"Whuuuh... ooh man...18 at last, huh...” the young man thought to himself out loud as he closed the door to his room.
(Or so I thought, been a week already and nothing’s changed, isn’t this supposed to be the time for big changes being a legal adult and all that.)His tired eyes stared at the digital alarm clock which stood on an old nightstand next to his bed. The numbers 22:14 shone red, their shine further supported by the dimness of the room.
"For once I'd like to actually have my full eight hours." He mumbled to himself as he struggled his way toward his bed, midway there his stare redirected from the clock numbers onto the TV screen on the opposite side of the room, its screen facing his bed with brightness settings on the lower end.
With an audible thud, he collapsed onto his rather uncomfortably hard bed and began reaching for something under it, his face simultaneously digging into his pillow which muffled his voice a bit. "Where'd I leave that damn remote!"
The TV, being the only source of sleep obstructing light and sound, forced his ears to focus on the ongoing news while he was looking for the remote. "...n other news, the mysterious human disappearances still plaque the globe, With civil unrest and disappearance incident frequency on the rise, as well as the recent new incidents with entire classrooms of people vanishing into thin air, experts of various fields are starting to really take notice. With all the speculation being replaced by actual theories from reliable sources, most of which are fueled by the more and more varying yet consistent witness accounts, governments worldwide are taking action to solving this mystery. Some of the aforementioned experts theorize this to be something extraterrestrial based on the bright flashes of light, inexplicable areal and spatial phenomenon and onsite mass machine malfunctions while others claim it to be the work of some secret organization based on the commonly witnessed onsite, impossibly fast & unidentified large white truck w-"
The news lady was finally interrupted when the man got his hands on the remote. Now with the TV turned off & the room turned pitch black, the man settled onto his back ready for some Z's "Oh right, damn it, the homework that’s due tomorrow...god I hate Mondays...oh well, I’m too brain-dead now anyways so fuck it, not gonna ruin my day by cutting even more sleep time on useless schoolwork...and now, with that said, time to pass out."
Minutes later as calm began settling into the exhausted body and mind of the man, his thoughts wander on to what he’d just then heard on the news.
(Haaah, man how I wish for this never-ending bullshit to just end already. I’d honestly spend every drop of karma or luck or whatever I have just to disappear like those people...pfft, as if that would ever happen to me now considering my shit luck since I just had to go and think of that as something even remotely positive...Though...one does wonder where the hell every one of those people disappeared to...) at that, the man turned to the picture frame next to the alarm clock on his nightstand, his eyes watering even though the room was too dark to see anything of the picture other than a few hazy features revealed by the red LED light of the alarm clock. (…where you disappeared to.) with these thoughts, a single tear flowed out and behind the man’s ear as he quickly fell asleep.
...
As morning came around, loud snores could be heard echoing around a strange forest as it gradually came alive again with the rising sun. The source of the snoring, a naked weirdo, was also on the verge of waking up.
"Zzz!" "Pipi pipi pipi!" "ZzzZ mmrgghhmm" the naked weirdo turned his head up slightly, annoyed and mumbling at the sudden bird singing, then slowly he rolls around onto his side, back facing the singing bird with unexplored parts of the blanket of grass folding as he rolled.
In drowsy annoyance, The weirdo began scratching the sideways twig mark left on his butt-cheek, clearly matching the twig which he revealed during his roll and evidently slept on for several hours.
"Hmmmrgh? Fuhkn Bhörd shuts your trap, the alarm snt rungg..."
"Pipi pipi pipi pi"
(...Hmmm? How the fuck are you so loud, did I leave the window open? ...why's the mattress always so damn hard & itchy, didn't I also just wash it recently, how does it already smell like muddy dirt. I swear I'll buy a better one soon and when I do I swear I'll...) the man reaches his hand up trying to find an open window to close but instead swings at empty air.
