Anton watched his Combat log as he respawned and died over and over. Three minutes and Thirty Seconds later he found out that the bonus did indeed improve when he received a new notification.

Congratulations! You have died 20 times, Title Rarity Upgraded to Uncommon for “I Ain’t Worried”. Attribute Efficiency for all Attributes increased to 20%.

Eight minutes after that another notification stated that he’d died 50 times and that the title had been upgraded to Unusual, then Advanced, and finally to Scarce. Attribute Efficiency increased to a total of +50%. While the Title was nice, and it was going up, he was growing concerned. The heat in the chamber with the Pillar didn’t seem to be lessening. Of course, it had only been about 11 minutes but still, it had to cool off at some point.

After 23 minutes something started to change. As his body reformed after his 101st death he didn’t die instantly, there was a moment of intense pain as he took the damage and then died again. Also, the blinding white light was interrupted as there seemed to be a grey mass for a moment which then disappeared. If he had to guess his body was lasting a little longer before it disintegrated which was what he had to be seeing. Also, his Title upgraded to Legendary and his bonus to Attribute Efficiency for all of his attributes increased to 100% which looked to be the maximum for that title.

Congratulations! The Title, I Ain’t Worried has increased in rarity to Legendary. Attribute Efficiency has increased by +100% for all attributes. 100% is the maximum attribute efficiency bonus any single Title may grant

For the next 23 minutes and 4 seconds, he died 99 more times. That brought his count during this continuous death count to 200 with a total death count of 201 times if he counted the Pillar killing him that first time. His Attribute Efficiency upgraded to 100% and he received a new title.

Congratulations! You have earned the Title, “I Can Take It!” You have endured excruciating pain continuously until 100% of your total hit points were removed 100 times in quick succession. Willpower and Endurance are increased by 10.

What about the first 100 times he died? Maybe the SYSTEM didn’t count those times because he died too quickly? He guessed that could be the case. After 70 minutes of dying every 14 seconds his life was getting tedious, painful, and boring. The good news was that he was feeling the pain for just a little bit longer and he could see his body falling to the ground as he died and his spirit remained standing where he’d respawn. Also, every time he died 100 times the bonus to Endurance and Willpower increased by 10 points.

Congratulations! The Title, “I Can Take It!” has increased in rarity to Uncommon. Willpower and Endurance now receive a +20 to their Base Value.

After two hours and twenty minutes, he’d died 600 times. The rarity of his Title I Can Take It had increased to Unusual, Advanced, Scarce, and then Master. His Attributes had effectively doubled and his endurance and willpower were continuing to increase as well. Unfortunately, that’s when it started taking two seconds to die. It took a long time for the amount of time it took him to die to increase by another second, 7 hours to be exact. At that time his Title I Can Take It increased in rarity from Master to Rare. After Rare was Epic, then Mythic, and finally Legendary. Where his Title I Ain’t Worried had jumped quickly to Legendary it had taken a little time for the Title I Can Take It to get to Legendary. He’d also received a message when the bonus for that title maxed out as well.

Congratulations! The Title, “I Can Take It” has increased in rarity to Legendary. Willpower and Endurance both receive a +100 point bonus. Legendary is the maximum rarity for Scaling Titles. This Bonus can no longer be increased.

From dying repeatedly all of his attributes had increased by double and willpower and endurance had increased by 100 points. Well, 200 actually since the efficiency bonus doubled the base value of his attributes.

The 2 seconds of agonizing pain increased the time between death and respawn to 16 seconds which reduced how many times he died per hour. For the next 6 hours and 13 seconds, he lived in excruciating pain for 3 seconds every 17 seconds until at exactly 13 hours and 13 seconds since this started he received a new notification right after he died.

As a new message popped into his vision Anton realized he was really beginning to hate the number 13. Then again, maybe he was looking at that wrong. In this case, being in this state of perpetual death and rebirth had helped him out quite a bit. Maybe the number 13 wasn’t a curse for him after all. He checked the message that had popped into his vision.

SYSTEM Message: Pillar 10 Control Room Flushed and Repaired

Anton respawned into the empty and pristine Pillar room. He looked around and couldn’t see a single thing wrong in the room. The Pillar came up through the transparent floor and into the ceiling. Anton checked over himself and noticed that the armor he had been wearing was gone and he was now wearing the clothes he’d designated as his default set of clothes, which he could swear were up on the Odyssey where he’d left them on his bunk. The eleven bodies of the military men that had been in the room were gone, as was the body of the female elf.

