So writing combat is hard. It is something I will have to work on in the future, but at least another chapter is finished. Also I'm going to be going back and re-editing the earlier chapters, so anything else that anyone sees that needs fixed; now is the time to tell me about it.

Sword'sfun: Funny story about the mistake with the fire department vs the police station. The original story placed the starting point on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, near San Francisco. So I decided to look at a map to try to figure out where that could be located. Problem was that San Francisco is really really big and various suburbs are pretty well spread out everywhere. That means that there would be nowhere for the bunker and the surrounding area to actually be located. So I looked around and noticed that on the other side of the bridge there was a state park that could work. But then, so long as I was going that far, I should look to see if there was a police station nearby. The map said there was, except that when I went to street view it turned out to be a fire department instead. So, in between the original story saying "police station" and the map saying "police station" I had originally written that till I saw what was really there. With all that I ended up going back and forth between the thought that nobody would actually look the area up and the realization that I had actually looked it up so maybe others could too; between the idea that it wasn't important to the story and the realization that good research is the background of any sort of realism; and finally decided because if I didn't change it I would pull my own hair out thinking that I should have. Lol. So there you go.

And in other news, that mistake should be fixed now.

Ceasa20: Knowing that information is important doesn't necessarily mean hording it. While I could make the excuse that the story needed someone for Alan to talk to rather than just trying to throw that information out without any context, he easily could have talked to Eve or to the robot or gotten it across in another way. The truth is that Alan's background is from a team multiplayer game, and a good player doesn't hide things from his teammates. Also, to be fair, he had no way of knowing how high powered the people of this group really were. If this was a normal group than, despite his low level, he might easily be one of the most combat capable players due to most all his points going to that and the stupidly fast way he can pick up certain skills (most people would be more diversified at his current level by virtue of their starting skills), but luck did not work out for him that way. The main issue, though, was that he started out viewing the others as teammates rather than independents currently working alongside of him. And, of course, the universe will punish him for his mistake.

As for not having clear readouts of Alan's abilities, that is mostly because it simply hasn't come up in the story… and partly also because Alan doesn't have very many exact numbers and doesn't want to focus on it (A frankly embarrassing amount of his starting points went into things like being able to breathe air). It will come up later, just not in this episode. I won't be repeating it constantly, like the original did, because I don't feel it added much to the story in the majority of cases. Even the original author tapered off on that aspect of it after a while.

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So I had gotten my skills with daggers, short swords (which apparently included any straight blade longer than a dagger but shorter than half my height) and small arms (which included most any non-archaic projectile weapon held in a single hand) up to intermediate level, one spot below expert. I had my basic stealth, which was one level below beginner stealth, and beginner energy weapons mastery. By firing at things from a distance I also managed to cheat The System into giving me beginner sniping. There was also an ability called "computerized synchronization", which basically just meant that The Game recognized what I was doing with Eve feeding me the exact memory of the actions and me repeating them and gave me an ability for it. Also, apparently as a note, the word skills and abilities are interchangeable, usually, sometimes, when The Game or The System isn't trying to mess with me. Whomever wrote the rules for this 'game' should be put before a firing squad of grammar Nazis. Eve told me it is an issue with "imprecise translations", but whatever. From there I was able to convince DeLong to show me how to use "medium arms" (which includes most normal non-sniper rifles) in exchange for giving him a quick tutorial on how to use energy weapons. I got up to beginner level while he got up to basic level. Finally I stayed close enough to Thiago, Kitana, and Aphrodite when they were setting up traps to attempt it myself later for another basic skill.

Speaking of the energy weapons skill, it was another example of how weird everything was. Apparently it consisted of feeling the specialized hum of the powered weapon as you held it and using that to know how to maximize the power and efficiency of the shot. Asking about the skill had let me know that all skills had stats they were based on but many had required stats at other lower levels depending on how they were used, and even these could seem really backwards. Feeling the hum and using the feedback in your use of it was based off of intelligence, but required a lower level of wisdom (which was basically mostly just senses) and some even smaller level of agility too. When I asked how much I needed or in what ratio Eve had given me the extremely helpful answers of less and much less. Many other skills were the same.

