Saturday, July 18, 1983 - Hawkins, Indiana
___________________________________________________________________________
Ninety-two degrees and the asphalt on Maple Street was soft enough to leave bike tire impressions on the road.
Ryan felt the heat on his shoulders as they pedaled south toward the community pool, five bikes in a loose formation.
"I'm going to die," Dustin announced from the back of the line. His face was red and his Padres cap was soaked through. "I want everyone to know that I fought bravely."
"You're biking half a mile," Lucas said without looking back. "On flat ground."
"In this heat? That's heroic. I should get a medal."
The pool lot was packed. Minivans and station wagons and a few pickup trucks crammed into spaces that weren't spaces, parked on the grass strip along the fence.
The sound of splashing and screaming carried over the chain-link before they even locked their bikes. Mike had already stripped off his shirt and was walking toward the entrance with his towel over his shoulder.
Will was carrying a paperback. Not a fantasy novel this time. Ryan caught the cover as Will tucked it under his arm: The Shining. Stephen King. Will had been on a horror kick for two weeks, ever since he'd found a box of used books. The irony was too sharp.
They paid the quarter admission and pushed through the turnstile. The pool was Olympic-sized, which meant it was the biggest thing Hawkins had ever built, surrounded by a concrete deck with metal lounge chairs and a lifeguard station.
Ryan walked out of the locker room last. Swim trunks, no shirt, towel over one shoulder. He was thinking about whether his ID Create would hit LV 10 today when Dustin grabbed his arm.
"Dude." Dustin's voice was pitched low and urgent, the tone he used when he spotted a rare comic at the newsstand. "Rachel Hoffman. Three o'clock."
Ryan glanced right. A girl with dark hair and a red two-pieces was sitting on the edge of a lounge chair, looking in their direction. She was talking to another girl, but her eyes weren't on the conversation.
"She's staring at the diving board."
"The diving board is behind us."
"Then she's staring at the fence."
"Ryan, she is staring at you. Accept it."
Ryan continues walking toward the lane ropes and caught the reactions around him.
Two sophomore girls near the fence went quiet mid-sentence. A junior on a lounge chair who'd been reading a magazine, sunglasses sliding down her nose as he passed. A girl he didn't recognize leaning toward her friend and saying something behind her hand, and the friend turning to look, and then both of them looked at the water instead when he glanced their way.
Someone even f**king whistled.
He caught half a sentence from a pair of girls near the snack bar: " Who is that, he goes to Hawkins High?" and the answer got swallowed by the noise of the pool before he heard it.
STR 20, VIT 22, DEX 20, and a frame that had grown two inches. His shoulders were broader than any other freshman's, his arms had the lean definition that came from months of genuine work, and his stomach showed abs that belonged to a swimmer. He looked seventeen. Closer to eighteen, if you weren't looking carefully.
He'd been mentally twenty-four since May. Teenage girls staring at him was flattering and also slightly strange. But mostly flattering, after all he does have Ryan original memories, and sexual maturity. Thank you system!
Lucas was already in the water, doing laps with a focused mentality that suggested he was pretending to be an Olympic swimmer. Mike had found the lifeguard and was arguing about whether the deep end rope was in the right spot. Will bypassed all of them and walked to the far corner of the pool deck, sat down with his back against the fence, and opened his book.
Ryan dropped his towel on a chair and headed for the water. The concrete burned the soles of his feet, which meant his HP ticked down by one, but his nerve endings still worked fine.
He dove in. The cold hit him like a system reset, and for about three seconds, his whole body felt good in a way that had nothing to do with stats.
* * *
They played Marco Polo for twenty minutes. Ryan won four rounds in a row with Mana Sense guiding his movements through the water like sonar, which was cheating and he knew it and didn't care.
Dustin accused him of peeking. Mike called it "statistically implausible." Lucas just swam faster and tried to outmaneuver him, which almost worked twice because Lucas had gotten genuinely quick.
Will put the book down after the second round and joined them. He dove under Ryan's reaching arms with a clean duck that surprised everyone, surfaced behind Mike, and tagged him before Mike even turned around.
"When did you learn to swim?" Mike sputtered, wiping water from his eyes.
"I always knew how to swim."
"You knew how to float. That was an actual dive."
Will shrugged. His shoulders were thinner than the other boys' but there was definition in his arms that hadn't been there before. His improvement was amazing, and he did it with quiet consistency.
Ryan hauled himself out of the pool and sat on the edge, feet in the water. He was catching his breath, which was unnecessary, but the appearance of effort was part of the cover. Gamer's Body didn't tire. His lungs felt clear and his heart rate was always at the baseline. So, he sat there, dripping, and let his eyes wander.
And one beauty caught his eyes…
Chrissy Cunningham was sitting on a towel near the fence on the opposite side of the pool, with two girls Ryan recognized from the hallways at school. She was going into eleventh grade, a year above his group. Blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, tan from weeks of summer, wearing a pale blue one-piece that matched the color of the pool water. One of her friends said something and she laughed, head tipping back, the sound lost in the noise of forty kids splashing and yelling.
