One night, I had gone to sleep, and woke up somewhere new. Well- me and everyone else on Earth.
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I awoke with grass underneath me.
I was not the kind of person who would wake up with grass under me. For the longest time, I’d sworn off drugs, alcohol, and whatever the hell kind of pills my mom used to take. I’d seen the spiral that led, and I considered the lack of any grassy mornings in my life a resounding victory for the indomitable human spirit over statistics. The statistics still hurt, and contributed to my paranoia consistently, but I won. At least until this morning, apparently.
Almost desperately, I wracked my mind trying to retrace my steps last night. I remembered falling asleep on my bed—couch technically—with my phone next to me, and nary a suspicious substance in sight. Did someone kidnap me? I didn’t have any crazy ex’s, any enemies online, or even a particularly angry pet that might want to get revenge on their owner. More than that, as my consciousness was slowly returning to me, I realized the grass was blue.
That made me stand up, peeling myself onto my feet with a distinctly concerned expression on my face. The grass beneath my toes—bare toes—was a distinct dark greenish-blue color, while explicitly away from turquoise or cyan. Somewhere in the back of my head I knew the name for it, but it was long gone and superseded by things my brain categorized as significantly more important—things like obscure books and movies no one had ever heard of.
Belatedly, I realized I was stuck up on the color of grass rather than actually figuring out why I was somewhere new with strangely colored grass. I looked up quickly, a bit more panic in my eyes while trying to get as much broad information about my surroundings as possible.
But… there was almost zero information to be found. The sky was empty, a solid light gray color that stretched on and one in a monotonous single shade that hurt my eyes due to its lack of depth. No sun. No clouds. Just gray. The ground too, besides the strangely soft grass, was abnormally flat. No texture existed in the soil beyond the fact that it was soil. No small little rocks or moisture, just a vast expanse of the weird blue-green color.
And there, almost fifty feet away—the only thing to give me some sense of scale—was a dark brown, almost black, tree with leaves the same color as the grass. It was short, but I couldn’t tell exactly how short it was until I realized I was suddenly standing in front of it. Without thinking, my feet had carried me toward it, and my eyes were lost in the strange rivulets in the bark that seemed to loop upon themselves. With my own measly height, I had to wager it was at most, ten to fifteen feet tall, but its branches fanned out in an odd oval that was more prominent in the direction I came from. It reminded me of one of those savanna trees I saw in many nature documentaries, but I couldn’t really process its out of placeness before something strange started to happen.
The rivulets in the bark—whose surface was unnaturally smooth otherwise—began to glow a light, almost neon green. A hum, not too dissimilar to a ringing sound, started to fill the air, and something deep in my bones started to rumble, keeping me still, like a deer watching a semi-truck the size of the moon barreling towards it.
And then it stopped; I was left in silence for two, maybe three seconds, before words started to float in front of my vision.
It was… indecipherable at first. The font was almost calligraphy, but for a language I had never seen before. I blinked, rubbing at my eyes slightly from the headache that started to form, only to find the words in English once I opened my eyes again. A giant wall of text hovered in front of me, and I began to read.
[Juno Hall:
You, as well as the rest of humanity, face a choice with which you cannot decide the answer. The impetus behind the words you read forces me to act, and give you the gift, and great burden, of the weapon I forged.
You have a trial. One where your death, and the deaths of other beings are necessary. The vast majority of your species will not be able to succeed , including yourself.
Five days is all you have to build, fight, and change. You will face creatures you have never seen, face death's your body could never comprehend, and at the end of it you will not be the same person.
But death is a ladder. Climb it.]
I stared for a moment, confusion and uncertainty sprouting in my gut. The words were the same color as the light that previously shined from the tree, and before I even had the chance to dismiss everything that happened, to call it all a tree, they disappeared and my headache worsened with an irrevocable truth settling in my mind. This was real.
I tried hard to reread the message in my head. First, it knew my actual name. Juno. Not ‘Jona,’ like I tell everyone else, but Juno. That dumb name my dad heard in passing before deciding to give it to his son. After we moved again, I just started telling people it was Jona, and it was close enough that I didn’t have to do much convincing.
And the weird… being? The whatever-the-hell behind those words knew it. More than that, it implanted shit into my brain. Even with the utter knowledge that what it said—wrote—was true, it was still so hard to accept it. It made me feel pathetic, like a man being walked to his death taking a moment to toy with the hem of his shirt.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
My hand idly went to toy with my hair as I considered the situation. I had a trial, along with eight billion other people. Was I in it already or was there some kind of thing I had to do to trigger it? When did the five days start? After the text disappeared, or when I first woke up? Where in the hell was I supposed to go-
My spiraling was interrupted with another message. This one outlined in a green box, with green letters. In the back of my head, I started on my way to hating the color green.
[Time Remaining: 120:55:47
Hello (PLAYER_42600913)!
