Veins crisscrossed the tutorial sky. Thick, coursing with unknowable fluid, the view through the smoke-stained skyscrapers was like gazing into the back of an eyeball. It always made Ben shudder. Despite the countless times his fingers dipped into blood, he kept his squeamishness at unnatural sights.
Every day it lessened, and he feared his humanity shrank alongside. The apocalypse erased the world he grew up with. He needed to adapt, but lately, things grew even more manic.
People paced the streets and glanced at the sky as the veins darkened. Their rapid pulse slowed. The air grew thin. The plumbing backed up and stopped flowing. Shadows stretched and devoured the light. What few survivors remained huddled together in the cleaner buildings. Windows open for the air and their senses raw with anticipation.
The tutorial should end in two days, but the system remained silent. Nobody remembered the system speaking for a week. After a transmission about the end of reward administration, silence followed.
Ben hated the new quiet in his mind. He grew so used to the system’s presence, that without it he found his steps faster, his anger closer to the surface, his ears pricked and searching. Others were the same, distraught, alone. They sought company. Ben, like so many others, drowned his rising fears in the comfort of flesh.
The room stank of sweat and exertion, a feat with their bodies enhanced to a point of 30 levels. Ben lay entangled with three women. He couldn’t remember their names or faces. Sleep evaded him in this room of performed snores. The walls sat too close to his face. Perspiration ran down the yellow wallpaper like sweat. When was this room built? How many people died here?
He extracted himself from the satiated women and walked out onto the balcony. The air outside was cool, but the thin wind barely sighed against his damp skin. He stood naked, glorious, and unfurled his aura.
His breathing eased as his power level soured. The levels he suppressed returned to him the stats he earned. His posture adjusted as his Dexterity soared. The sky sharpened as his Insight peaked. Vitality worked at the bruises and bite marks across his chiseled features. A shame to lose such trophies, but perfection insists upon itself.
His energy restored itself as his level capped out at 49. The last insight to reach level 50 still eluded him. The potential power of a transformed body vibrated at the edge of his senses. Bewitching. Taunting.
He spied Mr Biggs on a faraway balcony, watching from the dark. The open curtains gazing into the room behind Ben were simply another compromise in his quest to survive.
And he would survive like a cockroach outlives a nuclear bomb.
The sky cracked. Deafening thunder shook the air as the veiny red surface peeled away. Stars glowed from beyond, and the dark rushed forth in a tide of clean water. Ben gazed up in shock, his nakedness flooding him with shame as a silver god floated through the rent in the sky. His features reached perfection in flesh, an angel of steel, heavy with a blue and brooding demeanor, cheekbones so sharp they cut the --
Blood trickled down Ben’s cheeks as he averted his gaze. He squeezed his eyes shut as he hurried to the bathroom mirror. The women stirred, moaning, as his agitated aura brushed against their dreaming minds. He entered the bathroom.
[Operating Environment]
Bright white light flooded the area and coated every surface with a smooth layer like translucent paint. The coating glowed a dull white and Ben examined his face in the mirror.
A deep cut ran across his right eye. He couldn’t open it, even with his high Dexterity, his body refused to obey him. The sight made him shudder. His face. His perfect face! He leaned over the glowing toilet. His vomit stank of alcohol and disintegrated when it struck the sanitized coating.
What was that thing in the sky? Something he shouldn’t see. Would his eye even heal?
“What is it, Benny?” a sleepy woman said from behind him.
He kept his face from her.
“I think the tutorial is over,” he said.
“What?” said another woman.
What were their names? He couldn’t remember for the life of him.
[Tutorial participants, hear me now]
The silvery voice cut into his mind. He could hardly breathe as it sank like a pin down his spine.
[You are the bastard slaves of the Crimson Armada. The dogs of contempt bred to harry and devour your own world. Shame on you all]
Wails rose from the city as sliver light flooded from the sky. Ben stopped with his hand on the apartment’s doorknob. Every inch of his skin felt the prick of a blade. He couldn’t breathe. Silvery light played over the entire room. No shadows remained.
The city grew silent. Any who wailed now lay cut to pieces. The executioner’s axe sat high above them.
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Nowhere to go.
Cornered.
Ben growled.
“Coward.”
A blade sliced through his throat. Blood flowed down his throat. He choked, and gurgled, but his Dexterity kept him still as his Vitality closed the wound.
[Coward?]
Weight wrapped around Ben.
The apartment vanished as he appeared in the sky above the city. Great pressure held him in place. He gazed upon the glowing man rendered in blades. The sharp presence sliced through his mind. Agony tore his thoughts in a thousand directions, only for some alien force to place them all back together.
Rain fell in sheets to the city below. Already several feet of water covered the streets. Bodies floated along the rising bloody lake. A bubble of calm sheathed the area around Ben and the horror that sliced his eye. That presence pressed upon him.
[Speak]
Ben struggled to keep his voice steady as he grunted against the pressure wrapped around in his throat.
“We did what we could to survive. Who are you to judge us?”
[I am Rue]
[I am the Heart Torn system]
Two voices overlapped and flooded Ben with knowledge. A young enemy, a rage born of blood and maddening grief, a blade that would cut through the world.
“Your battle is with the Crimson Armada… let us help.”
Rue floated forward. He gripped Ben’s cheek with fingers of steel and turned his head one way, and then another.
