Thursday, September 8, 1983 - Hawkins, Indiana
______________________________________________________________________
The parking lot at Hawkins High smelled like cut grass and something sweet from the cafeteria vents that might have been cinnamon rolls.
He'd parked the truck in the back row near the baseball diamond, where sophomores parked if they were lucky enough to have vehicles, and walked around to the front entrance to meet the guys.
They were already at the bike rack. All four of them, bikes locked in a row, standing in a loose cluster near the front steps. Lucas had his backpack over one shoulder. Dustin was doing something with his shoelaces. Mike was leaning against the rack with his arms crossed, watching the front doors like he was sizing up an opponent. Will was eating an apple.
Ryan stopped about twenty feet away and looked at them.
Three months ago, these four kids would have blended into any crowd at Hawkins Middle. Average height, average build, the kind of boys who got shoved into lockers by bigger kids and never ever in their life dare to shove back.
That was gone.
The summer had carved them out of their old frame and made something new. They were definitely not athletes by any means.
Ok maybe Lucas is.
But they did show some buds for going there. They stood straighter. Their shoulders were wider, and their clothes fit differently across the chest and arms. The matching short haircuts made them look coordinated. And most importantly their confidence was spilling out of their body, what is a bully compared to fighting monsters?
Lucas's forearms had visible muscle definition through his t-shirt sleeves. Dustin had dropped weight all summer, his face leaner, jawline showing. Mike had filled out through the shoulders and stood with a stillness he hadn't had in his entire life, when he'd been all nervous energy and fidgeting. And Will, who three months ago had arms like broomsticks, stood with his weight balanced and his chin up and ate his apple like someone who wasn't afraid of anything anymore.
"You're late," Mike said when Ryan reached them.
"I'm on time. You're early."
"Being early is being on time," Lucas said. "Being on time is being late."
"That's a football coach quote," Dustin said without looking up from his shoes. "You've been reading football coach quotes."
"My dad says it."
"Your dad was a football coach."
"He was a linebacker."
"It's the same"
Will finished his apple and tossed the core into the trash can by the steps. A clean arc, eight feet, nothing but can. "Are we going in or are we going to stand here until someone takes attendance on the lawn?"
They went in.
The hallway was the standard first-day chaos of six hundred students trying to remember which direction their lockers were. Sophomore hall was on the first floor, east wing, sandwiched between the gym and the science rooms. Ryan's locker was three down from Lucas's and across the hall from Dustin's. Mike and Will were around the corner, which Mike had already complained about twice already.
Troy Walsh was at the hall near the east stairwell.
Ryan saw him before the others did. Troy was bigger than last year, a summer growth spurt that had added height but not coordination. He was standing with James, the two of them taking up space in the hallway like some territorial animals, forcing other students to walk around them.
Troy's eyes found the five of them approaching. His gaze went to Ryan first, lingered, then moved across the group. His expression was shifting in real time like slow motion movie.
First his automatic sneer, the one he'd been wearing since sixth grade whenever he saw the D&D kids. Then he got stalled. Something about the way they looked, or the way they moved, or the fact none of them were looking at him.
They walked past him. Nobody even glanced at Troy or James or acknowledged that they existed. Troy said nothing.
Maybe Ryan and the group should start bullying the bullies?
Thirty feet past the hall, Dustin leaned toward Ryan. "Did you see his face?"
"Whose face?"
"Troy's. He looked like someone swapped his lunch with shit."
"Troy who?" Lucas said, and the flat delivery got all of them laughing loud enough that Mrs. Kaminsky looked up from the attendance office window.
They kept walking. Ryan obviously noticed the looks. So did the others.
Sophomore hall wasn't a straight shot from the entrance. It was a left, a right, and a long stretch past the main office, which meant three minutes of exposure to the rest of the school before they got to their lockers.
Three minutes was plenty of time for a building to look at you.
A junior with a stack of books turned her head as Mike passed. A group of girls near the trophy case stopped talking mid-sentence and didn't start again until the five of them were three steps past. A senior in a letterman jacket stepped sideways without looking up from his schedule, and Lucas walked through the gap like it had been cut for him.
"Something's weird," Dustin said, under his breath but not quietly enough.
"Yeah," Lucas said.
"No but ACTUALLY weird."
"Yeah, Dustin."
"Did those girls by the case just..."
"Yes."
"At ME?"
"Probably at Ryan."
"Shut up, no way it was at..."
Actually, it probably was about Dustin. Dustin had lost twenty pounds over the summer. His face had angles now, cheekbones where there hadn't been any before. The real world worked like that…. Being good-looking makes things easier. Dustin wasn't going to stop traffic, but he had other things going for him, and now that the weight was gone, people might actually notice them.
Mike was quiet. Which, for Mike Wheeler, was the clearest tell in existence. The junior with the books had said "hey" to him in passing, and Mike had not yet decided whether that had been a real word in the English language or some kind of auditory malfunction.
"Did she know you?" Lucas asked.
"No."
"Then why did she..."
"I don't know, Lucas."
Will once again surprised Ryan. He was walking half a step behind, head up, and when a kid he'd been in elementary with came the other way and raised a hand in a small awkward wave, Will waved back like a normal person. Not the ducked-head Will of last year, the one who acted like eye contact was a punishment.
"That's Kevin Dunn," Will said, quiet enough that only Ryan caught it.
"Okay."
"He's never waved at me."
"You also never waved at him."
"This… is actually true."
They turned into sophomore hall. The crowd thinned. Mostly their own grade now. Kids who'd seen the five of them in ninth grade last year and were doing the same double take the upper grades had just done.
Ryan caught three conversations in the first twenty feet.
"...is that Wheeler?"
"...no way that's Henderson..."
"...did they all hit the gym or..."
