Mistrunner 2 - Chapter 52 - Progress and Choices (Patreon)

I thought things would get better when I took over. I cared more about the tribe than Jeremiah ever did, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference. He was willing to abandon everyone, all for the sake of one little girl. And I’ve given them everything. Why can’t they see it?

Nora Lancaster

The next two days went better than I could have hoped, and I killed quite a few more groups before the octavangians realized they were being hunted. When that happened, the rest retreated into their stadium stronghold, leaving me a little unsure of how to proceed. When my assault began, I’d chosen to eschew directly attacking their base for a couple of reasons, chief among them that I didn’t want to damage the mechanism that allowed access to the Rift. I’d learned first-hand just how fragile the machines could be, and I didn’t want to chance rendering the whole trip pointless.

So, as I watched the stadium from just outside the influence of the aural sensor, I contemplated my next moves. Obviously, I could just wait. Eventually, the aliens would relax and resume their normal habits. However, that option wasn’t without danger. There was every chance that these aliens could call in reinforcements; perhaps they already had. And while I knew getting to the surface wasn’t easy for the aliens – after all, the planet was still in quarantine for a few more years until the Integration – I wasn’t so naïve that I thought it was impossible. No – if I pushed them too far, they would absolutely bring more aliens to the surface. Once that happened, I would be forced to flee.

The other option was to take the fight to them. That came with its own issues. Not only would I have to take them all on at once, but I’d also be forced to limit myself. At the very least, explosives were off the table, save for in very controlled circumstances. Given that the BMAP was my trump card, I knew that removing it from the deck would leave me vulnerable.

Finally, I could just turn around and go back to Nova City. Perhaps, I could find another dead zone – and a Rift – sometime in the future. No guarantees on that front, but at least I would live to fight another day. Survival would have to be a reward all its own.

In the end, it came down to three choices: caution, aggression, or retreat. All three had detriments as well as merits. Even when I weighed them against one another, I couldn’t decide which route offered the most advantages.

My every instinct told me to take retreat off the table. Certainly, despite nearly dying, I’d made great progress during the trip. Killing hundreds of those mutated wildlings had come with significant advancements in my skills as well as my level. Even Patrick had managed to make some gains, mostly from killing wildlife we’d encountered during the trip. By all rights, I should have been happy with that.

But I wasn’t.

Not even close.

The problem was that I had quite a bit of difficulty admitting defeat. Sure, I knew I couldn’t always win. That was a given, and during my training, I’d become intimately acquainted with losing. Sometimes, that was even the point. Learning to cope with defeat was a necessary skill, after all.

But quitting before I’d even gotten started? That just rubbed me the wrong way.

I would run if I found myself facing off against an opponent I couldn’t beat. I didn’t have a death wish. However, running away from the octavangians felt so wrong, primarily because I knew I could win. Perhaps not without cost, but victory was within my grasp. Quitting now wouldn’t just see me leaving resources behind, but it would be a blow to my pride I wasn’t sure I could endure.

To distract myself from the sour taste of even thinking about retreat, I opened my status:

The biggest change had to do with my attributes. After gaining seven levels since the last time I’d studied my status, my potential had reached one point shy of two-hundred. One more level, and it would surge past that line. And while I hadn’t really come close to realizing that potential, I was still extremely proud of the achievement.

More importantly, my actual attributes had experienced a huge surge, and all three categories now exceeded a hundred points. That was no small matter, either.

Ever since my Awakening, each point of improvement had represented an incremental increase in power. The difference between reaching ten and eleven points in Constitution were barely measurable. Even a gain of a dozen points, especially when it came so gradually, was difficult to notice. However, if I were to compare the current version of me to the one right after my Awakening, the difference was downright scary.

Put in easier to understand terms, before, I’d have struggled to lift more than a hundred pounds. But now? I could deadlift a thousand pounds without missing a beat, and that was just one facet of Constitution. My body was far more durable than it had been even a few months before. I could think faster, parse more information, and draw on a truly huge pool of Mist to power my skills and abilities.

