Myst in Worm (Gamer) Part 13 (Patreon)

“Critical success: Exquisite Knight Sword of Parrying created. Luck increased by 1!”

Myst's hand shook slightly as he carefully pulled the hot pink blade away from the anvil and slid it into his inventory for safe keeping. "Multiple stacks of the Fragile quality, that explains the mess," he muttered as he glanced down at the piles of hot pink fragments scattered over the white butcher paper he'd grabbed from the art department once he realized how badly the swords could fracture. He reached over and grabbed his plastic cup of root beer off the counter and took a drink as he tried to talk himself into making another blade while he had the equipment.

"Screw it, I'm not cleaning everything up twice," he grumbled as he put his cup back on the counter. He glanced at his mana bar, opened his enchanting window and added 2 points of mana regeneration then dropped a cheap silver locket into his box and hit the button, causing his mana to flow into the locket over the next ten seconds as the counter wound down. "Okay, a couple more blades then I'll swap to stabbing rats and stealing dexterity."

He put the necklace on then tossed several ingots of the hot pink metal into his crafting box and hit the craft button, starting the rather annoying process of trying to craft the hot pink metal without shattering it.

“Critical success: Brutal Knight Sword created. Luck increased by 1!”

Myst carefully slipped the sword into his inventory then leaned on the anvil, feeling like he'd just sprinted for a mile. "Yeah, I'm done working with this shit," he grumbled as he glanced at his empty stamina bar and slightly reduced health bar. 'Great, apparently if you run out of stamina, you start taking hit point damage.'

He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing, trying to get it under control as he revised his plans. 'Fuck it, two blades should be enough, at least until I boost my crafting skill.'

Myst took a deep breath then let it out and focused on his party function, "Invite Leet: Gamer World!"

0o0o0o0o0o0o0

"Fuck!" Eric cursed as he spilled his coffee on his hand when he twitched thanks to the strange translucent popup window that appeared in front of him asking if he wanted to join a party. "Gamer World?" he blurted as he reached out and hit the accept button before he realized that it was probably just someone screwing with him.

'Hello, is this Leet?' Myst asked as he started working on cleaning up the shards of hot pink metal so that he could drop the ID barrier without leaving a mess.

'Is this a power or tinkertech?' Leet wondered, more than a little surprised when his question appeared in the floating text box next to the health bar that was floating in front of him. "Huh, why didn't I ever build anything like this?"

'It's a power,' Myst replied. 'My power basically turned me into an RPG character and I can share some of the benefits by inviting people into a party.'

'And you're inviting me because I'm awesome and know a lot about video games?' Leet asked as he poked the health bar that was hovering in front of his face, causing it to move a little to the left. "Huh, nice." He moved the health bar off to the side of his vision so that it wasn't in the way. 'Wait, what type of benefits are we talking about?'

'People in my party can basically learn skills by reading informational books and grind their skills like an RPG character,' Myst replied as he carefully folded one of the sheets of butcher paper so that he could stuff it in his inventory with the scraps of metal.

'Permanently?' Leet asked excitedly as he dashed over to the desk, picked up Uber's Japanese for Dummies book that he normally used to translate old games and opened it. He twitched as he pushed the accept button and information and words streamed into his mind as the book vanished. 'What the fuck? You could have told me using the book ate it!'

'I was about to,' Myst replied, hoping Leet hadn't lost anything important. 'What did you get?'

'Basic Japanese,' Leet replied.

'That's useful. Speaking of useful, do you want to make a show in an empty city filled with giant rats or zombies?' Myst asked as he slid the paper and metal bits into his inventory.

'Yes!' Leet replied then frowned as he realized he should probably ask a couple more questions considering he didn't need a kill order for causing another Elisberg or sneaking into a containment zone or doing something else completely insane. 'Where are you going to find a rat or zombie filled city?'

'My power comes with the ability to create temporary pocket dimensions,' Myst replied as he started working on folding the next piece of paper.

'How much?' Leet asked, curious what he wanted him to make.

