This time I knew something was different. For one thing, the beam felt stronger, somehow both bigger and more concentrated, which could only mean it was depositing massively more Cosmic Qi through me. For another, the notifications I received were far less than helpful:
Congratulations, you have forged your sixteenth Qi Skill, %$$&*# ERROR
Congratulations, you have forged your seventeenth Qi Skill, %$$&*# ERROR
Congratulations, you have forged your eighteenth Qi Skill, %$$&*# ERROR
Congratulations, you have forged your nineteenth Qi Skill, %$$&*# ERROR
Congratulations, you have forged your twentieth Qi Skill, %$$&*# ERROR
Congratulations, your Class Trait: Qi Magician has evolved to ##$%# ERROR
WARNING! You have cultivated a lethal amount of Cosmic Qi. Changes to your physique are imminent. Brace yourself.
I’d thought I’d been in a state of supreme discomfort before, but now I remembered what pain actually was. Oh, yeah, that’s right; it was like a rod of nuclear energy was impaling every cell of my body and injecting me with absolute cosmic death. Beams of light shot out of me, lighting up the food court. Bryan covered his eyes with an upraised arm, cursing as only the British can and backing away out of sheer necessity.
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.
Yep. Heard. But once again I was stuck, agonizing though it was, and couldn’t move out of the beam. C’mon, Bryan, I mentally screamed—get me out of this thing!
He did come closer, sweat running down the side of his face as he did so, but instead of shoving me out, he started jabbing me with needles. I rolled my eyes down in shock to see the syringe he’d held earlier. He was… taking my blood? No, as he pulled the needle it wasn’t red fluid that filled the chamber, it was effervescent rainbow-shot white. Qi, then? Or was that just what my blood looked like now?
“Hang on, Quart,” he called through gritted teeth, pulling out syringe after syringe. He must have stood there for an hour drawing the shit out of my bared arms (I’m sure it was more like twenty seconds but hey, you know how it is when you’re stuck beneath the pressure of a world-ending death-ray; time is subjective at best) before finally backing away and giving me a little kick to push me out of the beam.
I didn’t budge.
“Fucking bloody fuck,” he spat, eyes widening in fear. He tried again. Again, I was frozen in place.
Then the beam began to sing.
Oh yes, dear reader. Maybe you remember what that meant. It meant something was about to come down and, hopefully, shoot me out, if I was as lucky as I’d been earlier. Given my lackluster luck stat, though, I didn’t love my odds. All I could do was vibrate in place, sweating great big gobbets of magic sweat, and hope.
God, help me, I prayed.
Weird thing to do in the middle of an alien system apocalypse, pray. I tried again anyway.
Elf-God… Spaceman… God. Please, if you can hear me, help me.
That felt even weirder, but fuck. I was all out of sane options.
The pressure built, an otherworldly crescendo of reality-bending power, until I thought my body would pop like a Totino’s pizza roll left in the oven just a few too many seconds (come on though, be real, you know you kinda fucking love it when they do that. No? You don’t know? What the fuck do you mean, you always just put them in the microwave? Jesus. The least you can do is try the actual oven. If you were a real gourmand you’d be pounding them out through the air fryer these days. Get on my level, Jeff. Who’s Jeff, you ask? Nevermind, long story).
Anyway, right. Pressure. Then rings of light coming down, yada yada ya, that whole thing again. Until, just before the big finale, I felt something crawl around my shoulder, and there was my new friend, Tommy. The tarantula, I mean. I might have named him Tommy. He sat there, in the beam with me, gazing up into my two eyes with his many-faceted eyes.
Uh-oh.
Then finally, with Bryan backed up so far he had almost left Tommy and me alone in the food court, something big shot down the beam and collided with me.
Collided… into me.
Space cracked in half and became sound. Sound became color. Color was time and life and death and I was starting to think I’d taken about five too many pills before passing out in bed.
I was still in the beam, but also I wasn’t, and I was nowhere. And somewhere. Wait, was I everywhere? I felt big, like, bigger than usual. But spread out, stretched thin, and cold in the middle, like there was a chilly draft blowing around inside me. And my vision… I could see in bits and flashes, but from all different angles, some inverted and colored strangely, others annoyingly wide or nauseating in their perspective, and occasionally pixelated as if the world presented itself before me on many small screens.
It was confusing, I’d say. But I think you get the gist.
I don’t know how long this went on, because by the time my consciousness recollected itself I had been lying on the floor, dazed, and the beam was stable and several feet away from me.
“Quarter! You ugly son of a bitch! Are you alive?”
Bryan fairly jumped on me, and I winced as I pushed myself up to my elbows, sliding away for a bit of breathing space.
“Shouldn’t I be? Ow, damn.” I held a hand to my throbbing head. “What happened?”
