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SoK Chapter 137
🕑 Added 2025-05-04 04:08:41 +0000 UTCSorry! I just... forgot to schedule this.
With a snarl and the ripping of wood and brick, the entire side of Roger and Susan’s house disappeared. As TJ watched, a horse-sized wolf pulled its head back and howled at the sky. The hole it’d ripped into the house was twice its body’s size, but TJ immediately saw how it had enacted so much property damage so quickly. It activated a Skill and a 20 foot tall ethereal version of its head appeared. TJ Appraised the wolf as he activated Divine Transformation and threw himself at the monster.
Fenrir-blessed Vargr (Copper (I)), 27
“Stay back! Keep Roger alive, kill the wolves if you can!” TJ shouted as he slashed a blade of wind through the Vargr’s Skill. It was weakened but still crashed into him. TJ was sent flying back into the house, but he immediately gathered himself and sailed back at the beast. The black-furred monster opened its jaws and snapped at him. In the relatively controlled situation of facing just a single Copper tiered monster while under a storm and being influenced by Divine Authority, TJ let its jaws fall on him. He tensed up, waiting to see how much damage he took from the creature.
His worry was answered by a sound not unlike that of a hammer striking an anvil. The Vargr’s fangs couldn’t pierce his scales. With a quick calculation, TJ realized that his Toughness, while being assisted by the Storm, was just over 900. He grinned internally, and went to test his strength against the Vargr’s. With jaws wide open, TJ’s fangs found the wolf’s shoulder. As his fangs flayed flesh and tore tendons, TJ writhed and began wrapping his coils around the beast. Its bones creaked and it whined as he crushed the air out of it.
The other wolves, the ones that had been menacing Roger and Susan, came out to assist their leader. They fought to pull TJ from the giant wolf, but to no avail. He continued to crush, to kill the beast. It lowered its jaws at him, probably to make a last-ditch, useless attack, and TJ didn’t pay it any mind. When the ethereal version of its head appeared, TJ realized he’d discounted the Vargr too quickly, but it was too late. The glowing jaws punched through his scales and ripped him away from the giant wolf. Most of his length was pulled away from the wolf as it did so, though maybe 10 feet of snake remained around the wolf’s chest.
TJ wrapped himself even more tightly and cracked ribs as the Vargr’s Skill’s power faded. He went to close back in on the Vargr and deal a final, deadly blow, but it would appear that the Vargr was far from done. Directly above TJ’s head, another representation of the beast’s head appeared. Knowing what was coming, TJ sent a pair of blades of wind through it, cutting it into four. This time, the Skill dissipated completely, but the Vargr howled again, the sound somehow different from before.
As the sound visibly shook through the falling rain, each of the Fenrir-blessed wolves swelled in size from four feet tall at the shoulder to at least five. Then, they threw themselves more desperately at TJ. For his part, TJ decided to stop solely competing with his physical body. With a thought, he sent a blade of wind through every one of the Dirt tiered wolves’s legs. They fell to the ground, crippled, but TJ was done experimenting. He pulled a cloud from the sky, lightning rippling inside of it, and made a sparking approximation of himself. It opened its mouth in a hiss, crackling thunder sounding off instead of a more animalistic sound. The lightning snake smashed into the Vargr's face and knocked it back. It twitched, the lightning coursing through its body as TJ slithered back into melee distance with it.
Whenever the Vargr attempted to use one of its Skills, TJ sent the cloud and lightning version of himself smashing into it. All the while, he bit deep into its throat again and again, ripping fur, flesh, and life from the Vargr. Its blood coated his face as it stumbled and fell to the ground. Even so, TJ didn’t stop, condensing a blade of wind on his tongue and sending it through the monster’s neck and decapitating it. As soon as he got the death notification, TJ relaxed and slithered away from the corpse.
Panting, he deactivated Divine Transformation and rolled his shoulders. The wolf hadn’t been able to do too much damage to him, all things considered, but it also wasn’t an Elite. It was surprisingly powerful, considering how it was just a regular Copper tier. TJ laughed at his own pride, how he’d considered the beast to be nothing more than an easy target to practice on. The smell of burnt fur filled the air, though the still-falling rain quickly dampened that. With the blood washing from his body, TJ looked behind himself to see the remains of Roger and Susan’s house.
Where the Vargr had shredded the wall, the roof had collapsed. Roof shingles and shattered wood lay everywhere, remains of what had been the two people’s life. Inside, blood mixed with water slicked the floor, and Mimi tended to Roger. The Vietnamese Zealot’s wounds had been healed, and he stood in front of his wife, who’d sagged after exhausting her MP. Sam had walked through the crippled wolves and dealt killing blows to each, leaving a total of a dozen dead wolves on the ground. All four of the people inside of the house looked at TJ with their jaws agape.
“Should I charge you?” He joked, looking between them.
“No, you–oh shit!” Roger replied. TJ didn’t say another word as he turned to respond to the threat.
Nothing was there. Just a bunch of dead bodies. Before he could ask, Roger rushed past him and grabbed the Vargr’s body to drag it back closer to the house. Only then did TJ realize that gallons of blood were covering the pool deck and tinting the pool’s water pink. He didn’t say anything else and went to help pull the corpse away from their lasting supply of water. It took less than a minute to pull it to the side of the house and over the rubble, where the blood still flowed freely, but soaked into the ground instead of the pool. Then, TJ again met eyes with the other four people nearby, who continued to look up at him.