Dustin was vibrating. "Are you HEARING this?"
"Walk, Dustin."
"Ryan. Ryan. They're talking about us."
"I know."
"This is the greatest day of my life. Lucas, remember this day."
"I'm remembering. Who knew that fighting monsters has this kind of benefit?"
Ryan spun his locker combination and the door opened on the first try, which at Hawkins High felt suspicious enough that he checked the number. Correct locker. Just a good locker.
"Stacy's looking at you," Dustin stage whispered.
"Who?"
"Stacy. End of the hall. Brown ponytail. She's in our English class, I checked the roster."
Ryan didn't turn his head. Peripheral vision was sufficient. A girl near the bulletin board, pretending to read a drama club flyer while absolutely not reading a drama club flyer. When her eyes caught his half-eyes, she gave him the small, embarrassed smile of someone who had been caught and went back to the poster with new dedication.
"Noted," Ryan said.
"NOTED? That's all you have?"
"What do you want from me."
"I want you to APPRECIATE this. A girl looked at one of us on the first day. That has never happened to any of us. In our combined lives."
"I appreciate it."
"With feeling."
"I appreciate it with feeling."
"Thank you."
Sometimes Ryan forgot that the summer had changed something for them too. The system stuff was his circus. But the part where four kids who'd spent their whole lives looking at the floor stood up straight and found out people looked back, that one belonged to them.
For Ryan it was a double win. His friends were doing better, and that mattered on its own. But the little Stranger Things fan still living somewhere inside him, the one who'd watched these four kids on a screen, he was happy too. Maybe even happier.
The warning bell rang. Four minutes.
"Okay," Mike said, shoving a notebook into his bag. "Let's just. Not make it weird. Be normal."
"We ARE being normal," Dustin said. "The building is being weird."
And with that note, they scattered.
* * *
Mr. Clarke's classroom was packed with science stuff. The man himself stood at the front in a short-sleeve button-down and a periodic table tie, his face lit up like he'd been handed a gift. He'd probably spent the entire summer waiting for this. Kids in seats, a whiteboard behind him, and something he actually cared about to talk about.
"Shortwave receivers," Clarke announced, tapping a diagram on the chalkboard. "Each team will build one from components. We're talking coils, capacitors, diodes, antenna connections. The goal is to pull in a signal from outside Indiana by the end of the month."
Dustin turned to Ryan so fast his chair squeaked on the linoleum. Ryan gave him a half-nod. Partners. Obviously.
They had their receiver pulling signals before lunch.
Dustin handled the antenna coupling and the tuning circuit like he did all summer, while building a shortwave rig from scratch on Ryan's roof. Ryan designed the filter circuit. The circuit used a bandpass configuration that eliminated adjacent-channel interference, something the textbook wouldn't cover until college-level communications courses.
Clarke stopped at their station during the work period. He stood there for about ten seconds, looking at the filter circuit on the breadboard, then at the signal output on the oscilloscope Dustin had borrowed from the back shelf.
"This is professional-grade work," Clarke said. His voice was careful, but you could hear the surprise leaking out a little bit. "Where did you learn bandpass filtering?"
"Library," Ryan said. "There's an amateur radio handbook in the reference section."
"That handbook doesn't cover this topology."
Ryan shrugged. "Dustin figured out most of the antenna side. I just cleaned up the filtering."
Clarke looked at Dustin. Dustin, to his credit, didn't oversell it. "We've been building receivers all summer. Ryan's better at the circuit design part. I'm better at the antenna part. It's a whole thing."
Clarke moved on to the next station. But he came back after class, when the other students had filed out, and caught Ryan at the door.
"Ryan. If you're interested, I have some reading I think you'd find challenging. Graduate-level material. No pressure of course."
"Sure, Mr. Clarke. I'd like that."
Clarke smiled. It was the smile of a teacher who'd found the thing that made teaching worth it. "I'll leave it on my desk tomorrow."
Even without his engineering background, Ryan's INT stat made everything easy to pick up. Whatever material Mr. Clarke brought didn't much matter. With knowledge from forty years in the future, this stuff was practically archaeology.
* * *
Cross-country tryouts were on Thursday after school. Ryan laced up the running shoes he'd bought in August, Nikes from the sporting goods, and lined up with fourteen other kids on the track behind the football field.
Coach Dalton was a wiry man in his fifties with a stopwatch and the permanent squint of someone who'd spent too many afternoons in the Indiana sun. He started by explaining the course.
Three miles. Out along the perimeter trail, through the woods behind the school, back along the access road.
"I'm timing you. Run your pace. Don't try to impress me."
Which was the exact phrase every coach said to every kid on every first day, and every kid tried to impress the coach anyway. Ryan watched three of the guys next to him set off way too fast in the first hundred meters and knew they would be walking by the mile marker.
Ryan ran at his pace. DEX 28, VIT 30, Physical Endurance doing whatever Physical Endurance did in the background. He held back enough to keep it in the range of a gifted kid with good genes and a solid summer. He crossed the finish line forty seconds ahead of the next runner.
Sixteen minutes and forty-five seconds.
Dalton clicked the stopwatch. Looked at it. Looked at Ryan. Looked at the stopwatch again, in case the first two times had been a glitch.
"That was a 16:45. As a sophomore."
"I trained all summer."
"I can see that." Dalton's squint deepened. Ryan could practically see him running the math. "The sectional qualifier is in October. You're definitely running it."
"Sure."
"Don't say sure like it's nothing, kid. I had seniors last year who couldn't hit that time."
"Got it, coach."
Ryan wasn't worried about cross-country. Exceptional high school runners existed. A 16:45 three-mile was fast for a sophomore in a small town, but it wasn't supernatural. It was the kind of time that got you a write-up in the Hawkins Herald sports section and maybe a look from a college recruiter in a year or two. He could run here at fifty percent and coast into a varsity spot without a single eyebrow going up.
