Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.
Creenchez had been busy directing the planting of the grove when the feeling had come on. It stole her breath away, causing her to squat on all fours. In mere moments, without checking her status screen or notifications, she knew what it was. Something had happened to Big Bossy Boss.
Picking up her priestess garb to free up her legs, she began running towards the camp, activating her divine ability as she did so to locate her patron. Only a blank screen greeted her.
When she was still only halfway back to the main camp, her path crossed with the horde leaders. They crashed into each other in a comforting embrace, each trying to communicate what they were feeling.
“Big Bossy Boss…”
“Something is wrong…”
“I can’t feel him anymore…”
“What will we do?” they both said in unison.
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Mike was pulled backwards, his speed increasing rapidly until it matched and then exceeding his speed after the cosmic-water enhanced explosion. Suddenly, an intense pressure squeezed his body, seeming to overwhelm Unflinching Meteor and turning his face red as it built. It reminded him of the internal abdominal pressure he felt when reaching his 500 pound squat record in college, only much much worse, and had he been able to feel anything, he was sure he would have felt blood leaking from his nose. Before he could think too much about it, the nighttime sky and fiery explosion vanished, and with it, the pressure decreased.
Facing upwards, still moving through the air, he was struck by the vast cosmos above him. Far different from Earth’s sky, there was no one celestial object that gave off light. Rather, uncountable stars and planets filled the sky, and swaths of interstellar were visible.
A moment later his motion halted as his body careened into the ground, encapsulating his head and and shoulders. For three seconds he lay unmoving, waiting for Unflinching Meteor to finally end. As it did, he became acutely aware that it wasn’t just the sky that was different, the atmospheric pressure was too. Even his enhanced body struggled to function properly in the environment.
With his head, neck, and shoulders buried in the ground, he became acutely aware of his inability to breathe. Trying to remain calm, he reached up and began to dig himself out, only to find that it wasn’t merely dirt he was stuck in, but hard rock. He didn’t think about the physics behind him somehow entering solid rock as if it was jello in the moment, rather, he focused on not panicking as he activated Rock Tunneling and began to dig himself out, only nothing happened. He next tried Tactics, pushing his Dexterity into Strength, but again, this only led to him feeling foolish.
He did everything he could think of as the pressure built in his chest, his body screaming for oxygen. He remembered hearing that drowning was the most peaceful way to die, well his SEAL trainers had clearly never experienced it before, because that was a lie. He wriggled his body back and forth, his legs bucking, causing the rock beneath his to dig into his back, cutting his skin and causing him to bleed.
Determined to fight til the very end, he continued struggling, trying to activate any of his skills, even something as ineffective as Fortune’s Folly, but for once, the System remained absolutely silent.
Eventually he began to wonder why he hadn’t died yet. 5 minutes turned into 7, which rapidly became 10 in his state of alarm. At first he had thought that maybe the System had expanded his lung capacity, but it wasn’t nearly 15 minutes of constant exertion that he gave in, allowing his body to succumb to the darkness. Which never came.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
By 25 minutes, he had the startling realization that he no longer needed to breathe anymore. Sure, his body still wanted to, as it had been keeping up with the habit for nigh on 70 years, but it simply didn’t need to anymore.
With imminent death out of the way, he began to think more logically once again. Worried he had contracted some kind of debuff and wanting to understand why none of his skills had activated, he pulled up his notifications, only to find that they too were missing, as was his Character Sheet. The feeling was surreal. Having interacted with the System regularly for over a year, only to have it suddenly disappear. The only thing he could liken it to was returning home from war. That first step on his home soil and instantly all of the fear of death and constant threats was simply gone, so suddenly that it had left him wondering if he had dreamed it all up. Of course, the memories never truly left, it was just an illusion of finally being safe and returning to the “normal” world.
Turning inwards, he got his first concrete evidence that it hadn’t simply all been a dream. His channels were still as strong as ever, the energy cloud around his core being as dense as he had left it ever since he determined that he didn’t want to upgrade skills anymore.
Tracing his pathways, he found the fractals for Rock Tunneling on his hands. If the channels are still there, I still have energy inside of me, and the fractals don’t look damaged, why won’t they work? He would have spoken the thought aloud had his mouth not been completely ensconced by rock.
Gathering some energy from his center, he guided it to the skill and pushed it into it, much as he had done with his Quicksilver Drill when creating his underground kitchen chimney. The skill immediately lit up, and with much greater confidence, he reached his hand up and began to dig himself out. The rock parting around his hands like water. Within a few moments, he had uncovered his body, and pushed his way to his feet.
He found himself in a large-ish crater, around 30 feet in diameter. The walls were high enough that he couldn’t see outside, however, as he took in his surroundings, it became very apparent to him that he was no longer on Earth. The sky still looked completely different. The pressure was immense. And the rock on which he stood was unlike anything he had ever seen before. He used Analyze on it out of habit, but of course that returned nothing.
A mighty roar emaciated outside of the walls, and rather than explore as he had intended, he instead turned back to wear he had just been buried and began to tunnel deeper. Call him crazy, but if he could barely walk in this strange place, he had no idea to test his mettle against the local wildlife.
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Many hours larter, he found himself hunkered in a small burrow about 20 meters below the surface. He had dug a spiral tunnel that hopefully would be hard for any large creatures to follow… unless they were big enough to simply scoop him up from the surface. He really had no idea what kind of titans existed in his current environment. Throughout digging, he had found that his body used up large amounts of cosmic energy to activate certain skills, while others took barely any at all. He came to realize that skills like Unflinching Meteor and Footsteps of the Wind, which had long cooldown times, were also the abilities that required more energy. The only logical conclusion stemming from this, is that the System had been powering his skills and abilities with cosmic energy before he even knew how to manipulate the energy on his own. It was a strange realization, and like everything related to the System, it made him feel slightly violated.
In the darkness of his small burrow, he cycled energy into Energy Sense, taking in his surroundings for the first time. The first thing he noticed was that the density of the energy in the air was much higher than that on Earth–he estimated about four times as much.
The next thing he noticed was the large cores of energy existing on the surface above him. Clearly there were entities on the surface that dwarfed even the giant bird.
The next realization was that the System was nowhere to be found. No strings went from his core outward. Meticulously searching his surroundings, he couldn't detect even a speck of influence watching him. On finding this, he immediately attempted to level Tactics, which was still at lower levels and should be incredibly easy to do. 30 minutes later, after throwing all of his experience and energy at the problem, the symbol hadn’t changed.
“Freeeedom!” he yelled in his best impersonation of Braveheart, not caring that the noise might attract predators.
After months of constant observation and a year of endless violence, he was finally alone. It was at this moment that he realized that his core was also free of the ties that connected him to his hobgoblin horde, and the joy turned to anger. Somewhere out there, there was a force manipulating all of earth's inhabitants. He didn’t know how, and he didn’t know why, but his instincts wanted him to believe that it couldn’t be for any good reason.
Firming his resolve, he sat down and turned inwards. It was time to get to work.