Leo found himself in a small clearing of pristine green grass with small wildflowers sprouting around his feet. The smell of fresh flowers and clean air calmed him from the ordeal he had just experienced, and he released a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding. Looking down, he found himself wearing a white shirt and pants, with no shoes. More alarmingly, however, was the very unnatural bronze coloring of his skin- not a nice tan bronze, mind you, but the metallic sheen sort of bronze- and the red lines traveling up his arms and disappearing under his shirt. The red lines blazed with an inner light, and looked like lines of lava or fire were actively moving up his arms.
“Woahhhhhh” Leo said softly, drawing out the word as he examined the lines.
“Hello there!” a soft voice said from behind him.
“Gah!” Leo jumped back in surprise, whipping about to face the thing behind him. Unfortunately, a previously unseen rock made its presence known at that moment, and Leo went spilling to the ground with a “oomph!” of surprise. A tinkling laugh met him as he groaned and finally got a look of the thing that had spoken. It was about 3 inches tall and had four butterfly-like wings sprouting from its back. Its skin was a very cotton candy shade of blue, and it had way too many teeth for comfort. It actually matched the description of pixies from mythology pretty well. As Leo was catching his bearings again, the pixie spoke.
“You’re the last one to arrive, so we can get started. Follow me to the others"
“Wait, What? Others? What Others? Are there more people here? And what the hell is going on?” Leon’s questions tumbled out one after another like an avalanche. The pixie thing looked nonplussed and just repeated for him to follow before flying away. Leo, having nothing better to do followed it, still feeling a bit miffed. “Guess I should just go with it, I am in a strange new place, and after that horrid experience in the void, I think a dream or OD is far-fetched.” Turning his thoughts away from that horrible experience with a shudder, he looked around at the town taking shape around him. Small, quant houses were ordered very neatly in a grid pattern, and the roads were cleaned to perfection. The roads and houses themselves were made of a perfectly white stone, with a light brown mortar. As the pair kept walking, the faint sounds of talking reached Leo’s ears. “Must be getting close” Leo thought with no small amount of trepidation and excitement. Sure enough, they took the next left and ended up in a square clearing in the center of town. The square was 25 by 25 feet of the customary pristine white stone with brown mortar. In the middle of the square, was a fountain with glowing green water pouring out the top. “Wait, is that water… glowing?” Leo did a double take on the fountain, and sure enough, the water was indeed glowing faintly. Shaking his head, Leo moved his attention to the people standing in the square. People that were all staring at him. Above the fountain 4 more pixies hovered, and they were also staring at him. Feeling slightly uncomfortable, but never one to miss out on something important, Leo walked forward and joined the group by the fountain, feeling their eyes track him all the while. As soon as he joined the others, the largest pixie started to speak.
“Now that all of you are here, we can begin” Most of the eyes on Leo turned back to the pixie, but a few still lingered. “First off let me welcome you to the Multiverse! The Immortal Multiversal Ascendant System or IMAS for short has deemed your planet worthy of entering the multiverse. Although I'm sure many of you have questions, we will get to them. While at the Village of Beginnings, We will cover the basics, and get you some basic gear while your planet is being terraformed with other compatible planets. As the first instruction, say “Status” to open up your personnel status window” The pixie stopped talking, clearly expecting us to say status. Leo, having nothing better to do, said.
“Status”
Status
Name: Leon Byrn
Race: Fire Djinn
Rank: Initiation
Class: N/A
Dark Matter: 10/10
Attributes
Power - 10
Vitality - 9
Cognition - 8
Elemental Control (RA) - 5
Free Points - 0
Skills
N/a
Leo immediately noticed the changes. For one his Rank was now “Initiation” whatever that meant. And for the other, his race now said “Fire Djinn” instead of the unawakend one before he got here. Trying to get more information he tried staring hard over his race, and to his surprise, another prompt appeared.
Djinns are an incredibly rare and unique race born of pure elements. Hence, each one is different. Each has different elemental capabilities depending on which elemental concept they were born out of. Beware young djinn, as you awaken, you will take on more characteristics of your element.
Even though the prompt was relatively bare bones, Leo thought his race sounded pretty badass. Aside from the vague warning about taking on more elemental characteristics. Whatever that meant. Before Leo had a chance to dig for more information, a green pixie started speaking.
“I will explain the basics of the status page. Stats are one of the main ways to power. Power influences your physical strength, and/or your magical prowess depending on your class. Vitality is how tough your skin is, and how hard it is to kill you. Finally, Cognition is how fast your processing speed is, and by extension, how fast you are as well. Dark matter is the energy of the world, and you can manipulate it to perform skills, spells, and other phenomena. Each level gives you a bit more dark matter, although you can increase your capacity by meditating and drawing it into yourself. There are Ranks of power in the multiverse and they go as follows: Beginner, Pawn, Heavens Knight, Spirit Slame, Dark Core, Conqueror, King, Demigod, and finally, Mythic. Any questions so far?” The pixie ended by looking around at everyone. Someone raised their hand and the pixie nodded at them to continue.
