Monday, October 31, 1983 - morning
______________________________________________________________________
The sixth Demogorgon died in three minutes and twelve seconds.
Ryan had been running the Hunt every two days for weeks. He'd brought the average kill time from six minutes to under four. The pattern was muscle memory now. Anchor before the tree line, Fireball at forty meters, Golem from the flank.
The Demogorgon screamed. The Golem's chest plate cracked under a claw strike. Ryan recast Anchor and went back to work. Finished it with spear, same as always. Ok sometimes he was using TK… but where is the fun in that?
[Demogorgon (LV 27) defeated! +4,100 XP]
Loot: Demogorgon Hide (×1), Demogorgon Claw (×1)
Dimensional Residue (×2), $440
1 Skill Book: Dimensional Ward
He picked up the skill book. The system absorbed it on contact.
[NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: Dimensional Ward (Active) - LV 1]
Creates a protective barrier over an area that prevents new dimensional rifts from opening within the warded zone.
Radius: 20m at LV 1. Duration: 24 hours.
MP Cost: 200. Cooldown: 24 hours after expiry.
Note: Does not affect existing gates. Only prevents new rifts from forming within the warded area.
A skill that stopped new gates from opening.
Twenty meters wasn't enough to cover the entire property. But twenty meters covered the house. Five sleeping bodies, walls and a roof, all of it inside a circle that no Demogorgon could enter through a fresh-made tear in space.
Also, he can multi-cast it through the whole house.
He cast the Ward right there in the ID, just to feel the cost. Two hundred MP drained in a single steady pull, and a faint dome shimmered into existence around him, semi-visible only because his Mana Sense was open and watching. From outside the dome, no new rift would open. It wouldn't stop a Demogorgon already in the world from walking through on foot. But it would stop a new tear from forming under the house while his friends slept inside it. It could also prevent teleport-style gates from opening, like the Demogorgon did in season 5 while hunting Holly and almost killing Karen Wheeler.
This was a skill he had to level up.
He let the Ward dissipate. He'd cast it at home tonight, properly. For now, he had hide in Inventory, and he was due at school in forty minutes for a Halloween party he could not skip without being noticed.
He exited the ID and went inside to shower.
* * *
Monday, October 31, 1983 - Hawkins High School, evening
The gym had been decorated by the junior class, which meant everything was slightly crooked. Paper bats hung from the basketball hoops on strings of varying length, some at eye level and some close enough to the floor that short kids had to duck. Orange streamers spiraled from the overhead lights. A fog machine in the corner coughed out a thin chemical haze every forty seconds and then stopped, resting, before coughing again.
The DJ was a senior named Kevin who had a boombox the size of a suitcase. He was playing Michael Jackson's "Thriller" for the third time in an hour. Dude didn't know how to be a DJ. Well…... It was the eighties.
The party came as their D&D characters. Mike wore a robe made from a bedsheet, dyed purple with fabric paint that hadn't quite set, so there were purple smudges on his neck and the inside of his left wrist. His staff was a broomstick with tinfoil wrapped around the top. He'd committed. He looked ridiculous and didn't care, which was the best thing about Mike when he let himself go.
Dustin was a bard. He'd borrowed Eddie's lute for the night, and the instrument was more costume than instrument, the neck wrapped in ribbon and the tuning pegs twisted to angles that would have made Eddie scream. He'd drawn a mustache on his upper lip with his mom's eyeliner.
Lucas wore a leather jacket and carried a toy bow slung over one shoulder. The jacket was his dad's, two sizes too big… but he'd rolled the sleeves and stood up with confidence that made the jacket look like it fit. People kept looking at him. He didn't notice or at least pretended not to.
Will had a dark robe that looked like it had started life as one of Joyce's old curtains and a wooden staff, he'd carved himself. Wizard. The staff was surprisingly detailed, runes scratched along the upper half with something sharp and patient, the wood sanded smoothly. He'd painted the tip silver and it caught the light when he moved.
Ryan went as Garrett the Fighter. Leather jacket, jeans, and a prop sword. The sword was Mana Crafted from hardwood, shaped and compressed until the grain was so tight the surface looked metallic. It caught the gym lights and threw back a dull gleam that turned heads.
"That sword looks real," Chrissy said.
She was at the punch table in a princess costume. White dress, fake tiara, hair curled into loose spirals that fell past her shoulders.
" Good… but it's not," Ryan said.
"It LOOKS real." She reached out and touched the flat of the blade with two fingers. "It's also warm."
"Wood absorbs heat from my hand. The finish holds it."
"Hm." She turned it over in her head. "Did you make this yourself?"
"Yeah."
"It's kind of incredible." She looked up at him. "Also, a little weird."
"For a Halloween costume?"
"For a sixteen-year-old to make this kind of thing… "
"I had the whole week free."
She looked at him. "That's either impressive or sad."
"Probably both."
She laughed. They stood together near the punch bowl and watched the gym.
Mike was dancing with a girl from his history class. His bedsheet robe swung wide on every turn and the girl had to lean back to avoid getting hit in the face. Mike didn't notice. But the girl didn't seem to mind, which meant Mike's CHA stat and training had definitely done their job.
Dustin was strumming the lute with what he clearly believed was dramatic flair. He knew three chords, none of them in the right order, and he was singing something that might have been an original composition or might have been "Bohemian Rhapsody" with different words. Two girls from the volleyball team were watching him with expressions that hovered between horror and admiration. One girl in particular gave him a look that was hard to ignore, more intense than the rest. She looked familiar… but he couldn't quiet place her. His memories told him her name was Honor, but she wasn't supposed to exist in this world…... He should check her out later.
