Once upon a time, there was a knight in shining armor. This knight was a young man tasked with saving his country's princess from a powerful dragon, who lived in a great castle, far away from the knight's home.
The knight, after arriving at the dragon's great castle, demanded that the dragon return the princess. The dragon refused because he did not want to part with such a treasure. The dragon did, however, propose a deal.
If the knight could best it in a battle of wit, the princess would be freed.
The knight knew he would not be able to best the dragon, as it had lived for far longer than any human, granting it knowledge that he could never hope to live long enough to collect.
The knight expressed his concerns with the dragon, thus resulting in the dragon humbling itself down to a human form. This would limit the dragon's knowledge to be that of a human's, as the brain of man could not possibly hold enough room for the dragon's vast wisdom.
This was the chance the knight had been waiting for. In a swift motion, when the dragon let down its guard, the knight had sliced off the head of the dragon, ending the majestic creature's life.
Thus, the princess was saved and fell in love with the knight for his heroic deeds. The two learned to live on, happily ever after. The end.
----------------------------------------
The teacher finished their story, resulting in the room of children laughing and smiling.
All except a young boy with dark hair.
"That's stupid." The boy said.
The teacher was perplexed.
"How so?" The teacher asked.
"The reason the dragon lost. It's dumb. Why didn't the dragon just kill the knight? Forget the princess. The dragon died for a stupid reason."
Yup. That's me.
I'm Tim Hodgins, former quiet kid, now a fairly popular online gaming figure. My alias is "Zombie," for no reason in particular. I am known for my habit of silently climbing the leaderboards, only being noticed before it's too late.
People started to speculate who I really was about a year ago, most giving up after finding nothing. A few keep trying, but it's all for naught. I've tried my damndest to not leave a trace of myself on the internet, only using aliases and the same fake account information on all platforms.
Many people online seem to have come to the conclusion that I'm some no-life loser who dedicates his life to games, only ever stopping to eat or sleep, which isn't exactly correct. The parts being wrong are the eating and sleeping parts. Who needs food or sleep when you have the sweet sight of pixelated violence?
Speaking of which, I read an article that said the human body could potentially survive without food for 8 to 21 days, and I ate three days ago, so I'm fine. Hell, I don't even feel my body, that's how fine I am.
Almost immediately after that thought, I began losing consciousness, vision quickly fading to black.
----------------------------------------
I awake in what looked to be a waiting room. Its walls were completely white, along with everything else in the room.
Did I die? Am I in heaven? No. That can't be it! I ate three days ago! I should have been plenty healthy.
But then I realized something.
I never took water into account.
Understanding that I don't have time to waste bumming about, I took a look around me.
Surrounding me, sitting patiently in their designated chairs, were dark, humanoid silhouettes, deeply contrasting the snow-white room. None of them had any defining features to differentiate between them.
I look down and take in the sight.
In front of my eyes were the same pair of pitch-black hands that everyone else in the room had.
It's official. I'm dead. And so is everybody else in this room. Speaking of which, what exactly is this place?
Trying to stand up, I'm stopped by an overwhelming force. It sends a chill down my spine, allowing me to understand its meaning very clearly.
Don't get out of my chair. Got it. Won't happen again, boss.
As I wait in my chair, I get bored incredibly quickly. After only the first minute, I start to twiddle my fingers, with literally nothing else better to do.
I get bored of that too, so I decide to make a better decision and observe my surroundings until I thought of something else to waste my time away.
Taking another look around, I begin to wonder what exactly we're waiting for, and for how long will I wait? Just in spite of my impatience, I quickly notice that the line of chairs seemingly goes on indefinitely.
After a short while, I understood that this was quite possibly the most boring room I have ever been in. You can't seriously expect me to sit in a chair for the rest of eternity. It most certainly beats standing for eternity, but hell, get me some entertainment won't you?
After nothing happened for another few minutes that felt like a few years, I tried to get out of my chair again, only to meet the same chilling feeling as before. I try to ignore it, as I push harder to stand up. The feeling intensifies more and more, sending a feeling of terror directly to my brain. I tried my best to disregard the feeling, but it was a lot harder in practice than it was on paper, as my body screams at me to stop before I die.
This is when I remember that I'm already dead, allowing me to push through the fear until I felt something break. A connection. A command, My binding, broken. I was standing now!
My feeling of triumph was short-lived, however, as my vision faded again. Before I lost consciousness, I noted the uncomfortable experience of something enveloping me, before quickly resulting in the feeling of free-fall.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
----------------------------------------
I wake up yet again, but this time to the sight of rocks and mud. After clearing my head, I attempted to make heads or tails of the situation. My first thought was that I was alive now, as I am no longer in that weird waiting room.
This thought was further proven when I looked down at my hands.
They looked to be my hands. Their color had changed from pale peach to full-on grey, but they still looked to be my hands.
