“Death, eh?” Griffin’s tone rang surprisingly hollow as he finished reading through the text, the possibility not inspiring the terror it should have.

It was a flavor he had sampled before, after all— it tasted like a thousand pound hulking frame of metal and glass that decimated your body before your mind was even offered a chance to acclimatize.

“How vapid,” Griffin disparaged the blue interface before him, even as he lay butt naked and near prone on the unforgivingly cold stone tiles.

The blue interface remained unmoved by his provocation, unfeelingly continuing to inform him of the so-called calling quest that he had to fulfill if he wanted to continue living in the Realm of Aeldfane, in the truest sense.

“Ah,” Griffin muttered in understanding. “This might be bad. I think I’m dissociating,” he wryly admitted, finding a spot of humor in the otherwise absurd situation he found himself in.

“Well,” he muttered, addressing no one in particular. “If this is a coma, I suppose that it would be remiss of me not to test how far I can take the simulation before it breaks.”

There it was again.

The dissonance between the words he believed himself to be speaking and the unfamiliar language that fluently spilled out of his lips.

“Determined, are you?” He asked aloud. “Fine then.”

What followed was Griffin’s attempt to over-stimulate the supposed mental construct he had found himself in, as he blended English, Hindi Slang and the little bit of spanish he still remembered from his high school classes. The gibberish that spilled out of his mouth was consistent, atleast in its variation, before he sprung the trap that he had been withholding.

“Pizza. Mac and Cheese. Vada Pav. Canard à l'orange,” Griffin fired off the names of random food dishes that should not have any direct translations, if the interface’s statement was to be taken at face value.

His expression twisted into a grimace as the exact pronunciations he had intended for spilled out of his mouth, down to the variation in inflection between the American, English and French pronunciations.

“Spare me the effort, program. Just tell me something that I already don’t know, like intergalactic physics formulae—- something that I couldn’t possibly dream up on by myself and I’ll believe you.”

A minute passed by in silence, forcing Griffin to admit that his pleas had fallen on deaf ears.

Just as Griffin was about to give in to his burgeoning annoyance by unleashing an unholy combination of expletives, a realization struck him.

“Oh,” he muttered, as he felt a bit of strength return to his limbs. His gaze was blank as he truly stopped to analyze his situation. “When I place them in juxtaposition, being whisked away to another world seems a lot more palatable than waking up to a devastated body after a two year coma. What the hell, I’ll run with this.”

That acknowledgement gave Griffin the resolve to channel what little strength he had at his disposal, forcing his arms to hoist his upper body long enough for his right leg to kick in as support.

“Come on, now,” He whispered, feeling a bout of phantom pain lance through his left leg as he courageously brought himself to a standing position.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Gingerly, Griffin turned to inspect the ‘new realm’ he had found himself in, his attention instinctively drawn to the source of the deep-purple glow.

“Wha-,” The croak was all he could manage before he found himself stumbling backwards, landing on his behind with a muffled thud.

“What the fuck!” Griffin screamed out as the panic attack threatened to resurface, his adrenaline spike the only thing keeping him from sensing his racing heartbeat.

It was not the stone dais that he had found himself lying on shortly after waking up in the realm of Aeldfane that had shocked his sensibilities. The fractals that had been slowly spiraling inwards had frozen in place, their destination a pitch-black two-dimensional circle that was exuding an odd sense of familiarity. Even that, however, was not enough to justify Griffin’s horror-stricken reaction.

No, the sight that had elicited such a reaction from him was far more disconcerting. How he hadn’t noticed the five desiccated bodies kneeling in a circle around the altar that served as his first touchpad for arrival into Aeldfane before, he did not know.

“Summoning…,” Griffin trailed off, desperately trying to recall the very first words the blue interface had welcomed him with. “Ritual target is gravely injured…. Compensating.”

Compensating.

“I’m fine…,” Griffin acknowledged with trembling hands as he took a step forward. “Better than fine. I’m new. Whole. But they’re….,” He winced, unable to believe his own audaciousness as he gingerly inched his hand forward, lightly tapping one of the desiccated bodies that was clad in thick robes, holding a crooked, sickle shaped staff with both his hands.

He flinched backwards as the lifeless corpse slammed into the ground with a loud bang, the weight way beyond what should have been expected for a diminutive man no taller than 5’3.

[Out of an acknowledgement for [****], you have been awarded 10 uses of Skill: Analyze (MAX)]

[Analyzing….]

[Name: Dershi Varunget

Age: 96

Race: Half-Dwarf

Calling: Blood Cultist

Class: Blood Magus [E] (Master), War Berserker [U] (Grandmaster), Magic Swordsman [C] (Grandmaster)

Level: 99

Status: Deceased]

[Remaining Skill: Analyze (MAX) uses: 9]

“Well shit,” Griffin grimly muttered under his breath. Disregarding the fact that the person before him, if the blue interface’s words were to be believed, was apparently a Half-Dwarf Blood Cultist—- whatever that meant—- there were two observations that stuck out to him.

The first was the fact that the person before him was dead.

Amidst the chaos of everything that was going around him, it was this simple fact that had the most influence on him. He knew death. He had experienced it first hand. But he had never seen someone die before him, let alone the vague, prickling intuition that told him that he might have been responsible for the Half-Dwarf’s demise.

His mind was a blurry haze, a battleground between confused guilt and building horror as reality began to set in—- the possibility that Aeldfane could very well be real and if he did not take it seriously, he would die before being granted the opportunity to even understand what was happening around him.

There was a second observation, though, that just barely managed to keep those emotions at bay. As a programmer, while he was no prodigy, genius was a title that he had earned. He had not forgotten about the program’s classification of his own abilities, marking him at a piddling level one.

Dershi Varunget, the Half-Dwarf, had already unlocked these classes the interface had hinted at earlier. While Griffin had no idea what Blood Magus or War Berserker meant, if there was a thing he was good at, it was numbers.

And ninety nine sure as hell sounded like a lot more than one.

A small part of him was ashamed to admit it, but if Griffin wasn’t capable of overpowering that side of him, then he would not have been greedy enough to pull off the greatest cryptocurrency heist in human history.

He was the legendary Griffin Thorne and the first thought that came to his mind when he noticed the difference in levels between him and a deceased man was…

‘Can I use this to my advantage?’