When Lucas Bennet was nine, he briefly saw a therapist who told him that he needed to work on identifying what emotions he was feeling and how they were influencing his actions. That one idea stuck with him over the next decade, though he could admit to himself that he wasn’t very good at it. He tended to lash out at problems and only think of alternative solutions after the fact.
Luke could safely say that right now, he was pissed off and helplessly confused in equal measure. The last normal thing he remembered was sitting down at his uncle’s kitchen table to have a beer, and then he woke up in a field in the middle of the woods, surrounded by mountains he didn’t recognize, with a plastic grocery bag full of beef jerky and store-brand water bottles on one side, and his cousin’s old baseball bat on the other.
Thank God for that bat, because about thirty seconds after he woke up, the nightmare spawn of a three-way between Satan, a wood chipper, and a muskrat had leaped out of the grass and attacked him. Luke had beaten the little fucker to a bloody pulp before it could tear off his calf muscle. It was only after he’d finished having a miniature heart attack that things went off the rails.
Up to that point, there could have been some sort of bizarre but ultimately logical explanation. Now, however, there was a thing floating in front of him, a weird text box that had popped up as soon as he’d bludgeoned the mutant woodchuck to death. It moved with him as he turned his head, always remaining front and center. It was translucent enough that he could see the grass and dead rodent behind it, but was still easily able to read the words.
[You have slain Blademouth Marmot (lvl 2). 4 XP awarded.]
[Error. System unable to connect. Tracing route.]
[New route established. Searching index for profile.]
[Error. Unable to find profile. Generating new temporary profile.]
[Profile generated. Performing initial diagnostics.]
[Diagnostic scan completed. Bloodline detected.]
[Welcome, Lucas Bennet.]
[Level: 1]
[XP: 4/10]
[AP: 1]
[Bloodline: SysAdmin]
[Strength: 4]
[Agility: 2]
[Stamina: 2]
[Perception: 1]
[Skills:]
[None]
The window didn’t physically exist, of course. He couldn’t touch it. It was just this thing in his vision that didn’t want to go away. Once he acknowledged it and skimmed its contents, it folded up on itself and disappeared with a barely audible pop.
“Only 2 stamina? I guess I should have done less weights and more cardio,” Luke said. “And what’s with this 1 perception crap? It’s not like I’m blind.”
“Oh! This is most unexpected!” a voice said from behind him.
Luke jumped a foot in the air, spun in place, and swung the baseball bat as hard as he could. It passed harmlessly through a man-shaped glowing blue thing, barely doing more than blurring its form for a moment. The blue thing, the same shade as the window and about the same transparency, now that he got a chance to look at it, didn’t even react to the bat going through it.
“My apologies. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Who the hell are you!” Luke demanded. “Actually, scratch that. What the hell are you?”
“I’m System. I don’t usually appear to people in the flesh, so to speak, but people don’t usually make it to nineteen before being connected to me. I don’t think that’s happened in at least a hundred years.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Quite understandable. It’s not every day a new off-worlder shows up on Aros.”
“Off what now?” Luke said. His eyes widened as his brain caught up to his ears. “Oh you have got to be shitting me.”
“What can I do to help, Lucas?”
“I prefer Luke.”
“Noted. Would you like your status screen updated to match?”
“I- er, I guess?”
“Update completed. I would love to help you further, Luke, but first you should probably address those monsters approaching you.”
“The what?” Luke spun in place to see another of the mutant groundhogs scurrying through the grass towards him. Its feet made little scrabbling sounds as it ran, and the grass rustled with its passage. There was another one behind it by five or six feet, also coming his way.
“Fuck me. I do not need this right now,” he growled, gripping the baseball bat tightly and setting his feet.
The first time he’d been attacked, the monster had surprised him. This time, his bat met the thing’s face as it leaped and he punted it halfway across the field in a cloud of shattered teeth and blood. The second groundhog monster was on him before he could reset his stance, but this wasn’t the first fight Luke had been in. Admittedly, his previous fights had all been against opponents that stood on two legs, but he figured some of that experience should translate over.
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He backpedaled across the field, one part of his mind hoping and praying he didn’t stumble into a hole and twist an ankle, and the other part focused on the groundhog pursuing him. It snapped at him with each step, but he kept it at bay with a series of short and vicious downward chops that smacked against its shoulders and head, but didn’t stop it.
The groundhog leaped in the air, giving him what would have been a perfect opportunity to smack it across the field like he’d done to its friend, but he wasn’t in position for it. Instead, he pivoted on his back foot and let it jump by, then followed up with another smack of the bat. The groundhog tumbled into the dirt, stunned.
Luke lifted the bat up like he was chopping wood, and brought it down with both hands on the monster’s skull. Then he did it again, and a third time. He didn’t stop until a new box popped up.
[You have slain Blademouth Marmot (lvl 1). 1 XP awarded.]
[You have slain Blademouth Marmot (lvl 3). 9 XP awarded.]