The actress that plays her on the show was Grace Van Dien. He'd known what Chrissy Cunningham looked like. But the actress and the girl in front of him were connected by a resemblance that the screen had flattened into something two-dimensional. The real version had something that a camera couldn't capture, the way her laugh moved through her whole body, the slight flush of color in her cheeks from the heat. Her hair caught the afternoon light differently every time she moved. She was genuinely, straightforwardly beautiful. Which made him understand immediately why every boy at Hawkins High knew her name.
He Observed before he could stop himself. The skill fired on instinct after five thousand uses.
[Chrissy Cunningham - LV 1]
HP: 80/80
Age: 16
Status: Healthy. Performing (social ease masking tension).
Background: Cheerleader. Popular. Home environment: stressful (mother, control issues).
Disposition: Neutral.
Performing. This just felt wrong. Everyone performs for social reasons, but not many have that show up in their profile.
The show had only sketched Chrissy's backstory. The controlling mother, the eating problems, the perfect surface that cracked under Vecna's psychic pressure. Observe LV 6 confirmed it in a single readout. She was laughing with her friends, and the skill could see through the laugh.
She caught him looking. Their eyes met across forty feet of pool deck and screaming children and held for maybe two seconds. Her expression didn't change. She didn't smile or frown or look away with the quickness of someone who'd been caught staring. She just looked at him. Then she turned back to her friends.
Ryan turned back toward the pool and watched Mike try to dunk Lucas, which went about as well as expected.
* * *
They stayed until four. The afternoon was all chlorine and sun and kind of lazy heat.
Dustin ate three hot dogs from the concession stand and rated each one on a scale he invented.
Lucas found a quarter at the bottom of the deep end and spent ten minutes arguing that finders-keepers were a legal principle. Mike tried to do a backflip off the diving board, over-rotated, and belly-flopped so hard that the lifeguard stood up.
Will finished four chapters of The Shining and told Mike the book was "way scarier than the movie," which launched a fifteen-minute debate about whether Kubrick or King was the better storyteller.
Ryan mostly listened. He liked these moments. The system wasn't pinging. Nobody was in danger. His friends were loud and dumb and happy, and the gap between who he was and who they thought he was felt smaller on days like this.
On the way out, Troy Walsh was standing near the bike rack. He was with James, both of them shirtless, and both of them sunburned. Troy saw Ryan's group and took two steps in their direction.
Ryan stood up from unlocking his bike. Just stood. He has STR 20 and the body to match.
Troy looked at him. Looked at Ryan's arms, his shoulders, and he changed direction. Walked past without a word.
Lucas glanced at Ryan. The faintest smile.
"Did Troy just..." Dustin started.
"Yeah," Ryan said. "Let's go."
They biked home in a line, five boys on the road with the sun in their eyes, and Ryan thought about a girl with a ponytail and a smile that wasn't real. He would try to save them all, there is no reason to let the plot go as he went with the kind of power he has.
* * *
Monday, July 20, 1983
ID Create hit LV 10 on a Tuesday afternoon in the Miller property cellar. Ryan had been pushing it, and the skill had climbed from LV 8 through LV 9 to the threshold over the course of forty-plus activations.
[Skill "ID Create" has leveled up! LV 9 → LV 10]
[New tier unlocked: Demodog Den]
[Enemies: Demodogs (LV 10-18). Pack hunters. Fast, aggressive, coordinate.]
He read the notification sitting on the cellar floor, back against the cool stone wall, and his pulse spiked before Gamer's Mind leveled it out.
Demodogs.
The things that had torn through Hawkins Lab security like tissue paper. The juveniles of the Demogorgon species, fast enough to chase down a car, smart enough to flank. In the show, they'd killed armed soldiers. Bob Newby had died to a pack of them in a hallway while Joyce watched.
And now they were in his dungeon menu, so much fun…
He obviously didn't rush in. Three months of grinding had taught him that preparation beat enthusiasm every single time.
He spent the afternoon getting ready.
The Louisville Slugger got a fresh coat of Shadow Sap, brushed on with Mana Crafting active. The dark coating dried into a glassy shell that added weight to the barrel without throwing off the balance. He tested the grip, adjusted the tape, and swung it through ten practice arcs.
The kitchen knife went into a belt sheath he'd sewn from scrap leather. Blade Mastery was only LV 1, but having a backup for close work was better than not.
He filled a spray bottle with lighter fluid. Packed his Inventory with the two Minor HP Potions. Checked his MP pool: 575. Full.
Mana Shield ready. Mana Bolt and Ignition variant ready. Power Strike at LV 7. Earth Shaping at LV 7 for terrain manipulation.
Then he went.
The activation drained 28 MP, the cost down to almost nothing after ten levels of the skill. The world bleached out in the familiar color-death, gray walls and dead air and silence. But the silence was different this time. The gray was darker, closer to black at the edges of his vision.
Ryan climbed the stairs and stepped out the back door.
The copied yard was dead. Definitely not the gentle gray of the Vine Crawler tier, where things looked faded but intact. This was dead. The grass was black. The privet hedge was skeletal, branches stripped to bare wood, thorns protruding like teeth. The sky overhead was pure black, no gray wash, no distant light source. Just void.