“You, ah, may have disintegrated. Slightly.”
I dropped my hand and stared at him. “Sorry, what?”
“Only slightly! In that your entire body maybe broke itself down into pure Cosmic Qi, merged with the descending monster, flew around the room for a few minutes in the ephemeral form of a whirling sand tornado, and then reformed here.”
I sat up straighter a bit too quickly, but the shock precluded the headache. “I did what??”
Breathless, I willed my notifications open.
Congratulations, you have formed your twenty-first Qi skill, &%$$$% ERROR…
Processing…
WARNING: system unable to solve for variables from available templates. Review requested.
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Reviewing…
Processing…
Case accepted. Rerouting…
Routed to Guardian 1&%$&. Guardian reviewing…
New Class Determined: Battlemage Cultivator.
Applying…
Unlocking frozen stats and XP…
Applying…
Title gained: Triple Threat
Congratulations, you have unlocked three system-unique class traits! +3% all stats. +Subclass.
New Status Available. Would you like to view your stat screen?
I mentally agreed, and the following popped up:
Combatant Stat Screen
Name: Quart
Level: 9
XP to Level 10: 51
Class: Battlemage Cultivator
Class Traits: Combat warrior (pugilism; blades);
Cultivator (Cosmic Qi, spirit);
Qi Magician, Journeyman (ambient and cultivated Qi)
Subclass: Spirit Beastmaster
Subclass Traits: Spirit servant (Sand Witch)
Sprit companion (Tommy)
Base Stats
Charisma: 9.27
Constitution: 12.36
Intelligence 15.45
Luck: 9.27
Strength: 12.36
Speed: 10.3
Wisdom: 14.42
Pools
Health (HP): 60/180
Spirit (SP): 200/200
Stamina (StP): 70/180
Raw Cosmic Qi: 12,382 (stored)
Experience (XP): 349
Titles
First Blood, Regional Award applied.
First Trap, Planet Award applied.
Primary Evolved Award applied.
Triple Threat +3% all base stats, constant.
Skills
Pothead
Keep a Lid on It
Edward Breadknife Hands
Peanut Butter Jelly Time
Candyman
Polysynthetic Fall
Scoot On By
Ballers Be Balling
Storm Globe
Sweater Weather
Squirter
Timeout
Cart Collection
Facepaint
Walk On Water
Knives Out
Plug and Play
Discount Rack
The Fucculent
Map Quest
Caged Beast
Physique
Iron, Qi-Forged. 72%.
Equipment
Bag’o’knives
Attire set: combat robes, level 1
As was apparently always the case when I perused my stat screen, I didn’t feel like I really had the time to continue reading the numerous other headings at my leisure, so I scrolled back up, wide-eyed, to the items I really wanted to know more about just then. I focused on each line and was gratified to find them expand to show more information:
Class: Battlemage Cultivator
A blended class utilizing combat experience levels, Cosmic Qi and
spirit cultivation, and the magical manipulation of Cosmic Qi.
This is a unique class in this combat trial.
Class Traits:
Combat warrior (pugilism; blades);
Levels are gained by the accumulation of power through the
experience points (XP) mechanism; XP gained primarily by
defeating enemies in combat or completing quests.
Combat build favors pugilism and blades.
Cultivator (Cosmic Qi, spirit);
Physique, then later a core, and eventually meridians, are formed
by gathering, cultivating, and cycling Cosmic Qi, refining it into
Spirit, and cultivating and cycling spirit.
Qi Magician, Journeyman (ambient and cultivated Qi)
Cosmic Qi, whether ambient or cultivated, is manipulated to form
skills, items, quests, and other tools and powers.
This is a unique class trait for humans in this combat trial.
Subclass: Spirit Beastmaster
Spirit beasts can be subjugated and controlled via Cosmic Qi
through Spirit and Wisdom. Spirit beasts may in rare instances be
formed and nurtured.
Subclass Traits:
Spirit servant (Sand Witch)
You have subjugated a spirit beast, Sand Witch, level 3. You may spend
cultivated Qi as Spirit to summon and control this beast. You may share
some traits and powers with the Witch.
Sprit companion (Tommy)
You have formed a spirit companion, Tommy the Tarantula. Your spirit
pool must reach 300 before you can summon Tommy in physical form,
but you may nurture him with spirit or raw Cosmic Qi at any time.
You may share some traits and powers with Tommy.
“Tommy!” I shouted. Bad-fucking-ass; I got a spirit spider!
“Oh Jesus, I hate that thing,” Bryan muttered as he backed away, finally giving me my space.