'Do you have any blueprints for power armor or at least combat armor?' Myst asked, fairly sure he would have kept records of everything he made so that he could crosscheck everything.

'Blueprints? Are you a tinker?' Leet asked.

'It's more accurate to say that I have an RPG like crafting ability.' Myst dropped a copy of the levitation meditation book into the party inventory. 'I dropped a book in the party inventory, feel free to use it. Just think really hard about summoning the party inventory and it should appear.'

Leet felt a little silly focusing on a party inventory until a game like interface appeared. He quickly grabbed the book and opened it. "Levitation meditation? Uber is going to flip!" He quickly used the book then started practicing, floating a couple of inches off the ground before dropping back to the ground when he lost focus. 'Do you have one of these for Uber?'

'Tell you what, if you bring a camera and Uber, I'll show you around the rat dungeon and you can see if it's worth giving me a copy of one of your old blueprints, deal?' Myst asked, fairly sure he wouldn't be able to resist at least showing up.

'Deal, where do you want to meet?' Leet asked.

'Wherever. I'm near Arcadia right now, but I'm fine with anywhere downtown,' Myst offered as he went back to cleaning up fragments.

"What am I going to flip about…" Uber trailed off as he walked into the room and saw Eric floating several inches off the ground. "I thought you said you weren't going to test shit on yourself anymore?"

"I didn't," Leet replied with a smirk. "Someone triggered with an RPG based gamer power and sent me a party invite because I'm awesome."

"What did they want?" Uber asked, fairly sure someone was messing with his friend.

"A copy of one of my old power armor blueprints in exchange for letting us play with a pocket dimension filled with giant rats," Leet replied enthusiastically.

"Giant rats?" Uber asked, curious if Eric was tripping on whatever he'd used to let himself levitate.

"I'll explain in the car," Leet replied as he headed for the garage to grab a costume. 'There's a sub shop across the street and a block down from the school, we'll be in a van. Say, twenty minutes?'

"Fine, I'm driving," Uber stated firmly as he followed his friend.

'Sure, that gives me a chance to finish a project,' Myst replied as he slipped the last piece of paper into his inventory. He grabbed his root beer and worked on finishing it while carefully looking over the area to make sure he wasn't going to leave any fragments of hot pink metal behind. 

"Hopefully this doesn't blow up in my face," he muttered as he dropped the empty cup into his inventory and pulled the potion that suppressed pain out of his inventory. He glared at the unappealing white liquid for a couple of seconds then popped the cork and drank the chalky bitter mixture, almost gagging as he tried to get it down. 'Fuck, that's nasty!'

Myst spent a couple of seconds making sure it was going to stay down then glanced at the potion icon that was floating under his status bars. 'Twenty minutes of no pain.' He shivered slightly as he used his Life Tap spell and his health dropped by 100 points while his mana jumped up by a 100 without feeling a damned thing from losing slightly more than a third of his life in a second.

"Yeah, that's creepy," he muttered and repeated the spell then cast Soul Recovery on himself to heal the damage. "You're a filthy casual, Jihan. Crafting for the win," he mused as he dropped a bracelet into his enchanting box, added 2 points of mana regeneration and pressed the button.

Myst waited for the progress bar to run out with a smile on his face then equipped the bracelet and repeated the process, enchanting a second bracelet, happy that his Gamer's Body ability prevented permanent damage. He adjusted his Stranger rating so that no one could sense him then dropped the ID barrier. He ignored the voices and machine noises he could hear coming from the metal shop as he refilled his mana pool by burning his health and then healing himself.

He slipped into the rat dungeon and glanced both directions, not particularly surprised to see a number of giant rats hiding in the shadows at the end of the hallway. 

'Yeah, I might as well make a decent weapon.' He carefully moved his Exquisite Parrying Knight Sword into his enchanting menu then selected the Vagrant enchant and applied it, draining most of his mana pool as the counter spun down.

Vagrant's Blade created!

