The Point System's Cruel Trade-off

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Fusion Punk 2333 Apocalypse ran on an Advantage/Disadvantage Trait System.

You started with a base of thirty points and spent them on whatever traits you wanted. If you needed more points than that, you had to take disadvantages. That was the game. The so-called law of equivalent exchange.

It was the part of a build that ate the most agonizing thought, because among the traits you could grab at the start were some truly broken advantages. Load up on disadvantages just to farm the points, though, and there was a high chance your character wouldn't survive the early game—they'd simply fall apart.

Why was I thinking about this all of a sudden?

"Oh, fuck…"

I had been cutting through a back alley off the main strip when I happened to glance at a shop window. The moment I saw the wreck of myself in the mirror inside, a chime rang behind my eyes and a window bloomed across my vision.

"Hah. What a complete waste."

After the breakup, I had poured every leftover hour and every ounce of stress into the gym, grinding iron like it owed me something. All those precious muscles I had clawed into existence were gone without a trace. Gone wasn't even the word—I was wasted down to bone and hide, a scarecrow in a handsome face.

The disadvantage trait Extreme Muscle Loss. It permanently locked the efficiency of the strength stat at the absolute floor. Heavy weapons were out of the question, and firing anything with serious recoil stood a decent chance of wrecking my shoulder.

That nightmare of a trait was sitting on my body right now. The one mercy was that, for how scrawny I looked, the face hadn't turned ugly. I did have a bit of that pretty-boy look about me—the kept-man type.

"Well~ no more pumping iron~ efficiency's garbage anyway~"

Muttering like a man who'd come unspooled, I turned the rest of the traits over in my mind. In this world, the mana you needed for magic was stored in the heart, and the qi you needed for martial arts was stored in the dantian. That was the baseline.

Heart Mana Deficiency meant the mana that gathered in the heart leaked without stopping, so no matter how hard you pushed you could never climb past the 1st Circle. Dantian Mana Rejection meant you couldn't hold qi in the dantian at all, which slammed the door on the martial path completely.

That much, I could live with. In Fu-Punk-Pocalypse, magic and martial arts both cost a fortune and took forever to learn. For anyone trying to live an ordinary life, they were disadvantages that barely registered. And if I ever did manage to grow, it wasn't as if there was no way to strip a disadvantage trait off.

The last one I had taken, though—Starvation Constitution—was a different animal.

In the game, it had been nothing more than a satiety gauge in the corner of the screen that drained three times faster than anyone else's. An annoying little penalty you dealt with by clicking a canned meal or a nutrient tube in your inventory. For a character like mine, parked in a workshop doing nothing but crafting, food was the one resource I always had too much of.

If this was reality, that was a different story entirely.

Grrrk—!

"Ghk—"

The thought hadn't even finished before a sharp, twisting pain wrenched through my stomach and the world tilted. Unlike the others, Starvation Constitution was a disadvantage that could actually kill me.

This is bad.

The pressure landed all at once: if I didn't get something in my mouth right now, I was done. I had to find a way to eat.

That was when my nose caught a smell. Aggressive, punchy—meat grilled under a crust of seasoning thick enough to qualify as a war crime. My body moved before my brain did. I forced strength into my staggering legs and walked toward the source.

The smell was coming from a street stall set up along one edge of the commercial strip. Behind it, a rough-faced vendor with a cheap plastic prosthetic bolted to his forearm was sizzling skewers of unidentifiable meat on a mana-stone grill.

A sign hung off the stall, simple and to the point.

Ding—!

The ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠instant I read those words, as if it had been waiting for the cue, the method for checking an account balance in this world surfaced in my head. It felt exactly like a tutorial prompt from the game.

I tapped twice behind my ear with my wrist.

A citizen ID unfolded in hologram in front of my eyes. The name on it was Seol Gyehyeon. The instant I saw it, the entire life of the person called Seol Gyehyeon poured into my head.

Abandoned by his parents as a child. Shuffled from one underclass shelter to another. And then, just recently, the moment he turned twenty, forcibly aged out of the system and left on his own.

Hah. This guy was completely broke.

He'd been given something like a hundred thousand credits as a settlement stipend ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠when they kicked him out, but he was the gullible type, and instead of putting down roots he'd bounced from scam to scam. A memory even flickered past of a few days ago, when a bag holding his clothes and every last credit he owned had been stolen.

Five hundred credits a skewer. My entire fortune: five thousand. Enough for about ten skewers.

Not that I had a choice. I was lightheaded enough to drop where I stood. Pinch pennies tonight and I wouldn't live to see morning—I'd starve.

"Mister. One skewer."

The vendor gave my sorry state a once-over and answered like he was doing me a favor by speaking.

"Five hundred credits. Up front. If you're not eating, get lost."

A customer walks up and that's the attitude? What, you don't want to sell?

The smell of the meat was already chewing holes in my reason, so I prepped the payment anyway.

I swiped two fingers across my wrist, and five hundred credits—my blood, as far as I was concerned—drained away.

"Here."