And somewhere across the field, something howled.
The sound was high and thin, and it carried across the open ground. The sound had harmonics in it that made the hair on his arms stand up. Mana Sense pulsed in response, feeding him a distortion signature that was warmer and faster than anything the vine clusters had produced.
It was alive and coming closer.
Ryan gripped the bat, stepped off the porch, and walked south on Route 7.
The first Demodog came around a tree thirty meters ahead.
[Demodog - LV 14]
HP: 320/320
Status: Hostile. Hunting.
It looked like the show. The petal-mouth was there, the four legs, the eyeless head. Standing in the black grass of the ID with its mouth opening in segments, it was a thing made of muscle and wrong-colored skin and hunger. The petals peeled back and showed teeth that went all the way down the throat.
What a terrifying creature and it was only a little boy.
It charged.
Mana Shield. Twenty MP, the shimmer coating his torso. The Demodog crossed thirty meters in about two seconds, moving with the fluid speed of a hunter.
It hit the shield at full sprint. The impact was a full-body blow that dropped the shield's HP by eighty in a single contact. His shoes dug furrows in the dead grass. He stayed on his feet.
Ryan swung the bat. STR 20, Power Strike, Shadow Sap coating. The bat connected with the side of the Demodog's head, and the crack of impact echoed across the empty field. The creature staggered sideways, petals snapping shut and reopening in what might have been a pain reflex.
He followed with two Mana Bolts at point-blank, both fired from his left hand while his right held the bat. The bolts punched into the Demodog's flank, and it lurched, twisted, trying to bite his arm.
Ryan jammed the bat sideways into its open mouth. The teeth scraped on Shadow Sap coating. And then he fired an Ignition bolt directly into the opening, past the teeth, into the throat.
Fire inside a living thing.
The Demodog convulsed, smoke pouring from between its petals, and collapsed sideways onto the black grass. It twitched twice and stopped.
[Demodog (LV 14) defeated!]
[+380 XP]
Loot: Demodog Fang (×1), Corrupted Hide (×1), $24
Ryan stood over the corpse, bat in hand, chest tight with adrenaline that Gamer's Mind was already filtering down to something manageable. His hands were steady. His heart rate was coming down.
He'd just killed a Demodog. Solo. In under twenty seconds.
Three months ago, he was sure he couldn't have outrun one. Now one was dissolving into loot at his feet.
He picked up the fang, a dark curved thing the length of his hand, hard as stone and warm to the touch. He stored it.
The second Demodog appeared at the tree line along the creek. LV 12, smaller, but faster. It tried to circle behind him and Ryan countered with an Earth Shaping wall, raising a seven-foot barrier of packed dirt across its flanking path. The Demodog ran into the wall, stumbled, and Ryan put an Ignition bolt into its side before it recovered.
The third and fourth came as a pair, and the pair was harder. They coordinated. One went high, lunging for his face. The other went low, diving for his legs. Ryan dropped Mana Shield over himself and swung the bat in a horizontal arc that caught the high Demodog across the jaw and sent it spinning. The low one hit his shield and tore at it, dropping shield HP by sixty per second.
He kicked it off, fired an Ignition bolt into the grounded Demodog, and finished the stunned one with a Power Strike to the skull that caved in bone.
After that, he stayed for three hours.
He hunted carefully, pushing south and east across the copied landscape, finding Demodogs in ones and twos roaming the fields and tree lines. He learned their patterns. Solo hunters charged straight. Pairs flanked. They all feared fire. An Ignition bolt at range made them flinch, buying time for a second shot or a bat swing. Earth Shaping barriers forced pairs into single-file approaches where he could deal with them one at a time.
Eleven Demodogs dead by the time his MP pool scraped low enough to make him cautious. His HP sat at 280 out of 360, taken down by glancing hits and one bad moment when a LV 16 caught his shoulder from behind. The HP loss didn't impair him. But the number reminded him that overconfidence could killed him faster than Demodogs did.
He activated ID Escape on the road. Bit risky, because someone could see him suddenly appear, but he could probably bullshit his way out of it. Color and sound crashed back, cicadas and humid air and the orange light of a sunset he'd missed entirely.
Loot inventory: eight Demodog Fangs. Eleven pieces of Corrupted Hide. Three vials of Shadow Essence, a dark liquid that pulsed faintly when he looked at it. $267 in assorted bills. Four Minor HP Potions. One skill book, a thin leather-bound volume titled Detect Life.
And a stat crystal. A small blue gem that fit in his palm and hummed with energy that matched the frequency of his own MP.
Ryan used it without hesitation.
[Stat Crystal consumed! STR has increased by 1!]
[STR: 20 → 21]
One free stat point, delivered through a gem dropped by a LV 16 Demodog. His LUK was 5, which meant rare drops were genuinely rare. Better LUK meant better loot. Better loot meant better materials. Better materials meant better everything.
He sat on a log behind and opened the skill book.
[Skill book consumed! New skill acquired:]
[Detect Life (Active) - LV 1]
Senses living beings within 10m. Direction and distance.
MP Cost: 10
Useful, but limited at LV 1. Ten meters were two car lengths. He'd need to level it before it became a real scouting tool.
