0000 UTC
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There were five ninjas and three barrels on the weapon, which would have to do. Dodging sideways, Sean did his best to line up two of them in what he imagined the blast zone would be at this range, pulled a pin, and doused them both with time-juiced Plug Mud. As soon as the glue hit the first target, Sean pumped a charge of Hard Time into the biggest splotch he could see, concentrated, and willed it to harden faster.
It worked better than he could have hoped. For whatever reason, Hard T...
2024-03-10 01:37:45 +0000 UTC
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Trash Compactor MK II Prototype
Forgive the label, but I think we both know this isn’t where you are stopping with this.
Made of a sock weaved out of wire, the heaviest metals you could salvage from human trash, and a bunch of Plug Mud you’ve juiced to insane levels with your adhesives skill, this weapon is better and worse than the orig...
2024-03-09 00:24:34 +0000 UTC
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“So it’s vermin, then? In the basement?” Sean asked. “And you want me to kill them?”
“Yes, they are vermin. No, I don’t want you to kill them. These things are a delicacy. I need them alive.”
The restaurant manager whose work request Sean had answered was not a skilled communicator. Sean had been working the details of the job with him for minutes now, and still wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. As near as he could tell, there was some kind of animal in the...
2024-03-06 22:05:17 +0000 UTC
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The thing with Sean was, even when we worked together, you didn’t want to give him too much free time. You had to keep him busy, keep eyes on him. Or he’d do stuff you wouldn’t expect. I remember going into a badly flooded janitor’s closet, with Sean somehow having managed to plug both the work sink and the floor drain with hair.
You take a smart guy and put him in a physical job and that’s how it goes. They get bored. Sean was always smart and that made him dange...
2024-03-05 10:30:52 +0000 UTC
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Sean tumbled down the stairs, wrapped up in the unloving arm of a guy who had made it clear he wanted him dead. Worse, that arm wasn’t idle. The man didn’t have the best leverage in the world, sure, but he was actively and angrily working on killing Sean by means of some sort of claw weapon that ripped through Sean’s skin as he flexed and unflexed his hands.
And yet, somehow, it wasn’t as big of a deal as it should have been. Sean had been in a lot of fights now, and had somehow...
2024-03-04 01:38:53 +0000 UTC
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“And what? I should just believe that?”
Itto let a slight smile slip through to his face before letting it die on the vine, like he felt he was too busy for smiles right now. On such a little guy, it should have funny or cute. Somehow, Sean felt, nothing like that was ever going to actually look that way on Itto. He put off a vibe that being small had never, ever been something that had slowed him down in a fight.
I think this guy could kick my ass, Sean thought. ...
2024-03-02 21:47:29 +0000 UTC
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The main thing to know about the universe is that it’s not that different from home. Some things are great. Some things are beautiful. Most things, though? Bullshit. Once you get used to all the magic and flashing lights, most things are boring and normal. The other stuff tends to be trouble.
That trouble isn’t just exciting kill-the-monster stuff, either. There’s plenty of that, don’t get me wrong. But the universe is a place where people live. They work jobs. They...
2024-03-01 19:48:27 +0000 UTC
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Somewhere far away from almost everywhere, Jeff latched a makeshift cup welded to the front of his rocket-cycle around yet another floating piece of space rock, and once he knew the rock was securely lasso’ed to the craft, he slowly wheeled the craft-asteroid conglomerate around. It wasn’t sweaty work, which he liked. Plus, the person he had stolen this bike from had been a man of distinction, one who had built a gigantic, gallon-sized cupholder into the handlebars.
Or maybe it was ...
2024-02-29 14:10:24 +0000 UTC
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Hi, Everyone!
Most of you know this already, but I do one of these author’s notes every time I finish a novel. The idea behind them is to give you a chance to see what my writing process for the novel was, which is important to some people who write, want to write, or just are interested in what it takes to get 100,000-ish words out of a human brain and on to paper.
Every time I’ve done that before, that’s been very easy, because for the most part the books I’ve written up...
