Chapter 3: Making Gains

Nine years later.

Whilst I was relaxing on my comfy bed with my hands resting behind my head, I started to think of the last nine years.

Hmm, it's been a minute since I've gone over what I've accomplished and man, have I made a ton of progress these last nine years. Let me start off by checking my S.P.E.C.I.A.L. book to see how I've been doing as of late.

Reaching under my pillow, I pulled out my precious S.P.E.C.I.A.L. book that I've held onto for all these years and proceeded to open it. A split second later, a holographic screen appeared within my vision, displaying my S.P.E.C.I.A.L.s that have progressed a decent bit in the last few years.

| S.P.E.C.I.A.L. |

Strength: 5

Perception: 10

Endurance: 11

Charisma: 5

Intelligence: 13

Agility: 4

Luck: 7

0 Points Left

Yeah, not bad, I've made a pretty decent gain of 9 S.P.E.C.I.A.L. points over a period of 9 years. Although, most of the gains came from the last few years, but still not too bad overall for not being able to get any real training in for a good portion of those years. 

Now that I've had a look at my increased S.P.E.C.I.A.L.s let me go over what I've accomplished and what I'm capable of as well as some of my body's measurements.

Beginning with my measurements, I now stand at 5 foot 5 inches or 1.65 meters currently and weigh about 150 pounds or around 68 kilograms, give or take. As for my strength, I'm now able to curl 132 pounds and can easily dip my own body weight for reps. My bench press is sitting at 224 and I'm back up to doing 50-pound dumbbell shrugs like I was in my previous life.

I remember before I started going to the gym I had to get permission from dad and oh god did that take forever. But my old man could only withstand my teary-eyed look for so long before he caved eventually and the day that he did, I started going to the vault gym the very next day and haven't stopped since.

Though when I first started hitting the gym, the other vault residents thought I was lost or were asking each other why such a young kid was there. However, they quickly got used to me once I explained to a few of them that I just enjoyed exercising and weightlifting on top of seeing me there all the time.

As time went on and I started putting on a decent amount of muscle as well as leaning out I became quite the spectacle in the vault dweller gym that I started to draw a few eyes every time I went, especially from some of the younger female residents. There were also a couple of younger guys eyeing me up as well, which reminded me of my previous life when I used to go out to clubs with my buddies and I would get hit on/felt up by the occasional dude.

I even had an incident where a weird 20-something female vault resident tried to grab me inappropriately while I was at the gym later on in the evening. Where not many people were watching nor paying attention unfortunately for her, I quickly intercepted her hands and shut her down by going off on her and threatening to sick my uncle officer Gomez on her, who has basically become my uncle over these last few years.

The instant she heard me mention my uncle Gomez, her face turned a bit pale and once I was done telling her off, I let go of her hands before she scurried away quickly, almost fleeing, which I found to be a bit odd. I guess uncle Gomez has a bit of a reputation.

Returning to my measurements before I got sidetracked, I've made other strength gains besides those across a multitude of other weighted exercises. But I think I've listed enough for now otherwise I'll be covering every little thing which isn't really necessary, so continuing on.

I wanted to start hormones or peds to boost my progress but I haven't yet because it could be very problematic for many different reasons, though the main one is my body has yet to fully mature. That aside, I have had access to stimpaks thanks to my dad being both a doctor and a researcher and a pretty high up one at that.

So that has been a significant contributing factor to my gains, along with my larger intake of food to fuel my training and my increased endurance that has accelerated my body's recovery speed massively compared to a normal individual. With my strength pretty much covered at this point, I'll move on to my perception next. 

Where to begin... I suppose I can start there. I feel like the range I can detect others has increased a bit, but not too much because I find it to be extremely tedious to train with my current methods. Which is basically me just sitting with my eyes closed while I focus on detecting the presence of passing vault dwellers going by my home in the hallways right outside of my room.

Sitting there with my eyes closed for extended periods of time requires a shit load of patience on my part that I don't necessarily have for that specific activity most days, hence why I haven't made any substantial progress in it. It's also one of those S.P.E.C.I.A.L.s that progresses at a slower rate, so it has that working against it too.

Because of those problems, I only ever really find myself training it when I'm relaxing at home or before I fall asleep in my bed at night, which in reality isn't really all that much time. I will definitely have to find a better way to train it in the future because the way I'm training it right now just isn't all that effective.

