Museum Core Chapter 11: The Ultimate Underdog

“In essence, the Anima Pugilist Class grants you the ability to fight as your chosen animal does. As such, it is vital to choose one that reflects your position. Going into a jungle filled with creatures far stronger than you with the abilities of an apex predator will not end well, nor will choosing a grub digging in the dirt because it has a specific ability. In addition, you need to be familiar with the creature,” Gula explained.

“So, flatworms are right out.”

That statement was followed up with that option being noisily crossed off the clipboard.

Jaclyn’s knowledge of the natural world was limited to animal documentaries and common sense, so she’d arranged for a little help, asking one of the newer officers to make some suggestions.

Wyatt Granger had gone to university before deciding to join the police force and spent an inordinate amount of time picking up random factoids on every conceivable topic. Of course, if he spent even a quarter of that time on job-based training, he could have become an extraordinary police officer, but he was still young and it wasn’t like it didn’t come in handy, occasionally.

There was also the small issue of him occasionally being a little dramatic. For example, the only reason there was a clipboard involved was that he’d brought one so he could dramatically cross things off the list.

“Is a ‘flatworm’ a powerful monster?” Gula asked.

“Nah, they’re small worms. Like half the size of my fingernail,” Granger shook his head while holding up his hand while sticking out his pinky demonstratively. “But the little buggers are almost immortal. Slice its front end into five parts and it’ll regenerate into a five-headed worm, chop one in half to get two … never try to feed them to your fish, learned that one the hard way.”

Jaclyn’s takeaway from that little tangent was that choosing a flatworm would have made her practically unkillable, but likely cost her most of her offensive potential.

“The leopard is also off the list,” she decided. As a creature near the top of the food chain in the regions where it resided, it likely violated the “no apex predators” condition.

It would have been nice, though, and fitting to her capabilities. Bàoquán was known by a few other names, specifically Leopard Style Kung Fu, or Leopard Fist.

It was based on speed and taking advantage of openings while doing severe damage to weak spots using the eponymous leopard fist. It was formed by not making a regular fist, but rather folding only the last two fingerbones, leaving your second knuckles protruding forward as the leading edge, rather than striking with the knuckles at the base of your fingers.

That allowed for a very narrow striking surface perfect for targeting spots like the temple, eyes, or groin. It wasn’t something she’d had to use very often, those kinds of strikes were illegal in MMA and as a police officer, she’d only used them when a life-or-death situation somehow devolved into fisticuffs, but it was what she was best at.

Still, as useful as that kind of fighting was against other people, she doubted it’d work too well against dragons and the like.

“Snakes?” Granger suggested. “A constrictor should make you terrifying when grappling.”

“Constrictors are powerful, but that strength is mostly crushing power, and I’m not exactly a wrestler. And venomous snakes are a terrible idea. They take a while to regenerate their venom, so I’d basically only have powers every few hours. And I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to get biting-based superpowers.”

Granger sniggered and she facepalmed as she realized how badly she’d phrased that.

“Look, there’s a jungle out there, and I’ll spend most of my time exploring it. I don’t want to find out that I’m dealing with the alien equivalent of the poisonous dart frog by dropping dead when I bite it.

“What about a spitting cobra?” Granger suggested.

“Venom regeneration,” she retorted.

“What about regular cats? You can’t use the big cats, but Felix is pretty fierce, isn’t he?”

Ah yes, Felix, the precinct’s cat. They’d gotten him in the usual way, namely, by an officer finding a kitten and deciding to keep it, but being unable to have it at their apartment. More and more people would find out about the little houseguest but keep the secret.

The general plan had been to introduce him to the cute little kitten and beg in ways that should have been beneath the adults they all were.

And then Felix, still a tiny ball of fluff at this point, had shown up in the middle of the bullpen, dragging a dead rat that was larger than him.

Owens had taken one look at the kitten and declared that since the precinct clearly had a rat problem, they needed a cat.

From that moment onwards, Felix had become his cat, and spent most of his time in the commanding officer’s office.

But no one had ever forgotten his takedown of that massive rat.

The cat was a sweetheart overall, but an unholy terror to all pests and became an utter berserker in the bath … so they’d started bathing him in bomb suits.

“Biting things in an alien jungle.” She pointed out, calling back to her previous argument about snakes.

“Right,” Granger conceded and once again dragged his pen across the clipboard with unnecessary force.

“Do you have bears in this world?” a nearby orc asked.

“Apex predators,” Gula reminded him.

“What about a goose?” Granger offered.

Jaclyn just shook her head. Being able to fly would be cool and geese could be a lot more terrifying than they had any right to, but she just wasn’t interested.