Anton looked over his attributes. While he didn’t know what the numbers meant double in all cases and +100 in two cases had to be good. He looked over his Personal Information and focused on his attributes.

Attributes

Strength 9, 100%, 18

Agility 10, 100%, 20

Dexterity 10, 100%, 20

Endurance 111, 100%, 222

Constitution 14, 100%, 28

Perception 10, 100%, 20

Intelligence 8, 100%, 16

Wisdom 8, 100%, 16

Willpower 108, 100%, 216

Charisma 8, 100%, 16

Luck 10, 100%, 20

??? 0, 100%, 0

He now had 15 Hit Points and if he didn’t heal all damage every 14 seconds his Health Regeneration said he could heal 7 Hit Points per hour. His Stamina was 2,220 thanks to his 222 in Endurance. His Stamina Regeneration was 411 per second. His Mana attribute was still sitting at a nice big “0”. With 216 in his Willpower Attribute, he’d thought he’d get some mana, but no, no mana for him. No mana meant no spells, which meant no magic. While the little female elf had been a psycho bitch from hell, the fact that she could cast spells had been pretty cool now that he’d had time to think about it.

Anton closed his Personal Information and decided he needed to look around, especially if this structure was now powered up, which it looked to be. The hallway Bethenny had gone down looked lit now. Before he went exploring he backtracked to the hallway he’d entered from and looked to where the remains of Alpha One had been and noted they were gone as well. He walked down the hallway to the steps that went down 20 feet and checked to make sure that the body hadn’t been blown down the stairs. There was nothing. Alpha One was gone. Anton walked back to the Pillar room where the console had been and looked around. The only thing in the Pillar room was the Pillar that extended down through the transparent floor. The holographic control console was gone.

With nothing else to do, Anton turned toward the Hallway Bethenny had explored earlier and began walking. Fifty feet down the passage it branched. The corridor to the right seemed to curve to the right and go down while the branch to the left stayed level and straight as it went on for another 50 feet to two doors. One door was on the right wall and the other was at the end of the corridor. Anton chose to stay on his current level and went down the left corridor. As he came to the end of the corridor he stopped at the door on the right first. Both doors looked like pressure doors that were made of metal that he couldn’t easily identify. They appeared to be made out of Iron but they could just as easily have been Aluminum. Also, neither door had a porthole so he couldn’t see what was on the other side.

Anton opened the door on his right which led into a small 30 x 30 foot room. It was lit dimly but otherwise, there was nothing in the room. On a hunch, Anton stepped into the room and looked at the door he’d just stepped through. As he’d suspected the number 10 was above the door. Anton exited the room and closed the door. If this was like a role-playing game he was betting that the room he’d just exited was an incoming room for travelers that were either teleporting or using wormholes to travel to this Pillar facility, at least that was what he was going to call it from now on. The Pillar 10 Facility.

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He opened the other door and would have patted himself on the back if he could. Directly in front of him was an Arch which was currently filled with darkness. This room was a little bit larger at 50 x 50 feet and about 20 feet high. So not much bigger than a nice-sided dining room. Off to the side of the arch was a pedestal with a grey orb on top of it.

Anton walked over to the orb and looked around it to see if there were any buttons or obvious controls but there was a hand-shaped impression on the top of the orb which he placed his hand on.

Welcome

You have established contact with the Pillar 10 Portal Node. Would you like to add this Node to your local Network, Yes or No?

Anton chose “Yes”

The Current Node is outside of the normal space-time configuration. Only local Nodes are accessible from this Node

You may use this Node to connect to any other Node within the local network or to travel to any point on the current planet.

Anton chose “Current Planet”

A three-dimensional holographic map of the current world appeared directly in front of Anton, though it looked a little off. Anton reached out with his hand and found that he could manipulate the map with hand gestures, not unlike what Tony Stark did in the movie Ironman. The continents seemed different than he was used to but he was able to find North America and from there he was able to zoom in on the location of North Dakota. After that, it was a simple matter to zoom down until he could see a town map except that the map of Minot was wrong. Anton knew that from Minot to Grand Forks was a 4-hour drive or about 199 miles, give or take. The distances looked okay, but…

Anton played with the image for a few seconds until he figured out how to activate a measurement function that looked to be in miles. He measured the distance between Minot and Grand Forks and was shocked to find that it was 1990 Miles.

