Plummeting like a comet from the sky, the Avatar sent Akemi fireballing towards the planet of Kodra. From what the cow had told her, it was the most populous, flourishing world in the system. Jampacked with millions of merchants and crooks, adventurers and stragglers, princes and queens. A place rife with opportunity for a would-be villain.
Or so he said. All Akemi saw was dirt.
She landed – and landed hard – in a dark, dim, mossy forest. The first contact she made with the planet’s bustling ecosystem was her butt getting stabbed by a tree branch.
“Ouch!” Akemi groaned, pulling a spiked piece of wood out of her onesie.
(Tragically, she had not received a change of clothing when transmigrating between universes. So here she was, rabbit ears and all.)
She examined the bark she pulled out of her posterior. The texture of the wood was like nothing she had seen before. It had the thorns of a rose, and was slightly reflective. She could see her own muddied, disheveled face in its reflection. Her bangs had completely gone off course, and her brown hair was now the color of black soot.
“Stupid cow,” she muttered. “He totally aimed me here on purpose.”
As she stumbled upward, a shaky blue screen fell over her vision. She reflexively whacked it with her hands, surprised, but it didn’t flinch. Text was scrolling down the holographic screen like the intro to Star Wars.
“What the…?”
Body: Initializing…
Brain: Initializing…
Importing base stats from previous life…
Admin [Avatar] has applied -300 Reputation
You are now feared as a Lesser Villain. Your bounty has increased.
Name: Akemi
HP: 50/50
MP: 20/20
Class: None
Level: 1
STR: 10
DEX: 12
INT: 13
CHA: 3
Reputation Score: -300 (Lesser Villain)
* Your Bounty: 1,000 silvers
Guild Affiliations: None
Active Skills:
* Orb of Pestilent Bloodlust (Lv. 1) This skill was gifted by the Avatar
Passive Skills:
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
* All-Speaking Tongue
Akemi blinked several times. So this place works like a videogame. Of course it did. Part of her wondered if it had been her last flitting thought before she died – that she’d never get to play the next Elder Scrolls game – which somehow destined her for this weird, gamified purgatory.
She wasn’t sure if she was happy or peeved about that.
She settled on curious.
Her curiosity fixated, first and foremost, on the Orb of Pestilent Bloodlust. The name was a little overkill, but Akemi didn’t mind. She liked her evil with a heaping side of flamboyance. Nothing was funnier than defeating your enemies with the most ridiculous combination of words imaginable.
“How do I cast you?” she grumbled at the screen. She eventually found a way to close out the System tab, but found no instructions for actually making use of the skill. “Do I just need to yell the spell name out like they do in those corny fantasy films?"
With a shrug, she gave it a go.
“Orb of Pestilent Bloodlust!”
True to her assumption, a ball of red, glittering magic materialized in the air before her. It was constructed haphazardly out of hornets and bees with demonic little horns, avatars of pestilence that swirled around and around in a circle, chomping at the air with fanged teeth.
“Jeez,” she muttered, taking an abrupt step back to avoid getting bitten. The tiny parasites didn’t seem to care what or who they ate. “Super nasty, but I’m sure this is already so much better than whatever the hero equivalent is. They probably got Orb of Nice Little Fairy Babies or something else boring as hell.”
She bit her lip. “But how do I control it?”
She lifted her hand experimentally, and the orb lifted with it. Nice, she thought. Controlling this thing was like airbending demonic bugs. She reared her shoulders back, posed like a baseball pitcher, and then threw her arms forward towards a horde of trees.
The orb zipped forward at lightning speed, burning gaping hole after gaping hole in the trees; the demonic insects dissolved the wood within seconds, eating away at the bark as if it was marshmallow fluff. In the orb’s wake, the ginormous trunks came crashing down one by one, setting into motion a small forest avalanche. Birds frantically flew their nests, squirrels took their nuts and ran for the foothills. It looked, all in all, as if a tornado had just blown past.
I did all that with a level one spell? she thought, adrenaline coursing through her.
“Oh shit!” she yelled, watching as one of the remaining trees began to subtly tip in her direction. The trunk of it was taller than a windmill, big enough to crush a giant. She leapt out of the way at the last second, just as it clamored down onto the forest floor. The gust of wind it emitted blew her bangs onto her forehead. Her heart racketed in her chest.
How did I just do that? She thought. I have zero reflexes. I can barely even get my cereal into my mouth on a good day. It had to be this world. She had seen her Dexterity stat on the original screen. It was something like… 12? She had very little to compare that to, but she imagined her earthly self had a score of something like a 2.5. So that was a considerable improvement.
In the distance, she heard a deafening crunch. The ground shook below her, as if a mini-earthquake had struck the earth. She looked dead ahead, and saw it: one of the largest trees in the forest had fallen. It hadn’t been her orb to get it, but the domino effect of all the other trees falling against it consecutively, battering its trunk into submission.
She then heard the ugly, guttural cry of some kind of… animal?
Villainous Achievement Unlocked! [Threat to the Environment]
Well, look at you – the enemy of all environmental activists. If they’re tree huggers, you’re a certified tree crusher. Not to mention the Ogre you just accidentally leveled into dust. Well done!
[+500 XP] [ -50 Reputation]
TUTORIAL TIP: Villainous Achievements are the diametric opposite of Heroic Feats. They provide experience and decrease your reputation. Or, if you were to look at it another way, they increase your reign of villainy. The lower your reputation, the more feared you are, and the higher your bounty is.
You have leveled up! [Lv. 1 -> Lv. 2]
[+1 SP] [+1 STR, +1 DEX, +1 INT, +1 CHA] [+10 HP, +1 MP]
Akemi grinned.
Screw the cow. This is way better than the same old hero shit.
Just as she was about to try and find a way out of the now-desecrated forest, she heard a voice suddenly call out from the treetops above.
“I’ve got eyes on the bounty, Gio! Get ‘er!”