Sunday, May 15, 1983 - Hawkins, Indiana
The alarm went off at five and Ryan was already awake.
He'd been lying in the dark for twenty minutes, thinking about XP. In the manhwa, Jee-Han's early leveling was fast because the system front loaded rewards to get the player invested. Standard game design. Hook them early, taper the gains, make the grind feel earned by the time it gets hard. If this system followed the same logic, the first few levels should come quick, and the training-based stat gains would be easier to trigger while his numbers were still in the single digits.
Should be. A lot of weight on those two words.
He killed the alarm before it could ring a second time. Uncle Pete's bedroom was twelve feet away through drywall that blocked about as much sound as a wet napkin. Pete didn't work Sundays, which meant he'd sleep until eight or nine, shuffle to the kitchen, make coffee in the percolator that sounded like it was dying, and read the Hawkins Post at the table for an hour. Ryan had watched him do it hundreds of times.
He swung his legs off the bed and stood up.
He felt good. Unreasonably good. Yesterday had been one of the most disorienting days of his life, two lives crashing together behind his eyes, the system activating, the slow realization that everyone he knew was a character in a TV show he'd binge-watched four times. He'd gone to sleep wired, his thoughts running in loops, planning and worrying and planning again.
Now all of that was gone. His mind was clear, his body felt like he'd slept twelve hours, and his MP bar, visible as a thin blue line at the edge of his vision when he focused on it, sat at a full 100/100.
Gamer's Body. Sleep resets everything. No residual fatigue, no grogginess, no stiff neck from sleeping wrong. It was like booting up fresh every morning.
He dressed in the dark. Gym shorts, a t-shirt that said HAWKINS across the chest, the only pair of running shoes he owned. He laced them tight and went downstairs, skipping the third step because it creaked.
The kitchen clock read 5:07. The house was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of Pete snoring through his closed door.
Ryan drank a glass of water at the sink. Stretched his calves against the counter. Touched his toes, which came easy because he was fifteen and flexible in a way his old body had stopped being somewhere around twenty-two.
Then he opened the back door and stepped outside.
Hawkins at five in the morning was a different town. No cars, no lawnmowers, no kids on bikes. Just empty streets under a sky that was shifting from dark blue to something lighter at the eastern edge. The air was cool, clean, and wet from overnight dew.
Ryan started running.
He didn't have a route planned. He just picked a direction and went. South on Maple, past the Hendersons' house with the rusty mailbox, past the corner where the Sinclairs lived, left on Kerley, heading toward the edge of the residential grid where the houses thinned out and the road turned into packed dirt that led toward farmland.
The first ten minutes felt fine. Better than fine, actually. His body was young and active, this version of him played baseball in the spring and rode his bike everywhere, so he wasn't starting from zero. His legs found a rhythm. His breathing settled into a pattern.
The shoes slapped the pavement in a steady beat.
And nothing hurt.
That was the weird part. By minute eight, running at this pace, a normal Fifteen-year-old would be feeling it. Tight calves. A stitch forming in the ribs. Lungs starting to protest. Ryan had run track in his old life for exactly one semester before quitting, and he remembered what early-morning runs felt like. The body's long list of complaints delivered one at a time, each louder than the last.
None of that was happening. His legs pumped and his arms swung and his breathing was elevated but steady, and his body just... worked. Gamer's Body didn't just mean sleep resets and reduced visible injuries. It meant his physical systems ran on game logic. No lactic acid buildup. No micro-tears in the muscle fiber. No oxygen debt screaming through his nervous system. His body didn't break down from exertion the way a human body did.
What it did instead was drain stamina.
He couldn't see a bar, like he could see his HP and MP. But he could feel it. A resource, somewhere in his body's internal accounting, ticking down with every stride. It wasn't discomfort. It was more like... a tank emptying. A percentage dropping. At minute ten, he felt full. At minute fifteen, he felt like he was at seventy percent, maybe sixty-five. His pace and form were the same, but something under the surface was being spent.
By minute eighteen, the tank was getting low. His legs still worked perfectly, but there was a drag on the system. A pull, like running through water that was getting thicker by the inch. His speed dropped. His stride shortened, almost on its own, as if his body was downshifting to conserve what was left.