And then the notification he'd been grinding toward.
[Level Up! Level 10 → Level 11]
[You have gained 5 stat points!]
[You have gained 1 skill point!]
[HP and MP have been fully restored.]
The warmth spread through him, every scratch and bruise vanishing, his MP pool refilling like water pouring into a glass. The Demodog shoulder hit was gone. The accumulated fatigue from three hours of combat reset to zero.
He paused on the allocation. Three months of discipline had built a habit: 3 INT, 2 WIS, every time, no exceptions. INT and WIS didn't grow from training only from reading or making smart decision which was too hard. Physical stats did.
But the stat crystal and the loot tables were making him think.
LUK 5 was garbage. The stat reference in the manhwa had been clear about this. Low LUK meant low drop rates, which meant worse loot, which meant slower material progression. Every point of LUK improved every drop from every kill going forward. The improvement was multiplicative. Better loot meant better crafted items meant higher combat effectiveness meant faster grinding meant more loot. The feedback loop was easy to understand.
Two points into LUK wouldn't feel like much. But compounded across thousands of kills, it would matter more than two points of WIS.
Level 11: 3 INT, 2 LUK.
INT: 44 → 47. LUK: 5 → 7.
The loot piles from his next kills would be different.
* * *
July 21 - July 28, 1983
The Demodog grind consumed the next eight days.
Ryan ran the Den every afternoon, pushing deeper into the copied landscape with each session. Solo Demodogs fell in under fifteen seconds. Pairs took thirty. He rotated between bat-and-bolt combinations, using Earth Shaping barriers to control engagement zones and Ignition bolts to open fights at range. His kill count climbed past forty, then sixty, then eighty.
LUK 7 worked. The difference from LUK 5 was visible in every drop. More fangs per kill. More Corrupted Hide. Shadow Essence appeared in about one out of five kills instead of one in ten. Cash drops averaged is now higher. And on the fourth day, a second stat crystal rolled out of a dissolving LV 17 Demodog.
[Stat Crystal consumed! STR has increased by 1!]
[STR: 21 → 22]
The physical training pushed harder alongside the dungeon combat. Weighted morning runs with a backpack full of rocks, push-ups past a hundred, and the obstacle course behind the Miller property. DEX climbed from 20 to 21, then 22, then 23 over the week. VIT kept pace: 22 to 23, then 24.
Each point of VIT added ten HP. Each point of STR hit harder per swing. And each point of DEX made the Demodogs fractionally easier to dodge, their lunges arriving a half-second slower in his perception.
His running total of cash passed four thousand dollars.
VIT hit 25 on a Thursday morning, the stat point arriving mid-run as his body completed whatever internal recalibration the system used to track physical improvement.
[VIT has reached 25!]
[Threshold Bonus Unlocked: Iron Constitution]
[+15% HP. Poison/Disease resistance. Minor out-of-combat regeneration.]
Ryan stopped running. He stood on the shoulder of Cornwallis Road in the early morning fog and read the notification.
Iron Constitution. The VIT 25 threshold, same as INT 25's Sharp Mind and WIS 25's Inner Calm. Three stat thresholds unlocked, three permanent bonuses that stacked on top of everything else.
The fifteen percent HP boost recalculated his pool immediately. He felt it, the same swelling sensation that came with the MP bonuses, except this time it was physical. A thickening. Like his bones were denser and his skin was harder and the impact he could absorb before things went wrong had just expanded.
And minor out-of-combat regeneration.
He wouldn't need to sleep or eat to top off his HP anymore. Small cuts, bruises, the accumulated wear of daily training would mend on their own over hours instead of waiting for the full reset of sleep.
He finished the run.
The same afternoon, he sat in the cellar workshop and dealt with the skill points he'd been hoarding.
Ten skill points banked since he first leveled up. The manhwa's Jee-Han had invested heavily in passive skills, the ones that worked constantly without concentration or MP cost. Ryan had been sitting on his points because he hadn't been sure which passives deserved the investment. Now, with eighty-plus Demodog kills behind him and a very clear picture of what combat demanded, he was sure.
Physical Resistance: LV 2 → LV 5. Minus half a percent physical damage per level. At LV 5, every hit landed two and a half percent lighter.
Physical Endurance: LV 3 → LV 5. The stamina drain reduction was already good at LV 3. LV 5, push it more.
Sprint: LV 1 → LV 3. The movement speed boost went from thirty percent to forty. Against Demodogs that ran like hounds, ten percent more sprint speed was the difference between dodging a lunge and eating one.
Seven points spent. Three remaining for later. The passives were invisible but constant. Every fight from now on would be slightly easier, slightly more efficient, slightly more survivable.
* * *
The next level arrived on a Saturday morning in the Miller property kitchen while Ryan was making breakfast.
Eggs and toast, the same meal he'd cooked two hundred times since May, Cooking LV 4 buffing his VIT by five percent for ninety minutes. The XP from a week of Demodog kills stacked with dailies and crossed the Level 12 threshold between flipping the eggs and buttering the toast.
[Level Up! Level 11 → Level 12]
[You have gained 5 stat points!]
[You have gained 1 skill point!]