I took the skewer he shoved at me with that plastic hand. I didn't have time to taste it. I chewed, swallowed, and it was gone.

Starvation Constitution was not impressed by a single skewer. If anything, the moment something actually hit my stomach, whatever patience I had left detonated. I needed more calories.

"Mister. Hurry. Another one."

"Huh? Oh—yeah."

The vendor flinched at the way I thrust my hand out and threw a fresh skewer on the grill. Two. Three. Five. I jammed nine more into my mouth in a row before I finally clawed my way back to something like lucidity.

"Aigoo, customer! You sure eat with gusto. How about I grill you one more?"

The man who'd been telling me to get lost a minute ago had vanished. In his place was a stall owner rubbing his palms together and beaming at me like I was his favorite person in Ground Zero.

Truthfully, I still didn't feel completely full. There was a reason I couldn't buy another anyway.

I had wiped out my entire fortune. Clean.

"Mister. I ate ten of those. You can't throw in one on the house?"

"What? On the house? Don't jinx a man trying to run a business. You gonna get lost or what?"

His eyes flashed, and he flicked a glance to the side. I followed it, confirmed the gun sitting within easy reach, and eased myself carefully away from the stall.

Come on. Ten skewers and I don't even get one for free? Stingy world.

I stepped back out toward the street and, a moment later, understood what I was looking at. This whole stretch was a stall market. Vendors packed every gap, calling customers in from every direction.

"Ah. Should've tried something else instead of buying ten skewers of the same thing."

Regret didn't change a thing. Five thousand credits' worth of meat was already sitting in my stomach. Eaten was eaten. The real problem was where—and how—I was supposed to sleep tonight. I walked the street and started turning that over.

A stall street didn't mean food and only food, either. Clothes, music discs, miscellaneous junk—and here and there, stalls selling weapons.

Figures a neighborhood like this wouldn't have decent stock.

Ground Zero, which happened to be where Seol Gyehyeon lived, sat on the city's outer rim, closer to a slum than anything else—the place the underclass washed up. Everything on offer was used, and everything used had something wrong with it. The kind of scrap you'd have been forced to scavenge in Fu-Punk-Pocalypse and pretend was fine.

That was when the idea hit.

If this was a stall street, I could throw together a temporary stall of my own and run it. If every disadvantage trait I'd taken was sitting on this body, then the broken advantage traits I'd picked to match them were sitting on it too. Which meant I could play technician the same way my character had in the game.

Ding—!

The certainty arrived with another jolt of knowledge pouring into my head: an activation manual. Following the guide, I pictured myself drawing something up from inside my skull and slowly lifted my right hand into empty air. Then I fixed my gaze on a cigarette butt lying in the gutter.

A faint whisper of displaced air.

To my astonishment, the cigarette butt followed the motion of my hand, ignored gravity, and drifted slowly up into the empty space above the street.

It actually works?

One of the advantage traits in my build. A psychic ability I'd taken to paper over the strength-stat collapse from Extreme Muscle Loss—a late bloomer, weak in the early game, the kind of thing that got frightening later. Technician or not, you couldn't do the work on stagnant muscle alone. The higher the craft, the heavier the equipment you ended up having to move.

Martial arts stored qi in the dantian. Magic stored mana in the heart. Psychic power didn't use either. It ran on energy pouring out of mutant cells, which meant none of my disadvantages could touch it. "Energy pouring out of your cells," of course, was another way of saying that if you used it a lot, you got hungry. On a body carrying Starvation Constitution, I still needed to be careful.

The ability confirmed, my eyes started moving. If I had the advantage traits I'd picked, I could stop worrying about sleeping on the street tonight. A little looking around turned up a trash collection point where the stalls had dumped their empties—thick cardboard boxes piled into a small mountain.

Mana Thread Control had been the workhorse of an old combat-mage build of mine. I'd used it as a general-purpose tool even then, so I'd brought it over to the technician tree—and it had turned out to be an absurdly good stand-in for a whole toolbox. Having Heart Mana Deficiency didn't mean I couldn't use magic at all. It just meant I would never grow into a high-circle mage. Running the threads gently, as tools, was no problem. And the mana shortfall from the leak was something I could work around later, if I built myself the right auxiliary gear.

I'd taken the trait for those early stretches when you didn't have a decent tool to your name and had to work with your hands. It let you draw thin threads of mana ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠from your fingers. Those threads could be given three properties—Cutting, Rotation, and High Heat—and that combination was tailor-made for a technician's kit.

This time I pulled energy from around my heart and started releasing it through my hand. A thread of mana about the length of a finger joint spilled from my fingertip. When I brought it to a cardboard box, the box sliced and punched through as easily as I pleased.

"Alright. Let's do this."

I gathered the boxes into a corner and started building a stall. Using the mana threads drawn from my fingertips, I cut the cardboard and fitted the pieces together. Whether it was the high dexterity stat or not, I had a halfway decent stall knocked together out of boxes in no time.

This ought to be good enough to do business.

I set the threads to the signboard and started carving letters.