That was a total of seven new abilities in about three hours. This got me a total of a whopping six levels (feel the burning sarcasm) to bring me all the way up to level nineteen! That's only a little more than ten levels below the cutoff point for the bottom 5% of all humans in The Game, and even less in terms of what the average alien was capable of. Truly I am unique, I am the 1%.

I had put as many points as I could into Agility, but my actions had actually gained me a fair number in body and a few points in intelligence, wisdom, and even charisma; no points in luck, however. The problem was that, even with the new skills, the effectiveness of my skills was based on my stats. So even, if I knew how to fire a gun on the practice setting while KingAurthor proved how easily he could punch me in a full suit of plate male, my relatively low agility meant that I was slower and that I would have to be more careful if I wanted not to miss. Forget about taking on any of the more combat focused members of the group, I figured Daisy could likely take me on. I guess that is what having over 250 more stat points will get you…

Speaking of Daisy, she was really funny when I told her about my level jump. She kept saying "that can't work, it just can't" over and over with a dazed look on her face.

Somehow that leads us to now, fighting giant dog monsters that can ignore bullets to their bodies and large flying cat creatures that jump off platforms of thin air. Behind them, directing the assault, is a lone figure in green power-armor protected by an energy shield not unlike ours. Of course ours is useless against melee attackers and his works fine against all our guns, so there is that difference. Also, anything short of completely disabling them and the animals will just limp back to their master to get healed up like new.

And now a couple of them are trying to drag one of the seemingly dead ones, one that didn't evaporate into pixelized light when it went down, back to their master. Just great… I started firing at the downed one to try to finish it off.

"Guys," I called out, "a couple of them are trying to drag the bodies back to the guy. I think if they don't disappear, they aren't dead." I kept firing but I had already figured out that the only way to truly put them down was to almost completely destroy the head or get lucky. My gun fired plasma, which spread when it hit shields and left a golf-ball to softball sized hole in whatever I hit that was unshielded, but it still took a while.

"Don't ef-ing let them," Thiago yelled, in a statement of the overwhelmingly obvious, "we have to wear them down."

"Do we have some way to destroy the bodies? Something faster than relying on the teenager…" Ace asked, avoiding me and looking at DeLong instead. My twenty-four year old self felt a bit insulted by that, though not enough to actually say anything.

DeLong grumbled, but reached into his jacket to pull out a grenade in the hand opposite his machine gun. At this point I wasn't even surprised anymore, because of course someone would have grenades. Earlier Ace had casually mentioned how he would be 'deploying anti-personnel mutations'… or in simpler terms he somehow had freaking land mines. I glanced over as he pulled it out, giving Eve enough of a glance to highlight the his jacket showing rows of the things on the interior. It was like he was some crazy with a deadman's switch or something. He casually pulled the pin and waited a couple seconds before throwing it to another downed monster. The others easily jumped out of the way.

I was personally taking every spare moment I had and was watching the beast-master who seemed to be controlling the horde. At first I had thought he was some kind of super well trained or tactical genius for controlling all these animals at once. Then I realized that he was a green power-armored alien and that normal rules might not apply. It was with this understanding that I noticed the simplicity of the movements. The animals moved in and out independently, and with more intelligence than should be true of animals, but they always backed off or evaded in a counter clockwise motion. There was no cris-crossing to distract their movements or any coordinated attack from more than a couple sources at once, all he was doing was sending them in from all directions with no feints or misdirection whatsoever. But while his tactics were just so simplistic that it was hard to reconcile with how many commands he seemed to be giving, they were successful only because we didn't have time to respond.

