"So. Do I understand this correctly? You can create different solid matter manipulation options in your spell builder?" my brother asked. "You do realize that's a pretty broad concept?"
"Of course! I leveled my Intelligence to twenty, and now I'm several times smarter than I was before," I playfully replied to Dima. "So don't bother trying to play chess with me. You'll just lose."
"So, you can make stone arrows, just like your ice arrows, and shoot them?" my father prompted.
"In theory, it's possible, but not very effective. It would just make a hole in the body, and that doesn't work on all creatures. Besides, I already have pretty effective skills against living targets, but I don't have anything armor-piercing or useful against a horde of small enemies."
"Then why not make a magical analog of my Saiga?" my dad continued, developing the idea. "You're somehow making your ice things and launching them. Why not make stone pellets and shoot with those?"
"Hmm…" I pondered. "That's an excellent idea! Dad, Dima, cover me then. I need to get to work."
I pulled my field kit out of my inventory, the one that had saved me more than once before.
"Mom, can you make some tea and sandwiches for everyone? Dad just started learning a new skill, and it recommends high-calorie nutrition. I'll make my own now and eat after."
After giving everyone a task to distract them from their problems, I opened the spell builder and dove into the design.
First and most importantly—the name! To be honest, I was already tired of shouting out skill names like in a cartoon, so I needed to come up with something simple but memorable. And it definitely had to be tied to a specific hand gesture so it wouldn't accidentally trigger in everyday life. I could set the name to "Shot." It's clear, short enough, and I won't get confused by similar names. Otherwise, I could just number the skills, but I'd get mixed up, call out the wrong number, and kill everyone around me.
I went back to building and started thinking. I could try to form metal directly, but what guarantees that there would be enough iron in the surrounding space? It's the same problem with stone. If I were to form granite, I'd have to create an incredibly complex chemical formula, and it's not clear where I would get the elements. It's not a given that the necessary chemical elements would be found in the environment to create stone out of nothing. So, the approach of gathering a molecular structure, like with Ice Blade, is fundamentally wrong here. I need to change the approach and work with the material that's already available.
I sat down on the floor, and after nodding to my worried relatives, I began to feel the floor, illuminating it with the light from my flashlight. The thin veins in the stone, similar to flowing waves, looked a lot like marble, which, forming under high pressure and temperature from ordinary limestone, leaves just such patterns.
I set a request to analyze the surrounding environment, cutting the scanning range to a hemisphere directed down from my feet with the maximum available radius. The resulting area captured five meters to the sides and five meters down. That's a little more than two hundred and fifty cubic meters, in which I could now set a search for solid minerals with a hardness coefficient according to the Mohs scale. As I recall, it has a gradation from one to ten, where clay, as a soft rock, has one point, and the hardest is the well-known diamond with ten points. Marble itself is three to six points, but granite holds a leading position with a solid seven.
I took five points as the minimum, but set the priority for maximum strength and formed the projectiles. During the analysis, the hardest found material would be used. Again, a standard twelve-gauge shotgun shell contains either fine shot, up to five hundred pieces, or several large buckshot pellets, eight millimeters in size. If I was going to make a skill, I needed to make it as devastating as possible so that one shot could wreak havoc and destruction in an entire area. What's more, I'm not limited by the size of the shell's caliber, and I can easily make a thousand buckshot pellets; the only question is the energy cost.
I took the buckshot as a basis, keeping the standard millimetrage but increasing their number to a hundred pieces in a small area to reduce scatter.
"Dad! What's the buckshot velocity from your Saiga?"
"Six hundred to eight hundred meters per second," my father immediately replied, knowing the characteristics of his shotgun by heart.
I added an initial flight speed of seven hundred meters and set the condition to extract solid materials from the scanned area.
I crossed my fingers and pressed the calculation for the amount of energy required for the manipulations. Due to using existing material without the need to build crystal lattices, the cost came out to only 0.2 percent per shot, and after looking at the result in the simulator, I confirmed the skill's formation.
"Phew! I'm done!" I announced to those around me.
"Well? Will you show us?" my father asked with interest.
"In twelve hours, after it forms. Mom, do we have anything to eat?" I was dying to grab a bite. Preferably a big one.
"Of course, son, here," my mom handed me tea with a whole plate of sandwiches and continued. "We often vacationed in nature with you since childhood, and picnics were in different places, but to have one in a crypt with reanimated undead, this is definitely a first."
"At least we're all together," my father came up to her and hugged her. "Go on, son, finish your meal and take over guard duty. Let Dima rest and eat too. We'll divide the twelve hours between the three of us so we don't get completely exhausted."
