MANUSCRIPT TITLE: FORTHCOMING
The last remaining geniuses from all of humankind stood gathered in a ring around the hulking magical beast. Silver and gold scales glinted, reflecting fire like blood in the eyes of everyone, as all together they released their most bitching, [no] badass [NO goddammit] advanced techniques on the monstrous form before them, the god, the devourer.
The dragon.
The sound of an earthquake The mighty gale of the superheated plasma from Yellowstone [FUCK] A pressure wave deeper than sound itself passed through everyone's bodies, searing their Qi-infused flesh, turning sacred and enchanted robes to ash, and blinding more than a few of them. And yet the dragon stood.
With the sound of a thousand worlds collapsing, the beast opened its primordial maw and said,
"Holy fucking shit, this sucks."
I slapped my laptop shut, not even bothering to save the file. "What a goddamn derivative waste of time. Please. Wouldn’t even read this bullshit for free. Not even on Royal Road."
I sighed. It was, after all, Tuesday.
Tuesdays were the worst.
I got home late. Ok, I know eleven isn’t “late” for everyone, but look. I wasn’t seventeen anymore. I was an old man, coming up on forty. My days of being out of bed before nine were supposed to be behind me. Weren’t they? Back with the hyper metabolism and the unflagging optimism of a person who isn’t dead inside? You know, I read somewhere that everyone dies in their twenties or thirties and the rest of your life is really just a long, slow reflection on what came before.
That was a depressing book.
Me, I didn’t have time to be depressed. I was working. Always. Or I was driving to work. Or driving home. Like I just had that Tuesday. I’d snuck inside without waking the whole neighborhood, slipped out of my khakis, and crawled under the covers with my phone for a little escape reading. Writing obviously wasn't happening tonight, and you know what Stephen King says; when you're inspired, write, when you're not, read.
So I read a lot. I just didn’t read philosophy or the musings of sad people by so-and-so prize-winning such-and-such.
I read LitRPG. And that’s about it.
I had read a lot of other things. Fantasy, sure, and scifi. But also mystery. Courtroom dramas. The year’s hottest beach-reads. Hell, sometimes even some good old-fashioned literature. But not anymore. Nope, nuh-uh. When you work all day and night and only have enough time for a few minutes of pleasure reading before your eyes grow too tired to keep going, you have to make those minutes count. And LitRPG? Man. It did that, let me tell you.
The hook was the leveling. I was convinced. You know those experiments where they wire a little electrode into a mouse’s brain and give it a button it can push to have an orgasm? And you know how the mouse, ten times out of ten, will just sit there, pushing the button over and over, until it dies of thirst or starvation, even though it had access to food and water, because it would have had to have left the magic button for a few seconds to get to them?
Leveling was… well, slow down. I’m not saying it was… I’m not saying I was a freaky reader or anything, if you catch my drift. Not that I’m here to kink-shame, either! Hey, if that’s your thing, and you’re not hurting anybody, then by all means. Go enjoy your “book time.” What I mean is that moment of instant gratification, that little dopamine hit, you get when that really satisfying thing finally happens for the main character in whatever fiction novel you’ve been trudging through to get there with them? That was leveling in LitRPG. Or at least that was progression in some form. And it was probably the primary defining characteristic of the genre, so, yeah. It happened. A lot.
Lots of magic button.
I’d read some gnarly posts online about how a lot of the readership was looking for wish-fulfillment like that’s some kind of a bad thing. I’m sorry. I worked. All day. Did I mention? When I got home, I’m so very sorry I didn’t have time to read your ponderous exploration on the human condition that yielded no solutions and no happy feelings. I mean, hey. I wasn’t, like, a troglodyte. I knew the genre had its problems. I knew there were some things that had crossed over from deep roots in gamer culture that were, well, a little less than savory. I also knew plenty of authors were doing their best, trying to rise above and just tell a good story. My point isn’t that I was a bro. My point is that I wasn’t picking up books for self-betterment. I was picking them up for self-medication. As a choice.
Anyway, sorry. I can get on a little bit of a, uh, tirade, I guess, if you get me at the right moment. Or the wrong one. Or whatever. The point of all this was, yes. Hello. It was Tuesday. I was tired. I was reading. End of story.
Only it wasn’t. It so, so wasn’t.