[HP and MP have been fully restored.]
He set the spatula down and allocated.
Three into INT. Two into WIS.
INT: 47 → 48 → 49 →
The system paused. The same way it had paused at INT 25, at WIS 25.
He knew what was coming before the notification appeared, because the heat building in his skull was orders of magnitude stronger than anything the previous allocations had produced. His vision whited out for a full second. When it cleared, the kitchen looked different. He could see the wood grain in the table and extrapolate the age of the tree it came from. He could hear the well pump cycling sixty feet underground and calculate the flow rate from the sound frequency. His mind just became even more amazing!
[INT has reached 50!]
[Threshold Bonus Unlocked: Brilliant Intellect]
[+30% MP. Skill creation success rate doubled. Senses improved significantly]
INT 50. The second major threshold. And the MP explosion was real. The bonus stacked with Sharp Mind's fifteen percent, and his pool didn't just increase. It erupted. The reservoir in his chest expanded until it felt like he was carrying a lake where there'd been a pond.
The remaining two points went into WIS. WIS 30 → 32. More regen and more mental resilience.
He pulled up the status window while the eggs cooled on the plate.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: The Gamer
Level: 12
HP: 470/470
MP: 810/810
STR: 22
VIT: 25 (Iron Constitution)
DEX: 23
INT: 50 (Sharp Mind + Brilliant Intellect)
WIS: 32 (Inner Calm)
CHA: 8
LUK: 7
MP 810. He'd started at 100 on day one. That was an eightfold increase in eleven weeks. The INT-first strategy was paying off so aggressively that the numbers barely looked real.
And the doubled skill creation success rate. Combined with INT 50's raw processing power and Sharp Mind's learning speed bonus, he could attempt new skills and expect them to work on the first or second try.
Ryan ate his eggs. They were perfect. Cooking LV 4 didn't miss.
Tuesday, July 22, 1983
The county assessor's office was a single room in the Hawkins municipal building, staffed by a woman named Carol who wore reading glasses on a chain and had a fan pointed directly at her desk. Pete walked in ahead of Ryan, wearing his cleanest flannel Ryan ever saw him wearing.
The process took forty minutes. Pete signed the tax recovery paperwork. Ryan counted out bills from an envelope. Three thousand, nine hundred and forty dollars for back taxes. Seventy-five for the processing fee. A total of one 4,012 $, paid in cash. This was cheaper than the system estimation, and it was cheap as hell compared to this era houses prices, it looks like the county really wanted to get rid of this property.
Carol looked at the cash. Looked at Pete. Looked at Ryan. Typed something into her terminal. Stamped three forms. Handed Pete a receipt.
"The deed will be mailed in six to eight weeks," she said. "If you want to contest the assessed value, that's a separate filing."
Pete folded the receipt and put it in his shirt pocket. "We're good."
They walked to Pete's truck in the parking lot. The July heat pressed down on the blacktop. Ryan opened the passenger door and got in. Pete sat behind the wheel for a moment without starting the engine.
"Your dad was like that," Pete said. He was looking at the steering wheel. "Tom could build anything. Made a rocking chair for your mom when she was pregnant with you. Cherry wood. Best joints I've ever seen."
Ryan's throat closed. Pete almost never mentioned Tom. The memories from his Hawkins childhood were there, alongside the memories from his previous life, but hearing Pete talk about his father in this body, in this truck, hit a nerve that Gamer's Mind couldn't fully smooth over.
"I didn't know that" Ryan said. His voice was steady, but his feeling underneath it wasn't.
Pete started the truck. "He'd have liked this. The fixing-things part." He pulled out of the lot. "Not the whatever-else-you're-doing part."
Ryan looked at him. "What else would I be doing?"
"Kid, you've got four thousand dollars in cash and you're fifteen years old. I'm not stupid." Pete merged onto Main Street. "I'm not asking. I'm telling you I'm not stupid."
They drove home in silence. Ryan watched the storefronts slide past, the Hawkins Radio Shack, the hardware store, Benny's diner with its Open sign, and thought about Pete's words.
Not asking, but not stupid. The closest thing to parental concern the man had ever expressed, wrapped in Pete's way of speaking.
* * *
Tuesday, July 22, 1983 - Hawkins Public Library
Ryan thought how typical of her to study during vacation time...
Nancy Wheeler was sitting at the third table from the windows, surrounded by textbooks, and her face showed that she wants to throw the chemistry book across the room but was too well-raised to do it.
Ryan recognized the textbook from six feet away. Pauling's General Chemistry. The chapter on electron orbital configurations, which was the chapter where every AP Chemistry student hit a wall because the textbook explained the diagonal filling rule like it was obvious and it wasn't.
He almost walked past. He was here for his own reading, another text he'd been working through for Earth Shaping insights and a psychology book that might trigger a social-oriented skill. But he paused at the end of her table because he could see the diagram she was staring at, and the problem was so simple from his perspective that walking away felt wrong.
"The diagonal rule," he said. "There's a shortcut."