He pushed through it. Forced the pace back up. The system tracked effort, and effort meant pushing past the point where the game wanted to throttle you.
He ran past the dirt road. Along the tree line at the edge of the Byers property, he could see their small house sitting dark at the end of a long gravel driveway.
Ryan pushed harder. The stamina drain accelerated. He was at maybe thirty percent now, twenty-five, and the drag was real. His body still didn't hurt, not in any biological sense, but the resource depletion had its own kind of wall. A game character with zero stamina stopped moving. He didn't want to find out what that looked like with Gamer's Body.
At the 22 minute mark, something shifted.
The drain slowed. His breathing still elevated, but the resource wasn't bleeding out as fast. He felt like he got himself new buffer between the effort and the empty tank.
A blue notification appeared in his peripheral vision.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Physical Endurance (Passive) - LV 1]
[Reduces stamina drain during sustained physical activity. +2% VIT effectiveness per level.]
Ryan almost tripped. He caught himself, kept running, and read the notification again while his legs moved on autopilot.
The timing made sense. Passive skills triggered when you performed their associated action long enough and hard enough for the system to register it. He'd been running for over twenty minutes, burning through stamina at a rate that should've emptied the tank five minutes ago. The system saw sustained physical stress, and generated a skill to handle it.
And he could feel the difference immediately.
Two percent VIT effectiveness meant two percent less stamina spent per unit of effort. Small. But when you were running on fumes, two percent was the gap between hitting the wall and pushing through it.
He ran for another few minutes. When he finally stopped, he was standing in the middle of a dirt road half a mile from Uncle Pete's house, his stamina scraped down to what felt like single digits.
But he wasn't bent over. Wasn't gasping or seeing spots. A normal person who'd just sprinted for thirty minutes at that intensity would be on their hands and knees, puking their inside out. Ryan was standing upright, his body literally worked until it didn't. Game logic IS OP.
Two notifications stacked in his vision.
[Through intense training, VIT has increased by 1!]
VIT: 10 → 11
[Through intense training, DEX has increased by 1!]
DEX: 9 → 10
Ryan grinned at the empty road like an idiot.
Two stat points. Two stat points from thirty minutes of running. That was insane. In the manhwa, training gains came slower than that. But his base stats were garbage. Eight through twelve across the board. At these levels, the system barely had to push the needle to award a point. It was like going from level one to level two in any RPG, the XP bar practically filled itself.
It wouldn't stay this easy. He knew that. Going from VIT 50 to 51 through running would take weeks of brutal training, if it was even possible at that point without magical equipment or special training methods. But right now, in the first days, when every point mattered and every gain built on the last one? He was in the golden window.
He walked home. His stamina was recovering already, the empty-tank feeling filling back up faster than any normal cooldown. By the time he reached Pete's backyard, he felt close to full again. Gamer's Body recovery. The exertion that should have left a normal runner sore for two days was already gone, like it had been cleared from memory.
He'd need to fake being tired around other people after workouts. Because a kid who sprinted for thirty minutes and then walked home looking like he'd just rolled out of bed was going to raise questions he couldn't answer.
The backyard was small. A square of grass, a chain-link fence, a storage shed with a padlock that Pete never locked because there was nothing inside worth stealing. And at the back corner, against the fence, a maple tree with a trunk about a foot wide.
Ryan looked at the tree. The tree looked at nothing, because it was a tree.
Time for experiment two.
* * *
The Gamer system had two paths to new skills. The first was passive acquisition, like Physical Endurance, where the system detected a sustained behavioral pattern and crystallized it into a skill. The second was active creation, where you performed a specific action with clear intent and enough system relevant energy bullshit to trigger a new skill.
For Physical Endurance, he'd just needed to run hard enough. For what he wanted now, he needed MP.
Power Strike. The the one skill assembled from every LitRPG novel, every wiki page, every forum argument about optimal builds, said it was one of the most basic combat skills. Hit something hard with focused energy. That was it.
But "focused energy" meant channeling MP into a physical attack, and Ryan had never channeled MP into anything.
He had 100 MP. He could feel it if he concentrated. A warmth behind his sternum, like a second heartbeat that ran on something other than blood. It had been there since the system activated, but he'd been too overwhelmed yesterday to explore it.
