Sidekick by Carl Stubblefield (spicy books to read TXT) 📕

Gus awoke to find the morning light shining in through the balcony window, a shaft of sunlight playing directly across his face. Blinking at the light, he sat up and eagerly clicked the button to check his logs, and the dream was soon forgotten.

Looking at his display, he checked out his haul of new abilities:

New abilities assimilated!

Enhanced Strength (Level 36) [Passive]: At its current level, this ability gives a (1.7 x level) permanent increase to the Strength stat. Each stat point allocated into Strength yields 1.7 points in addition to skill boost (not retroactive).

Bound (Level 5) [20 MP]: Jump with increased ability. Energy stored upon landing, aiding height and power of successive jumps.

Resilience (Level 11) [Passive]: Grants extraordinary resistance to projectiles and explosive damage due to a passive ether shield that absorbs and deflects attacks above melee speeds.

Intermediate Shielding (Level 16) [10MP/minute]: Form barriers around the host. Can be enlarged to encompass more people but will drain MP at an accelerated rate. Energy attacks will weaken shielding and destabilize it.

Absorb (Level 26) [20 MP]: Extract energy and store for later use. Most effective when directly draining MP and HP from others.

Transfer (Level 13) [15MP]: Distribute energy from Absorb. Cannot change its form or convert energy into another medium. If energy is absorbed, it will be transferred in the same form.

Electronic Mind (Level 36): Facilitated communication with non-biologic entities, as well as intuition in construction and repair of all constructs meant to interface with biologic tissues.

Aim-Assist (Level 8) [5 MP/minute]: Display augment to aid in targeting, allows the host to lock-on at higher levels. Once a lock is achieved, it can be maintained even after the target is out of the line of sight or uses stealth skills.

Coerce (Level 11) [50MP]: Compels a target to agree with instruction. Success calculated based on the delta between the target’s base Intelligence stat compared to caster.

Hyper (Level 17) [20MP]: Doubles a stat for 5 minutes per activation.

Krackle (Level 6) [30 MP]: High energy burst attack of concentrated cascading spheres of energy.

Warp (Level 12) [30 MP]: Distort reality in a localized area, either crushing or expanding items in a 1-meter diameter sphere.

Xyzzy (Level 3) [75MP]: Bamf! Form wormholes to create portals and transport from one location to another. Base range is 5 feet. Each additional level extends this range another 5 feet.

13 new abilities assimilated:

13,000 XP awarded.

6,500 FP awarded.

8,200 XP to level 17.

Current Nth ability capacity: 92%. You are nearing capacity and will not be able to learn or absorb more powers when Nth reach maximum capacity.

“Well, that sucks! Leech will become obsolete in just a little while. Can I erase a power and gain space? I could do without Bound.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Sh—” Gus almost swore, then started spitting as he had the sudden taste of pencil shavings in his mouth.

“That the hybrid-Nth?” Gus guessed when he had cleared the bitter taste.

“Yes, the hybrid-Nth gathered some refined Kroutonium from that beam weapon, and are wondering why you don’t use it to make more hybrid-Nth.”

“Will that even make any difference? Did they scavenge enough?”

Gus heard the crunch of footsteps on newly-fallen snow and waited patiently for the reply. “There’s not enough from the gun, but they suggested getting their brothers from the other suit.”

“What other suit? That augment?”

“No, from the escape pod.”

“Huh? But that’s on the bottom of the ocean! Plus who knows where it’s moved in the meantime, even if I could make it down there.”

“It should be possible to go that deep, now that you have a shielding ability. The specs seem adequate for what we would need to do.”

Gus hedged a little bit; he had always been a bit claustrophobic. “Do we have to?”

“Only if you want more powers. The hybrid-Nth can store about ten-thousand times more skill data than Nth alone. If they weren’t tied up maintaining your systems, it would be a non-issue.”

“Helping those damn pirates is going to keep coming back to bite me in the ass, isn’t it?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, I guess a chunk of my day is planned out for me. I don’t want to lose any powers because I don’t have the capacity. Where’s Aurora?”

“She’s already eaten, trained, and is now down on the beach. She’s been up for hours, but I let Daphne know you were recovering from the battle, and probably sleeping longer to assimilate all the new powers.”

“Yeah, I wondered why I was so tired. I was getting used to needing less and less sleep.”

“If I were you, I’d shift your Energy Absorption skill to be more active after Leeching some powers, so you don’t get overwhelmed.”

With a little guidance, Gus made the changes to automatically pull needed energy from the environment as opposed to his own limited stores of glucose and body fat.

“Now that I know that some abilities can give a huge boost to stats, I think my main focus is going to be maximizing my MP pool. I’m pretty sure Aurora will agree, but I plan to sink all my points into Intelligence for the foreseeable future. Plus, I need to get a comfortable buffer of HP until I get some kind of self-healing effect.”

“Seems reasonable, just make sure you practice using all your new abilities so you aren’t using them for the first time without knowing how they function.”

Turning his comms on, he called Aurora and asked if she wanted to train. “I’ll meet you there. I’m almost done here. Feel free to start without me. I think I’ll be done quickly, but just in case, go ahead.”

Gus stood on the scanner in the arena and waited as the beam played over him, back and forth. “Is there something wrong with the scanner, Nick?”

“I think it’s just overloaded with your changes and trying to figure out a training regimen that would be adequate.”

Gus stepped off the scanner and opened the menu that displayed training options. The cursor blinked for a minute doing nothing. “Did I break it inadvertently? Wreck-It-Gus strikes again.”

“Give it a minute.”

Finally a new set of tabs