The Reincarnated Copy Boy

Goblin Attack

The sound crashed through the forest like a stone through glass, scattering from tree to tree, sending something small and startled bursting out of the undergrowth to his left in a frantic rustle of panicked wings. Ben didn't notice. He was holding two identical daggers that had arrived from nowhere, and for the first time since waking up in this place — for the first time, if he was honest, in considerably longer than that — something was going right.

He sheathed the original dagger back in its scabbard and held up the copy, examining it in the filtered afternoon light. It was real. Solid. It had weight and edge and texture. It was not a projection or an illusion or a pale impression of the original. It was, as far as any test he could apply was able to determine, the genuine article.

He thought about what that meant.

He could copy things. He had always been able to copy things, in the modest, unremarkable way of a person with a steady hand and an accurate eye. But this was different. This was the capacity to hold out his hand and produce a perfect duplicate of a physical object from nothing. The implications of that, for a mind that had grown up in a world with shop fronts and economies and the concept of supply and demand, were—

He became aware that he was grinning in a way that probably looked slightly unhinged to any observer.

"Right," he said, schooling his expression back to something more appropriate and looking down at the copied dagger. "Let's try that again."

He held the copy up, establishing it as the new target, and said firmly, "Perfect Copy. Activate."

Skill use limit reached, the System said. Perfect Copy at Level One permits one use per rest cycle. Please rest to restore skill availability.

The grin faded somewhat. "One use."

Correct. Skill frequency increases with level progression.

"So I can copy one thing. And then I have to — what, sleep? Before I can do it again?"

Rest cycle confirmation required. Skill will restore upon completion of a full rest period.

Ben lowered the dagger. He looked at it. He thought about all the things he could have copied — food, medicine, a full set of tools, a warm coat, an entire armoury if the conditions had been right — and then filed that thought carefully next to Online Shop in the cabinet labelled later.

"One dagger," he said.

One Iron Dagger. Correct.

He attached the copied dagger to his belt on the left side — he was right-handed, and it seemed sensible to have the original within easy reach — and straightened up. He was still grinning, despite everything. One dagger was, after all, one more dagger than he'd had before. The skill was real and it worked and it was, without any question in his mind, extraordinary. Whatever level ten Online Shop turned out to be, the foundation of it was enough to convince him that the old man in the armchair had been telling the truth about one thing at least.

Abilities that suit you rather specifically.

He picked up his pack, settled it on his shoulders, and turned towards the sound of running water.

Follow the river to the nearest town. Keep it simple. Find people, find information, find out what this world was and what his place in it might be. That was the plan.

He was three steps into the plan when the bushes to his right exploded.

It was short.

That was the first thing Ben registered, in the fraction of a second between the explosion of foliage and the arrival of impact. Short and fast and coming at him with a single-minded fury that left absolutely no room for misinterpretation. Whatever it was, it had not come to talk.

He had just enough time to get his arm up before it hit him.

The collision knocked him sideways, sent him stumbling over a root, and he went down hard onto one knee with the creature on top of him — and now he could see it properly, or as properly as the circumstances allowed, which was to say he was mostly getting an impression of leathery green-grey skin, a face full of teeth, and eyes the colour of old brass that were looking at him with an intensity that he found extremely personally directed.

Goblin.

He didn't know how he knew the word. He had played enough video games in his teens to have a working mental image, and this thing matched it with an accuracy that would have impressed him under different circumstances. It was perhaps four feet tall, wiry and quick, wearing what appeared to be a patchwork of badly cured leather over its torso. Its hands — currently attempting to get a grip on his shirt — were knotted and strong, with nails that were doing their level best to qualify as claws.

It was also, Ben realised with the crystalline clarity of someone whose continuing existence had just become an immediate practical concern, trying to bite him.

"Get off—"

He shoved at it with both hands and managed to create about six inches of space, which the goblin used to rake at his forearm with those nails and Ben used to scramble backwards across the forest floor. He fetched up against a tree trunk, which stopped him moving further, and the goblin came at him again without pausing.

He had the dagger.