This is the Interface! You have reached the age the Interface has deemed you ready for your trial. Congratulations!
The time above is how long you have left to complete the following task:
Kill 1x Giant’s Skeleton
Failure to complete will result in your death being permanent!
Good luck!]
I blinked, and before I could really try to process that screen, another appeared, significantly smaller.
[More information, skills, and resources will be provided upon first death! See you soon (PLAYER_42600913)!]
My stomach rolled, my mind flipping with even more questions than before. The only difference was this time I decided to save them for later, when I had a chance to write it all down.
I can’t exactly describe it, but the way the interface printed what I assumed to be my username gave me the impression of a button. Hesitantly, I raised a hand and tapped the screen. To my surprise, there was real, actual, physical feedback, a glassy-like texture meeting my hand with the interface-provided name glowing before another small screen came up.
[Enter preferred name:
Jona Hall
Y/N?]
I pressed the ‘Y’ and finally, finally there were no more screens. My headache lifted in the same way your head clears after leaving a crowded room. A breath involuntarily escaped my chest, and I pinched the bridge of my nose, idly shaking my other hand for some level of control. It didn’t help much, but I needed some kind of real manifestation of my effort. All that’s happened so far is I’ve received information, and I can already vaguely understand that calling this a trial is a bit of a misnomer.
Just got to kill a giant huh? Simple.
I tried to rationalize it. This was like a video game, right? Funny little menus and everything. I never really got that into RPG’s was the only thing, but I’m certain I could figure this out. But what would it cost? I could only die so many times in a five day span, and how many would it take me to do this?
I started walking, dreading the answer.
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There wasn’t much to walk to, besides walking away from the tree and… south of where it was pointing. I didn’t know how death would work; where I would come back, if time would reset, things like that were all valid questions with which I was certain—like the interface had not-so-subtly hinted at—I would find out soon.
But it did give me time to think, and figure out some more questions I had. The very first screen—not even—I saw was significantly different from what came after. From what I could remember, it was from the perspective of the interface’s creator, right? ‘The weapon I forged,’ it had said.
So the second set had to be the interface itself. Why did it… seem so peppy? There were exclamation marks, and even its grammar suggested some kind of extrovertedness. Was it trying to personify itself to me?
I had already tried, to my own embarrassment, calling the interface back. I said out loud things like ‘stats,’ ‘help,’ and ‘character.’ None of it worked, and a part of me was oddly thankful to be gone from those bright blue-green greens.
Granted, I was still stuck with the blue-green grass, and not a single shift in topography, in the color of the sky, or the sighting of any significant landmarks had occurred since I started wandering.
However, with that thought, my eyes managed to pick up a… shape in the distance?
A black dot perfectly centered on the horizon. It slowly, almost imperceptibly grew closer towards me. Logic dictated that I run away from what was certainly going to be a horrid beast out to eat my insides, but logic didn’t matter any more. I was going to die no matter what I did, so I didn’t run. I walked toward it, trying to get as much information as possible before it reached me.
It was about the size of a human, but its proportions were off. The arms hung at its sides, trailing behind on the ground. It wore armor, lacking a helmet, with rigid, rusty spikes jutting haphazardly from the individual pieces. And though it didn’t wear a helmet, it’s head was elongated and covered in scaly scars. Its eyes were milky, but even from a distance, I could tell the thing was looking right at me. I managed to keep walking, but soon noticed that as we approached each other, some kind of invisible indescribable force started to press down on my shoulders.
My steps slowed, each movement lethargic, until it took everything for me to stand straight. Then, I couldn’t even do that, falling to my knees. The oddly draconic creature stopped, ten feet out, its head lolling.
Its name was whispered into my ear. ‘Hero’s Shade,’ the wind seemed to say.
“You did not run.”
It sounded like a question, but was phrased without enunciation so I couldn’t know how I was able to tell the distinction. Hunching over—for it had to be at least eight feet in height—the thing crouched down to my level.
“For that, I will make this quick. Forgive me, hero.”
It moved.
A hand—claw—came to my head, and my thoughts stopped. I don’t know if the shade cut my head off, pierced it, or crushed it, but I was gone before I could process it. I was left with the thought, the very pathetic one, of wanting to give up and let the timer run dry.
The thought didn’t get room to breathe as I woke back up under the tree, a new screen in front of me.
[Congratulations!
You died to a {Hero’s Shade}!
For your first death, you have received the following rewards:
* Burgeoning Workshop
* “Welcome to the Trial” Forum Page
Enjoy!
Time Remaining 118:32:49]
I wanted to punch something, but the screen blinked out of existence before I got the chance. I closed my eyes, sitting down with my back against the tree. My hands wrapped around my hair with the force of a vice grip, practically trying to pull it out. Everything was wrong, and I finally started to feel it.