“Attempts at isolating and securing the landing sites of the objects have failed,” the speaker informed the room filled with men in suites and military uniforms. “While the objects appear to be obelisks of various colors, they render any human who approaches them unconscious with an unknown energy weapon, then vanish, repairing the damage that they caused during landing. We estimate that there are presently six hundred thousand unique landings across the globe.”

“Six hundred thousand and we failed to isolate even one,” came a detractor’s voice.

“Yes,” the first speaker agreed. “Whoever this is, whatever the nature of this attack, they’re using technology that is significantly beyond ours. I do not know what happened beyond the event horizon of the arrival of the central craft, but the recordings of that phenomena makes my skin shiver. The fact remains, however, that by the time our teams arrived, the obelisks had already moved on to the next phase of their activation. We have secured a number of the victims and are holding them for observation, of course. But—”

“And observe we shall,” came a third voice, sonorous and friendly. “If this is an attack, then our guests will be the first to show symptoms of what kind.”

“Many of them have already been treated for radiation sickness,” the first speaker said. “But it leaves me wondering what the point is. The object could have caused far more destruction by sending a rod from god into a metropolis than by breaking up the kinetic strikes into six hundred thousand objects.”

“It’s quite obvious from that perspective that the objective was to deliver the thousands of payloads, not to cause mass destruction,” another speaker said. “The issue is that we’re dealing with complete unknowns, and so all we can do is speculate and observe our guests. Both the guests in orbit, and our guests in the hospitals and other facilities where we have been gathering them. It is so convenient that so many of them have been brought in by their own families and friends, wouldn’t you agree?”

The men and women at the table, not all of whom were physically present but were represented by a digital avatar on a screen, continued to discuss the matter for some time.

None of their deliberations amounted to a damn thing. They didn’t realize it, but these men and women, used to deciding things from the shadow, were already making a significant mistake.

They were being left behind. The system integration was beginning, and they were all level zero.

~~~~~~~

Please Remain Calm.

System Integration is in progress.

Your Species is extremely compatible, Your Survival is Guaranteed.

Your body is being watched over by the Core which initiated the process.

No predators are in the area, your body is safe.

Tell me, Elias Mathews,

What do you want to become?

Eli blinked. Or he tried to blink, except that all of his being was focused on the words in front of him. Like a movie screen where you were paralyzed and had to watch the words scrolling upward slowly.

Strangely, he was very calm.

“I’m not sure I understand the question. If you’re asking what I want to do after high school, then—”

The Antithesis Comes.

Your Society in its current state will cease to exist.

I/We are here to prevent excessive loss of life, if possible.

Your world needs warriors.

Are you a Warrior, Elias Mathews?

“I can’t even win at dodgeball,” he objected. He frowned. The system was crawling around in his brain, searching through his memories of P.E. and playing as a child. He went right along with it for the ride. Then, however, it began paying attention to him in class.

You fit the criteria of a Scholar.

Will you accept the responsibility of bringing lost arts back into the world?

“What sort of lost arts?” Eli asked the system.

And he gasped as visions filled his head. Magic. That was the only word for it that made any sense to Eli. The system was offering him magic, and he immediately accepted it.

“Yes,” he said. “Tell me how to do that, and I’ll...I don’t know. Fight this antithesis, I suppose? What is this Antithesis, and why does it mean the end of society?”

The Antithesis are the Antithesis.

They annihilate all who are not them.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

They have been to Earth before, and they will come again.

Previously your ancestors escaped by abandoning all technology and reverting to hunter-gatherer lifestyles.

This is the threat that stands before you now.

Will you truly stand before it and use ‘magic’ to defend the people of your world, Elias Mathews?

“Yes,” Eli said.

Assigning an extra 0.4% mana to your initialization.

With your consent, I will imprint the Runekeeper’s Grimoire into your mind.

Further Grimoires can be purchased from the system store for your contribution points.

“I consent,” Eli said, and he immediately regretted it as his head was subjected to excruciating pain, like someone jabbing broken glass into places where broken glass wasn’t supposed to go.

He blacked out.

When he awoke, he system was gone and his body was back. He blinked and sat up slowly. His head hurt, and it was evening now. He’d been left where he’d fallen after the obelisk had zapped him. He sat up and checked his phone, but the screen was black and cracked.

He glanced at the sky and realized that it was late evening. He’d missed school altogether, and he didn’t know whether he was in trouble for that or not.

But before anything else, he needed to know whether what he’d just experienced was real, or some lightning induced fantasy or what.

The Runekeeper’s Grimoire. A fancy name for a book filled with basic runes, he thought. But that made sense. He poked at the edge of the knowledge that had been merged with him, surprised at how easily he was able to access it. Like recalling what he’d had for breakfast leading to recalling a visit to his grandparents, really.

Except instead of a visit to his grandparents, the poking at the sore edges brought him to magic lessons that he’d never actually received.

He took out a marker and tore off a sheet of paper from a notebook from his bag, and he thought for a moment, then he began writing.

It wasn’t English. It wasn’t any known human language he’d ever seen before. It was a series of complicated symbols in a straight line.

When he finished, he rolled the paper into a tube, and he tested it out to see if he was understanding this entire process correctly.

Something flowed through his body, into the paper, interacting with the ink he’d written there, and changing shape. With a sudden “Thwoop!” a blast of energy shot out of his hand and knocked Eli backward, as well as causing everything in a sphere to take an impact.

He began laughing insanely.

It was real. He could do magic now.

