The system display labeled it as a Stone Golem. It was basically the same size as the flaming beefcake standing across from him, but composed entirely out of jagged, shifting stones. To Blake’s surprise, a window appeared showing a bunch of statistics for the summoned monster.
Monster: Stone Golem
Level: 1
Evolution Stage: Basic
Affinity: Earth
Strength: 10
Toughness: 12
Agility: 8
Magic Power: 6
Personality: Dumb, but tough.
Traits:
* Oblivious
* Stone Body
* Pugilist
* Elemental
Past Evolutions: None
Future Evolutions: Unknown
The Golem rose to its feet, its massive stone body rumbling as it took its first step, which took Blake’s attention away from the notification window.
The guy with the flaming fists was taken aback by the sudden appearance of the golem, and he hesitated for a moment.
Blake had no idea how his card had done something completely different than what it said on the front, but this was his chance to catch this guy on the back foot!
“Attack!”
The monster obeyed, charging at the blazing man with its massive stone fists. Flamefist was caught off guard and tried to block the incoming hit by crossing his arms over his chest. The Stone Golem smashed right into and through his block and sent the man flying backward.
His flames flickered for a moment as he hit the ground tumbling.
Blake was stunned, left to stare at the display of magic. His mind was a swirl with questions, though right now he was just thankful he’d managed to not die.
Flamefist was down, but far from defeated. He staggered to his feet, his fists blazing with fire as he prepared for another round like a crazed terminator.
He glared at Blake, his eyes filled with anger and determination. He lunged at the Stone Golem, his fists blazing with fire. The Golem met the attack head-on, its massive stone fists slamming into the other guy with incredible force. The man and the monster clashed, their bodies crashing into each other in cracking bursts of flame and stone as they fought for control.
Blake watched the battle unfold in awe. He sensed that this was going to be a long and grueling fight. The other guy was relentless – borderline insane – his fists blazing as he attacked the Stone Golem again and again.
But the Golem had the determination of stone, its massive rocky body absorbing the blows as it fought back with equal force.
Suddenly, the other guy’s flames winked out. They started trailing smoke instead of flames. If his card was anything like Blake’s, then he’d be able to activate again twice before running out of power.
“Wait, wait!” the other guy said. “I’m done. I’m sorry. I’ve got no more juice. Please don’t kill me!”
Blake grimaced at the guy laying prone before his Stone Golem. “You just tried to kill me. Three times!”
“I wasn’t trying to kill you, I swear. The system gave me a mission the very first time you drove past. Your name is Blake Thornwood right?”
Blake couldn’t help his eyebrows rising in surprise. “Yeah, that’s me. The system told you to try and kill me?”
“I wasn’t trying to kill you, Blake! The system wanted me to capture you. It said I’d get an Epic quality card if I did. That’s three whole rankings above the one I found while I was out hiking! But that’s done now. The moment you beat me in this fight, I failed the quest. The system has stripped me of my anima for the rest of the day.”
Blake wasn’t sure whether what this guy was saying was the truth, and he had about 25 minutes left on his Stone Golem.
“Golem, if this guy tries to get to his feet, I want you to break both of his knees,” Blake said.
The defeated Challenger protested, but Blake needed to be sure about something. How could he check to see if what this guy was saying was true? He didn’t actually intend to break the guy’s legs, but tensions were running high.
A window appeared, and a friendly voice spoke the words into his ear.
Your First Scuffle!
Congratulations, Blake! You’ve won your first scuffle. Your Stone Fists card has earned its first bit of experience!
Hey, wait a minute… Why are your hands normal? And why is there a monster standing over there?
“I don’t know,” Blake said. “I activated the Stone Fists card, and the Stone Golem is what appeared. But that’s not what I care about right now. Did the system set a quest for this guy to capture me?”
The voice then spoke directly into his head and displayed its words in a text window at the same time.
The system will set quests for all of the Challengers. This may pit some Challengers against others, but nobody really knows why The system does this.
“So you’re not a part of the system?”
I am a part of the system, but I don’t make decisions for it. I don’t set quests or anything like that. I’m just your helpful artificial intelligence assistant who’s here to make sure you don’t go crazy!
Blake narrowed his eyes. No way he could trust what this guy was saying without knowing for sure that he’d suffered some kind of ramifications for not capturing him.
“How can I check to see whether what this guy is saying is true?”
If he’s suffering from a curse, a debuff, or some other negative effect, you should be able to see it by inspecting him. You can do this to any Challenger just by looking at them with the intent to inspect. You won’t be able to mask your status effects unless you obtain cards that have that effect. At this stage of the game, it’s very doubtful anybody would.
