That night, Lucas was a zombie. While he did manage to join Heisenburgle, he didn't manage to contribute much, which was fine because they didn't do much. The gnome worked on his mirrors for a bit and asked him about the reagents he'd used from the low lab, but he lost all interest when Lucas explained that he was trying different kinds of strength potions.

"For yourself?" the gnome scowled. "Bah, what a waste! Strength of mind will ever beat out strength of body!"

Lucas didn't necessarily disagree with that, but there was no point in trying to explain that outsmarting the dragoness wasn't exactly going to work. Oh, he'd try to poison her first. He had a few compounds in mind for that, but if that didn't work, he wasn't exactly going to stand there with his dick in his hand; he'd draw his sword and take care of her the old-fashioned way, and that would take strength, not wit.

He did try to explain to Heisenburgle that he wanted to test what different strength potions did in a logical, iterative way, but the gnome scoffed at that as well. "While I can understand trying to match the proper potion to the correct task, there's no need to test all of them to find it. Whole books have been written on the subject!" he declared. "Earth-aligned strength potions are best for the common laborer and men who were born in the fall, while fire-aligned potions are more suitable for martial tasks and men with darker complexions. Besides, taking so many potions in one day will make you sick!"

The conversation continued on like that for some time, interspersed with occasional questions that tried to probe the limits of Lucas's system, which were always couched in terms and contexts that were so obscure that it would have been hard for any observer to tease out the meaning behind those feints.

What do you make of the properties of these powdered naga scales? How would you isolate the toxicity for a potion that would be useable? Which water-aligned reagents do you find to be most compatible with them, in your unconventional opinion? Each of these questions would sound like business as usual if there were any actual spies out there listening, but really, what it was was the sound of the door being left open.

As badly as Heisenburgle wanted to slam it shut, some small part of the small man couldn't get Lucas' offer out of his head. Lucas knew that feeling, of course. He'd been a junkie for a long time; now, the only thing he was fiending for was revenge, so he nursed Heisenburgle along, doing his best to pique his interest without ever saying too much.

While that yielded no direct results, it did pass the time, and while Lucas was tempted to use empowered alchemy to improve the Potion of Sinuous Swimming they created from their improvised workshop session, he decided against it. The time was not yet right to tip his hand.

Heiselburgle said a lot of things that night, but as Lucas experimented, he found out that only one of the gnome's pronouncements turned out to be correct. Lucas found that out in the morning after a light breakfast when he started his strength experiment.

At first, everything went fine. The tea woke him up a bit, and the cold air, combined with some stretching and practicing his sword forms, did the rest. After that, he went to the smithy to borrow a few heavy things. The soot-streaked men asked what he wanted them for as he borrowed a few objects, but when he said he just wanted to work out, they offered him nothing but a few mocking glances.

Lucas took a couple of the heavier hammers he could find, a few ingots of pig iron that he could barely lift, and one anvil on a small cart that was well beyond his ability to pick up as things currently stood. Then he got to work. First, he tried to lift everything up without a single potion, noting how it felt and what the strain on his muscles was like. Then, he lifted and downed his first Tincture of Least Strength, and he lifted the things all over again.

Lucas noticed almost no difference with the addition of a single point of strength, but it was that almost that interested him because he could feel it. He made a note, then practiced with his sword for a few minutes while he waited for the thing to wear off. Then he repeated it with the +3 Potion of Lesser Strength and the +5 Potion of Minor Strength. He'd made a +2 and a +4 version, but the gradations seemed too small to notice, so he skipped them.

Both versions were a noticeable increase in performance compared to the first one he'd drunk. The +2 version made the hammers light enough that he could wield them about as easily as his wooden long sword, though their weight made the momentum of certain strikes somewhat unwieldy, and with the +4 version, he was able to pick up the anvil for the first time, which was cool.

So a small boost feels like I'm just in better shape, and +5 or so is where it starts to feel more like steroids, he thought approvingly. I wonder what +8, or even more, would feel like?

Lucas didn't have to wonder for long. As soon as the feeling of strength from his third potion wore off, he tried the fourth, which was +8. It was literally twice as strong as the previous one, so he wasn't surprised when it made him feel a bit queasy, but he ignored that and the way it made his heart beat faster as he continued his very unconventional workout.

This time, he could lift up the anvil with ease. In fact, it was so easy that he had to go find something larger to see if he could lift it. For lack of anything better, he found a cart that was halfway full of firewood. While he couldn't quite lift it up off the ground, he could curl the back end of it like a pair of barbells. "It feels like I have someone else's muscles strapped on to my muscles," he said to himself as he continued to enjoy the whole thing with a stupid smile on his face.

Stolen story; please report.

There were some warning signs that maybe he should slow down, but he ignored them. Even if he could see the distended veins in his arms, he still felt fine, and he was having too much fun to stop.

Lucas was getting some weird looks by now from some of the guards and a couple of the smiths, but he didn't care. Instead of worrying about what they thought of his eccentricity, he thought about what the ratio of strength number to the amount he could lift really was. The stronger he got, the less everything weighed subjectively, and he didn't exactly have an industrial scale to back him up. Still, he was able to make some assumptions.

