Wizard Leeches. They were surrounded by Wizard Leeches. Luke couldn’t use the fancy fire sword he had brought along because the monsters would supposedly suck up the magic and fire it back at them.

  The slimy monsters hadn’t attacked yet. It looked like Bumblebee had been right. They could sense the humans had magic and wanted to provoke an attack first.

  Luke reattached the sword to his leg with the embedded magnets in his armor. He assumed that the leeches could suck off the glowing magic of the runes along the sword. That left his hands free to - punch the monsters to death? There had to be a better way.

  He cast around and saw a few stones to his left. They were almost boulders, each a few hundred pounds. Should be easy for him to lift in his suit though. He picked up the closest rock and lifted it over his head with both hands. The Leech behind him slithered up closer. He lowered his stance and readied himself.

  Wait. He needed to cast his repair skill first. He focused inward and mentally activated the first half of Repair Craft. Mana exploded out of his core and shot out through his spiritual veins. It slowly soaked into his mech. His war machine.

  “Uh, Luke, you alright there buddy? Now would be a good time to attack. Right now!” Bumblebee worriedly said.

  Luke did his best to ignore him. Repair Craft needed to finish before he started fighting. Otherwise it would repair his suit back to a broken state later. Besides, the leeches were slow.

  The monsters decided to immediately prove him wrong. The one to the side in his peripheral vision bunched up and shot towards him, clearing ten feet in an instant. Luke’s skill had just finished so he felt confident in twisting and counter attacking the monster.

  Its wide circular mouth hit Luke in the chest, dozens of teeth immediately sinking into the chitin. He used the impact to increase the momentum of the rock in his hands, bringing it down like a meteor strike. The rock hit the monster and smashed it against the dirt path, green blood splattering to the sides.

  Luke raised the rock again, but another attack wasn’t needed. The leech had been smashed in half with the stone strike. It was dead.

  The leech on the main path decided to punish his distraction and attacked. It bunched and shot forward, hitting his left leg and making him stumble backwards. Luke cried out as its teeth burrowed into the leg. He could feel that. It wasn’t pain, not really, but he could feel the monster attack. It must have been the feedback from Machine Bond.

  With an angry grunt, Luke raised his left leg and brought down the stone. He trapped the attacking leech between a rock and a steel knee. The rock split in two from the impact, but only after doing the same to the monster. Green blood pulsed out of a headless body.

  Bumblebee made an odd whoop behind him and Luke was hit from behind. Two impacts, one after another, was enough to make him tip over and stumble to the ground. He caught himself before he fell on his face, but it was hard to get back up. There were two heavy monsters latched onto him, one on his left shoulder and the other on his right hip.

  Instead of getting up, Luke twisted and rolled onto his back. He squished the one on his left with the roll, but the one on his right was too smart for that. It unlatched and squirmed towards his face.

  Luke yelled and flailed downwards, knocking the monster off his chest and leaving a trail of slime across his body. He sat up and brought both fists down atop the leech’s head. It was like hitting a dodgeball. Rubbery and resilient, until it popped and the brains squirted out.

  There was one more monster left, a larger one that was harassing Bumblebee. Luke slowly stood back up as his partner used his Evade skill to slip out of the way of attack after attack.

  Luke growled and stomped forward, winding up for an epic kick. Just as the big one was landing from another missed leap, he stepped forward and kicked for the fences.

  The monster’s rubbery body absorbed much of the impact and it jiggled around in a small circle. It was still alive, and mostly unharmed. It was dazed for a bit, long enough for Luke to do a follow up attack, a stomp down with all of his weight. More green blood splattered across the dirt path.

  Luke took heaving breaths as he spun around, checking for any other attackers. There were none. He was also sure that the monsters were all truly dead, the mana glow had left them. He cut the body up a bit, but he didn’t find a mana core.

  He gave himself a few moments to catch his breath, green blood dripping off his suit. Through his Machine Bond, he could feel the runes on his left leg sparking, they were going to cut out soon. The Wizard Leech must have nicked something important or sucked some of the mana out of them.

  Looks like it was time to use his repair skill. He focused on his core and felt around for the second half of Repair Craft. He activated the skill and felt mana be pulled out of him, bits of it going towards his front, back, and leg, swiftly repairing the damage the leeches had inflicted. To his delight, the skill also pulled off the monster blood and let it splash to the dirt. He was pristine once more.