Blake looked over at the guy laying prone and inspected him. A window appeared that looked a little bit like a profile card. It had a full body image of the defeated Challenger, along with some basic information about him.
His name was Harry Grenfell, he was 26 years old, which made him five years older than Blake himself. It showed his height, which was above average, and so was his weight, but it was likely because of how muscly Harry was.
There was an icon sitting directly beneath the profile card which Blake inspected in more detail.
Failure
You failed a system-generated quest and must suffer the consequences. You failed to kill the first Challenger you came across, and as a result you have been stripped of your anima for the rest of the day.
Blake’s eyes narrowed. The debuff didn’t say anything about Harry having to capture him directly by name. It only said that he’d failed to capture the first Challenger he came across.
Maybe this wasn’t personal at all, and maybe this new system that had arrived on their planet was just setting these quests to cause chaos among those who survived.
If the other events around the world with the wildfires and the earthquakes were any indication, then lots of people who had received power cards had done exactly what the system asked without a second thought.
They’d also done it without really understanding what they were doing. No wonder that things were such a mess people out there were accidentally summoning monsters and whatnot.
Suddenly the system displayed a notification. This time, it offered Blake a quest. Well, it wasn’t really a quest so much as a choice.
Quest Received: Deciding Fate
Harry Grenfell just spent the last twenty minutes trying to kill you. Now that you have bested him in a fight, you need to decide whether Harry lives or dies.
If you choose to let Harry live, you will be risking further betrayal and possibly more attempts on your life.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
However, if you choose to let Harry live, you will gain one Paragon Perk chosen at random. Paragon Perks are aligned with heroic and benevolent actions and enable you to be an even better person more effectively.
If you choose to kill Harry, you will have taken vengeance against someone who tried to kill you. It doesn’t really matter that the system gave him the quest to do it, does it? He still tried to kill you.
If you kill Harry, you will receive one Scoundrel Perk chosen at random. This is the opposite of a Paragon Perk, and it will make it much easier for you to perform villainous actions more effectively.
So, the choice is yours.
Do you want to be a hero, or do you want to be a villain?
Blake didn’t have any chance to slow down and think about things. There were far too many moving parts to be able to make a proper decision, and yet if he hesitated even a little longer, he felt like the system would probably make his decision for him.
He’d never been the kind of person to let his emotions control him. Sure, whenever someone crossed him, Blake wanted to make sure that they would never do it again, but he understood Harry’s situation.
After receiving a magic card, the system had given Harry a hard choice: lose your power or capture this random person that you didn’t know.
Blake couldn’t rightly say whether or not he would have tried to capture Harry if the situation was reversed.
There was something else that Blake noticed about the system message. The system itself was implying that Harry had tried to kill him, but Harry was saying that the quest had only tasked him with capturing him.
Either the system or Harry was lying to him.
Was it even possible for this system to lie and manipulate him to its own ends? Blake didn’t doubt it for a second. He sighed when he knew what he had to do.
“Stand down,” Blake said to his Stone Golem. “I don’t want you to kill Harry, and if he’s lost his powers for the rest of the day, then he’s no threat to us. Especially if he’s already failed that quest.”
“Oh, thank God,” Harry said. “Dude, I am so sorry about all of this. I thought The system was going to execute me or something if I didn’t do what it told me to do.”
“If given the same choice, I honestly don’t know what I would have chosen. Anyway, that’s water under the bridge,” Blake said and held his hand out toward Harry.
A notification appeared in front of him.
Quest Complete: Deciding Fate
You’ve decided to be a bigger person and forgive Harry Grenfell’s previous transgressions. Because you’re such a good person, you’ve earned yourself a random Paragon Perk!
New Paragon Perk: Champion’s Determination
Both you and your summoned monsters gain a 5% reduction in both damage over time effects and the chance to be affected by negative status effects.
As Blake read all of this information, he was struck by how bizarre this was. Not only was the world being destroyed by disasters, but these disasters were happening because of magical trading cards that could also summon monsters? This was not how Blake thought today was going to go.
He took a deep breath, focused on his newly unlocked perk, and really tried to take in what it meant.
It sounded like it was definitely a good perk to have, but Blake still had no explanation as to why his power cards that should unlock abilities summoned monsters instead. The cards themselves said absolutely nothing about summoning monsters. Even this most recent system notification about the new perk he unlocked referenced summoned monsters, which had nothing to do with the card he’d taken.
Harry didn't know what card it was that Blake actually held, and if Blake said anything out loud to his system-provided AI companion, then Harry would know. Blake still didn't trust the guy, so he decided to just leave it for now. He would need to get to the bottom of this later.
