Chapter 16: Progress

Date August 6th, 2260

5 years later.

"Haa, my birthday is finally over. I can get some rest now." I thought aloud to myself upon entering and shutting the door to my room.

Alone and ready to chill for a bit, I collapsed on my bed, got settled into a nice comfy position, and started relaxing. Unknowingly, less than a minute in I got so relaxed I fell asleep and took a short but pleasant nap and when I eventually awoke, I continued lying in bed, letting my mind wander. At some point, I had the idea to go over my progress to see how I've done the past several years.

It's been a good number of years since I last gone over what I've accomplished and considering I'm resting and not doing a single thing at this very moment, I might as well do it now. Hmm, where to start… I suppose I can start off with what I've designed over the years, and as soon as I cover that I can move on to other stuff like my current physical abilities and what not.

To begin, I've completed the worker bot design I started way back on my first day of school as well as its Artificial Intelligence software. The design is basically a six-foot tall metal human skeleton covered head to toe in modular armor that can be easily and rapidly replaced when damaged. As for the name of the design, I was stuck on what to name it for a while, but I eventually settled on simply naming the robot design Multibot.

The reason I named it that is pretty obvious. First, the robot is designed to be a do it all robot and can do just about anything any normal human could do. Hence why it's named as such, although in my case they'll mostly be used for combat, manufacturing, and general labor.

For the second reason, well I couldn't come up with anything better so instead of wasting further time on trying to come up with marginally better names when I could be better using my energy on more productive things, I just went with Multibot because it fit the robot model well enough.

Other than finishing that robot design in these last several years, I also designed another two and modified a pre-existing design that I obtained in my knowledge acquisition. The first of those designs being a tracked Hauling Bot, I specially designed to haul thousands of pounds of material or cargo on its cargo bed. The second design is a mining bot called Prospectron, that can scan and mine the many resources that lay within the earth with its assortment of inbuilt tools.

And the last design is the preexisting one I modified slash upgraded, a combat oriented robot called a Sentinel. It was originally a large tracked heavy combat robot that either normally came equipped with a 5.56mm minigun and a four tubed 80mm rocket pod or a gatling laser and a four tubed 80mm rocket pod.

What I did to the design was, I improved its mobility by replacing the tracks with heavily armored legs, making it a bipedal robot, thereby improving the amount of places it can travel in with relative ease. Alongside that, I upped the armor on it significantly to bring it in line with the heavily armored legs I added, replaced both arm weapons with gatling lasers, and placed a mounting point on each shoulder for missile launchers and missile pods. Though many different weapons can be fitted there, such as more miniguns and gatling lasers.

However, in my case, missile pods will be mounted there instead simply because it gives the robot the ability to take down aerial targets with lock-on missiles. Not to mention the fact that there is a wide selection of different missile types that I can take advantage of, like swarm missiles, for instance. Which I'll for sure be abusing in the future to eliminate swaths of enemies and bombard expansive areas in an instant if the need arises.

In addition to the armament upgrades I made to the design, I replaced the fusion core with a fusion breeder core, getting rid of its need for refueling. I also went ahead and upgraded a number of components in the design to compensate for the additional weight and upgraded the artificial intelligence software. Last but not least, I added emp shielding like I did with every one of my robot designs to prevent it from being taken out by emp grenades and other electromagnetic pulse weapons.

That's about it for the robots, moving onto the next thing in the category we have weapons. I didn't really have much time to dedicate to weapon designing with all the stuff I have on my plate every day. Even so, I was able to churn out my primary weapon, an eight barreled minigun chambered in 7.62 with a variable fire rate range from as low as 2,000 up to 6,000.

The weapon should be more than capable of handling most threats I come across minus the heavily armored ones, such as power armor users. That said, the moment I get enough skill points in both my ballistic weapons and heavy weapons skills, my damage output will be more than enough to pierce through that kind of armor.

Though I wouldn't be able to do that with this minigun until I had several hundred skill points in both skills or double that in just one of them, and that would only allow me to penetrate the lower and mid end suits, not the higher end ones. I could also use armor-piercing rounds on top, but honestly, it would be a hell of a lot easier to just use a weapon specifically made to penetrate and take out armored hostiles.