But the biggest jump in my relative power came from passing the one-hundred point mark in each of the categories. It was as if my effective power doubled almost overnight, and I was still trying to get used to it. Still, I knew it was only the beginning; my uncle had been fighting for almost a century, and his strength reflected that. I’d never asked him about his attributes – he probably wouldn’t have told me even if I had – but from what I’d seen, his numbers were probably at least double mine. Maybe far more than that, given that I’d never really seen him go all-out.

That was what I had to look forward to.

As far as the progress of my skills, I’d made incredible strides. They’d all reached at least Tier-2, with [Acrobatics] passing into the third tier. I could only explain its rapid improvement by remembering that my other skills had evolved when I’d attained my class. As such, it – as well as [Demolition]– progressed much more quickly. Eventually, they would catch up and probably evolve, but for now, rapid growth was the name of the game.

Thinking of my skills, I opened the appropriate menu and continued my inspection:

Tree

I had to admit I was a little disappointed with the slow progress of [Combat]. Certainly, it was a powerful skill. I knew that, just as I knew that without its modifiers I would have been a lot less effective. Still, after reaching Tier-2, its progress had slowed to a crawl. Even now, the individual branches hadn’t experienced nearly the improvement I would have expected, with none of them – save for the Movement branch – reaching the second tier.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if those third tier abilities didn’t seem so powerful. But anything with a name like Explosive Shot had to be strong. Or perhaps that was just my predilection toward blowing things up making itself known.

In any case, I moved on to the [Infiltration]tree:

[Infiltration]had seen more improvement than [Combat], but the progress was still maddeningly slow. That slow development was made even more annoying because the Stealth branch was only one percent from rolling over into the second tier. The reward – a modifier to the effectiveness of the Stealth ability – wasn’t a huge deal, especially considering that I had yet to run into anything that could easily see through the ability, but that single percentage point still taunted me.

I was less interested in the abilities associated with reaching the third tier of the individual branches, but perhaps those new abilities would prove just as vital as any of the others I regularly used.

Next, I looked at the [Mistrunning] tree:

As was the case with [Combat], the progress had been glacially slow. However, that had always been the case with both [Mistrunning] and its predecessor, so I was inured to its slow progression. Still, I was eager to reach Tier-2 in the Combat and Mistwall branches. Gaining more damage as well as a stronger Mistwall was never a bad thing, after all.

Finally, I took a look at the tree for [Fieldcraft]:

It played host to one of the few branches I’d progressed to the second tier, but the pace of its progress was just as slow as all the rest. As much as I liked the idea of my Universal Language ability, it had yet to be put to the test, so my feelings about its utility were more than a little mixed. What good was an ability if you never got to use it?

More useful were the modifiers that came with the other branches. Already, my high attributes meant that I needed less sleep, food, or water than other people, but every time I ate a ration bar, I found myself looking forward to the day when I wouldn’t need them. The other Tier-2 modifiers, both of which would almost assuredly enhance my ability to recover from injuries, would be a welcome addition as well.

But as happy as I was with my progress – and I was, despite how slowly my individual skills had grown in power – I knew I was just delaying the inevitable choice laid before me. Did I retreat? Did I attack? Or did I wait?

Oh – who was I kidding? I hadn’t come so far and braved the dangerous wilderness just to turn tail and run the moment I ran into difficulty, had I? No. Of course not. That was the easiest option to dismiss.

Waiting was a little more difficult, mostly because I knew it was the smarter choice. The chances that the octavangians would seek reinforcement were unlikely. My uncle had been adamant that, to the aliens, the only thing that mattered was profit. Because of that, I felt certain that the octavangians wouldn’t waste the time and effort necessary to bolster their ranks, if only due to the reduction in profit such a choice would represent.

No - they wouldn’t do that unless absolutely necessary.