“Where are you headed?” Blake asked. His Stone Golem grumbled, as though disappointed it didn’t get to smash Harry’s knees into paste.
Harry dusted himself off, but he just spread the blackened ash over his clothes. “To be totally honest, I’m not really headed anywhere. I’m kind of in between things at the moment, which is why I’m out here.”
“Have you got a truck?”
“I did, but it’s not just us that are different now. Before you drove along there was this crazy deer that tried to skewer me. But it wasn’t like a regular deer. Its antlers were made of sharpened stones. The system called it a Shardhead Deer. It kind of popped one of the front tires on my truck, and I don’t have a spare.”
A couple of things fell into place in Blake’s head.
“Harry, that card that you’ve got. What’s it called?” Blake asked.
“Flame Fists. It’s got three uses at my current level, and each of them lasts for half an hour each. But I was only on my second use when I lost my anima for failing that quest.”
Earthquakes, fissures, wildfires, and exploding volcanoes? Everything came back to Earth and Fire.
These cards had to be behind the natural disasters spreading around the globe.
If there was one thing that Blake had learned growing up in the age of the Internet, it was that the moment someone had a little bit extra power, they used it to better their own position.
This usually meant taking even more power. Or, they used it to get what they wanted at the expense of others.
Pop culture was absolutely saturated with superheroes who could do incredible things that broke the laws of the natural world. If magical cards started landing on the planet Earth and they imparted wondrous and terrible abilities, it was no wonder that they had been taken up and used for both good and evil.
Blake had no doubt that there were people out there doing the right thing, but that was doing things the hard way.
Choosing to put the needs of others over the needs of yourself was a much more difficult way to live. Most of the time if people could do things and get away with it without feeling the ramifications, they would.
In Blake’s case, his parents believed in raising their son with an internal moral compass that could not be corrupted.
“Well Harry, there is some place that I need to be, and thanks to you destroying my car and sending it careening down the side of a mountain, it’s going to be a fairly difficult predicament to get where I need to go. So we’re going to get your truck back up and running, and you’re going to chauffeur me where I need to go.”
“Where are you going?” Harry asked.
“Well as I’m sure you can understand, with things going crazy across the world at the moment, I’m worried about how my parents are going to cope. Especially if one of these crazy power cards lands in their backyard and sets one of them on fire. My mother has never been great in the kitchen, but she’s mostly managed to not set the house on fire. I just want to know that they’re okay.”
“Where are they from?” Harry asked.
“They live in Cedar Creek, which is about an hour and a bit northwest from here, I think. With the snow setting in and us being stuck out here in the wilderness, there’s no way I’m going to make that without your help. Plus, I think you owe me, what with you trying to kill me and all.”
“Yeah, I think I kinda do,” Harry said as he scratched the back of his head. “But look, I didn’t try to kill you. The system just wanted me to capture you.”
Blake narrowed his eyes at Harry. He was insistent that he hadn’t tried to kill Blake, and Blake suddenly remembered the debuff displayed on Harry’s profile card. He focused on it again and confirmed his fears.
The debuff specifically said that Harry’s debuff was because he’d failed to capture Blake now. Blake could have sworn that the last time he looked at this debuff, it said kill, not capture.
The system never tasked Harry with killing him, and yet the system specifically tried to make Blake believe that killing was the aim of the quest. Yet now it was displaying differently?
The system had definitely lied to Blake, then.
“Okay, I believe you,” Blake said finally. “But still, we need wheels if we’re going to get out of here.”
“My truck is parked up in the camping grounds just near where I ambushed you. I have to apologize for that again, Blake. I am sorry. I would have never done that if the system hadn’t given me that quest, I promise you.”
“It sounds like this system is a manipulative jerk, and it’s pretty likely that it’s going to pit us against each other again. So I have a proposition for you. I’d like to make a truce between us, no matter what the system throws at us, we are never going to try and kill each other again. Even if it threatens to take all of our anima. Do we have a deal?”
“Sure, yeah. I promise, man. I… I don’t know why I went along with the quest, it’s… I have frigging magic cards now and was just afraid, okay? No more fighting, I swear.”
“Alright. Now come on, let’s head back up to the campground and find your truck.”
Blake and Harry stumbled up the steep mountain trail, their bodies battered and exhausted from their altercation. The Stone Golem crumbled to dust about halfway up the side of the mountain as the half hour timer ran out, and Blake kept his distance from Harry.
There was no trust between them, and Blake had to ensure that Harry wouldn’t turn on him again. Just because he didn’t have any more anima to use didn’t mean that Harry wasn’t dangerous.
