6. Cheng Rui in His Mech

Cheng Rui in His Mech

A gaunt humanoid over two meters tall charged at Cheng Rui’s heavy armor faster than most cars on a highway.

It had terrible claws and a skeletal face. The claws slammed into the thick iron plating with a deep, bell-like clang—and shattered in the process.

While the monster howled over the loss of its claws, the drill mounted on Cheng Rui’s left wrist punched through its torso.

Very quickly, the scream became a wet gurgle. The sharp, ultra-hard, vibrating chisel cut through tendons and smashed bone with insulting ease.

The humanoid’s assault failed.

Its companions followed.

Several of them.

Cheng Rui was not confident that he could take them all in close combat. He raised both arms. Devices like exhaust pipes built into the mechanical forearms roared toward the monsters.

They were modified versions of modern camera flashes—reinforced, oversized, overengineered—capable of emitting a focused shockwave more powerful than a flashbang.

The pack of charging monsters collapsed instantly into a heap of wailing, thrashing limbs. Once they had lost the ability to resist, Cheng Rui’s precise follow-up strikes silenced them for good.

Fireballs streaked across the sky, falling toward Cheng Rui from every direction.

If he had been wearing the prototype armor, even the relatively weak explosions produced by flying little devils would have pierced it in short order and killed him. In the second or even third generation armor, their flames would have roasted him alive before the plating failed.

But Cheng Rui was not worried.

Over the last few days, he had made many improvements to his original design. The twelfth generation armor had environmental systems and insulation strong enough to walk through lava or liquid nitrogen.

In Cheng Rui’s own opinion, that was not bad for something built from scavenged car parts.

Two watermelon-sized spherical turrets mounted on his shoulders rotated at the same time and began spewing dense, continuous fire, louder than heavy machine guns.

They did not fire bullets.

They fired thin, impossibly straight streaks of lightning, each as fine as a needle, more than sixty shots a second. Anything caught in their sights was punched with inch-wide craters.

One little devil fell.

Then another.

Then a third.

The surviving little devils were forced to retreat.

Of course, it was not real lightning. Cheng Rui had not yet built a working electrolaser. But turn the power high enough, improve it with super-science, and even an otherwise ordinary pulsed laser became dangerous.

As the little devils died or fled, the shoulder cannons turned back to distant targets, either striking them directly or breaking up enemy formations, while Cheng Rui used his wrist drills to finish whatever slipped through the long-range fire.

This was the fifth time he had successfully repelled the enemy’s attack.

But despite the cool, damp air, his armor was growing hot. Damage was accumulating too. If enough repeated impacts destroyed a load-bearing joint or damaged the servos, the monsters would not need to pierce his breastplate. Half a ton of metal would crush him against his own ribs.

Name: Cheng Rui
HP: 64/75
Stamina: 16/75
Mana: 31/45
Class: Level 15 Inventor

Skills [1 point available, 75 total]
Academics lv4, Analysis lv14, Camouflage lv2, Charging lv11, Energy Weapons lv5, Enhanced Armor Fabrication lv14, Enhanced Electrical Engineering lv11, Enhanced Robotics lv11, Fabrication lv14, Ancient Martial Arts lv8, Instant Repair lv12, Language: English lv3, Language: French lv1, Persuasion lv5, Piloting: Combat Suit lv6, Programming lv5

Attributes [5 points available, 75 total]
Strength 14, Agility 21, Constitution 20, Intelligence 49, Perception 16, Charisma 13

Fortunately, Cheng Rui had leveled up. In the lull between waves, he could distribute his attribute points sensibly.

He wanted very badly to put all of them into Intelligence again.

Intelligence did more than make him think faster. It improved memory, comprehension, mental arithmetic, and even the ability to imagine multiple things at once. At Intelligence 20 and 40, all of his mental skills had improved as well.

He had originally thought raising Intelligence might let him grasp magic. Instead, when his hobby for robotics converted into a series of powerful technological skills, what he got was much closer to comic-book super-science.

But no.

Previous battles had proved that investing only in Intelligence did not work well in real combat, even with more advanced weapons. Several times, that build had nearly gotten him killed. Without Chi Li’s help, he would certainly be dead.

To survive, he had been forced to invest attribute points into Agility and Constitution. At Chi Li’s insistence, he had also raised other attributes and only then discovered that Perception was the primary magical attribute, while Strength made heavy weapons and armor a little easier to handle.

The battle was not over, so he could not waste points on anything that would not help immediately in a life-or-death situation. Because the continuous fighting had nearly drained his stamina, he raised Agility to 26, increasing his maximum stamina by forty-five points as well.

As for skills, he had long ago decided where his next investment would go.

The single skill point earned every three levels was the only way to unlock skills without personally using them, and therefore the only way to unlock supernatural skills. There was no question about that.

That was how he had first obtained Shock and Observe. Later, those two skills had evolved into Charging and Analysis.

There was also Instant Repair, a spell that consumed mana to repair things exactly as its name promised, without tools, time, or effort. And Fabrication, which could transform materials into finished products so long as he theoretically knew how to make them.

Without those skills, it would have taken him days to build anything even slightly complex and useful. With them, he could manufacture something like his armor on the battlefield.

But skills and instant fabrication were still limited by the materials available.

His armor was still iron. His combined skills had improved its basic performance more than tenfold, but the underlying material was crude.

It was time to change that.

Cheng Rui spent his newly earned skill point and learned Metal Creation lv1.

Thirty mana to create a single pound of metal was an expensive price, but acceptable. For now, the skill was limited to bronze and iron alloys. That would not do. He would have to work hard to raise its level.

“I hope you’re done tinkering, because here they come,” seven-year-old Verity told him.

The little girl did not fight monsters directly, but she always seemed to know what was happening. She could also exist in several places at once, which often confused monsters, lured hungry creatures away, or simply delayed an enemy wave long enough for Cheng Rui to shred it with lasers.

He was not going to blame her for little things like breaking the local rules of space-time, even if watching her do it gave him a headache.

“Just a few small adjustments,” Cheng Rui told her.

He did not build anything new. Instead, he spent his available mana on Instant Repair, restoring his power armor to perfect condition. Then he used Charging to fill the armor’s capacitors in preparation for the coming fight.

Those pulsed lasers consumed a great deal of power, after all.

“Now,” he said, “let’s drive those monsters back to whatever hell they crawled out of.”