Unless my uncle’s assessment of the aliens’ priorities was wrong, at least. But I’d already come too far to start questioning his judgment, especially after building my own philosophy around it.

So, the last remaining option was probably my best.

But just because I’d decided on all-out assault didn’t mean I had to run in there, guns blazing and asking to be cut down. Instead, I could be smart about it. Sneaky. To that end, I would take a page out of my uncle’s playbook.

Before that, though, I needed to take care of something I often overlooked: establishing a secure connection with Patrick. My oversight wasn’t that surprising, considering that I often worked completely alone. Patrick was my companion, but I’d never really considered him all that useful. If my plans came to fruition, that would change, and soon, but for now, he was more of an afterthought when it came to actual combat.

Still, when I’d returned from my latest hunt to find that he’d devolved into a bundle of raw nerves, I had begun to see things from his perspective. Often, I just left him to his own devices, never looping him into my plans. How would I have felt if we were forced to trade places? To me, the not knowing would have been the worst part, so I had decided to remedy that with a secure connection.

Of course, secure was a relative term, which was why I had yet to do it. My uncle had once warned me how easily someone could hijack a connection – with the right skills, my enemies could discover all my secrets. No – according to him, it was better to limit important communication to face-to-face meetings.

And he was probably right, too. My own [Mistrunning] abilities didn’t go down that road, but they were close enough to suggest that people with the right abilities or equipment could hijack even the most secure communication lines.

Even so, I felt it was worth it just maintain Patrick’s sanity. So, I initiated the secure connection, helped along by the KIOI, which served to augment the security as well. Patrick’s end was still a source of weakness, but I tried to ignore that as asked, “Can you hear me?”

“I’m right next to you,” he said. “Of course I can hear you.”

“No – through the connection, I mean,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Oh. Yeah. Loud and clear,” he said. “Are you sure I can’t help? I know I’m not the fighter you are, but –”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Just…it’s better if you hang back unless I need you, okay? Maybe you can swoop in and save the day like you did back in Mobile.”

He gave me a slight smile. “Maybe,” he admitted. “Just…when you go in there, just be careful. This isn’t worth dying over.”

That was where he was wrong. Certainly, I didn’t intend it to be some sort of suicide mission, but the moment I stopped putting myself in danger, that was when I’d fall behind. I was well aware that I’d grown addicted to my own progression, but I didn’t think that was a bad thing. Instead, I felt that it was a great motivator to keep me from committing the sin of weakness and falling under the thumb of someone more powerful. After all, I hadn’t forgotten that, aside from the threat posed by the dawning of the Integration, there were still plenty of people out there who could’ve given my uncle a run for his money. If I came up against one of them, I wouldn’t last more than a few seconds. The only solution was to keep moving forward, and for that, I needed to acknowledge that mortal danger would forever be a part of my life.

Even so, I placated him by throwing a grin right back at him and asking, “When am I not careful?”

“Uh…you’re never not careful,” he said. “You see that, don’t you? I can’t even count how many times you’ve almost died.”

“Oh, c’mon – it hasn’t happened that often,” I argued.

“It really has,” he said. “And that’s just the times you’ve told me about. I bet the real number is way higher.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong about that, but I wasn’t about to admit as much. Instead, I changed the subject, saying, “Just keep your head on a swivel, okay? I don’t think they’ll call in reinforcements or anything, but if you notice anything out of the ordinary, let me know. In the meantime, just wait for me to finish clearing them out, and we can hit that Rift. Before you know it, we’ll be swimming in credits.”

I liked the idea of having access to so much money; after all, better equipment usually equaled an easier time with survival. But I couldn’t even convince myself that was why I was doing it. In the end, I just liked challenging myself. My time in Nova had thrown a blanket over that enjoyment, but now that I was out of the city, it had returned with a vengeance.

“Just be careful.”

“I will,” I said. Then, without further delay, I left the building where we’d made our camp and headed toward the stadium. There was a nest of aliens I needed to exterminate.