Aster opened her eyes to find herself no longer in the white room with the entity. Instead, she was outside. Above her a sun shined, bright in the cloudless blue sky. A breeze tousled her clothes and she rolled her shoulders, marveling at how healthy she felt.
Before the cancer she’d gotten sick before, like everyone else. Once or twice she’d been laid up in bed for days on end with a fever or the flu, and she vividly remembered how it had taken her months to feel completely like herself again. That had been nothing like having cancer. The tumors had started out in her lymph nodes and metastasized elsewhere before it had been caught. Chemo and radiation poisoned her body, ideally killing her more slowly than it would kill the cancer. Weight loss, exhaustion, and pain had become her reality.
And now that was all gone, and the relief was incomparable to anything else in life.
She wiped at the corner of her eye and centered herself, focusing on her situation. It looked like while she was outside she was not on the ground, but rather a platform of sorts. Others floated in the distance, making ten in total. It looked pretty cool, honestly.
She spun her spear around as she took it all in, then decided to use Identify again.
[Basic Spear (Inferior)] - A spear granted to new initiates during the Tutorial by the System. Stick them with the pointy end.
Aster grinned at the last bit of flavor text. Then she started wondering what was supposed to happen next.
A moment later she got a smattering of System notifications, followed by an incredibly refreshing wave of warmth that emanated from somewhere in her core and spreading throughout her body.
*Welcome to the Tutorial*
Title earned: [Forerunner of the New World]
[Forerunner of the New World] – Complete the introduction and enter the tutorial as a forerunner of the New World. +3 all stats. Grants the skill: [Endless Tongues of the Myriad Races (Unique)].
[Endless Tongues of the Myriad Races (Unique)] - Allows you to communicate with the myriad races throughout the multiverse. A unique skill granted for free to the forerunners of a newly initiated race.
Whoa. Three free stats felt freaking amazing. Like a jolt of energy and stamina—which she guessed it was, in a very literal sense. The skill was also really cool, though she wondered how it would function practically. Would others hear her in their language? If they spoke multiple languages, would they hear more than one from her? Would she hear a foreign language and understand it, or would it be interpreted for her into her own?
Aster was busy thinking through this and many, many more questions this System had presented her when she heard movement behind her followed by a, “Oh fuck me. It’s you again.”
She turned to see the nurse standing not too far away from her. In the distance, other people started to pop into existence on both her pillar and all the others, though the nurse was the only one close enough to make out. Aster found herself smirking at this. “So you died, too, then?”
“Pretty sure I didn’t die,” the nurse said, looking intimidating in her chestplate, her hand tightening on the halberd she carried. “And neither did you, though I don’t care as much on that end. Didn’t you see that notification pop up right before the elevator fell?”
Aster frowned. “Honestly, I thought that was a hallucination. Either way, everything’s changed. I’m healthy, you’re no longer on the hook for me, and we live in a video game now. At least two of those are good things.”
The nurse just shook her head. “I’m sticking by you for the moment. Considering we were both handed weapons, I don’t think this is going to be somewhere very safe. Do you recognize any of these people?”
She looked around at the now much more crowded pillars. Dozens had appeared on theirs and hundreds throughout the others. “Maybe?” Aster sighed. “I was pretty sure I’d died and this was an afterlife of sorts, but if the whole ‘universe initiation’ thing is real then I guess… there.” Aster pointed at a group a hundred meters away. “I had a lab with that guy. I remember his hair. Could these be students? Faculty?”
“Considering the only thing we have in common is our proximity to each other when the world ended, I’d say it’s a safe bet everyone here was somewhere nearby, too.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Aster didn’t know how she felt about that. She wasn’t on particularly good terms with anyone from school at the moment, considering how they’d all treated her the last few months.
Before she could consider the situation more, another System notification appeared before her:
*Tutorial Commencing*
[Tutorial Panel]
Duration: 63 days & 23:59:59
Tutorial Type: Challenge
Completion Criteria: Complete challenges and survive the duration of the tutorial.
Tutorial rules: Collect Tutorial Points (TP).
Tutorial Information: Ten flying islands below are filled with danger and opportunities for the new initiates to experience. Beasts roam the various biomes, hunting for prey—or waiting to be prey themselves. Kill the beasts to acquire TP while gaining strength.