Basketball was a different thing all together.
He'd signed up for JV tryouts because Steve Harrington was on varsity, and JV and varsity practiced in the same gym. Proximity leads to access. Third rule of Ryan's personal art of war.
Ryan wanted Steve in his corner before November, needed the connection already established before everything went wrong. Steve Harrington was the kind of person who ran toward danger when the people he cared about were in it. He was going to get pulled into this mess no matter what, that much Ryan knew. So better to make sure he got pulled in the right way, through the right door, by someone who could point him in the right direction. Ryan wanted to be someone he cared about before the Demogorgon gave him a reason to.
Was it manipulative? Yeah, a little. He tried not to think about it.
Actually, scratch that. He thought about it for about six seconds and put it under things "I'll feel guilty about later" if there is a later.
The gym overlap happened during a Monday afternoon shootaround. Varsity was running through offensive sets on the main court while JV did drills on the side baskets. Coach Jeffries called a pickup scrimmage to fill the last twenty minutes, mixing JV and varsity players. Somebody up there, some basketball deity with a sense of humor, put Ryan on Steve.
Convenient. Very convenient.
Steve Harrington moved like a fish in the sea on a basketball court. Fluid crossovers, quick first step, a pull-up jumper that released at the apex with a smoothness that came from years of practice, and not from stat points. He had court vision, the ability to see plays developing before they happened, and a competitiveness that ran hotter than his easy grin suggested.
Ryan played hard. He stayed in front of Steve on three consecutive possessions, his DEX-enhanced reaction time keeping him between Steve and the basket. Steve's eyebrows started doing a thing. He is getting curious.
Fourth possession. Steve tried a crossover. Ryan read the shoulder dip, anticipated the direction change, and got a hand on the ball. What a clean steal…
The gym went quiet for a second.
Until some senior on the baseline went "damn" real low. Coach Jeffries didn't stop the scrimmage but Ryan caught him looking.
Steve didn't say anything. He got back on defense and took the ball the next possession and hit a fadeaway jumper over Ryan's contest that was pure skill, pure touch. The kind of shot that no amount of stat points could replicate, because it came from ten thousand repetitions in a driveway.
Okay. Ryan overclaimed that one a little. There was probably a stat number that could replicate it without the experience. But he was still genuinely impressed. Real talent was a thing. It deserved respect even when you were cheating.
Steve's team still won. They were supposed to. They were seniors. Ryan was making them work for it more than they'd expected, and that was the whole point.
After the scrimmage, Steve found him by the water cooler in the corner of the gym. He was sweating and breathing hard.
"Not bad, sophomore. Reed, right?"
"Yeah."
"You should try out for real. Varsity could use a defender."
"I'm on JV."
"JV is where people warm up for varsity." Steve tossed his towel over his shoulder. "Think about it."
"I'll think about it."
"Do that." Steve started walking off, then turned back. "Where'd you learn to read a crossover like that?"
"My uncle played in college."
Which wasn't true. Pete Reed had never played basketball in his life. Pete Reed had only watched basketball. But "my uncle played in college" was the kind of answer that closed a line of questioning instead of opening one, and Steve nodded like that explained it and headed for the locker room.
Ryan drank from the cooler. First contact, established. He gave himself a high five mentally.
* * *
The confrontation happened in the hallway outside the locker room the following Monday. Ryan felt like the protagonist in some cliché face-slapping moment with a young master, the kind he'd read about in a hundred web novels. It felt pretty good, honestly. He finally understood the appeal of showing off a little.
Ryan was walking toward the east exit, gym bag over his shoulder, hair still damp from the shower. Tommy Hagan stepped into his path. Another kid, a senior Ryan didn't recognize, flanked from the right.
Tommy was Steve's friend. Or Steve's hanger-on, more accurately. The kind of guy who orbited popular people and absorbed reflected status. He had a broad face and mean eyes and the posture of someone who'd never been hit hard enough to learn caution. And he'd been completely overshadowed by Ryan's performance all week, which was probably why they were doing this now. Wounded ego. What a predictable piece of shit.
"Hey, sophomore." Tommy was pitching his voice for an audience, even though the hallway was almost empty. "You think you're hot shit because you blocked Harrington?"
Ryan stopped. Observe fired on instinct.
[Tommy H - LV 2]
HP: 90/90
Age: 17
Status: Healthy. Aggressive (territorial, performing for peers).
Disposition: Hostile.
LV 2. HP 90. Ryan had STR 28 and could break Tommy's jaw without winding up. Or more likely, kill him.
Which, to be clear, was not the plan. The plan was to do the minimum amount of something that would make Tommy walk away and never bring it up again. Embarrass him a little. He needs to close the loop.
"I played basketball," Ryan said. "That's it."
Tommy put his hand on Ryan's chest and pushed him.
Or tried to push. His palm hit Ryan's sternum and Ryan didn't move. He didn't even lean or shift his weight. At STR 28 and VIT 30, Tommy's shove had the mechanical effect of pushing against a wall.
Tommy's face flickered. Confusion, then anger. Confusion made him look weak. He shoved harder, putting his weight behind it. Ryan's sneakers didn't even slide. His body didn't rock. He stood there and let Tommy exhaust himself against a physics problem he couldn't solve.
If anyone had been filming this, Ryan thought, it would look like a kid trying to push over a telephone pole.
The other kid reached for Ryan's shoulder. Ryan shifted his weight, DEX 28 moving him two feet left in a motion that didn't look fast but put him exactly where the grab wasn't. The kid's hand closed on air.
"We're done here," Ryan said. Gamer's Mind didn't even flicker. He didn't feel anything, there wasn't any fear or anger.