He was pretty sure the hammers weighed like twenty or thirty pounds a piece. The ingots were more than fifty but less than a hundred, and the anvil was at least two hundred. It might even be three hundred; he wasn't sure.

So, with a strength of 11, I could lift fifty or sixty pounds, but not two hundred. I probably could have lifted up an ingot in each hand if they weren't so bulky, so let's call 11 equal to a hundred pounds, he decided. With a 15, I could barely lift the two-hundred-pound anvil, and with a 19, It's pretty easy. So, the question is, what's hard with 19? Because I have no idea what a wagon weighs.

With the minutes he retained, his super strength slowly ticking down, Lucas stacked up both of the ingots on the anvil and then tried again. This time, it wasn't easy, but it was doable. He was able to lift what had to be 300 or 350 pounds off the ground in a particularly awkward, heavy squat, which was impressive as hell in his mind. He hadn't even been able to bench press his own weight in gym class before he'd dropped out, and he was doing close to double that now.

If a nineteen strength could do all of that, Lucas had no idea what a 31 could do, or even a 40. Though he hadn't made it before, he could. He was almost tempted to stop what he was doing right now, but he resisted. He also resisted the urge to go straight for the strongest one he had next. Instead, he stopped what he was doing and took a few minutes to gather more heavy things.

This time, the smiths were eager to help him. He'd become quite a spectacle, and they'd mostly stopped what they were doing to watch the bizarre show he was putting on. Lucas had seen a few well-muscled men in Lordanin, particularly in the small courtyard. Even though he didn't look especially strong right now, Lucas was pretty sure he was stronger than Hura'gh. If the half-orc was here, Lucas would have arm-wrestled him to confirm that. He didn't have that option, though.

Instead of arm wrestling anyone, he gathered a couple of large cauldrons and then filled them up with as much junk as he could until he had a weight that was nearly five hundred pounds and another that was closer to seven or eight hundred pounds. Then, he popped his fifth potion, which was a +11 Potion of Greater Strength, bringing his attribute to 22, which was a nice round number.

This time, his stomach churned violently and even cramped a little. He felt nauseous as the effects began to burn through his body, but it was easier to ignore that when that burn became a fire. If Lucas had felt powerful with the +8 potion, then he felt unstoppable with the +11 potion he'd just imbibed. Almost instantly, the fire spread through his arms and legs. At first, he worried that something terrible was going to happen, but it quickly dissipated until something more bearable.

The only experience he could really compare it to was doing uppers back on Earth, so worried he was about to give himself a new addiction, Lucas checked his status screen to make sure. While he didn't see anything that looked like an addiction, he did note that he had an unexpected status effect.

Potion Overuse (5) - Nausea, +2 poison. -30% duration. Continued Potion use will worsen the symptoms.

That surprised him, though he supposed that it shouldn't really. He couldn't remember ever using so many potions so quickly, but the Potion of Wakefulness that Heisenburgle had given him had a similarly negative short-term effect, so he shrugged it off. Note to self: Only drink a couple of potions before your fight with Skylara so you don't ruin the moment by puking.

When he gave it another shot, Lucas needed two hands to pick up the anvil, but he was able to hold onto it with one arm, which was nothing less than Herculean in his mind. That wasn't even the crazy part. The crazy part was when he tried to lift the lighter of the two kettles. He couldn't do it the first time, but when he took a few pieces of junk out of it and tried again, he was actually able to lift the damn thing as his whole body strained with the effort. That caused a few audible gasps.

He was as strong as an Olympian who'd trained their whole life thanks to a potion, which was nuts. His mind raced in that moment as he tried to do the calculations.

"Fuckin' crazy, man," he whispered to himself as he considered the implications.

If eleven lets me lift a hundred pounds, nineteen lets me lift like three hundred, and a twenty-two is closer to five hundred… He imaged those three points on a curve as he graphed it in his mind and realized very quickly that the higher the attribute was, the more that it did.

The difference between eleven and twelve was a lot less than the difference between twenty-one and twenty-two, and he imagined that the gap would only grow larger as he approached the thirties and forties. I could be Superman, he told himself. It might only be for five or ten minutes, but still…

On whim he reached into the cauldron and picked up a horseshoe that was in there for weight. Then taking one end in both hands he tried to bend it. For a moment, he strained, as his muscles bulged and his veins throbbed. That moment lingered to two, then three, and still nothing happened. Eventually he released it, but he wasn't even that disappointed.

Truthfully he felt like he was right there. He was right on the cusp of being able to bend iron with his bare hands, and if he took a stronger potion, he really might be able to do just that. Lucas' mind boggled at that, and suddenly, he desperately wished he'd made the strongest potion he could the day before.

However, however much he wished he'd made it, though he hadn't. He did, however, still have one Potion of Monstrous strength left. Lucas' tried to stay calm after those revelations, but it was hard. He took the few minutes it took for his current potion to wear off to think about it. Then, he decided to try the last one, just to see if he could lift up the heaviest weight he tried.

Unfortunately, that was impossible. The second he drank the bitter brew, he immediately started puking his guts out.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.