Chapter 1. Unaliving
19 Year old Zachary did what many modern humans do every day, he took a shower. It was in their nature to stay clean and as technology and science advanced, more and more, dirt was found. Bacteria and viruses, of good and bad nature, dead skin tissue inhibiting normal skin functions.
They invented soap to fight these miniature warriors and get rid of the debris, and the endless war of hygiene began. Zachary was a master of hygiene, rubbing and scrubbing every nook and cranny of his body until the last soldier of dirtiness fell to the equivalent of a nuclear missile to organic tissue, alkali.
After a hard day of being an unproductive member of society, he felt like he deserved to feel clean. Such a blissful reward was worthy to his hour long, mind numbing cat video binge.
Engaging the last sequence of operation hygiene, he turned off the hot water and only cold water left the showerhead. He braced himself and stepped into the unnaturally cold water.
It seems like it was too cold, since his metabolism suddenly collapsed by the sudden switch from hot to cold and his legs buckled under his own weight. A misplaced step forward and a futile attempt to regain balance landed him on the wet and slopped part of the bathtub, centripetal force and gravity working in tandem against him. Then came the calculated impact, orchestrated by physics itself.
Since his eyes were still closed only his nervous system and pain receptors gave him any indication of how, or rather where he landed. And it wasn’t good.
Thoughts being interrupted by a constant pulse of pain from his forehead indicated that he hit his head against the metal tap protruding from the tiled bathroom wall. That wasn’t good, if the burning heat still coming through the cold water around his forehead was any indication he was bleeding.
But it didn’t matter, Zachary felt at peace, he knew he had to do something about this situation. But it also didn’t matter. He felt warm, cozy and tranquil, suddenly having the urge to sleep.
WAKE UP!!!
Zachary’s eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his…. no wait, wrong novel. It felt like electricity coursed through his veins and Zachary jolted awake, a last attempt to save himself. His torso shot upwards.
It did not go unnoticed how close his head passed the heinous tap still protruding from the wall. His head pulsing with pain at the sudden change in relative position. Regaining some mental faculty, he found himself staring at a weird decorated blue panel floating in front his face. Written on it was something his mind could not decode before his body failed him yet again, the sudden shock drained by the complex surprise in front of him. He gave in to the sensation and fell back yet again, expecting his head to hit the bathtub floor hard and the weird panel moving out of sight.
Sharp pain erupted from the back of his head as time slowed down and his mind pieced together what just happened.
“Ah… the tap…..” What’s with that damn blue thing anyway?
A last ditch effort of his brain analyzed the weird panel still hovering where his nose was pointed at, towards the ceiling, and then his body assumed control and moved into emergency mode, shutting down unnecessary bodily functions, slowing down his heart rate, and increasing blood around his lungs and his brain. The last thing he remembered was a deep breath when his body decided his consciousness counted as “unnecessary”.
And that was the pitiful life of Zachary Rubistone, death by cold shock, hypothermia, brain trauma, skull fractures and quite a handful of health problems unknown to the boy. It ended in a pitiful death, unnaturally cold water hitting his bare corpse.
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[Subject XXX Status: Vital Status: Critical. Request Emergency Protocol of Subject XXX.]
[Denied]
[Subject XXX Advanced Status. Vitals: Critical. Bodily Function: Restricted. Mental Function: Impeded. Estimated ToD: 73541054160 Oscillations. I Repeat, Request Emergency Protocol of Subject XXX.]
[Denied]
[Request Emergency Protocol]
[Denied]
[Initiate Emergency Protocol]
[Operator XXX, cease unauthorized execution of Emergency Protocol immediately!]
[Denied]
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“Honey, food is ready! Stop playing games and let’s eat.” Zachary heard his mother shouting from the kitchen, but he needed just one more second.
“Kick, Smash, Special, common and now.. DOWN SMASH!!! YEAAAAH.”
Jumping up and down in excitement because he finally beat the boss, he dropped the controller on his bed and ran out of his room. To the left, through the hallway, down the stairs, around 180 degrees and straight ahead. All in a full sprint clinging to all objects to swing around the corner and narrowly miss furniture.
“Zachary, no running in the house! Even if its your birthday, you could still hurt yourself.”
Coming to a halt in a slide he looked his mother in the eyes, tilting his head a bit.
