Clover's breaths came out quick and shallow, leaving his lungs tingling as his eyes rapidly darted about. For a long moment, he sat stock still on the floor, frozen like a deer in the headlights, trying to force himself to wake up from the nightmare he was trapped in.

He flinched, barely holding back a scream as a second blue screen appeared. The damn thing had appeared so suddenly that it had almost given him a heart attack. He absently rubbed his eyes, wiping the sleep out of them, and after the hallucinatory message refused to disappear, he took the time to read through it.

Congratulations! Your planet has begun its integration into the System. A host of changes comes with this privilege, most of which you will discover later. However, in the interest of your survival, you should note that the Earth's geography has been rearranged, wildlife populations have been mutated, and monsters have begun to crawl through the cracks in reality.

In the face of these threats, The System offers opportunity. Defeat your enemies to increase your Level. On rare occasions, monsters will drop a Skill Stone when slain. Additionally, treasures and items of great value have appeared in the wilderness and areas of interest.

You can check your progress at any time by accessing your [Status Screen].

For the first stage of the integration, lasting precisely one [Earth Week], humanity will be given a chance to adapt and reestablish itself. Local monster populations will be suppressed, restricting their movements in daylight, and various bonuses will be given to humanity. Act quickly; as time passes, these boons will dissipate.

Good luck!

Clover wondered if he had suffered a psychotic break - words weren't supposed to float through the air. He squinted at the blue box. The letters did not waver or otherwise distort under his attention, nor did they possess any of the other hallmarks he assumed a dream or hallucination would.

Despite his repeated efforts, he couldn't find anything to suggest that what he was seeing wasn't real, but a part of him refused to believe because that would mean —

Faint, barely louder than a whisper, scraping footsteps echoed down the hallway. Clover jerked his head, following their path as they meandered toward him. Finally, someone was coming to save him. Clover went to call out but stopped himself at the last moment. Something about their gait didn't sound right - it was off, too bony and sharp to be human.

Propping himself up on his elbows, he inched across the floor, dragging himself to a hidden corner of the room, careful not to make any noise.

A creature of medium size stopped outside his door. It cast a flickering silhouette of a shadow that seemed to stretch toward him onto the tile flooring.

Shit. Clover's heart skipped a beat. Clover held his breath and curled into a ball, convinced his end was near - that a misshapen and murderous monster would burst through the door any moment now.

However, as one long second ticked to the next, his end never came. The monster meandered outside the door, audibly sniffing around, searching for something. While he waited, stressed beyond belief, a persistent urge to cough built in the back of his throat. He tried to hold it back, but he knew from experience that it could only be delayed, not avoided.

He tensed his jaw, a sense of annoyance rising up to match his fear. What was taking that damn monster so long? Was it going to sit outside his door all night long?

Finally, the monster left. Clover waited as long as he could, which amounted to less than ten seconds, then covered his mouth and coughed, doing his best to muffle the sound. The creature's dragging footsteps paused, then reversed their course.

Curled up in the corner, he closed his eyes, wishing this all was just a nightmare, but when he opened his eyes, nothing had changed. His heart still pounded in his chest, and the lights above still flickered. This was real.

The monster continued its approach. If it found him, he’d die. Clover was too weak to fight and too slow to run. All that stood between him and his end was a door that didn't lock. All he could do was hope that the monster was too stupid to figure out how to open it.

"Is anyone out there?" someone yelled from down the hallway.

He didn’t answer.

But the monster did. It loudly shambled away, hunting after a new target.

Clover stared at the door for a long moment, not believing his luck. He wiped a bead of sweat from his brow with a shaking hand. He felt like throwing up, but he was safe for now.

Finally accepting that what he was experiencing was real, he returned his attention to the System Announcement and began to shakily make a plan. It wasn't easy; every creak, groan, and rustling of leaves in the building distracted him and set his heart racing, but his search eventually led to two discoveries.

First, according to a built-in timer, he found on the blue screen a little more than two hours had passed since the apocalypse had officially started. Which didn't make a whole lot of sense. There was no way he had slept through the literal end of the world.

Clover glanced at the only non-System related clock in the room, noting its cracked glass surface and unticking hands stuck facing midnight. Not very helpful.

Irrespective of how much time had passed, he decided to hide out the night in the room. Like a child pulling a blanket over his head, he stacked fact after fact, convincing himself it was the right decision.

He pointedly ignored an unnatural creaking of wood.

The truth was the facts didn't matter; he just didn't want to face whatever was outside that door. He was scared - scared of the unknown. Even if leaving was the right decision, he didn't know if he could force himself to do it.

