Being unconscious and getting actual rest are not at all the same thing. Least of all when you are somehow pseudo aware of yourself even when you really shouldn’t be - because of the aforementioned unconsciousness. It wasn’t like I was aware of what was going on around me. Nor was I particularly aware of where I was. Rather, it was like there was an unseen force demanding my utmost attention, even if it had to bend the rules of reality to make it so. Thus, the entire time I had been unconscious, I had been staring at two little, blue, windows.
Condition: Concussed Duration: 0:9m:31s
Please select a class to place your level in:
Warrior
Mage
Thief
Hunter
Paladin-
The list went on and on like that. Dozens, possibly hundreds of classes, ranging from what I would consider fairly generic all the way up to the clearly and blatantly extravagant.
I would have probably paid more attention to figuring that out, because even I could understand that it would probably be important later - but I was much more concerned with the window that hovered just above the class selection one. Because if I was both Concussed and Unconscious, did that mean I was liable to go into a coma? What was the timer for? Was that how long the condition would last, or was something else going to happen afterward - like the aforementioned coma.
It was this way that I found out that by focusing on the words in one of the windows, I could get details on them. It was kind of uncomfortable to manage - because it wasn’t a trivial amount of focus we were talking about here, there was no chance of doing this by mistake - but ultimately I had managed it, if only for lack of anything else to focus on.
And really, my options were either to mess with my new powers, or panic - and I was doing my best not to think about all the reasons I should probably be panicking right now.
Thus, by focusing on the word ‘Concussed’ I got this;
Condition: Concussed
Effects: -2 Intelligence, -2 Dexterity
I had several problems with this. For one, there was absolutely no mention of my present state of being in there - which was worrying, because I still didn’t know if I was going to wake up or if I was dead or something.
I mean yes, I get that it was incredibly unlikely, but hovering in a black void at the center of your own mind while a bunch of video game windows flickered in front of you wasn’t exactly standard fare for me. I had no frame of reference for what was going on.
All I could do was eyeball the timer next to the condition and hope against hope that when it ran out, I would wake up.
I could have just spent the entire ten minute period staring at the timer. Truthfully, I should have spent the entire time doing that. The Concussed condition plainly told me that it lowered my intelligence, which meant that - assuming I could trust it, and I really did have ‘video game’ powers - any decision I made right now was almost guaranteed to be impaired.
Unfortunately, knowing you are impaired doesn’t mean you stop being impaired, and only rarely stops an impaired person from making dumb decisions.
Which is why I got bored of staring at the timer and started using my newfound ability to interact with the interface of my powers - even if only slightly - to start reading about the different classes.
I skipped Warrior and anything that looked like it focused exclusively on using a weapon or being in melee out of hand. It wasn’t that I held no interest in the concept - I just knew there was no point. I lived in a world where people regularly threw cars at each other. Ye old knight in shining army had nothing on that, no matter how good I got at it. The first thing I looked at was the ‘Mage’ class which proved to be… not especially helpful.
Class: Mage
Description: Wields an improved mana pool and ranged spells to deal damage.
Accept / Decline
And that was it. No list of skills. No indication of what stats they gave me… or even used. Not that I knew if I had stats in the first place. Nothing. Just a simple one line description. If I was awake and had a face to emote with, I would be scowling angrily right now. Now even more agitated than my ongoing near death experience had already made me, I rapidly flipped through several more class descriptions.
Class: Channeler
Description: Wields an improved mana pool and buff spells to-
Accept / Decline
Class: Witch
Description: Wields an improved-
Accept / Decline
Class: Warlock
Description: Wields-
Accept / Decline
They… they were literally all like that. Every single class that looked even tangentially related to magic. Every single description boiled down to ‘has more mana’ and a generic description of the type of spells they cast. It was ludicrous. If I was playing an actual video game I’d have gone to look up a guide immediately because making a decision with this little information was a joke.
Unfortunately this wasn’t a game, and I doubted there was a manual describing my specific situation just laying around.
In a fit of desperation, I backtracked to look through some of the classes I had intentionally skipped before this, hoping for something - anything that could help me make some kind of decision here.
Class: Warrior
Description: Wields weapons expertly in order to deal physical damage to opponents.
Accept / Decline
‘God fucking dammit.’ I cursed silently to myself - not actually having a mouth or body in the endless void to curse or scream with. By the five minute mark, I had largely given up on finding hidden meaning in any of my options and was just browsing through the list. If the descriptions of some of these classes were better I would have described it as an inhuman amount of choice for a normal game.
