Pressure. Pressure like I’d never felt; like suddenly an entire mountain sat on top of me. You ever have that thing when you’re in the shower and the water goes cold and at first you’re like ok but then your imagination starts to run away with you, telling you this is what it would feel like to go down in the north Atlantic on a sinking ship, and then you start to think about the immensity of the cold depths of the ocean, and then you imagine your shower is at the bottom of the ocean and a two-mile pillar of ice-cold water is stacked on top of you and you are simultaneously freezing, drowning, and imploding beneath the pressure until you get the hell out of the shower?
No? Just me?
Well anyway.
That’s what the pressure was like, I imagine. Like all the bones in my body should have already broken and every bit of soft tissue been vaporized in a mist or squeezed out the edges like jelly. Instead, I got a notification screen:
WARNING: error detected. S.H.I.T. subjected to exponentially lethal dose of Cosmic Qi from Invasion Beam Two Four Two Point Nine Eight Seven.
Huh. That looked familiar. So… this was it, then? I’d wake up, I guessed. You always wake up right before. Right?
WARNING: error detected. S.H.I.T. immune to lethality of Cosmic Qi. Unknown variables. Unable to solve.
Congratulations combatant! You have discovered a source of cultivatable Cosmic Qi. Would you like to cultivate? Y/N
Had I had the energy I would have frowned or cursed or something but the truth was I was hanging on by a thread. Well, shit. What the hell. What a crazy dream. Sure, system thing, why not? Why not cultivate, too? I selected ‘Y’ for ‘yes.’
Energy coursed through me like magic. Absolute fucking magic. Every pore of my skin widened, every cell of my body seemed near bursting as I welcomed the light inside myself. The pressure didn’t lessen, really, but it reached a strange equilibrium as my body became saturated with the… cosmic Qi? That stuff. Like, imagine a sealed, empty water bottle at the bottom of the ocean. That shit’s going to get crushed, right? But now imagine the bottle is open and full of water at the same pressure as the outside. Eh, I don’t know if that’s a perfect metaphor or not, but I’ve always been shit with metaphor; I’m not a great writer. My point is that, while the energy surrounding me was still unbearably potent, the same energy now rose within me to meet it, and I didn’t feel like I was about to implode anymore.
WARNING! Error detected. S.H.I.T. code corruption. Unknown variable, unable to solve.
WARNING! You have cultivated a lethal amount of Cosmic Qi. Changes to your physique are imminent. Brace yourself.
I arced my back involuntarily like I’d been impaled in the spine with a railroad spike as pain wracked my entire body. It felt like my spinal column had ignited, and the fire spread quickly, filling my frame. I would have passed out and fallen in a heap but the beam seemed to hold me in place, a sort of petulantly flailing stasis. I opened my eyes wide in shock and saw two piercing beams of multi-hued light shooting out into the distance like lasers. My mouth dropped as I realized the beams were emitting from my own face, and then a thick, superheated beam likewise shot out of my open mouth.
I screamed.
WARNING! Your body has processed an amount of Cosmic Qi beyond your recommended cultivation stage. We recommend you desist from further cultivation at this time.
My eyes trembled in rage and fear as glowing, rainbow-hued tears streamed freely with blood down my face. How the fuck was I supposed to stop? I was stuck in this goddamn motherfucking beam of—
An immense pressure bore down on me again, but this time something had changed. My body not only resisted; it pressed back.
Light exploded and I was thrown from the beam. I came out on hands and knees, reeling and dizzy and heaving great heaps of vomit. Gore rained down, splatting on my back out from the beam, and I idly noticed the severed arm of a goblette thud on the grass beside me. I guessed another of those fuckers had tried to come through and the resulting collision had broken me free.
“Uggggh… gnnnuh, oh fuck,” I murmured, my tongue thick in my mouth. The coppery taste of blood mixed with phlegm coated everything and I spat, trying to clear it out. I vomited again.
The most disgusting bile you can imagine—like, if a mouse ate nothing but rancid beef until it died in a diaper full of shit that then sat at the bottom of a garbage bag full of rotting fish carcasses—came out of my body. Just the feeling of it sliming its way over my tongue made me throw up again. And again. Until I had dry heaved the rest of my tears out.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
INCOMING MESSAGE: COMBATANT ACCOUNT SUPPORT
The text flashed red across my vision. An angry red. In spite of the fact I was currently barely holding my face an inch about the puddle of vomit over a puddle of blood in between gore-strewn monster corpses, and that I was laying in my neighbor’s yard without pants on, I was still triggered with that stomach-churning dread you get when account support finally contacts you. Has your account been terminated? Was your card declined? Is it just another fucking automated email or did a real person actually contact you this time?
I could muster just enough strength to roll my eyes over the text and, with a thought, the message expanded.
COMBATANT ACCOUNT SUPPORT: CASE FILE Z827344450, S.H.I.T.
Hello,
Upon reviewing your initiation into the System, the Samwert Company has concluded you are an anomalous entity that does not belong in the Zeta Sector and therefore violates the Terms of Service for this initiation. Your combatant account has been terminated and all experience points and Cosmic Qi gathered will be removed. Please prepare for immediate S.H.I.T. extermination.