Tommy threw a punch. Ryan watched it come from the shoulder, tracked the arc with reaction time three times normal, and stepped inside it. The fist sailed past his ear. Tommy's momentum carried him forward and his knuckles connected with the edge of a locker door with a sound like a dropped wrench.
Tommy grabbed his hand. His face twisted. The other kid took a step back.
Probably a sprain. Maybe a fracture in the pinky knuckle if he'd caught the edge wrong. Not Ryan's problem. He'd swung at his own locker. That is some weird personal fetish.
Ryan was already walking away when the second kid found his voice.
"The hell was that."
"Physics," Ryan said over his shoulder, and kept going.
He turned the corner and almost ran into Steve, who was standing at the intersection of the east and north hallways with his letterman jacket over one arm. Ryan clocked him a second too late. Steve had been there for most of it. Maybe all of it. His posture said spectator, not interrupter. The letterman jacket was still over his arm, hadn't moved.
Great. Fantastic timing.
Actually, no, perfect timing. Ryan didn't adjust his face. Let him see it.
Steve looked past Ryan, down the hall, at Tommy nursing his hand. Then back at Ryan. His expression was the complicated one Ryan had been waiting for.
"What happened?" Steve asked.
"Ask clown Tommy. What a joke." Ryan kept walking.
Come on, Steve. Open your eyes. Your friends aren't your friends. Figure it out six months early this time.
Ryan heard Steve's footsteps pause, then start again in Tommy's direction. Good. That was something. Steve Harrington's character arc required him to watch one of his friends be a jackass to the wrong person, and it was better to do it now in a hallway over nothing than later in a yard with a girl dying in it.
Behind him, Steve's voice carried down the hall.
"Tommy, what the hell, man."
"Steve, that kid is a freak, I swear he..."
"You swung at a locker, Tommy."
Ryan smiled to himself and pushed out through the east exit into the afternoon sun.
* * *
The school library was half-empty during sixth period. Most students used the free period to hang out in the cafeteria or the courtyard. Ryan preferred the back tables near the reference shelves, where the light from the high windows was good and nobody bothered him.
He was reading a psychology textbook he'd pulled from the behavioral sciences shelf. The book was dry like any other nonfiction textbook from the seventies, but the content was useful. Repression, projection, displacement, reaction formation. The clinical language for things people did to survive their own minds.
He was reading it because INT 65 and three months of Gamer system optimization had taught him that even when knowledge inputs do not always generate skill growth, the knowledge itself still had value. Understanding how people protected themselves from pain, the emotional structures they built around the parts of themselves they couldn't look at, was the kind of thing worth having. With the Gamer system, knowledge translated to power. Even Cersei Lannister would have to agree with him on that.
The chair at the next table scrapped against the floor. Ryan looked up.
Chrissy Cunningham sat down with a spiral notebook and a pencil case. She looks like she is trying to be invisible while sitting in an open room. She was a junior, one grade above Ryan. Blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. Cheerleading warm-up jacket over a pink top. The kind of face that belonged on a homecoming poster, symmetrical and bright. Yes, she was stunning, but in a different way than Nancy's beauty.
Ryan had seen her three times now. The pool in August, the hallway between classes, and here. Each time, Observe read the same thing beneath the surface.
[Chrissy Cunningham - LV 1]
HP: 85/85
Age: 16
Status: Healthy. Performing (habitual, stress-based, concealing anxiety).
Disposition: Guarded (surface-friendly, underlying distress).
Performing. Every f***cking time.
Everyone used masks and adapted to different social situations, but Chrissy was the only person he'd Observed who wore the status like a uniform. Which meant she was almost never her true self. Not with friends, not at practice, probably not at home. Maybe especially not at home.
She wasn't doing homework. She was writing in the spiral notebook. Small, cramped handwriting that filled lines without stopping, the pencil moving fast enough that it was closer to purging than composing. She didn't look up. Just wrote herself out.
Ryan went back to his book. Five minutes passed. He was reading about reaction formation, the mechanism where people display the opposite of what they feel, performing happiness to mask misery, performing confidence to mask terror, and he realized he was essentially reading Chrissy Cunningham's diagnostic profile. The irony…
"You're the guy from the pool," she said.
Ryan looked up. She was watching him, pencil still in hand.
"Ryan," she said. "Right?"
"Yeah."
"You're staring at that book like you are going to eat it."
He glanced at the textbook. The chapter header read DEFENSE MECHANISMS AND ADAPTIVE FUNCTIONING. "It's interesting. Dry, but interesting."
"What is it?"
"Psychology. How people cope with things they can't control."
Chrissy tilted her head. Something in her expression changed, the performance dimming by a fraction, curiosity pushing through the surface. "Like what kind of things?"
"Anything painful. The book says people build defenses without knowing they're doing it. They smile when they're angry. They act tough when they're scared. They pretend everything's fine when nothing is."
She was quiet for a beat.
"That sounds like everybody," she said.
"Probably is."
"So you're reading a textbook that says everyone's faking it."
"Not faking. Adapting. There's a difference." Ryan closed the book but kept his thumb on the page. "Faking implies you know what you're hiding. Adapting means you've been doing it for so long you forgot there was something underneath."
The silence between them stretched for four seconds. Chrissy's eyes moved from the book to his face and stayed there. Not the way girls usually looked at him. She wasn't assessing his social rank or physical appeal. She was looking at whether he was for real.
"Do you ever just write things down to make them feel less heavy?" she asked.
The question surprised him. The cheerleader asking a near-stranger about emotional processing in the school library.
"I make lists," Ryan said. "Plans. Schedules. It's the same idea in a different shape."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It helps."
She looked at her notebook. The pages were full. "Writing helps me. Sometimes I don't even read it back. I just need it out of my head."
