Zarian was about to gather his remaining darkness and try to escape away from the wild black portal. When he turned to check on Ariana, he found her stepping calmly through the chaos of twisting water, thrashing koi fish, and screaming people flying to what could be their doom.
Zarian shook his head at his ghostly little sister. What was she thinking? She should get away. Yet, she ignored what should be common sense in favor of getting up close to the portal.
Her braided pigtails wavered toward the swirling dark pit. So did the rest of her body, barely holding on to this side of the world.
What happened to ghostly little sisters when a void-like phenomenon ate them? Zarian didn’t want to find out.
“Ariana, what are you doing?!” Zarian shouted.
“Heading for the portal, Big Bro,” she said with a grave weight that was beyond her childish appearance. “We don’t belong in this weak, mundane world. We belong on the other side. At least for now.”
“What’s over there? How do you know that?!” Zarian watched a screaming mall shopper fly into the portal.
She disappeared with her shopping bags.
There in one moment.
Gone in the next.
Zarian’s heart was practically in his throat as he shouted himself hoarse. “The dreams didn’t tell us about what’s on the other side!”
Ariana turned back to him and smiled. “Let’s go on an adventure and see. It’s going to be okay. Just like always. Trust me.”
Zarian watched her, waiting to see if she would step into the portal and disappear. She didn’t. She waited patiently for him.
He was both relieved and horrified. He always wondered if Ariana was a weird break in his psyche that drugs and therapy could treat. If she was fake, then he was actually crazy, even with magic.
That would be devastating. They had thirteen years of laughter and tears, hard times and visceral excitement.
She was the only family he knew, and that familial bond was strong, like well-forged steel.
She’d been encouraging.
She’d been practically perfect.
She had to exist. If so, then there was another slight worry. Tiny. Infinitesimal, even.
He still had to ask while facing down an apocalyptic scenario.
“Ariana, you’re not a demon are you?” Zarian asked. “You didn’t, like, play a long game of getting me to this point, so I’ll doom Florida and the rest of world, right?”
She smiled at him, holding her silence. She looked lovely and bubbly like always. Zarian felt like he wanted to protect her instead of accusing her of apocalyptic evil.
More screaming people tumbled past him and Ariana. More blood leaked out of his body from the gunshot wound. He was getting more tired now. All the chaos, violence, and bad nutrition were draining.
“Fuck it.” Zarian dropped the dark spike wall from around him.
He didn’t bother regathering his fading darkness. That was going to be a pain to load up later.
Oh well, he had bigger concerns. Like getting lifted off his feet and yanked into a portal to the unknown.
The last thing he saw was Ariana’s upturned face as she watched him flip into the portal. The look on her face was slightly different. Just slightly.
Zarian’s concerns deepened. Because inside of Ariana’s eyes was a glint of crazy glee. Truly, they were family. They were crazy together.
He hit the portal. Everything went dark for him. And ultra weird. Like he was getting stretched out into the longest piece of human taffy without physically feeling it.
Time seemed to stop. Motion was a concept that didn’t exist in simple observable terms here. Space was infinite and finite.
He should be dead. Or at least unconscious. But he was still alive and aware.
His mind interpreted it all while unable to feel, speak, taste, hear, smell, or do anything. Most people would’ve found that hellish to endure, or they would’ve completely zonked out.
Zarian, however, found it normal. Once he put aside the panic and settled into the journey to the unknown, it even felt like a pleasant reprieve.
It helped that the journey was happening inside high quality darkness. The deepest and densest kind. Since it was his favorite element, he liked its crushing hold on him.
Better yet, he could sense the depths of this portal magic far better than before. There was more to it than just darkness. Like it had a few unique twists or ingredients to make it all possible.
What could all that be?
They felt … familiar. Natural. He kept trying to break it down, but the answers kept slipping out of reach. He was right on the cusp of grasping it all.
He snapped back into reality before he could unravel the secrets of the portal. He slammed chest first into a stone floor. Hard. The air whooshed out of his lungs.
His chin dribbled off the stone floor, whacking his jaw and the rest of his head with thumping pain. He was still bleeding from the gun wound inside his upper back. And he wasn’t alone.
