Friday, July 4, 1983 - Hawkins, Indiana
___________________________________________________________________________
The whole town was at the fireworks.
Ryan could hear them from the Miller property's back yard, muffled thumps and a faint whistle-crack that carried across the flat Indiana farmland. Pete had gone to the downtown display with the Hendersons. The guys were scattered with their families. Even the Sinclairs, who Lucas said treated Independence Day like a military operation, had driven over to the high school football field with lawn chairs and a cooler.
Nobody was within a mile of the house.
Ryan stood in the back yard, listening to the distant fireworks and looking at the privet hedge. He'd finished his second Vine Crawler clear of the day two hours ago and meditated his MP back to full while sitting on the porch, watching the sky turn orange and purple.
He'd been running the same loop for five days. Create the Vine Crawler ID. Clear the house. Kill everything inside. Loot. Escape. Meditate. Repeat. The routine was productive and the numbers were good and the loop was getting very, very boring.
Today he was going to try something different.
He activated ID Create. Selected Vine Crawlers. The familiar drain of 38 MP pulled from his chest, and the world went wrong.
Color bled away. The yard turned brown-gray, the hedge darkened, the sky flattened to that empty nothing that always made him think of an environment that hadn't finished loading. Shadow vines crawled across the porch behind him, tendrils pushing through the cracks in the siding he'd repaired last week. The copied house was already infested.
He ignored it.
Instead of going inside, Ryan walked down the porch steps, crossed the yard, and pushed through the gap in the privet hedge.
The dirt road stretched south. Gray and lifeless, the ruts from old tire tracks perfectly preserved in the copy. Vines had crawled across the road surface like dark veins, some thin as twine and some thick as his wrist, looping over fence posts and hanging from the branches of a dead-looking elm twenty feet ahead.
He'd never walked outside the property boundary in the ID before. Weeks of creating pocket dimensions, and he'd always stayed in the house. Cleared the rooms, looted, left. The house was almost like a safe zone for him by now.
Ryan took ten steps down the road and a vine cluster dropped from the elm branch.
He sidestepped, let the mass of tendrils hit dirt, and put a Mana Bolt through the center of it before it could recoil. The bolt punched through and scorched the road behind. The cluster convulsed, sprayed dark liquid, and dissolved into loot.
Vine Fiber. Three dollars in crumpled bills.
He kept walking.
More vines at fifty meters. A cluster growing through the slats of a wooden fence, tendrils reaching for the road. He burned it with two bolts and a Power Strike on the thickest tendril that whipped toward his legs.
At a hundred meters, the road curved south toward the Byers property. The terrain changed. Open fields on both sides, and the vines here grew differently. Instead of dropping from overhead or lunging from walls, they spread across the ground in low mats, barely raised above the gray dirt, easy to miss until a tendril wrapped your ankle.
Ryan learned that the hard way. A ground vine caught his right foot mid-stride and yanked. He stumbled, caught himself, and drove a Power Strike into the mat. The force blew a crater in the vine network and splattered residue across his jeans. Three more ground mats ahead. He could see them now that he knew what to look for, subtle ridges in the otherwise flat field surface.
He fired bolts at each one from ten meters out. The mats erupted, tendrils flailing, and died within seconds. More loot. More Vine Fiber, more cash, a vial of Shadow Sap.
He walked for forty minutes. Every few hundred meters, new clusters. The terrain kept changing and the vines adapted. Road clusters ambushed from the ditches. Field clusters hid in the grass. When the tree line thickened near the creek bed south of the property, forest clusters dropped from above in curtains of wet dark tendrils that required him to dodge and fire simultaneously.
The forest vines were the hardest. They came from every direction, and the canopy blocked his sight lines. He took hits. Vine grabs that cost 15 HP each, a ceiling drop that caught his shoulder and squeezed before he ripped free. His HP dipped to 210 before he cleared the tree line and came out the other side.
The copied Byers house sat at the end of the road. Dark and vine-covered. The windows were black, the walls draped in shadow growth so thick it looked like the house was wearing a skin of something organic. The front porch sagged under the weight.
Ryan cleared the yard. Three dense clusters, tougher than the road vines, with thicker tendrils and faster reaction times. He burned through 80 MP on the yard alone, firing bolt after bolt while dancing around grasping vines that came from under the porch, through the rotten lattice, out of the overgrown flower beds.