“You didn’t mention the Initiation Rank, what does it mean?” The speaker's voice was a baritone rumble, like two rocks grinding in the big man's throat.
“The Initiation Rank is the lowest of the low, and only obtainable by being initiated. Due to this, you will not be able to leave this town until you have reached level 10 and ranked to Beginner.” The Pixie replied with a predatory smile before stepping back and letting the cotton candy pixie take the lead.
“Onto levels and classes. You will not be able to level until you have acquired a class. Classes can be acquired through class tomes or fighting prowess. Now, you will go to find a group and take down a beast. Or do it alone, we don’t care.” The pixie smiled, showing off its many sharp teeth. All the people gathered around the fountain collectively took a step back and started whispering to each other. Leo caught snippets of
“Did it just say “
“Monsters?”
"Yeah, I think “
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“Is this for real?” and other stuff along those lines. Feeling like he should try to find a group; Leo went up to a group and introduced himself.
“Hi, name’s Leo, are you guys interested in forming a group?” Leo held out his hand to them and smiled. Instead, he got looks of confusion, and was that… fear? Were they scared of him? Why?
A girl, –she couldn’t have been older than 16– asked suddenly.
“What are you?”
“What do you mean?” Leo asked, very confused at this point.
“I mean, what are you? You’re clearly not human.” the girl responded flatly.
“Huh? What do you mean, of course I'm hu-” Leo cut himself off as he remembered that he wasn't, in fact, a human.
“I'm a Djinn. It’s a race apparently born from the elements” Leo corrected with a shrug.
“Have you even looked at yourself recently? A blind man could tell you're not human!” a voice piped up from the back of the group. Leo was starting to get annoyed and let his hand drop. First, he had been teleported to a black nothingness where he had experienced the worst eternity of his life. Then he came here, not knowing what the hell was going on, and now people were judging him based on his skin color and some lines on his arms? He was done.
“You know what, I'll just do it myself!” Leo walked quickly out of the town, and into the woods surrounding it.
< — >
After 5 minutes had passed since he entered the forest, he wondered if he shouldn’t have asked the pixies what he was looking for. A few minutes later, however, he heard rustling in the bushes ahead. Crouching down, Leo crept forward until he could peek through the bushes at the creature. The thing was a boar the size of a large pony, its tusks were the size of short swords, and as it plodded forwards, it made a heavy thump, thump, thump sound, speaking to how heavy the thing was. Leo was at a loss for how to beat this thing. “It's hide has to be thick enough to stop a stick from doing much damage. Maybe a rock could work? Yeah. let’s try that. Momentum would help too. I could climb a tree.” Leo narrowed his eyes as he thought, and looked up at the surrounding trees, gauging how climbable they were. He found a good tree, and groaned softly as he saw where it was. On the exact opposite side of the boar's clearing. Leo searched the ground for a suitable rock and found a good candidate under the bush he was peeking through. It was shaped like a teardrop, and came to a jagged, broken point. Leo took a deep, slow breath and started slowly walking towards the tree. It took the better part of 5 minutes to work his way across the small 10 foot clearing. Finally reaching the tree, Leon circled to the back, and started to slowly climb the tree, using the rock as an improvised climbing pick, the ascent was slow, but smooth. “Thank you for going to the gym regularly pre-integration self!” Leon thought to himself as he made it to the first branch relatively easily. “Now comes the hard part” Leo crouched onto the branch about 12 feet above the ground and waited for the perfect moment to strike. Patience had never been Leo’s strong suit, so 10 minutes of intense waiting later saw Leo jittery with anticipation as he finally saw his moment. The boar passed by underneath his branch completely unaware. Leo jumped off the branch, rock poised to strike like a scorpion's tail. Unfortunately, Leo was no physics nerd, and had misjudged the trajectory of his jump. The fact wasn’t helped by the boar having been alerted from the tree rustling, it darted forward faster than Leo had thought possible for a creature its weight, and thus Leo missed the beast's head by quite a bit. Landing hard on the boar’s back, all the air rushed out of his lungs with an “oomph!”. The boar squealed in surprise and started to buck, but Leo straddled the boars back as he raised the rock to strike. He brought it down on the boar's back, only for it to dig in a few inches before skipping off something hard and unyielding. Reverberations spread up into his hands and he felt the rock’s sharp tip crunch as it impacted.