After a few more futile swings at emptiness, he opens his eyes a little in an attempt to see the non-existent open window better, but instead of his room, the man is greeted by a forest of thick trees & tall dark green grass. The man quickly swung his head up off the ground slack-jawed and eyebrows furrowed. ”...Wh-What The Hell!?...a-a tree...trees?! Was I kidnapped???" He immediately jumps to his feet and looks down after feeling a light breeze. "Did you really have to take my fucking boxers too!!!".
Slightly panicked he looks around for the perpetrators only to be met with more and more forest and a really weird lizard slowly creeping around on one of the sturdy branches of a nearby tree. Totally uninterested in the weird suicidal monkey in the middle of an obvious clearing, Instead stalking a threateningly colored small snake in the opposite direction of the man, so that the red spots acting as fake eyes on the back of Its head stare into the weirdo's soul.
"WHOA HO! Wha-th, WHAT The fuck are you?!!" The Weirdo Screams at the lizard in full-blown confusion.
The ~1,5meter tree lizard covered with rough, obsidian colored scales, turns Its head to stare back at the man with Its slit, red, unsettling, real eyes for a few seconds only to continue minding Its own business, having lost interest in the snake.
Mesmerized by the black scales & red eyes combination, the man walks closer to it like an idiot, ignoring the small pinches his feet are getting from the gravel patch under them, the weirdo once more speaks to himself. "h-huh, never seen one like that before," He looks around a bit more only to get the absolute shit scared out of him by an ~60cm tall green humanoid equipped with a loincloth & an ugly mug some 4 meters away from him, readying to throw Its spear at him with hints of blood-lust in Its eyes.
"Whaath the fhuuuuuuuh-," He barely dodges the sharp rock-headed spear by dropping to the side right onto nice & sharp gravel. The spear, though thrown quite weakly, digs itself a few millimeters deep to a tree behind the spot where the man had just been standing and bounces back off Its tough bark.
The now even more confused man, who is also trying to recover from the face-dive to the sharp rocks that he just masterfully performed which also ripped small painful skin cuts & tears on his hands and knees, is profusely swearing as the pain burns throughout his fresh injuries.
The martian angrily shouts some unintelligible nonsense at the man and charges at him at Its full speed, which isn't all that fast. "Oh, you motherfucker that could have- Ohohoo no you don't!"
Confusion turned to anger then fury, the naked man tries to kick the little fucker with all he has as if It was a football that he needed to get across the entire field. He only managed to hit Its right ankle though, as It tried to jump over the kick. The hard impact dislocates the small green ankle and flips the martian in midair, making the poor thing slam Its head against some small rocks on the ground.
The green thing disoriented and with tears of pain forming in Its eyes shouts more nonsense at the man and tries to scratch at the man’s feet with Its filthy nails without doing much other than drawing only a little blood slightly above the right ankle. "Ach, you bitch!" Says the once more angered man and winds up the hardest kick he could muster.
The kick lands right on the green thing’s deformed nose, the Impact Instantly forces blood to flood out from Its nostrils and slowly gush out of its eye sockets, ears and mouth, silencing it as It began twitching with increasingly violent movement that abruptly ended after no more than five or six seconds.
A second or so later a game-like notification window popped up in front of the man. Blinking in confusion, the man tried to wipe his eyes. "Uuuhh... Nah man that's just..." In his attempt to walk away from it, he noticed how it follows his head movements perfectly, never leaving his line of sight, but he can look far around it if he only moves his eyes meaning it's not stuck to the middle of his view but rather attached to the way his head is facing. The screen is clearly projected outside of his body as well since it can be obstructed by trees and other objects that get in its way, passing through them like a ghost. "What in the?"
The man tries to relax a little and see what the window actually says, hoping for some answers he reads and speaks to himself aloud while deep in thought, his inner gamer speaking through him as his racing mind tries to decide whether or not he should be frustrated, confused, screaming in fear, calm, panicking, thinking things over, investigating, or maybe just straight up pass out.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
"Notice: Gained 10 Experience Points From {Goblin}, Congratulations: Level Up -1 < 0 ... and I'm guessing that’s the Exp Bar on the left which says 5/7 above it with the same white text as the notifications on the main section of the screen, the bar itself is bright yellow from the bottom up almost to the top with a dark yellow going the rest of the... hop..." The man lifted his palm slowly up to his forehead to rub both of his temples as if to suppress a headache. "so anyway, that means that uhh... The exp needed for a level up is multiplied by 1,4 or something. The screen itself is black and in no way see-through, oh that’s gonna get annoying fast!"