[Congratulations! You have reached level 2. 2 AP awarded for use.]
“Okay, so I’m in a video game. System, you still here?” Luke asked, looking around.
“I am everywhere,” System said, appearing next to Luke. “Admittedly, not usually to this extent, but I’ve always found off-worlders need a bit of help getting going.”
This was all spiraling way out of control. Luke was stranded somewhere, in another world if the fucking ghost haunting him was to be believed, armed with nothing more than an old baseball bat, wearing blue jeans and a coat. At least he hadn’t taken his shoes off before sitting down at the table.
When Aunt Sophia had first disappeared, her husband had been investigated on suspicion of foul play. The cops never found anything, and eventually they’d given up. Either she’d run off somewhere without telling anyone, or whoever had taken her had done it without leaving a shred of evidence behind.
Then his cousin had disappeared a month later, and then his father, his older sister, and his older brother, all a few months apart and in that order. None of them had ever been seen again. Investigations had been opened, and reopened, and nobody had a clue what had happened to them. Uncle Duncan had become more and more erratic. If there’d been anyone left to make the decision, he might have ended up institutionalized.
Luke had a pretty good idea of what had happened now. He wondered how many other worlds were out there, if any of his family had ended up on the same one together. Maybe the last off-worlder to show up on this one a hundred years ago had been a great-great-great-something of his.
It was obvious that Uncle Duncan was involved somehow now. Luke had been literally sitting at his table talking to him before he’d… he didn’t know, been drugged and shipped off to another world? He wanted to know why his uncle had done this to him, to his whole family. He wanted to know how he’d done it. It was insane. Impossible. If he was ever going to get a chance to ask those questions, he needed to find a way back.
“Okay, first question: how do I get back home?”
System shrugged. “Same question everyone always asks. I don’t have an answer, unfortunately. No off-worlder has ever left Aros after arriving, to the best of my knowledge. And, well, I’m System. It’s unusual that I don’t know the fate of something connected to me.”
“Fucking. Fantastic.” Luke wiped the baseball bat off on a relatively clean spot of marmot fur. “So I’m trapped here, just waiting for one of these things to sneak up on me and tear out my throat.”
“These monsters are a very low level. It should not be too much effort to advance past the point where they could threaten you,” System said.
“Video games are a lot more fun when you’re not stuck in one,” Luke said. “Okay, give me the tutorial or whatever. How does this all work?”
“It’s very straight-forward. As you gain levels, you will be given ability points. You can spend them on new skills, or use them to boost your stats.”
System walked Luke through the process of accessing his status, the skill store, and helped him select his first skill: [Mace Mastery]. It cost him 1 AP and, as soon as he bought it, it appeared on his status screen. The entry in the store switched to an option to upgrade it to rank 2 for 3 AP.
“So this… does what? Makes me better at swinging a baseball bat somehow?”
“Give it a try,” System told him. “You’ll be faster, stronger, more accurate.”
Luke took a couple practice swings, but they didn’t feel any different than usual. He raised an eyebrow at System, who shrugged back. “It’s only rank 1.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Luke muttered. “Okay, let me think here. So this is pretty basic stuff. Kill monsters, get XP, level up. Get stronger. But then what? Where the hell am I? Are there even any people nearby?”
“This region is known as the Tenebrous Valley, located approximately two hundred miles west from the human city of Valtira.”
“Okay, okay. Fine. I can work with this.” Luke started pacing back and forth. “Jesus. This is messed up.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” System asked.
“Uh, well. What should I do with these other 2 AP?”
“That depends on what your goals are.”
“Uh, well, I want to not starve to death.”
“You might enjoy something like [Survivalist], given your current situation. Your… rations… such as they are, are not going to last you too long.”
“Mmm, yeah.” There was about one good meal’s worth of food in that bag. “What other options do I have?”
“You might consider investing points into your stats. Perhaps perception? It is currently your lowest stat. Those who invest heavily in agility often find that their minds can’t keep up with their bodies without it.”
“Uh.”
Luke was so far out of his depth. He played video games, sure, but that had always been more his brother’s thing. He was the one who played the games with all the stats and builds and levels. Luke preferred retro games from his old man’s collection, games that all he had to do was insert the cartridge and turn the system on to play, games with a very simple progression of left to right, and beat down anything that gets in the way.
“Heh, I bet Curt would have loved this place. This is exactly the kind of stuff he enjoyed.”
“Curtis Bennet?” System asked. “He asked more questions when he first got here than any other off-worlder I’ve ever met.”
Luke jerked his head around and stared at the ghostly apparition. “You know my brother? How? You said there hasn’t been an off-worlder for a hundred years! He’s only been missing for a month.”
“I do not know how fast time flows in your home world. I suspect it works differently than it does here.”
Luke groaned. “Great, like this wasn’t complicated enough already.”
“My apologies. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Was there anyone else here with my last name?”
“Yes, two others in the last thousand years.”
Luke stared at System for a minute. “Fuck.”