2024-02-25 23:07:41 +0000 UTC
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Tyr: Oooh, boy. Another book finished. But do not worry! We're posting an Author's Note tomorrow and starting Book 3 on Wednesday~
---
“It’s a bad idea to sleep on the bus, kid.” A familiar voice boomed near Sean’s ear. “The bus people will have their way with you. You don’t want the kinds of things they want. Trust me on that.”
Sean bolted upright in his seat, finding that he was indeed on a bus of sorts. Sure, it was in space, whizzing ...
2024-02-23 22:48:43 +0000 UTC
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If Sean was crammed directly into a reservoir of all of Earth’s energy, there had to be a way to use it. Sean was hemorrhaging mass and whatever essence-of-him holding him together fast, but he was able to think clearly enough to know that if Hard Time worked in here at all, at least some of that energy had to be time. It just had to be. And while he couldn’t move earth or breathe fire with any power he had, he could at least manipulate time.
Focusing hard, Sean threw out a...
2024-02-21 16:45:01 +0000 UTC
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There is, and has never been, such a thing as a fair fight. In some very specific situations, the system has been known to try to equalize things as much as is possible, but there are limits to both what it can and is willing to do in pursuit of that goal. Adding to this the simple fact that the System appears to hate ties and stalemates, means that any competition that seems fair even rarely is, no matter how close it might seem to be.
And why should it be, after all? In a...
2024-02-19 22:40:39 +0000 UTC
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Sean drew the Mystereamer and the Jellyfish Shield out of his pack, bolting towards Eike while he still had some adhesive-based slowness on him. Even now, Sean could see some skill of Eike’s boiling it off of him, baking it into his armor at the same time as it nullified the stickiness of the glue and left him free to move.
As Sean neared his own striking range, Eike was apparently satisfied with his glue-removal progress, drawing his big two-handed sword from its scabbard smoothly, l...
2024-02-18 22:59:50 +0000 UTC
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Sean held his breath as he dropped into an icy cold river. If that didn’t keep the webs off of him, nothing would.
If there was one thing Sean now knew about the Apocalypse System, it was that it loved forests. Any time it wanted animals in the mix, it would generate some trees. If it wanted a fairy tale setting, a surprising amount of them took place in deep, dark woods.
If, as in this case, it wanted a frankly overdone scenario, it created living trees that carried around silk...
2024-02-17 23:38:21 +0000 UTC
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Sean was awake when the alarm went off, and hit the ground running. Today’s theme seemed to be a sort of unending desert and abrupt transitions. As soon as he stepped through the former barrier that held him to his forced rest, he found himself in a bright, sandy expanse, one without any clear indicators of where to go or what to do.
With a quick glance around to verify that all the directions truly did look just the same as every other, he took off running in the same direction he ha...
2024-02-16 22:11:35 +0000 UTC
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Whatever burst of incredible speed the knight gained while Sean was on the wall was gone, replaced by a fast-enough-but-easier-to-handle tempo. Which meant the knight either had a super-fast boost it could use when it wanted, or it got buffs when Sean was trying to cheese his way past it.
Sean reached out the Mystereamer, slamming it sideways against the knight’s greaves and using it as a leverage point to roll himself over out of the way of the descending sword. Scrambling to his fee...
2024-02-14 22:04:29 +0000 UTC
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With every step, Sean was pushing off the ground so hard he felt the cobblestones sinking into the ground beneath them. Eike, on the other hand, was pulverizing them, his whole body glowing with some kind of enhancement that seemed to turn him into a destructive force. The street was one of the village’s main thoroughfares, so there were more than a couple of steps to cover before they got to each other, but within just a second or so they were almost at each other’s throats.
But on...
2024-02-12 16:17:01 +0000 UTC
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Sean had thought this before and would probably think it again, but he was a little sad to have been born in the pre-Plug Mud era. Besides a few specialty adhesives he had made himself since getting magic glue powers, he had never dealt with a glue that was so good at so much. Even factoring out how much better his Adhesives Mastery ensured glue worked for him, Plug Mud was basically magic in a tub. Or, in this case, mixed with huge amounts of powdered metal in big barrels he was car...