I fell asleep, phone in hand, blue-light setting proudly shining yellowish characters up into the darkness above my bed.
And the next thing I knew, wham. Full party disco. I’m talking sound—so much sound, the volume exceeds understanding, like I’m not really sure how I wasn’t bleeding from my ears—and lights overloading my senses like I was a toddler on the dance floor at their first wedding reception and the DJ was actively trying to deafen me for life while sending me into a seizing heap. Blinding white light filled my room like liquid, like so much light it was viscous and difficult to move through. I blinked back tears and the light split into a full rainbow that bore down through the ceiling into my bed like I was the lucky pot of gold.
“SSSSSSHIT!” I yelled, rolling over and off the bed and not stopping until I banged my arm and leg so hard into the opposite wall I got tingles down both limbs. That light had burned me! Like easily a second degree burn; my nondescript white t-shirt and gray cotton boxers (elastic waist, single button, come on guys, you know) were singed and smoking, and my skin was so hot it felt cold, you know what I mean?
And it wasn’t done. It was getting hotter as the multi-colored beam grew in contrast and intensity. My bed caught flame the next instant, and it was a scattered pile of ash a moment later. The beam bore a hole straight through my floor, straight into my basement. I backed up, gasping for breath, until my ass broke free through the doorframe and I could stand, spinning around, to run.
Run.
No. That wasn’t right.
I stopped. Heat billowed out from behind me as my entire bedroom caught fire, and my rational mind told me to just get outside. You know the drill; items can be replaced, lives can’t.
But this wasn’t just a fire.
I turned, squinting as I took in the sight of the ever-deepening colors of the beam.
I knew exactly what this was.
“Motherfuck.”
Now, before you judge me, there’s one more thing you ought to know. I’m a lucid dreamer. Not by choice, not exactly. It’s a side effect of my meds. And man, I get some weird ones, let me tell you. So was it weird that I was having this vivid, true-to-life fantasy science fiction apocalypse experience if I was asleep? Yeah, a little, but certainly within the parameters of believability. Weird meds yield weird dreams, and I figured that’s just what this was. And I had learned, over the course of my lucid dreaming, not to fight it, but to play along. So that’s what I intended to do.
I couldn’t very well get back into my bedroom closet so I was out of luck for pants, and that was a real shame. I laughed nervously. Carl hadn’t had pants. He’d done ok. Jason Asano, completely buck-ass naked when he got Isekai’d. He did ok. I would too.
I ran to the front closet instead and pulled out boots, a coat, and a backpack. Awesome. Then I was in the kitchen, cramming food into the pack wholesale. A loaf of bread. A jar of peanut butter. Bag of apples.
Yeah, ok, you got me. There weren’t any apples. It was a bag of circus peanuts. You know those things? They’re like, dried out, chewy, banana-flavored marshmallows? Amazing.
Then it was knives.
All the knives.
If I’d had the luxury of ten minutes to stand there and appropriately plan out how to fill every nook and cranny of the bag with the optimal gear I had on hand, sure, I suppose I could have done better. But, given the circumstances, I think I did pretty damn well. And anyway, the light was getting brighter, the heat hotter, the sound louder, and the fire was spreading through my little house.
It was time to go.
One last thing, on a whim; I grabbed the five-gallon stainless steel stockpot and lid I’d gotten for Christmas from the parents. I might need to boil my water from now on. Or need a blunt weapon.
I stopped in the frame of the front door and turned around.
“So long, little house. You were good to me. I think it’s time for a little adventure.”
And then I was running into the night. I didn’t even bother to check my car; I already knew it wouldn’t start. Just as my oven clock had been off, my fan hadn’t been running, my microwave hadn’t worked (I may have tried to make a bag of instant popcorn for the road). Nope. No twentieth or twenty-first century tech allowed, kids. This was the real shit. End-of-days, the eschaton.
The apocalypse.
Outside, shit was wild. The neighborhood was lit up like a prayer chapel in Notre Dame; little fires everywhere. Massive beams of rainbow light connected the heavens to the earth like the discarded spears of an angry god. Not all of them had shot down through homes, but they all gave off that hellish heat and so houses, garages, cars, even trees had begun to just spontaneously combust all up and down the street. I turned back and looked at the beam that stretched upward from my home. I couldn’t see its end; it faded into oblivion between the stars.
