Miles “Shrug” Lindstrom received a quest almost 2 years before the world ended. He took the idea of an impending apocalypse seriously and prepared meticulously. When the countdown day finally arrived, it marked the end of his world as he knew it.
All of the equipment and provisions he had stockpiled vanished. In their place, he received advancement points to use with the mysterious new system that had been introduced to everyone on Earth. However, Miles discovered that he also had access to another menu–one to purchase upgrades that most others did not have. He used all of his points in this exclusive menu and received some strange abilities. At first, they seemed to have limited utility, but later proved to be effective when used in tandem with other skills.
Almost immediately after the apocalypse, Miles met a mysterious man who suddenly appeared in his house wearing what looked like a dog mask. The man gave him a few pointers and other advice before disappearing. Then, when a giant cyclops tore apart Miles's house, he escaped into the woods. After his first fight to the death with monsters, he met up with his friend who owned a gun store. Together with several other people, Miles helped defend the store from monsters.
During a particularly nasty attack by large ogre-like monsters, a woman using magic killed the last of the creatures and asked for medical aid to help her injured friend. She introduced herself as Aldina, and after Miles used his healing ability to help her friend, she informed the group in the gun store that the world was going to get worse, not better, and that leveling up was extremely important. She also mentioned that firearms were not a good way to gain experience killing monsters unless someone had a relevant skill to paired with them.
After educating the group, Aldina still owed a debt to Miles for helping her friend, so she accompanied him on a couple dangerous destinations in town to gather needed supplies. Upon returning to the gun shop, they discovered that all of their friends had been killed.
Without anywhere else to go, Miles accompanied the mysterious woman as they leveled up.
Then Aldina revealed her secret, secure bunker. She explained that this was her third life. The reason she knew so much about the end of the world was that she had experienced it before in other dimensions, on other worlds.
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The next day, Miles and Aldina went searching for monsters to gain experience. They found the aftermath of a goblin attack, fought a group of them, and entered a challenge portal. In the challenge portal, Miles was able to intuit that the Faceted within was not friendly.
Rather than focusing on doing well enough to earn better rewards, Miles took advantage of the system to kill monsters for experience. Wisely, he ended his trial while he still could, and the unhappy Faceted was forced to award him with the prize.
Once Miles and Aldina returned to their world, where barely any time had passed locally, the two agreed to go their separate ways but meet back up in four days. Miles was soon visited by the masked priest again and brought to another dimension where he met the god Anubis.
Anubis requested that Miles become his champion. After a deal was struck, Miles agreed. As a result of this pact, he was gifted a terrifying companion, an oblivion hound that Miles named Bacon.
Back on Earth, Bacon was turned loose on all the goblins in the area, which he killed efficiently on his own. While Bacon was massacring goblins, Miles met up with the human resistance in town, a group currently headed by a man named Sheriff Gray. Miles asked for information and then bid his farewells to a group of four brave young men that he met, who had been patrolling and hunting monsters as part of a larger effort.
In order to level up as quickly and efficiently as possible, Miles backtracked to where he had seen a group of more powerful monsters called water kobolds. He attacked them and managed to use a combination of skills, including poison, to wipe them out, receiving a genocide achievement through the system. Then Miles was able to choose a class, Dark Contractor.
As Miles finally slept after spending the large number of points he'd earned through the system, some townspeople, led by Sheriff Gray, investigated the aftermath of the goblin destruction. They discovered that an unknown, terrifying creature (Bacon) had actually saved several people's lives by massacring goblins. During the course of this investigation, Sheriff Gray confirmed that the giant cyclops was in town as well.
Around the same time, Miles, now the champion of the god Anubis, awoke.
After waking up, Miles met again with the town's defenders, who informed him that Sheriff Gray was aware of his existence. They implied that he had the town's blessing to keep hunting and killing monsters. They also let him know that the giant was in town.
Armed with this new information, Miles went off on his own to find new adventures, to grow stronger before meeting up with Aldina again. As he took the first few steps of this new journey, he received a new quest similar to the one he'd gotten before the apocalypse occurred.
His new quest was to kill the giant in town, and he had a time limit of two days to do so.