"Why is this guy here? We shouldn't be fighting someone like him in the first round!" Aphrodite yelled amid the confusion. Wait, 'shouldn't be fighting someone like him'? How would she know?

Kitana spoke up next, swinging at a dog who veered away just before it would have entered her range. "The alien said 'only 1% passing rate' for The Tutorial rounds. Could this be the result?"

"No," Thiago answered with a bit less surety in his voice, "we took that into account already." Wait, what? Was I the only person who didn't know this stuff?

How do they know what was coming? I nearly screamed at Eve, hoping for some answer, as I continued firing on the enemies. Apparently hitting the back of their head was enough if I could get a good angle, I had learned through some experimental shots, if only they would stop falling at such inconvenient angles.

Ace and Aphrodite had started arguing again. Aphrodite wanted to go after the boss to shut down the aggravation at its source while Ace wanted to play it safe and wait for the enemy to make a mistake.

Eve's answer was entirely too calm. Perhaps they learned information about the challenges during the time after they had entered the game and before they started the Tutorial. It is, in many ways, a period exempt from many of The System's rules.

WHAT?!

I said, perhaps they learned information…

I heard you the first time. I cut her off. You mean that you could have told me anything I asked during that time?

I kept firing for the few seconds it took her to answer, trying to ignore the argument that now included KingArthor trying to figure out who's fault it was that we were now facing this boss. Yes, but the results would have been less than optimal. The tutorial's early challenges are leveled to the recipient, therefore increasing the difficulty was calculated to be highly detrimental. Translation: You couldn't handle the truth, you weakling. It only would have made everything harder.

Right, and how do you know all this?

My base code did originate within The Game, after all. Well hu. That might have been a good thing to find out before now. In truth I had never found out much about the website with the AI tutorial on it and a lot of the base stuff had been way over my head. At the beginning I had just been doing it as a hobby without much to it, then the fine tuning of the program had gotten overwhelming when I got the grant, and finally my time had been consumed with preparing to enter The Game itself till the very last minute. There was no point at which the question of 'where had the website come from' seemed important. Why would I even question that it was from a human source? Earth's internet was so old that it was completely incompatible with the systems the rest of the universe used.

Then another, even more infuriating, thought hit me and I yelled it out to be heard over the continuing argument. "The test gets more difficult for players who are tougher, so the boss showing up is probably because you cheated to get info about what would be coming!"

The arguments suddenly stopped. It wasn't silent, there was gunfire and a dizzying volume of random noise from the monstrous 'scouts', but at least everyone wasn't yelling any more. And yes, apparently these demon beasts counted as little more than disposable scouts to the Haxlard Empire. I took a couple more shots of super heated 'goo' to 'disappear' another 'dog' as the 'cats' tried diving from the sky toward the 'tank' in full plate. Did I mention before how weird my life has gotten recently? I think it is important to focus on it from time to time to retain some semblance of sanity. Also, it helps to keep me from yelling at people who could kill me.

Thiago spoke up, breaking the pseudo-silence. "Ace and Kitana, you are with me. We are going to break through to take out the boss. KingArthur, protect Daisy at all costs. She is our fallback. Everyone else, keep firing and distract."

He nodded wordlessly to Ace and he threw a canister toward the enemy's snow-globe looking shield that burst into a growing cloud of smoke. Of course Ace has smoke grenades, what else should I expect from the guy with experience in hiding landmines? They gave the cloud a few seconds to grow before rushing into it, and several dogs turned to cut them off. The wind was from that direction, bringing the cloud toward us, but there was still enough new smoke to completely hide the enemy bubble.

For my part I remained paranoid. This could not go smoothly, if experience served me. I hoped it wouldn't, but I wasn't making any bets.

