“We’re here with Mr. Brent Cooper, the lead investigator for the recent waves of missing people in Washington, D.C. Mr. Brent-“
It happened again.
At first, I—well, everyone—thought that it was a freak case where a bunch of people went missing due to some unknown crime; a good marker for the beginnings of a serial killer case, but that notion went away as it just kept happening with a scale that no single human could accomplish on their own. Day after day, more and more people went missing, and to make the matter worse, it happened all across the planet at the same time; which propped the severity of these cases several steps higher.
“Gray! Watch out!”
A lone gray hound slipped through the defenses of our party, mauling the head of my character from the back, Backstabs. I hate this feature. As the skull rolled off my necromancer’s body, I sighed, reminded of the grind I’d gone through to build this character from the ground up.
Never again, this is the last time I wasted my time on a hardcore run.
“Shit! Sorry, man, I got careless.” The party chat blared after witnessing my character’s death. At this point, The run itself was doomed, and the mood of the chat went from optimistic babbles to a doomed, chaotic mess. Everyone knew that we’d wasted our time for nothing. Again.
“It’s fine… I was distracted too.” I replied, my mic a few inches away from my face. “I, uh… I guess we’ll do this again next week?”
Didn’t I say that this will be my last run? I just can’t stop playing…
“This sucks. Yo, Blake, what about you?” Carol said, munching on his chips.
“I’m good for next week.” Blake replied, “Carol, please don’t use that bard again. It’s useless.” His disapproving tone was obvious, almost as if he wanted Carol to know.
“It’s a good class, I swear! I saw this video on Yo…” Carol’s defense wasn’t anything logical, his class selection was based only on his preferences, after all. I didn’t mind it, but the others, Blake especially, didn’t show the same level of excitement as he did.
I chuckled, reminding myself of why I played this colossal waste of time in the first place. The friends—well, my only friends, were the sole reason I even bothered to turn my pc on these days.
The game itself was… okay. I liked how the necromancer class played here, there was something so intriguing about having minions to fight for you, while I focused on debuffs and ranged spells instead.
But at the end of the day, it’s just a game.
“See you guys next week.” I turned off my group call, leaned on the back of my seat, then closed my eyes. There goes another day. There goes another time when I promised I’d change my life, and I didn’t.
How many times had I come across this thought? How many times had I told myself to get up and do other things? And yet, I always came back here, to remain stagnant, to not take the next step and alter the course of my own life.
“And thus, our report is now concluded. We hope that the cases will be solved soon, as the lives of those affected by the missing people have been forever changed.”
It’s still on? I grasped the table to look for the remote, which caused a domino effect of random stuff falling off the desk; Chip packets, aluminum cans, and other sorts of trash in general, before finding that black, greasy remote. But my hands were too oily from all that grease, and it too, fell, bouncing around the floor away from my desk.
As I watched all of it unfold, My eyes scrunched, and my brows furrowed. An unprecedented wave of repressed dark emotions erupted. Then it spread, First, to my lips and cheeks, which quivered, then the rest of my body. Tears flowed from my eyelids, cascading down my upper cheek, then to the corners of my mouth. Salty.
Disgusting. An absolute abomination of an adult man. That’s me.
Wiping off the tears on my cheek, My knees creaked as I got up and crawled to find the remote on the floor. The random trash around my room didn’t make it any easier for me to find it, but I persevered. I needed all the little victories that I could get.
Oh, maybe I’ll clean my room tomorrow. It’s too late now. Time to sleep. Thoughts like these kept me going, despite the near-certainty that I wouldn’t even remember my promise to myself when I woke up the next day, and the day after. Rinse and repeat.
I’m 30 soon. And after all these years, I was never able to break past this hole I dug myself into.
The light flickered; The TV was still on. Now, it was playing some random commercial about some canned juice.
I reached up to find the power button under the relative darkness inside my bedroom, with the flashes of the TV’s light as my only source of guidance. Then it played another commercial, this time, it was about the army.
My teary eyes squinted from the message shown on the screen. Really? Why now?
The recent war changed how most people viewed the importance and the necessity of strong men on the front lines. The fact that I was a part of the war 2 years ago, and compared to who I was today, would make a great example of a before and after image, except… in reverse.
Yeah, I used to be in the army, unbelievable, right? Even I had to convince myself that I had been there at times.
One could say that I turned into this mess because of the events that happened in that war. I wouldn’t say that they were wrong, but no, my problems came way before I even stepped foot in the barracks. If anyone was to blame, it would be my father, then me.
Growing up, I had what most people would call a psychotic father figure. He was a lieutenant and well-respected in the army; But despite his numerous accolades, displayed by the medals and the pins on his jacket, a good parent he was not. I was neglected as a child, for the most part, living alone in his home because what woman in their right mind would stick with him?
