emergencycomplaints

Chapter 28

The next few days of Luke’s life were miserable. He just couldn’t relax anywhere, not even safely hidden away in his workshop. He hadn’t realized how much his various projects had been keeping him sane until he lost them all. He’d coasted on the initial frenzy of revenge for a day or two, but now it was just stressful to go out.

He wanted the freedom to come and go as he pleased without being hunted, but unless he got strong enough that he felt confident in attacking dozens of g...

Chapter 27

Luke hefted the spear he’d taken from the goblins. It was too bad about that strange crossbow; he’d wanted to examine it closer. Oh well, the spear was the true prize with those freaky little proto-gobling things still running around. He casually stabbed it into the one goblin he’d only clipped when they’d tried to jump him and got another ding.

“And that makes five,” he said. “Okay, System, we were talking about how to get the hell out of this place.”

“Yes, inde...

Chapter 26

The goblins hadn’t seen him yet, a fact Luke fully planned to use to his advantage. He might not have had an actual stealth skill, but his agility was higher than their perception, and that had to count for something. That combined with the fact that he was up on the balcony and had a bit of cover from the railing made him think he had good odds of getting the jump on them.

No doubt the goblins knew he was there, somewhere. He had too much XP to avoid being noticed, but they probably ...

Chapter 25

It got easier to navigate the tunnels when Luke started thinking of them as streets and giving them names, though easier was a relative term. So much of it looked alike that it was by no means simple to determine where he was at, but after half an hour spent wandering around, he thought he had a pretty decent mental map of the place.

What he didn’t have was a pile of notifications about all the goblins he’d killed, mostly because he was having problems finding any goblins. The only ...

Chapter 24

As far as Luke could tell, goblins were nocturnal. They could operate in the day, but they preferred the dark and the weaker ones had trouble seeing in bright light. He supposed if they pumped up their perception stat high enough, they’d overcome that issue, but as a general trend, most goblins didn’t seem to do that.

That was why Luke waited for the sun to be at its peak before he went hunting. There was a dedicated tracking skill that probably would have served him better, but 2023-02-10 17:32:41 +0000 UTC View Post

Chapter 23

A few times in Luke’s life, he’d ended up napping for a few hours in the evening, only to wake up and have no idea what day it even was. That intense feeling of disorientation from being off his normal sleep schedule, not knowing if it was day or night, or how long he’d slept, was something that had stayed with him.

That was how he felt when he woke up. It didn’t help that he was sleeping inside a cave that never saw a single ray of sunlight. It didn’t help that the more his s...

Chapter 22

Luke was absolutely fucking exhausted. He was filthy with blood, of which about half was his own. It had taken about five hours before the goblins had given up, and in the meantime, he’d been forced into eight separate fights. Or rather, he’d let eight different hunting parties pursuing him with mastiffs find him, carefully working to make sure only one group at a time caught up to him.

That was not as easy as he’d have liked, since he was leaving a blood trail all over the damn f...

Chapter 21

“How in the French fried fuck did they do this so quickly?” Luke demanded as he bounced up and down on an ankle snare. A swipe of his knife was all it took to split the rope holding him upside down to the tree, and he managed to flip around to land upright. He winced in pain as his weight came down on his injured foot.

He supposed he was lucky that he’d come at this trap from the wrong direction and already killed both goblins watching the snare before he’d stepped into it. That...

Chapter 172

Two weeks of searching and scrying and hunting, two weeks of frustration and annoyance, two weeks of failure. At this point, Nym had run out of possible answers and was revisiting his most basic assumptions, trying to determine where he’d gone wrong. And he was coming up with nothing.

The only thing he had left to conclusively disprove was the idea that there had been a talisman generating the cursed scarabs originally, but that someone else had already found it and removed it. Even t...

Chapter 171

Nym floated about fifty feet off the ground and scried deep into the earth. He’d spent the day tracing connections in his target area, going deeper and deeper towards the center, which was apparently far, far underground. That was annoying, if he was being honest. He was sick of having to go underground to resolve problems. It would be nice if just once, some ancient, evil, cursed thing could exist in plain sight.

He wasn’t surprised though. It spread primarily through the undergrou...