Guess I'll be designing a high damage weapon with good armor penetration capabilities next time since it makes a lot more sense than me having to dump a ton of skill points into a skill or two so I can get a minigun to pen power armor suits. It'll get there at some point. I just have many other skills to focus on besides weapon skills. Back to what I was thinking about previously, before I got sidetracked. It's still not too bad for something I designed in my spare time.

With weapons covered quickly, that's it for designs, time to move on to my physical abilities and stats. To start it off, I've grown to a height of 5 feet 10 inches, 2 inches away from my dad's own height and weigh approximately 210 pounds, relatively lean. Absolutely massive for a 10-year-old, but that's what happens when you eat a shit ton of food daily specifically optimized for growth and recovery for years on end along with many supplements.

Not to mention my working out and training that has also contributed to my growth, and now that I'm bringing up working out, all of my lifts have progressed a shit ton over the past 5 years. Two examples of this are, I can now deadlift 315 pounds off the floor and curl 140 pounds, both for reps, exceptional lifts if I do say so myself.

Impressive lifts aside, I wouldn't be at my current level if it wasn't for grandpa Henry supplying me with as many Medstims I wanted. Those medstims have contributed greatly to facilitating my body's rapid recovery after each workout. I honestly couldn't ask for a better family. But moving past that, my strength attribute has increased to 7, putting me ever closer to obtaining another potentially good perk. So overall I'm plenty satisfied with my strength gains over this period.

Continuing onto agility and speed, my agility attribute sits at 4 currently and only lagged slightly behind my strength increase by a month. So I adjusted my training regime, increasing its difficulty further and allocated even more time to my agility training to try to make it keep up with my strength gains to some extent, even though it seems like a lost cause.

For speed, the fastest I've clocked myself at was 18 miles per hour, meaning I still have a lot of room for improvement. But all factors considered that's still some very good progress and at the rate I'm going, I wouldn't be surprised if I could achieve a speed of 25 to 27 miles per hour when I finally leave for the wasteland. Last thing for my agility, I have a 2 foot vertical which is more than decent for my weight and height, pretty proud of it actually.

Onto endurance now, it is the one attribute that has seen the most growth out of my attributes with it sitting at a tremendous 18. I'm not really surprised about it going up as much as it has over the years seeing how I've been grinding my balls off day in and day out. And as a reward for my efforts, my stamina as well as my body's toughness has increased by 50%.

On top of that, the pores across my body have shrunk down so much that they're nearly invisible to a normal person's vision. Adding on further, my skin no longer has any blemishes and appears increasingly pristine and beautiful, or at least that's what the older women around me tell me while they go on about how they wished they had skin as nice as mine.

I also tested out my body's durability with the combat knife my grandpa John gifted/passed down to me a couple of birthdays ago, just the other day, to see where I was at.

| Grandpa John's Combat Knife |

Damage: 16

DPS: Variable

Weight: 1.25

Value: 670

Item Description: A longer and slightly heavier than standard 10-inch long hardened steel combat knife.

And surprise, surprise, the result was I couldn't penetrate my skin with how durable it was until I put some real force behind the knife stab and even then as it penetrated my skin it lost most of its energy and momentum in the next layers and got stopped in its tracks.

So the only thing that ended up happening from that experiment was I bled a few drops before the wound began rapidly healing and closed up after several seconds, leaving only a faint trace of it ever occurring. All that said, unless I control my body's passive defense to let the knife penetrate through like I do when I'm injecting medstims, a normal man has no way of actually hurting me with a full powered stab from a combat knife.

The sole exception being if I willingly decided to turn off my body's defense in their entirety, as I just stated. Which never happens anymore simply because I've gotten to the level where I have such control over my body's defenses that I merely need to open up a miniscule spot, large enough for a needle to penetrate. And doing so only requires me to think of it.

Meaning the window of vulnerability for me to be taken out while injecting meds is gone for every one of my future enemies, at least when considering combat knives. And with how things are progressing, I wouldn't be surprised if my endurance reaches over 30 points by the time I step out of here. At that kind of damage threshold, I should be able to shrug off shots from standard barrel length 5.56 rifles, as long as my damage threshold is 31 and above.

Although if I'm being shot at with armor-piercing rounds, it's a whole nother story... Anyways, it's good to know that I don't have to worry about ever getting stabbed in my sleep, and if someone ever has the balls to try, they'll end up waking the bear and be in for a world of hurt.