Taking a deep breath and noticing the stench of blood getting stronger, he looks at the corpse with a hint of disgust. (So that is a goblin... I thought they were supposed to be around waist height according to all the stuff I've read but I guess not. Maybe that one is just short, though barely reaching above my knee when standing upright instead of the waist is a bit of a stretch for just short... oh shit, I didn't kill a goblin kid, right?)
After a bit of contemplating what he'd done, he started messing around with the floating screen looking for answers. "Notification Options, Voice Commands, Notification History... " He started reading through all the other screens that could be opened with the buttons on the small right side sub-section of the notification screen, he read them in the order the buttons were in from top to bottom left to right, there were 8 buttons in total, all with different icons in two rows of four next to each other. Both subsections were shaped the same, just that on the left there was the exp bar, also the sub-sections were only separated by a thin white line that the main section's text began & changed rows at, the text never closer than a single cm from the line.
Currently, the man was looking at the Voice Commands screen.
(Okayyy?... Inventory, Status/Stats, Skill Tree, Discovery List, Notifications & System Settings... Ha HA the fuck Is this video game wanna be, Bullshi-!)
Suddenly, all sorts of Déjà-vu & clarity hit the man like a truck, since that enormous adrenaline high clouding his reason is finally dissipating.
"Whahait, Is this, did I… Did I get isekai’d for real... that definitely said goblin didn't it and as far as I know, we don't have any angry Martians roaming the woods back home."
The man takes a slow look around and walks further away from the gravel patch, now with some actual focus, noticing all the unusual things around, such as the goblin oozing light purple blood from Its nose, ears, eyes & the back of its skull, the weird bugs on the trees, the lizard munching on a sap leaking vine & the one-eyed bird that's been annoying him the entire time.
As the realization is sinking in and the incoming panic attack really starts taking hold of his mind, a massive hawk-like brown bird sweeps through the air directly above the clearing at a terrifying speed a dozen meters higher than the tops of the giant 40 meter tall trees. The worst part is that. for something so huge and fast enough as to be followed by a very noticeable gust of wind, it was dead silent during its flight. The gust of wind followed by a deafening hawk screech and a ground-shaking impact already a few kilometers away pushed all remaining thoughts out of the man’s head.
With a meek voice, the man lets out some noise that resembles the language he's been speaking thus far. "Well, that answers that huh, a roc bird?"
The stiffened-up man falls backward onto the grass right next to where he first woke up. Tears of shock begin to form in his eyes & fear-induced sweat appears everywhere as his mind lingers near unconsciousness.
"!" "Hm?" The sudden high-pitched ding pulls him back into awareness.
(Gained knack: Recognition I,
Recognition: Recognise things you have some knowledge of more easily, the greater the knowledge of the target, the easier it is to recognize.)
The man blinks twice with a blank gaze "Well gee, a skill that lets me know things that I know already, that'll come in reeeaal fucking handy won't It!" Now with his mind void of thought, it’s as good a time as any to process all that just happened in the last ten minutes, especially since likely nothing will want to be in the vicinity of something like that roc bird.
...
Fifteen minutes later after a small roller coaster of mixed feelings, his mind arrived at a sort of acceptance.
(Haah... I guess it's goodbye earth then. Not that I really give a shit, I was losing all interest in my life there anyway. All my so-called friends were a bunch of fakes who would throw each other under the bus if need be, I had no girlfriend & my ex... Well, I'm glad I don't need to see her ever again... My family... Even though my mother mostly took care of me, we weren't really at all close, I barely knew of my long-dead grandparents, my father was more like a buddy than a father, and my older siblings were almost complete strangers due to our 10 year age gap so other than the occasional events we never saw each other. My younger brother does his own thing and I’d say he is the only thing resembling an attachment to earth and as for my younger sister she...ahhm, actually, let's not go there right now.) ”Haa-CHU, sniff” (…Thinking about it now, that’s just sad and I might just be a fucking sociopath of some sort huh... or whatever fancy word they call it nowadays. Anyway, it's a bit chilly isn't it...)