In 23:59:59 you will receive the rules for your first week-long challenge. The island that performs the worst will fall into the sea below. Moving between islands is allowed once a week, starting after the end of the first challenge.
Tutorial Point Rules: Gain TP upon killing beasts split amongst the contributors. Upon killing another initiate, half their TP will be split amongst the contributors. Gain TP upon successful completion of a challenge. Final Rewards based on TP and the number of Survivors.
Total Survivors Remaining: 1200/1200
TP Collected: 0
Aster leaned on her spear to steady herself as the platform below her began to descend. She walked toward its edge, vaguely aware of the nurse walking beside her. Once they reached the edge she looked down and saw the island.
Canyons broke apart the bare red earth below like mudcracks after a desert storm. The whole thing was hexagonal in shape with a large spring oasis of sorts in its center. Streams ran from the pool out to the edges where they flowed off in waterfalls that streamed in a breeze.
The other islands were all similarly shaped, but with different setups. One was a tundra forest, frozen over with steam rising from a hot spring at its center. Another was covered in a forest of coniferous trees so thick Aster couldn’t see the ground. The others all were various rainforests and mountainous areas, deserts and plains. Flora consisted of everything from cacti to conifers, bamboo and succulents.
“They almost look like Catan pieces,” the nurse commented.
Aster nodded. “My guess is there’ll be a bit more violence than your average family game night, though.”
“You’ve never met my family.” The nurse shrugged and turned to Aster, offering out a hand. “I never got to officially introduce myself, courtesy of you being a bitch. I’m Maria Castle, but I go by Castle."
After a beat Aster took the offered hand and shook it. “Aster. And I’m not sorry in the slightest.” That got a chuckle out of the nurse—no, out of Castle. “I’m thinking we can reset for the moment, considering the rest of the fucking universe just did the same thing.”
“Deal.”
“So why are you taking all of this in stride?” Aster folded her arms awkwardly, considering the spear.
“Hmph. Why are you?”
Aster raised an eyebrow—a hairless eyebrow. “That’s a stupid question. Dying, remember? Now?” She motioned around them, “Now I’m in a video game. Basically. I couldn’t give two shits about a single living soul, save for maybe Mr. Lawrence, and the only reason I was fighting so hard was out of spite. There is literally no downside to this for me. But you were a nurse. You were working and making a ton of money from my dad, right?”
Castle was silent as they neared the ground, and Aster didn’t push. She just enjoyed the heat that grew in intensity as they neared the desert below. It seemed like all the platforms above their island were places roughly halfway between the edge and the center oasis, in a circle around its circumference. The island grew tremendously in size as Aster realized she had definitely been wrong about how large it was.
From end to end the longest way, it was probably a hundred kilometers, maybe more. The oasis in the center must be a fifth that size, and she shuddered at the thought of what amazing aquatic life must exist in a place like this.
“I hate your father,” Castle finally said.
Aster studied her before nodding. “So you’ve met him, then.”
“Only once, and it was enough.” She seemed to brace herself before turning back to Aster. “One of his companies made a drug, Clemendol.”
Aster felt a chill crawl up her spine, like the specter of her past looming behind her. The wooden haft of her spear groaned under her grip. “Oh, God. Did you live—”
“My family did,” Castle cut her off. “Byproducts of the manufacturing process made its way into the groundwater and sentenced thousands to death, not just them.”
“I’m sorry.”
Castle didn’t say anything else for a while as their descent neared its end. “It wasn’t your fault. You were barely a teenager at the time, I think, and I was in the States, starting school.”
Aster let the quiet permeate the now dry air as they made the final leg of their descent. It kindled and burned in her core, like fire in her veins. Everything that man had ever done or had a hand in had turned to shit. “If he’s alive,” her voice crackled like embers, “and if I ever see him again, I’m going to kill him.”
Castle blinked in surprise at the heated fury in her gaze. Then she bared her teeth in a grin. “Looks like the rose has thorns.”
The platform disappeared into the ground beneath their feet, leaving them due east of the oasis, if the sun was anything to judge by. Aster looked from her new comrade to the sun and finally to the end of her spear. “This Rose does,” she said, and took her first step into the new world.