~~~~~~~

After getting scolded by his mother for skipping school, Eli took a shower. He noticed a few things in the shower. Like the fact that he had abs now, and in general looked like he was in a much better state of health than he’d been since … ever.

He wasn’t stacked like someone who did nothing but lift weights and drink protein shakes, but he was significantly more muscular.

When he got dressed, he sat down at his computer. He hadn’t even bothered his mother with the phone being broken; he’d known that would only set her off down another tangent. Chronicling his delinquency or something. Better to wait and find a new opportunity to beg for a new phone. They had insurance, so it should just be a matter of going into the store and--

He lost interest in his phone as he began searching the news on his computer. He frowned as he learned that his experience was far from unique, as hundreds of thousands of the obelisks he’d observed had landed on the surface of the planet. The “survivors” of the crashes were all supposedly left unconscious and were to be sent to the hospital for observation and medical treatment.

“Yeah, like I’m going to do that,” he muttered to himself, thinking that he’d seen enough films with men in black to have a healthy distrust in the government’s willingness to just let him go afterwards. He scrolled through the news sites for a few moments before suddenly recalling the video he’d been in the process of uploading to his astronomy forum and panicked. He swiftly logged into his account to delete it, but it had already been hidden and deleted by the administrator.

Who had also sent him a direct message. Eli clicked on it, and it was a link to another forum.

“Check this out when you wake up,” the message said, and that was it.

He clicked on it. He was pretty sure it wasn’t a scam, since he trusted the administrator of the astronomy website not to pull something like that on him, but found that it linked to a still image from his own video of the obelisk.

He spent a few minutes reading the text. It was set up by someone whose friend was in the hospital after having come into contact with another meteorite like Eli had been. He was encouraging anyone who had a similar experience not to go into the authorities, stating that they were being treated like patient zero in a plague scenario.

“Yeah, that’s not what this is at all,” Eli muttered to himself. He frowned and typed for a few moments on the keyboard, then sat back.

He deleted everything that he’d written and started over.

“The System Apocalypse has begun,” he typed. “The Antithesis comes. If you’ve heard the system’s voice, then you know it’s true. —Runekeeper”

He submitted his comment and began working on deciphering the magic that was locked inside his head, inside the Runekeeper’s Grimoire, instead.