The thing hovered in midair, hunched over so that its featureless head was perfectly in line with mine. Its spine looked like it had been cracked over a mountain ridge with how jagged and curved it was, giving the skeletal looking thing a creepier silhouette than I’d initially thought. Every single movement the thing made was accompanied by a shudder afterwards, as if simply existing was giving it ecstatic pleasure.
“A resident? With Hazard level one already?” The thing mused, cradling a glass cube between too-long fingers as it floated towards me. “You shouldn’t be here, young one. It will only get worse as the hours go on.”
It was suddenly standing in front of me, a blank face splitting two from crown to chin to show a mass of writhing tendrils and teeth. I reached towards the button that would send me to the other world, but then there was a hand wrapped around my arm.
“No.” The thing burbled, leaning in close so that its tendrils could gently feel at my helmet. “You are not a young one. I can feel the stain of age on you, but not the stain of the chosen. What stories do you have to tell, that you came to be here?”
The fact that this thing was speaking English was enough to make me pause, and the fact that it hadn’t killed me yet was enough to make me talk. Maybe I could be interesting enough to spare. Or at least get it to let go of me so I could run.
“I was there at the end of the world. Both this one and the other.” I said, trying to be as vague as possible to keep this thing’s attention. “I was at a high-level hazard when the last chosen died, then I was…”
The thing’s split face pressed up fully against my helmet, teeth grinding against metal as the tendrils wrapped around my head. I yelped and struggled against its grip, and I must have somehow activated my interface, because an analysis of the thing popped up right before my eyes.
//ANALYSIS COMPLETE.
//INFORMATION FOUND… LACKING.
//THAT SHALL BE REMEDIED.
//CUSTODIAN: A BEING PLACED IN THE EMPLOY OF THE END, TO PREPARE WORLDS FOR THEIR FINAL TRANSITION.
//HAZARD LEVEL: 99.
Ninety-fucking nine. I was beyond screwed.
“You were there at the end.” The custodian said with something like hateful reverence. But my head was still attached to my body, so maybe it wasn’t directed at me. “You have twelve hours. Come. You must meet Overseer.”
Half of me wanted to say something bad-ass, but the other half knew when to shut my fucking mouth and look for an opening–and when to forsake that opening for greater possibilities.
“Custodian.” Whispered a voice from over my shoulder, and I whipped my head around to see a mass of blood red scribbles floating over a body that looked like it had been spun out of golden threads. Its fingers were woven together, and rested gently on its chest as it hovered to float next to the custodian. “I see you’ve found the clear jewel. Have you shared the remainder of your responsibilities?”
The custodian shook and shivered until it began producing afterimages, each of which then took off out the door in a burst of wind. “Thank you for reminding me, Archivist. The excitement of this prospect shook me to my core.”
The archivist bowed once to the custodian, then turned to face me. “I truly apologize for what happened to your world, clear jewel. And know that we will give it a proper burial.”
“...Thanks?” I said after a moment of silence, unable to think of anything else to say. Overwhelmed was far too small a word for what I felt.
“Come.” The custodian insisted, dragging me towards the door with a grip that didn’t hurt but was impossible to fight. “Overseer wishes to speak to you in person.”
I was pulled out of the doors and into a hellscape. Glass beads filled the street up to my knees, their ambient power sending a surge into my armor’s battery. It was getting dangerously high, to the point where I was at risk of melting down.
“I’m going to explode.” I grunted, pushing aside a glass horse filled with a multitude of glowing yellow rings. “I need to leave!”
The custodian’s face was on mine again, but this time it wasn’t open. “My sincere apologies. Allow me to relieve your excess battery and expedite our travels.”
The glass beads flowed away from me, leaving a massive empty cylinder up to the cracked sky. My feet crunched against something new, a sand that was almost perfectly red, and then the beads burst away to show a massive rain of glass lightning flooding the ocean with beads. An ocean that we shouldn’t have been anywhere near.
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“Where are we?” I asked, but the custodian wasn’t there any more. Instead of it, I found myself with a brand new entity standing up to its ankles in the oncoming tide. “Are you the overseer?”
The thing turned, and my vision went black. I felt fingertips prickling against my limbs and on the back of my neck, then words were blown through my head like the whisperings of a dying man.
“Survive.”
That one word echoed through my mind until it felt like it was etched into my very being. I reached out to try and touch the overseer, but every sensation was wispy and fleeting as if I was pushing through thick mist.
“Represent us.” It spoke, and I felt my core shudder. “The End places its faith in you. Listen when it speaks, but do not become subservient. It will name you. Wear it not with pride, but with ambivalence.”
I backed away in the darkness, my footsteps turning from crunching sand to wet splotches somewhere after the sixth. It didn’t stop the fingertips, and it didn’t stop the words. But I felt further away from them.
