Chapter 1
Day 1
Jeremy, Sarah, Daniel, and I have finally arrived on the Shattered Isles. The island we landed on seems to be very peaceful, there are tall beautiful trees with fruit hanging everywhere, a soft white sandy beach, and almost glowing blue waters. The only monsters we’ve seen here are small monkey-like creatures, but with two tails and have bright orange fur, but they don’t seem as intimidating as the other monsters we’ve heard of. But we weren’t very interested in them, we were all much more fascinated by our status pages and what they meant.
Name: Matthew Hendrix
Age: 23
Level: 1
Class: Locked
Experience: 0 / 100
Unused AP: 5
Health
10 / 10
Stamina
10 / 10
Mana
10 / 10
Constitution
1
Vitality
1
Resilience
1
Intellect
1
Endurance
1
Spirit
1
Strength
1
Focus
1
Agility
1
Wit
1
Perception
1
Insight
1
Dexterity
1
Control
1
Skills
Abilities
Treasures
None
None
None
Class: Locked
Jeremy said he chose to put most of his Attribute points in Strength, while Daniel put his into Constitution and Vitality, and Sarah’s went into Perception. I just couldn’t understand it though, sure their improvements seemed incredible, but when given the option between physical Attributes and magical, the choice seemed clear to me. I put all of my points into Control. The sensation was amazing, I felt a sense of… control, which sounds redundant. But it wasn’t control over my body, it was control over something else, something I had never sensed before, it felt like power! But the best part wasn’t the rush of strength from increasing my Attributes, the best part was when the feeling faded and the power stayed. When I first put my points into Control, it felt like a surge of power, but a power that would fade. Now it felt like I had gained something permanent.
This feeling of improving myself like this could get addicting. Of course, my friends all thought that my choice was pretty ridiculous, seeing as I didn’t have any magic to control, but the feeling of a higher level of Control made me want more. A lot more.
Day 2
My friends and I started discussing when we should leave the island, the Shattered Isles had strange effects on people’s minds the further they went in, but that power had less sway over people with higher levels. Our choices were to leave after a few days in this paradise island – which really wasn’t that bad an option, even if I didn’t agree with it – or to hunt some of the animals on this island. Daniel was all for leaving, he didn’t like risk and I could tell the thought of staying too long and having our minds affected like that scared him. Sarah and Jeremy wanted to stay however, so I decided to compromise and give them my plan, which they agreed to after a little persuasion on my part. We would stay for today and hunt some monsters, if we couldn’t find any or if hunting them was too risky, we could leave. If hunting the monsters around here was an option though, we could level up and stay here in relative safety. Jeremy went to go grab the guns he packed in our boat, we knew guns wouldn’t work on any of the monsters a few islands in, but they could still work on most of the monsters at the edge of the Shattered Isles. Once we were all packed up we headed out, with Jeremy and Sarah at the front, Daniel looking around cautiously in the middle, and me in the back, thinking about what I could do with my higher Control.
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Day 3
Hunting definitely didn’t go as planned. The only monsters we found were those same weird little monkeys, jumping around and ignoring us. Our new status's identified them as mostly |Level 3| monsters called Savage Monkins. We were hesitant to shoot at them because they hadn’t made any moves to hurt us so far, so for the moment we held off from attacking them. But as I said earlier, the only monsters we had seen were those monkeys, and our growing frustration and boredom made us consider attacking them. Like before, it was me who came up with the reasonable plan, Sarah would use her higher Perception to find a small group of monkeys away from all the others, and then we would attack at the same time at close range, something we could only do because of the monkey’s lack of interest in us. Then we’d run away in case other monsters came to investigate and look at how much Experience we had gained to see if our method of hunting was efficient enough.
My plan failed the second we took aim however, apparently the monkeys were smarter than we had guessed and immediately let out an ear-piercing screech that took us off guard. Before I could yell for the others to run, Jeremy’s gun went off, blowing through one of the monkey’s stomachs. We all looked at each other and ran but we heard a chilling and frankly annoying noise from behind us, the monkeys were gaining on us. After a while of running with the noise only growing louder, I gave a small look back and was terrified by what I saw, there must have been over a hundred of them clawing at the ground to catch up with us. But then something even worse happened, Jeremy began to get a large lead on us. Although he hadn’t chosen to increase his Agility, it seemed increasing Strength still helped with moving around. Daniel was behind him too, his choice of Constitution and Vitality had given him a much healthier body that could handle the strain that he was likely putting on it just to keep up with Jeremy. Sarah and I were at about the same pace though, seeing as neither of us had increased anything that would help with our speed, but then Sarah had slowed down a bit. I wasn’t sure why at the time, but now I realized she had slowed down a bit to look back. And what came next I never expected, Sarah pushed me. I tripped and fell, the monkey stampede washed over me, clawing at my back and giving me horrible bruises. I had expected broken bones but the monkeys were thankful light for their size. Then I blacked out
Day 4
When I woke up, my body was a mess. I was right that none of my bones were broken, but I was pretty sure one of them was at least cracked. The many cuts I had gotten were shallow and had scabbed over, but there was a good chance many of them were infected. A glance at some of my horrible purplish-green bruises made me want to puke from moving too fast, I tried to hold it down but it was too late. I puked all over myself. It smelled bad. And felt warm. I began to cry before falling asleep once more.