She was a beautiful petite women with teddy bear black eyes, and shoulder length black hair.
He couldn’t help but feel bad at the worried look his mother had, the same one she always has when he jumps down the stairs.
“Sorry mom.” he apologized with a slight bow.
“Ok, come on, sit down, I made your favorite meal today. Pancakes!” she said, lifting the steaming, heavy plate full of delicious pancakes high in the air.
Jumping in excitement he dashed to his chair and his mother just giggled, refraining from lecturing him again, it was his birthday after all. While placing the steaming pancake plate in the middle of the table she grinned in return to his own ecstatic grin.
A few strong but confident knocks on the door jolted him and her out of their pancake dreams, for him it was even more excitement erupting as the only possibility came to mind. It was Dad!
Yet for his mother it was a worried look on her face, he didn‘t understand.
“Let me get that honey, okay?”, the worried look suddenly melted from her face, turning into a warm and gentle smile.
“Okay.”, he drooped and refocused on his pancakes.
His mother stepped around the corner of the kitchen and to the front door.
A sudden scream erupted at the front door, obviously originating from his mother, and a moment later he sprang to his feet and ran to the front door. What met him was an inhuman abomination. It was nothing more than a torso, surrounded by tentacles. On the front side it had a dozen human faces, split in the middle by visible, inhuman teeth. All the faces inaudibly screaming in agony.
Behind the monstrosity stood an army of small penile shaped humanoids, all the same height as him and carrying human arms as weapons.
The torso creature lifted his mother, raising her atop the creature as the giant maw split the torso in half. The last thing that happened was mother being torn in half.
“MOOOOOM.” Zachary shouted. One hand raised in front of him, as if to get a hold of something. “Just a nightmare, calm down Zachary, juuust a nightmare.” he murmured to no one in particular, reassuring anyone but himself.
To his surprise someone answered, or rather his voiced echoed off the walls, since he found himself in a cave. A huge circular cave with nothing but void everywhere, beside the pedestal he was currently sitting on, right in the middle of the huge room. Surrounding him was nothing but void, pure black emptiness. Nothing but his platform standing out.
That was enough reason for panic, and his body seemed to agree, since his heart rate skyrocketed and he panically layed down and grabbed ahold of anything he could. Which meant he grabbed the edges of his small and circular pedestal.
“Shouldn’t i be in a hospital?!?” he truly wondered. Didn’t he slip and hit his head twice against the shower tap, and yet he felt no pain or hole when he touched his fore and the backside of his head.
Then an unfamiliar, yet familiar blue panel appeared in front of him, almost sending him sprawling into the void by his sudden reaction to this weird object. It was a flying, transparent and blue shining panel. Around the blue panel were golden flowers, as if to decorate the weird, floating panel.
“Weird aesthetics but i dig it.”
Evidently something was written on it but it was nothing but mumbo jumbo.
“Hagurt zaha baguga gimbha saya.” yeah, about right. They were just strange, half resembling letters, blue shining runes, suspiciously resembling RPG like runes or enchantments.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Huh. Weird. Touching the floating panel resulted in something resembling a thousand knives and a hundred taser’s entering his body, electricity coursing through his veins. Zachary’s body exploded in a spray of meat and I felt my….
No, jokes aside. Nothing happened, besides his finger passing through the holographic-like thing, it was as if nothing was even there. Besides the light emanating from it, illuminating his fingers.
Usually this was the part where panic and existential dread would come to influence his reasoning and make him panic, but no such emotions occurred. It was more like he was curious and thirsting to know what the actual duck is going on.
Zachary just pushed the thoughts aside, not needing such contemplation at the moment. He was naked and standing atop a weird stone platform with a blue window in front of him.
He actually contemplated if he should jump down the void, but it was reckless and unreasonable and he continued to think.
The ideas were… non existential actually. The only thing he could do was try to decipher what this panel was saying.
“Ok, this is weird, so I am gonna be weird. TRANSLATE MYSTERIOUS PANEL!”
It was ineffective.
Next he put his hand in front of it and focused, reaching into his mana core, located somewhere around his solar plexus, and executing a complex, mandala like pattern in his body, orchestrating perfectly calculated and organic motions with finesse. Mana moved troughout his entire body and he sent it through his arm and towards his open palm. There it coalesced and was violently pushed out of his palm and hit the panel.