"Then it's working."
A pause. She didn't close the notebook. Didn't hide it. Just set the pencil down and sat with it open between them like it wasn't a secret anymore.
"You seem like someone who carries a lot," she said.
"I can say the same about you."
Her eyes widened slightly. A small crack in the performance.
"Maybe we should start a support group," she said. "Overloaded teenagers anonymous."
"I'll bring snacks."
She laughed. Short and quick and different from the cheerleader laugh he'd heard in the hallway.
Chrissy picked up her pencil and went back to writing. Ryan opened his book. They sat at adjacent tables for another fifteen minutes without speaking, and it wasn't awkward.
When the bell rang, Chrissy gathered her things. She paused at the end of the table.
"Same time next week? You know. For our OTA session."
Ryan laughed a little. "I'll be here."
She left.
Ryan watched her walk out, her posture straightening as she entered the hallway, the performance clicking back into place like armor being buckled on.
Vecna fed on hidden pain. On the things people buried so deep they couldn't reach them anymore. Chrissy Cunningham had years of buried pain, and season 4 showed us how Vecna had found every piece of it and used it to kill her.
She wasn't going to die. Ryan would make sure of that.
* * *
Saturday, September 15, 1983
The five of them stood in Ryan's kitchen with their gear on. Bats in hand. Corrupted Hide arm guards under their jacket sleeves, the ones Ryan had Mana Crafted and presented as "tactical leather" without further explanation. The guys had stopped asking where Ryan's equipment came from around week three of training. The stuff worked. That was enough.
What the guys didn't know was how much of their performance was actually theirs.
Demodogs were not the kind of thing you killed with a baseball bat. Not a normal baseball bat, anyway. Their hide was thick, their musculature was dense in layers that shouldn't have been possible for an animal their size, and their skeletons absorbed blunt trauma. Ryan had seen this play out on the show, over and over. Grown adults unloading shotguns into them at close range and watching them keep coming. Hopper had emptied a revolver into one in the tunnels and barely slowed it down. A baseball bat swung by a teenage boy should have been closer to an annoyance than a weapon. Two or three solid hits might bruise muscle underneath. Ten might crack a rib. By hit twenty the kid would be exhausted and the Demodog would be in his face.
That was for a normal bat. And it was a problem that ended with a dead kid. Unless, of course, they had plot armor, which was the greatest weapon in any multiverse. But Ryan's intervention may or may not have put some cracks in that armor, so he couldn't count on it.
The gear was the fix.
Each bat in the guys' hands had spent a night on Ryan's workbench, taking in coats of Mana Crafting as he built them up layer by layer. The wood drank the mana and held it. The swing weight sat lighter in the hand and hit harder on contact. A swing that should have been a bruise was now a fracture. A swing that should have bounced off tough hide now bit in. The mana didn't just add force, it added something the hide couldn't shrug off the way it shrugged off ordinary impact. A punch is a punch to a Demodog. A punch with mana in it is closer to a bullet in terms of how the hide responds to it.
The arm guards did the opposite job. Mana Crafted Corrupted Hide absorbed the kinds of impacts that would have snapped a teenage forearm in half. Invisible padding under jacket sleeves.
The guys were getting stronger. Real gains from real work. But the gear was doing the job their bodies physically couldn't, turning a fight they should have been losing into one they could actually win, and Ryan preferred it that way. Every edge he could give them without them noticing was an edge they'd still have when things went wrong.
"This is different from the vines," Ryan said. "They're faster, stronger, and they have teeth instead of tendrils. If I say fall back, you fall back. No arguments, no heroics. Understood?"
"Understood," Lucas said.
"Dustin."
"I heard you."
"Mike."
"Yeah. Got it."
"Will."
Will adjusted his grip on the bat. "Let's go."
He really liked this upgraded Will.
Ryan activated the Demodog Den.
The world changed differently than the Vine Crawler tier. The color didn't just drain, it curdled. The kitchen walls went dark gray. The light through the windows thickened into something yellow and sick, like looking through stained glass in a church that worshipped the wrong thing. The air temperature dropped ten degrees. And the smell was metallic and organic.
"Jesus," Dustin whispered. His hand tightened on the bat.
Mike was scanning the room. Windows, doors, the back hallway. His face was tight, but his breathing was controlled. "Where are they?"
Ryan checked Detect Life. Three dots on the Minimap, moving in the copied yard about forty meters south. "Outside. Three of them. They haven't spotted us yet."
"Three," Lucas said. "How do we do this?"
"I take two. You four take the third. Stay tight, stay together, and hit it from two sides. Dustin, fire on the approach. Lucas, you and Will flank left. Mike, you call the shots."
They moved to the back door. Ryan opened it slowly. The copied yard stretched out under the sick sky, the grass gray and brittle, the tree line a dark smear against a horizon that didn't look like Indiana anymore.
The Demodogs were in the field south of the fence. Three of them, loping in a loose patrol pattern, their petal-mouths closed, their bodies low to the ground. They were bigger than the guys expected. Lucas sucked in a breath. Will's hand tightened on his bat but he didn't flinch.
Ryan moved first.
He vaulted the fence and broke right, pulling the nearest two Demodogs toward him with noise and motion. They reacted instantly, heads snapping up, mouths flowering open, and charged. Ryan met the first one with a Power Strike that caught it across the skull and sent it tumbling sideways. The second one lunged and he sidestepped, letting it pass, then brought the Shadow Sap bat down on its spine as it skidded past. Two hits, two staggers. He kept them busy.
The third Demodog was turning toward the noise when Dustin hit it with fire.
The pump-sprayer arc wasn't elegant. It was a fan of fuel and flame that caught the Demodog's right side and made it scream, a high wet sound that carried across the copied field. The flame was doing more than cook meat. Upside Down biology didn't like fire like normal animals didn't like fire. Their biology was like dry paper against the fire.