  He checked his mana, that had taken almost all of it. The first half of the skill took a flat fifteen points and the second half took variable mana depending on the damage. Worth every point though. He had gone from barely functional to tip top condition in just thirty seconds.

  Bumblebee clapped. “Hell, yeah, man. You gottem good. That last kick was brutal, you really put the smackdown on that little bugger.”

  “Yeah, no thanks to you. Did you even fight? Or were you using all your mana on Evasion?”

  “Using Evasion is fighting. I was making sure they didn’t swarm you all at once. Besides, I did kill one. See?” Bumblebee said and pointed to a squished leech in the bushes. “Plus, I was keeping watch for other monsters. This close to the ocean, you get Blast Crabs drawn in by the sounds of fighting.”

  “Yeah, alright. Still, I would have appreciated a little more help. I used up all of my mana with that repair. How long does it take to recharge?”

  “Dunno for you, but for me it’s like forty-five minutes.” Bumblebee said with a shrug. “Oh hey! You killed a buncha monsters. Did you level up?”

  “Lemme check.”

  “You are looking at a level 1 War Machine,” Luke said with a small amount of pride.

  “Fire. Grats, man. If you got stat points, now’s the time to use them.”

  “I’m assuming that’s what the plus sign is next to the stat numbers?”

  “Yep. You gotta use them right away. Degenerate said that if you don’t, the system assigns your point for you.”

  Luke shuddered. He definitely didn’t want that. “Alright, I’ll assign some now. Only, I don’t know what stats are good for my class. Any ideas?”

  Bumblebee shrugged. He started walking towards the ocean as they talked. “Never heard of your class, or even anything similar. I know about Drivers and Warriors. Heard some rumors about a Mirror Mage, but that’s it.”

  “Huh. I guess I’ll just have to wing it.” Luke said to himself.

  Normally when he played video games he liked to min/max, to focus on a few stats and ignore the rest. But in video games he got to try again. Real life didn’t have a restart.

  Bumblebee snapped his fingers, the metal gauntlet making the snap much louder than normal. “There is one thing. There are usually extra benefits to hitting level six or twelve. Like when I hit six in dex, I ran faster. When I added points four and five, I just got a bit more flexible, sleek. But when I hit six, I could straight up run faster.”

  “Six or twelve? Whoever made the system must have used a senary system.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nevermind. Thanks for the advice.”

  Luke pulled up his stats again. He was one away from twelve in memory, without the buff from being in power armor. If he included the buff, then he was one away in strength, acuity, and perception.

  That didn’t exactly narrow things down much. It only meant that he didn’t want to add to constitution or dexterity. Four choices was still too many.

  Honestly, he wasn’t sure how much benefit Memory or Acuity would give him. If it wasn’t for the fact that his class used magic, he would ignore the stats entirely. Perception was useful, he spotted the Wizard Leech ambush early enough that they could do something about it. Strength would be useful too, he wanted to be stronger in and out of his mech.

  They jogged along the path while Luke thought about it. The landscape slowly shifted from scrub brush and scraggly trees to long grasses and balloon plants. He tried to stay on a lookout for monsters and enjoy the scenery, but the weight of his decision pressed on him.

  Eventually, Luke chose Strength. It was a stat he wouldn’t regret adding to. He immediately started jogging a bit faster. It wasn’t a huge increase, but he could tell the difference. Like he had spent the last three months seriously weight training and exercising. It didn’t feel like he had any particular bonus like Bumblebee had mentioned. Just a bit stronger, not a big change. That must mean the buff didn't count towards the base six bonus.

  He pulled up his stat screen. His strength was 3(3), as expected, but the plus sign was still there. It was by all the stats. Had the system glitched? Did the level up come with two stats instead of just one? That had to be it. His platinum class must be better than Bumblebee’s bronze one.

  The choice for his second stat was easy. It had to be Memory. It was the only one of his natural stats that was one away from a multiple of six. He mentally pressed that plus sign next to Memory and felt the change hit him.

  His brain throbbed and he felt a tingling sensation wash over him. When it ended, he tried to remember important things and less important things. He felt like his ability to remember things had improved slightly, but nothing too impressive. Then he thought about runes. All of the sudden it became clear to him what the Memory stat really was.

  It wasn’t focused on recalling things, it let him hold more things in his head at once. Normally he had to focus hard to keep a full rune in his mind. They were slippery things that required his full focus. Now he could instantly recall the full set of symbols of two Adept runes, and almost three. It was like the difference between having more computer storage vs having more RAM. The Memory stat didn’t give him more storage, but it did let him access things quickly and hold it all in his head at once.