“Shit!” Leo yelled as he was forcefully flung from the boar’s back and with another woosh of air, found himself short of breath for the second time in as many minutes. Leo pushed himself to his feet and was immediately skewered through his shoulder as the boar charged him, snorting, screaming, Leo grabbed the tusk protruding through his shoulder, and pulled the tusk through the other side with a spurt of blood. Promptly throwing up from the pain, Leo proceeded to hammer the boar's face with the stone. It squealed in his face, frothing at the mouth with fury and pain as he jabbed out one of its eyes. Raising its head, the boar thrashed him from side to side, before throwing him against a tree with a crack.
“Should… have seen that…coming” Leo hissed as he fought unconsciousness. Biting his tongue hard enough to draw blood, he tried to focus through the haze of blood loss and stand up. His legs gave out halfway through and Leo screamed again as his shoulder was jarred. The boar started a charge, and Leo knew this would be the final one. He was too weak to do anything about it. But no. Leo refused to die like this, belly up to some overgrown pig. Snarling in rage, Leo roared a challenge as he remembered the pixies talking about the dark matter in their bodies, and reached for something, anything. Suddenly, the lines on his arms blazed as he found something inside himself. Vapor, flowing through his body in looping whirls. Leo instinctually channeled it through his arms, a burning lance of fire spearing out towards the boar. The boar screamed in pain as the lance hit it, its skin char broiling and going up in flames like dry tinder, its one remaining eye popping from the heat. The boar stumbled away, still screaming as the burns on its body continued to smolder. A lot of the vapor had been used up, but not all. Channeling the rest into his arms like before, Leo launched another spear of flames at the overgrown pig, and this time, the pig collapsed and didn't get up.
“N-nice” Leo muttered before fading into the numbing release of unconsciousness.
< – >
Leo awoke sometime later, with the smell of charred meat thick in the air. Wrinkling his nose, Leo sat up with a groan and looked around for more threats – the fight had made a lot of noise after all –but there was nothing. Standing up, Leo looked at his shoulder, which was still hurting, but not much. The wound had stopped bleeding, but still had a long way to being healed. Noticing a red dot in the corner of his vision, he tried to blink it away, but to no avail. When he focused on it however, a prompt appeared spilled across his vision.
< You Have 2 Class Choices Available, Do You Wish To Proceed?>
Excitement bubbling in his gut, all lingering traces of the whole experience being a dream disappeared.
“Hell yes I want a class!” Leo cheered.
While very unskilled in manipulation, your talent for fire cannot be denied. Pyromancers are a type of mage class specialized in the manipulation of fire. Their special talents give them higher Dark Matter per level, and bonus Dark Matter cultivation. This class specializes in high damage output and crowd control, but very low durability and sustain damage.
+3 DM Per Lvl +5 free points per lvl Power = magical strength
While not exactly adept, you have shown yourself willing to fight up close and personal with smaller weapons, your fists, or fire magic. The Flaming Pugilist class is an up-close and personal type class focused on burst damage and durability, but low sustained damage and crowd control. Provides slightly above average dark matter per level, and has no change in Dark Matter Cultivation
+1 DM Per lvl +7 free points per lvl Power = ½ Physical
½ Magical
Ignoring the jabs about his lack of skill, Leo considered his options. On one hand, he really didn’t want to get close to enemies anymore, but on the other Pyromancer didn’t seem that good to him. Especially since glass cannon mage classes in games always needed a party to be effective, and it was shaping up to be a lonely ride for a little while because of his race. Also, being a glass cannon was usually very tedious, and being able to take a hit was very important. So, he picked the Pugilist.
<+9 DM +21 Free Points>
Leo promptly opened his status and distributed his points. He hadn’t liked how easily the boar had run him through, so 5 points into vitality. Next was 7 points into cognition, and the last 9 into power. Muscle ripples and condensed, a feeling of euphoria spread through his body, tingling along his nerve endings and the world seemed to slow down. He felt like he could climb a mountain, kill a dragon, run so fast he cou- and then the feeling stopped all at once.
Status
Name: Leon Byrn
Race: Fire Djinn
Rank: Initiation
Class: Flaming Pugilist (Rare) Lvl. 3
Dark Matter: 3/19
Attributes
Power - 19
Vitality - 14
Cognition - 15
Elemental Control (RA) - 5
Free Points - 0
Skills
Flame Creation (Racial/Unique)
Fire Punch (Class/Common)
“Dammmnnnn” Leo drew out the word “I want to level up mow now, is this what an addict feels like on a high? I totally get it now, that felt great!” Leo looked around one last time, and decided to test his new speed back to the town. He sped off towards the town, the dying light of the sun fading behind him.