He stood in front of the maple tree. Made a fist with his right hand. Stared at his knuckles.
Okay. Push the warmth into the fist. Like... pushing blood to your fingertips, but with the other thing.
He punched the tree.
Bark scraped his knuckles and pain lanced through his wrist.
Nothing.
No notification or blue window.
His MP bar hadn't moved. He'd thrown a regular punch at a regular tree, and all he'd gotten was a sore hand.
He shook his fingers out. Gamer's Body meant the scraped skin would heal fast, but it still hurt. The system didn't numb pain, it just made the body heal like a game character. Damage was real. But it didn't slow you down or leave lasting marks.
Second attempt.
He closed his eyes and focused on the warmth in his chest. Tried to pull it down his arm, through his shoulder, into his bicep, his forearm, his fist.
The warmth moved. Barely. Like trying to push water uphill through a pipe that was almost too narrow.
He felt something reach his elbow and then dissipate, spreading back into his body like it had hit a dead end.
He punched the tree again. Harder this time.
Bark cracked where his fist hit. Decent punch. Zero MP spent.
"Come on," he muttered.
He rolled his neck. Took a breath. The warmth was still there, sitting in his chest like a pool of water that he kept failing to tip over the edge.
Third attempt. He didn't close his eyes this time. He looked at the tree. Looked at his fist. And instead of trying to push the warmth through his arm like a pipeline, he thought about it differently.
In software, when you had a process that needed to send data to an endpoint, you didn't push the data down a wire. You packaged it. You wrapped it in a function call, defined the parameters, and the system handled the routing. You told the system what you wanted to happen, and the system made it happen.
So instead of pushing MP through his arm manually, he punched the tree and told the system to put power behind it.
The warmth snapped through his arm like an electric current. His fist hit the maple trunk and the impact was different this time. Louder by huge margin. The bark cracked and a chunk of it the size of his palm fell to the grass. The tree shook hard enough that a branch above him dropped a handful of leaves.
His MP bar ticked down. 100 to 90.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Power Strike (Active) - LV 1]
A concentrated physical blow channeling MP into raw force.
MP Cost: 10 | Cooldown: None
Damage: STR × 1.5
Ryan pulled his fist back. His knuckles were red but unbroken. He stared at the dent in the tree trunk, a shallow depression in the exposed wood where the bark had blown off, and then he stared at his hand.
"STR times 1.5," he said out loud. His STR was 8, so that was 12 points of damage from a single punch. Against a tree with probably a few hundred HP, that was nothing.
He punched the air twice, bouncing on his toes, feeling the weight of the skill sitting in his muscles like a loaded spring. He could feel it now. The pathway from his MP pool to his fist, the route the energy had taken. The first two tries he'd been doing it wrong, trying to manually push the power instead of letting the system handle the delivery. The third time, he'd basically written a function call and let the compiler do the work.
He covered his mouth with his hand and laughed. Short, helpless, the kind of laugh that would've scared anyone watching. But nobody was watching. It was 5:40 in the morning and the neighborhood was dead.
He had his first combat skill. A real one. Level 1, garbage damage, but that was a start.
The grind started here, with one punch at a time.
He hit the tree again with Power Strike. Ten MP gone. The bark cracked deeper this time, or maybe he was imagining it. Again. Ten more MP. The pathway from his chest to his fist was smoother on the second repetition, the energy flowing with less resistance.
Third hit. The dent in the trunk was real now, a shallow crater in the pale wood. Eighty MP left.
Fourth hit. Seventy. He was starting to feel the rhythm of it, the exact moment to release the energy, the angle that transferred the most force. The tree shuddered.
Fifth hit. And then—
[Skill "Power Strike" has leveled up! LV 1 → LV 2]
Ryan pulled his fist back and stared at the notification. Five uses. Five uses and the skill ticked over. In the manhwa, Jee-Han's early skills had leveled fast too, but seeing it happen in real time was different. The system wanted him to use these abilities. It was rewarding repetition, reinforcing the habit loop, the same way any well-designed game drip-fed dopamine in the opening hours.
He threw one more punch. This one landed harder than the first five, and he could feel why. LV 2 Power Strike had a little more bite to it. The damage formula hadn't changed, still STR times something, but the something did grow. Less energy wasted on delivery, more arriving at the target.
