Alex jerked his head back to look at the windshield and found that it now had a small opening where the creature had been attacking the glass. He blindly continued to fish around the back of the vehicle for something to defend himself with while watching the opening. Breathing was all but forgotten as Alex grabbed one random thing after another, hoping for something solid to fend off the nightmare happening in front of him.
Teeth!
The animals small muzzle with a mouthful of disturbingly sharp teeth latched onto the opening and started to rip glass away in chunks. The scream that was building in Alex’s throat cut off as two things happened at once; the creatures head appeared through the cracked opening it had made and Alex’s hand gripped around something sturdy. Time seemed to freeze as he made eye contact with what now appeared to be a rabid rodent of some sort.
“Holy shit!” Alex yelled as the rodent struggled to wriggle its way into the truck.
Alex pulled the object he had latched onto from behind the passengers seat and swung downward onto the little monsters head.
Clonk! Screech!
With all his might, the hit only seemed to slightly daze the animal as it let out a tiny scream of pain but continued to try and claw its way inside. Alex had entered a full blown panic now and continued to wail on the monsters head over and over again. Clonk! Screech! Clonk! Screech! Until finally, no more screeching screams. Alex kept hitting with what little strength he had left for a while longer before he finally gave out and sat in eerie silence.
“Oh my god… What the hell was that!” Alex panted and tried to wrap his mind around the situation.
No matter how many times Alex hit the rodent, it continued to try and enter the truck with absolutely no regard to its own well-being. It never retreated the entire time it was having its head smashed in and even with its final breath, tried to claw just a bit further inside. Alex looked down at his limp arm and the item he found that had saved him from razor sharp teeth.
“A soda can saved my life.. hahaha… hahahaha!” Alex devolved into uncontrolled laughter until he could barely breath anymore.
The can was dented in on the base of it where it had connected the most with the creatures head, but otherwise it was still intact. There was a bit of slightly dark goo on the can from what Alex could see and he could only imagine it must be blood. He slowly allowed his death grip to subside and the can slid from his tired hand. Alex let out a ragged breath, leaned back and closed his eyes.
DING! A loud ring sounded out and Alex’s eyes once again snapped open, expecting the worst.
System Alert.
Combat initiated with Mana Crazed Red Squirrel Level 2.
Combat finished. User defeated 1 Mana Crazed Red Squirrel Level 2.
System experience has been acquired.
System rewards are awaiting retrieval.
Alex sat in dumbfounded silence while the words hung in front of him. This system had to be broken or at the very least, messing with him. It was letting him know that he had entered combat with what he now knew was a freaking squirrel of all things after the fight was already over. Alex could not be bothered to try and access anything else for the time being and let his heavy eyes close again. If another demon squirrel came, it could go ahead and eat him for all he cared.
When Alex opened his eyes again, there was the slightest bit of light to his surroundings. The sun was coming up! The system prompt remained but that could wait as he started to try and look through his driver side door to check if there were any obvious threats waiting for him. As he scanned the surroundings, he could only make out a bit of the road and trees as the sun had not crested the trees enough to fully illuminate the area.
He peered out the window for longer than he needed to but he really didn’t want to look at what he knew would be laying halfway through his windshield at that moment. The previous events whirled around in his mind and finally he decided to get the worst of it over with. His eyes slid slowly towards where the dead animal had been only to find that there was no longer a dead squirrel there. Only the broken glass and dried bloodstains of his would be murderer remained.
“Something ate the squirrel that I killed or at least something came and took that little monster away without me even noticing. Well shit..” Alex contemplated aloud.
Something had happened to the first thing he had ever killed larger than a bug. The squirrel had vanished seemingly without making a sound, or at least quiet enough to not bother Alex from his deep and well deserved nap. He sat, staring at the vacant hole in the windshield and trying to let his mind catch up to the events that happened. He breathed in deeply and out slowly, over and over, letting the breathing exercise calm him as best as it possibly could. Finally, after several minutes of trying to keep his mind from overflowing with unhelpful thoughts, his attention returned to the system prompt.
“Status.” Alex said to the system.
User: Alexander Ingram
Race: Human (Other)
Age/Sex: 19 / Male
Class: None*
Profession: None
System Credits: 10,000
System Tokens*: 1 Y-Grade Token, 3 X-Grade Tokens, 5 A-Grade Tokens
Skills: Mana Tolerance (1), Mana Absorption (1)
(System rewards are awaiting retrieval)
Attributes:
Strength: 9
Constitution: 11
Vitality: 10
Resistance: 8
Endurance: 8
Dexterity: 9
Agility: 8
Perception: 11
Intelligence: 13
Wisdom: 9
Willpower: 11
Charisma: 8
Nothing seemed to have changed with the exception of the System letting him know he had rewards ready to be retrieved. He looked over his status but didn’t see the so-called experience that he had earned. He was about to ask the system to retrieve his rewards when he noticed the asterisk beside his lack of class. He stared at it for a moment and then sighed, how was he supposed to view whatever this was trying to show him. Where was the damn systems user manual.