When the last cluster dissolved, he stood in the cleared yard and breathed. His hands tingled from the MP expenditure, but his body felt fine. Game logic. Two hours of near-constant fighting and he wasn't winded.
He Observed the loot piled across the dirt. Vine Fiber bundles, Shadow Sap vials, cash, and a familiar red glow.
Two Minor HP Potions this time. And a total of $68 from the yard clusters alone.
Ryan pulled up his Inventory and started collecting. The walk had taken two hours, covered maybe two miles of road and forest, and generated much more loot and XP than the house runs.
He activated ID Escape. Color and sound crashed back. The real Byers yard was smaller, messier, with Jonathan's car parked in the driveway and a light on in the kitchen window. He was lucky nobody was there to watch him pop out of nowhere.
Ryan stood behind the tree line, invisible in the dark, and checked his totals.
Vine Fiber, eighteen bundles. Shadow Sap, four vials. Three Minor HP Potions. And a hundred and forty-two dollars in cash from two hours of work.
A hundred and forty-two. He'd been pulling thirty to forty dollars per afternoon from the house interior runs. The full-world exploration had multiplied his income by four, and the XP was proportional. Dozens of vine clusters killed across miles of copied terrain. The experience bar had been moving visibly with every fight.
The notification appeared while he was counting bills.
[Level Up! Level 7 → Level 8]
[You have gained 5 stat points!]
[You have gained 1 skill point!]
[HP and MP have been fully restored.]
The warmth spread through him. The familiar full body reset, everything refilling, the soreness in his hands from gripping vine tendrils vanishing.
Three into INT. Two into WIS. INT: 35 to 38. WIS: 24 to...
The allocation was paused. WIS hit 25 before the second point applied, and the system interrupted itself.
[WIS has reached 25!]
[Threshold Bonus Unlocked: Inner Calm]
[+20% MP regeneration. Lie detection available with sustained concentration.]
Ryan sat down on a tree stump at the edge of the Byers property and read the notification twice. WIS 25. The second stat threshold. He'd been putting points into WIS because MP regeneration scaled with it and because every fraction of a percent faster recovery meant more casts per dungeon run. The threshold bonus was an unexpected windfall.
Twenty percent MP regeneration. His base regen at WIS 26, after the second point applied, would be roughly 13 MP per minute out of combat. With Inner Calm boosting that by a fifth, call it 15 or 16 per minute. Combined with Meditation, he'd recover his full pool in under minutes.
And lie detection. He could tell when someone was lying to him if he concentrated. The implications of that were huge. He was fifteen. Adults lied to fifteen-year-olds constantly. Teachers, Pete, shop owners, anyone with something to protect.
The second point finished allocating. WIS 26. The warmth settled. The world sharpened by a fraction he couldn't quite define, as though the contrast between objects had been turned up slightly. The oak tree to his left was an oak tree, but now he could see the individual furrows in the bark and the way one branch was growing at a slightly wrong angle from a healed wound.
He walked back to the Miller property in the dark, counting fireworks overhead and running numbers.
* * *
The next two weeks were a complete push trough.
Ryan ran the full-world ID every afternoon. He varied his routes. South to the Byers house and beyond. West into the farmland where the vine clusters grew in the open fields and he could see them coming from a hundred meters. East toward the creek, where the forest vines were denser and more aggressive but dropped better loot.
On the second day, he brought equipment.
The baseball bat came from a sell yard, a Louisville Slugger with a crack in the handle that he'd repaired with wood glue and Mana Crafting. He'd been ignoring it as a weapon until now, because his fists and Mana Bolt were doing the job. But two miles of road combat had taught him that Mana Bolt cost 15 MP each, and MP was the bottleneck. A bat cost nothing to swing.
He entered the Vine Crawler ID with the bat in his right hand and hit the first cluster he saw. A full overhead swing that connected with the main stalk of a road vine and splattered it across the dirt.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Blunt Weapon Mastery (Passive) - LV 1]
Increases damage and stun chance with blunt weapons.
+1% damage, +0.5% stun chance per level.