"Hey! I'm going to stand guard too," Mom tried to protest, but when she saw our indignant looks, she fell silent and quieted down.
I pulled the glowing stones I had mined in the rat's lair from my inventory and laid them out in several piles, putting the largest one at the entrance, in case a new creature came out of there. "An echo of our adventures," I commented on the crystals. "Sometimes you find some pretty funny little things."
"By the way," my brother asked. "How long does the communicator's battery last?"
"According to the answers from my voice assistant, the bracelet has microscopic nanogenerators built-in that use quantum effects to harvest energy. So theoretically the energy reserve is infinite, and it only grows with a level increase."
"That's some cosmic level of technology," my father couldn't help but say. "There's a thing called the Kardashev scale, which measures a civilization's technological development. They came up with it back in the Soviet Union and published it in sixty-four. According to that scale, we're a Type I civilization, using only our planet's energy. If humanity could build a Dyson sphere around the sun and use all the energy it produces for its own needs, it would be considered a Type II civilization. But according to you, these bracelets use energy from quantum vacuum fluctuations and photons, using phenomena on a nanometer scale. That's infinite energy! I don't think the creator of the bracelets is human. An unimaginable level of technology, and for what? So humanity can kill monsters in portals?" my father came to a logical conclusion.
"I thought about that, Dad. But we have only two options. The first is to live an ordinary life, and when whatever the bracelet creators are leading us to happens, to find ourselves on the sidelines of life, if we don't die altogether. And the second is to use the opportunity and power up as much as possible. So these moral torments can just be put aside, and we can go with the flow. And when a chance presents itself, we grab it."
Timosha barked as if agreeing with what I said. We started, thinking more monsters were coming, but the alarm was false.
"You red-headed idiot, what are you barking for?" my brother asked the dog and ruffled his head. Timosha wagged his tail and, as always, started licking my brother's face from an excess of emotion.
"Right... Inventory learned. Son, what do I do next?"
"Open your communicator and select 'Inventory,' then try to put an item in there."
My father took the Saiga in his hands and put it in his inventory. The familiar scene of the mind-bending folding of the object into itself, and it was done.
"Right. And how do I get it out?"
"In the same place, in your inventory, you should now have a cell with the item's description. Just select it, and it will be in your hands."
"But there's nothing here, the inventory is empty," my father replied, not understanding.
A stab of anxiety hit my heart. I walked over to my father and looked at the holographic panel of his inventory.
"Indeed, nothing. What the hell?"
"But here, in skills, my shotgun is here. Or rather, there's only one skill, and it's called 'Saiga 12k,' for some reason broken into two parts, and each with a capital letter."
"What's the description?"
"Let's see… 'Increases weapon characteristics by ten percent for each skill iteration when firing generated projectiles.' The shot cost is 0.5 percent of the current energy capacity."
"Wait… Stop!" I rubbed the bridge of my nose. "So your weapon disappeared and became a skill? And a scalable one at that? With the ability to create its own ammo?" I asked, with a slight note of hysteria from the injustice of it all.
"It seems so. But what's so wrong with that?" my father still didn't understand.
"Well, the ammo generation is fine. After all, I just made a skill myself where I fire a hundred buckshot pellets for half the price. But! 'Increases weapon characteristics by ten percent for each skill iteration when firing generated projectiles'—that's completely unbalanced. At the first level, yes, the weapon will be ten percent stronger, and for example, the initial bullet velocity is no longer eight hundred but eight hundred and eighty meters per second. And every single skill point you put into the weapon, which you get for leveling up, will increase the power of the weapon by ten percent. And that's not only the flight speed but everything else too. And at level twenty-five, the bullet velocity will be eight thousand meters per second, and at fifty, when the characteristics have increased by twelve thousand percent, it will be ninety-six thousand eight hundred meters per second. Almost ninety-seven kilometers! You'll be able to shoot down satellites and fire at the moon with your Saiga! No, wait…" I corrected myself. "I completely forgot about air resistance! When meteors fall to Earth, they burn up in the atmosphere because of air resistance, and the speeds aren't even comparable. At ninety-seven kilometers per second, you'll be shooting cursed meteors!"
"Oh wow!" the others said in unison, impressed.
"I don't know how the recoil will be handled, what will compensate for the power, and how the weapon's material will change, but first and foremost, Dad, you should increase your Strength and Constitution to handle the weapon, and only then your Dexterity to use it at full power, managing to aim at fast opponents. And still, if possible, learn a less destructive skill. Because if you shoot such a chimera at a high level, you'll destroy not only it but also a couple of hundred kilometers of the area behind it. And you'll leave a scorched wasteland just because the whole area will literally boil from the collision of buckshot with air atoms. In short, it won't be a shotgun, but a weapon of mass destruction."