"Oh Fuck, right, I'm still naked, hmm..." The man finally moved and sat up to think for a few moments "Well I guess that would work, though It's a bit gross."
He got up and walked back to get the spear that the goblin had thrown, though In his hands it was more of a javelin. Then he turned to the trees looking for the lizard... and it took him an embarrassingly long time to find it again... in the same tree... branch even...
"Shit will I even hit It from here, my throws never really were all that accurate... I kinda feel bad doing this to It. Imagine just chilling on a branch munching on some snacks ten meters up minding your own business and suddenly getting a fucking spear thrown into your side by some homicidal ape."
The man fixed his posture, taking aim at the lizard as If he was one of the pros participating in the Olympics as he'd seen on TV, and threw as hard as he could.
"!" He didn't even have time to look up to see where the spear landed when his vision was blocked by the notification window and a second after he hear a heavy thud behind the black screen, from the direction he threw in.
"Like I said, I can see that getting very annoying very fast" he focused on the window and was greeted with the good news.
"Gained Skill: Bull’s eye I,
Gained Skill: Against The Odds I,
Gained knack: Motion mimicry I,
Gained knack: Accurate throw I,
Notice: Gained 540 Experience points from {Black scaled bloodshot acid lizard},
Congratulations: Level up 0 < 10, Exp 55/203.
Well that's kinda fucking terrifying... 54 times more than what I got from the goblin, if exp gain is measured by or comparable to danger level then I would probably be a goner already or at least running my ass off right now, jeezuz maybe more caution next time,"
(Against The Odds: Damage Dealt increases by 2% for every level the opponent is above you & received damage decreases by 3% every level the opponent is above you, the maximum stack is 15. Each stack is a separate buff, meaning max damage increase is ~34,6% and max received damage reduction is ~55,8%. Cool, the other skills are pretty self-explanatory: throwing accuracy increased, more accurate movement mimicry & 100% accuracy on a physical ranged attack of any kind with a 1 minute cooldown... at least I don't have to worry too much about embarrassing my self with poor aim... but why did I get that skill & how are skills different from knacks?)
The man closed the game-like window and walked over to the now-dead lizard laying on the ground as a very surprised look appears on his face. (It seems I hit it In It's Left Eye... and the spear's entire blade part is in Its skull, probably piercing Its brain, hence the skill? Yup! I meant to do that, pure skill!)
The man then very unskillfully skins the lizard with the spear's rigid sharp rock blade after pulling it out of the firm grasp of Its skull & started playing with the voice commands of the system right after.
"Inventory" (An empty inventory... So how? does one? store items? into it? Ahh, the [— ? —] is a guide button aand to store item: touch/hold item & say/think: store item & to remove stored item: Say/Think: remove stored item while thinking of the item you wish to remove from the inventory space, for manual system blah blah blah, ok pretty straight forward stuff.)
The man stored the lizard corpse, Its skin, some sharp rocks & the goblin corpse into the inventory in which everything just appeared as text & started wandering around the forest looking for a water source. "Maybe This way?"
After around 20 minutes of storing everything that looked valuable or useful along the way, The man arrived at a small stream (took less time than I thought, I was preparing myself for this to take hours, lucky me.)
The man proceeds to thoroughly wash the lizard skin, his skin injuries & the itchy ankle in the stream water and after that, he pulled out a nice big wide leaf from a low-hanging tree branch, washed it as well, tied it around his crotch then he took the lizard skin, tied it tightly around his waist over the leaf all in simple knots & that's makeshift underwear done.
After a few more minutes of crouched down drinking and admiring of his handiwork, some garbled nonsense could be heard in the distance. The man, slightly startled, looked up from the river & turned his focus in the direction of the angry noises & smiled wickedly while scratching the ankle that was still dripping blood "More goblins?!"