Hidden Special Weapon
"They're spelling it out because the jump is that dramatic. No way the Status Window would be talking this up if it were just blowing smoke."
When you play games, it's rare for the system to actually break down your detailed stat values. This had to be outrageous enough to warrant an introduction.
Presently, the Status Window laid out the F-Rank's detailed stats.
Ohhh. Even just F-Rank and your physical abilities jump up to a pretty serious level, huh?
My shoulders puffed up for a second. Was it because the F-Rank stats being granted to me looked that impressive? That was part of it, sure. But the real reason they went up was something else. The moment I saw the numbers the Status Window was putting up, I got it. This was a field I actually knew my shit about.
Years of pumping iron, and here's where it all pays off!
I'm a gym rat. An iron junkie. I love weights, and I love other sports too, honestly. The secret behind my explosive happy time isn't just that I'm young — it's because years of consistent training have my testosterone cranked to the max.
Some gym bros hold back on happy time because they're terrified of losing their gains. That's not the kind of gym life I signed up for. You work out so you can be happy, for fuck's sake. And sometimes, being happy means working the prostate and draining the pipes.
Anyway, up until I was about twenty-four, I enjoyed working out well beyond the level of a hobby. Rain, snow, blazing heat, drought — I trained, steadily and without fail. Which is exactly why I could feel, down to my bones, what F-Rank actually meant.
"I used to hit 570 on the big three, and I ran the 100 in 11.8."
I'd kept training even after coming over to this world. With the apocalypse hanging over my head, that was a given. So even after reincarnating, I'd held onto those numbers.
I'm 186 centimeters tall, 90 kilograms. A 570-kilo big-three total at 90 kilos is top-tier amateur territory, and the 100-meter time sits in the same ballpark. Stack those numbers against the F-Rank Power the Status Window listed — a 650-kilo big-three — and the picture comes into focus. That's roughly the big-three output of an elite lifter in the 100-to-110-kilo class.
Link it to punching power instead of the lifts, and the concept gets even clearer. For F-Rank punching power, it just comes right out and says it: Possesses the punching power of a heavyweight professional boxer.
"But that's not even the real meat of these detailed stats... Look at Agility and Stamina. This shit is not normal!"
It was astonishing. The moment I looked past Power and into Agility and Stamina, something even more interesting clicked. Plenty of heavy guys can still run a fast 100 meters. But agility when it comes to evasion? That's a different story. A heavyweight can only be so fast — he's still human, and weight class has a ceiling. Same logic in reverse: a lightweight punching through a heavyweight's wall is a tall order.
And yet the awakening had given me heavyweight power and lightweight agility at the same time. On top of that, I could fight in that state for forty minutes straight. That's a full twelve-round boxing match. So even if F-Rank was the lowest level on the Status Window, the synergy of F-Rank Power, Agility, Durability, and Stamina stacked together made you a superhuman who had blown past the limits of weight class.
"Yeah. That's a Status Window ability for you."
At the bottom of the basic stats sat an entry called Mana. Maybe that was the force letting me output something close to superhuman. If I had to put it in terms a deranged chronic masturbator would understand, it was like this: going full throttle on yourself for a solid hour without ever coming, while the massive pleasure never dips for a second.
Absolutely fucking insane.
Whshh-shh-shuk! Shuk! Whshh-shh-shh-shh-shuk!
I got up for a second and threw some shadow boxing. Except those sounds weren't coming from my mouth. My mouth wasn't moving at all. My lightning-fast fists were splitting the air.
"Oh... that's definitely different! I'm moving like a game character!"
I hadn't even been throwing proper, form-tight shadow boxing. And still, a nine-hit combo had fired off in an instant. That was how clearly I could feel the physical ability the Status Window had granted me. I'd been swinging genuinely heavy punches in a nine-hit flurry, and through all of it, my balance never broke. The overall rise in my stats was keeping my body in equilibrium.
"And throwing shadow like this, I can actually feel the traits kicking in too."
Sitting on the couch and turning it over in my head, it had all been vague. But the moment I stood up and started throwing, I felt them fire.