I wonder what the diameter of the planet is, He thought. A console window opened and a message appeared.

79,176 Miles

That couldn’t be right the radius of the world was only about 4,000 miles which should make the diameter less than 8,000 not 80,000. Anton looked back to the holographic image and zoomed in on his mother and father's house, except that there wasn’t just one house that matched that description, there were 10 different copies of Minot in the area Miont should be on this map that had streets and houses that looked identical to each other. It looked like someone had put a second Minot beside the first one then put eight more cities of Minot around those two for a total of 10 different Cities of Minot together.

Minot had been a small town, approximately 8 miles wide from east to west and 7.4 miles wide from North to South. What Anton was looking at right now was about 35 wide from east to west and at least 33 miles. The rivers that went through the town, towns, were all wrong as well. How the hell was he supposed to be able to tell which town was his foster mom and dad’s?

As he zoomed in he realized that the map was a real-time interactive map that could show him what was going around the world he started looking around. He’d lost track of time but it should be around 8 p.m. in Minot which meant it should be dark. Even so, the map he was looking at showed him what was going on as if it was the middle of the day. Minot seemed to be stable though there were people in the streets looking around at the edges of each Minot zone.

Anton scrolled the map over to Fargo and noted that the same thing had been done there though riots had seemed to break out and people were ransacking various stores for supplies as he watched.

For the next 12 hours reviewed various locations around the world. What he was able to figure out was as scary as it was surprising. First, it looked like most big cities had no power. Everything on the planet had been duplicated 10 times and it looked like that included damns and infrastructure but the way it had been put together wasn’t efficient. It also looked like every single satellite in orbit was missing. He’d figured that out when he’d zoomed into a house and found a family cooking over a wood stove with no electricity or television. Then he’d zoomed out away from the planet so he could see if any satellites still existed. None had. The only things in orbit were 10 copies of the International Space Station (ISS) which all seemed to be in a very close similar orbit.

Some places had electricity but most of them were places near reactors, damns, or solar farms or running on diesel generators. Places that relied on the power grid, especially outside of North America seemed to be suffering tremendously though vehicles still worked. After looking over everything for 12 hours Anton knew that things were going to get bad before they got better. The question was what could he do to help? He had no way to get what he’d discovered to anyone else, or did he?

Anton moved the image of what he was looking at to Washington DC and looked through each White House until he found the President he was looking for. After the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections, the American people decided that they were fed up with Washington DC, lobbyists, and anyone who was bought out by big tech. Every single Senator and House Representative who held their position for more than two terms was replaced between 2024 and 2030. In 2031 the 31st Amendment had been passed and signed into law.

The 31st Amendment had been a relatively simple Amendment to the Constitution. Senators could never hold more than 2 terms, and Representatives could never hold their office for more than 6 terms, which limited each to 12 years. Additionally, From that point on the pension of any Senator, House Representative, Supreme Court Justice, or President of the United States could not be more than that of a four-star General with 30 years’ service. The Amendment had also rescinded all other Amendments that guaranteed pay, even if the Government shut down. If federal employees weren’t getting paid, neither were the politicians. The Amendment had been simple and it had worked. There hadn’t been a government shutdown since 2032.

Of course, thinking about all the good changes that had happened while he was graduating from high school didn’t matter now. The world was almost 10 times the size it had been. Speaking of which, He’d sucked at science but shouldn’t a bigger world have higher gravity? He didn’t feel any different. Again not something he needed to worry about, that whole “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!” mentality his foster dad tried to teach him. What was he thinking about again, oh yeah, finding his President?

All the changes that had come about had ensured that votes actually mattered and were handled fairly because a neat bit of technology had been invented that made it incredibly hard to hack someone’s identity and everyone voted. Also, there was a very powerful A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) running things which was double-checked by two other A.I.s. They watched and verified all voting machines and kept track of who voted.

If someone was found to be cheating. It was a felony to tamper with the votes. Once those in charge started using common sense again, those who tried to cheat found themselves either going to jail or paying a fine dependent on how large a scheme they’d implemented to cheat. In some cases, the fine had been so large that they had nothing left after. The Government needed money to pay down the deficit after all. While voter fraud wasn’t proved during the 2016,2020, or 2024 elections it was obvious that some cheating had gone on. Since 2031, that habit has been curbed dramatically.