Aphrodite chose this moment to make fun of me. "Scared of the bogie man? Frightened he will jump out and…"

I didn't hear the rest of what she said because fate had been tempted too much to ignore. The first I saw of him was a backhanded slash of a glowing electrified sword that took my gun and hurled it away. I don't think he expected me to block, I certainly hadn't expected it, because he halted his forward advance with a bit of a start. Suddenly he brought down his sword toward me twice in quick succession, both from subtly different angles that hurt my hand to block, and then easily flicked by high tech blade into the distance. I quickly grabbed my knife from its holster on the back of my waist only to see that he was already moving on. A lunge at his back showed me why. I felt a force as something slowed and deflected my blade, but I couldn't get the tip of it to close within an inch of him. I tried a few more times with exactly the same result. It was only after my first swing that I fully realized how truly fucked we were. The boss was over here, taking out our group, and our most combat oriented members were all blindly running off where he used to be.

Meanwhile the boss moved forward, ignoring the gunfire, and quickly took out both MadMerlin and Aphrodite with little more than a tap that left them convulsing on the ground. His electro-sword apparently worked as a stun-gun. The bullets flew at him stopping in the air an inch or two around him, just hovering there for a quarter of a second, before dropping to the ground without even deforming. KingArthor took pot-shots before dropping his gun and moving in to use his two-handed bastard sword. Barry the Beast-master blocked it rather than taking it and angled himself so that DeLong's shots were blocked by the mountain of armor that was KingArthor. DeLong kept firing his machine gun, holding it in both hands to steady the shots as he moved to get a better shot, then suddenly had to turn to ward off the monstrous animals as they moved in again. Daisy huddled behind KingArthor and was unable to reach her two downed allies.

I didn't see what happened next because two of the giant four hundred pound dog monsters attacked. Fortunately, without constant direction, their attacks were even more predictable than they were before. Not that they were completely on their own, Barrington the Beast-master somehow was able to keep track of the fight with a level of precision that bordered on the insane and give a few obvious but silent commands to the 'scouts', but it still meant that the dogs crowded together, getting in each others way and sometimes even trying to intimidate down each other. Meanwhile the cats had created shimmering air platforms a good distance away and were suspiciously eyeing each other and everyone else. They would momentarily stop when specifically prompted to move forward, but then they would back off again just as quickly given half a chance.

As the first giant dog lunged at my neck I genuinely surprised myself by moving out of the way. I mean, holy shit, my hand eye coordination may not be back to normal but I could already move a lot faster than I ever could in real life. I may not have moved as easily as I could during my first few hours in game, but I easily slid to the side of the leaping beast and then, with a thought and a mechanically exact memory of the movement, brought my knife down into the base of the lion-like dog's skull at the weak point I had found earlier. There was some resistance for a brief moment before the entire beast turned into strange digital blocks and disappeared, leaving behind little more than a mote of light. The other one was more cautious and tried snapping at my arm instead of making a lunge. It was an easily predictable attack and I responded by pulling back my left and stabbing it in the eye with my right. The action looked and sounded like it had been censored for TV, no sickening sound or blood and a blurry little digital block where the eye had been. The super-bulldog pulled away, hurt but still battle ready. My moment of victory was cut short as two more moved to come around the wounded ally in what would soon be a pincer attack. Behind them I could see at least five more who had lost the doggy dominance displays necessary to be the one to eat me first. So I did the most manly and valiant thing I could, I turned to run at the Beasty Bro with the hope that it would slow the onslaught.

What I saw was not good. Daisy was on the ground next to the two fighters while they duked it out. One dogzilla was slowly, almost stealthily, dragging Aphrodite away by her leg and two others were squaring off over the rights to MadMerlin. KingArthor had lost his helmet but was displaying some extremely impressive swords work despite his exhausted look. Barrington the beasty boy reacted as though he could see where the blow was going long before it landed and his blocks caused a look of pain on the knight's face. DeLong, thanks to him still having his machine gun, was faring fairly well against the dogs as only three of them were menacing him from a bit of a distance and several more had been disabled in their approach. Then the killer cat came down from above like the unnatural thing it was, giving him a nasty wound on his left arm but being unable to do any more damage before it had to retreat. There was nothing I could do for Delong or the downed people right now, but I could do something to help KingArthor.