The bat was a fucking big deal. Against vine clusters, a Power Strike through the bat hit harder than his fists and didn't cost anything beyond the 10 MP for the skill activation. The bat's reach meant he could hit tendrils before they reached his body. And the stun chance, even at half a percent, occasionally locked a vine in place long enough for a follow-up swing.
So, he also tried a kitchen knife the next day. A four-dollar purchase from the hardware store, cheap carbon steel with a wooden handle. He used it to cut vine tendrils that wrapped around his arms and legs during grapple phases, sawing through the fibrous plant matter while Power Striking with his free hand.
[Blade Mastery (Passive) - LV 1]
Increases damage, accuracy, and speed with bladed weapons.
+1% per level.
By the end of the first week, Blunt Weapon Mastery was LV 2 and Blade Mastery sat at LV 1. The bat saw more use. Ryan was a batter, not a knife fighter, and the bat's geometry suited him better. The knife was a backup for close entanglements.
Wednesday, July 9th. A forest vine caught his right hand and squeezed, pinning his fingers around the Zippo he'd been carrying as a light source and as experiment. His thumb found the striker on instinct. The flame caught the vine's surface and the reaction was immediate.
The vine ignited. It went up like it had been soaked in kerosene. Yellow fire raced along the tendril from the contact point to the main stalk two feet away. The vine thrashed, releasing his hand, and the burning section separated from the cluster, writhing on the ground while flames consumed it.
Ryan stood there, lighter still open, watching a shadow vine burn to nothing in under ten seconds. The experiment was successful.
Fire. Fire was the answer to plant-type and Upside-Down enemies, and he'd been punching them for two weeks like an idiot. He sure needs some skill for that.
He bought a spray bottle from the hardware store the next morning. Filled it with lighter fluid. The combination worked exactly the way he'd hoped.
Spray a vine cluster at arm's length, flick the Zippo, and watch it burn. The fire did more sustained damage than Mana Bolt against vine types, and the lighter fluid cost sixty cents for a can that lasted all day.
The fire discovery led him somewhere else. On the second day of lighter-fluid operations, while spraying a cluster at the edge of a field, Ryan pushed the fluid through the air with a pulse of Earth Shaping, extending the spray's range by two meters. Then he followed it with a Mana Bolt aimed at the spray cloud.
The bolt hit the aerosolized lighter fluid and the combination detonated in a flash of orange that crisped the vine cluster and scorched a circle of gray dirt around it.
He tried to replicate it without the lighter fluid. A Mana Bolt, but hotter. He'd been shaping MP into a compressed sphere for weeks. What if he shaped it with heat already encoded?
Three attempts. The first two bolts fired normally, pale blue and cool. On the third, he held the sphere a half-second longer and pushed the internal energy faster, compressing it past the point where the MP stayed stable. The bolt left his hand glowing white-orange instead of blue.
It hit a fence post and the wood caught fire.
[Skill "Mana Bolt " has evolved a variant through creative application!]
[Mana Bolt: Ignition (Active) - Variant]
A superheated Mana Bolt that ignites on impact.
Damage: INT × 1.0 + fire damage over 3 seconds.
MP Cost: 20 | Requires: Mana Bolt LV 3+
Twenty MP per cast, five more than the base bolt. But the fire damage over three seconds meant total output exceeded the standard bolt significantly, and against vines it was devastating. One Ignition bolt could set a whole cluster ablaze, turning a 30-second fight into a five-second bonfire.
Mana Bolt had hit LV 3 mid-week from the sheer volume of casts during extended exploration runs. Hundreds of bolts fired across miles of copied terrain. The variant unlocked automatically the moment he met the threshold and attempted the modification. Sharp Mind compressing the creation process, turning what might have taken twenty attempts into three.
* * *
Between Vine Crawler runs, Ryan worked on defense.
He'd been taking hits. The forest vine clusters were fast and attacked from angles he couldn't always anticipate. His HP stayed above half during every run, but the damage accumulated, and he'd started thinking about what happened when something faster than a vine was trying to kill him.
In the Empty ID, alone in the gray kitchen, he attempted Mana Shield. The concept was straightforward from the manhwa: shape MP into a barrier around the body, sustain it with continuous feed. The execution took seven attempts. The first to third produced nothing. Four to six generated a flicker of blue light around his right forearm that collapsed after half a second. And the seventh, with Sharp Mind feeding the pattern recognition, produced a translucent shimmer that covered his torso and held.