And if I could start increasing my perception stat, it should increase the range I can detect different things by a decent amount. So if I improve the range on my pseudo perception field enough, it should prevent me from walking into any dangerous situations out in the wasteland where there are plenty of dangers located around every corner. That sort of ability would be incredibly useful.

Okay, that's enough about perception onto endurance now.

This one I'm not really all that surprised about going up because I've been grinding my balls off. As a result of it increasing, I noticed my body has undergone a few changes since my endurance had gone up to 11. Changes like my body becoming tougher, my overall stamina basically doubling, and my sleep being halved.

I've also noticed my pores have basically become so small that a normal person can't really see them, and my skin seems to be more durable as well as more beautiful. Or at least that's what the older women around me tell me while going on about how they wished they had skin as nice as mine.

When this increase happened and I eventually noticed these changes, I decided to perform a few tests on my body to test out its new durability. What I discovered from these tests was that my skin's durability had increased so much that a knife can barely cause any real damage to it. 

Nevertheless, that was only to a point and the second I surpassed that point and applied enough pressure, the knife still pierced my skin. However, unlike before, it met a ton of resistance from the layers underneath. Upon discovering that, I applied more pressure to the knife, causing it to slice in deeper but only a slight bit more. After that, it just stopped cutting any further no matter how much strength I exerted, which was nice since that was the point where I started to bleed. 

That new durability of mine will certainly be very useful in the days to come. Being able to shrug off knife attacks certainly does sound nice. And since my body's ability to stop damage is already this strong, I can only imagine how much stronger it will be once my endurance starts increasing rapidly when I begin using hormones, peds, etc.

Continuing on down the list. Well, there's not really anything to say regarding charisma. Maybe it'll go up 1 by the time I leave the vault, or maybe not.

So I'll just continue onto Intelligence, which has improved somewhat since I've been sucking up as much knowledge as possible by helping dad with his research, providing medical treatment to our fellow vault dwellers, and making visits to the vault library nearly every day of the week.

The library they have down here in vault 101 is something else. That place is absolutely gargantuan and has the largest assortment of books I've seen that cover innumerable topics. Ranging from general robotics to how to run and build nuclear power plants to stuff as basic as cleaning radioactive water and turning it into purified drinking water. But those are only a few of the topics I've read about and explored so far.

And seeing how I've only managed to go through a third of the library at this time, I still got plenty left to learn and absorb.

Due to that all-encompassing selection, I've been able to learn a ton from my daily trips back and forth.

Because of all that time I spent in the library, it has given me some new ideas and influenced my plans. Such as changing my initial plans to leave the vault early to take control of the RobCo facility to the east so I can build up a robot army. And once I think I have a decent amount of robots, I'm going to make a move on the VSS Facility that houses a large untouched armory with a set of T-51 Power Armor and a suit of Chinese Stealth Armor.

Both of which would do wonders for upgrading my combat capabilities, and if I leave the vault early enough, I could get to and loot the VSS Facility way before the outcasts leave the brotherhood of steel to form their own faction and take over the facility. Which would be one less problem for me to have to deal with in the future.

I could also try reverse engineering the Chinese Stealth Armor technology to be used on power armor in conjunction with stealth boy technology. Having access to that sort of tech should allow me to take over Raven Rock, the military installation I very much desire because it possesses a majority of the manufacturing facilities I want. Those being its robot, vertibird, weapon, and lastly its power armor manufacturing facilities that created the notorious black devil power armor. 

So if I want to make sure everything goes right, having stealth power armor will probably be a necessary requirement if I want to gain control of Raven Rock safely, especially if it's occupied when I depart from the vault. And if I had to guess if it is or isn't, I would put my money on that it is occupied. Therefore, I'll have to make just about every preparation I can to ensure the facility ends up in my control without going boom, thanks to eden.

Once I make Raven Rock mine in the future, it's basically gg, I'll basically have the ability to make myself a nearly unstoppable force in the wasteland, or at least against the factions I know of here on earth. As for the Zetans, that's a whole nother story. They could easily wipe me off the map with any one of the death rays mounted underneath their spaceships. Therefore, I'll definitely have to figure out how I'm going to deal with them in the future.

I think that's enough about all that for now since it's a bit too far out into the future at this time to make any plans with any actual substance. But as I'm getting closer to being capable of taking over and making Raven Rock my own, I can revisit and modify my plans as needed to make it a reality.

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It should be clean, but if you guys find any issues, let me know so I can fix them. Thanks.

If you want something else to read, that's similar to this, check out my other webnovel Wasteland Conqueror. It has a lot more chapters released.