  Bumblebee had been right. There was a bonus for hitting a multiple of six on his stats. He pulled up his stat screen once more and found another little bonus. His mana pool had expanded. It was now a pool of twenty-four, it had gone up by two. That’s a pretty simple conversion, two points of mana pool for every point of memory. Sadly, he only had three points of mana in that large pool, so he needed to be careful about injuries for the next little bit.

  They trudged through the grasses heading north along the shore line for the next half hour. The spider’s tidal cave came into view and they carefully made their way towards the ocean. Luke gave the funeral pyre a respectful bow and walked up to the cave entrance. There was a possible problem there.

  “The water’s awfully close. Do you know if the tide’s coming in or going out?” Luke said.

  “Dunno. Tides are weird here. They don’t have a moon, they have rings.” Bumblebee pointed up.

  Luke looked up to the Kalibutan sky. He hadn’t noticed it before, but the planet had three rings tracing a line across the sky. They were faint in the morning light, but he bet they were beautiful at night. That still left the original question.

  The waves were cresting only feet from the entrance to the cave. Luke noticed that there were some mosses around the cave entrance. They were fully dry. That meant the tide was coming in, not out. Depending on how fast the tides moved here, the cave could be fully blocked in an hour or two. The end of the cave would be above the waterline, but they would be trapped in there with the remnants of the spectral spiders.

  “Ok. It looks like the tide is coming in. We are going to go in anyway, but we’ll keep an eye out. It shouldn’t take long to find out if the spiderlings have cores, and we can go from there.”

  Bumblebee had stopped in front of the pyre ashes. He turned and nodded, heading into the cave without a word. Luke drew both swords and readied his mana. There were spectral spiders in this cave, but he had chosen fire and acid swords because he knew that they were effective against these slippery monsters.

  His heart was pounding and he kept glancing around at the walls, floor, and ceiling in an unceasing loop. Against all expectation, they arrived at the scene of the battle unmolested. Everything was just as they had left it, dog sized spider corpses surrounding the spider queen. The light crystals they had left were still faintly glowing. Monster blood had mostly dried and the only smell in the air was salt and rot. The corpses looked like they were decaying faster than expected, like they had been dead for a week, not a single Kalibutan day.

  Bumblebee knelt down near one of the smaller corpses and started cutting with his sword. He thoroughly mangled the body, but there wasn’t a monster core to be found. He sighed and moved on to the next one. Luke decided to keep watch instead of helping, the last thing he wanted was to get caught unawares.

  “Got one!” Bumblebee said as he reached into the cavity of a thorax. He pulled out a small shining marble.

  That was about 4k right there. If they went by monster size, there were probably twenty-one monster cores hiding inside the larger corpses strewn about the room. Luke did some mental math and his heart started beating faster. 84k, assuming they could get full price for them all.

  “Alright. Let’s harvest the rest of them. We gotta be quick about it though. Don’t worry about getting messy,” Luke said.

  He showed Bumblebee what he meant by slicing open a thorax with the sword in his left hand and plunging his right hand directly into its guts. Machine Bond gave him enough physical feedback that he was about to quickly fish out the valuable marble inside.

  “Gross man. I don’t have a magic repair skill that cleans me up,” Bumblebee said. “I’ll just keep watch.”

  “Whatever. Let’s get this done and out of here.”

  Luke put his head down and focused on slicing and grabbing. He quickly created a stack of monster cores, one after another adding to the pile. In less than ten minutes, he had a total of twenty-three cores gathered on the stone floor. Happily, the monster cores sloughed off the blood they were covered in and the pile was pristine. He shoveled them into his back compartment and when there wasn’t enough space, he put the rest in his hip compartment along with his phone.

  “I wanted to take the queen spider’s exoskeleton for crafting materials, but I feel like that’s tempting fate. Let’s just get out of here,” Luke said.

  They hurried through the cave and out into the light. They had to stop at the entrance because it was blocked by two enormous crabs. Each one was fifteen feet tall and puke green. As soon as the monsters saw the armored suits, they skittered forward, shoving each other to get at the tasty humans inside.

  Today’s chapter title comes from Groundhog Day (1993)

  Get it? They are Chekhov Crabs because I mentioned them in the beginning of the chapter and they showed up at the end. I'm hilarious.