He gulped, then moved on to further inspecting his second discovery. If he focused on the words "[Status Screen]," a new window would appear.

Name: Clover Hills

Race: Human

Class: Blank Lvl 0 - 0/100

Shard:

HP: 100/100 (10)

SP: 100/100 (10)

MP: 99/100 (10)

Affinity:

Strength: 0

Endurance: 0

Vitality: 0

Dexterity: 0

Agility: 0

Perception: 0

Intelligence: 0

Magic: 0

Stat Points: 0

Skill Points: 0

The [Status Screen] reminded him of a video game he had played before, so he had some basis to understand what it would imply, Though, even with his background, some aspects of the screen confused him: What was an Affinity, and what was a Shard?

He shelved those questions for later.

All his stats were at 0, but he couldn’t help but wonder if he raised them high enough, would he finally be free? Would his body heal itself? A small flicker of hope ignited in his chest.

Clover doubled over, covering his mouth as he coughed, trying not to make a sound lest he attract the attention of another monster. He was mostly successful, but his lungs and body felt like a wrung-out sponge afterward.

He shook his head, ignoring the grim reminder of his situation. The clock was ticking - he only had a week left to live.

His eyes flicked to his phone resting on the bed halfway across the room. He needed more information. If the internet still worked, he could guarantee there would be answers on it. Maybe not to the important questions, but someone somewhere had to have figured something out.

He rubbed his eyes and convinced himself that as long as he was quiet, moving should be safe. He dragged himself onto the bed and then picked up his phone. Happy to have his constant companion back in his hands, he clicked the on button.

Nothing happened - just his luck. The phone was dead. His dull reflection stared back at him as his neck tingled. In a moment of clarity, he finally noticed that something was wrong and had been for a while - he had just been ignoring it.

Before he had time to react, the window on the far side of the room shattered, sending shards of glass raining to the floor. Through the opening, a tree branch grew at a visible rate, stretching toward him. Offshoots bloomed from the main branch and snaked along the floor, threatening to encircle him. If there was any doubt about the tree's demeanor, blood dripped from its verdant leaves, and thick thorns on its trunk shone a brutal black.

It wasn't the monster he had imagined, but nonetheless, it was the one that had come.

Clover screamed. He had seen enough; he was getting out of here.

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However, when he tried to roll out of the bed, his body didn't respond. A pressure with no visible source was holding him down. Panicked, out of the corner of his eye, he gauged the tree's slow approach. He estimated he had about a minute before the monster reached him.

He strained, fighting with everything he had to lift his arm. And it worked, somewhat. The limb felt like it was weighed down by steel plates, but if he focused, he could move slowly. His muscles burned, and something even beyond that felt like it was tearing with each slight movement as he dragged himself to the edge of the bed away from the monster.

He pushed himself so hard in his rush to escape that he felt he might just pass out from the strain. At the peak of his exertion, his vision flickered, and for just a moment, he could see what bound him. Gently wrapped around him, phantasmal flowers of vibrant turquoise and cyan folded against themselves, twisting and converging into complex patterns. With each of his movements, petals fell off the flowers and crumbled into smaller motes.

In a strange, horrifying way, it was beautiful. It was magic; he was sure of it.

He blinked, and then the ghostly flowers disappeared without a trace, but he knew they were still there - still binding him. Leaves rustled from beyond where his eyes could see, and an unnatural wave of fatigue swept over him, so intense that he almost fell asleep on the spot. It was like he had been smothered in the world's deadliest warm blanket.

He tried to move - to escape, but his body wouldn't cooperate. Bit by bit, his eyes closed, drawing him toward the call of sleep.

His wheelchair was almost within reach.

He fought against the impending drowsiness with all he had, battling to keep his eyes open, but it was a losing war. The damn tree had taken its time wrapping him in its spell; it wasn't easily broken. With each passing second, his vision darkened, and the tree's thorn-filled branches crept closer.

This is it, huh. His lips twitched into a small frown as a burning disappointment rose up from the pits of his stomach. A chance to see a new world filled with magic, and I spent it cowering in the corner.

As the small hospital bed was about to become his final resting place, he wished for another chance. He didn't want to die - not yet. There was too much he hadn't seen.

No one answered his wish. No one came to save him. Clover's eyes closed, and his struggles were no more.

Alone, he fell into a terrifying stillness - an unending darkness.

….

The sickly boy violently coughed, his whole body retching as his lungs twisted painfully in his chest. His eyes shot open, blood and saliva leaking down his mouth.