Now I ran.
I ran like never before. Well, like never before the last ten or so years. I ran like a young pup, like someone who runs for the joy of running, if you can imagine it. It wasn’t until I’d gotten all the way to the end of my street that I paused, cursing myself for not looking for a bike or something, and caught my breath. It was at that crucial moment I realized two things: first, I was in no fucking shape to run like that anymore, and I was lucky I wasn’t currently passed out in shock on the pavement. Second: I shouldn’t run.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
I should fight.
Any idiot who read what I read knew what was happening and what came next, and if I wanted to survive, I couldn’t run far or fast enough. My only option was to fight, to make myself strong, until I was so strong no one dared fight me. That’s always the justification for OP tropes anyway, right?
I swung my bag around and pulled out the longest knife I had, a wicked looking bread knife with a serrated edge and a double pronged end. I looked at the stockpot lid and a silly grin crossed my face. Yeah, sure. Why not. I gripped the lid by the handle and, voila, instant shield. I mean, sure, it wouldn’t really stop much. But it made me feel better. Problem was, I had no way to also hold the pot effectively.
Then inspiration struck and I capped myself with it like a helmet.
Ok, I said to myself. This is it. This is fucking it. I took a breath and trundled back down my street toward the nearest beam, moving a little slower and breathing a little harder than before.
As I approached the beam, which was currently boring a hole straight through the sidewalk, I gritted my teeth. Did I really want to know? What if I was wrong? What if this… what if it wasn’t what I thought it was?
I shook my head. No, dumbass. This is my dream. Of course this is what it is. I stepped forward and was rewarded with a bright blue flash across my vision. A transparent blue dialogue box flooded my sight and characters arranged themselves before me even as a weird, garbled voice narrated what the message said:
System initiated.
Welcome, System initiate!
This planet, designated Zeta Five Point Three Six Two, has been selected for System initiation. This sector, the Zeta sector, has been allotted to the Tarabine Galactic Empire and the Samwert Company. The Tarabine Galactic Empire and the Samwert Company have elected to determine the division of resources from this planet by intergalactic combat.
WARNING: System Holdings Indigenous Thing, S.H.I.T., detected! On behalf of the intergalactic System, the Tarabine Galactic Empire and the Samwert Company welcome you, S.H.I.T., to this initiation and trial by combat. Should you wish to reclaim the resources of this planet from the Tarabine Galactic Empire and/or the Samwert Company, you must defeat all invading forces during the combat trial. Failure to do so will result in your enslavement or eradication.
Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with your status screen and layout. We value your feedback. Please be sure to provide feedback upon successful completion of the combat trials.
Thank you and have a nice initiation!
“Hey! Did you seriously call me a sh—”
Another box took the place of the first and the voice continued:
WARNING: error detected. S.H.I.T. subjected to exponentially lethal dose of Cosmic Qi from Invasion Beam Two Four Two Point Nine Eight Two.
WARNING: error detected. S.H.I.T. protected by “bed” status. Damage significantly reduced.
Damage taken! Invasion Beam hits you for -55 HP.
WARNING: you have less than half of your total HP remaining.
WARNING: lethal exposure to Cosmic Qi. Result: &&&$$%??? Unknown variables. Unable to solve.
A massive explosion threw me from my feet and back out into the street where I hit the blacktop like a sack of potatoes, rolling and bruising and groaning. There’d been a minivan in the driveway nearby a moment ago. Now, no minivan. Just a blackened crater beneath another beam of wickedly bright light.
Damage taken! -5 HP.
In the dazed moments that followed, I rose to my elbows, blinking away what looked like water from my eyes. Then I realized it wasn’t water; it was more of those screens. I sighed through my nose. Nothing drove me crazier than when the main character got an important notification in the middle of a scene but minimized it without at least giving a cursory scan, so I made a point to glance at a few of them before closing them with a thought. And boy howdy, was I glad I did.
Right on top was the jackpot.
Welcome, System initiate!
You have entered a combat trial invasion zone. Please select your preferred mode of progression during the combat trial:
Leveling or Cultivating
My eyes brightened as my head cleared. Was I reading this right? I focused my attention on “Leveling” and another paragraph of text populated as the voice narrated in my head:
Leveling:
Combatants who select leveling as their preferred mode of progression must gain experience through combat kills and quest rewards. Combatants can improve themselves with attribute points distributed upon reaching level benchmarks.