[A.N: Little surprise for you guys… let's see if any of you caught the reference. Also let me know in the comments whether to go for it for Dustin or not. I'm honestly torn. I know the whole Suzie thing was hilarious, but it came totally out of nowhere for Dustin in the show.]
Lucas had found a spot against the wall near the bleachers and was talking to a girl Ryan didn't recognize. He was leaning with his arms crossed and his bow over his shoulder, and whatever he was saying was making the girl smile.
Will was near the speakers, standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the dance floor with a half-smile. His foot tapped against the floor, finding the beat. When Dustin's singing got especially bad, Will winced and covered one ear, and Dustin pointed at him from across the gym waving him to join.
"Save me a dance?" Chrissy asked.
"I thought you'd never ask."
They danced to "Every Breath You Take" by the Police.
1983 had exactly one slow song and Kevin played it whenever the energy in the gym dropped below a certain threshold. Chrissy was shorter than Ryan by four inches. Her hand was on his shoulder and his hand was on her waist and she smelled like vanilla and the faintest trace of the punch she'd been drinking.
Dancing LV 1 handled the footwork. DEX 35 handled the balance. The combination made Ryan look like someone who'd taken lessons. His feet found the right spots without searching for them.
"Not bad," she said when the song faded into something faster.
"I'm a fast learner."
"You say that about everything."
"It's always true."
She held his eyes for a second longer than the joke required, then let go and stepped back. Cheerleader Chrissy walked away from the punch table. The real Chrissy had been there for four minutes and thirty seconds.
Across the gym, Steve Harrington was standing with a cluster of seniors. He caught Ryan's eye and gave him a nod and a thumbs-up that could have meant anything. Basketball, the dance, life in general. Tommy Hagan stood behind Steve's right shoulder.
* * *
Tuesday, November 1, 1983 - Hawkins National Laboratory
The room had a number on the door. Seventeen. She had counted the corridor's doors so many times she knew the numbers without looking. Her room sat at the end on the left.
Eleven sat on the edge of her cot with her bare feet on the concrete and her hands flat on her knees. The shower had been four minutes long. Her hair was still wet. The orderly had given her the gown and walked her back, and now she was waiting for the next part of the day to start, because there was always a next part.
Two sessions in the tank yesterday. They had not told her there would be two. She had thought the first session was the whole day, and then they had brought her back to the tank an hour later, and Papa had been waiting.
He wanted her to find something specific now. He had stopped naming the people in offices and started naming directions. Reach further. Find the place where the warmth ends. She had not understood at first, but she understood now. He wanted her to find the cold thing. The big one. The one she had been afraid to even go near.
She didn't want to find it.
She wanted to find the other thing. The warm one she had found by mistake.
She closed her eyes on the cot and tried, very quietly, just for herself. Not the way Papa wanted. The way she wanted. She reached past the rooms of the building and the people in them and the engines under the floor that hummed all day, and she pushed her attention out into the place she could only get to when she was scared enough or alone enough.
The dark thing was there. Closer than yesterday. She could feel its pressure in her whole being. She moved around it.
The warm presence was further away than she remembered. She had to push to reach it. When she found it, it was the same as before, a steady glow that did not move or speak. She pressed against the edge of it for as long as she could hold her breath. Counted to twelve. Then she had to come back.
She opened her eyes. The crack in the ceiling was where it always was. The light buzzed. The vent above the door pushed cool air down onto her shoulders.
Her left nostril had started bleeding again.
She wiped it on her wrist and pulled the blanket up over her knees and waited for the door to open.
She kept thinking about the warm thing. Whatever the warm thing was, it had hands and it had a back and you could put your face against it and the cold things would not get through.
She had no plan. She had no idea what plan would even look like. She had spent her whole life in this building and the building was the world. But the warm thing was outside the building, and the cold thing was getting closer every day, and Papa wanted her to touch the cold thing, and she had decided last night that she was not going to touch the cold thing again no matter what Papa did. She didn't know if she could keep that when they put her back in the water.
The lock on the door clicked. The handle turned.
"Eleven." The orderly's voice. "It's time."
She got up. Walked to the door. Followed him down the hallway with the numbered doors, past the metal gate, past the cameras at every junction, past the place where the hallway branched left to the medical wing and right to the holding wing, and straight on toward the room with the tank.
She walked on the cold tile in bare feet. She did not let her face show anything.
She was going to find the warm thing again today.
* * *
Tuesday, November 1, 1983 - Miller Property
Ryan stood in the driveway with the truck's hood up and his sleeves rolled past his elbows, thinking, not for the first time, that the F-150 was about to become something Ford would have recalled if they'd known what he was doing to it.
The truck had good bones. Twelve years old, blue paint faded to chalk along the upper panels, rust starting at the lower seams. Engine ran, the transmission held and the frame was straight. Everything inside that frame was about to change.
He started with the doors.
Earth Shaping had stopped being only earth a few weeks ago. Stone first, then clay, then sand, and at some point in October he'd noticed the skill answering when he pushed it at iron. Metal was just dense, organized stone, after all. The system seemed to agree, though he wasn't sure the materials engineering guys would see it that way. Whatever. What worked, worked, and the system was an omnipotent god….
By now he could move steel the way he used to move soil. Pull it, bend it, hollow it, grow ridges along its surface. Mana Crafting locked with whatever Earth Shaping moved into and made everything harder than the original metal had ever been.
Water… Earth, Fire, mana. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Upside Down attacked.
Only the Gamer, master of all four elements, could stop them.
But when the world needed him most, he was busy reinforcing a 1971 Ford F-150 in his driveway.
He pushed the thought down before it could become a smile. He'd watched too much Avatar in his old life. But the comparison wasn't entirely wrong, and he allowed himself a second of it before he got back to the door.