Nancy looked up. The Wheeler intelligence was all over her face. Dark eyes, sharp, assessing him in two seconds flat. Natalia Dyer was very pretty, with delicate features and a beautiful face, but the real Nancy Wheeler had an edge the camera tended to soften. There was a stubborn set to her jaw, a quiet strength beneath the surface. She was also curvier than the show suggested, her hair pulled back with a simple clip, loose strands framing her face, and a faint smudge of ink marked her right index finger.
"How did you know what I was working on?" she asked.
"You've had that page open for a while. And you've been tapping your pen on the same spot." He pointed at the orbital filling diagram. "Write it as a grid. Rows for n values, columns for l values. Then draw diagonals from upper right to lower left. The filling order follows the diagonals."
He grabbed a scrap of paper from the table, sat down, and sketched it. Fifteen seconds. The 1s, 2s, 2p, 3s filling sequence laid out in a visual grid that made the ordering self-evident instead of arbitrary.
Nancy stared at the grid. He could see the moment it clicked. Her pen stopped tapping.
"That's... where did you learn that?"
"I read ahead. A lot."
She studied him. Her eyes moved from the diagram to his face and stayed there. "You're Mike's friend. Ryan."
"Yeah."
"Mike says you're some kind of genius who won't admit it."
"Mike exaggerates."
"Mike never exaggerates about other people." She tapped her pen against her lip. "Only about himself."
She went back to the textbook. Ryan should have stood up, but she asked a follow-up question about electron shielding, and the question was good, and his previous-life engineering degree had included three semesters of chemistry. That was over the top of his new knowledge from Hawkins's library grind, INT is supreme. So, he stayed.
He explained molecular bonding. Electronegativity. Lewis structures. The octet rule and its exceptions, which the textbook glossed over with a hand wave that Ryan remembered being frustrated by fifteen years ago. Nancy took notes in handwriting that were small and feminine, filling half a notebook page in ten minutes.
She was fast. Faster than most of his college classmates had been. She asked questions that weren't confused, they were on point. She wasn't struggling with chemistry. She was struggling with a bad textbook, which was a different problem entirely.
After an hour, she'd jumped three chapters ahead of her summer prep plan.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Teaching (Active) - LV 1]
Students learn 10% faster under instruction.
MP Cost: 10/hour
Ryan dismissed the notification. The MP drain was negligible at his pool size, and the skill was a nice bonus, but the real value was the hour itself. He'd spent sixty minutes building a connection to Nancy Wheeler, who would be the one investigating Barb's disappearance, who would be one of the first people to understand what was actually happening in Hawkins. The badass Nancy "The Shooter" Wheeler.
Nancy packed up her books. She was very organized, stacking in order, closing each textbook at its bookmark.
"Same time Thursday?" she said.
"If you want."
"I want." She paused at the door and looked back. "You're not what I expected from Mike's friends."
"What did you expect?"
"I don't know." She almost smiled, then didn't. "Someone less... helpful and more anxious, maybe. Thursday."
She left. Ryan sat at the empty table and thought about how strange it was, talking to someone from the show. A real person. Nancy Wheeler was not just a TV character. She was a sixteen-year-old girl with ink on her finger, a temper she kept on a leash and the kind of intelligence that would make her dangerous when she needed to be.
This was different than Mike and the group. Original Ryan has deep memories about them which smoothed this phase of being weird about it. It was also different from meeting Joyce, which was short and her doing most of the conversation. Nancy Wheeler was one of the bravest characters in the show.
* * *
Late July, 1983 - Miller Property, empty ID
Skill creation with INT 50 was a different experience.
Ryan stood in the Empty ID, alone in the gray cellar, and focused on a loose stone he'd pulled from the wall. He'd been thinking about telekinesis since the awakening. The manhwa's Jee-Han had developed it at high INT, and Ryan had been waiting for his stats to reach a level where the attempt had a reasonable chance of success. INT 50 and the doubled skill creation rate from Brilliant Intellect.
He channeled MP toward the stone. Not into it, like Earth Shaping. Toward it. A field of force between his hand and the object, pushing without touching. The concept was different from anything he'd done before. Earth Shaping moved earth by describing the end state and letting the system execute. Telekinesis was direct force application. His mind grabbing something and moving it.
First attempt. The stone twitched. A millimeter of vibration, then nothing.
Second attempt. The stone lifted off the cellar floor, wobbled, and rose six inches. His hand was extended, palm out, and the MP was flowing from his chest through his arm and outward in a sustained stream. The stone hung in the air, trembling, held by nothing visible.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Telekinesis (Active) - LV 1]
Move objects with mental force. Max weight: INT × 2 kg = 100 kg.
MP Cost: Variable (10 base + mass/distance modifier)
Two attempts. INT 50 and Brilliant Intellect had compressed what would have been a dozen failures into two.
Ryan floated the stone across the cellar. Turned it. Set it on the workbench. His hands were trembling.
He practiced for an hour, lifting progressively heavier objects, moving them with increasing familiarity. By the end of the session he could juggle three stones simultaneously, keeping them in a slow rotation above his palm while feeding MP into the sustained field. The cost was manageable at his pool size. Thirty MP per minute for three objects.