“Wear your enmity as a spine.” It ordered, and my back burned. “The Embodiments know not of you. One of many clear jewels among the myriad of colors. Hate them for what they’ve done. Hate us for what we have to do. But no matter what, Survive.”
The darkness began to illuminate, and I stumbled further backwards. My foot caught on something, and I slammed backwards into a mixture of soft ground and hard roots. I blinked the surprise out of my eyes and tried to move, but there was a little icon in the bottom left-hand side of my vision right under my integrity and battery percentages. It looked like a fully open eye with an exclamation point where the pupil should have been.
I focused on it, and a title appeared just above the icon. “Overwhelmed.” I chuckled, lying on my back in the middle of a forest that very much wasn’t on earth. “Cannot perform any functions until the victim is sufficiently whelmed. That’s a new debuff.”
I took in my surroundings as the leaden feeling of all my limbs slowly dissipated. I’d never been to a rainforest before, even with all of my time in the new world, but if I had to explain what one looked like, I’d have described word for word what I was now seeing. Deep brown trees had large, waxy leaves that folded upwards to catch droplets of constantly falling rain. Their trunks strained and creaked under the weight of so much water until they couldn’t take any more, snapping with a sound louder than any gunshot and crashing to the forest floor.
I watched in horror as a deluge sprung forth from the fallen giant, water rushing in towards me as coppery tendrils flailed upwards from the snapped trunk like some sort of alien spawn. I grit my teeth and closed my eyes as water slammed into me, sending me tumbling as I screamed at the inside of my helmet.
The notification of my armor’s integrity plummeting came along with the pain of my back slamming into something solid. The water kept me pressed against what I assumed was a tree for what felt like minutes, but there was no physical way one single tree could have amassed that much water in its leaves.
“Just send me to the damn starting town already.” I groaned, pushing myself to my knees and bringing up my interface to check the damage. Coloured bars in the bottom corner of my vision always showed how much battery and integrity I had left, but I couldn’t check how badly beaten my body was without the full interface.
I swiped down on my basic stat screen, ignoring an exclamation mark next to my non-existent core, and sighed when I saw just how badly I was doing. “Two compound fractures on my right leg, both shoulders dislocated, cracked skull, punctured lung, ruptured bladder…” I shook my head and forced myself to sit against the tree. “Holy shit, that was the closest I’ve come to dying in years. And it was to a damn flooding tree.”
If my armor hadn’t been damping the pain, I wouldn’t be able to move at all. But even with the armor’s help, I was still stuck in this flooding forest without any of my old equipment. A swipe to the right across my detailed information brought me to the area information portion of my interface, but it didn’t help my confusion at all.
//RUSTED FLOODFOREST : 1% EXPLORED
//1% EXPLORATION: HAZARD LEVEL REVEALED AS [1]
//REACH 25% EXPLORATION FOR FURTHER INFORMATION
“If it’s hazard level one, why am I still here?” I muttered. If someone managed to get into a hazard that was above an arbitrarily calculated level, they were instantly removed and sent back to the entrance.
I remembered something like this happening the last time around, where I saw a glimpse of some sort of lava field hazard for a split second before I found myself at the abandoned gates of the first nameless city. And now I had no core to show for it, so I should have been kicked out right away. I shook my head and swiped back to my equipment page, blinking twice as the answer stared me in the face.
Somehow I had hazard tolerance 1. Which meant there was no escape from this place until I cleared it.
I slammed my fist into the ground and pushed myself to my feet, ignoring the numbness that I knew all too well was the armor dulling the pain signals my brain was receiving in spades. My integrity held steady at half, but a bright blue indicator told me that my battery was draining at a rate of 0.3% per minute to heal my injuries. Combined with my recovery rate of 0.15% per minute, I had a handful of safe hours here if nothing else went wrong.
The rapid snapping of another tree sent a lightning bolt up my spine. “Shit.” I muttered, swiveling around to try and see which way I had to start running. But I couldn’t see anything wrong from where I was standing. So up it was.
One glance up at the massive tree told me it wasn’t going to be an easy task, but the squishy give of its bark said differently. It was like putting my fingers through the stale layer on top of old pudding, but trying to move them up or down felt like trying to push concrete. The cracking grew louder, urging me to keep moving, and I kicked my feet into the bizarrely soft tree while I scampered up like a terrified squirrel.
By the time I reached the first branch, my armor's battery had fallen to seventy percent. With a gasp I grabbed onto the thick brown appendage and yanked myself up, feeling a warmth emanating from it that the rest of the tree most certainly didn’t have. It felt like sitting on a heated seat for too long, but discomfort was infinitely better than death, even as the leaves above me filled and bloated with the water that would eventually send my hiding spot crashing to the forest floor.