But they had a lot more creatures to consider.

“Hippos, and crocodiles, have insane jaw strength, but …”

He trailed off as she raised an eyebrow.

“I know you didn’t mean it like that, but did you really think that comparing your boss to a hippo was a good idea, especially when we’d already eliminated bite-based powers from contention?”

He went white as a sheet and began to stammer out an apology but she cut him off.

“Don’t worry, I’m not mad. But you’ll eventually have different bosses and some of the people in charge can be incredibly sensitive,” She warned. The more she was around Granger, the more she feared he had a terminal case of foot-in-mouthitis.

“Thanks, Inspector,” Granger nodded, still looking ever so slightly terrified.

“This is so surreal,” Jaclyn muttered as she hung her head “London is a jungle, we have orcs camping in the parking lot and I’m getting animal-based superpowers that function the way a video game does. What the hell has my life become?”

“I mean, we’re cops. Every Halloween night is basically this crazy,” Granger commented dryly.

“Fair point,” she shrugged, then lit up as she had an idea, “What do you guys think of a creature that’s almost indestructible against even the local apex predators, is almost immune to most toxins, and has both powerful fangs and teeth?”

“It sounds workable,” Gula said, just as Granger asked, “Are you talking about a Honey Badger?”

“How’d you figure that out so quickly?” Jaclyn asked.

“It was next on my list,” he deadpanned, “Though it was mostly as a joke. Their nigh-immortality is a myth.”

“But they can still shrug off a direct machete strike, are incredibly resistant to many toxins and once I can manifest natural weapons, those claws are going to be terrifying,” she pointed out.

“So this ‘honey badger’ is what you’re choosing?” Gula asked.

“Yes, I’m choosing the Honey Badger as my bond,” Jaclyn announced, causing another System Window to appear in her vision.

Spirit Bond: Honey Badger

The Spirit of the Honey Badger now empowers you, granting the following benefits:

-Badger’s Instinct (useful items in your surroundings will be highlighted, in situations where you don’t have time to think things through, your instinctual responses will be more in line with what you would have done if you’d had the time to think)

-Digging Claws (your hands will be able to dig rapidly through soil or flesh)

-Stubborn Invulnerability (you gain extremely tough skin while becoming quite difficult to grab a hold of, strikes at your vital areas will become less accurate, toxins will become nigh-useless against you)

-Hunter’s Senses (you gain a significant boost to your sense of smell and hearing)

-Thick-headed Badger (your resistance to various forms of intimidation is greatly increased, you gain the ability to see through most attempts to scare you off, and you gain the ability to expertly judge the amount of damage an attack against your person will inflict)

Rank Increase:

Null-Rank -> F-Rank

So, that sounded good, no, great, but it wasn’t quite the world-shaking superpower that she’d half expected to receive.

“Once you reach the peak of F-Rank, you’ll be able to choose an Ability that will grant you a wider use of your bond, for example, by manifesting parts of its body as weapons or armor,” Gula informed her, “Now, I’d advise you to pull up your Status sheet and assign the five Stat points you’ll have received for choosing a Class. You should also decide which Skills you want to focus on enhancing first. In theory, you can train them all at the same time, but the effect will be almost useless if spread out.

“Chose six at most, then list them at the top of your Skill list so you can keep track of them. You can change which Skills will be trained every day.”

Jaclyn obeyed, only to frown as she saw the four Statistics, Mind, Body, Magic, and Spirit.

“Er, what do these mean?” she asked.

“The Body Statistic determines your physical durability, strength, flexibility, and endurance. Mind increases your ability to make dextrous movements and make the most of your Body Stat, as well as increasing your memory capacity, the speed of your thoughts, your senses, and reflexes. Spirit will directly enhance the strength of your Skills and Abilities and Magic will increase your mana pool and allow you to use spells. I would avoid putting points in magic, however, your Class functions without mana.”

Once that had been explained, Jaclyn placed her points. Two went into the Body category, one in Mind and the last two in Spirit. A brief surge of strength made her tense up as the world around her swam, coming into slightly sharper focus than before, but then, it felt completely normal despite the boost. It was almost scary how natural the change felt.

She’d wanted to see what the sensory boost would look like, so she’d put a point in Spirit, but what she really needed was the physical and power boost.

If she’d be working in a jungle, the ability to lay a physical beatdown on enemies while being warded against sneak attacks by having attacks aimed at her vitals weakened was what she really needed.

