“Have I seen you before?”

Silence.

“Have I seen you before?” I shot back. Why? I had no idea what possessed me.

The shadows masking his face remained unmoving, maybe even a bit taken aback. After a long time, the man grumbled

“How the hell should I know?”

If he’s speaking English, he must be one of Claira’s teammates. Maybe they hadn’t been kidnapped by a monster like I thought they had. They probably saw what was happening here and… decided to join in on the festivities.

My opinion of the man in front of me decreased by a hundred points.

“What’re you doing out here?” The man asked in a rather dull voice.

Readers, objectively looking at it, this was a tense situation. My identity as an outsider could be uncovered, and I could be lynched or worse. I was treading on thin ice here.

But for whatever reason I felt none of that. Maybe the reality of the situation hadn’t set in. Maybe the threat wasn’t really that obvious— I could run away after all. Maybe I just found this whole situation funny.

In short, I wasn’t tense at all. Not a fiber of my being felt nervous or afraid.

Maybe it was because of that, that I wanted to get a little kick from this encounter.

“Getting water. And you? What’re you doing out here?” I subtly made my voice a bit duller to match his dumb tone. It took everything in my being to stop myself from bursting out into laughter.

Ah! This was actually a great situation to test out another one of my theories about skills.

I’d tested out augmenting my stats and other specific physical elements like punches and kicks, but I wondered if I could make some skills that affected others based on my actions.

Like a command skill, or a persuasion skill or the like.

“Me? I… I uh,...” He looked around, as if just waking up from a deep sleep, “Where am I? Where…”

I deleted the skill: rabbit-butcherer’s fortitude, and instead replaced it with something else. Of course, it wasn’t up to my expectations, but it was surprisingly good enough.

[Skill: Persuasion proficiency

Description: Roll a 20-sided die to determine the success of your persuasive action. The number required to succeed increases with the persuasive statement you intend to make, as well as the target. Rolling a 1 is always a failure, while rolling a 20 is always a success.]

This sounded extremely familiar, but whatever. The interesting part was that the moment the skill appeared in my menu, I could intuitively understand the difficulty of any statement I was about to make.

For instance, if I were to say that you are in your home back on Earth with your family, I intuitively understood that I had to roll a 34 to succeed, which meant that this option was awful.

But if I were to say something like ‘You’ve been brainwashed, come! There’s a rescue force waiting outside the village, let’s get you out of here!’, that would require that I roll a 14 or above— a very difficult check, but one that was doable.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

With this, I was literally choosing the best dialogue option in real-time…

This was incredible!

Holy fuck!

What if I made another skill to grant me conditional bonuses to my dice rolls, so I’d have a higher chance of succeeding? I needed to go back to Earth and research everything I could to juice this System to the max.

After a few moments of silence, the man’s window of confusion seemed to be closing. His moments were less hazy and unfocused, and started to retain their dull mechanical nature from before.

But before that window closed completely, I grabbed it by the windowsill and flung it open.

It was a dice roll of 12, but if it failed I could just run away no problem. This was just a test after all.

“You’re Claira’s teammate right? I’ve finally found you! Listen, we need to get you out of here as soon as possible. There’s something really horrible going on here and we need to get back to Earth immediately. Do you know the way back?”

I saw a small blue panel open up in front of me and saw a 2D image of a dice being rolled and eventually settling on a number.

17.

The Gods of luck have smiled upon me today.

“Claira? Right… Claira I, yes! We need to, we need to get out of here. There’s something happening here but I can’t remember what it was I can’t… It was something so important but I can’t remem—”

“Hey, hey, that’s not important, you can try to remember later, after we get you somewhere safe okay? Come on, let’s get you out of here first!” I said, holding him by the shoulder and gently nudging him forward.

But something I didn’t expect at all happened.

The panel popped up in front of me, and the dice rolled.

What the hell? I didn’t intend to activate it, but it did anyway… No, that couldn’t be possible. Was this a passive skill? Ah fuck, so that meant that the outcome of anything I said was tied to a dice roll.

I would have to modify the skill later, but for now I just patiently watched the rolling dice as I lead the man along the village road. It was a skill check of 4, I had quite literally 17 numbers I could roll that would guarantee success. This was quite literally a cake walk.

I didn’t even bother looking at the dice roll at this point and started to walk slower as we passed the large building with the depravity happening inside.

I heard a noise— a ‘voooom’ that had a depressing note to it that came from within me rather than somewhere outside. Before I concluded that I was going insane, I glanced at the dice roll.

I rolled a 3.

“Hey…” The man said, as if on cue.

I distanced myself from him and prepared to bolt at any moment, but I still had faith in my persuasion skill.

“I remember now.” The man chuckled, “Hey you’re from Earth too right?”

“Huh? Yes?” Why was he asking me useless questions.

That was a dice roll of 1. Naturally I succeeded.

But the tone of his voice changed. It was slightly clearer and didn’t have that dull aspect like before. Something about this outcome felt wrong to me, but curiosity got the better of me.

Instead of running like I knew I should, I decided to stay and watch my choices play out.

“That’s great! Finally!” The dullness in his voice completely disappeared and he sounded vigorous and jovial.

“I finally have someone who understands me! My friend!”

“I’m sorry?”

“Go inside and take a look! Who would you like to fuck? Or…” Suddenly the shadows obscuring his face seemed hungry and I unknowingly took a step back, “You know, I’ve never done it with a man before.”

I bolted.

I deleted that stupid ass persuasion skill and ran for my life. And the moment I took off, I heard him yell at the top of his voice,

“HEY EVERYONE! WE HAVE A NEWCOMER!!”

The building door broke open and a horde of nude people stumbled out like a pack of animals. Some of them were disfigured and had features a human couldn’t possibly have. Others had tentacles and horns instead of arms and legs. Yet others had discoloured skin that seemed to extend to their whole body.

It was almost as if some of them were turning into something else not human.

In the flooding pale yellow lights of the building, the sight of the rampaging bodies rushing towards me looked like a renaissance painting that belonged in the Louvre.

Maybe if this sequence was shot, it would be an intriguing spectacle in a zombie action movie starring Brad Pitt.

But the very sight of the sheer quantity of people running after me, and their crazed expressions that looked like they wanted to literally eat me alive, set a fire running in my heart like an inferno and I squeezed every drop of energy from my legs, and every point of that 50% increase from my running skill.

If only it weren’t for that failed dice roll! Screw this persuasion skill!