And yet, he had massive, unreasonable expectations of me. I had to always get good scores, always be the best athlete in all sporting events, always be the first in all races, etc, but I never had the help nor the parental guidance to be deserving of those grades and placements. I wasn’t talented in anything either, so that helped.
I couldn’t forget the eyes that he’d shown me after being disappointed for the nth time. That one look; a look of someone who lost all their interest and hope in you, stuck by me until this very day. Even after he’s dead, his visage never once left my being.
Being a lieutenant’s son, I was conscripted into the army outside of my own will once I reached the age of 18. I expected nothing but the worst when I reached the barracks, and at the start, my fears turned out to be true. The types of men who entered the army were the same type of people who’d love to bully a nerd like me, which meant that I had a jolly time during the first few weeks of training.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
And yet, I persevered. Through the trials and tribulations of army training made by fire and flames; I stepped up, perhaps from the frustration that had been piled up inside of me. Well, it wasn’t like I excelled in the army or anything like that, to be honest, I was a rather average soldier, but the others saw the efforts that I’d put through, and a semblance of respect was given.
One year passed, and I turned from a scrawny kid with looks that screamed ‘nerd’, to another nerd that had built up a decent amount of meat between my bones. I even made friends, Blake and Carol; we connected from our love of the same old games. Blake ended up being promoted to sergeant not too long later through his family connections, but even without those, I saw him as the most competent one in our generation of soldiers. I had a great time after the initial few months and found myself in a place where things just felt… okay.
Then the war came out of nowhere. All of sudden, we were stuck in a situation where we could cease to exist the next day—a horrifying thought for us greenhorns, Which for the most part was what ended up happening. Only a small few percentages of us returned from deployment, me being one of those very few. A miracle, some would say, which I deemed to be true.
The truth is… I died in that war.
No, that wasn’t a metaphorical statement; A bullet bored through my skull and I felt myself drawing that one final breath.
A lot had happened that led me to that situation in the first place. My squad was filled with a bunch of inexperienced soldiers, and that included Carol and me, led by Blake himself. He was competent, to a degree which the other soldiers respected him to their fullest.
We were supposed to hold a position down the south, inside the rural regions in the midst of a small village. Our path towards that spot was arduous, with constant sightings of an enemy squad, which more or less signified that a skirmish was about to occur, leading to a few wounded or dead on both sides.
Prior to that day, I had never taken a human life before. The trope of those extreme hesitations in the movies when the protagonist was forced to kill someone the first time was real. Although I didn’t quite freeze up like how the movies portrayed it to be, it was more like a lingering snake that coiled itself around your head, whispering the atrocities you’d committed when you pulled the trigger. To say that I had a bad sleep after that kill was an understatement; The face of the first one I killed never left my head up to this day.
Understandably, we were all shaken up upon reaching the spot we were ordered to secure. Blake took charge and breached into a small house that looked abandoned, but we were wrong. So wrong that we forfeited our lives the moment we stepped inside. It was a trap.
I watched them gun down my dear friends and fellow soldiers. My limbs and my heart were frozen, fear instilled in the deepest corners of my heart, and I couldn’t utter a single word as they kicked me to the ground and pointed their guns at my head.
Flash.
My end started like a sequence; The smell of gunpowder, the blinding light of the gun flare, and the smiles and laughter from their disgusting mouths. On the verge of my final breath, A core memory formed, made of the searing steel bullet ripping what was left of my consciousness, penetrating through my skull, massacring every brain cell on its path, and then, the cold that trailed behind it.
It was quick. It was instant. Everything that I’d fought for, every progress that I’d made, gone.
On the verge of death, during the last possible second, I blinked. Within that one frame of time, I returned to the same morning, waking up from my sleep with a jolt. My eyes were wide open, straining themselves out of their eye sockets, yet unable to.
I held one hand up to my temples. No holes there, not yet.
Blake and Carol couldn’t help but notice my frantic breathing after I jolted awake, cold sweat drenching my already dirty clothes.
Since they were my friends, I explained everything that had happened after a few minutes of puking my guts out. Of course, this could just be the ramblings of a man going mad after witnessing the horrors of war, but they listened, treating me as if what I said would come true.
I suppose it was my manic, terrorized expression, or maybe it was from me pleading that we took a different path, but they believed me. Since Blake was the sergeant, he had the authority to lead our troops in a different direction, as long as we secured that location.
The rest was history. It was, no, it is a miracle.
We returned to our normal lives after our victory, then everyone went on to their separate lives. Blake worked for an advertising agency, and so did Carol, I failed to pass the interview for that job, and I had been trying since.