The dent in the maple was getting obvious. He'd have to find a different spot tomorrow, or Pete might wonder why the tree looked like someone had taken a bat to it.
Ryan went inside. Drank another glass of water. Checked the clock. 5:52. Pete was still snoring.
* * *
His bedroom was ten by twelve. A bed, a desk, a bookshelf, a closet. The window faced east, and the first real sunlight was starting to come through the curtains, turning the room gold.
Ryan sat on the floor. Cross-legged, back against the bed, hands on his knees. The carpet was rough against his bare legs.
Meditation. In the Gamer, it was an active skill that doubled MP regeneration while stationary and focused. He needed it. Power Strike cost 10 MP per use, and his total pool was 100. Ten punches and he was empty. Meditation would let him recover faster between training sessions, and as it leveled, the multiplier will get better.
But generating the skill meant actually meditating. With intent and for long enough that the system recognized it as skill.
He closed his eyes.
Focused on his breathing. In through the nose, four counts. Out through the mouth, six counts. A rhythm he remembered from a stress management seminar his old company had offered, the kind of thing he'd attended because there was free food.
The MP pool sat in his chest.
He'd felt it during the Power Strike attempts, a reservoir of warmth that the system drew from. Now, with nothing to channel it toward, he just... sat with it. Felt the edges of it. Let his attention rest on the warmth without trying to move it or use it.
Minutes passed. His mind wandered. He thought about the tree damage. He thought about whether Pete had eggs in the fridge. He thought about the fact that in six months a thing from another dimension was going to drag this town into a never ending nightmare.
He pulled his attention back. Breathing. Four in, six out. The warmth.
His thoughts drifted again. He thought about the fact that he had to go to school tomorrow. Ninth grade. Algebra and English and gym class and cafeteria food that tasted like salty garbage.
Back to the warmth. Four in, six out.
At some point, and he couldn't tell exactly when, the wandering stopped. The warmth in his chest pulsed, slow and steady, synced to his breathing. His awareness narrowed to the sensation of air moving and energy sitting and time passing without weight.
It was boring. Genuinely, deeply boring. Sitting on a carpet in a room that smelled like old socks and cedar, doing nothing, with his eyes closed and his legs going numb. If someone had told him in his old life that he'd spend a Sunday morning sitting on the floor trying to feel his own magical energy, he would've asked them what they were smoking.
But boring was fine. Because after what he estimated was twenty minutes, a blue window appeared behind his closed eyelids.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Meditation (Active) - LV 1]
Accelerates MP regeneration while stationary and focused.
MP Regen: ×2 while active.
He opened his eyes. His MP bar, which had been sitting at 50 after the Power Strike practice, now read 100. 50 points recovered in the time he'd been sitting here. Normal regen was about 6 MP per minute at his WIS level. The meditation had doubled it, so he'd recovered twice what he would have just standing around. He regen much more than his actual MP bar.
Everything was small numbers right now. But the math would scale. Higher WIS meant faster base regen. Higher Meditation level meant a bigger multiplier.
That was far away. Very far away.
Ryan stood up, shook the pins and needles out of his legs, and went to eat breakfast.
* * *
By nine o'clock, Pete was up.
Ryan heard him before he saw him. The bedroom door opening, the shuffle of slippers on linoleum, the percolator filling with water from the kitchen tap. Pete's morning routine had the precision of something performed ten thousand times without thinking about it.
Ryan was at the kitchen table, eating toast, reading a D&D manual he'd pulled off his shelf. Or pretending to read it. He'd read it before, in both lives.
Pete came into the kitchen. Fifty-one years old, though he looked older. Thinning brown hair, heavy around the middle, hands that were permanently stained around the nails from machine work. He wore a white undershirt and pajama pants, and his face had the puffy squinting look.
[Pete Reed - LV 3]
HP: 210/210
Age: 51
Status: Healthy. Tired.
Ryan had Observed Pete yesterday while eating cereal, but the notification didn't bother him this time. Level 3. Uncle Pete was a factory worker who'd spent thirty years doing manual labor, which put him above the average civilian. His HP was decent for a non-combat adult.