Just as the Beast-master stepped back from blocking KingArthor's two swings I struck, bringing my blade around in an underhanded toss straight at my enemy. He blocked, of course, with that stupidly fast reaction time of his, but I was already under his sweeping blade and went straight for his legs. Unfortunately he noticed before I could bowl him over, but Arthor maneuvered to block his retreat just enough that I was able to at least grab one of his legs. Not that I could do much of anything other than hold on, but I hoped it would hinder his mobility. I rolled my eyes at getting a one-point 'grab' skill as I was kicked about during the fight. It was weird, at first I grabbed nothing but the shield around his leg but within a second or so by grip solidified around him as I made my way through the shield. How exactly do these things work? That's something to look into later.

I never actually saw how that battle ended, as I was a bit busy holding on, all I saw was a massive flash of light followed by the sound of KingArthor falling and the tazer-sword flickering out. He swore then rushed at DeLong's back dragging me along as I yelled a warning that was too little too late. My teammate turned in time to take a solid punch to the temple that dropped him almost instantly. Almost instantly, though, as in that last moment he dropped an armed grenade right at our feet. My eyes went wide in horror as the thing rolled toward my face only to feel some relief as our enemy lazily kicked it away.

"You've lost, kid. Might as well take it like a man." He said with a deep but surprisingly not-ugly voice.

"I've never been very good at loosing." I bravely said to his face from my place at his feet. Eve, message the others: "Help!" Practically speaking, one liners or no, I was screwed.

He just shrugged and demonstrated his superior strength by throwing me around, still attached to his leg. It was a quick motion, first backwards and then forward, sending his foot into my ribs and nearly dislodging me as one arm came off him completely and I rammed into DeLong's unconscious form. I panicked and made a desperate attempt to stop my movement by grabbing at the body only to be pulled away with nothing for my effort but a useless grenade. It was a nice military grade M67 model, but Kitana had already demonstrated what happened when you tried to use someone else's stuff, so it was basically dead weight. Still, inspiration hit me and, as the leg I was on got ready for another kick, I acted like the troll I am and reached up to drop the grenade into the leg sheath for his sword. Immediately after he finished his kick and I flew through the air the fifteen feet to land on the pile of KingArthor and Daisy. The impact hurt but seeing a small pin in my hand brought a tired but satisfied grin to my face. Five, Four…

"What's so funny kid?" he asked as his tazer-sword sparked back to life. Three…

"Fallout and creative use of pickpocket." I answered and then jumped behind KingArthor, just in case. Two, one...

My countdown never finished and the beast-master only had time to give me an incredulous look before it went off. My dive, as it turned out, was completely unnecessary. The entire explosion was contained within the force field, only showing a strange fiery glow at the point of origin and then a mass of pixilation as he disappeared. Three pop-up notifications showed up in my lower vision. The first popup informed me that the round's boss had been killed with a fragmentation grenade, congratulated us, and proclaimed that we would get more credits and experience rewards for the success at the end of the round. The second informed me that I had killed the boss and would be getting bonus credit and experience rewards at the end of the round.

The third was the most interesting, and the thing that made me pause as the cavalry reappeared. Thiago used his shotgun to clear the beast sneaking up on me as Ace warded away the beasts from Delong, Aphrodite, and managed to wound one of the cats. Kitana, for her part, showed a terrifyingly bloodthirsty grin and threw herself at the biggest mass of enemies there were. I barely noticed as I reread the notification again to make sure I understood it.

"You have demonstrated sufficient mastery to be awarded a new ability. "Swipe." 1pt. This is the basic thievery skill associated with the removal of unattended objects in unguarded situations."

Eve, is that right? Can you actually steal stuff in The Game, despite the protections, as something built into the system?!

… Eve answered in her usual way.