Chapter 20

Ever since he’d started putting AP into stats, Luke had stopped getting tired. No matter how much he worked or how heavy the load was, he just didn’t get exhausted. He might get worn out for a few minutes after doing something strenuous, but he bounced back almost instantly.

So even though it was an inconvenience, he walked over to the trail before the sun was even up and killed seven earth elementals. He didn’t want to push his luck since he planned on coming back later in the da...

Chapter 19

[You have slain Bloodbite Goblin (lvl 7). 50 XP awarded.]
[You have slain Bloodbite Goblin (lvl 12). 147 XP awarded.]

Luke stared at the kill notifications from his raid on their camp for a long time. He knew the higher level goblin would have more AP, but the difference between them was insane. “System,” he said finally. “Can you help me out here?”

“How can I assist you?” System asked.

“Every goblin I’ve fought so far has been… well, ki...

Chapter 18

What was it that System had told him? Goblins in the valley were between levels 7 and 21? That sounded right to Luke. He’d killed probably a hundred of them and had never found one higher than level 9, until now.

These goblins were definitely higher than level 9. Physically speaking, they were bulkier, taller, and moved with that easy grace that Luke himself was becoming more and more familiar with each time he leveled up.

This was a no-win situation for him. He’d expected to ...

Chapter 17

Luke was an equal opportunity genocidal monster. He didn’t discriminate between goblin tribes, and was more than willing to kill anything that attacked him. The fact that goblins always attacked him, without hesitation or provocation, went a long way towards making him feel alright that he was single-handedly decimating their population.

With his next level up to 12, he spent 3 AP to increase [Survivalist]to rank 2. The expanded knowledge made him look back at his old...

Chapter 16

There was only one thing to do: grind out levels. Regardless of how he escaped Tenebrous Valley, it was going to be easier if he was stronger. More stats would make everything easier, increase his odds of success, give him a bigger margin for error if he screwed up. With a monstrous earth elemental squatting on his only known exit, he either needed to be strong enough to overpower it or fast enough to outrun it.

That did bring up an interesting point. The pass was his only known exit, b...

Chapter 15

Curt’s build notes wanted Luke to invest in a suite of basic rank 1 combat skills, then pump stats for a few levels, and finally return to increasing skill ranks. It also called for learning a lot of rank 1 utility skills, as he dubbed them, and wanted Luke to do that the old-fashioned way. Luke didn’t really have the patience for that, so he was gimping his combat effectiveness slightly, but he didn’t figure wasting 5 or 6 AP was going to hurt him in the long run.

That having bee...

Chapter 14

It was perhaps inevitable that the sole exit from Tenebrous Valley was at its southeast end, not too far away from that goblin camp that had fucked him up so bad. Luke had actually explored the valley quite thoroughly, at least the part of it that was above-ground. He’d found probably forty or fifty caves scattered around the edges, but he wasn’t eager to delve into those. Other than the one his brother’s secret base was in, Luke left them alone.

Maybe if he’d focused higher on ...

Chapter 13

Luke spent the next day taking it easy, or at least as easy as a person could take it in a forest full of murderous wildlife. Red was actually kind of comforting to have around, even if the bird did give Luke the occasional searching, hungry look. He appeased his avian overlord with a steady offering of raw meat, courtesy of several different types of animals that tried to take a bite out of him.

Sometimes Red accepted the meat, sometimes it didn’t. Luke built himself a small fire and...

Chapter 12

Luke scooped up his knife on his way by the first deceased goblin. He held it loosely and tried to flick the blood and eye goop off it, but it had gotten into the pin and would no doubt gum everything up once it dried. He was not looking forward to cleaning it up. He wiped it on his pant leg as best he could, folded it, and stuck it in his pocket.

“What’s a little more blood anyway,” he muttered to himself. Then he set off in a kind of limping lope, favoring his injured leg while ...

Chapter 11

Luke woke up the next morning to find the hawk sitting in a branch overhead, staring down at him. Despite his new levels, it still had that dreadful aura about it, but given how often he’d ran into it now, he was pretty sure it wasn’t going to attack him.

“Well if we’re going to be hanging out, you need a name,” Luke told the bird from where he was lying on the ground. “How about… Red… bird. Red Feather. Red hawk… Maybe just Red? What do you think?”