The sprayer was a lot closer to a fatal weapon than the bats in some ways.
The thing wheeled, confused, burning, and Lucas was already moving.
He came in from the left with Will half a step behind him. Lucas's swing was aggressive, full-body rotation, and the Mana-Crafted bat connected with the Demodog's flank with a crack that was louder than a Louisville Slugger had any right to be.
The creature staggered sideways. Will swung at the thing's legs while it was off-balance, a low horizontal arc that caught it behind the front knee and dropped it.
A Demodog at full strength would have shrugged both of those hits off. Tough hide, dense muscle, reinforced skeleton. But the fire had stripped the hide on one side, and the bats were hitting harder. The situation was very ugly for the Demodog.
"Lucas, watch the mouth, it's turning!" Mike was at the fence, tracking it from an angle none of them had. "Will, back up, back up! Dustin, one more spray, low!"
Dustin hit it with another burst of fire. The Demodog thrashed. Its tail caught Lucas across the thigh and Lucas went down on one knee, but the Corrupted Hide sleeve under his jacket took the brunt and what should have been a ripped-open leg was a bruise he'd feel in the morning. Lucas came back up swinging. Brought his bat down on its skull. Once. Twice.
It stopped moving.
Ryan finished his two a few seconds later. One Power Strike to the chest, one bat hit at the base of the neck. He jogged back to the group.
They were not buzzing yet. They were frozen.
Lucas was still on his feet but his breathing had the shallow fast rhythm. He had just used every ounce of adrenaline his body could manufacture.
Dustin had dropped the sprayer at his side and was staring at the body, mouth open. Mike was gripping the fence rail with both hands, knuckles white. Will was the closest to the Demodog, crouched next to it, one hand braced on the ground.
Three seconds passed. Five. Ryan let them sit in it. This was important. This was the part where the nervous system had to figure out that it had survived.
Then Dustin said, "Holy."
"Shit," Lucas finished.
"I thought I was going to die," Dustin said. "I thought I was about to actually die. For real."
"We didn't," Mike said, still holding the fence. "We didn't die."
"We killed a DEMODOG." Dustin's voice was coming back. "We killed an actual Demodog. Jesus Christ, Ryan. Jesus. Christ."
"Language," Will said, quiet, and looked up at Dustin with a small crooked smile, and that was the thing that broke the spell. Dustin laughed. Lucas laughed. Mike's hands loosened on the fence. The adrenaline started coming out as noise instead of sitting in their chests.
"I am going to tell this story for the rest of my life and nobody will ever believe me," Dustin said.
Lucas kicked the body lightly with his shoe, testing if it was really done. It was. Will was still crouched next to it, inspecting it without flinching.
"It's warm," Will said, touching the flank with two fingers. "The body heat. These things are very different than the vines."
"Yeah." Ryan crouched next to him. "Different tier of creature. They eat, they sleep, they hunt in packs. The vines are more like invasive plants. These are predators."
Will wiped his fingers on his jeans. "I want to fight another one."
Ryan looked at him. Will Byers, standing over a dead Demodog, asking for more. The irony would have killed him.
"Tomorrow," Ryan said. "We'll run it again."
He popped the ID before any of them had time to come down too hard.
Back in the real kitchen, the color bloomed back into the world. September sunlight, yellow and honest, coming through the windows. The kitchen smelled like coffee and bread and nothing metallic at all.
And the crash hit hard.
Lucas made it to a chair and sat down hard. Dustin sat on the floor, back against the fridge, and didn't get up. Mike was walking a slow lap around the kitchen table. Will leaned his bat against the wall and just stood for a long moment with his eyes closed.
"Is this normal?" Dustin asked the ceiling. "Do I feel like this every time now?"
"First time fighting something that wanted to actually kill you," Ryan said. "You body's flushing the chemicals. It'll pass in twenty minutes, more or less."
"I can't feel my legs."
"You can feel your legs. Stop whining"
Ryan pulled five "energy drinks" out of Inventory, slid them across the counter, and didn't tell anyone they were HP potions. He didn't need to. The guys drank them on reflex now. The bruise on Lucas's thigh faded by half while he was still holding the bottle.
That was when the notifications pop up in Ryan mind. How convenient for him.
[Party XP distributed]
Mike Wheeler: LV 5 → LV 6
Dustin Henderson: LV 5 → LV 6
Lucas Sinclair: LV 5 → LV 6
Will Byers: LV 5 → LV 6
Across the kitchen, Mike stopped his lap. Dustin blinked at the fridge. Lucas straightened in the chair. And Will opened his eyes. For maybe three seconds, none of them said anything.
"I feel," Mike started, and stopped.
"Yeah," Lucas said.
"Warm," Will said. "Like... I don't know. Warm."
"Better than warm." Dustin was looking at his hands. "Shit, Ryan, do your energy drinks get stronger every time?"
"Kind of," Ryan said. "They're supposed to bring you back no matter how exhausted you are. The harder you push, the more you feel the recovery. So yeah, today it's hitting harder because today was harder."
A total lie.
Dustin had handed him the out on a silver platter and Ryan had just run with it. He was lucky the alternative was so outrageous that nobody in this kitchen would reach for it on their own. These guys would sooner believe they were living in a simulation than believe their bodies had actually just gotten stronger from a Level Up.
"This is so cool," Dustin said. "I hate that it's cool. I hate that I'm excited right now because a thing tried to eat my face twenty minutes ago. What is wrong with me?"
"Nothing," Will said from across the room. His voice was calm. "There's nothing wrong with you. We did it. We're supposed to feel like this."
Ryan didn't say anything to that.