Since I couldn’t tell the difference between any given class of a particular type, it was mostly just anxiety inducing. At a certain point, I just started browsing through them to see if I could find one that didn’t have the same boilerplate description as all the others.
And to my surprise, I did. It just… wasn’t a class I actually wanted to choose.
Class: Monk
Description: Perfect the Mind, Body, and Spirit in order to wield them against opponents.
Accept / Decline
Now, to be clear, this was clearly just as unhelpful as all the others. In fact, it was more unhelpful than the others, because I had no idea what the hell ‘Perfect the Mind, Body, and Spirit’ meant in this context.
However, I had a gut feeling that this was the class for me. The gamer in me naturally drifted towards the class, purely because out of the dozens of options I had browsed through, this one was the most unique sounding - despite its simple name.
And here was where the fact that I was impaired came in - because rather than keep that in mind while I continued to browse, what with still having a couple of minutes left before I learned my ultimate fate, I instead simply directed my attention to the hovering ‘Accept’ button and focused on it.
Congratulations! You are now a Level One [Monk]!
You have learned the Class Skill: Block!
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Description: While blocking, reduce incoming damage in the direction you are facing by 25%
You have an open Attunement Slot! Please select an Attunement:
Fire
Water
Earth
Air
Summoning
Psychic
Shadow-
I stared blankly at the skill I had gotten - my only skill. Objectively, anything based on percentages was guaranteed to be good in a video game. They would be as good at level one as they would be at level one hundred. The problem was, this particular skill wasn’t altogether very useful for me. Some people might not think so, but I was feeling thoroughly ripped off. To me it would have made a lot more sense to get an attack ability instead of this.
Still, there was some hope. As soon as I had chosen a class, two little colored bars had appeared in the corner of my vision, that I could expand if I focused on them. One was red, and the other was yellow. The red one was nearly empty, and the yellow one was full.
Health: 3/100
Ki: 10/10
The fact that my health bar still had Health in it was good - because it meant I probably wasn’t going to die. The fact that it was almost empty made it clear that the previous fact wasn’t a guarantee.
Then there was this… Attunement thing. It had another stupidly long list of things under it, some of them obscure - like whatever the hell Genesis was - and some obvious - like Fire. I assumed this was a sort of… subclass that would dictate how my other selections would work - which would explain why all choosing Monk got me was access to my health bar and a single skill.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to examine any of them, because at that exact moment my Concussed condition ended, and I found myself suddenly blink wildly awake, with my heart hammering in my chest and the sounds of things exploding in the distance sending vibrations rattling through the floor.
The… floor that I was laying down on.
Shaking my head once, I blinked several times without actually getting up, my eyes open but my mind not really processing anything I was looking at.
Which was probably good - because what I was looking at was a fist sized pinkish leech. It was just sort of sitting on the floor an inch from my face, with its eyeless head pointed straight at me.
“Gah!” I barked in surprise when it reared back and hissed at me, haphazardly flailing one of my arms in its direction.
Something weird happened then.
My haphazard flailing… changed somehow, and the arm I had been trying to feebly slap the creature away with subtly repositioned itself without my input, before slamming a closed fist down on the thing so hard that the linoleum floors gave off a sound like someone had just dropped a fifty six kilogram bag of concrete on it from a great height.
Yes I know exactly what that sounds like. The only elaboration I can provide is to say that sometimes, work is slow.
Regardless, the sudden appearance of the small monster had me scrambling upright and looking around myself in terror, expecting to be either surrounded by more leeches, or worse, mind controlled coworkers.
I found my coworkers, but none of them were conscious. They were all lying on the ground in neat little rows, breathing lightly and otherwise looking like they were sleeping peacefully. Upon closer examination, I was the only one not part of that formation, having been sprawled out on the ground from the blow to my head.
‘Did he think he killed me and didn’t bother to finish me off?’ I wondered, my body still tense from anxiety and distress. Honestly, I felt generally like shit. Not in any specific way - I wasn’t bruised or cut anywhere - but even still, I could feel myself on death's door.
A quick look at my health bar told me that I had regenerated a single point of health - to 4 points total - and I frowned, wondering if my general health was reflected in the health bar, or if it was the other way around. If so, would passive regeneration be enough to fully heal me, or would I need to go to a hospital?
