“Please stand by. ”

The words echoed inside my head. Then everything went dark. I couldn’t see a thing.

Suddenly, something I can only describe as a video suspended in an empty space started playing. It was like I was in a pitch-black theater and the movie just started. I couldn’t feel my body at all. A panic like I never felt before overwhelmed me. But I couldn’t scream. I had no mouth to scream with anymore.

“Greetings, Earthlings. Welcome to the Universe!” An extremely upbeat female voice exclaimed, followed by equally upbeat music. Planet Earth spun in place in my mind, like in those documentaries about the cosmos. The invisible woman continued. “As your planet has reached a level of social and technological advancement, it has become eligible for Universe Integration. This is a fantastic opportunity for you to become full-fledged citizens of our great Universe and grow stronger alongside others who have already taken the plunge. Our state-of-the-art System will help you accomplish just that and aid you in achieving your dreams. “

While she was talking, a whole flurry of images changed in front of me. They showed all kinds of beings, humanoid and otherwise, participating in different kinds of activities, like farming, crafting, singing in sci-fi-looking bars, and so on.

Something about the pitch rubbed me the wrong way. Other than, you know, how fucking insane the whole thing was. I felt like I was watching a travel ad for a trip to a country ruled by a dictator, made with a budget of a piece of string and chewing gum.

Then the theme changed and strange animals were roaming through the savanna, then the woods, crossing flooded rivers, and swimming in the sea.

“Right at this moment, your planet is being seeded with different kinds of monsters to challenge you. The rewards are great for those who dare to risks. The Universe welcomes the strong.”

The images slowed down and faded to black. The music also stopped and some strange script showed up. Somehow I was able to understand it, but at this point, I gave up on questioning things.

“According to Section LDF-459 of Terms and Conditions, the System's creators are not responsible for any consequences of System Integration, including, but not limited to death, breakdown of society, and cannibalism,” Another voice read quickly, like in a medicine commercial.

I found myself on the floor of the porch, face down. I felt something like a pinprick in the back of my neck, and a tingling sensation spread down my spine, right on the edge of being painful. It went away after a few moments, but an echo of it persisted a while longer. I was nauseous, and my stomach threatened to bring up my dinner.

The feeling subsided soon, and I pulled myself up on my knees. The woods around me were eerily quiet.

Usually, I wasn’t afraid to be alone up here. But the lack of sound was unnerving.

“I don’t know how you and your mom do it,” my friend Angela told me often when I’d mention the cabin. “I’d be scared shitless. You could get axe murdered.”

“I guess you could get all different sorts of murdered in the city too, ” I’d reply.

The truth was that I wasn’t particularly afraid of dying from an axe murderer. Statistically speaking, a woman is more likely to get murdered by her romantic partner than anyone else. Random murders are rare. As I was single and on pretty decent terms with all of my exes, I didn’t want to let my fear keep me from doing things alone.

Of course, I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t leave my drink unattended in a bar and I crossed the street at night if someone kept walking close behind me. I kept the chain on my apartment door at all times and even carried pepper spray in my purse.

At the cabin, Mom changed all the windows so they could be bolted and the doors were decently sturdy. Every night we would check the windows and the doors. In all of my years staying at the cabin we haven’t had a single incident and that kept me feeling safe.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Now, I didn’t feel safe. At all.

For a brief moment, I considered if my grief had made me black out or hallucinate. I was sure that it was something that happened to people. However, that notion quickly evaporated from my mind as soon as I noticed something in the corner of my vision. A small, green, pulsating logo of an eye hovered in the right-hand side of my vision. I tried to shake my head to make it go away, but it persisted. I closed my eyes, but there it was.

An ominous green eye.

I could feel my heartbeat starting to climb rapidly and I recognized that I would get a full-blown panic attack soon. I used to get them often as a teenager, but I hadn’t had one in years.

Being aware that I was panicking didn’t help me calm down, of course.

My breath kept getting caught in my throat and my hands started shaking. I forced myself to slow down my breathing and took huge breaths. I put my hands on the wooden porch floor.

It took some time, but I calmed down. The eye was still hovering in the field of my vision, but I ignored the feeling of panic that threatened to bubble up from below the surface. I focused on the eye and a transparent green window opened in front of me, like in the old web browsers.

“Okay. This is fine. For sure,” I said and giggled nervously. There was a browser window hanging in front of my eyes and that’s just fine. There was nothing weird or unusual about that.

Again, there was that strange angular script and I could still understand it perfectly. The window had three tabs: Status, Skills, and Inventory. I focused on Status and a list showed up.

Name: Diana Mond

Age: 25

Class: N/A

Level: N/A (0/100 exp.)

Strength: 2

Constitution: 3

Intelligence: 4

Wisdom: 3

HP: 30/30

Points to distribute: 0

“Yep. I’ve gone insane. Go away.” I said and the window disappeared. The eye was still there in the corner, watching me. I decided to ignore it. It wasn’t real. There wasn’t a character sheet in my brain.

I got up from the floor, my knees protesting as I did. I went inside the cabin and fetched a bottle of wine and a glass. I struggled with the bottle opener as usual. I silently cursed my mother for buying the nicer wine with the cork, and not the bottles with a screw top I’ve been known to enjoy in my missions to get as drunk as possible for the least amount of money.

The woods around the cabin were still eerily silent. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. Something deep inside the lizard part of my brain screamed for me to hide, hide, hide. I wasn’t going to ignore my body’s warning, so I got up as quietly as possible, picked up the hatchet from the porch, and went inside the cabin, the wine forgotten on the table.

I spent the next few minutes frantically locking the front door and making sure every window’s latch was secure. I even pulled the curtains on for good measure, and stood next to the window, peeking into the outside world.

It was still fairly light outside and soon I was able to see the very thing that awoke the primal fear of the wild and unknown, forged by the thousands of generations that resulted in me. A large bear-like creature walked into the clearing in front of the cabin and made my blood run cold.

It was a horrifying sight. The animal was slightly bigger than an average male brown bear and had the same colouring as one. It was quadrupedal, with each paw ending in long claws that promised to disembowel you if you gave it a chance. Its head was massive for the size of its body and its maw was the scariest part of it. Instead of a snout, it had an angry red hole lined with a few rows of teeth, as if someone lit a firecracker where its mouth used to be and it blew up and later healed. As I watched it approach, a transparent green box popped up in my vision and read Grizmorph level 15.

I quickly slid down on the floor, with my back pressed against the cabin wall, gripping the small hatchet. I was screaming inside my head, but I forced myself to keep quiet. My heart was threatening to break out of my chest.

I could hear the Grizmorph climbing up the few steps onto the porch and the breaking of glass as it nudged the coffee table. I didn’t dare to take a look through the window. All I could do was sit quietly and hope that it would lose interest and go away.

My prayers were answered after several excruciating minutes. The beast had left the porch and I steeled my resolve and slowly got up on my knees. Through the window, I could see it retreating. Only after I couldn’t see it for ten minutes did I let myself breathe again.