Mana Crafting and Earth Shaping let him work the steel without tools. He sat in the driver's seat with his hand on the inside of the door panel and pushed mana into the metal in slow, focused pulses. The steel responded like clay responded to a thumb, except shape wasn't what he was changing. It was density. The molecular grid compacted, and the door's skin became something twice as thick as Ford had ordered from the supplier, with the surface looking exactly the way it had looked when he'd parked the truck the night before.
Then he tried something he'd been thinking about for a week.
He took a strip of Demogorgon hide and laid it flat against the inside face of the driver's side door. Pushed mana through both materials at once. The hide didn't sit on top of the steel. It sank into it. The two materials accepted each other like two metals accepted each other in a forge weld, except this wasn't heat, it was Mana Crafting at the threshold level, and what came out the other end was a hybrid the system labeled as something new.
[Composite material created: Reinforced Steel-Hide Plate]
Density: 4x standard automotive steel
Tear resistance: 6x standard
Inherent property: Mild dimensional resistance (Upside Down
creatures see the surface as wrong-feeling)
He stared at the notification for a few seconds.
Then he started melting hide into everything he'd already armored. The doors, redone. Took twenty minutes per door, but the result was a single continuous skin of steel-hide composite, no seams, no layered weakness, no separation between materials that a Demogorgon could exploit by tearing the inner liner away from the outer. The roof, the same. The rear bed. The wheel wells, which he hadn't planned to do at all but which now seemed obvious in hindsight, because tires were the most exposed part of any vehicle.
He'd burned through three full Demogorgon hides by the time he stopped. He had four more in Inventory. The hide budget wasn't going to be the problem. MP was going to be the problem.
He took a break. Made a sandwich and ate it standing up. He watched his MP regen climb back from forty percent to seventy. The expend on Composite was steep. About two hundred MP per square foot of surface, but it scaled, and he'd done close to thirty square feet today.
The windshield was the difficult part. Glass wanted to break when you fed mana into it, and hide didn't bond with glass at all. He worked in increments, narrowing his focus to a point the size of a coin, sliding the Durability enchantment through the glass at a rate of about four square inches a minute. By the time he finished both windshields and all four side windows, it was past noon and his MP was at fifty percent.
Then the engine.
The 302 V8 Ford had bolted into the F-150 in 1971 was a perfectly adequate engine for a quarter-ton pickup that hauled groceries and lumber. It was not adequate for a truck that now weighed somewhere around two hundred and fifty pounds more than it had this morning, and that was going to gain another hundred fifty when he finished the cab. The brakes would cope, the suspension would probably also cope with new pads. But the engine wouldn't bring out his full power if it was weighed down by extra mass.
He pulled the air cleaner and the valve covers and got his hands on the block.
Mana Crafting on a working engine was tricky unlike stationary metal. The engine had moving parts, finished tolerances, balanced rotation. You couldn't just compact the cylinder walls and assume the pistons would still fit. He worked piece by piece, each component pulled and reset on the bench, the cylinder bores compacted and re-honed by mana to a tighter cross-section, the pistons reinforced with a thin Composite liner that would let them survive higher compression, the camshaft refined to sharper lift profiles than Ford had ever spec'd. The valve springs got Mana Crafted to a stiffer rate. The crankshaft got density compacting and a Sharpness enchantment applied to the bearing surfaces, which was a use of Sharpness he had not seen in any reference.
The intake manifold was the last piece. Opening the runners, smoothing the casting flash that Ford's foundry had left behind in 1971, narrowing the plenum. By the time he bolted everything back together, the 302 was no longer a 302 in any meaningful sense. It was something that displaced the same volume but produced significantly more horsepower per cubic inch.
He turned it over.
The engine caught on the first crank. Idled at six hundred RPM, smooth. Very smooth. The kind of smooth that came from internals balanced to tolerances Ford's assembly line had never approached. He blipped the throttle. The response was instant. No lag. No coughing. Just a clean rise and fall.
The truck could now move its new heavier weight without complaint and probably outrun anything Hawkins County was willing to put on a road in 1983.
He took a break. Made a second sandwich. And then move to the interior.
He'd built a hidden compartment behind the bench seat using Earth Shaping techniques applied to the cab floor, a Mana Crafted steel box welded into the gap behind the seat back. From inside the cab, invisible. From the box, he could fit a full combat loadout with room to spare. Backup weapons. Flashlights. Spare clothes. A medical kit that looked normal and contained Greater HP Potions in mislabeled bottles.
He lined up the box itself with the Composite. If the cab took a direct hit, the loadout survived.
The CB radio in the dash he replaced with a unit Dustin had built him a month ago. Generic stick-on label on the case, but the guts were custom-tuned to the property and the Lab frequencies he'd mapped.
He installed an antenna along the inside of the truck bed wall, hidden under the underlayer. A long-range whip that would push the CB's range past forty miles in clean weather, longer if he Mana Crafted the signal boosters. He didn't know how the radios in the Upside Down would behave, he only had the show for reference. So, probably they wouldn't behave well. But you didn't go into a place by assuming the equipment was useless. He'd go there with the equipment and see what worked.
Under the dash he routed a Mana Crafted wire from the battery to a small reservoir built into the firewall. The reservoir held a charge of stored mana, slow leaking, that would feed any active enchantments on the truck for about seventy-two hours of continuous protection without him recasting. He'd test that number later. The math was theoretical.
The fuel tank was a problem he hadn't considered until he was lying under the truck running new lines for the auxiliary fog lights. The original tank was a steel bladder mounted between the frame rails. Twenty gallons. Fine for normal driving. Wrong for a vehicle that might need to drive into and back out of a place that did not have gas stations. Also, the more powerful the engine, the more fuel it would need.