Myst frowned as he pulled the tarnished and pockmarked pink blade that looked to have seen better days out of his inventory and examined it. "Indestructible, Sealed…" he trailed off as he read the description for the Sealed quality and realized there was no point in using the weapon until Vicky killed enough monsters to reduce the damage penalty to something more reasonable as it reduced the damage the blade did by 98% requiring a dozen mobs to be destroyed by it remove a single percentage point from that number. "At least the Indestructible quality removed the Fragile tags."

He put the blade back in his inventory then played the Life Tap and healing dance until he'd refilled his mana pool. He pulled out his steel katana and dropped it in his enchanting box then added the Berserker quality and hit the button.

Critical Success: Berserker's Blade Created! Luck increased by 1!

Myst frowned as he looked at the description for the new blade, rather suspicious of the fact that the blade increased strength by 98 points and caused the user to go into a berserk frenzy whenever they attacked an enemy because it should have just increased aggression and Strength by 50 points. "Why not double for a crit?" he muttered as he played the Life Tap and healing dance to refill his mana pool.

He pulled the blade out of his inventory.

Berserk negated by Gamer's Mind.

He dropped his sword when he saw the message, mostly because he wasn't used to not being able to feel anything. "That's annoying. So much for only activating when I attack something." He closed his enchanting menu and opened his thievery menu as he snuck down the dead end hallway towards the two giant rats he could see lurking in the shadows. 

'This is like walking while my legs are numb. This is way more annoying than the description implies,' he thought darkly as he leaned in close and touched one of the rats on the back as he burned 100 mana and stole a point of Dexterity from the nimble creature. He jumped back when the rat started snapping in his general direction.

-1 HP

He scowled as he realized he'd jammed his finger. 'Yeah, I'm not doing this again.' He edged around the snapping rat and burned another 100 mana to steal another point of Dexterity, annoyed at his failure, but not overly discouraged.

He slashed the rat and grinned when the sword cut through the rat like a hot knife through butter. 'Yeah, this is almost cheating,' he mused as he successfully stole a point of Dexterity from the other rat.

He grinned when he cut the rat in half with his blade and it dropped a roll of leather. "Yeah, having an extra 98 points of strength is nice…" he trailed off as he realized he might be able to use the sword to boost Coil's Strength past his own so that he could drain his Strength before he dropped him in the auction house.

He put the sword in his inventory then dropped Coil on the floor and tried to steal HP.

Success: 6 HP stolen.

Myst stared at the log for a couple of seconds. "Huh, why 6?" he asked as he opened his character sheet and went looking through his abilities until he noticed the 30% effectiveness boost he had for magic. "Ah, it's a magic skill. That makes spending mana, almost worth it." He grinned as he stole another 6 HP from Coil then did the Life Tap and Soul Recovery dance and continued stealing his HP, curious how much he could steal before Coil started taking endurance penalties.

Myst frowned as the HP option changed to show that he could only steal one more point after stealing an additional 24 hit points. 'Yeah, this would be nearly useless if I didn't have invisibility or unconscious victims.' He stole a point of Vitality and frowned as his HP increased by 12 and the option for stealing health greyed out. 'Shit, that means I need to steal hit points first.'

He shook his head then swapped to stealing the man's Dexterity, playing the Life Tap game when he got low on mana which was easier as he could Life Tap three times rather than just twice. He grinned and swapped to stealing points of Strength when Coil's Dexterity dropped enough that he couldn't steal it.

Myst scowled as Coil's strength hit 25 and he couldn't steal anymore from him. "My strength is 20, why am I having issues…" he trailed off as he looked at the temporary score next to his base score. "Fuck, my passive bonuses are screwing me over," he grumbled then grinned as he realized it probably worked both ways. "Okay, this should work the other way around."

He glanced at the duct tape he'd used to secure Coil's hands then opened his auction menu and ran a search for crowd control spells. "Bondage for Fun and Profit? Customizable mana chains and shackles." He glanced over the rest of the books in the list. "Sleep, petrification, berserk, how the hell does turning someone's blood to ice count as crowd control?" 