[No]
Ben stared out of his good eye. His heart rate exploded as angelic death smiled at him.
[It is a fine wound. Wear it well]
Rue vanished.
The bladed light vanished.
The pressure around Ben’s body vanished.
He plummeted toward the flooded town.
The rift in the sky remained, and it widened as Ben fell. He gazed through the tears. Stars no longer blinked on the other side, now a sky of colors and floating islands shifted. Destinations whirled like a kaleidoscope.
Air rushed in through the hole, and candy-colored mists flowed in to cover the veins of the Tutorial sky.
[Tutorial Zone destabilized]
Ben struck the water hard. Water shot up. He lay stunned on his back, his whole body aching from the slap., but he only sank a few inches below the surface. Despite the pain, the voice of the Crimson Armada was a welcome thing. Water rained down on him.
[Prepare for ejection into the world]
The rent extended until the entire sky shattered like a window pane. It rained down onto the flooded city. Shards disintegrating like sparkling jewels. Where the veins once grew, now a world lay displayed. It whirled, slices of another world, islands passing over each other like waves over coral, sky overlapping sky, space contorted and swirling.
[Tutorial destabilised in 5 minutes]
[Select your spawning location]
Ben kicked toward a nearby rooftop and pulled himself out of the water. His eyes remained glued to the sky. A world lay on the other side. His gaze fell on dozens of places, he could see they were rich in the resources he needed to grow, close to pockets of civilization, it was like his tutorial studies had shown him.
Though another presence blighted the sight. Pools of water, ruins that resembled a sunken Rome, a river rippling through the sky like slashes of a sword. Another system imposing itself upon the maps of the Crimson Armada.
The Heart Torn system.
Ben grinned.
He could escape.
Ducking inside the house, he crouched beside the window and scanned the sky above. He searched until a particular island caught his fancy. He focused on the luscious grove of peach trees. A farming community lay nearby. The centuries-old monastery remained perched atop the nearby mountain, but now it housed a dungeon alongside the atrocious memories. The place was perfect, and if Ben selected it fast enough, Mr Biggs would never find him.
His wound stung as he focused on the island. The cut across his eye refused to heal. Vitality burned at the edges, but it was as though the injury were separate from his Skein.
Fighting to concentrate through the pain, he selected the location.
[Spawning in one minute]
[59 seconds]
Ben let out a sigh of relief. He was getting out of here!
“Where do you think you’re going?” Giuseppe strode into the room with a grin. The old man had his hair slicked back and his hands stuck into his jeans. The white tank top did nothing to hide the silver hair on his chest and the hard muscles and fresh scars he earned during the tutorial. His hands were stuck in his pockets.
Ben grinned.
“Nice working with you, dickhead,” he said. “But tell the boss I’m quitting.”
[41 seconds]
“Tell him yourself.”
Giuseppe pulled a hand out of his pocket as Mr Biggs placed a hand on Ben’s shoulder. Ben started, but the grip was iron-tight. When did Mr Biggs get here?
Giuseppe pointed a finger gun. It seemed Ben wasn’t alone in hiding his levels. The mean old bastard must have advanced his spatial technique in secret. Now he could carry other people.
[33 seconds]
“What a perfect location you’ve selected, Benjamin,” Mr Biggs said magnanimously.
“I’m quitting,” Ben said as he prayed for the clock to hurry.
Mr Biggs leaned down close. The fat man’s hot breath tickled Ben’s ear.
“Oh, no, we work together until the bitter end.”
Golden light pulsed from Mr Bigg’s skin as he activated his technique. Ben didn’t know the limitations, but the intricate blending of Body Path and Skein technique inside Mr Bigg’s body pulled at Ben’s heart like an anchor.
His skin pulsed like sunlight on money, and an answering light flashed from inside Giuseppe’s chest. The wiry old man’s ribs illuminated as dark bands of shadows across his chest. The same glow pulsed up inside Ben, a syrupy feeling, as though he drowned in gilded honey.
Ben could hardly move, hardly think, except to obey, and so he opened himself.
[Spawning in 12 seconds]
[Joining party]
[Preparing to spawn party…]
[5 seconds]
“Good boy,” Mr Biggs said. “You might see this as coercion, but I see it as medicine. The world is sick, my boy. We shall distribute the cure. You understand. You’re a doctor.”
[3 seconds]
Ben slurred, but the words wouldn’t come out right.
“The bastard cut my eye.”
[2 seconds]
“We’ll get you a pretty new eye, don’t you worry,” Mr Biggs said as he squeezed Ben’s shoulder. “You just do as you’re told.”
[Spawning…]
Ben vanished from the tutorial zone, and he felt the two men stuck against him as he rushed through the grey void. Pressed together, body and soul, melting, before they separated and blinked into existence on a grassy knoll overlooking a quiet town. A windmill slowly turned above the trees.
Mr Biggs clapped Ben on the back.
“Now the real work begins,” he sniffed the air. “Our first target is in the mill.”
He walked toward the trees with a whistle, and Giuseppe followed. The wiry man had his hands stuck in his pockets again, his long grey hair flowing over his shoulders as he glanced back at Ben.
“Come on, boy, hurry up now.”
Ben shuddered and followed as thoughts of dark vengeance crawled through his brain like irradiated cockroaches.