He fabricated a second tank. Mana Crafted from sheet steel, lined with Composite, mounted inside the rear bed under a false floor he made out of more Composite. Eighteen extra gallons. The truck could now carry close to forty gallons total, enough for six hundred miles at the F-150's normal economy and probably four hundred under whatever conditions the Upside Down imposed. He plumbed the second tank into the fuel system through a manual valve under the dash. Switch to backup with a flick of his thumb.
The headlights got the last of the day's work. Fog lights, off-road auxiliaries, four extra forward beams along the brush guard, all wired to a single switch under the dash. He enchanted the bulbs with +Brightness, a variant he'd been trying for a week and had finally gotten to work. The light would push twice as far through fog or smoke or whatever the Upside Down used in place of either.
He also added a spotlight to the roof. A surplus aircraft landing light he'd bought at a hardware auction in September and stashed in the workshop without a clear plan. How convenient for him…..
Now it had a plan. Mounted on a gimbal he could rotate from inside the cab, enchanted, controlled from the dash. A million candlepower of focused beam pointed at whatever needed to be lit.
He bolted the brush guard back on. Fed it Composite while it was off the truck. Same with the front bumper, which got a forty-pound thickness gain and the Sharpness enchantment applied to the leading edge. If he had to ram something, the truck would survive being the rammer.
By dusk the truck looked the same from outside. Same chalky blue paint. Same rust. Same dings on the bumper from the year he'd been learning to park. Inside, it was a different vehicle. He started the engine and drove it down the access road and back, listening to how it handled. The new suspension load was rough on the stock shocks. He'd buy heavy-duty replacements tomorrow morning. The new engine more than compensated for the weight, and the steering felt tighter than it had in years.
MP at twenty percent. It was the heaviest single-day MP expenditure he'd ever sustained, that with counting all the regen through the day.
He was sliding out of the cab when something brushed his awareness.
Not so strong. Half a second, maybe less. Like a finger trailing along his shoulder and pulling away before he could turn his head. The same direction as before. Southeast.
[Anomalous psychic contact detected]
[Source: unknown. Contact duration: 0.4 seconds.]
[Direction: southeast. Distance: 2-3 km.]
She'd reached for him on purpose this time. He was sure of it. Last week's contact had felt accidental, like two people passing each other in a crowded room and brushing shoulders. This one had been deliberate. She'd found him and held the contact long enough to recognize him and then she'd let go.
He sat on the porch for a minute. Long enough that the air cooled down and his breath fogged in front of him.
If she could feel him, then she knew he was here, and what she needed to know more than anything else right now was that someone outside the building was thinking about her on purpose.
He pushed his Mana Sense out as far as it would go in her direction. He couldn't reach two miles. He could reach maybe a hundred and twenty meters, the boundaries of his thirty-meter psychic radius extended a little by Deep Perception. It wasn't far enough.
But he sent the thought anyway even though he knew it would never reach her. I'm here. I know you're there. Hold on.
If she heard it, the system didn't tell him.
He went inside, sat at the kitchen table, and pulled out the notebook he'd been keeping on the contacts. Two confirmed events now. October 24th, 0.8 seconds. November 1st, 0.4 seconds. Both southeast. Both her, almost certainly.
He was about to close the notebook when the system pinged him.
[Skill Acquired: Telepathy (Active) - LV 1]
Acquired through prolonged passive exposure to external psychiccontact. Repeated foreign neural intrusion has restructured your cognitive architecture to support outbound psychic transmission.Current capability:
Send simple thoughts to a target you can see directly (visual lock required at LV 1).
Range: line of sight, max 50 meters.
Duration: 1-2 seconds per transmission.
Requires: Established familiarity with target. Strangers resist instinctively unless contact is held longer.
MP Cost: 30 per transmission. 60 for non-familiar targets.
It made so much sense…... Eleven had been reaching for him for the past two weeks. The contacts had been brief, but they had been real. Every time she pushed against his mind, the contact had left something behind, like footprints in soft mud. He had not noticed. The system had been keeping the score in the background, and the score had finally added up to a skill.
Telepathy, even at this baseline, was a tool he hadn't expected to have. Most of the use cases were obvious. Communicate silently with the party in combat, when shouting would draw attention. Pass instructions across a crowded room. He'd already broken half a dozen social norms by being a teen with the brain of an adult, and now he could add silent telepathic communication to the list of things he had to remember not to use casually.
The line-of-sight requirement was the biggest constraint, and it was the one he expected to lose first as the skill leveled. The Gamer system rewarded use. Use it enough and the limitations dropped one by one. The same way Mana Sense at LV 1 had been ten meters and was now thirty plus the Deep Perception bonus. The same way Stealth at LV 1 had been useless and was now LV 8 and could move him through a corridor without a security camera catching the motion.
He needed a target to test it on.
He thought about it for a minute. The party was not in the house. Pete was at the foundry. Nancy was probably at home. There was no choice but to use his new cat. He'd always been pro animal experimentation…... Just kidding... Probably.
The tabby was on the back porch.
It had been coming around for a week or so. A stray, orange and white, missing half its left ear from a fight it had either won or survived, which in cat terms was the same thing. It had shown up the first time in end-October with a gash along its side that was deep enough to see muscle. Ryan had picked it up, which cost him a scratch across the back of his hand, and cast Heal. The wound had closed in about four seconds. The cat had stared at him, then at its own side, then back at him, and jumped out of his arms and disappeared into the trees.