He shook his head and bought the two copies of Bondage for Fun and Profit as he couldn't just buy one of them as the seller was selling them as a set then grabbed a copy of the best looking book on sleep spells. 'Oh, spells to turn people into stone and spells to manipulate stone for 99.99 dollars?' He quickly paid the buyout price. "Sold!"

He glanced over the rest of the books and decided that he wasn't going to pay over a thousand for a spell to cause a group to go berserk. He closed the auction menu then pulled one of the identical Bondage books out of his inventory and opened it.

Learned Mana Chains!

Myst focused on his new spell and cast it on Coil, chaining his hands together with glowing pink ethereal looking chains. "Yeah, that's embarrassing," he muttered then recast the spell and shackled Coil's ankles together with blue chains. "That's better." He carefully stuck the Berserk blade in Coil's hands then jumped back when the man twitched and started swinging his blade around like a lunatic. 'Good call on the shackles.' He slipped forward, jabbed Coil in the back with his finger and stole another point of Strength then dodged out of the way as he flailed in his vague direction.

'At least his aim sucks.' Myst scowled as Coil broke the bindings on his wrists after wrenching them apart. 'Shit!' He quickly recast the spell then slipped behind him and stole another point of Strength while Coil was distracted then slipped back out of reach when he swung at him with the blade. 'Yeah, this is better than leveling like a maniac or trying to grind my stats with pole dancing.'

He jumped back as Coil managed to cut into a section of the concrete wall with a wild swing. 'Fuck! Screw this.' He lunged forward and punched him in the temple as hard as he could.

"Die!" Coil screamed as he backhanded Myst, sending him flying into the opposite wall with a glancing blow and doing a significant amount of damage but causing him no pain. "Blood!"

Myst recast his Mana Chains spell then dove out of the way as Coil charged him and swung the extremely lethal sword through space where he'd been standing. He pulled his gun out of his inventory as he scrambled backwards then shot Coil twice, once in the chest and once in the head as Coil stumbled backwards.

Myst scrambled to his feet then kicked the sword out of Coil's hands, ready to shoot him a third time if he needed to. "Fucking blade." He stared at the blood that was pooling on the ground under Coil, fairly sure he should be feeling something beyond annoyance that he wasn't going to be able to sell him on the auction house and frustration with himself for overestimating the shackles and underestimated the sword's ability to motivate people to violence and insanity. 'So, either I'm crazy or Gamer's mind is keeping me calm.'

"Then again, it could just be that I know he was going to kidnap and addict a child to drugs so he could use her to take over the city like a Bond villain's idiot nephew," Myst mused as he tried to figure out how much his Gamer's Mind ability was influencing him.

After several seconds of mulling the question over he glanced at his potion buff icon. "Screw it, I'll worry about it later."

Myst frowned as he realized Coil was twitching more than he probably should be for someone that was actually dead. "Soul Recovery?" he asked as he cast the healing spell, not really expecting it to work but figuring he might as well try, if only to test the limits of the spell.

Watching the hole in Coil's head fill in was a bit disturbing but oddly refreshing, if only because it proved that his Soul Recovery spell could heal severe injuries which was good to know before he got into actual fights.

He pulled the Sleep book out of his inventory and used it, figuring he could always create a book from memory, it would just be more annoying. "Soul Recovery." He quickly cast his new Sleep spell as Coil started to wake up, "Sleep. Shackles."

He watched Coil warily for a couple of seconds then opened his crafting window, dropped the mostly empty gun into the box and hit salvage, reducing it to components.

'Why are you at half health?' Taylor asked over the party chat.

Myst quickly cast Soul Recovery, healing himself back to full. 'I'm using my health to fuel my mana then healing myself while I work on training.'

'That sounds painful,' Taylor replied as she watched her father sign the release paperwork.

'Like you wouldn't believe,' Myst complained as he picked up his sword and dropped it in his inventory, wanting to make sure Coil couldn't grab it if his shackles failed. 'So, when are you getting out?'

'Dad's just finishing the paperwork,' Taylor replied, happy to be leaving the hospital. 'The real trick will be convincing him that I don't need to crawl into bed and sleep for a couple of days.'