The fight had taken a heavy toll on both of them, and they were now struggling to climb their way back up the mountain to the safety of the road and the campground beyond. Both men were covered in bruises and cuts. Blake’s from the wreck of his pickup truck, and Harry from going toe to toe with the Stone Golem monster.
Despite his exhaustion, Blake pressed on. The camp ground and the truck were just the next two steps between him and his parents.
As they reached the top of the mountain, Blake let out a sigh of relief. “How far until we get to the camp ground?”
“Not long. It’s just around this bend.”
Blake followed Harry around the curve in the road from a safe distance, and then he saw the sign for the Mountain Vista Campground. The dirt road led between borders of old forest that seemed to lean in over the road in a protective gesture. At least this road was straight and flat.
Blake motioned for Harry to lead the way, which Harry protested about first, arguing that Blake should go first because he was the one who still had powers to use. But Blake not so gently reminded him that was exactly why Harry had better listen to him. He kept his eyes peeled as he scanned the surrounding forest for any sign of danger.
As they approached the campsite, Blake suddenly heard a loud animal growl from in the forest nearby. It sounded like a mountain lion on steroids, or rather a mountain lion empowered by some kind of power card magic.
“Did you hear that?” Harry asked.
“I sure did. It sounded big.” Blake held his card, ready to summon the golem. “We need to stay quiet.”
Harry nodded in agreement, inching a little closer.
The animal growls repeated a couple more times as they moved along the dirt road, but nothing sprang out of the darkness. Eventually they came to the Mountain Vista campground, which was a collection of tent and RV sites, each surrounded by towering trees and offering stunning views of the surrounding mountains.
There were fire pits and picnic tables at most of the sites. Odd, considering most of the world was breaking apart or burning down.
A clear, rushing stream ran through the area, providing a soothing soundtrack to the peaceful surroundings. There were also hiking trails that lead into the surrounding wilderness, offering visitors the chance to explore the rugged beauty of the Rocky Mountains.
“That’s my truck over there,” Harry said.
Harry’s truck was at least a decade newer than Blake’s had been, though its front had gotten bent and banged by some attack—if Harry were to be believed, then it might have been that mutant deer. One of the headlights was destroyed, and one of the front tires shredded. It was lucky that the wheel itself hadn’t been damaged.
“We should be able to fix this up no problem,” Blake said. “Look at all of these other abandoned cars. Did the people all leave when you got your card and erupted into flames?”
Harry sighed. “It wasn’t just me that got a card. Three cards appeared at once, and the two others got different powers than I did. Everyone started fighting, not only because they had power, but the system sent out a message to everyone that was gathered in the same place. It said that if anyone managed to kill any of the newly empowered Challengers, then they would inherit the cards once we were dead.”
Blake’s eyes widened. Was that a standing rule for how this system worked?
Could someone come along and kill him and take his card for themselves, just like that?
Suddenly being a Challenger was a lot more than wielding awesome powers.
“I watched a guy set his friends on fire because they were going to kill him and take his card,” Harry said with a shake of his head. “I got Fire Fists, but the other guy got Heat Vision. The moment he activated it, these two laser beams shot out of his eyes, and they cut his whole group of friends in two.”
Harry looked over to one side of the campground, and Blake followed his gaze. He saw an RV cut through by a scorched line. His gaze flicked down to the pile of eviscerated corpses, and he quickly looked away.
“I don’t even know why I ran for the card,” Harry continued. “I just felt drawn to it, like I was meant to have it. If I had hesitated for more than a few moments, I would have been dead too.”
“Well you’re not, and neither am I. We can make it out of this and figure things out. I’m not a murderous psychopath, and I hope I’ve proven that to you. I still don’t trust you, but we’ve got a better chance of making it if we work together, right?”
“Right.”
“Have you tried to start your car since the attack?” Blake asked.
“No. I’ll give that a shot now.”
Harry slipped into the driver’s seat of his car and tried to turn the engine over. It coughed and spluttered but wouldn’t catch.
“Ah, damn it! I thought it was just the tire, but maybe the Shardhead Deer hit the engine too.”
“It’s fine,” Blake said. “There are still cars around here. Come and help me find any keys that might have been left behind.”
Harry slid out of his car seat and peeked over Blake’s shoulder. His eyes went wide as he lifted a pointed finger right behind Blake.
Blake stood completely still and tilted his head slightly to look behind him. It was a mountain lion. He could feel the heat of the beast’s breath on his back as he reached deep into his pocket and withdrew his Stone Fists card.