“Oh not again.. Class?” Nothing. “Display Class Information?” VWOOP! An odd chiming noise happened after he asked the system to do something with his class a second time.
User: Alexander Ingram
Class: None
Exp: 42
Class options are not currently available. Combat Experience gained will be banked until a Class has been selected.
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“That’s it? Give me some damn details!” Alex fumed at the system but it remained diligently floating in front of him.
Once again, Alex felt that he was not getting even a fraction of a full picture. Even though he knew this was reality or at least some coma riddled approximation of reality, he felt the system was not fully thought out. It should be easier to navigate something that his mind made up so he was forced into a different line of thought.
“Maybe aliens made the System and don’t really have a great understanding of how to help us interact with it? That or I’m a complete moron.” He thought it over briefly and him being a moron was definitely not out of the running for possible explanations. Alex sighed and turned his attention to rewards.
“System Rewards.” Luckily this time, something happened on the first time he asked.
System Rewards.
System Reward: Title: First Among Many
System Reward: Title: The Sky Is My Kingdom
System Reward: Title: Lonely Warden
System Reward: 3 A-Grade Tokens
System Reward: 6 B-Grade Tokens
System Reward: 9 C-Grade Tokens
System Reward: 30,000 System Credits
Acquire all? Y/N
Alex’s mouth hung slightly open as he read over the rewards. Titles were something he was familiar with in certain types of games but never had he gotten so much for seemingly doing so little. Sure, it was a rabid squirrel of doom and death but had he been even slightly prepared, he didn’t think the ordeal would have been all that hard to handle.
“All this for killing a squirrel?” He asked softly to himself.
“Yes.” He said aloud but nothing happened. “Acquire all?” Nothing. “ Yes, acquire all.” FWOOMP! The display closed and his status opened once again. Alex felt that the system not understanding his intentions was going to get older to him than his whole world changing in every other conceivable way.
User: Alexander Ingram
Race: Human (Other)
Age/Sex: 19 / Male
Titles: First Among Many, The Sky Is My Kingdom, Lonely Warden
Class: None*
Profession: None
System Credits: 40,000
System Tokens*: 1 Y-Grade Token, 3 X-Grade Tokens, 8 A-Grade Tokens, 6 B-Grade Tokens, 9 C-Grade Tokens
Skills: Mana Tolerance (1), Mana Absorption (1)
Attributes:
Strength: 9 +271% = 24
Constitution: 11 +271% = 30
Vitality: 10 +271% = 27
Resistance: 8 +271% = 22
Endurance: 8 +271% = 22
Dexterity: 9 +271% = 24
Agility: 8 +271% = 22
Perception: 11 +271% = 30
Intelligence: 13 +271% = 35
Wisdom: 9 +271% = 24
Willpower: 11 +271% = 30
Charisma: 8 +271% = 22
Alex got a glimpse of his new status page before he doubled over, throwing up what little he had left inside his body and then promptly passing out, once again.
“Uuuugh, uuuh..” Alex came to, mumbling incoherent noises to nobody and everything all at once.
Sitting up from where he was slumped over, vomit now caked to his left leg and pooled around both feet. He had to be poisoned, was the first thought that came to him after his brain started to tick back up into action. Around that time was when the smell hit him; he slung the drivers door open and hobbled his way out of the truck as fast as he could. The smell was overwhelming him and he began to wretch up an empty stomach but only bile and spit made its way out.
Bent over, hands on his knees, Alex could not understand why these horrible things kept happening over and over again. Why had he thrown up and why had he passed out? He slowly stood to as full a height as he could manage and leaned back against his truck. Breathing as evenly as possible in order to keep the nausea from creeping back up, Alex turned his head to the sky and let out a steadying breath. The breath never made it fully out of him though as his eyes took in the impossible.
“Oh.. Fantastic.. So much for reality.” Alex muttered to himself as he once more felt light headed. He turned his head away, breathed and looked back to the heavens once more.
“There is a pl… nope.” He looked away, his mind simply could not take in or accept what he was seeing.
Deciding that the sky was off limits for the time being, Alex instead looked back towards where the explosion had happened just a few hours earlier. This direction did not fill Alex with much more comfort than looking at the sky had. For one thing, he was still looking at the sky even though his vision was essentially ground level. Just beyond where the explosion and dust cloud had been before, now hung nothing but open air and sky for as far as his eyes could see. He stared out into the expanse of open sky as if he were looking out a window from a commercial airplane but there was no window framing the view. The view was instead framed by trees to either side of the once flat interstate and now cliffside.
Alex reached out and slowly closed his trucks door and started to walk towards the open sky. Slowly at first but then with a bit more urgency, he made his way to the edge of the cliff. He’d managed to stop his truck only a few meters away from certain death. Alex creeped the last few feet to the edge of what had just earlier been a road and looked down.