[Mana Shield (Active) - LV 1]
Creates a barrier that absorbs incoming damage.
Shield HP: INT × 5
MP Cost: 20 to cast + 5/second sustained.
At INT 41, that was 205 shield HP. He tested it against a vine strike in the next Crawler run. The vine hit the shield, and the shimmer absorbed the impact. His HP didn't move and the vine recoiled.
The sustained cost was the problem. Five MP per second drained his pool in under ninety seconds. The shield was a panic button, not a permanent defense. He'd use it for ambushes and concentrated attacks, then drop it to conserve.
By the end of the second week, the numbers looked different.
[Level Up! Level 8 → Level 9]
INT: 38 → 41. WIS: 26 → 28.
[Level Up! Level 9 → Level 10]
INT: 41 → 44. WIS: 28 → 30.
Two more levels from the full-world exploration runs. The XP from dozens of vine clusters per session, stacked across fourteen days of daily runs, pushed him through Level 9 and into Level 10 faster than any previous stretch.
ID Create leveled alongside. Extended sessions gave the skill far more XP than the twenty-minute house cycles had, and the gains were visible.
[Skill "ID Create" has leveled up! LV 5 → LV 6]
Then LV 7. Then LV 8.
LV 8 brought the MP cost down to 32 and the cooldown to 34 minutes. And a new feature. He could partially influence spawn density. Cranking the density up meant more clusters per area, more combat, faster XP. Cranking it down meant safer travel for exploration.
The money accumulated in his Inventory like water behind a dam. A hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars per extended run, every day, for two weeks. His running total passed two thousand by July 15th.
He'd started as a kid mowing lawns for five bucks. Now he was pulling more daily income than most adults in Hawkins earned in a week, and all of it generated by a pocket dimension full of shadow plants.
* * *
The physical stats crossed a line Ryan hadn't taught he will manage to reach.
Two weeks of weighted morning runs, push-up sets past eighty, pull-ups past thirty, plus the ID combat that demanded constant movement, dodging, swinging, and grappling. The combination pushed harder than either source alone.
Week eight: STR 16 to 17, 18, 19. VIT 18 to 19, 20, 21. DEX 16 to 17, 18, 19.
With week nine, slower a bit: STR 19 to 20. VIT 21 to 22. DEX 19 to 20.
STR 20.
He found out what it meant on a Tuesday morning when he picked up the kitchen table at Pete's house to sweep underneath. He grabbed one end and lifted, expecting the familiar resistance of solid oak and the weight of a table that normally took two hands.
The table came up like it was made of cardboard.
He set it down fast. Looked at his hand. Looked at the table. Picked it up again, one-handed, and held it level at his waist without strain. The thing weighed sixty, maybe seventy pounds. His arm barely registered the load.
That afternoon, helping Lucas move a fallen log during the Saturday training session, Ryan lifted his end and realized Lucas was straining with both arms, face red, legs braced. Ryan was holding his end with one hand while waiting for Lucas to get a better grip. He adjusted fast, grunted for show, and shifted to a two-handed hold.
Lucas didn't say anything.
He started being careful. Doors opened gently. Handshakes got moderated. The glass that cracked in his grip during dishes taught him that Dishwashing LV 4 didn't prevent super-strength accidents. He washed the replacement glass like he was handling an egg.
* * *
Saturday, July 9th. After the training session.
"I want to show you guys something."
They were standing in Mike's driveway, sweating, bikes leaning against the garage door. Ryan had run them through a longer session today. Three miles, the expanded obstacle course along the creek bed, more hand-to-hand combat on the Wheelers' lawn that had Mrs. Wheeler watching from the kitchen window with an expression that suggested she was reconsidering her position on outdoor activities.
"Is it another training course?" Dustin asked, pulling his cap off to wipe his forehead. "Because my legs just filed a formal complaint."
"It's better. Follow me."
They biked south on Route 7. Ryan led, setting a pace that pushed but didn't punish. The guys followed in a loose line, Mike and Lucas side by side, Dustin lagging slightly, Will at the back.
When they turned onto the dirt road and the Miller property came into view, Dustin slowed.