'Best of luck with that, you should probably ask the doctors about exercise before you leave, that's usually a good excuse to get out of the house,' Myst replied as he worked on stealing Luck from Coil, not surprised when the next couple of attempts failed. He played the Life Tap and Soul Recovery dance then continued stealing Luck until he couldn't steal anymore.

He grabbed Coil and dropped him in his inventory, finding him a lot easier to lift now that he'd improved his Strength. He frowned as he stared at the pool of blood on the floor, not sure if the blood would vanish with the dungeon or stick around. "Crap," he grumbled as he opened his auction account and ran a search for cleaning spells.

'Thanks, that should keep Dad from locking me in my room to keep me safe,' Taylor replied as she left the hospital with her father

'No problem,' Myst replied as he bought a cheap pamphlet on a CDC approved citrus scented cleaning spell that was supposed to work on chemical and biological spills as well as dust and stains. "CDC approved, yeah, right," he muttered as he pulled the book out of his inventory and used it.

Citrus Cleaning Spell learned.

He focused on the pool of blood and cast his new spell, wondering how many times he was going to have to cast it. He stared in disbelief as the blood glowed with orange light for a second then vanished. He grinned as he realized that the metallic scent in the air had been replaced with a faint yet pleasant citrus scent that didn't smell at all artificial. "Seriously?" he sputtered as he stared at the perfectly cleaned floor, shocked that the description was completely legit as far as he could tell.

'What are you working on?' Taylor asked as she headed towards the parking lot with her father.

'I'm working on increasing my attributes so I can survive more dangerous dungeons and get better material to make exceptional armor,' Myst replied as he headed down the hallway in search of rats to steal from.

'Does that mean you'll be free to help me train or something after lunch if my father stops hovering?' Taylor asked.

'I should be free and cut your father some slack, it's his job to worry,' Myst replied as he snuck around the corner and saw a dog sized rat walking down the hallway. 'But yeah, my health should be bouncing around a lot the next ten minutes, don't worry about it.' He cast his Life Tap spell twice to refill his mana bar.

"What do you want for breakfast?" Danny asked as they headed towards the car.

"Sausage and eggs?" Taylor asked as she replied to Myst over the party chat, 'I'll try.'

'Is there a reason you're nearly dead?' Amy asked in a private message.

Myst cast Soul Recovery. 'I grabbed a pain relief potion from the auction house and I'm doing some training that takes a lot of mana,' he replied as he snuck over and tried to steal a point of Dexterity from the rat. He jumped backwards as the rat twisted and snapped at him. 'Nasty little buggers.'

'What are you working on?' Amy asked, wondering what would be important enough that he'd repeatedly stab himself just to boost his mana regeneration.

He stepped to the side and tried again, smiling when he managed to steal a point of Dexterity.

Success: Steal Attribute increased by 1!

'I'm working on enchanting a set of gear with mana regeneration so I can step up my training,' Myst replied as he stole another point of Dexterity. 'Huh, that only cost 99 mana, nice.' He glanced at his log. 'That should make things easier and cheaper.'

'Keep track of your status screen, I'm giving you a full check up once school gets out,' Amy informed him.

'I'm not going to object,' Myst replied as he stole another point of Dexterity from the rat. He stepped to the side as it lunged for him, finding it surprisingly easy to avoid. He stole another two points of Dexterity after failing an embarrassing number of times. He pulled his berserk sword out of his inventory and cut the rat down then did the Life Tap and Soul Recovery dance. He opened his enchanting menu and tossed a pair of jeans into the box, added two points of mana regeneration and pushed the button.

He waited for the counter to finish then swapped his pants and played the Life Tap and Soul Recovery dance so that he could enchant another piece of gear with mana regeneration, intending to make a full set before he went back to stealing Dexterity.

“I’m going to end up dressed like an extra from The Matrix, but at least I’ll have some decent regen,” Myst said with a chuckle. “I wonder if they have any decent shades on the auction?”