"Morning" Pete said. He didn't look at Ryan.
"Morning"
"You were up early." It wasn't a question, exactly. More like a statement of fact, that Pete knew he left early but didn't attach any particular concern to it.
"Went for a run."
Pete grunted. The percolator started hissing. He stood in front of it, arms crossed, watching it like it owed him money.
This was their dynamic. It had been for years. Pete fed him, housed him, made sure he got to school, bought him clothes when the old ones stopped fitting. He'd never raised a hand to Ryan, never yelled, never done anything that crossed the line into bad. But he also never asked how Ryan's day was, never came to his baseball games, never sat down and talked about anything that wasn't day to day meaningless stuff. He existed in the same house the way two coworkers existed in the same office.
Ryan's memories didn't resent Pete for it. That version of Ryan had never known anything else. His dad died when he was four. Pete was just the guy who lived in the next room and made sure there was food in the fridge.
Ryan's twenty-four-year-old memories recognized the dynamic for what it was. A man who'd never wanted kids, who'd taken in his brother's son out of obligation, and who'd done the bare minimum with consistent reliability. Pete wasn't a villain. He was a guy who didn't have it in him to be a father and hadn't pretended otherwise.
"There's eggs," Pete said, still watching the coffee.
"I already ate."
Another grunt. The percolator gurgled. Pete poured his coffee into a mug that said WORLD'S BEST FISHERMAN, which was a joke because Pete didn't fish. Ryan had never found out where the mug came from.
Pete took his coffee and the Hawkins Post to the living room. Ryan heard the recliner creak, then nothing. That was Pete for the rest of the morning. Coffee, paper, maybe the TV later. The Cubs were playing at one.
Ryan finished his toast, washed his plate, and went to get his bike.
* * *
The "Welcome to Hawkins" quest had five location requirements. He'd accepted it yesterday during his walk, and now he had a Sunday morning with nothing to do and an XP reward waiting at the end.
He pulled his bike out of the garage. A blue Schwinn scuffed and scratched, a standard issue for Hawkins kids in 1983.
First stop he planned is the library.
Hawkins Public Library sat on Main Street between the hardware store and a barbershop called Sal's that Ryan had been going to since he was six. Brick building, two stories, with a flagpole out front and a bike rack that had never been full in its entire existence.
He parked, went inside, and used Observe on the building as he walked through the front door.
[Hawkins Public Library]
Established: 1924
A public lending library serving the Hawkins community. Two floors. Contains approximately 22,000 volumes. Basement archive with local historical records.
Notable: Hawkins National Laboratory public filings, and a surprisingly complete collection of fantasy and science fiction literature.
The librarian, a woman in her sixties with glasses on a chain, gave him a polite nod. He waved back, browsed the science fiction section for two minutes to look normal, and left.
Second stop on his way was Hawkins High School.
The school was closed on Sunday, obviously, but the quest just needed him to visit the location. He rode past the front entrance, a squat brick building with HAWKINS HIGH SCHOOL in metal letters above the double doors. The parking lot was empty except for a maintenance truck.
[Hawkins High School]
Established: 1952
Public high schools serve Hawkins and surrounding communities. Enrollment: ~600.
Notable: Basketball program ranked 3rd in regional conference. Science department receives supplementary funding from Hawkins National Laboratory (DOE grant, classified allocation).
He read that last line twice. Supplementary funding from Hawkins Lab. The DOE, which was the public front for the lab, was funneling money into the school's science department. Ryan didn't know what that meant, exactly. Maybe it was innocent. Maybe Brenner wanted to keep the local schools funded so the town stayed happy and quiet and nobody asked questions about the facility on the edge of town.
Or maybe they were using science classes to identify kids with potential. Gifted programs as a recruitment pipeline.
Paranoia or fishy situation? At this point, who knows.
He moved on to Downtown.
Hawkins' downtown was four blocks of shops, a diner, a movie theater called The Hawk, and a town square with a war memorial and benches that were mostly used by old men who had nowhere else to be. On a Sunday morning, half the shops were closed. The diner was open, and Ryan could smell coffee and bacon through the door.
[Downtown Hawkins - Central District]
Population center of Hawkins, Indiana. Commercial area containing 34 active businesses.