"That's the haunted house."
"It's not haunted."
"Ryan, that house has been empty since I was nine. The Peterson kids used to dare each other to throw rocks at the windows." He was straddling his bike, one foot on the ground, eyeing the sagging front porch and broken ground-floor windows like they owed him money.
"Come around back."
They followed him along the hedge line to the rear entrance. Ryan opened the back door and stepped aside.
The kitchen was clean. New hinges on the cabinets, counters scrubbed to the, the gas stove functional, the floor swept and even. The table Ryan had built from scrap lumber sat in the center with four chairs he'd repaired over the past three weeks. Afternoon light came through the back window, warm and gold, hitting the new shelf he'd mounted on the far wall.
Lucas walked in first. He stopped in the doorway, scanned the room left to right, checked the windows, checked the exits. Always the tactician. "You did this?"
"Over the last couple months. Since the end of May."
Mike came in behind Lucas. Opened a cabinet. Closed it. Opened another. His eyes moved over the organized tools, the stacked lumber, the cleaning supplies in a neat row. "How?"
"Carpentry books. Practice. Sweat."
"You don't sweat." Mike said it flat, like a fact
Ryan shrugged. "I sweat. I just don't complain about it."
Dustin pushed past both of them and headed for the stairs. "There's a second floor? Is there a second floor?"
"Five bedrooms. Two are clean."
Dustin's footsteps pounded up the stairs. They could hear him opening doors, exclaiming over the size of each room, his voice carrying through the ceiling. "This one's mine! I call this one!"
Will was last inside. He stood in the kitchen and turned slowly, taking it in. He ran his fingers along the countertop, pressed his palm against the cabinet door.
"The floor's level," Will said quietly.
Ryan answered, "I borrowed Pete's level and sanded down the high spots."
Will nodded.
Lucas came back from the living room. "The front's still trashed."
"I haven't gotten to it yet. Didn't want to attract attention from the road."
"Smart." Lucas leaned against the kitchen counter and crossed his arms. "Sightlines from the upper windows are great. You can see the road for a quarter mile in both directions."
Mike looked at Lucas. "Why is that the first thing you notice?"
"Because it is cool."
Ryan let them explore. Dustin claimed a bedroom upstairs and started measuring the wall for a shelf he wanted to build. Lucas checked every window lock and reported which ones needed replacement. Mike found Ryan's floor plans for the remaining repairs, the ones he'd drawn on graph paper and pinned to the workshop wall. He was tracing the flow of rooms and exits with his finger.
They regrouped in the kitchen twenty minutes later. Dustin was already talking about a radio setup he'd been designing in his head for a month, a multi-band receiver with an antenna tall enough to pick up signals from three counties. Lucas wanted to fix the fence line along the property boundary. Mike had questions about the structural integrity of the second-floor bathroom that Ryan answered honestly that the subfloor needed replacement and the plumbing was disconnected.
"Why?" Mike asked again.
"Because we need a place," Ryan said. "Not someone's basement. Something that's ours. Where we can do whatever, we want without adults asking questions."
The room got quiet for a second. Then Dustin said, "The Fortress."
"No."
"Castle Greyskull."
"Absolutely not."
"Fine. But it needs a name."
"It already has a name," Ryan said. "The Miller Property."
"That's not a name, that's a title deed."
They argued about names for fifteen minutes. Dustin proposed six. Lucas vetoed four. Mike suggested "the Outpost," which got a shrug from Lucas and a "too military" from Dustin. Will said nothing during the debate, just sat in one of the repaired kitchen chairs with his feet up on the cross-rail, looking comfortable in a way that Ryan hadn't seen from him before.
They left without picking a name. But they came back.
D&D moved to the property on the following Wednesday. Mike brought his campaign materials in a milk crate strapped to his bike's rear rack. They played in the dining room, which had better light than Mike's basement and didn't require navigating Mrs. Wheeler's questions about homework. Dustin brought chips and soda. Lucas brought a folding chair from his garage because the kitchen chairs were "too hard." Will brought graph paper and a set of colored pencils and mapped the property itself while the others were setting up, producing a floor plan that was more accurate than Ryan's own sketches.