The remaining thirty minutes until my new skill formed flew by unnoticed in conversation with my relatives. We recalled childhood stories and shared our impressions. I told my parents about life in the capital, and they were horrified by the morals that prevailed there.
And indeed, as I talked about my recent life, I realized that living in Moscow was very convenient. Excellent service with amenities, shops, theaters, and architecture available at any time of day. But the endless rat race of its inhabitants and the general haste of those around you, dragging everyone into their rhythm, negated all those advantages.
Take even the trivial amount of time the average person spends commuting to work, and it turns out that twenty percent of the day consists of travel. And everyone around is in a hurry, in a hurry. Even on the metro, where it would seem the escalator carries you at a decent speed, people are still in a hurry and walk up it too.
But I think this is because of problems with self-organization. After all, no one prevents people from finding a job close to home, and then there will be no need to spend your life running like a hamster on a wheel.
But in the provinces, where there is not such a crowd and the rhythm of life is much slower, people always found time for themselves and lived a full life, often going out of town, traveling, and taking care of themselves and their family. It was the same now; we were strengthening family social bonds, albeit in the conditions of a medieval crypt with undead.
"Well? Shall we test it?" I asked a rhetorical question after the skill finished learning.
"Go on, son. Let it rip!"
I held out my index finger and uttered the activation word, "Shot!" The round buckshot pellets, which burst out from under the ground in a split second, raised a small cloud of dust, hung in front of my index finger, and without any further sound effects, rushed into the passage, which I was aiming for to avoid ricochets.
"Seems good. Now let's test it on the skeleton of the first skeleton."
The headless skeleton, which practically disintegrated into small pieces, left not only my parents and brother but also me impressed. Very decent firepower, which should definitely be enough for the chimera.
A bone creature, almost the same as the previous one, jumped out at us. With the first shot, it lost a paw, which was torn off by the large shot. The chimera fell on its side, hitting the floor with its empty skull, and the second shot deprived it of its second support paw, leaving only three hind ones, with which it crawled forward, moving its body. I moved to the side a little, and with the third shot, I tore off two hind legs at once, leaving one, with which it could no longer move and only snapped its toothed maw.
"Dima. Do you want to try finishing it with the axe?"
My brother cautiously moved toward the chimera and, raising his axe, struck the monster with force. At the last moment, the chimera jerked its head, and Dima missed, hitting the floor with his axe and beginning to fall toward the skeletal creature.
I, covering my brother, managed to grab his clothes and pull him back, saving him from inevitable tearing bites. The teeth of this creature looked so bad that a single light wound certainly wouldn't have been the end of it.
"Let's try again."
This time, he succeeded. With the blunt side of the axe, so as not to dull the blade, my brother smashed the creature's head, ending its existence.
[Participated in the killing of a level 5 bone chimera. Received 15 experience points.]
"Damn it. I only got fifty experience points for it," my brother complained. "We need to find another one of these creatures."
The next crypt greeted us with a familiar sarcophagus, only this time the lid was already half ajar, and a bone chimera was crawling out of it, its bones cracking as it straightened, apparently having been in storage mode to save space. To its great chagrin, it didn't even manage to get completely out of the stone coffin before I, coming up from the side, tore off its entire hind part with three absurd paws with one shot. The creature, which fell to the stone floor from a height, broke off its protruding horn and broke the long, clawed fingers on its left paw. However, it didn't need it, as I also shot it off a few seconds later.
A few axe blows, and another pile of bones was left lying on the crypt floor, bringing my brother the long-awaited experience points he needed to get his first level. He immediately started learning the inventory and handed the axe to my mom.
"Hold on! Keep it, we'll test a theory," I stopped him and, taking a crossbow from my inventory, handed it to my mom. "Let's try to finish off an opponent with the crossbow. If you shoot at approximately the same place, you'll definitely crack the skull. And I suggest we go back to the very beginning and open the sarcophagi that were left behind. It would be unpleasant if we reached the location's boss and they came running up from behind."
With that argument, everyone was forced to agree, and the three of us managed to move the lid of the stone coffin a little. As soon as its integrity was violated, blows came from inside. The chimera was hitting the coffin lid with its whole body, literally knocking it out from the inside.
"That's insane, it's so strong," my brother commented on what was happening. "If you get hit by a creature like that, no bulletproof vest will help. And this is a level two location? What if I were here alone with an axe, how would I have managed?"