Lucas finished his bottle and set it on the counter. "Ryan."
"Yeah."
"Tomorrow."
"Yeah."
"Same time?"
"Same time."
Dustin groaned from the floor. "Does it have to be tomorrow? Can it be on Tuesday?"
"Tomorrow," Will said.
"I didn't ASK you, Will. I asked Ryan. Don't be the swing vote on this, you are historically the quiet vote..."
They argued about it for ten minutes while the adrenaline burned off. Ryan made sandwiches.
* * *
The group sessions shifted after that first Demodog run. Vine Crawlers became warmup. Demodog Den became the main event. Three times a week, Monday-Wednesday-Saturday, with Ryan controlling the difficulty by managing how many he let the group engage while he handled the rest.
By the end of September the party sat at LV 7. Their movements had sharpened again, the stat gains from leveling stacking on top of the physical training they were all still doing independently. Lucas hit harder. Will moved faster. Dustin's trap setups had gotten sophisticated enough that he could funnel a Demodog into a kill corridor made of Vine Fiber tripwires and burning rags. Mike's callouts were getting sharper, his timing better, his reads on Demodog movement patterns improving to the point where he could predict a charge direction before the creature committed. He also joins the fights most of time while taking the shots.
Ryan ran solo sessions on the off days. ID Create hit LV 15, then 16 during the third week. The Demobat Swarm tier unlocked at LV 15 and he tested it once, the sky filling with dozens of leathery shapes circling in patterns that looked random. He built Earth Shaping canopies over the truck and threw stones at them with TK for almost zero MP cost, picking them out of the air like target practice. Individually they were fragile. In swarms they were a problem.
The skills climbed.
Telekinesis crested LV 10 from constant use, combat and daily life. Mana Bolt hit LV 10 the same week, cost dropping to 7 MP per cast, and the homing variant unlocked, bolts curving toward living targets with eighty-five percent tracking accuracy. Fire Bolt climbed to LV 7 at 11 MP. Earth Shaping pushed to LV 12. Mana Crafting hit LV 8, the durability bonus so high now that a Mana Crafted knife stayed sharp indefinitely and a Mana Crafted jacket could absorb a hit that would bruise bone. Golem Creation reached LV 6, duration extending to fourteen hours, the stone constructs hit with STR 22 and carrying 250 HP.
Observe leveled to LV 8 from constant use on everything that moved. Emotional reads were detailed now, relationship dynamics visible, partial hidden motivations surfacing in the disposition lines.
Money poured in. Three hundred fifty to five hundred dollars per session, four or five solo sessions per week. His cash reserves pushed past seventeen thousand dollars.
A skill book dropped on a Wednesday run. Stealth, passive, LV 1. Ryan absorbed it and tested it during the next session, moving through the copied woods without making a sound. At LV 1 it wasn't invisibility. It was soft feet and controlled breathing and the system smoothing his movements, making him blend into the environment instead of disrupting it.
* * *
Ryan drove to Pete's house on a Sunday afternoon. He parked in the driveway, walked in through the kitchen door without knocking, and found Pete at the table reading the newspaper.
"I need a favor," Ryan said.
Pete looked up. Looked at Ryan. Looked at the newspaper. Folded it and set it aside, which in Pete-language meant this was getting his full attention.
"I need you to tell anyone who asks that Dad left some money. A savings account that matured when I turned sixteen."
Pete leaned back in his chair. His face didn't change. "Your father didn't leave a savings account."
"I know."
"You want me to lie."
"I want you to not have to answer questions you can't answer."
Silence. Pete picked up his coffee mug, found it empty, and set it back down. "How much money are we talking about?"
"Enough to fix up a house and buy a truck."
"Kid." Pete's jaw worked. Ryan could almost hear the gears turning behind the flat expression, the careful man running numbers and arriving at a sum that didn't make sense for a sixteen-year-old. "I told you I wasn't going to ask. I'm still not asking. But if someone asks me, I'll tell them your dad left a small insurance policy, and you've been doing handyman work since you were fourteen. That's close enough to true that I don't have to think about it."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Just don't get arrested."
Ryan also started taking visible repair jobs around Hawkins after that. He fixed Mrs. Henderson's fence, which took forty minutes and earned him forty dollars and a reputation that spread through the neighborhood phone tree in three days. He repaired a deck for a teacher at school. Replaced a section of plumbing for a neighbor on Maple Street. The work was trivial at his skill levels, but each job left a trail of witnesses and cash payments that built the cover story one small piece at a time.
* * *
The achievement notification popped during a solo session in the third week of September, triggered by a kill count he'd stopped tracking.
[Achievement Unlocked: "Demodog Hunter II" - Kill 300 Demodogs]
Reward: +2 Skill Points, +1 STR (permanent)
Title available: "Demodog Hunter" upgraded (+12% damage vs. Beast-type)
STR 28 climbed to 29 from the permanent bonus, then to 30 from a training gain two days later, then 31 from another training gain on the last day of September. The performance gains past 25 were real but invisible, every point of STR translating to harder hits and heavier carry loads without changing the way he looked. He was grateful for that.
Ryan invested the two skill points into Mana Regeneration, pushing it from LV 1 to LV 3. The passive stacked with Inner Calm and his WIS base, adding fifteen percent to a regen rate that was already comfortable.
Level 17 ticked to 18 in the second week. Three points into INT, two into WIS. INT 65 to 68, WIS 36 to 38.
Level 18 to 19 came at the end of the month. Same split. INT 68 to 71, WIS 38 to 40.
WIS 40. The perception gains were subtle but constant. Conversations carried more information than the words being spoken. He could feel the shape of what people meant before they finished saying it, not mind-reading or psychic, just a bone-deep attentiveness to the signals humans sent without knowing they were sending them.