That sounded pretty good, and pretty standard. Well, it used to be standard. That’s at least how progression worked in the first wave or two of LitRPG stories, back when the most popular story vehicle was the old “stuck inside the game” VRMMORPG trope. But that framework had long been passe in favor of more, shall we say, cosmopolitan ideas like cultivation. I brought my focus back to “cultivating” and the following text presented itself:
Cultivation:
Combatants who select cultivating as their preferred mode of progression must gain experience through cultivating and refining cosmic Qi. Combatants can improve themselves by allowing refined cosmic Qi to alter their mind, body, and spirit.
That sounded wicked awesome as well, and, if I was being honest, more of my favorite stories had an MC that cultivated than didn’t. The only problem was it seemed to be an either/or proposition; the wording—that one little word, or—made that clear enough.
Dammit.
I hemmed and hawed and was probably sitting about seven to three in favor of choosing cultivation when something suddenly changed. The flaring rainbow beam nearby began to sing. Not, like, sing, sing, like a pretty voice, you understand. More like the screech of metal being bent and torn to shreds in a massive highway pileup.
I glanced at the source of the sound and saw the beam begin to pulse with rings of increasingly intense light as well, like halos were riding it down from the stars.
Uh-oh.
That couldn’t be good. In fact, I bet it could only mean one thing.
WARNING: invasion of local area imminent. Please prepare for combat.
Fuck me.
No time to think this thing through; I had to be a man of action. Anyway, it was just a dream. If I fucked everything up I’d just wake up and go back to work. No big deal. And yes, to pause the story and totally break the fourth wall for a moment, I can hear you intermittently laughing and groaning because you know that obviously this was not what I thought but, hold that thought for now, please; this is my story. Don’t fuck with my flow. You’re just going to have to suspend disbelief for a few chapters and trust me when I say, I honestly thought I was asleep. For realsies. Anyway, back to it.
I swiped the interrupting screen away with my mind and focused on the “Leveling” option. I needed XP right away. I had to get stronger to survive what was coming. Which meant I couldn’t wait to sit around and cultivate. I had to kill me some alien invaders, and I had to make sure I’d progress from doing so. The word blinked a couple of times like it was waiting for my confirmation, and I nodded and muttered it aloud.
The blinking stopped. I guessed that was it, and then I had to minimize all the screens because I was out of time. The fuckers were coming out.
The singing grew to a fever pitch and the halos started coming down faster and faster. A shadowy form began to materialize at the base of the beam—a vaguely humanoid form—and I knew what I had to do. As soon as I could determine which way the thing was facing, I snuck around behind the beam, gripping my breadknife for all I was worth (which, incidentally, wasn’t currently very much), and waited for the monster to emerge.
It did. With a grunt.
I took one deep, calming breath, before I leapt forward from beside the radiant beam and full-on body-checked the newcomer, leading with my breadknife. I bent my arm and sort of steadied my elbow against my gut, like a really inexperienced fly-fisher trying to pull in a log on their line.
I was numbly aware of its stature—it was short, almost like a child—and its stodgy, sturdy frame; it did collapse under me, but only just. Then it was wriggling beneath me, trying to free itself, even though my bread knife had to have been buried in its weird green back like half a foot or so—
Nope. Wrong again. This knife wasn’t meant for stabbing; the two weird little prongs had only gone in like half an inch.
“Shit!” I gasped.
It growled and squealed like an actual real-life pig, and I could tell from the mass of muscle beneath me that if it got it together and really started to buck, it would throw me, no problem. So I yanked out the knife and turned it to its side before I started sawing into the thing with the serated edge like it was just an everyday loaf of bread. Your common, storebought, enormous, tough, green loaf of bread. Some kind of leathery armor ripped beneath my blade, then flesh tore and dark green blood and black ichor shot up into the night sky and sprayed hot on my face. In a moment of inspiration I grabbed one of the stabbier knives which had fallen out of my backpack as I’d crashed down atop the monster. Then I stabbed it. And again.
And again.