Notable: Multiple vacant storefronts indicate economic stagnation. The Palace Arcade (currently under construction, opening in summer of 1983) will occupy the former site of Langford's General Store.
Summer 1983. The Palace Arcade. That was where Max Mayfield would spend her afternoons when she moved to Hawkins in the fall of '84, chasing the high score on Dig Dug. The construction barely even started yet. A sign in the window said COMING SOON with a picture of a Pac-Man ghost.
Ryan kept riding to the infamous Mirkwood.
That was the party's name for the stretch of road between the residential area and the woods south of town. A narrow two-lane road with trees pressing close on both sides, named after the forest in Tolkien.
This was where Will Byers would be riding his bike on November 6th when the Demogorgon allegedly took him. The road felt ordinary in the May sunlight. Leaves overhead making patterns of shadow and light on the asphalt. Birds in the trees and squirrels crossing the road.
[Mirkwood - Unnamed Road, South Hawkins]
A forested road connecting residential Hawkins to the southern woodland area.
Notable: Proximity to Hawkins National Laboratory (2.4 miles northeast). Minor dimensional membrane thinning detected along this route. Current risk level: NEGLIGIBLE.
Minor dimensional membrane thinning. Ryan stopped his bike in the middle of the road and read it again.
The barrier between Hawkins and the Upside Down was already thin here. Months before the gate opened. The lab's experiments were weakening the membrane, and this road, two and a half miles from the facility, was close enough to be impacted by it. The Demogorgon hadn't chosen this spot randomly. It had found Will on a road where the wall between worlds was already cracking.
If it was really a Demogorgon…. Ryan read a social media post about the kidnapping. It was mentioned that in the first episode the lock on Will house door was open from the outside and there was the sound of a bell's clock through the scene. Which prove that maybe it was Vecna who did it.
Ryan thinks it makes sense that it was Vecna, given these clues. But it also suggests he should rescue Will without confronting whatever was responsible, because Vecna would be a final‑boss‑level threat for Ryan at his current strength even with few months of grinding.
Mirkwood looked like every other stretch of Indiana woodland, harmless and unremarkable, and Ryan's system was telling him the fabric of reality was frayed here like old cloth.
He rode on faster now for his fifth stop, the quarry.
Sattler Quarry sat at the edge of town, a deep gouge in the landscape filled with dark water. Kids swam there in summer, which was technically illegal and universally ignored. The cliff face dropped thirty or forty feet to the surface, and the water went deeper than anyone had measured. In the show, Mike had jumped off this cliff when Troy held Dustin at knifepoint. Eleven had saved him with telekinesis, catching him mid-fall and lifting him back to solid ground.
Ryan parked his bike at the fence, the one with the NO TRESPASSING sign that every kid in town treated as a suggestion, and looked down at the water. The surface was black and still. Trees reflected on it in perfect detail, like the quarry had a twin world underneath it.
He used Observe.
[Sattler Quarry]
Abandoned limestone quarry, operational 1891-1968.
Maximum depth: 94 feet.
Water temperature: 52°F (surface).
Ryan backed away from the edge. He stared at the water for a long moment, then got on his bike.
A new notification appeared as he reached the road.
[Quest Complete: "Welcome to Hawkins"]
All 5 locations visited.
Reward: 100 XP
Reward: Local Map unlocked - Minimap feature enabled.
[Minimap activated.]
A small translucent map appeared in the lower-right corner of his vision. It was like a satellite view, circular, maybe four inches across in his perception, showing the area within a few hundred feet of his position. He could see the road, the quarry behind him, the tree line, and a small blue dot that was him.
The areas he'd visited today were filled in. Solid color, with labels. The library, the school, downtown, Mirkwood, the quarry. Everything else was gray and featureless, waiting to be explored.
Ryan stopped his bike and stood there for a minute, turning his head, watching the minimap update in real time as his orientation changed. The dot moved when he moved. The map rotated to match his facing. It was smooth, responsive, with no lag..
"I have a minimap," he said to nobody. "I have a minimap and it's beautiful."
Ryan stood alone at the edge of Sattler Quarry, in 1983, grinning at a heads-up display that only he could see.
He stayed like that for about thirty seconds. Then he got on his bike and rode home.