VIT pushed to 31 from training. DEX hit 29, then 30 from continued daily work.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: Demodog Hunter
Level: 19
HP: 720/720
MP: 1,320/1,320
STR: 31
VIT: 31
DEX: 30
INT: 71
WIS: 40
CHA: 8
LUK: 15
Stat Points: 0
Skill Points: 0
Skills: 52
Party: Mike Wheeler (LV 7), Dustin Henderson (LV 7), Lucas Sinclair (LV 7), Will Byers (LV 7).
The first month of school was over.
Steve Harrington knew his name. Chrissy Cunningham met him in the library. The guys were fighting Demodogs three times a week and getting better at it fast enough that Ryan was starting to think about the next tier.
Forty days until November 6th. The number lived in his head like a countdown on a bomb.
He was sitting at the kitchen table after the last Saturday session of September, eating leftover hash, when Dustin called.
"I got Europe," Dustin said. The words came out at twice normal speed. "I pulled the BBC World Service on 15.070 megahertz. The signal was clean for eleven minutes before it faded. Eleven minutes, Ryan. From Hawkins, Indiana. With an antenna we built on your roof."
"Told you the impedance was off."
"You were right, and I hate that, and also it was incredible. Will and I are going to try for Radio Australia tomorrow night, 17-meter band. He thinks we need to adjust the ground plane, but I think the propagation window opens later, so we're going to test both theories. Loser buys Cokes."
"How's Will going to buy Cokes? He doesn't have money."
"He does now. Joyce gave him five dollars for mowing Mrs. Holland's lawn."
"Will mowed a lawn?"
"He mowed it badly, and Mrs. Holland paid him anyway because she's nice. The point is we're doing science and it's working and you need to be excited about this."
"I'm excited."
"You don't sound excited."
"This is what my excited sounds like."
Dustin hung up. Ryan finished his hash and washed the plate.
Outside, the September wind pushed through the privet hedge and rattled the loose board on the toolshed that he kept meaning to fix. He left the dishes in the rack and went upstairs to read.
[A.N: Oops... I did it again. 8,700+ words fresh out of the oven. I genuinely have no idea how I got there. Some scenes took way more words than I planned, but I think everything came out pretty solid.
We got the first day of school! The boys deserve some respect for how far they've come. I'm not saying they're walking around overconfident all the time, but compared to Upside Down monsters? Yeah, they can handle Troy. No question.
Ryan finally met Steve "The Hair" Harrington, which was honestly one of my favorite scenes to write. One of the best characters in the show, and getting to introduce him properly in this story felt great. I also pushed for some more Chrissy time to explore their chemistry together. For those keeping track of the romance situation, remember that for now only Nancy and Chrissy are relevant on that front, at least until November 6th.
Some of you might argue that the Demodog should have been stronger and harder for the group to take down. I disagree. Don't forget the preparation, the training, the magical weapons, and weeks of fighting together as a unit against Vine Crawlers. The point is that a single Demodog IS beatable if you prepare properly, know what's coming, and work as a team. Plus, they have fire, which is basically kryptonite for Upside Down creatures. Demodogs have insane physical defense, but they're not invincible.
I also had to get Ryan and Pete's financial story aligned so nobody asks too many questions about Ryan's situation. And please don't come at me with comments about taxes and money laundering, just imagine that the cash Ryan generates is already clean. Roll with it 😄
Massive thanks to all 103 Power Stone contributors this week! The list just keeps growing and I'm blown away:
Psycho_Paradox, Yunos_Noor, Getryx, GODKINGASH, Dear_Lord, XenonBlaster65, Dillmet_Singh_4812, Aaronzaid, Gustavo_Dias_4181, Xander_Hartig, Daoist3tTlco, Arthur25, heavenlydemon_, Mirksas, this_your_bush, Chikary, aXionPingu, Alternatif_OfMe, GzeroX, Gavin_Esteb, mitch_mitch40, SleepWalkingMan, DontDon, Bean_Man_7767, Maicros, UchihaGod, LouCaz, Lalo, AkGreyback, Akira890, Charly_26r, TomTheReader, Wither_Kingzz, Max202_Solana, siddhu, Gabriel_andrino, Shev, guardian252, jjtcaster, DaoistuhLIL5, Yuri_Marinho, ChristiaanZA, k_l_4014, Broccolitop, Raymond33, Makuraty, DaoistbpwiMZ, ChillPixel369, daviangarcia85, iamaguynamedtre, Alex_Vizio, Werph, Sad_Box, xNeke, KingSavage20, KBG_Obsidian, D1vineMonarch, Xplizit, String11ni, origin_of_power, GreatNovelLover, Piggy, Yoxiria, Xdd_0162, Carl_0, Consort_of_Ranni, Nicola_Lacey, A_Verdade, corey_miller_0016, DaoistoYoxBR, Kauak, Oladimeji_Daniel, Bakr24, vis_g_s_4628, ENELSON_RODRI, Lolggloll_XD, Dany_Baca, Celestialicz, GrimDaddy, ExoTic_, StormKing1, Venkata_Narendra, Death_St0rm, alessio_gentile, William_Von_Blum, Bonni_Clyde, krishnanaunni_j, DaoistJTE1Za, The_lazy, Kadiox, Josh_Balbarona, f3rnand0, MMBarqawi, Demonilusion, Kranox, Greenmatsui, balistic757, AlMutairy, Gorinjou, Matteo_De_Santis, Diosazura599, and Tomik.
103 people throwing stones for this story. That's insane for me. Every single one of you matters.
Please don't forget to keep commenting, reviewing, and if you can, send some Power Stones to help push the fic up the rankings. It really makes a difference! And as always, if you spot any inconsistencies, plot holes, or typos, let me know so I can fix them before they snowball into something bigger.]