Day 5
When I woke up, I was quickly assaulted by the smell of my vomit, but it was soon ignored in favor of something else. I had leveled up. It turned out that simply surviving something you couldn’t beat also gave experience. Probably. My status wasn’t forthcoming on the details but my guess felt right so I just left it at that and looked at my status once more.
Name: Matthew Hendrix
Age: 23
Level: 2
Class: Locked
Experience: 3 / 200
Unused AP: 5
Health
20 / 20
Stamina
20 / 20
Mana
20 / 20
Constitution
2
Vitality
2
Resilience
2
Intellect
2
Endurance
2
Spirit
2
Strength
2
Focus
2
Agility
2
Wit
2
Perception
2
Insight
2
Dexterity
2
Control
7
Skills
Abilities
Treasures
None
None
None
Class: Locked
103 Experience? I didn’t have anything to compare it to, but that seemed like a bit much. Then again, there were probably over a hundred monkeys chasing us, so perhaps it does make sense. If only I knew how the experience worked. Either way, I had Attribute points to spend. Since I didn’t want to die, putting some point into Vitality which determined how fast I heal was a must. But I didn’t want to put all of them into Vitality either. I decided to put two points into Vitality and three into Control. Just like last time, I felt a surge of strength, but it was different this time. My control didn’t feel like it had increased as much as last time and I felt something new, a different type of strength. Like all the weird cracks and popping noises my body used to make if I didn’t stretch enough disappeared. I felt amazing! And I felt like I knew more about this status thing too. It seems you gain one Attribute point in every stat when you level up and five more points that can be used however you want. I don’t think I noticed the level up though because I was passed out and in pain, but it’s probably what kept me alive from my wounds this whole time.
Unfortunately increasing my Vitality wasn’t enough to heal me up in one go, though I was feeling substantially better. All I could do at the time was lay there with my thoughts, and I definitely didn’t want to do that after what had just happened to me. Sadly, my body didn’t care about opinion and laid there anyways. And then my thoughts inevitably went towards my betrayal, where my frie– no, not my friends anymore, friends don’t do what they did. But I did want to know if they were alive, for what reason I’m not sure, but I wanted to find them. I also wondered if Jeremy and Daniel were okay with what Sarah did, Daniel probably was. He always was the coward of the group, making me play as the negotiator so that everyone got what they wanted. Turns out they wanted me gone.
I laid like that for a while, thinking about them, with nothing else to do. There’s nothing you can do when your body is all busted up like mine, or that’s what I thought at the time. My mind latched on to what I had just said for some reason, but I couldn’t figure out why. That thought was like a piece of food stuck in your teeth that you could never get out. The answer to my problems was in those words but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. But then I did figure it out, there was something that I could do even with a busted-up body, something I was never able to do before. Magic. My old friends had laughed at me for putting my Attribute points into Control, saying that I had no magic in the first place to control. But that wasn’t true, was it? Control wasn’t just about controlling magic, it was also about controlling my Mana. Similar things but very different. And so I got to work.
I tried to relax and search for that source of power I had felt only a few days ago. I quickly found it but learned that finding it wasn’t the hard part, controlling it was. A bit ironic since my highest Attribute was Control. So I backed off the gas a bit and tried it from a new angle, I just tried to sense all of my Mana and what it’s doing. I did this for a while, coming to the conclusion that Mana flows in the same space as my body but not in it. It was strange, my Mana seemed naturally constrained to the shape of my body but I knew that it wasn’t actually flowing through it. Since getting Mana out of me was hard, maybe I could do the opposite and pull it into me, I relaxed again and started pulling with my Mana but nothing happened.
I did this for the rest of the day, my thoughts finally far away from those who betrayed me. Eventually, I was able to do something with my Mana, I stopped trying to move some in or get it out and just moved it around in my… well, I’d already figured out it’s not actually in my body but it looked like I was circulating my Mana faster than its normal speed. I wasn’t sure what that would do, but I was going to master Mana and survive. Hopefully I’ll find my old friends and when I do, I’ll have figured out what I want to do with them. Probably not something good.