LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 16: Past – Zach
ACT I – Zach
Decisions
Zach was lying on his back, looking at the ceiling, Linda draped over his chest. He had no idea how they ended up in the bedroom. One moment they were in the kitchen, Melody and Ryun having just left, and the next they were tearing their clothes off. He had spent so long wanting this, before the world had gone to shit, that he had no idea how to act now. He had spent most of his time these last few days with Linda, talking about nothing, trying to get their minds off their situation. They hadn’t spoken about their feelings at all. It wasn’t how he imagined things happening, but he was glad all the same. He tightened his arm around her, and she sighed contently. For a while both of them had forgotten all about the world going to hell.
Then the doors to the cabin opened and Linda shot up, Zach following quickly behind.
“They’re back!” she whispered as she started looking for her clothes. Zach got up from the bed and leaned down to pick up his pants.
“Hey, guys!” Melody’s voice got closer, along with her footsteps. “Where are you? We got ne— Oh my god!”
Zach froze and turned his head around and saw Melody standing in the doorway with her eyes and mouth open wide, looking at him with his pants still around his knees. He quickly pulled them up, bowing his head in embarrassment.
“What’s wrong?” Ryun yelled out as he got closer, his voice worried.
“Nothing,” Melody said, and he could hear her walking away. “Except for Zach’s tight ass in my face, nothing at all.”
“What?” Ryun asked, confused.
Zach picked up his shirt and pulled it on. Linda walked out of the bedroom, followed quickly by him. Ryun blinked at them as they came into the living room. Zach saw that Linda’s face had turned nearly completely red from embarrassment. Her hair was messy and she was trying to pull her golden locks back. Zach looked at Melody and Ryun standing next to each other and just staring at them.
“Oh,” Ryun said as he glanced from Zach to Linda.
“You found something?” Zach asked quickly.
The two didn’t respond immediately—they seemed to be in a state of shock.
Finally, Ryun spoke. “Yeah, we did.”
They were gathered in front of the fireplace that evening, Linda sitting next to Zach, holding his hand, and Melody and Ryun sitting across from them.
“So what you are saying is that we should stay here,” Linda accused.
“No,” Ryun shook his head. “I’m just saying that if there is one such powerful monster around, there are bound to be more. And I know that we would die if we tried to fight that boar or anything like it. We need to get stronger.”
“I don’t understand why we can’t just avoid the monsters?” Linda argued. “We can just run away, head to the valley. We can be careful.”
Ryun sighed. “You’ve seen how all of us have gotten stronger, faster, with more stats, yes? The monsters are the same. If a monster that is so stronger than us wants to catch us, it will.”
“So you want us to stay here. Forever?” Linda said. Zach could tell that she was angry, and he understood her position, but he also understood Ryun’s. It was why he was keeping mostly quiet, not wanting to get in between them.
“Of course not. What I want to suggest is that we start hunting monsters, actively. We will both make our area safer, as well as get stronger. Once we are strong enough, we can make the trip to explore the valley.”
“And what if those people leave, huh? What if they go, and leave us alone here?!” she yelled.
“We don’t know if there are people in the first place,” Ryun said reasonably.
Linda turned to look at Zach. “Tell him! We should go and find help, we can’t stay here!”
Zach grimaced. He really didn’t want to get in between them, but seeing her pleading with him made him speak. “She is right, Ryun. We can’t stay here forever.”
Linda shot Ryun a smug expression.
“But…” Zach added, and Linda turned to glare at him. “I also think that we need to be able to handle everything that is out there. So I am proposing that we spend the next week doing what Ryun said. We go out and hunt monsters, get Essence, prepare for the trip, and then we go.”
Linda looked like she was about to argue, but Melody spoke up. “I think that that is reasonable,” she said, looking at Ryun, who himself didn’t look happy.
Finally, Ryun nodded.
Zach sighed as the atmosphere settled. “Good. We’ll start going out for hunts tomorrow.”
The next morning, Zach looked at his stat screen. With the Essence Crystal from Ryun, he now had enough to get to level ten. He was a bit hesitant to spend it all, since they depended on the shop for water, but Ryun assured him that he had enough. So, with a deep breath, he put one thousand Essence into his Class.
Level 10 unlocked!
3 attribute points available!
Movement Ability Available—*Multiple Choices Available*
Achievement unlocked, title available—First to Ten
Reward: +10% to all stats; 10,000 Essence
Seeing the new title, Zach blinked. The reward hadn’t been just Essence, he had gotten a bonus to his stats. He read deeper into the reward. From what he gathered he had received a ten percent bonus to his base stats, meaning that the bonus would scale as he leveled. That was pretty good, but the Essence was much more welcome—with it, he could level more. Then something occurred to him. If what he’d read about his title was right, then he was the first person in the world to reach level ten. Suddenly, he felt weak. That did not make him feel better at all. If he was the strongest person on the planet at the moment then the situation out there was far worse than he believed. Quickly he put all his Essence into his Class, stopping once he reached level fourteen, as he didn’t have enough to reach level fifteen. That left him with one thousand Essence.
Then he turned to look at his stats. With the five levels he had gotten he had fifteen free points to distribute. His Class points had already been put into dexterity and strength, bringing them to thirty-seven and twenty-four, respectively.