By the end of the week, the property had become their gravitational center. Saturdays for training. Wednesdays for D&D. Weekday afternoons for anyone who wanted to bike out and help with repairs or just hang around. Lucas attacked the fence line with wire cutters and posts he hauled from the hardware store in his backpack, two at a time. Dustin spent three afternoons in the kitchen wiring components for his radio antenna, muttering about signal frequencies and impedance matching. Mike and Will drew increasingly detailed floor plans and argued with Ryan about which room should be the "war room" versus the "library" versus the "common area."
They didn't know about the ID. They didn't know about the dungeons, the combat, the loot. They thought Ryan was a kid who was weirdly good at fixing houses and committed to having the best house in Indiana.
Ryan just let them think that.
* * *
"There's an abandoned place on Route 7."
Pete looked up from the Hawkins Gazette. Thursday evening, the second week of July. Ryan had timed this for after dinner, when Pete was settled and the house was quiet.
"The county owns it," Ryan continued. "Back taxes from '79. I've been fixing it up."
Pete set the paper down. "With what?"
"My hands. Tools from the shed. I borrowed your level and the pliers."
"I noticed." So, he had noticed. Pete's face gave nothing away. "How much are the back taxes?"
"Less than five thousand."
"And you're telling me this because you want to buy it."
"I want to pay the back taxes and get the deed transferred. I've been doing repair work and selling things I make." Ryan set the stone bookend on the kitchen table. He'd Mana Crafted it from a fieldstone he'd Earth Shaped into a clean rectangular form, then polished with fine grit and careful work. The result was a bookend that looked like it came from a furniture store. Dense, smooth, with a grain pattern in the stone that caught the light.
Pete picked it up. Turned it over. His thick fingers found the edges, tested the weight, ran a thumbnail along the polished face. He was a man who'd worked with his hands his entire life. He could tell when something was well-made.
"You made this."
"Yes sir. I sold a matched pair in Brooksville for twenty dollars."
Pete set the bookend down and looked at Ryan for a long moment. The kind of look that Ryan's WIS 30 and Observe LV 6 could read in detail.
Pete was reassessing, the internal model of his nephew shifting by a degree. Pete had been comfortable with the version of Ryan who cooked breakfast and did his homework and kept quiet. This version, the one who restored houses and sold handmade stonework and talked about back taxes, required adjustment.
"Less than five thousand?" Pete repeated.
" Four thousand and two hundred. I've saved most of it."
"You're fifteen."
"The deed would be in your name. I can't legally own property."
Pete picked up the newspaper again. Unfolded it. Looked at the headlines without reading them.
"I'll think about it," he said.
Ryan took the bookend off the table and went upstairs. "I'll think about it" from Pete was closer to yes than anything he'd gotten from the man all these years.
* * *
Ryan also started doing some crafting experiments.
He sat at his workbench in the Miller house kitchen and braided Vine Fiber into rope while Mana Crafting was active. The MP drain was small, five per minute, but the result was tangible. The finished rope was darker than regular hemp, with a faint sheen that caught light wrong. He pulled it taut between both hands and yanked. It didn't stretch. He wrapped it around a fence post and pulled it until his feet slid on the floor. The rope held.
Observe read: "+30% tensile strength, minor dimensional resonance."
He tried Shadow Sap next. A thin application to the bat's striking surface, layered on with a brush while Mana Crafting fed energy into the bond. The sap dried into a dark, glassy coating that added weight to the barrel end without making the bat unwieldy. In the next Vine Crawler run, the coated bat hit harder, crushing vine stalks that normally took two swings.
He mixed Shadow Sap with water. Diluted, the solution made a thin dark liquid that smelled like wet earth and something chemical. He brushed it onto the back porch railing as a sealant. The wood absorbed it and the surface went slick and hard.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Alchemy (Active) - LV 1]
Combine reagents into compounds with enhanced properties.
Success rate scales with INT and skill level.
MP Cost: 10 per attempt.
The mixing of Shadow Sap and water, a basic reagent combination with practical application, was enough to cross the threshold. LV 1 Alchemy wouldn't let him brew potions or create exotic materials. But it was a foundation. The same way Lockpicking at LV 1 had started as fumbling with bobby pins and was now a smooth five-second process.