* * *
The rest of the afternoon was quiet. Ryan sat in his room, meditated for few minutes each, and felt his MP bar filled completely.
He used those mana points on 10 more Power Strikes against the maple tree in the backyard, aiming for a different section of trunk to spread the damage. The bark cracked and fell, and each time the impact felt slightly smoother, the MP flow a little less like pushing and a little more like breathing. He didn't get a skill level notification, but the progress felt real.
At four o'clock, he heard the front door open. Pete was done with the Cubs game, or maybe the Cubs had lost early, and he was moving around the kitchen. Cabinets opening and closing. The fridge door. The clink of a beer bottle being set on the counter.
Ryan went downstairs.
Pete was standing over the stove, pushing something around a pan with a spatula. It smelled like hamburger meat and onions. This was Pete's other meal besides Thursday spaghetti. Sunday burgers, cooked in a cast-iron skillet.
"Burgers?" Ryan asked, sitting at the table.
"Yep."
"Need help?"
"Nope."
Pete flipped the patties. Oil popped and hissed. He reached for his beer without looking, found it, took a sip, set it back down. Every motion practiced.
Ryan watched him. When things started going wrong, Pete would be one more person in Hawkins who had no idea what was happening. He'd go to work, come home, drink his beer, eat his burgers, and never know that the town he'd lived in for thirty years was sitting on top of a doorway to hell.
Should he tell Pete? Warn him?
Probably not. Pete would think he was crazy. And even if he didn't, what would he do with the information? Pete was a factory worker with Level 3 stats and a bad knee. He couldn't fight a Demogorgon. He couldn't help Ryan train. The safest thing for Pete was to keep living exactly the way he was living, and for Ryan to make sure the threats never got close enough to matter.
"Cubs lost," Pete said. "Buckner error in the seventh."
"That's rough."
"They'll be alright." Pete didn't sound like he believed it.
They ate burgers at the kitchen table. Pete had his with ketchup and mustard. Ryan had his with whatever was in the fridge, which turned out to be a single slice of American cheese and some iceberg lettuce that was going brown at the edges.
Outside, the late afternoon sunlight made the backyard look warm and gentle, and through the window Ryan could see the maple tree with its fresh scars.
Ryan went upstairs, sat on his bed and pulled up his status window.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: The Gamer
Level: 1
XP: 100/300
HP: 160/160
MP: 100/100
STR: 8
VIT: 11
DEX: 10
INT: 14
WIS: 12
CHA: 7
LUK: 5
Stat Points: 0
Skill Points: 0
Skills:
- Gamer's Mind (Passive) - MAX
- Gamer's Body (Passive) - MAX
- Observe (Active) - LV 1
- Physical Endurance (Passive) - LV 1
- Power Strike (Active) - LV 2
- Meditation (Active) - LV 1
- Mapping (Passive) - LV 1
One hundred XP out of three hundred. The quest had given him a third of a level, which was decent for walking around town, but he was a long way from Level 2. He'd need to find more quests, or start grinding in a way that generated XP, or both.
The stat gains were pretty awesome though. VIT 11 and DEX 10, up from 10 and 9. His HP had jumped from 150 to 160, and he could feel the difference when he moved. A little faster and smoother, a little more aware of his body in space.
Four new skills in a day. Physical Endurance, Power Strike, Meditation, and Mapping. The first three were trained. The last was a quest reward. All of them were level 1, except for Power Strike.
Ryan closed the status window. Reached over and set his alarm for five AM.
Tomorrow he should run again. Push for another VIT point or DEX point. Meditate between Power Strike sessions to keep his MP cycling. Maybe try punching with his left hand to see if the system tracked bilateral training differently.
He had 170 days until Will vanished. 170 days to turn these garbage stats into something that could survive what was coming. The numbers were small and the clock was loud and the grind was going to be exactly as tedious as every LitRPG novel made it look.
Ryan turned off the light.
He fell asleep in under a minute. Gamer's Body didn't care about racing thoughts or anxiety or the weight of knowing the future. When his head hit the pillow and his eyes closed, the system said sleep, and sleep came.
[A.N: Yes, it takes time to feel comfortable with writing, it isn't that easy, I will try my best to make better chapters. Though I do hope you all still like it]