I turned my head to observe more of my surroundings and find that I'm in some sort of lush cave. It had strange fungi growing out from the walls, with moss covering a majority of the walking space. There was also this mysterious mist that I felt the slight urge to sniff, but I stopped myself as that is just generally a bad idea.
Walking forward through the cave, I advance until I spot a small pond. I take a look at my reflection, and in it was my grey face. I guess there are consequences to defying what I can only assume to be God.
That makes me curious as to what that white room was. I guess it would have to be Heaven, right? Although it could be Hell as well. I'll just call it the afterlife.
Only about ten feet away from me, I notice a strange creature. It looked to be a caterpillar, but it was the biggest one I had ever seen! It was at least a foot long and had strange leaf-like appendages on its side.
I sat and observed it for a few minutes, fascinated by the creature until a purple lizard with what looked like crystals on its back approached the caterpillar. When the lizard entered striking range, it opened its maw and prepared to devour the creature.
Just as the lizard pounced on the caterpillar, a large, red mouth similar to that of a venus flytrap opened up and snatched the lizard right off the ground in one fell swoop. As the plant creature enjoyed its well-earned meal, the caterpillar was revealed to be one of the plant creature's appendages, serving as a sort of bait to lure out unsuspecting prey.
Just as I started to wonder what kind of place I had ended up, I noticed the chewing of the plant creature had stopped, and so I looked up, only to be met with the assessing stare of the plant creature debating whether or not it had room in its stomach for one more.
Not waiting for it to make up its mind, I ran in the opposite direction as quickly as possible, hopefully leaving the would-be maneater in the dust.
Only after about three minutes of running did I stop, ending up exhausting all of my stamina. I know I'm not particularly fit, but the fact that three minutes of running exhausts me feels a little unfair. Maybe it's because of all the adrenaline.
...
Probably not.
I sat down, barely able to stand at that point, and notice a tinge of pain erupt from my feet. I look down and see that my feet are just barely attached to my legs. I could see inside of my feet, as the black blood and rotten-looking flesh had caught my attention.
That looks like it should hurt a lot more than it does.
After sitting for another moment, I got to thinking.
I'm an ordinary guy who just so happens to like games, and I got transported to a world with creatures I've never seen before.
...
Am I in one of those isekai stories I read about online?
Feeling the need to prove my theory, I try to conjure up a status screen using my mind, only to be disappointed when nothing happens.
Maybe it just needs another word? It might not be as simple as "Status."
Menu, status screen, summary, etc. It was all in vain, however.
Saying it all out loud didn't seem to help either.
There better be some kind of help system for this type of situation, otherwise, I'll be-
Before I could finish my thought, my mind was suddenly flooded with foreign symbols and glyphs that were oddly similar to Arabic letters. The process of the stream of information being forcefully transferred to my brain could be described fairly simply.
It fucking hurt.
Once the process was done, I had an instinctual feeling of how to bring up my "Property Panel" as it was apparently called. Silly me! Of course, I wouldn't be reincarnated into a fantasy world without some sort of system! What was I thinking? Preposterous!
I will my Property Panel to open and in my mind, a mental image appears with a whole bunch of information about me. It had everything ranging from my name, age, gender, to my hobbies. It even had a specially made description just for me. How sweet.
Alas, it would be incredibly inconvenient if I had to sort through all of this information every time I opened up the panel, so blindly tinkering with the system until I figured out the basics, I customized my panel to hide all of the information that I deemed unimportant.
Finally, my Property Panel starts to look like a real status screen, complete with some basic information, as well as the more important, juicy bits.
It eventually ended up looking like this:
General Information
Attribute Property
Name Tim Hodgins Vigor Death 0/1 Race N/A (Undead) Agility Flesh 0/1 Rank Normal Convalescence Hunger 0/1 Spirit Dominion 0/1 Progress to (Copper) rank: 0%
I take pride in how good I was at tidying that up.
Anyway, from the vast amount of knowledge that I gained from the pain orge in my head, I have deduced one thing:
I have no idea what any of this means.
It would have been immensely helpful if the information I had received transcended that of merely telling me how to open the equivalent of a menu in this place, but strange men with broken feet in a jungle can't be choosers.
Wait, a jungle?
As it turns out, in the process of running from the Venus Guy Trap, I had stumbled upon a jungle. Presumably, I had run the correct way and ended up leaving the lush cave I woke up in. Of course, this could just be a very large cave with complimentary trees and elves, but for some odd reason, I doubt- Did I just say elves?
Well, wouldn't you know it? Some people! Fantasy people in a jungle looking at me with a mixture of disgust and fear, but people nonetheless!
Kind of rude to look at me like that. I am naked after all.
...
Well, I suppose I've found the reason for their disgusted looks.
They continued to look at me, some of their faces changing from fear to curiosity.
One of them, a tall woman with eye-catching white hair walked forward, holding something in her hand.
Hey, what are you doing with that club-
*BONK!