He was alive. Despite its encroaching branches, the tree had yet to eat him. He still had time. In a blind panic, more desperate than ever before, he threw himself from the bed with all his might. The flowers that bound him fell away. Weaker than before, they put up little resistance. Panting for air, he rolled into his electric wheelchair with a crash.

Wasting no time, he jammed the chair’s control stick forward. Tires squealed against the tile as he accelerated away. He didn't know why the tree's restrictions no longer affected him: maybe it was his racing heart and adrenaline surging through his veins, or perhaps some other reason. In truth, he didn't care. He had been gifted a second chance, and he wouldn't waste it on pointless hypothesizing.

He threw open the door and rushed through it, not even bothering with one last look behind him.

Clover half expected to be immediately attacked by another monster, but to his surprise, the hallway was empty. Though, it looked like a small-scale war had been waged within its confines. Holes were torn into the drywall, and the overhead lights were on the precipice of falling, only held up by a single electrical wire.

Clover didn't linger long; he slammed the door shut, then with tense and scrunched-up shoulders, he turned left down the hallway toward where he remembered the elevator to be.

Almost in a daze, he wheeled down the hallway past dark and empty rooms.

Abruptly, the hallway ended. As if a giant scalpel had descended, the building had been cut in half, cleanly sliced from top to bottom. He wasn't sure where the other half of the hospital building had gone.

He wheeled closer to the edge, careful to not fall, then looked out at the remnants of downtown Middleburg. His view was blocked by neighboring buildings, limiting what he could see to only his near vicinity. Directly below him was a fluffy tree, thankfully of the non-man-eating variety. Around the tree, the grass was littered with broken glass, and past that was an electronics store that definitely hadn't been there before.

Like the other half of the hospital, the System had, for some reason, seen it fit to teleport the building to a new location. It wasn't common by any measure, but from his limited vantage point, he could tell it wasn't a rare occurrence either. And that wasn't even the strangest part: in the distance, at least a few miles away, a blue pillar of light stretched from earth to sky like a giant spotlight.

Of course, there were monsters too. Though not as many as he feared. If he was careful, he could avoid them. He nervously glanced behind him, checking to see if anything had tried to sneak up on him while he was distracted. Nothing had. It didn't make him feel much better.

He tried to stop his hands from shaking as unbidden thoughts of how close he had come to death rose to the surface of his mind. A lifetime of movies had left him unprepared for what he had faced on his deathbed: His life hadn't flashed before his eyes, and he hadn't seen a golden tunnel leading to the afterlife either; all that had greeted him was a terrifying darkness - utterly still and blank. He shook his head, trying to shake the thoughts out of his skull, but they wouldn't leave him.

Snapping him out of his introspection, Clover spotted a group of people traversing the broken and cracked streets a few blocks away. He had no clue what they were doing or why they were outside. Clover waved wildly, but predictably, with his luck, they didn't see him.

Unwilling to risk drawing more attention to himself for obvious reasons, he circled back down the hallway, looking for another way out of the hospital. If he had remembered correctly, a secondary elevator was on the other side of the building.

Clover continued nervously wheeling down the hallway till he encountered another oddity, this one much more concerning than the first. He stopped dead in his tracks.

Sat in the center of the hallway, a rat the size of a large dog devoured a dead man's arm. With each ravenous bite, stark white bristles of bone sprouted out of its black fur, forming a primitive armor. Above its head hung glowing red text.

Bone Rat - Lvl 3

A wave of nausea built in Clover’s stomach. The monster looked up from its feast and met his eyes.

Without a second thought, Clover reversed and sped away, quickly turning a corner. His heart dropped as a moment later, he looked back only to find that the monster had rounded the corner with a limping stride, its meal forgotten.

In his opinion, Clover did the only sensible thing left to do: he metaphorically put his wheelchair in sports mode and wheeled away like his life depended on it.

"Hell no! Stay away from me, you overgrown rat." Unfortunately, the Bone Rat didn't understand human speech and continued its pursuit despite a bullet hole in its hind leg that leaked a trail of blood. Fortunately, the large animal couldn't move very fast, which was good because Clover wasn't very fast either. His wheelchair topped out at 5 miles per hour.

He threw frantic looks over his shoulder as he wheeled down the hallway in the most intense low-speed chase of his life. The end of the hallway came into view, only a hundred feet away. If he continued forward, the only thing awaiting him would be a three-story drop.

He didn't slow down as his mind raced, wildly searching for a way out of this situation. He glanced around. With how close the monster was, there was nowhere to hide, and with how quickly the ledge approached, there was almost no time to think.