It came back the next evening. And the evening after that. It showed up most nights around dusk and sat on the porch railing until Ryan put out a bowl of leftover chicken or tuna, and then it ate and disappeared into the tree line without acknowledgment or gratitude. But it came back. The gash had healed clean without a scar, which was more than any vet could have done, and the cat seemed to have taken Ryan as his servant.
It was sitting on the railing now, watching him with flat yellow eyes.
Ryan sat on the porch step three feet away. Made eye contact. Pushed a thought across the gap. Hey.
The system charged him sixty MP. The thought went through. The cat's pupils dilated. Its ears went flat against its skull and it stood up on the railing, back arched, tail puffed to twice its width. It hissed once, short and sharp, and then froze, staring at him with an expression that said very clearly that voices were not supposed to come from inside your own head and whoever was responsible for this was going to get clawed.
So the system translated intent across species. Good to know. He briefly wondered what "Hey" sounded like in cat. Probably something rude.
Easy. Just me.
Another thirty MP. The cat did not relax. It jumped off the railing, landed in the dead grass, and walked away at a pace that was too dignified to be called running but too fast to be called walking. It stopped at the edge of the tree line, looked back at him once, and vanished into the brush.
Apparently healing a cat's wounds bought you regular visits but not telepathic privileges.
The skill worked. The MP cost was higher than he liked, but it would drop with leveling. The cat's reaction had been stronger than he'd expected. Animals didn't have the social filters humans used to rationalize weird input. A person might hear a voice in their head and spend ten seconds wondering if they'd imagined it. A cat heard a voice in its head and immediately decided that the porch was haunted and left.
He thought about Eleven again.
If he could see her, he could talk to her without anyone hearing. That changed everything about an extraction scenario. He wouldn't have to explain himself out loud. He wouldn't have to negotiate the language barrier, which he knew from the show was significant in the early days. He could push safe and friend and come directly into her head, and she would know.
The system would probably charge him the unfamiliar rate the first time. Sixty MP per transmission. He had two thousand and one hundred MP. That was enough for thirty-five transmissions, more if he was patient between them and let regen catch up.
He went back inside. Turned on the overhead and started cooking dinner, and the new skill sat at the edge of his awareness, a fresh entry on his sheet that he'd come back to later.
* * *
He needed a second car. A daily driver was a public thing. Pete had given him the F-150 for school and groceries. If the F-150 went into the Upside Down and came back smelling like rotten meat, Pete would notice within a week. Ryan needed something he could drive to school and to Pete's and to his friends that didn't smell like the wrong dimension.
He'd looked through the Brooksville Bee classifieds last weekend and circled three options. A 1976 Honda Civic at $1,200, sold by an old woman whose son had moved to California. A 1979 Datsun 510 at $1,800, listed by a mechanic who'd rebuilt the engine and wanted a quick sale. A 1974 AMC Hornet at $900, "needs work."
He should use cash transactions. Pete didn't need to know yet. Ryan would tell him eventually that he'd bought a backup car for the winter, when the F-150 was unreliable in snow. Pete would grunt and call it a waste of money and not push. Pete didn't push when Ryan had clearly thought a thing through.
The money was the easy part. He had close to thirty-six thousand dollars in Inventory, accumulated from Demogorgon kills and Demodog drops. Twelve hundred for a Civic was nothing. He could have bought ten Civics if he'd wanted ten Civics.
Maybe he should buy a fourth. A junker. Something he could let the Upside Down ruin and abandon by the side of the road if it came to that.
* * *
He stood on the porch in the cold air and looked at the property.
The bones of the place had been solid since August. Mana Crafted studs and joists, Earth Shaped foundation sealed into a continuous surface, the sub-cellar with its two levels and the escape tunnel running a hundred feet southeast to the tree line. The structural work was finished before school started. What he'd been doing in October, after the Demogorgon kills started dropping usable material, was the second layer.
Demogorgon hide behind every ground-floor wall. He'd had enough material to line all four exterior walls and the cellar ceiling, the hide compressed and fused into the drywall with Mana Crafting. Not sitting behind it. He fused into It with the same Composite technique he'd used on the truck, except applied to construction lumber and plasterboard instead of automotive steel. A Demogorgon could cut wood. It could cut drywall. It could probably cut its own kind's hide. But it would have to cut through a fused composite of all three to get through any single point of the house, and by the time it had worked through that, Ryan would have heard it and put a Fireball through the breach.
The windows were the part that worried him. Glass was glass, even Mana Crafted. The Durability enchantment held, but a determined Demogorgon would get through eventually. He'd built secondary defenses this past week. Retractable steel-hide Composite panels behind every window, hidden in the wall cavities behind the curtains, triggered by TK from anywhere in the house. He could lock down all windows in about four seconds. The panels themselves were each an inch thick of the same fused material he'd used on the truck doors. A Demogorgon claw might score the surface. It would not get through.
The cellar door had gotten Composite iron bands welded across its inside face earlier this week. The bands were fused into the hinges and the frame, the whole assembly, a single piece that would hold against impact for as long as the stone foundation held. And the foundation had been Mana Crafted to hold against anything short of a direct artillery hit.
The new addition was the Dimensional Ward.
The skill book had been clear. 200 MP cost, 24-hour duration, 20-meter radius. Twenty meters covered the house and the front yard but not the workshop or the field.
The skill required a recast every twenty-four hours. Two hundred MP every day. Sustainable. But two hundred MP per cast was a lot. Factor in a few spread castings to cover the whole house and he was burning a serious chunk of his MP on something passive every day. And forgetting to recast was the kind of mistake that got you killed.
He wanted it permanent. So he'd been experimenting.
The Mana Crafting threshold at LV 10 had unlocked persistent properties. If he could anchor the Ward to a physical object instead of casting it into empty air, the property became attached to the object instead of the caster. Like enchanting a sword, except the property was an area effect.