It was ineffective.
“Man even my chuunibyou prowess are not strong enough.” In actuality, it was just a ruse. Just a fool's errand to try to salvage an already unbelievable situation. And yet his fooleries showed results.
The runes on the blue panel coincidently shifted and twisted, and the end result was a clearly latin alphabet, resembling understandable words.
Welcome to the tutorial.
“That’s it?!?!?!!!!”, Zachary shouted in fury. He hoped he got some special flying powers or something to help him out of this unbelievable situation. But all he got was a welcoming?
Why did the text even decide to change for him now? he wondered. It was strange. He looked at it for 20 minutes and it decided to translate now, as if his lunacies did something? He dismissed the thought and refocused on his current task, getting the hell away from this pedestal. The blue panel suddenly turned into smoke, leaving the pedestal a bit darker than before.
Now that he noticed, it seems like the area had an unnatural light source, evenly covering the pedestal he stood on. He didn’t need the distraction about physic’s defying light sources right now and focused on what mattered.
He already had plenty of ideas, or rather two. One he dismissed as a last resort as the obvious choice. And the other was just randomly trying everything that came to mind for the next 3 days, until he starved or rather thirsted to death. Where he would take a shit and pee was not the problem, although it could inhibit or rather sabotage his dismissed plan.
Nevermind , he decided to first recite random words, like status, info, character sheet, hopefully shining some light on his bizarre situation. A Tutorial was already a hint of what could be going on, so why not character sheets. When that ended up nowhere, he recited a few line of his recent novel’s. The half remembered sections ended in no fruition. Nothing happened and frustration welled inside of him, his emergency plan seemed a better idea every moment that passed. Finally he had enough and shouted one word in pure frustration.
“Help!”
And help it did. A whole plethora of words came into the same decorated, blue panel he knew from the sad welcoming. To be precise those were three words. Habtgul, Zibare and Jejetikle.
Unpredictable and unfair words that no fucking human would ever find out as one lonesome person. he thought.
Zachary was furious at these stupid, alien words but he dismissed such emotions and started recite the first word. Habtgul.
“Habtgul.”
And suddenly the word made sense. IT WAS FUCKING STATUS?!?!?!?!?
Yes, Habtgul was status he realized.
Zachary Rubistoned
Restricted
Class
Restricted
Stats
Restricted
MAS
Restricted
#*´?! Notifications
“I’m fucking restricted?” It made no sense. He finally got answers and now they blatantly restricted him from answers. What the fuck?
Calm down. He told himself, he needed to figure this out and there were still two words to go. So the tested everything he could think of, asking for more information, advanced statistics, histories, battle plans, replays, classes, shops. Everything even closely connected to a status screen, but nothing worked. He expected that at least 2 of these words were behind cryptic, alien languages and he had to unlock these first. So after trying everything he could think of, which was probably not everything, thats what he did.
“Zibare!”, and zibare it was. It was help. Yes. Help. It was the thing he said to get help, and he got it. So why did help work but not status? It was confusing, it made no sense. Why would reciting help work and why not status? He couldn’t figure it out, so it didn’t matter at the moment and he tried Jejetikle the most interesting sounding word so far.
“Jejetikle!”
[Jump down, water awaits you. Move fast. 3 left.]
Zachary was flabbergasted, he figured it was some kind of help for the tutorial but it almost felt like it was sentient. The weird boxes translated to his own inner voice in his head and it read it like a command. Scary!
But he did not yet obey the command, it was not time yet. Maybe he could use the same “ability” again, but it was too risky to waste 3 more uses, probably, on this guide-like ability. It could just output the same message for all he knew. So he yet again contemplated what to do with this information. Hopefully he had a safe way out, although water did not equal a safe jump. If it was above 30 meters it was like hitting concrete. Not an optional solution he figured.
Yet he had nothing else to try. He was naked, in a cave with nothing but a pedestal just wide enough for him to spread out like a starfish. But he didn’t give up thinking just yet. The least he could do is decipher what the last part of the mysterious message was, and so he did.