Evasion Technique Mastery
General Martial Arts Mastery
Combat Mental Mastery
I'd gone pretty deep on the iron. Martial arts, on the other hand, I'd only ever dabbled around dojos and gyms. But shadow boxing with the traits active made it obvious. Evasion routes and body-movement paths drew themselves automatically, and I could feel myself moving along them. On top of that, there was this calm. A physical change this sudden should have been enough to rattle anyone — but with Combat Mental Mastery applied, I was taking the whole sensation in with surprising composure.
"I'll be able to wring every last drop out of this physical ability."
Just because you've gained a body that can slip a lightweight boxer's punches doesn't mean you'll actually slip them. Evasion is a technique too. With the traits reinforcing me, I had a feeling I could put a hundred percent of this enhanced body to work.
"I've got a hunch it'll feel even more obvious in a real fight."
Even just from the image of it, the effect had been pretty vivid. If it applied in actual combat, I suspected it would hit harder than what I was feeling now.
Whsshk! Shuk! Whshh-whshh-whshh! Whshh-whshh-whshh-shuk! Shuk! Whssshaaa!
I was so high on the trait rush I threw a few more combinations.
"The physical ability is definitely incredible. Even just this much is honestly huge. But here's the thing — the enemy isn't human. It's zombies."
Even after putting on a solid shadow-boxing show, I couldn't just sit there grinning. A body that transcended weight class. Martial technique at a mastery level. If the enemies I had to deal with were human, I might have walked out the door right then and caved their skulls in. A heavyweight punch delivered at lightweight-boxer speed — unless athletes of a similar caliber stepped in to stop him, shutting down Special Hidden Awakener Kim Taeshik would be a tall order.
The problem was, the enemy was zombies. The mechanism that puts a zombie out of a fight is nothing like a human's. Given enough time, this being an apocalypse, I might have to deal with humans too — Awakeners and ordinary people alike. But for someone who needed Zombie Points, I had to treat zombies as the primary target.
"If I'm going up against zombies, I have no choice but to plan for getting swarmed."
One of the situations where a zombie's nature really maxes out is when you're fighting several of them at once. The two things I'd have to watch for most once I started hunting were ambushes and swarms — and a zombie swarm is a completely different animal from a human one.
Humans, for instance, don't have to die to be taken out of a fight. You don't even have to kill them. Land a clean shot on the jaw and you can put them down through a knockout. Especially now, with a pro heavyweight's punch in my arsenal, that kind of setup gets even easier — because one punch can put someone out cold. That's why people say a heavyweight pro fighter has the edge if he goes head-to-head with ten ordinary people. Most of those civilians are going to catch a heavy, precise fist flush on the jaw and go down in one shot. You don't even need to drop all of them. Wreck the first few in the vanguard badly enough and the fight's probably over, because humans are animals that feel fear.
So if I had to deal with ordinary, unarmed humans right now, I could walk out and take them. Technically speaking, anyway.
Zombies are different. A zombie doesn't go down from a shot to the jaw. It doesn't go down from a hard shot to the skull, either. I'd beaten a few of them to death on the way here, and the ones roaming around out there now — like the zombies in the movies — don't stop moving until the brain is severely damaged. Take a decent hit, even crack the head open, and they still aren't out of the fight.
I'd learned that the hard way myself, fighting zombies before I made it here. I'd properly caved a head in, but the thing had only gone down — it hadn't gone out. Then another one came at me, so I never got the finishing blow in. Eventually the first one, the one that had already dropped, came back with a second attack. If the enemy had been human, eight or nine times out of ten that first steel-pipe thrashing would have knocked them out or scared the fight right out of them. Because it was a zombie, that situation happened instead.
That's what fighting zombies looks like. Attack power at the level of a knockout isn't enough.
"In the end, if the goal is to hunt zombies out in the open and farm points, it has to be one-shot, one-kill."
Get bitten once and you're fucked. On top of that, they don't even go down from a decent impact. If I wanted to be a point hunter against these things, a one-shot, one-kill capability had to be locked and loaded.
"Which means in this situation, what I'm counting on is — of course — the weapon."
That's right. The weapon. If the base stats climbed several times higher than this, I might be able to beat zombies to death on physique alone. But that was a long way off. Right now, the weapon had to deliver the one-shot, one-kill. Which is why I decided to stake everything on my special weapon — the Nano Awakened Steel Pipe.
Trembling... trembling... trembling...
My fingers, loaded with anticipation for the weapon, shook as they found the button.
Click.
Those fingers pressed it.