He'd spent most of Monday night working on it, after he got back from the Halloween dance. The breakthrough came around two in the morning, when he'd taken a dimensional residue crystal from the Demogorgon loot pile, ground it down with a mortar and pestle on the workshop bench, and mixed the powder into Mana Crafted clay. The clay accepted the Ward like a sponge accepted water. He shaped it into a lens and set it on the back porch. Ryan finally found a use for the dimensional residue loot he'd been sitting on. The stuff had been useless up until now, every attempt to do something with it going nowhere, until this.
The Ward had drawn up out of him for an hour straight, a slow pull on his MP that totaled around eight hundred points before it stabilized. When it stabilized, it sat inside the lens, contained, with a weak self-sustaining feedback loop that drew on ambient mana to maintain itself.
It needed feeding. About a hundred MP every two or three days to keep the lens charged. A massive improvement over the base skill's twenty-four-hour recast cycle, but not zero maintenance. With WIS 54 and all the regen bonuses stacked, the MP cost was less than three minutes of sitting still. He could top up a lens in the time it took to drink a cup of coffee. The problem wasn't the cost. The problem was remembering. He'd figure it out somehow. For now, he'd scaled it up.
A second residue lens sat at the northwest corner of the property, covering the workshop and the driveway. A third at the southeast edge, overlapping with the first to close the gap along the back field. Each one had cost him eight hundred MP to anchor and the same hundred MP every few days to maintain. Three lenses, three hundred MP every two or three days. Under nine minutes of regen total. Nothing.
The total coverage was close to sixty meters across. Not the whole property. Not the tree line or the road. But the house, the workshop, the driveway, and most of the back yard were inside a continuous zone where no new rift could open. Anything that wanted to get in would have to walk.
He had enough residue for more lenses. He'd place those after Sunday, when he had a better picture of where the threats were actually coming from.
There was something else.
He'd noticed, while working with the residue, that the powder behaved oddly when he traced patterns with it. A line of residue dust on the workbench wanted to hold its shape after he'd drawn it. A circle held even better. Geometric patterns drawn in residue paste slowed ambient mana the way a riverbed shaped a current. He hadn't pursued it last night because he'd been too tired and too focused on the Ward. But the system had given him a pre-skill notification.
[Pattern recognized: Sigil Construction]Continued practice may unlock a new skill.Synergy detected with: Mana Crafting (LV 10),Enchanting (LV 4), Dimensional Ward (LV 1).
He'd left the notification and gone to bed. The drawing could wait until he had time to do them right.
Another Five days. He'd to come back to it later that week.
* * *
Wednesday, November 2nd
The seventh hunt was another quick one with nothing worth remembering.
The eighth one surprised him.
He opened the way he always opened. Anchor landed clean. Fireball hit the chest at forty meters. The Golem moved in from the left, three hundred and fifty pounds of stone, ready to tank the first swipe.
The Demogorgon didn't swipe.
It ducked under the Golem's guard and rammed it. Full body, legs driving, skull plates down. Three hundred fifty pounds of stone versus six hundred pounds of Upside Down predator at a dead sprint. The Golem went over backward and hit the ground and the Demogorgon was on top of it, both claws buried in the chest cavity, tearing. The Golem's torso split open in two seconds. Ryan felt the construct die through the mana link, a cold snap like a wire breaking.
He'd never lost a Golem mid-fight before.
The Demogorgon pulled itself free of the rubble and turned toward him. Blood and stone dust on its claws. The petal-mouth opened wide enough that he could see the rows of teeth all the way back to the throat.
Ryan adjusted. No Golem meant no tank, which meant no standing still. He threw Mana Bolts while backpedaling, six MP per cast, the homing variant finding joints and eye sockets. Six casts. Eight. The creature flinched with each hit but kept coming, closing the gap at a pace that ate ground faster than he could give it.
The Anchor expired. The Demogorgon flickered, its outline blurring as the dimensional phasing kicked back in. Ryan recast. Eighteen seconds locked. The creature solidified mid-stride and stumbled.
He used the stumble. TK grabbed the boulder he'd pre-positioned at the edge of the copied tree line. Two hundred kilograms of granite. He didn't lift it this time. He threw it sideways, a flat trajectory at chest height, fast enough that the air cracked.
The boulder caught the Demogorgon across the ribcage and knocked it off its feet. It hit the ground rolling, claws digging furrows in the dirt. Before it could stand, Ryan closed the distance and put two Fireballs into it at point-blank. One in the shoulder. One in the petal-mouth while it was still open from the scream.
The second Fireball went inside the creature's head. The detonation was muffled. The body dropped.
Ryan stood over it, breathing harder than he'd breathed in three fights. His heart rate was up. Gamer's Mind held the adrenaline at a manageable level.
The Golem had been stupid. He'd gotten used to having the tank, and the Demogorgon had gotten smarter, or this one had been smarter than the others, and the difference between those two possibilities mattered for future fights. If individual Demogorgons could learn from watching others die, his pattern was going to stop working eventually. If this one had just been faster, then the pattern held and he needed a better Golem.
Either way, lesson learned. Don't assume the next fight looks like the last one. Especially knowing the real Demogorgons were hive-mind wired.
[Demogorgon (LV 27) defeated! +4,100 XP] Loot: Demogorgon Hide (×1), Demogorgon Claw (×1) Dimensional Residue (×3), $420 1 Stat Crystal (+1 DEX)
A level.
[Level Up! Level 25 → 26]
+5 Stat Points available.
+1 Skill Point available.
Three into INT. Two into WIS. INT 89 to 92. WIS 52 to 54.