Two days later, Ryan was on his knees in the kitchen helping Dustin with the radio antenna. Dustin had the receiver mounted on a board and connecting the antenna cable, but the signal path wasn't clean. Ryan looked at the wiring and his engineer's brain fired without permission.
The circuit was wrong. The impedance mismatch between the antenna and the receiver was killing the signal. The cable needed a balun transformer, which Dustin didn't have, but could be improvised with a coil of coax wound around a ferrite core.
Ryan could see the solution.
He reached for the soldering iron Dustin had borrowed from his mom's garage and started explaining the fix. Halfway through, the notification appeared.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Programming (Passive) - LV 8]
Enhanced interface with electronic and logical systems.+16% efficiency
Note: Base level reflects extensive prior knowledge. +2% efficiency per level.
LV 8 from the start. His previous life, the years of writing code and building systems and debugging production failures at three AM, condensed into a passive skill that the system recognized as already mastered. It hadn't started him at LV 1 because the knowledge wasn't new. The system just hadn't had a trigger to create the skill until now, until he used the old expertise in a way the system could measure.
Dustin was watching him solder the improvised balun. "Where did you learn to do that?"
"My uncle had a radio when I was a kid." The lie came easy. "I used to take it apart."
"Pete doesn't seem like a radio guy."
"He had one. It broke." Ryan tested the connection. Clean. "Try it now."
Dustin flipped the receiver on. A burst of static, then a voice. Country music, faint but clear, from a station in Terre Haute.
"That's sixty miles!" Dustin grabbed Ryan's shoulder and shook it. "You just tripled my range!"
Ryan tapped the coil. "It's just impedance matching. The signal was always there. The cable was filtering it out."
"Just impedance matching, he says." Dustin was grinning the way he grinned when a D&D plan worked. "We're going to pick up Chicago with this thing."
The general learning pattern triggered later that week, from the accumulation of daily skill practice, the library reading, the ID training, and the cross-domain knowledge transfer that came from doing ten different things every day.
[Through sustained diverse learning, a skill has been created!]
[Accelerated Learning (Passive) - LV 1]
Increases learning speed for all new skills and knowledge by 5% per level.
Stacks with Sharp Mind and INT bonuses.
Five percent. Marginal at LV 1. But it stacked with Sharp Mind's learning speed bonus and his INT-scaled acquisition rate. The compound effect meant every new skill attempt had a better chance of success, and every existing skill leveled slightly faster.
The daily work at the property pushed the crafting and utility skills forward. Earth Shaping hit LV 7 from the combination of real-world construction and ID-world terrain manipulation. Mana Crafting climbed to LV 3, and the items he produced at that level started showing minor special properties like enhanced durability, weather resistance, the railing section that held when he kicked it full force.
Repair LV 6. Basic Crafting LV 4. Cooking LV 4, from making breakfast every morning and dinner three nights a week. The everyday skills climbed fast because he used them constantly. The system rewarded frequency.
* * *
A quiet evening. The property was empty. The guys had gone home hours ago and the sky through the back window was turning deep blue.
Ryan sat at the kitchen table and pulled up a menu he'd been avoiding.
[Party System]
Invite willing individuals to your party.
Party members gain shared XP from kills and quests (30% base, scales with CHA). Leveling up will grant automatic stat allocation.
Party leader can see members' HP bars and status conditions.
Members do NOT see system windows.
Maximum party size: 4 base + CHA scaling.
He read it twice. Thirty percent shared XP from his dungeon kills. Even at a fraction, that was significant over months. If he'd had the guys in his party since the Vine Crawler grind started, they'd each have gained levels. Their HP would have increased. They would be harder to kill when the Upside Down came knocking.
But.
The Party System made them somehow visible to his system. Did the Upside-Down monsters sense something different about him? He didn't know. The dimensional resonance he'd detected with Mana Sense, the faint static that pointed toward Hawkins Lab, suggested the system and the Upside Down occupied adjacent spaces. If tagging his friends as party members put them on some kind of radar that the Demogorgon or the Mind Flayer could detect...
He closed the menu.
The risk was unclear and unclear risk was the kind of thing you didn't bet other people's lives on. There is also the fact that he would have to explain to what the hell ID is, at least they won't see the status windows.