The government had made real headway in the last 10 years. The budget was down to 20 trillion dollars and balanced for the third year in a row. A lot of programs had been cut but then again they needed to be. He hadn’t paid attention all that much except to know that unless he was truly disabled he needed to work or he would be forced to work. It wasn’t the government’s job to spoon-feed its citizens and there was plenty of infrastructure to fix around the country.

As Anton moved the map around he was looking for the last duly elected President, a former Air Force General, Ezekial Louis Ainsworth. President Ainsworth had been elected in 2036 and if he won the next election in November he would remain the President next year. Anton played with the Map a little bit in areas that didn’t have anyone in them and figured out that he could have the Arch create a portal to any location he was viewing with a push of his will. He zoomed in and viewed each of the ten Oval Offices.

Only three of the offices had President Ainsworth. Two had a female who was being addressed as President, though he didn’t recognize her. Four more had the individual that had run against President Ainsworth, though he couldn’t think of the guy's name, it had been so forgettable. The 10th Oval Office was in ruins. Not something that had happened recently. It looked like it hadn’t been rebuilt from whenever it had been damaged. Anton looked closer and noted that there were huge blood stains all over the carpeted floor.

Anton went back to the three Oval Offices that contained President Ainsworth and looked over each. It took a little while but finally, he was able to pick out the Oval Office that had news he remembered seeing that didn’t feel off from what he knew. Like Minot Washington DC was laid out with two copies in the center of eight, one on each directional spoke. The Oval Office he was looking into was the one that was on the North West side of combined cities. Anton shifted the map back to Minot, went to the North West version of Minot, and found his Foster parent's house. He looked into the house and found his foster dad and mom barricaded in the basement with a gas lantern for heat and a couple of sleeping bags to sleep on. He quickly checked the other two versions of Minot that matched locations for the alternate versions where President Ainsworth was President. There was one on the west spoke and the other was on the south spoke. Neither house had anything that looked like it belonged to him.

That gave him the idea to shift his view to the Antarctic, which was weird. He was able to zoom through the rock until he found himself, standing in this room, fiddling with the map floating in the air before him. Unlike the cities, there was only one facility. There was no other facility near him. He wondered what that meant but honestly, he needed to get this information out so he stopped messing around and brought up the image of the North West Oval Office with “his” President Ainsworth in it. It was a simple thing for him to direct the portal to shift to where he wanted it to open and then initiate the Arch. As the Arch solidified into a view of the Oval Office a portal opened and 13 people looked directly at Anton.

Thirteen! Thirteen? There had been twelve people a second ago… Before he could move or utter a word two Secret Service Personnel had pulled their weapons and fired. Anton was flung back and away from the Portal Node, which deactivated the Arch and the portal in the Arch to the Oval Office disappeared as Anton was flung back and away from the node.

This time it was a weird sensation as he lay there looking up through his open dead eyes not moving or breathing. A message Notification entered his vision. Since he wasn’t doing anything else he opened them.

WARNING! You have been shot through the heart

Critical Hit, Damage is multiplied by 2

Damage Taken 12 (6 x 2)

WARNING! You have been shot through the heart

Critical Hit, Damage is multiplied by 2

Damage Taken 12 (6 x 2)

Total Damage 24

You Have Died

1% Damage healed

3% Damage healed

6% Damage Healed

10% Damage Healed

15% Damage Healed

21% Damage Healed

28% Damage Healed

36% Damage Healed

45% Damage Healed

55% Damage Healed

66% Damage Healed

78% Damage Healed

91% Damage Healed

100% Damage Healed

Respawning

As Anton reached up and felt his chest he said, “That Sucked!” Seriously, if he had to die, he wanted to be vaporized, it was much easier to come back when he could move his point of view. As he checked his shirt he realized there were no holes in it. Just to make sure he pulled the shirt and the hoodie off quickly and looked them over. Nope, his clothes were also repaired. Nice, it looked like he wouldn’t be respawning naked again.

As he put his shirt and Hoodie back on he realized that was the third way he’d died. The first had been the Beam. The 2nd had been the detonation of a nuke and the subsequent respawns into the radioactive center of that nuke and now he’d been shot. Among the many questions that he now had the most important question right now was how was he going to let the President know about what he’d found down here without getting shot?

Just then a couple of new messages popped into his vision.

SYSTEM AMALGAMATION COMPLETE

NEW SYSTEM ENVIRONMENT ANALYZED

To all beings reading this Announcement, please make your way to a safe location. SYSTEM Announcement will commence in 60 seconds.