He applied the DEX crystal. DEX 35 to 36. Training in the past week had pushed STR to 37 and VIT to 36.
The skill point went into Stealth. LV 7 to LV 8.
He picked up the loot. Hide, claw and cash into Inventory, residue crystals carefully wrapped in cloth. The fight had given him enough crystallized residue to do even more exterminates.
The third dimensional residue had been a surprise. The kills had been dropping one residue each since the second fight. Today's drop of three meant either the system was rewarding the pattern or LUK 16 was finally paying off.
He sat on the back porch of the copied house for a while, letting his MP regenerate. No Golem beside him this time. Just rubble where the Golem used to be.
Four days to Sunday. He'd build a better Golem tomorrow.
He exited the ID, walked into the workshop, and started laying out the third Demogorgon hide for processing.
* * *
Wednesday afternoon
The guys came back to the property after school. Ryan sat them down at the kitchen table. He'd laid out the kits before they arrived. One per chair. Each kit had armor, a weapon, a CB radio, two sealed bottles labeled ENERGY DRINK with electrical tape around the caps, a flashlight, and a folded note.
"What's all this," Mike said.
"Emergency kits."
"For what."
"For an emergency."
Mike gave him a look. Ryan didn't break eye contact.
Lucas picked up the spear before anyone else could press the question. Hefted it. Set it back down.
"This is the one I've been training with."
"It's yours now."
"Permanent?"
"Permanent."
"Sweet."
Mike read the note and set it down and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"What is it?" Dustin said.
"Read the note."
Dustin read. He read it slowly, his lips moving on the harder words. When he finished he looked up.
"Real weird like what?"
"Like what we've been training for."
"Specifics."
"Air smells wrong. Lights flicker for no reason. A dog won't stop barking at empty corners. You see something move that shouldn't be moving. Don't go home. Don't call your mom. Come here."
"What about my mom?"
"Bring her."
"She's not gonna come."
"Then make her. Pick her up over your shoulder if you have to. You come here."
"Okay." Dustin said it like he meant it. He had no follow-up. He packed the kit into his backpack and sat there with his hands on the bag.
Will hadn't spoken yet. He was running his thumb along the edge of the fang knife, testing the balance.
"Ryan."
"Yeah."
"Sunday."
"Sunday."
"What time."
"Six. Bring an overnight bag. Tell your mom you're staying for movie night."
"She'll buy it. She likes when I'm here." A pause. "Why Sunday specifically?"
Ryan had been waiting for this question since he started planning the night.
"You know that I told you, how the energy from the Lab has been climbing for a couple of weeks?"
"Yeah."
"It's the same kind of energy I use to open the dungeon doors. Same signature. Whatever they're doing over there is pushing on the same membrane I push on when I make a portal. And it's getting stronger."
"Okay."
"I have an instinctive feeling that Sunday is the peak. Every time I've measured the cycle, the readings spike on the rotation, and Sunday is the next spike. It might be nothing. The cycle might just keep cycling. But it might be the day they push it too far."
"And if they push it too far?"
"I don't know what that looks like exactly. That's why I want everyone here. If something happens, I want all of you in one place behind a locked door, not scattered across town where I can't reach you."
"You don't know what's going to happen."
"No."
"But you think something might."
"Yeah."
Will nodded slowly. He didn't look like he believed every piece of it. He looked like he believed the part that mattered.
"Okay," Will said. "Sunday."
"All four of you," Ryan said. "Mike, Lucas, Dustin, you. I don't want anyone home that night. Anyone."
"Why all of us?" Mike said. "If you're worried about something at the Lab, why does it matter where Lucas sleeps?"
Because in the show it was Will. Because if Will isn't on Mirkwood Road, the thing that wanted Will is going to want somebody else. Because the next person it grabs might be you, Mike Wheeler, cutting through the woods between your house and Dustin's, and I don't know how to live with that. Because I've run the scenarios in my head until they make me sick and the only one that works is the one where all four of you are inside the warded perimeter where I can see you breathing.
"Because as I said, I don't want to drive across town in the dark trying to find four different people in four different houses," Ryan said. "I want everyone in one place if something happens."
"That's the whole reason?"
"That's the reason I can give you. The rest is a feeling. I've had a lot of feelings in the last six months, and I've learned to listen to them."
Mike held his eyes for a second. Then he nodded, he didn't plan on pushing it.
"Okay," Mike said. "I'll tell my mom I'm staying over."
"My mom won't care," Dustin said. "She thinks I live here already."
"Same," Lucas said.
"What's our job if something happens?" Mike said.
"Stay inside. Stay together. If anything comes through the door that isn't me or one of you, we fight it."
"And if it's bigger than a Demodog?"
"Run for the cellar. There's a trapdoor in the storage closet floor. It opens onto a tunnel."
Three heads turned.
"You built a tunnel," Dustin said.
"I built a tunnel."
"When. I feel like it became a routine for us to discover new things you do"
"In August."
"You've had a secret escape tunnel since August and didn't tell us."
"The point of a secret tunnel is the secret part."
"That is the exact opposite of the point of a tunnel," Dustin said. "The point of a tunnel is that everyone using it knows where it is."
"Everyone using it now knows where it is. Walk-through after lunch."
"I need a minute to be mad about this first."
"Take your minute."
Dustin folded his arms. Stared at the ceiling. After about ten seconds he said, "Okay, I'm done. Show me the tunnel."
"After lunch."
Mike had been quiet through the tunnel exchange. He picked up the bat with the Shadow Sap grip and tested the weight in his hands the way he tested everything when he was trying not to ask the question he actually wanted to ask.
"Ryan."
"Yeah."
"Are we going to be okay."
The kitchen got quiet.