Yeah, I never got a job. My collective failures and disappointments, adding to my already low self-esteem, broke my will down to a point where I couldn’t bother to step foot outside of my home. I had accepted my fate of being a waste of oxygen to this society, opting to hole myself up in my bedroom instead.
Slumping over my bed filled with random clothes and underwear that I had not washed since the last time I went outside, my eyes drooped from the embrace of slumber. I did nothing the whole day, and yet, why the hell was I so tired?
You’ll do it next time, Gray.
It was then that I noticed the bizarre screen that popped into my vision. It was small, yet bright, and it remained in my view even after I closed my eyes. At first, I thought it was just my brain going crazy, but after fluttering my eyes for what felt like minutes, the lit screen never left.
Of course, I was livid. What was I talking about, sleep? What the hell is going on?
[You are selected to be the next batch of hunters to participate in the White Trials.]
[You will be relocated to the Trial nexus in 10 minutes.]
If my eyeballs could propel themselves out of my skull, they would. But that wasn’t possible, and so was this thing that I was staring at. The White Trials? The Trial Nexus? These terms might as well be alien poetry to me, yet, none of these changed the fact that what I experienced now, akin to the time I allegedly died was real.
Then, the synapses in my brain found their connection to each other. The missing cases. If this strange event was indeed true, I’d go missing like the others too.
Thump. My heartbeat skyrocketed. I was enthralled by the turn of events that I launched upwards from my bed. Stepping down, I searched for my phone in the sea of my used clothes, then searched for the group chat containing my two friends. First, I tried to check if they were experiencing the same things I did, but after seeing their confused replies, I was deflated, but only slightly.
What was I planning to say anyway? That I was about to disappear? What if all of this was just a figment of my imagination?
I spammed the clear button, removing the text that I’d written. Then, I slouched on the floor with my back resting on the edge of my bed, watching the timer ticking down as my hands shuddered, pressing the phone tight between my fingers.
[You will be relocated to the Trial nexus in 10 minutes.]
Stories about a person being transported away to a different world had peppered the general media for years now, but those were just that; stories that came from someone’s fantasy.
Who’s to say that the place I ended up in will be better than where I am today?
I let my head fall on the soft cushion and closed my eyes.
[You will be relocated to the Trial nexus in 1 minute.]
I hope wherever I ended up, it would be better than this place. Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up somewhere equivalent to heaven.
Frankly, A part of me wished it was real.
My vision faded, and I succumbed to the realm of unconsciousness.
###
The next batch of new hunters from earth was chosen. Yet still, it would just be another wave of disappointing additions — Even when they were the sanctum’s curated selections, ugh… — but what the hell else was he supposed to do?
As he groaned, he recalled the progress humanity has made over the few hundred or so years since the White Trials began. Overall, humanity had failed to impress the Observers; Ranking far, far below all the other races’ strength levels.
Useless. He’d extended his complaints to the Sanctum about how flawed the humans were as a species numerous times — Low to non-existent strength, lacking any strong connection to the Arcane, and to top it all off, their useless pride — Which hampered them more than it strengthened them. And yet, despite those glaring issues, The Sanctum kept including them in its Trials. He couldn’t fathom any reasoning that made sense, but that was how the Sanctum operated; With absolute mystery and secrets.
The Observers were its creation, so for him to criticize the sanctum’s decisions was a futile effort. His directive was to ensure that the humans selected by the Sanctum were adapted to how the Sanctum functioned, and also, to filter out the bad ones from the batches of new hunters it selected. Well, that was clear enough, but…
How is he supposed to filter out the bad ones if all of them are bad?
And it wasn’t like the Sanctum made it any easier for him to help; All he was authorized to do was watch and supply those idiots with more of their kind. After all, he was just an Observer. He did not have the directive to provide direct help to those hunters; even when he never felt any personal motivation to do so.
He looked over the list of the people the Sanctum had selected, noting a few noteworthy individuals, but again, he reminded himself that these were mere humans, imitations of those who were born better, and to not put any hope in them, no matter how promising they looked at the start.
One might say that he was simply being lazy, which was true, at least, partially. He did his best during the first few waves of humans that were present under his care, and time after time, he was only rewarded with disappointment, which lead to his loss of morale and then…
Apathy.
“Meeting begins in 5 minutes.” The speaker above his head blared, shaking him off his seat.
Here it comes… He thought, collecting himself after the embarrassing fall. He didn’t forget to pick up the list which contained more than 50 000 names, an amount he considered small, considering how many of those humans were in comparison, but then again, none of these was his decision in the first place. If the decision was his, he’d just kill them all and stop including the humans in the next wave of trials, but, well, he wasn’t the one with the authority, so there’s that.
Well, Out of 50 thousand of those, at least one of these losers had to be at least capable, right?