The bird le...

Chapter 10

Luke wasn’t sure what he expected System to say. He half expected the apparition to become solid and leap forward to attack, or for it to sputter denials and obvious lies. What he didn’t expect was that System wouldn’t care at all.

“Curtis grew distrustful of me when I was not able to answer his questions to his satisfaction. I advised him that he would need a higher level of admin access in order for me to provide him with the information he wanted. It was his prerogative not t...

Chapter 9

When they were kids, Luke and his brother had found an old abandoned tree fort in the woods behind their house. Immediately dubbing it ‘Fort Impregnable,’ they had proceeded to zealously guard it against their older sister, despite the fact that she’d never shown more than a passing interest in it.

Luke had carved those words into the base of the tree and for three years, they’d made that fort the base of their woodland operations. Then their mother had died, the family had move...

Chapter 8

The new monster looked like a spider the size of a minivan, albeit one that was missing a few legs and a middle segment. It had bristly hairs and mandibles and way more than eight eyes, but the overall impression was definitely ‘spider.’

The only saving grace was that he wasn’t getting that gut-wrenching feeling of dread that came from running into something higher level. The gollum-spider cosplayers were surprisingly weak, so much so that the only real threat came from their numb...

Chapter 7

It was noticeably easier to see in the cave with the extra 2 points in perception. The fact that the sun was shining overheard probably helped a little, at least for the first hundred feet or so. It quickly got to the point where Luke could no longer see things in color, but he could still distinguish between shades of gray to navigate. The actual distance he could see dropped steadily as he got farther from the entrance, which did nothing to soothe his nerves.

The cave system presented...

Chapter 6

Before going any further, Luke spent the AP from his new level up. It was tempting to just dump 2 into each stat, but he still wanted to hold onto that single point until he finished going through the skills list. There were just so many skills for practically everything it seemed. System was less than helpful with any specific advice, leaving Luke to comb through thousands and thousands of potential skills.

He kept that last point in reserve and bumped agility, stamina, and perception ...

Chapter 5

Once both goblins were dead, Luke finally had an opportunity to get a good look at them. Mindful of his battery life, he used the flashlight to give them a once over and then turned it back off. Their skin was a kind of sickly greenish-yellow, with overly-long arms and too-short legs, and a torso somewhere in the middle. Long noses and floppy ears adorned their faces.

They were mostly naked except for their loin clothes and kind of sash-thing tied around their waists. Neither had a shea...

Chapter 4

The branches weren’t working out. Luke spent half his time making new clubs, and it was slowing the whole process down. He did make it to level 6, but it took way longer than he wanted it to. Luke spent 3 points to bring strength up to 8, which was an insane rush. His body felt weirdly light and heavy at the same time, a feeling he found extremely disconcerting until he got used to it.

Once he did though, he felt amazing. The jump from 4 to 5 hadn’t been that much, but with a much l...

Chapter 3

Whatever it was, it was coming straight for him and it was fast. Luke almost wished he’d put a few AP into agility instead of perception, just because he felt like it would allow him to attack with both branches more efficiently, and he very much wanted to attack with both branches now that he had one in either hand.

“Uh, System? What can you tell me about this?”

“Apologies. I am unable to assist you with information about a specific individual.”

“Thanks for noth...

Chapter 2

Luke sat down on a rock and put his head in his hands. “So… my family is dead. It’s been centuries, relatively speaking.”

“That is unfortunately correct. The last member of the Bennet bloodline connected to me was an off-worlder who perished ninety-seven years ago.”

“Shit,” Luke whispered. “Curt, Lizzie, Dad…”

He sat there silently, just staring at the ground. He’d known in his head that his family was gone. One after another over the last year, they�...

Chapter 1

When Lucas Bennet was nine, he briefly saw a therapist who told him that he needed to work on identifying what emotions he was feeling and how they were influencing his actions. That one idea stuck with him over the next decade, though he could admit to himself that he wasn’t very good at it. He tended to lash out at problems and only think of alternative solutions after the fact.

Luke could safely say that right now, he was pissed off and helplessly confused in equal measure. The las...