He had telekinesis. He had honest-to-god telekinesis, the same power Eleven used to flip vans and crush monsters. His version was weaker, limited by skill level, and cost MP instead of coming from whatever Eleven's power source was. But the skill would grow. Everything grew for him.
Fire skills came next. It was a waste not the exploit Brilliant Intellect to its core.
He knew the Upside-Down creatures feared fire. He'd seen it with vines, with Demodogs. The Ignition bolt was effective, but it was a variant of Mana Bolt, not a dedicated fire skill. He wanted something built from the ground up around heat.
He raised his hand and shaped MP into a small sphere, the way he did for Mana Bolt. But instead of compressing it for impact, he agitated the energy internally, accelerating the particles, or whatever MP was made of, until the sphere glowed orange and heat radiated from his palm.
He launched it.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Fire Bolt (Active) - LV 1]
Launches a bolt of fire. Damage: INT × 0.8 + fire DOT (3 seconds).
MP Cost: 18 | Range: 25m
The bolt hit the cellar wall and left a scorch mark the size of a dinner plate. The fire damage over time would stack on anything organic, burning targets for three seconds after impact. Against Demodogs, against anything from the Upside Down, sustained fire was more effective than raw impact.
He tried a second configuration. Not a bolt but a ring. He pushed MP downward, into the floor, and let the fire expand outward in a circle around his body.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Flame Ring (Active) - LV 1]
Creates a ring of fire (3m radius) around the caster. Enemies within take fire damage per second.
Duration: 10 seconds. MP Cost: 30
Three new skills in a single afternoon. Two attempts for Telekinesis. One each for Fire Bolt and Flame Ring. What a crazy rate.
On the next Demodog run, he tested Fire Bolt against a LV 15 pair. The first bolt caught one in the shoulder, and it burst into flame along the impact zone, the fire spreading across its hide with a chemical feeling that suggested Upside Down biology was spectacularly flammable. It panicked, abandoned its flanking approach, and ran in circles while the fire consumed it. The second Demodog hesitated, watching its partner burn, and Ryan put an Ignition bolt through its open mouth.
Seven seconds. Two kills.
* * *
Late July, continued
Ryan now owns the property, so he could begin with full on renovation. And the cellar expansion was high on list. He worked on it in stages.
Ryan used Earth Shaping to push the walls outward, carving new space from the packed earth beneath the Miller property. LV 7 Earth Shaping with INT 50 meant his weight limit was enormous, 350 kilograms, and the precision had reached a level where he could shape surfaces smoother than poured concrete.
He'd been shaping the walls for an hour when an idea crossed his mind that had been sitting in the back of his thoughts. Since the first day, he'd used Earth Shaping on that drainage slab and imagined stone soldiers.
He shaped a rough humanoid form from the cellar wall. Three feet tall, thick-limbed, faceless. Then he pushed MP into it. Not shaping it. Animating it. Telling the system that this was a construct, not a sculpture. That it should move. That it should follow commands.
The stone figure twitched. Its right arm moved. Ryan fed more MP, a sustained stream that drained his pool at an alarming rate. The figure took a step forward, then another, then stood in the center of the cellar looking like a crude stone doll that had learned to walk.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Golem Creation (Active) - LV 1]
Create an animated construct from available materials. Follows mental commands.
Construct stats: According to the materials used.
Duration: 4 hours. MP Cost: 200 + 10/minute sustained.
Two hundred MP to create, ten per minute to sustain. At his pool size, he could keep a golem active for about an hour before the drain became dangerous. The construct's stats were weak, mud and sand weren't the best material, which meant a golem with STR 7 and VIT 8. Not a fighter yet.
But a builder. A tireless, instruction-following laborer that could dig, carry, and shape earth under Ryan's mental direction while Ryan himself worked on other things. The cellar expansion, which had been a solo project requiring hours of concentration, could now run in parallel.
The golem picked up a bucket of loose earth and carried it to the surface without being told twice. Its movements were jerky and it walked into the doorframe once, but it worked.
Ryan dismissed it after thirty minutes, letting the stone form collapse into inert rubble.
* * *
Thursday, July 30, 1983 - Hawkins Public Library
Nancy was already there when he arrived. She'd brought a second textbook, organic chemistry, and two cans of Tab from the vending machine near the front desk.
"I figured you might want one," she said, sliding a can across the table.
He took it. "Thanks."
They worked for ninety minutes.
Nancy had blown through the electron configuration material and was now into molecular geometry, which she picked up fast enough that Ryan's Teaching skill ticked twice during the session. Her questions had gotten sharper over the past week. She wasn't asking him to explain basics anymore.
"Why does the book not mention d-orbital hybridization for transition metals?" she asked, pen hovering over a diagram she'd drawn.
"Because Pauling wrote the foundational textbook and Pauling believed in a clean model. The reality is messier. Transition metals don't follow the same rules as main group elements because their d-orbitals participate in bonding in ways the simplified model can't account for."
"So the textbook is wrong."
"The textbook is incomplete. It's telling you the version that fits in a chapter. The full version fills a graduate-level course."
Nancy wrote something in her notebook. She did this when she disagreed with a textbook, writing a note in the margin that she'd return to later. Her handwriting got angrier when she was frustrated.