"I think so," Ryan said. "I've prepared for this for six months…. Ever since I felt the energy thing was rising. I've also trained you for three. The plan is solid. The house is solid. If I'm wrong about something, the contingencies exist for a reason."
"That's not yes."
"No. It's not."
"Okay." Mike set the bat down carefully, "Okay… no pressure at all"
* * *
Lucas stayed behind on the porch after lunch. The other three biked home. He sat on the steps and watched the access road for a minute before he spoke.
"You're scared."
"I'm prepared. They're not the same thing."
"They're not opposites either."
"No."
Lucas reached into his backpack and pulled out a small carved wooden figure. Set it on the porch step between them. A knight, four inches tall, the detail rough but clearly a knight, with a shield raised.
"Will carved this," Lucas said. "Gave one to each of us last week. He said it was for the campaign. He didn't say it was anything else, but I think he thinks it is."
"He thinks it's a charm."
"Yeah. Feel like Mike also think so…"
Ryan picked up the figure. The wood was the same kind Will had used for his wizard staff. And the figurines were the same Mike had given Holly when she was scared of Vecna, the little charm she'd been clutching when Vecna took her. Not a great omen.
"He's smarter than people give him credit for."
"Yeah." Lucas stood up. "We're going to be okay. I am telling you. Definitely not asking."
"Okay."
Lucas got on his bike and rode after the others. Ryan stood on the porch with the wooden knight in his palm for a long time before he went inside.
He set the knight on the kitchen windowsill where the morning sun would hit it.
* * *
Then Ryan sat down at the kitchen table with a sheet of paper and started writing.
TO: Chief Jim Hopper, Hawkins Police Department
He'd been thinking about this letter for a month. He'd started a draft in October and torn it up because the tone was wrong. Then another one a week later that he'd torn up because the tone was right, but the content was insane. Tonight he'd settled on a third version. Short and believable enough that Hopper wouldn't dismiss it but vague enough that it wouldn't read like a confession.
He wrote with pen on plain printer paper. No letterhead. He wanted this to read like an adult had written it.
The letter said that if he'd been reported missing for more than twelve hours, Hopper should drive to the property at the address listed at the bottom. It said the trapdoor had a key hidden under the third porch step from the left. It said there was a metal box at the back of the workshop containing a list of names and a list of dates. It said Hopper should believe whatever the people in the house told him about what was happening in Hawkins, even if it sounded impossible.
It said that Will Byers might be involved and that Hopper should check on the Byers family first if Ryan was missing.
It said I know how this sounds. Please believe me anyway. I have evidence. The evidence is in the workshop in a box marked KAREN under the third tool shelf. Open it. Read everything in it. Then act.
The metal box marked KAREN actually existed. It contained photocopies of newspaper articles he'd salvaged from the library archives going back to 1959, all of them flagged with the dates of recorded power outages around the Lab. It contained a hand-drawn map of the Lab's perimeter with the strongest dimensional readings marked. It contained a list of children Brenner had taken before Eleven, names from the show that he'd written down without explanation. It contained a typed paragraph explaining what the Upside Down was, in language clean enough that a small-town police chief could parse it.
It would not convince a stranger. It would not need to. Hopper, after the next two weeks, would already be the kind of man who needed a box like that to make sense of what he'd seen.
He signed it with his full name and the date.
Then he put the letter in an envelope, sealed it, and wrote on the front: To be opened only if Ryan Reed has been missing for twelve hours.
The question was who held it.
Pete was the obvious answer. Pete was also the kind of man who'd open a sealed envelope handed to him within an hour, because curiosity and worry would do their work no matter what the front said.
Dustin was the smarter answer. Dustin had seen Demodogs. He understood that Hawkins had a problem most adults wouldn't accept on a verbal description. Dustin would follow the instructions to the letter. He'd carry it in his backpack and not look at it. If Ryan didn't come back, Dustin would walk the envelope to Hopper himself.
But Dustin would be at the property on Sunday night, which meant the contingency was different from what Ryan had been imagining.
He'd been picturing a scenario where he went out and didn't come back and the guys held the line in the house until adults arrived. The truth was uglier. The Ward stopped new rifts but it didn't stop something already in the world from walking up to the front door, and a Demogorgon would eventually find a way through walls if it had time.
So, the plan changed.
If it got bad, Ryan was sending them out. Through the tunnel. Dustin takes the envelope to Hopper, the others follow him. Ryan covers their retreat from the property side and buys them whatever minutes they need. There was a real chance he wouldn't even bring them inside if he saw the threat coming early enough. And he was talking real threats... Not a single Demogorgon but a pack, or Vecna. Anything below that was definitely manageable with what he had.
He hadn't told them that part yet. He wasn't going to. Mike would argue. Lucas would argue harder. Will would say nothing and look at him with those eyes Will had. Ryan would tell them Sunday night, when the door was locked and there was no time for argument.
He addressed the envelope to Dustin. Wrote on the front: Henderson. Hold this. Don't open it. If I'm gone twelve hours and you can't reach me, take it to Chief Hopper personally. Don't tell anyone else what's in it because you don't know what's in it. Trust me. R
Dustin would respect that. Dustin's superpower, separate from his actual brain, was that he could be trusted with secrets that mattered.
Ryan put the letter in his jacket pocket and the box back under the third tool shelf. The kitchen clock said nine fourteen. He went to the workshop and spent two hours experimenting with the residue paste before he slept. The patterns held better when the paste was warm. He filed that away for Friday.
[[[[[WebNovel won't let me upload chapter 14 in one piece because of the length, so I split it in two and posted both at once. Read them back to back, it's all one chapter. Sorry for the inconvenience.]]]]]