Suddenly, he started to feel strange, his mind heavy. He tried to move but his body was sluggish, barely responding. Something was wrong. He tried to yell out, but it came out as a garbled mess, but someone had to have heard him, because suddenly he saw Ryun kneeling in front of him.
“What’s wrong?” Ryun asked looking him over.
Zach tried to explain, to speak out, but it was like he couldn’t control his tongue, like it was faster and slower than him at the same time. Ryun frowned as he saw that there was no mark on him. Zach tried to speak again, but his words were muddled, but Ryun seemed to have gotten something.
“Did you level?” Ryun asked.
Zach managed to nod. Something in Ryun’s eyes told him that he had an idea of what was happening, so a part of him felt relieved.
“Okay, do you have any attribute points left to allocate?”
Zach nodded again.
“Good, I want you to put them into your lowest attribute, or attributes, if you have more than one that are around the same amount. Raise them up, okay?”
Zach nodded again and tried to use his screens. Thankfully, they responded as normal.
His intelligence and wisdom were his lowest stats, at seven and eight, so he started putting points in. He had fifteen points, and after he put only two into intelligence and one into wisdom, the feeling disappeared.
“What was that?” Zach asked slowly. He was still a bit woozy.
“I think it was stat sickness,” Ryun answered.
“What?”
“I used to play some games that didn’t let you just put all your stats in one or two attributes. You couldn’t min-max—you needed to bring up all of your stats up at the same time. You said that your Class automatically puts in points in your primary and secondary stat, so I figured that something like that had to have happen. Your main stats are dexterity and strength, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t put anything in your intelligence and wisdom, I’m assuming?”
“No, they are the same as they’ve been at the start of all this.”
Ryun nodded knowingly. “I think that what happened is that your body became too powerful for your mind to handle. You’d upgraded your physical attributes, but not your mental, and that probably created some kind of dissonance.”
Zach looked at his stats, starting to understand. He experimentally put one point in dexterity, bringing it to thirty-eight, and immediately the same sensation returned. Quickly he put another point in intelligence and then another in wisdom. The sensation went away and he sighed again.
“What did you do?” Ryun asked.
“I put a point in dexterity and the feeling returned, and it didn’t go away until I put in a point in intelligence and wisdom, bringing them up to ten,” Zach said.
“It looks like there is some kind of a limit to how much difference there can be in stats.”
Zach nodded as he did some quick math. “The difference is twenty-eight between my highest and lowest stat. Exactly double my level.”
“That could be it.” Ryun nodded.
Zach looked at his stats for a bit then allocated the rest of his points and took one last look at his screens.
Name
Zacharia Gardner
Race
Human
Titles
First Kill, First to Ten
Essence
1037
Class
Swordsman
Level
14 (0/3000 Essence)
Combat Ability
Piercing Stab
Movement Ability
*Available
Support Ability
/
Strength
27
Dexterity
40
Vitality
22
Endurance
25
Intelligence
12
Wisdom
12
His ten percent bonus seemed to give him a rounded down point, so his int and wis didn’t provide him with an extra point until he’d brought them up to ten. He had to put one more point in each so that he could keep up with the bonus that the percentage gave him to dexterity. It affected his base stat, so it didn’t increase again once he passed forty in dexterity.
But it was the fact that he could choose another ability that he was happy about. He looked at the choices.
Double Step
Quick movement: allows you to make two steps for what looks like one.
Roll
Defensive roll: able to halt your momentum and execute the roll at any time.
Leap
Distance closer: allows you to leap up to ten paces forward.
[Double Step] looked interesting, but he was leaning more toward [Leap]. He liked the idea of crossing a larger distance quickly, and he could use it either defensively or offensively. Making his decision, he picked up [Leap], and he knew he needed to try it out before they went out to hunt.
“You okay?” Ryun asked.
“Yeah,” Zach said, then decided that he needed to tell him about his title.
“Wow,” Ryun said after he told him. “Ten thousand Essence? That’s a lot.”
“Didn’t you hear the other part?”
Ryun nodded. “Yeah, it’s great news, isn’t it?”
“That’s not really what I was thinking.” Zach narrowed his eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you understand what this means? There isn’t anyone out there who is stronger than me, no one who can protect us!”
“So? I mean, we’re in the middle of the forest, we have only ourselves to depend on. I know that you guys all want to find other people, to get help, but did you ever stop to think what would happen if we go out there into the forest and find people in the first place? You think that you will just be able to lose all responsibility and relax? Follow others? Did you at all think that perhaps any people we find will be looking to us for help?”
Zach’s mouth opened in shock. He hadn’t thought about that at all.
“The fact that you got that title means that is all but guaranteed. I didn’t refuse for us to go out into the valley because I don’t want to find help; I think that we need to get strong so that if we find more people, we can protect them. Whether you accept it or not, we need to be able to take care of ourselves first. We can’t just sit around waiting for others to save us.”
Zach gave his friend another look. He realized that he had misjudged Ryun. He had assumed that he didn’t want to go because he was in part glad that this had happened. He knew that Ryun hadn’t been happy with his life, and this was probably something that he had always fantasized about—and while he still thought that Ryun was embracing this world just a bit too much, he could see now that he had been thinking far more about this than Zach had given him credit for.
When Zach didn’t respond, Ryun sighed. “C’mon, the girls are waiting.”
Zach sighed in turn and stood up. They were going hunting.