"I assume that ordinary locations are much easier, and there's no reward for them. But for the group portals that I went to with a party, we were all given an additional stat point," I pulled a dagger from my inventory and showed it to those around me. "This Quantum Effector," I read the description. "It just breaks the standard model. And we are in an atypical portal right now. Before, when I went through these, I got from two to five additional stats, plus an additional skill. The difficulty, of course, is off the charts for an ordinary person without equipment, but the reward is worthy."
The chimera shook the coffin lid and, expanding the passage enough, began to crawl out. The shrapnel shot didn't fail, tearing the bone creature in half, and my mom, under our approving glances, stuck three crossbow bolts into the creature's skull, splitting it into three parts. It came out even easier than with my brother, and with almost no risk. One more unopened sarcophagus, and a level.
"Judging by Dad's skill," I nodded in his direction, "everyone has a chance to get a rare skill. You all entered a location without even properly activating your bracelets, and this is a slightly abnormal situation that the communicators' developers might not have foreseen. So I suggest we wait for both of you to learn your inventory and see what happens, and only then we'll go on."
"Mila," my father walked up to my mom. "You're so amazing."
Dad hugged my mom and stood, stroking her hair. The dog, seeing that they were hugging without him, whined and began to jump around, eager to participate in the embraces. My mom laughed and picked the dog up, letting it lick her whole face.
"Alright…" she made her verdict. "Honestly, we've already been here for sixteen hours," she glanced at her watch. "And another twelve will be a bit difficult, so we need to rest. And this time I will also stand guard!"
Not wanting to argue with a determined woman, we went back to the beginning and settled down, laying our clothes on the stone floor. It was a good thing the temperature here was clearly not wintry, and even the stone didn't cool the body, retaining heat.
While time slowly passed, I raised my Strength and Dexterity to nine points each. It was a shame there was nothing to test my increased strength on; I couldn't very well lift my brother on outstretched arms. But I tried to stretch my slightly stiff body, and I easily managed to reach my toes on the first try, without a warm-up. Then a wheel, like I did as a kid, and a front flip. My body obeyed me amazingly.
My parents, watching my efforts with a smile, were quietly talking to each other, not disturbing my brother, who had dozed off on the floor, when the alarm signal woke him up, and he sat up, rubbing his eyes. He yawned and said:
"Well, it's not a five-star hotel, but it's acceptable. Mom. How's the skill? What are they offering?"
My theory was confirmed, and everyone received frankly unfair skills. Moreover, while my mom's were very similar to my dad's, my brother with the axe was strengthening himself, getting a five percent boost to Strength and Dexterity at each level. And by level fifty, he would become an unstoppable killing machine, receiving more than a thousand percent boost. If Dad and Mom could shoot down planes with their shots, Dima would be able to catch up if needed.
I was a little disappointed, but I pulled myself together and was genuinely happy for my family, who had received a chance at a future, and decided to do my best not to fall behind them. And besides, by 2033, there were already more than ten billion people living on Earth, and if even half of them got skills, what's the guarantee that they wouldn't have similarly absurdly powerful abilities?
"Dad, how's your skill?"
My father opened the communicator panel and set the weapon summon. In his hands, after activation, his old Saiga unfolded, retaining all its scuffs and outwardly not changing at all. Dad tried to detach the magazine, but it was stuck fast, not allowing itself to be removed. So that was the first difference.
"Shall we do some tests? Since the magazine was a ten-round one, we should technically fire more than ten rounds to see what happens. And while you're at it, display the energy level on the communicator to keep track of it."
The shot, louder than usual, made the dog crouch and pin its ears back, and the subsequent barrage of fifteen more shots plunged it into despair. Before, the shots hadn't sounded as loud, and no one had fired in an enclosed space, even though there was enough room for the sound to travel away without returning.
"Minus eight percent, and I have thirty-two left. The consumption is pretty high, of course," my father said, a little disappointed.
"As a rule, one shot will be enough for almost all opponents, and we're a team, there's always someone to provide cover," I reassured him. "Well, shall we go and finish this overextended adventure?"
My father and I in front, as the most heavily armed, and my brother with my mom and the dog in the back, we left the place where we had spent the last twenty-four hours and went on. The dog was having the most fun, periodically bringing back bones and demanding my brother to throw them farther away.
"Oh… Someone is going to have to wash their mouth with soap after these adventures," my mom casually remarked. The dog, hearing these words, froze, dropped the bone from its mouth, and pushed it back with its paw. It ran up to its owner and wagged its curly tail devotedly, its whole appearance saying that it was just a sweetheart and its mouth absolutely did not need to be washed. And that it wouldn't put any more nasty things in its mouth.
"Alright. Attention!" my father raised his hand. "The passage is widening, and there's light ahead. We must have made it."