“You’re very strong.” Roger said simply. “I didn’t think it was possible for someone to be that strong.”
“Well, that’s the world we live in now.” TJ shrugged. “You will be too, once you evolve to Copper.”
“Maybe.” Roger replied. “Maybe not.”
“You’ll need to be.” TJ insisted. “If you don’t you and Susan will end up dying. That wasn’t an Elite or Boss or anything. That was a regular Copper tier monster. You think you’ll be able to survive in this world when everything is like that as you are?”
Nobody responded, but TJ did notice Sam and Mimi shoot each other glances. Then, with a shrug, he looked down at the Vargr’s body. It was the first Copper tier that he’d killed that wasn’t a Boss or Elite, so he wanted to see if there was anything particularly special about this creature’s materials. It didn’t take long for TJ to realize that the fangs were the only part of the corpse that were even remotely remarkable. The rest of it was just… a large wolf with thick fur and skin. Perfect practice materials for the two kids, he decided.
“Roger, what are you and Susan’s Occupations?” TJ asked.
“I’m a Cook, she’s Architect.” The response came quickly, as if reporting to a superior. TJ sighed, understanding what was happening.
“Ok.” He didn’t acknowledge the deep respect he was being offered.”Sam, Mimi, you know what I’m about to tell you to do.”
“Ugh.” Mimi groaned, but she didn’t say no. Sam merely nodded and hopped to it, though he didn’t have a knife on him and went to hop over the wall to get the knife he and Mimi had used earlier.
“Use mine.” TJ said as he pulled the Wendigo Blade from his waist and offered it. Sam seemed excited to use it, surely expecting something as effective as the Raven Mocker’s Remnant. He fought to hide his faint disappointment when it was revealed that the knife wasn’t anything more than a pretty sharp knife. TJ chuckled.
“I’ll see what I can do for you two using one of these fangs.” He gestured at the decapitated head that lay nearby. “Or, maybe I let you two make one yourselves. We’ll see what you prefer when we get there.”
Less disappointed, Sam set about cutting the skin from the Vargr’s corpse. TJ didn’t think that it was anything meriting that excitement, but he decided not to disappoint the teenager more. Instead, he turned to Mimi to figure out what she should be skinning the other wolves with. Instead of having to find her a tool of her own, though, he saw that Roger had offered one of their knives for use. Surprisingly, the knife offered cut relatively easily through the dense muscle and skin of the Fenrir-blessed beasts. Seeing the quality of the handle in Mimi’s hand, though, TJ quickly realized that the couple who lived behind him had much nicer tools than he did.
“You fought things like that in your Tutorial?” Roger asked, consciously stepping towards the Vargr corpse and inspecting it.
“There were two.” TJ explained. “There was one, and it led the third wave of our defense. It was a mountain lion, so kinda like this. But it was an Elite, and it could teleport. Real pain to kill, but I managed to without dying myself. The other was the Boss, a wendigo. It made the dead things all around it come back to life with heads like its own, then used ice magic and healed by eating corpses. Not fun. Both were stronger than this one here.”
“Oh.” Susan’s response was muted, as if she was short of breath. She nearly hyperventilated, but consciously mastered herself before she nodded once and met TJ’s eyes. “You have free access to our home and our water. Thank you. You save us. Thank you.”
“Thank you. I don’t think you need to be so formal about it though, Susan. I wanted to help you, and I’m happy to have. Let’s keep working together and help each other out as we continue, shall we?”
In the back of TJ’s mind, he realized that this was an opportunity for him, and he didn’t mind seizing it. He’d seen that a god’s followers could be Divinities in and of themselves by dint of their faith, and in order to keep Junior safe, having a bunch of strong followers would work wonders. For now, that could start as making people feel indebted to him, to feel like he could protect them. How that would work moving forward, he didn’t know, but for now, he would work on teaching and leading, and see where that got him.
The rest of the morning was spent giving slight instruction to Sam and Mimi as they fought to skin the wolves that’d been killed already. With two fights so close together right at the same time as the reintroduction of monsters, TJ expected to have a dozen more skirmishes by the time the sun set. He was wrong, though. Maybe it was just those two packs of monsters that were focused on them, or maybe it was because the other monsters were killed by other people, but whatever the case was, no more creatures came by until after the storm faded.
With a bright sky overhead, TJ nodded approvingly at Sam as he scraped the fat from the Vargr’s pelt. Mimi was largely done, given how much easier the Dirt tier monsters were to work with, but Sam had fought to be the sole worker on the Vargr, and neither TJ nor Mimi had argued with him about it. The pelt was hard to work with, but there wasn’t anything to do about it except to work on it. Eventually, Sam stepped back and, though there were a couple spots that still needed his attention, nodded in approval.
“There we go. And actually, TJ–oh, man, that was a level? All I did was take off the skin!”
“You were probably pretty close in the first place.” TJ shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. But working with higher tier materials will give more experience. Plus, you’ll get better Skills offered. Anyways. What were you going to say?”
“I just wanted to say thanks.” Sam avoided making eye contact before continuing, “And, I wanted to say that I think I know what I want to do with my Occupation.”
“Me too.” Mimi jumped in.
“Sweet!” TJ declared as he stood up. “Tell me about it!”