Zarian heard other people shouting and screaming in front of him. He pushed up a little, blinking rapidly to clear his blurry vision.
A strong, desperate hand grabbed him by his bushy, tangled hair. The assaulter, a police officer, shoved Zarian’s face back into the stone floor, smashing his cheek. Then the officer pushed a hot pistol barrel into his face.
“What the fuck did you do? Where the hell are we?” shouted the cop, voice breaking.
Before Zarian could speak, the cop’s knee slammed down onto the small of Zarian’s back. The air he’d struggled to take in rushed back out.
Zarian sputtered and gasped. He tried to think as the cop screamed down at him while yanking even harder on his hair, his scalp burning.
Zarian wanted to say he had no idea where they were. He wanted to say he hadn’t meant for any of these complications.
He didn’t get the chance. He was still gasping for air when a strange thing occurred, popping up in his vision.
A blue box appeared in front of Zarian’s face. Like a notification. It even came with a soft ‘ding’ in the corner of his head. It wasn’t a sound that was heard by the ear. It was more internal, a part of his mind.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The blue notification read as if it came from a genderless and artificial speaker:
“Hello,” Zarian mumbled hoarsely.
Another notification popped over the welcoming one.
That was ominous. Shocking, even. Zarian’s mind felt like it was crawling and racing at the same time.
With a gun still to his face, he glanced past the cooling barrel and at the man holding him hostage. The panicked cop was staring at something in the air that only he could see.
Are we all seeing our own blue notification boxes?
Zarian wondered if all the blue notifications were doing the weird glitchy thing. Was there a problem with the integration commencing?
There was another weird thing happening. Zarian’s reactions.
I’m handling this pretty well, Zarian realized. Then again, I’ve been playing with actual magic for almost two years when nobody else can. I think. Maybe.
Another blue notification appeared over the last.
A red notification popped up with one big bold word written in white.
Zarian felt rising excitement instead of fear. He was growing more thrilled even while having a gun shoved into his face. Then the hype grew further with more red notification boxes appearing, overlaying the past ones.
“What the fuck is this? Is this some sick virtual reality game? Who paid you to pull this stunt off, asshole?” The cop yanked Zarian’s head around and placed more weight on his back.
He winced at the pain, but his enthusiasm remained undaunted. He wanted more notifications. He was practically starving for them.
He had no idea that any of this would happen.
But he felt like he was meant for this.
The Infinita Star System seemed to be on his side. It gave him a new notification to feel even more excited about. The notification came out gold this time around.
Zarian had too many questions. But he was delirious, starved, suffering blood loss, and having his hair yanked near the scalp with a pistol barrel and a twitchy trigger finger in his face. He couldn’t focus on any one thing until he forced himself to take a painful breath, hold on to that pain, and clear his head.
Two things came to mind.
It would be nice if I get a little more info about my origins.
And where is Arianna?
Zarian needed to get his feet under him, then take another breather and look around. First, the panicked cop had to get the hell off of him.
Zarian felt around for his familiar darkness. To his surprise, he felt a greater connection to the darkness in his surroundings. Stranger yet, when he called on the darkness, unfamiliar hieroglyphic symbols flashed through his mind.
Something clicked inside of him like the press of a button.
With a flex of his will, darkness pooled under his palm rapidly. Before it became too noticeable, Zarian flipped over his hand and shot up a dark bar of thick darkness. He struck the handgun directly with a force that was both surprising to Zarian and the cop.
The pistol fired. Zarian’s hearing went out, replaced by a painful ringing. He clenched his jaw when the flesh on the back of his skull flew off from a bullet scraping across his head.
If the shot was a few more inches to the left, then the back of Zarian’s head would’ve been blown out. His luck was pushing past the point of breaking now.
Lucky or not, I can’t die now. That’s a hell naw from me. Zarian pushed aside his pain, the weariness, and the shock of everything happening at once.
He scrambled from under the surprised cop who was already falling over, his gun arm swinging wide after getting shoved hard by the dark beam. He was shouting about his gun hand hurting, barely able to keep hold of his weapon.