Please reply to this message with any questions.
Thank you,
CAS
“Wha… whathafu…”
My mouth was dry and clumpy with the remnant blood, mucus, and other assorted fluids that had pumped out of me while cultivating, and I didn’t have the strength for much, but a jolt of adrenaline pierced my heart as my body decided to make one last ditch effort to survive. Another beam had come down on top of me, but this one was different. This one was pure red, accompanied by a long, slow rising tone that would, I had no doubt, reach its zenith just as my miserable dream body was crisped to ash in the beam.
Game over.
I tried to clear my throat and hacked away at what felt like concrete in my lungs.
“Reply,” I gasped, my voice the scratch of cardboard over cement beneath the desert sun. “Reply Terms of Service.” Nothing happened. “Reply S.H.I.T. Shit. Shit! Reply!!!”
Still nothing.
“Reply Zeta… uh… reply to… uhggn… reply to this message!”
My mind was a swirling fog of chaos, confusion, and panic. But even in that miasmic puddle I recognized the dialogue box that popped up for what it was: an email reply. I took a moment to try to gather my thoughts, then rambled and watched as my words appeared in the box.
“Request to appeal account termination and combatant extermination. Send!”
The email disappeared and the box reappeared almost instantly with a reply.
Hello,
We have reviewed your appeal and decided to uphold our previous decision to terminate this combatant account. Thank you for using the Samwert Company for your interstellar communication needs.
CAS
“FUCK!”
The pitch was still steadily rising, the redness of the beam had intensified, and my entire world felt like I was hanging in that moment of suspension at the top of the first hill on a massive roller coaster. Massive and fatal.
“FUCK, fuckitty fucking fuck, fuckers, fucking FUCK!!!” My dried, crusted lower lip bled from the gratuitous fricatives, but something in my soul felt a little better for all the fucks given. Worth it.
But now what?
I closed my eyes. Time to die.
No.
No?
No.
Weird. It wasn’t like me to resist dream-death. If anything, there was usually a sort of sublime thrill to it, like building a single-block tower beneath yourself (in everyone’s favorite sandbox crafting game) all the way to the world top and then jumping off—come on, you know you’ve done it—but this was different. Something inside me said no.
So I listened.
My mind-fog cleared just enough for me to grasp for a reply. They’d shut the first one down, sight-unseen. Cleary automated. Some overzealous bot had decided to throw me out with the trash, that’s what was happening. I had to get past the bots. Who was I writing to? The Tarabine Galactic Empire and the Samwert Company. Huh, a company; no wonder. Fucking businesses, they were all the same. I had to get past their fucking minimum viable product automation. I had to get past—well, my easily distracted self reminded me, it’s not as if public services were any better. Say what you will about the soulless nature of business; at least there’s productivity, unlike the way decisions get endlessly passed back and forth across bureaucratic red tape whenever the government gets in—
“Oh,” I muttered. Then, louder, “Reply to message! Reply!” The box populated once more and I coughed out my words with the last of my remaining will. “Request—no, demand—account termination review. Terms of Service not provided to user in a timely fashion by the Samwrick Company. Copy Tarabine Galactic Empire on this message. Send!”
The long droning sound rose to a fever pitch—literally, like the sound was making me sweat bullets and I was pretty sure I had begun to hallucinate even more than I already was, based on the creepy full-ass-Salem witches dancing in a wide, slow circle around me—and then, suddenly, it stopped.
Everything stopped.
No more keening, wailing siren slowly signaling my impending doom. No more hellish red beam of light. Just me, in the dark, without pants. Practically a typical Tuesday. You know, minus the blood and bodies and… everything else that had happened.
My eyes were very slow to adjust, but I began to see dim shapes in the night just as I heard the sound of footfalls on grass and pavement. And then I realized I hadn’t been hallucinating in the beam after all. It hadn’t been an imagined coven of witches. It had been—well, I hesitated to say real, but as real as anything else so far.
And they were coming toward me.
I blinked and scrambled to all fours, one more shot of adrenaline giving me just enough strength to get back up on my hands and knees—you know, like a dignified man—but that’s all I could manage. Another beam, this time just your average, everyday multi-hued rainbow beam, lit up the scene as it descended in the neighboring yard, and I got a better look at the figures approaching.
Ok. Picture this shit.
Long, flowing robes that parted in the front. Black, tightly laced knee-high boots with at least three-inch heels. A face both cruel and beautiful, eyes that held the promise of pleasure and perdition, and raven hair that flowed and floated as if suspended in water, all surrounded by a thick, powerful, hellishly sexy aura.
That is not what walked toward me.
The figure that shambled forward looked more like a tall burlap sack. They all did.
“Ugnn…” I tried speaking but my voice, rather than recovering, was more like a sputtering engine that couldn’t quite turn over.
They didn’t talk, either; just kept getting closer. I scootched on my butt a few inches, backing up against one of the dead goblettes, but I didn’t have the strength for anything more, and rather than invigorating my limbs with one last fight or flight, the last bit of adrenaline in my body seeped away into nothingness. The last thing I saw was a long, spindly limb rise from the nearest, centermost burlap figure, pointing directly at me. Then everything faded to black.