2024-02-11 16:24:55 +0000 UTC
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I’m finishing this book for him. I just read it, and I can tell he wanted it to be a longer thing. A chronicle of our adventures. He wanted it to be a better story. And now it can never be that.
Brett made me a shield, some armor, and a few other things. That might not seem like a lot, but how many times have I lived through things that I shouldn’t have since I met him? Tons. He wasn’t a fighting class, but he kept fighting classes alive. He kept me alive. And now he...
2024-02-10 22:25:14 +0000 UTC
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It was too good of a day, honestly. We gained too much. And even though the system didn’t retaliate for that, I still had a feeling that things were going to go south.
People knock on wood for a reason. They throw salt over their shoulders and follow other superstitions because of something very real, very dangerous, and very ancient that chases us all. Sure, the system has a lot of power, and sometimes it hurts people. But it isn’t the only player in the bad luck game....
2024-02-09 22:35:42 +0000 UTC
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Tyr: FYI there have been some continuity changes made to chapter 92! If something doesn't make sense, its probably due to that.
And my chapter naming sense is awesome! I absolutely do not have a problem. Nope.
Enjoy!
---
Sean was too off-balance to react to the golem’s chain-yank in time and yelped as he flew off his feet towards it. He saw what was happening perfectly clear, but had no options to actually stop it. Unable to fly or affect his own mov...
2024-02-07 18:13:10 +0000 UTC
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Tyr: We're back! Happy February, and sorry for the wait. We're back in business.
Schedule is once again 5 per week Mon - Wed - Fri - Sat - Sun.
Enjoy!~
---
Sean had only hunted in a group once before, and that was only in the loosest of terms. It had been him and Estesia, with him acting as bait and Estesia doing her best to eliminate groups of wolves before they disemboweled him. It hadn’t been hard, exactly, but it wasn’t the best intro in the wo...
2024-02-05 17:52:29 +0000 UTC
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Tyr: Hello people, just posting this 'ere so you aren't in the dark about why chapters suddenly stopped getting posted. We’ve had an emergency and will be taking a 1 week hiatus. Sorry for the delay in chapters.
2024-01-31 19:42:09 +0000 UTC
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All the pieces were falling in place for the night of fire. I didn’t see it, and Sean didn’t see it. None of the offworlders saw it. I’m not sure that, for all of its wisdom, the system even saw it. But it was coming like a freight train.
I’m not going to say it didn’t have benefits because, obviously, it did. If I had the chance to change it, probably wouldn’t. I have no idea how things would have turned out if it didn’t happen.
Sean was alread...
2024-01-27 21:09:23 +0000 UTC
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“Ah, the pouch.” As Sean’s bag materialized, Jason patted an identical item on his hip. “If I’m being honest, this is the exact kind of magic shit I was hoping for from the Apocalypse. I can’t help but think it’s all downhill from here.”
“Yeah, this is a game changer.” As cool as the bag was for daily living, giving Sean a better option for weapon storage was going to be a huge deal all by itself. “I do have some more notifications, though. Sorry.”
“No, I...
2024-01-26 20:02:50 +0000 UTC
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The fight hadn’t come without its costs. Sean’s armor had never been more damaged, and unlike in some of the books he had read, that came with real damage to his real, human body. He had picked up cuts and scrapes while fighting in the crowd, but jumping down onto the snake had produced substantial wounds on his feet and legs, wounds that had widened and increased in number as he stabbed the snake to death.
With his opponent dead, Stitch Up kicked into gear, pulling cuts an...
2024-01-24 20:24:56 +0000 UTC
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Somewhere deep in the giant snake’s instincts, it had a slow-and-cautious mode that kicked in once its poison found its mark. As Sean backed away, it let him, maintaining a medium distance from its poisoned prey.
Over the next few moments, Sean started to realize why. He didn’t feel nauseous, or even especially sick. Where once the wound had burned, it was now almost entirely numb. And his whole body was starting to feel heavier, slower, and overall less responsive.
It’s...
2024-01-22 21:24:12 +0000 UTC
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