But the idea remained. He knew he'd already changed things in ways he couldn't predict. And if any of his friends ended up dying because of those butterfly effects, then he should have taken the shortcut from the start and used the Party function. At least then he could have protected them somehow.
The last Saturday of the period. July 17th. Evening.
The guys had spent the afternoon helping with repairs. Lucas had finished the west fence line and started on the south. Mike had measured and cut boards for the second-floor bathroom subfloor, working from measurements Ryan gave him and making only two cutting errors, both fixable. Dustin had been in the kitchen all day with the radio, and Will had organized the workshop, building a tool rack from scrap wood that was better designed than anything Ryan had built.
Mike, Lucas, and Will left at five. Dustin stayed.
They were in the kitchen, Ryan holding wire while Dustin soldered a new connection on the antenna junction box. Late afternoon light came through the back window. The smell of solder flux mixed with the sawdust that was permanently embedded in the house's air.
"You know what I can't figure out?" Dustin said, tongue between his teeth, iron steady.
"What."
"The stone stuff you make. The bookends, the doorstop for Mrs. Riler. How do you get it that smooth? I looked at polishing stone in the library, and it takes diamond paste or a lapidary wheel, and you definitely don't have either of those."
Ryan handed him the next length of wire. "Sandpaper. Lots of sandpaper. I go through a pack a week."
"Hmm." Dustin finished the joint and inspected it. "I tried to smooth a rock in my backyard last week. Used three grits. Took two hours and it still looked like a rock."
"You have to start with the right stone. Fieldstone with tight grain. And you need patience."
Dustin looked at him. Dustin wasn't stupid. None of them were. They accepted Ryan's explanations because the explanations were plausible and because the alternative, that their friend was doing something impossible, wasn't a box their minds were ready to open.
"Sure," Dustin said. "Sandpaper."
He turned back to the radio and flipped it on. Static. He tuned the dial, working through the bands. AM, FM, shortwave. The antenna Dustin had built with Ryan's impedance fix was pulling signals from across the state.
A country station came through, tinny and distant. Merle Haggard, singing about working men and railroad towns. Dustin leaned back in his chair and spread his arms like he'd just landed a space shuttle.
"We have radio."
Ryan nodded.
He thought about the boys biking through the rain, calling for Will on walkie-talkies that couldn't reach past a mile. About the communications failures that cascaded through the first week when nobody could find anybody and the phone lines went dead near the Lab.
Dustin, right now, in this kitchen, was building the infrastructure that could fix all of that. Better range, better receivers, a central base with a clear antenna line to half of Hawkins. The kid who'd figured out how to contact the Upside Down through a ham radio in the show was building his skills early.
Merle Haggard faded into a DJ talking about weather. Dustin was already sketching modifications on a napkin, planning an upgrade to the antenna that would add another twenty miles of range.
Ryan collected the wire scraps from the table and dropped them in the trash can under the sink.
His status window sat in the corner of his vision.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: The Gamer
Level: 10
HP: 360/360
MP: 575/575
STR: 20
VIT: 22
DEX: 20
INT: 44 (Sharp Mind)
WIS: 30 (Inner Calm)
CHA: 8
LUK: 5
Stat Points: 0
Skill Points: 10
Skills: 31
Level 10. Ten weeks since the awakening.
His stats were a mess. Wildly unbalanced and probably still way too low for whatever the Demogorgon had on its murder to‑do list. But his growth was ridiculous, and borderline unfair. Also, if there was one thing he knew for sure, it was this: given enough time, mages always rose to supremacy. Especially The Gamer class mage, which was basically cheating.
[A.N: Another chapter just for you lovely readers, this one was 6500+ words. Your comments on the last update genuinely moved me, so thank you all so much. Please keep commenting and, if you can, send some Power Stones to help bump the fic up the rankings, it really makes a difference!
As always, if you catch any inconsistencies, plot holes, typos, or mysterious time‑travel paradoxes, please tell me so I can patch them before they grow into a huge mess.
And because I KNOW at least three of you were already scrolling down ready to ask. YES, Ryan will eventually use the Party function. It would be borderline brain stupidity not to. His friends deserve buffs, not just trauma. And NO! absolutely no one will learn about his Gamer system. We're sticking to the "wow cool natural powers" angle so that when Eleven eventually appears, everything will make sense in the overall.]