The cop was still armed and dangerous.
There was barely any light here. Only some scraps of illumination, with the shadows circling around the light sources and the darkness waiting hungrily further out. Zarian and the man who nearly blew out the back of his head were in one of those dark zones.
The strange hieroglyphic symbols flashed through his mind again. The button-like click resonated inside of him once more. He felt something uniquely orderly and powerful, giving him a firm push to do as he pleased, as if he was getting a helpful assist from something bigger than him.
He gathered a straight bar of darkness as long as a pipe and slammed it down on the gunman’s shoulder. Zarian felt the crunch underneath the weighty blunt hit.
The arm holding the gun flopped to the side uselessly after getting popped out of the shoulder socket. The gun fell fully with a dull clatter, barely audible to Zarian’s ears while they were still ringing.
The man cried out hoarsely, holding his injured arm. Zarian might’ve done more damage than pop the arm out of the shoulder. But at least he neutralized one shooter.
He turned in time to see the other cops who’d entered the dark portal along with a bunch of randos.
People were paying attention after the gunshot. Zarian counted three pistols leveled at him.
There were no more weaponized authorities than that. The rest were a handful of civvies and some flopping koi fish entangling with some weird gunk pooling in the middle of the dark stone room.
Hell, Zarian had seen nobody else drop in after him. There was no roaring portal or anything now. It was just him and the people who’d got sucked in first.
Looks like we have ourselves a Mexican Standoff, Zarian thought, even though everyone else was aiming at him. A real Mexican Standoff would have everyone against each other.
Worse yet, they were close enough to hit him accurately this time.
“Do you wipe up or do you wipe down?” Zarian asked, his hearing returning quicker than normal.
The police glared at him. One man asked, “What the hell are you talking about, psycho?”
“An older Marine once told me, depending on which direction you wipe, you might have shitty balls. So, do you have shitty balls?”
Zarian didn’t wait for them to respond as he covertly pooled darkness under him. He deepened its depths and density. It was far easier than ever before.
He shot three dark beams from in front of his feet, like lances of the deepest abyss.
The guns fired, roaring, flashing. Bullets flew, snapping by with sonic speed. One bullet clipped him on the hip. Another dug away some meat from his left arm.
Zarian was feeling awful even with the adrenaline. He stayed on his feet and watched his magic work.
Three dark beams landed on three chests and struck the police officers harder than Zarian had expected. For dozens of feet. They hit the stone floor with a hard finality that suggested they wouldn’t be getting up for a while.
Just to be on the safe side, Zarian reached out with four tendrils of darkness that snapped out faster than ever before. He gathered all the guns and piled them on the floor behind him.
Then Zarian collapsed to the ground with a phlegmy wheeze. He coughed into his fist, enduring the pain of having bullet wounds all over his body. Blood leaked from everywhere, which made it a wonder how he was still alive and functional.
“What the hell did you do? Where are we? You won’t get away with this,” yammered the officer who had his shoulder broken. “And get this blue crap out of my face!”
Zarian ignored him and the others for now. He looked around for Ariana. She was still nowhere to be found.
He paid attention to the new notifications he felt piled up in his head. The soft dinging sound they made wasn’t too distracting and helped as a reminder to check. As soon as he willed for the notifications to show up, they appeared in front of his face.
The boxes were still gold.
Despite the pain of bleeding out alive, Zarian’s face lit up with a crooked smile. Call him a simple man, but he liked how the System made him feel special with gold notifications.
It was like getting the VIP treatment.
He’d never had that before. And things were only getting better.
Zarian laughed giddily as a whole golden profile appeared before him. His heart rate picked up. Chills ran down his spine. He might bleed out soon. He didn’t care.
He did what the notification told him.
Behold.
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Origins: Zarian Darkrun, 21-yr-old Human, Honored Outsider.
Level: 10
Class: (Please Select)
Traits: Dark Affinity (Rare), Overpower (Epic).
Alpha Skills (1/3): Straight Darkness (Level 5).
Willpower: 21
Strength: 15
Agility: 14
Wonder: 22
Mysticism: 75
Free: 50
Achievements: Honored Outsider (Unopened).
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