Maybe it meant he had little time in this “tutorial”, or he had to move fast once he hit water, for all he knew a giant water-drake was waiting there for a midnight snack. Or it meant he had to abuse the situation and move fast, maybe he wasn’t the only one in this tutorial. Or it could indicate his slow movement speed, since he wasn’t the fastest sprinter in his school. The last one was just selfdeprecation but it didn’t matter. For all he knew all of them were true and he actually had to move fast, so no dwelling around until he died by dehydration.
Ok, no better time than the present! So he braced himself and jumpe……
“Wait a second! There was a lot more to do than just jump!” he snapped his finger, a light bulb illuminating above his head. Yes! Physic is my nemesis and yet i can abuse it!
So he tried to look for some rocks on or pebbles on his pedestal but found none. Next he tried to pee down but he didnt feel like peeing right now. He actually felt quite thirsty. Then the last idea came to mind, Human Water Magic.
Accumulating his inner power and focusing it on his mouth, he prepared the biggest spit ball he could handle and prepared for the attack. Dry as his mouth was, enough spit combined into quite a lot of spit and he prepared himself for a perfectly spherical ball of spit. Yeah sometimes i disgust myself.
Operation Spitball launched and he quietly waited for a small but definite sound of water hitting water.
A few seconds later, *Blop*. Touchdown!
It took just a few seconds, so it should be safe. But he could never know for sure. The response was nothing but silence, so he figured there was no giant man eating fish down there. Hopefully.
With nothing else to do he jumped. Yes, it was stupid but why not. Subconsciously he still thought he was in an overly lucid dream so death wasn’t on his mind. What was on his mind though was the experience itself, as lucid as it was there was no denial it would hurt.
Just three seconds of gravity deprived fumbling he hit the water. To his surprise it felt soft and refreshing, and without a second thought he swallowed a mouthful of water. Swimming up to he swallowed another load of water, tasting the sweet taste of clean mineral water, probably untouched for centuries. Climbing out the lake wasn’t as easy as he imagined, the edge was around 40 centimerers above the water and it took a serious amount of physical strain to climb out.
The moment zachary reached the top he laid on his back and relaxed for a moment. Just the mental strain of hoping to survive exhausted him. Not to mention the whole teleported to a “tutorial” thing, which he did not forget. It was exhausting and he needed a moment to rest now that his plan was successfully executed. But his moment of rest was short-lived when a small but noticeable shaking jolked him out of the powernap.
A second later the water noticeably bubbled up and zach instantly shot to his feet, adrenalin pumping through every beat of his heart. After a shocking moment silence met the stressing atmosphere and he stood still with fist raised in front of his face. Then the silence was shattered by water splashing in a great fountain out of the pond opening that saved his live. When the water cleared, the being living inside the pond came into sight.
A giant, snake-like, quadruple headed snake. A hydra. It opened its maws and cried a painful roar of pity, easily transmitted through ear shattering sound. Then it focused its four heads toward zach and moved. He was already in a full sprint towards the edges of this particular cave, strangely illuminated by ,yet again, invisible light sources. But he didn’t care, he just ran. The hydras head audibly snapped behind him, but he didn’t dare to look back if he was out of range. He just ran. When the cave walls were just a few meters away, he noticed a previously invisible entry into the cave wall. Camouflaged by shadows of the edgy cave walls. A few meters before he reached the cave he allowed himself a look back since there were no further ear damaging roars. And there was nothing. The floor was visibly reflecting of the invisible light sources, since water was still forming small ponds in the uneven ground. But there was no four-headed snake the size of skyscrapers. Nor any other living being besides himself. But that was to be expected. There was no doubt in his mind that this was some kind of special being living around here and there were plenty of strong enemies around, just waiting to slay him.
Even worse, there were probably strong being around, since there is no way that this was a starter area in this supposed tutorial, and the only thing that would call this area their hunting ground was this insane hydra-snake and strong enemies daring to come close to it. But not close enough to actually face the beast.
It eluded zach that he was quite stoic in such a dire and crazy circumstance, but it didn't matter.
Now that he thought about it, the floor was unusually wet. There were no obvious ponds of water around, but even the cave walls around the strange and hidden cave entry were bespeckled with small water droplets. Even the high up ceiling shined with all colours on the spectrum, evidently pointing at the hydra splashing out of the water, strong enough to reach the cave ceiling. Or worse spray water out of one of the heads… A Depressing thought he immediately suppressed. It was time to check out the cave, and so he did.