I didn’t have long to ponder this particular question, because the windows - the extra reinforced ones that face the outside of the building - exploded inward in a burst of air, admitting a woman wearing a dark purple bodysuit, steel toed boots that looked stylized for her costume, and a voluminous hood that perfectly hid every part of her face but the dull blue glow of her eyes. This woman was one of the premiere heroes in the world right now - and thus, I recognized her immediately as Breakdown. Also, I was a single adult male, and all Metahumans were preternaturally fit, while simultaneously wearing very skin tight outfits.
So sue me.
Breakdown was one of the most common types of Metahumans - she was strong, tough, and had a little extra to make her unique. The internet liked to colloquially refer to these types of Metahumans as Bricks with a Trick.
It was a good trick though. Breakdown could basically disintegrate anything in an unknown radius around herself. It’d be a terrifying ability if she wasn’t a good guy, but that - coupled with her long time membership with the national level Ultra team - meant that more than anything else I was desperately relieved to see her stomp into the room.
“Oh thank fuck. Adrenaline is here and-” I started to babble incoherently at her, taking a step forward only for her head to snap towards me like a cobra locking on to a mouse, freezing me immediately in place with the sudden sensation that I would absolutely die if I took another step towards her.
Then the sensation retreated, and she took one look at me, grunted something I didn’t quite catch, then waved a hand at me in what I thought was a greeting.
I was going to to take another step towards her then - I don’t really know why, except that my mind had automatically associated her with ‘safety’ - when someone from outside the building launched themselves through the window, drop kicking Breakdown so hard she hurtled away from me and through the brick wall separating the break room from the rest of the store.
“That ought to keep her busy for a minute. Lots of people inside to fight. How are you doing buddy?” Adrenalines particularly pleasant sounding drawl emitted from the mouth of Aiden - the teenager whose job was to make sure no garbage ended up in the parking lot outside. Unlike the previous Adrenaline minion I had come across, Aiden was covered in leeches. It wasn’t just one or two of the things - they were practically crawling over him like a second layer of skin. The squelching sound the things made as they moved and hissed at each other was nausea inducing, and I nearly vomited before it dawned on me exactly how screwed I was at this particular moment.
Sure Breakdown was here, and yeah she was basically like, top ten when it came to local heroes - but she had been blasted away by a single minion, of which there were dozens inside the store. She was definitely going to be too busy to help my dumbass survive.
“Looks like you’re having kind of a panic attack there.” Adrenaline noted, pushing Aidens body upright and taking a step toward me, and looking at him, I got the same ‘you will absolutely die’ feeling I got from Breakdown - only this time it didn’t go away.
I glanced at my health. I was up to five points out of one hundred. I was fairly certain a love tap would murder me right now. I glanced back at the leech covered Aiden. I had to hold him off long enough for Breakdown to handle things, without getting touched by the guy. The Block skill wouldn’t help me here because even reduced by twenty five percent, I was positive he could end me in one blow.
So what were my options?
Instantly, my eyes snapped to the still open window hovering in front of me - it had actually conveniently moved out of my field of view while all this was going on, and returned only when I chose to focus on it again. Without thinking - I was doing a lot of that recently - I scrolled to the first option on the Attunements list that I felt met my criteria for not dying.
Attunement: Summoning
Description: Utilize summoned minions to do battle.
Accept / Decline
Without hesitation, I mentally hit the Accept button, and was rewarded with more notifications.
Congratulations! You are now Attuned to [Summoning] Magic! Attuning [Summing] to [Monk]!
You have learned the Spell: Summon Terracotta Soldier
Description: Summons a Single Terracotta Soldier to fight on your behalf. Terracotta Soldier’s abilities are based on your Wisdom.
I didn’t bother to actually read any of it mind you. I was - in that moment - overwhelmed by fear, anxiety, and to a lesser extent, single minded focus. I don’t know how I knew how to activate the Summon Terracotta Soldier spell - but I just did, and I did so the exact moment I acquired the ability, willing my own minion into being between myself and the leech covered Aiden, already pre-loaded with orders to prevent the minion from reaching me.
I wasn’t sure how smart the thing was, and I had no idea how I knew that I could just think at it to direct it, but again I was firmly in the realm of panic response at this point so none of that occurred to, or even really mattered to me at that exact moment.
Instead, as the stone soldier, chiselled to look as though it was wearing a stone cuirass, and wielding a stone sword, faded into existence, I could only think of one thing. The only possible way I was going to survive any of this.
I was going to have to cheese the boss fight.