For the second time, I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar scene. This time it was a forest with tall, ancient-looking deciduous trees dyeing the light that reached the moss coated ground green with their canopies. I groaned and shook my head as a wave of dizziness overtook me.
“Wha-?” I blinked a few times, trying to get used to the fact I could now see through everything to a depth of about 20 meters. “Oh right, the depth vision.”
After a few moments I managed to get my sight under control and turned off the depth vision. “Phew, that's better,” I said, pulling myself onto my feet with a low hanging branch. My eyes widened and I hurriedly patted my legs. No exoskeleton.
“So, that talk with the God really happened then,” I mumbled to myself, looking down at my hand which was now clad in a black glove. I gave myself a once over and accidentally moved my vision to a point a couple of meters behind me, almost stumbling with the new layer of disconcertion. I was wearing clothing similar to that of a ninja and had a large pair of snow white wings sticking out of my upper back! I flapped them a few times experimentally and found that I understood perfectly how to use them. “That's good,” I thought, moving my point of vision back to first person. “Now then-” I concentrated for a brief moment and a large pink sword with a cat's head above the handle appeared in my hand. I concentrated again and it vanished again. I practised moving the sword in and out of my 'hotbar', finding it easier each time.
I concentrated again, and pulled a cell phone into my hand from my 'inventory'. It took a few moments longer than it took to pull the sword from my hotbar. I pulled off my mask, and looked at my own reflection. “Looks like me, though I must admit I’m more handsome now… wasn’t expecting the silver hair; I forgot my character had that. Hmm… I should tie it back when I’m not wearing the mask… silver eyes are cool, though not having pupils is kinda disturbing… hmm… I can live with it; not like I can change it now anyway.”
I turned the phone on and an instant later my head was flooded with filled with information about the time, my location, rare treasure nearby (none), how good I was at fishing, and what phase of the moon it was tonight. I quickly went through the settings and turned most of them off. I then checked the contacts list - I had none. A little disappointed, I then tried the 'Home' function. A glowing mist surrounded me and I 'popped' out of existence… reappearing a few centimetres to one side, standing on the ground where I had first arrived. “Oh good, that works!” I put the phone back into my inventory. This didn't seem to affect the information on my status it was sending me, which was good.
“Time for a proper test,” I said grimly, pulling the pink sword back from my hotbar. I swung it carefully in the air. With a loud “Nyan!” a rainbow trailing cat's head emerged from the tip of the blade and bounced off a tree (with another “Nyan!” and a puff of rainbow sparkles) and hit me (vision full of rainbows) before bouncing off again and exploding with a rainbow cloud and the loudest “Nyan!” yet. Everywhere the projectile had bounced, a shallow crater remained.
“Using this weapon is embarrassing,” I thought, dropping the sword and covering my masked face with my hands. After a few moments, during which the tree hit by the bouncing rainbow cat fell over, I pulled my hands away. “At least it doesn't hurt me,” I thought, trying to look on the positive side.
I pulled out the sword which had sunk down to the hilt, stored it back on my hotbar, and walked over to the tree.
I grappled it and “Huup-” lifted the several-meter thick trunk over my head with a lot less effort than I had predicted, causing me to stagger, slip on a patch of moss, and drop the tree on top of me. “Ow~” I said feebly, more because I felt I needed to say it that it actually hurt. In fact, I had barely felt the several ton tree hit me.
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After crawling out from under the tree, picking it up, and putting it in my inventory, I concentrated even further and pulled an acorn out of the supplies that had been in one of my worlds. I could now feel that all the materials I had stockpiled had now been merged together into a single giant storage space. I planted the acorn, musing on the fact that I could feel, to use distance as an analogue, even further out, something else. I guessed it was my other characters.
Pondering all this to myself, I started walking in a random direction. I could roughly sense a map being filled in in my head, so I had no fear of getting lost. As I walked, I carefully unwrapped the cloth on my arm, revealing the bare skin underneath. I fished around in my 'world storage' and pulled out a copper shortsword. I tapped its point against my arm, but it didn't even bend my skin. Frowning, I tapped it with my other hand, and a layer of bright orange flamelike armour appeared over my exposed arm, seemingly merging together with my skin and the cloth of my ninja costume.
“That's not quite how I expected that to work,” I muttered, but I could now feel how my armour merged into my skin. If I wanted, I could fully separate the two, but I decided to leave it merged after experimenting with it a bit; it was a bit bulky to wear comfortably under my clothes, nevermind the spikes, the holes in my clothes from which rapidly pulled themselves closed.
“If I am wearing the Solar Flare Armour, then where's th-” with a small explosion a flaming, spiked shield appeared floating in front of me. “Nevermind,” I said, dismissing it with a wave of my hand.
As I was wearing speed enhancing Terraspark boots (which had also merged with my clothing, as had my other accessories), I was walking casually at the average person's full sprint, and as I looked up, a branch broke my face. Splinters bounced off an invisible visor just in front of my eyes but it still made me flinch and trip over a tree root, sending me careening off into a tree, causing it to tilt over.
“Screw this,” I said, spreading my wings and pulling a small crystal out of my hotbar. I raised the hand holding the crystal Prism and channelled some mana into it. Scores of dancing rays of light shone out of it in a cone, slicing through the canopy and causing a brief rain of branches. A moment later, I got the hang of it and focused the beams into a two meter wide beam of rainbow light that blasted through the canopy above me, cleanly obliterating every splinter in its path. I tucked the prism back into my inventory and flapped my wings once, all that was needed to propel me the 30 meters straight up through the canopy.
A few more flaps and I was floating effortlessly high in the air. I felt as though I could fly forever even though I wasn’t using the infinite flight accessory, which was different to the game. I guessed the God had done something about that.
The forest spread out below me, stretching out as far as the eye could see, so I got out a pair of binoculars. In the far distance, the green became a little less thick, so I took off in that direction. I had the best wings in the game, I just had the white wings equipped over them in their vanity slot, so I knew I could go pretty fast. What I was not expecting was the boom as I broke the sound barrier.
“Eh? That's way faster than the max speed in the game! What the heck?”
I could barely feel any wind buffeting me through my armour, even though the 'speed' function of the cell phone was active and telling me I’d levelled off at 400 meters per second. “Holy shit this is fast!” I yelled, my words torn away by the wind.
Struck by a sudden thought, I looked back revelling in how quickly each tree I focused on fell away behind me. “Wait, aren't I a bit low-”
Splinters blasted out around me, the tree I’d hit practically exploding, sending me tumbling through the dense canopy to smash into the ground with my face, then bouncing, smashing through one tree and smacking into another. Which then fell on me.
“Ow~” I groaned, though again it was more because I felt it was required than it actually hurting. In fact, it only ached slightly. “Just how indestructible am I?” I exclaimed, dusting pieces of tree and ground off.
Just at that moment, my cell phone sent a notification into my mind: “Rare orerrtrrreasurrr *beep* feature detected: mana spring!”
“Seems a bit faulty, hopefully it sorts itself out,” I thought, bringing to mind the information about the world the God had given me. To my surprise it had somehow reorganised itself into the format of a game wiki page. “Mana spring: an unusual upwelling of mana from deep within the ground, makes spell casting easier and accelerates the expansion of the mana pool when near it.”
At that moment, surrounded by the ruinous impact of my first flight, I decided - this would be where I would build my new home.