He could turn and fight. That's what an action hero would do. He glanced back at the monster's mutated form. No. Despite its injuries, he doubted he could beat the beast without a weapon. It was Level 3, and he was Level 0. He'd be torn to shreds.

The distance between him and the ledge continued to dwindle as scenario after scenario flashed through Clover's mind. None of them ended well for him.

Clover bit his lip.

Before he could even consider what he was doing, Clover drove off the ledge, aiming for the tree. If he landed on it, he would probably bleed off enough momentum to make the fall survivable. As Clover flew weightlessly through the air, he questioned whether he had lost his mind. Before he could find an answer, gravity took its hold, and he came hurtling down towards the earth.

He fell through a thick canopy of leaves, earning multiple minor cuts on his arms, then crashed ribs first into a hard branch of wood, knocking the air out of his lungs. Like a rag doll, he bounced off the branch, hitting another before slamming into the grass. His head snapped back into the ground with a loud thunk.

Clover saw stars. Literally. Dazed, he laid on his back and stared at the night sky.

To his barely conscious mind, it looked nice. Wonderful even. With blank eyes, he watched. His body felt like it was a million miles away.

Following shortly after him, the Bone Rat dropped out of the sky like a dark comet and harshly crashed onto the grass with a sickening crack. It howled loudly, sounding strangely as if underwater to Clover's concussed mind. It looked at him; saliva dripped down its jaw. With a broken arm dragging on the ground, it forced its beaten and battered body toward Clover.

This was it - the end of the road. There was nowhere left to run. Clover stared back at the night sky, on the verge of falling unconscious. All this could be over. He could just close his eyes, and the pain would stop.

For a brief moment, he considered it, but then he thought back to earlier that night, to when he had been brought to the brink of death by that tree. A cold clarity struck Clover: Here was his second chance, and he was wasting it.

Clover rolled over and stared into the monster's dark eyes as it closed the distance. Before, he had been too scared to admit to himself what he wanted because he knew it would never happen. However, seeing the terrifying darkness that was on the other side of life made something clear to him.

“I want to live,” he whispered. He wanted to live normally and do all the things he had been too afraid to do before. He wanted it so badly that it threatened to burn him alive.

Winning would hurt. Living would hurt. He knew that.

A shard of glass laid in between him and the monster. He forced his failing body to crawl forward.

In his heart, he knew his dream was possible now. All he had to do was reach out and take it.

He gripped the shard of glass so hard that it cut into his palm. Not a moment later, the Bone Rat pounced upon him in an incoherent blur of violence. Knocked on his back, Clover blindly slashed at the beast, cutting deep red lines into its flesh, but the monster was ravenous, and before long, he was forced to drop all pretenses of offense in a desperate bid to hold back the Bone Rat, as it attempted to take a bite out of his shoulder.

His muscles strained, and sharp claws dug into his sides.

Slowly, the monster overpowered him, its maw drawing closer. Clover's heart rate doubled; he could feel its breath on his skin.

Clover shifted to the side and took hold of the monster's broken arm. It screeched, reeling back in pain, giving him a moment to act freely. Clover didn't waste the chance. He tightly gripped the arm, then pulled on it as hard as he could, slamming it against the ground, further shattering the bone. It howled in pain, erratically thrashing about.

“Just die already,” Clover’s voice raised from a whisper to a shout, ending in an incoherent and continuous scream.

Clover blindly stabbed until he cut into something large and beating. The mutated animal slumped, and its eyes dimmed. He had won.

Congratulations! You have defeated a Bone Rat - Lvl 3. +150 Exp.

Class: [Blank] has reached Lvl 1. +5 Stat Points.

He sprawled out on the grass next to the dead monster, utterly exhausted; his breaths came out in ragged pants. Tonight, the stars didn't seem so impossibly far away.

Clover opened his [Status Screen] and put a Point into Vitality. A rush of warmth flowed into him. For a moment, all his problems disappeared. He could breathe without pain, and his constant nausea lessened.

Without a second thought, he added the rest of his Stat Points to Vitality. Bones on the precipice of breaking mended, and the cut on hand sealed at a visible rate. A deep laugh bubbled up from his center that he couldn't contain. It came in spits and spurts, leaving his stomach pleasantly sore.

This was it. This was the solution Clover had been looking for all his life.

The warmth faded, and the pain returned, but now it was lessened. It was just a bit easier to breathe, and he didn't feel quite so nauseous anymore. It felt like he had woken up from an eighteen-year-long nap.

Clover smiled. He knew what he needed to do: raise his Level so damn high that nothing could stop him from living a normal life.