“Oh boy..” Alex’s head swam as he looked down and down and down. There didn’t seem to be a bottom, all he could see were clouds and blue. He felt himself begin to sway and managed to pull himself away from the edge and plop down on the hard ground.
The earthquake had to have caused a massive upheaval and now Alex was sitting at the edge of a new mountain. This was the only possible explanation that Alex could come to in that moment. The air did seem thinner now that he focused on it but not as thin as he would have imagined a mountaintops air to be. He pulled his legs to his chest and rested his had against his knees for what seemed like the hundredth attempt to calm himself.
“This is pure insanity..” He said to himself.
SNAP!
Alex’s head shot up as what sounded like a large tree limb snapping caught all of his attention. He had somehow forgotten one of the most important things that had happened to him. Monsters! Alex was on his feet faster than he’d ever moved in his life and back to his truck in record time. Who gave a shit about vomit when there were monsters that wanted to eat you slinking about. He closed the drivers door, locked it and thinking better of sitting in his own filth, climbed over his center console and sat down in the passenger seat.
Listening and watching through the cracked windshield and the passenger window for the giant that had surely made the loud snapping noise, Alex waited. Watching and waiting for something to happen lasted longer and longer until finally Alex could not keep the adrenaline rush up any longer and he slumped down into his seat from the rigid posture he had taken on. He felt that he could not catch a break. It was one horrifying experience after another for Alex’s absolutely drained mind.
By this point the Sun had finally made a full appearance and the world around Alex was fully alight with the morning rays. Although the light would normally be comforting, Alex only thought about how much easier it would be to see the things that were eating him alive. He let a shudder run through his body and decided action was better than waiting around doing nothing.
“Display Titles!” Alex said much too loudly but getting the result he wanted made up for his dumb outburst.
System Titles
First Among Many: You are one of the first of your species to kill a Mana warped creature in your world. All stats gain +1%. For every additional Mana warped creature you kill of the same name as the first Mana warped creature you slaughtered, gain additional +1% total to all stats, up to a maximum total of +100%. User has 5000 minutes to complete the task. 4624/5000 minutes remain.
The Sky Is My Kingdom: User is the first of their kind to kill a Mana warped creature above 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, 25,000, 30,000, 35,000, 40,000 and 45,000 feet. All previous titles associated with the Sky Slaughterer title are merged into the Users current title. All stats +220%.
Lonely Warden: The User has killed a Mana warped creature without being within 1, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 and 500 miles of another of the Users species. All previous titles associated with the All That Wander title are merged into the Users current title. All stats +50%.
Several things rushed through Alex’s mind that were not strictly high priority information but they were the things that he latched onto. The most innocuous of them being that the System recognizes minutes and feet as measurements. That was all he could really focus on for if he started to think about the other bombshells that had just been dropped on him, he feared he’d lose what remained of his sanity. Alex recalled seeing something different about his stats as he blacked out in the early hours of the morning but with everything happening, stats were not at the top of his mind.
“Display Stats.” SHOOMP! Another odd System noise played and Alex now felt that the sound was coming from within his own head which was a whole new disturbing thought. And was it just him or was the System starting to respond just slightly better than it had been only hours earlier?
User Stats
Strength: 9 +271% = 24
Constitution: 11 +271% = 30
Vitality: 10 +271% = 27
Resistance: 8 +271% = 22
Endurance: 8 +271% = 22
Dexterity: 9 +271% = 24
Agility: 8 +271% = 22
Perception: 11 +271% = 30
Intelligence: 13 +271% = 35
Wisdom: 9 +271% = 24
Willpower: 11 +271% = 30
Charisma: 8 +271% = 22
His status had made a huge leap from what had been displayed earlier. Alex was starting to make some assumptions about his stats compared to games and books he had read before but he felt like he should try and confirm some things about the stats before rushing off to fight dragons and demons. Alex reached over to his steering wheel and attempted to bend it to the point of breaking. A normal human could not break a steering wheel normally, not even a strong one without using some kind of leverage.
Creek~
While he felt that he was putting a lot more force into twisting the wheel than he could have down previously, it wasn’t breaking as he suspected it would. Maybe it was a bad test of strength. He wasn’t much of a gym-goer before all the craziness happened so he wasn’t even sure how much weight he could lift in the before times. He smirked at himself for thinking of the world before and after the system in such cringy ways but you had to have some fun in the apocalypse, at least some of the time. He smiled again at the thought that for him, fun was making a bad joke about the end of days. Oh well.
“ZYXWYUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA. Oh wow! Definitely couldn’t do that before.” He raddled off a few more mind teasers and then decided it was finally time he see what this whole System Store was about. He had let that little monster put him off from checking it out for far too long and he really needed to see if the credits and tokens could give him an edge in this crazy new world.