“Calm down; I don’t have enough spirit to summon him yet.” But that didn’t mean I had to let my little buddy go hungry. I mentally probed within myself and found I was… weird. I mean, I wasn’t weird, I was me, but it was weird to suddenly have such a complex and nuanced sense of my self, you know? My mind felt not only abstract, but almost like a concrete place. A cozy attic room with a spare bed, an old family quilt laid across it, and a couple of old wooden trunks. And in that cozy room, a friendly little spirit was waiting for me.
Hiding under the bed.
“C’mon, buddy,” I said aloud, but also in my mind, or spirit, or whatever the fuck this hallucinogenic meta-space was. “Treat time.” I willed a few quota of raw Cosmic Qi his way, and the cozy room lit up even brighter than my actual room had earlier that night. My headache throbbed with a vengeance and I fell to my side in my real body, retching. In my mind, I was dimly aware that this bed, too, had caught fire.
Fuck!
“Tommy,” I tried to shout, but my throat was raw and I nearly gagged on stomach acid.
As it turns out, I needn’t have worried for the little guy.
In a blur of motion, eight hairy legs carried him around the room, gathering up great big chunks of light like marshmallows and stuffing them into his adorable little spider-mouth. When he finished, the fire was out, the Qi consumed, and I sensed his attention turn to me.
“Ya good, buddy? Get enough for now?”
I sensed something like agreement, and then watched as Tommy crawled more slowly back beneath the charred spare bed, content. I nodded.
“Right. What’s next? Ah, right. My incredibly over-powered ass getting to have you explain to me just how over-powered I really am.”
“Tommy’s not coming out?” Bryan asked from a distance.
“Dude.” I gave him a flat look.
Five minutes later we had left the food court behind, wanting to put a little space between ourselves and the beam, and we were moving back toward Target, hoping to exit the mall at the opposite end from where we’d come in. We talked as we walked.
“Twenty-one skills.” Bryan gave a low, airy whistle. “First night. That is some kind of fucking record.”
“I haven’t seen a title for it. That last one I got though, Triple Threat? Looks pretty baller. I assume the percentage increase to base stats scales with stat increases, and that’s why all my integers have decimals now. When I should have, like, 30 intelligence, it’ll really be 33.”
“That’s right. But think of the raw increase if you ever got a stat to 300.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know how that works.”
He looked a bit put off. “You’re asking.”
I shook my head at myself. “No, no, you’re right, Bryan. We’re just past the extended opening action sequence, hitting the first expository lull, and this is often when the MC reveals themself to be an emotionally immature asshole. Why that happens so often is beyond me. The author thinks it’ll show growth down the line? Or maybe the author themself is a bit of a… well, anyway. I’m sorry, Bryan. I asked. Please continue.”
He raised an eyebrow at me in the darkness. We kept walking.
“You know, the things you almost say sometimes are actually almost wise, and sometimes even nice. That would be really, really nice, Quart.”
“If I hadn’t embedded it in a self-referential stream-of-genre-consciousness?”
“Just so. Now where were we—what’s next?”
“Class. What the fuck is going on with my class.”
We crawled gingerly through the hole I’d left in the door to Target and made our way into the box store.
“Yeah… well. Ok. Every human on earth gets a choice, right? You either level up with XP, or you cultivate.”
“Every living human. Not everyone survived the beams, I’m sure.”
He shrugged. “Right. Meanwhile, there are other races on the way. Not the goblettes and Sand Witches; those are just beasts, as we’ve established. Proper humanoid aliens are coming. Some of them also level, others cultivate. But some manipulate Cosmic Qi directly.”
“The Qi Magicians.”
“Right.”
“And the thing that makes me special, the reason you came and found me when you regressed in the loop, is that I can do all three.”
He paused and looked at me. “The reason I came to find you is that you can usually do two. Level and manipulate Qi. Which is already a game-changer… or, ah, in your words, a game-breaker. But this time somebody up there has really thrown some levers.”
“He did say this was the first time I’d been able to cultivate.”
We heard sounds coming from the mall outside the store, and instinctively we both crouched low just behind the cereal aisle. A box of Lucky Charms fell and clattered to the floor, knocked over by Bryan, I assumed. C’mon.
“We need to get out of this building,” he whispered. “Use your map. Find us the closest exit.”
I glanced at my pinky and my breath stopped; it was naked. “It’s gone!”
Bryan gently slapped the backside of my head. “Magic skills, remember? Do some magicking.”
“Oh.”
You have activated skill: Map Quest!
Just the same as when I had used the pinky ring, a translucent map overlaid on my vision, filling out my HUD. I spun in a circle to get a bearing on the direction of my little green arrow, nodded once, and began to lead the way.
“Follow me if you want to live,” I Schwarzeneggered as I began loping in a crouch toward the back of the store.
“Christ.”
“He said that too.”
“Fucking shut it!”