He had two daggers, in fact, and neither of them was in his hand because he had been busy congratulating himself on his own cleverness when the ambush happened. He got his right hand to the sheathed blade just as the goblin reached him and he got lucky — not skilled, not strategic, just lucky — in that the creature's forward momentum carried it directly into the point of the half-drawn blade before he'd done anything deliberate with it.

The goblin shrieked. It pulled back. Ben got the dagger properly free and got to his feet, breathing hard, his back against the tree.

They faced each other.

The creature was bleeding from a gash across its right side. It did not appear to find this discouraging. It circled him in a low crouch, those brass-coloured eyes moving between his face and the blade with a calculating intelligence that was considerably more unsettling than mindless aggression would have been. It was deciding something. Working out angles.

Ben was working out angles too, specifically the angle between himself and the fastest route out of this situation that didn't involve being bitten, which was narrowing rapidly.

"Nice goblin," he tried. "Good goblin."

The goblin said something. It wasn't in any language he spoke, but the tone was unambiguous. The goblin's opinion of him was not high.

It feinted left, and Ben flinched right, and it came at him from the right with a speed that was genuinely impressive for something its size. He got his arm up — the wrong arm, the one already bleeding from the claw marks — and the impact sent the dagger spinning from his hand into the undergrowth.

For approximately two seconds, Ben was unarmed.

He remembered the second dagger.

His left hand found the hilt on his belt through what was less skill and more pure panicked instinct, and he brought it up in a swing that connected with the side of the goblin's head not with the blade but with the pommel, which was not what he'd intended but turned out to be effective regardless. The goblin staggered. Ben did not wait to see how staggered. He followed up with the blade itself, hand shaking, and the fight ended.

He stepped back.

He stood over the goblin in the green-gold light of the ancient forest and breathed in ragged, tearing pulls, his legs threatening to give way beneath him, his arm burning where the claws had gone in. His heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his teeth.

He had just killed something.

He understood this intellectually. He looked at the evidence in front of him and understood it completely. But the understanding and the feeling of it were running on separate tracks, the feeling about three steps behind the understanding and coming up fast, and he did not particularly want to be standing still when they met.

He concentrated on breathing. In and out. The smell of pine resin and wet earth, very strong now, grounding him in the specific physical reality of the moment. In and out. His legs didn't give way. That felt like a win.

Then the System spoke.

Combat resolved. Experience points awarded: 45 XP.

Level threshold reached. Advancing to Level Two.

Level Up! You have reached Level Two.

And then it kept going, and Ben forgot about his legs entirely.

Health Points increased: +100 HP.

Mana Points increased: +10 MP.

Strength increased: +1.

Intelligence increased: +1.

Agility increased: +1.

Bonus attribute points available: 3. These may be distributed at your discretion.

The voice paused, then added, with the mild tone of someone reading a footnote:

Skill Perfect Copy has gained experience points.

Ben sat down.

Not intentionally. His legs finished their earlier consultation and arrived at a unanimous verdict, and he sat down on the forest floor next to a dead goblin with a bruised arm and bleeding claw marks and three attribute points to spend, and he stared at the canopy above him for a long moment and simply breathed.

"Right," he said, to no one.

When the breathing had levelled out to something resembling normal, he remembered the goblin. Specifically, he remembered that the System's voice had mentioned something about experience points being awarded, which implied a framework, and that framework implied rules, and rules could be learned. But before he got into any of that, he made himself look at the goblin properly.

There was something in its belt pouch. Two somethings, in fact.

The first was a small, rough stone about the size of a large marble, murky red in colour, with a faint interior light that pulsed very slowly, like a heartbeat. He turned it over in his fingers. It was warm.

The second was a piece of dried meat wrapped in a large leaf, which he identified by smell more than anything else. He put it in his pack without examining it too closely.

He also found, tucked into the back of the goblin's belt, a crude weapon: a short, heavy club, the wood was dark with use and the striking end was wrapped in some kind of knotted sinew. He held it for a moment. Heavier than the dagger but with a different kind of leverage. He added it to his pack. He had no idea if he would ever use it, but he was beginning to form the opinion that in this world the correct approach to potentially useful objects was to take them first and ask questions later.