Name: Jaclyn Abrahms

Race: Human

Class: Anima Monk

F-Rank, Level 1/20

Class Abilities

Spirit Bond: Honey Badger (F-Rank)

Statistics (0 points available)

Body: 13

Magic: 0

Mind: 11

Spirit: 12

Skills

Pugilism 9

Bàoquán 8

Firearms Handling 6

Situational Awareness 9

Bullshit Radar 8

Martial Arts 8

…

The six Skills she’d selected were a general hand-to-hand ability called Pugilism, which would increase the amount of damage she could inflict while unarmed … by a whopping nine percent. But the System could massively increase the leveling speed of Skills and she’d get it to a workable point soon.

Bàoquán, meanwhile, obviously boosted that fighting style, which was focused on explosive, aggressive speed. It also combined beautifully with her badger bond. Bàoquán had several moves that were decidedly illegal in MMA fights, such as going for the eyes or throat. But in a fight of life and death, she’d definitely resort to those.

Some of those moves also involved raking your fingers across someone’s eyes or throat. Painful and debilitating normally, but with her fingernails acting like a badger’s claws, they’d be utterly lethal.

Firearms Handling was the weakest of the selected Skills, but to be fair, she hadn’t spent most of her life playing around with guns.

Situational Awareness, meanwhile, was exactly what it sounded like.

And Bullshit Radar would come in handy for general detective work and interrogations, both when it came to actual crimes or snacks that had gone missing from her cupboard.

She’d thought long and hard about what to pick as her sixth Skill, but in the end, she’d settled on Martial Arts. It was partially performative, sure, but it would help her string together moves more easily, and with the System involved she’d probably learn or improvise a whole lot of new moves. Being able to use them with less practice could only be a boon.

And she’d get a significant physical boost when she acted in accordance with her Class. That was … problematic.

She had a fighting-based Class that would make her stronger when she fought, which was one hell of a conflict of interest. As a police officer, de-escalation would be the name of the game.

Thankfully, it wouldn’t be that big of a problem for her, not because she was too good a person to be tempted, but because she’d be spending the near future exploring the jungle and punching dragons, not people.

However, conflicts of interest were to be avoided by everyone, being a “good person” would not exempt one from having to avoid them. Besides, everyone thought they were a good person, so that was hardly a good criteria.

The human mind could be weird, and it wasn’t under one’s full control. Conflicts of interest were bad because merely by existing, they altered how choices would be weighed and you couldn’t just exclude certain things from factoring into your decision-making, the brain just didn’t work like that. Biases could be blatant or subconscious, but they were also trouble.

Perhaps one could create a new jungle exploration department once the initial mess had been cleared up and transfer any police officers with violence-based Classes into it?

All in all, it would have to be decided much later, by people way above her in the hierarchy.

Things were messy, and they’d likely get worse before they got better. And she had a job to do.

“You know, this whole thing reminds me of some stories I read. The world turns into a video game and things go to crap,” Granger mentioned off-handedly while returning to the precinct.

“Wait, what?” Jaclyn gaped.

“Yeah?”

“You’re telling me that this is a story?” Jaclyn asked. “As in, we’re stuck in a book?”

“No,” Granger vigorously shook his head. “It’s a genre, but if I’d read this as a story, I’d have said something,”

“What usually happens in those stories?” Jaclyn asked.

“It’s just a bunch of stories,” Granger pointed out. “They didn’t tell the future.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Jaclyn said. “I think they might predict people’s behavior. Humans take cues from fiction all the time.

“Imagine what would happen if the planet got hit with cosmic rays that gave superpowers. We both know that in a week, half the affected would be out on the streets in Halloween costumes, committing or stopping crimes.

“And most of them would either be animal-themed or in an immediate copyright battle with Disney. I’m not asking you to predict the future, I’m asking you to think about what lessons someone might draw from those stories of yours. What do they make you think is a good idea?”

“I mean, the big lesson is: be lucky,” Granger started, but she shook her head.

“Please write up a report and put it on my desk as soon as possible,” Jaclyn told him as her time here was limited. “And talk to our visitors, see what you can find out about cultivation and magic.”

If he managed to stay focussed on that task, that report should be an invaluable resource.

With his marching orders, Granger all but ran back into the precinct, likely to get something better than a clipboard to write with.

She’d love to stay and prepare more, but someone needed to look into that jungle.

After a few moments of contemplation, she decided to drop by Owens’ office to say goodbye before she embarked into the jungle, but he was too busy.

So she led Gula to the Husky, the military vehicle, not the dog, that Owens had arranged for them, and then drove the vehicle into the jungle.

Really, she was just glad that this had happened before the press had gotten their crap together.

A multi-species expedition into a magical jungle? They’d never have gotten away this cleanly under almost any other circumstances.