"Mr. Clarke would like you," she said without looking up. "He talks about science the same passionate way. Like it's an argument with rules."
"Science is an argument with rules."
"That's what he says." She closed the notebook. "You should be in AP classes. You know that, right?"
"I'm a freshman."
"Freshmen take AP classes. I did. Biology, sophomore year."
"Your brother would kill me."
Nancy's mouth twitched. "Mike would survive."
They finished the session. Ryan walked her to the bike rack outside. The afternoon heat was breaking and the shadows getting longer.
"Same time next week?" Nancy asked.
"Yeah."
She got on her bike. Paused. "Ryan. Why are you helping me?"
The question was genuine. Nancy let her good future journalist instincts flare on. Why. What's the motive. What's underneath.
"Because you're smart and the textbook is bad and I happen to know chemistry."
She looked at him for a long time. "Okay," she said. And biked away.
* * *
Early August, 1983
The crafting experiments used the Demodog materials in ways Ryan hadn't expected to work as well as they did.
He mounted a Demodog Fang on a wooden handle at his workbench, shaping the hilt with Basic Crafting and feeding MP through Mana Crafting during the assembly. The fang bonded to the wood with unnatural firmness, and the finished product hummed faintly when he held it.
He Observed the result.
[Demodog Fang Knife]
Damage: 35 + STR modifier
Properties: +20% damage vs Upside Down entities. Exceptional durability.
Thirty-five base damage. His Louisville Slugger did about twenty-eight with a clean Power Strike. The fang knife out damaged his primary weapon by a quarter, and the bonus against Upside Down entities made it even more effective in the fights that actually mattered.
He cut strips of Corrupted Hide and sewed them to the inner lining of his denim jacket sleeves with Mana Crafting active. The hide was tough and flexible, darker than leather, and it smelled faintly wrong, like wet earth. The finished arm guards added fifteen points of physical damage reduction.
Ryan sat at the workbench and looked at what he'd built. A knife made from monster teeth. Armor made from monster skin.
Equipment crafted from the dropped materials of creatures that lived in a dimension that ran parallel to this one. His life was messed up
* * *
August 3, 1983 - Miller Property
Evening. The cellar was bigger now, five hundred square feet with a new chamber off the main room that Ryan had shaped into a workshop over the past week. The golem had helped with the last two days of digging, carrying earth up the stairs in buckets while Ryan shaped the walls smoothly and reinforced the ceiling with packed stone.
He sat at the workbench, cleaning the Demodog Fang knife, and opened his notebook.
He still had over three months. Higher levels required exponentially more XP. Higher stats required more intense training.
Ryan picked up a pen and wrote the first entry.
Will disappears evening of Nov 6. Last seen biking home from Mike's on Mirkwood Road.
He kept writing. Five minutes, ten, the pen moving in small careful letters. The plan was taking shape, and the plan was imperfect, and imperfect was all he had. He knew what happened in the show. He didn't know what would happen here.
He closed the notebook and put it in the inventory.
STR 23 from the second stat crystal and another week of training. DEX 23. VIT 25, reinforced by Iron Constitution. INT 50, the highest stat by a mile, backed by two threshold bonuses that made his MP pool and skill creation something that belonged in the late game of the manhwa.
Outside, the first cricket of the evening started chirping. Ryan turned off the lamp and climbed the stairs.
[An 8,000‑word chapter… this one was hard. We got more social interaction with other characters, more skill progression, and yes, an actual f**king golem.
Ryan definitely deserves some kind of swimmer's body for his reincarnation. Give him a break, he already died once.
As for Chrissy, I'm not completely sure about her full background. We only know that Vecna targeted her and that she had issues beneath the surface, so I took some creative liberties, especially with the controlling‑mother angle.
I like Nancy. She can be annoying sometimes, but I genuinely believe she's one of the characters who actually moves the plot forward. She's also stupidly brave. Seriously. Who the hell crawls into a f**king tree to chase a monster?
A few readers asked about HP and MP progression seeming inconsistent between chapters. They are! I also comment about it.
Quick clarification, both HP and MP are calculated from multiple stats, not just one.
So, when you see a bigger jump than expected, it usually means Ryan leveled up AND gained a stat point in the same chapter. Each VIT point always adds exactly 10 HP, each INT point always adds 5 MP, but level-ups add to both pools too, which can make it look uneven if you're only tracking one stat.
Thanks to Getryx for the sharp eye!
Also, huge thanks to all the fans who are investing Power Stones in the story! Seeing Psycho_Paradox, Yunos_Noor and XenonBlaster65 at the top with consistent contributions means the world. And to everyone on the list from Aaronzaid all the way to StormKing1, your support keeps the chapters coming. Every stone count and I notice every single one. You guys are the real party members 🎲💪
Please don't forget to keep commenting, reviewing and, if you can, send some Power Stones to help bump the fic up the rankings, it really makes a difference!
As always, if you catch any inconsistencies, plot holes, or typos, please tell me so I can patch them before they grow into a huge mess.
Unfortunately, I'll probably only be able to post the next chapter around Monday due to my schedule, but I'll do my best. I made this chapter extra long to help make up for the wait, hopefully you enjoyed it.]