RCJoshua

Chapter 115: Thanks, Derek

Derek crouched in the dark, hoping the dirt on his face and the general dark hues of his clothes would keep him hidden. Hunting during the daytime, he had found, was a waste of time. There just wasn’t enough shrubbery to sneak through on the demon side of the human/demon border. The best he could hope for was to be seen a mile off and either be forced to fight with a ready group of demons or to chase down a lone, defenseless creature that would scream and flee until it ran into reinforcemen...

Chapter 114: Edward Scissorhands

Edward Scissorhands

After picking through the remains of the bar, taking a fresh look at Matt’s stats, and comparing notes together, Matt and Lucy came to one conclusion. Yes, Matt was a badass now. Kind of.

“I think it’s a combination of things. The first and biggest thing is just that people can’t seem to touch you. Like, I was watching that whole fight. It wasn’t like they didn’t try to hit you, Matt. They tried pretty hard. Some of those hits we...

Chapter 113: Am I a Badass

Having shambled up to the bar, Matt now stood awkwardly in front of the barstools as the wolf-man bar-owner-slash-demon-class-teacher made his way around to stand beside him. Matt leaned lightly on his shovel, nonchalantly positioning it in such a way that he could sweep it up to bat the wolf away if he needed to make a sudden break for the door.

“I have some things to point out about this particular demon’s technique, which I will do by asking him questions. This does not mean the ...

Chapter 112: A Play Rehearsal

The sunrise had much less of an impact on Matt than the sunset had. He might have felt a little more alert than he had been before watching it, but if so, it was a mild effect and thoroughly washed out by something he had found upon a closer inspection of his camping pack. Deep in one of the interior pockets of the bag, he excavated little packets of what looked for all the world like instant coffee.

“Really? You are that excited over this stuff?” Lucy rolled her eyes as Matt rocked...

Chapter 111: Squeeze Viper

Matt materialized the token and caught it out of the air as it fell.

“What’s that? Some kind of reward?”

“Yes. Maybe the good kind. One sec.”

The few years of life on Gaia that Matt had experienced had not been kind to his feet. All the general damage his feet had taken had been healed by his VIT and healing skill, but each time, he would be left with thicker and thicker callouses, which themselves had picked up little fragments of dirt, dust and various Gaian debr...

Chapter 110: Pedicure Token

Matt pulled himself up off the ground. It turned out that not all forms of travel to various system worlds were created equal. The fact that he was still alive meant the Gaians had got it at least partially right, but being sucked through the aether between the two worlds with their portal was not an experience he suspected would ever become popular.

The bits and pieces of it he even remembered were horrifying, all stars whizzing by and eternal blackness while he himself was stretched i...

Chapter 109: An Ambush

“Okay alright. With Derek here, we can start for real. Artemis, would you be so kind as to call up the map, and give us some basic background on what’s happening?” Brennan said, turning his chair to the side to look at the wall behind him.

Artemis walked to the same wall, fiddled with something, and a magic illusion of a map sprang into existence just off the surface of the wall. Derek recognized it as what he thought of as “the big little map”, one that captured not the entir...

Chapter 108: Field Work

Derek was having a pretty good day. He had woken up, eaten a sensible but delicious breakfast, gone on a ten-mile run, worked with the weight set the old blacksmith had made for him, went on his swim, freestyle-climbed the city wall, took his fighting class, and finally ate a big lunch.

And now, for the first time, he was holding his own against the old man. He had managed to either dodge or deflect all of the old man’s strikes, redirecting the force from the massive iron bar he swung...

Chapter 107: Into the Unknown

Matt shook his head. “I’m happy here. But we all know I’m useless here as well. Or at least I will be. The hunting parties start in earnest next week, and once they are up to speed, I won’t be useful anymore. They will level faster than I ever could, and I can’t level with them because once they are strong enough to pull their own weight, they will take the significance out of my survival of dungeons.”

“We can find you other work to do…”

“What work, Ramsen? Wha...

Chapter 106: Tough Conversations

Matt postponed heading into town for the few moments it took to take a quick shower in his enchanted tub, then he and Lucy set off down the path to the village. The Gaians had cut the path just the week before, with plans to pave it before the month was up. Ramsen called it the first step in building up Gaian transportation infrastructure to its former glory, and Matt suspected he was only half-joking.

Matt was, as always, fully armed and armored. The Gaians had, thankfully, come out of...

Chapter 105: The Work is Unlearned

Matt had often wished that the sun would set on Gaia, mostly because constant sunlight had done absurd things to his sleep cycle. Sometimes, he’d go days without sleeping at all, driven on by stat-weirdness and the ever-present need to grind more estate credits. Other times he’d sit down for a quick breather and wake up ten hours later covered in nap-sweat, having almost forgotten his name.

It had become better over the last half year or so, possibly because of stats, or possibly be...

Chapter 104.5: Author's Note

I am, for better or worse, a relative newbie as fiction is concerned.

A while back, Dotblue came to me and said, “Hey, have you ever thought about taking a try at fiction?” At that time, I really hadn’t. I had a few short stories under my belt, at most, and I wasn’t sure I had much (or any) talent for telling stories. I told him so.

For whatever reason, Dotblue wouldn’t have it. He told me that we were going to try to do some fiction, that he’d fill in the gaps in my s...

Chapter 104: Book 2 Epilogue

The main system was not exactly an AI. As a not-exactly-an-AI type of being, it could not, in actual fact, go on leisurely walks around its opulent, majestic estate to help with the digestion of exceptionally large meals that it wasn’t, in any literal sense, actually eating. But if you tried to understand what it was doing in human terms, that would be the closest you would come to understanding it.

He was enjoying the hell out of everything, though. Almost every part of ever...

Chapter 103: You Could Say That

“Reincarnator! Matt!”

After entering the museum, Matt wasn’t even fully reoriented before Ramsen was on him, grasping his shoulders, and nearly shaking him from excitement.

“You did it? You defeated the Scourge?”

“Looks like it. And I’ve repaired the museum.”

“Yeah, that part we already knew.”

Ramsen waved his arm behind him, and Matt goggled. Where the museum was once a single town square, it now extended past that into a small city, one fill...

Chapter 102: They Can’t All be Winners

Ding!

“Dammit, Barry.”

“What?”

“He’s being funny with the achievements. I wanted “Grand Gaian Savior” or something.”

“Does that matter if the loot’s good?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Then get to reading.”

Achievement: Mass Extinction Double Down

You once managed to, as far as the system understood, survive every living organism on a planet. Now, as far as t...

2023-10-25 15:47:27 +0000 UTC View Post