By the time it stopped moving and I noted the dim flashing of blue screens at the corner of my vision, likely announcing the kill, another body had nearly materialized from the beam.
This time I put a little more strategy in motion. I’d seen a neck on the body of the thing I’d killed, a bit of green flesh peeking out between the armor on its back and cap on its head, so this time I charged silently forward and whipped my breadknife up around it, serrated edge to its throat, and sawed as quickly and strongly as I could across it. I was pleasantly surprised that this enemy fell instantly and stopped moving fairly quickly.
Then I had a moment to look at what I’d killed.
I lost my dinner on the grass.
Deceased: Goblette, 2.
The box hovered over the bloodied bodies at my feet. Well, that wasn’t particularly helpful. Goblette? Like… uh… a goblet? Or a goblin, obviously, based on its appearance, but… why the strange diminuative ending? I guessed it was just the little sort.
I glanced to the side and focused on the other screens that had populated during combat.
You have defeated Goblette, level 2. +2 XP.
Title gained: First Blood, Regional
Congratulations, you have made the first combat kill in this region! Too bad someone beat you to the punch on this planet; you would have gained +2 to all stats! But let’s focus on the positive. +1 to all stats. +10 XP.
You have defeated Goblette, level 2. +2 XP.
Another goblette came down the beam and I dispatched this one just as I had the last. Then another came in short order and I readied myself to do the same thing, but there was a problem.
All the fucking corpses in the way.
“Shit!” I yelped as I tripped on the leg of one of the deceased and tumbled forward, announcing my presence to the newcome goblette. It grunted and turned, blinking. For a moment it didn’t seem to notice me. Weird, I thought. Maybe it’s disoriented from the trip? Whatever. I lunged into it, serrated edge of breadknife ahead, and we tumbled to the ground atop the bodies.
This guy, though. This fucker put up a fight. Probably because it had just that much more warning. Its eyes were wide and unfocused as we tousled, and I realized it had probably been nearly blinded by the beam and was having trouble adjusting to the darkness of night. I managed to get my knife into position and pulled in a sawing motion, but my knife failed me.
“Fucking thing,” I growled. It hadn’t cut the goblette’s flesh, even though I’d sawed as viciously as I could. In my moment of distraction the goblette starting to get its shit together. Two thick, clammy paws came up and boxed my ears.
“Owww!” I shouted. I hadn’t been hit like that in… well, never! I didn’t fight. I didn’t do much of anything.
The paws came up again, grabbing me by the ears and pinching. My world went white and I screamed in agony, frozen in time for a moment, back arched, pain like I’d never experienced coursing through me.
A deeply unpleasant sound came out of the goblette, a sort of thick, rasped coughing that I realized immediately was probably laughter. Then it let go of my ears, curled up its paw, and suckerpunched me right in the middle of my fucking face.
Everything spun as I tumbled over, off of the goblette and onto my back on the dark, bloody lawn.
The blue box that filled my vision flashed red on and off again, and I decided, since I couldn’t see around the damn thing, maybe all those annoying MCs who always set notifications to automatically minimize during combat had been on to something, after all.
Damage taken! Goblette hits you for -3 HP.
Damage taken! Goblette wrings ears for -2 HP.
Damage taken! Goblette scores critical hit for -20 HP.
WARNING: You have 15/100 total HP remaining.
“What the fuck,” I tried to croak, but nothing came out. Nothing came in when I tried to breathe, either; just a burning sensation as dark motes swam in my vision. I had to get up, I thought, but even trying to lift my head off the ground proved more than I could manage. So this was what it felt like to be almost dead.
Knife. I needed a knife. Not that damn bread knife, but the stabby sort. I flailed about as best I could, fingers grasping for the feel of cold stainless steel, but all they found was bloodied and lifeless goblettes.
The goblette snarled something at me that might have been words but in all honesty sounded more like someone vomiting at a rest stop after gorging themselves at the Cracker Barrel. Then it grabbed me by the hair and pulled me across the grass. I was dimly aware of the pain and of the fact that I should fight but, hell, I couldn’t even move my arms anymore.
Fuck it, I thought. I’m tired. Time to go to sleep.
Sleep wasn’t what the goblette had in mind, though.
It tossed me like a pillow. I flew through the air, numb limbs flailing about with no dignity, until I hit the light.