He was now standing with bare feet on hard-packed soil.
Real dirt, a different colour from the brown, almost black, that he was used to. It was a visual proof he was elsewhere, yet that change was not important. Instead, he focused solely on his feet. They were pasty white, with clipped nails, smooth, and soft!
A sigh ripped through him. “Of course.” His body had been reset, and that hardness he had developed over years of exposure to the weather was gone. This was the body he had on Earth before the tutorial started. Others would get to wind back the clock, and he had to start with his weak twenty-year-old body. Biologically, he achieved peak strength at twenty-five, and he wished he had been able to choose that as his starting point.
He glanced around and nodded to himself. He was completely alone, like he expected. After surviving for as long as he had, he had been certain that he was going to handily beat everyone else. That assumption was apparently correct.
He shifted his toes into the dirt. Then he applied force to test them under pressure. There was a prick of pain. When he lifted his left foot up and brushed his sole, the culprit, a speck of rock substantially smaller than a Tic Tac dropped off.
Fragile.
Dux hadn’t lied.
He was twenty again, but this time it was for real, and, most importantly, he would not be alone. He pulled his gaze away from his body’s regression to examine his surroundings and discovered he had appeared near the centre of a near perfect circle. It was maybe a hundred metres across. Then a glowing blue dome rose out of the dirt and expanded above him, encasing him in his own space, separating him from the world that existed beyond the boundary.
Him and the Earth and then eventually the others.
He was the first, but Dux had confirmed as much. Tom did not move as he waited for the others to arrive. He wondered what they would be like. It was a sizeable area, and hopefully, that meant his starting team numbers would be on the larger side.
The tunic itched, and it felt like it was scratching him even when he was not moving. Tom looked at his hands. The soft skin of a scholar greeted him. He had been an apprentice builder on earth, and that was the body he had now. There were a few calluses, but nothing like what he had toward the end of the tutorial. At least his arms were not as white as his feet.
All of him unweathered.
It was too late to do anything about it. After twenty years without wearing shoes, he had not even considered that the regression would mean he would need them.
Recency bias at its blinding best.
The cleared area was still empty, and he started pacing. Maybe he should see how opaque the dome really was, potentially gain a useful inkling of what they would face. Three steps later, he stopped and returned to his previous spot.
There would be time later.
How long had passed? Twenty minutes? He had confirmed that the longer you survived in DEUS’s trial, the earlier you would arrive here, but he had not wasted questions to clarify whether a year meant a minute here or an hour. Surely it couldn’t be the latter. The rules wouldn’t trap him in this dome for almost two days with nothing to kill.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Pop.
Suddenly he was not alone, and Tom’s eyes went to where the man had appeared. A youthful face as unweathered as his own feet greeted his eyes. There were differences, with the other man being noticeably richer from the possessions’ perspective. Tom’s brain catalogued the pertinent details. Around rank-eight, magic user, decent clothes, a well-made robe, shoes, visible socks, and a staff that lent more into its quarterstaff heritage than its alternative purpose as a magic focus.
No, he had misjudged it. There was nothing magical about the weapon. It was thick, heavy, sturdy, and probably packed a wallop, but it did nothing more. It was cheap.
Tom’s esteem for this other man increased.
The man was openly studying him back.
It was Keikain, a man the future him knew, who was as clever and skilled as he had originally thought. However, he also had a cold, callous side, that was only revealed after one spent a lot of time with him.
Time blurred forward, and people appeared more and more frequently. He was able to get a count. He had survived for forty years, the mage twenty-five, and now that they were down to fifteen years, a new person appeared every few seconds. Until they stopped at a disappointing eighty-six.
The accumulated people all looked at each other uneasily, assessing those around them just like Tom had. Everyone gathered here would rely on each other to survive for long enough for their personal strength to grow to the point when they could flourish independently. Though if how they went about it might differ, at least the aims of all these refugees from Earth were similarly aligned. They all wanted to save humanity.
The best path to achieve that was unknown. It was deliberately so, and it was probably the purpose of this twisted game. Fame, strength, influence, wealth, and who knows what else were the metrics that would measure them for the next sixty-four local years, or almost a hundred earth years.
Once the competition ended, they would find out if they had done enough. The rest of humanity was one hundred percent dependent on everyone gathered here, and the presumably thousands of other staging spots spread out over Existentia.
Tom forced his breathing to be even, to combat the mounting anger. He had seen the rewards for the different places among the seven races. They all had, and humanity’s combined score had, to be in the top three of the seven races competing, otherwise… the eight billion people currently in stasis would be seeded on this world in a way guaranteed to create death and suffering beyond anything that humans had ever done to themselves.
Tom shut his eyes and held in the tears as he imagined what would happen to his family and friends if they failed.
Seventh place meant they dropped everyone naked with nothing to aid them on a planet where a bunny rabbit could kill a grown man. Sixth, you got to spend your contribution points, but for most people that might mean they could drop with clothes and a knife. After all, humanity’s best was already here, and in a hundred years’ time, they probably wouldn’t be around to help.
Fourth place got contribution points, clustered starting zones, basic structures, and a month’s rations, which might sound like a lot, but it wasn’t. The only upside with that result was that human civilisation would probably survive, at least in some spots. According to DEUS’s analysis, there would be a five percent ten-year survival rate. Tom really did not want that happening to his mum, dad, and Em. The inhumanity! Internally, Tom laughed at the joke. For millennia, humans had believed that other humans were their worst enemy.
They were wrong.
Fuck the GODs!
Think it, but never say it out loud. He had learnt that lesson.
Fuck the GODs!
The essential thing was that everyone here was working toward the same goal. Their siblings, parents, partners, and kids were all in the same boat. Humanity completely united, and all it took was… Tom stopped the thought.
Fuck the GODs.
That was the only thing that had to be said, at least in the safety of his brain, where they probably couldn’t hear.
And when Dux had challenged him to grow and take destiny into his own hands, he had done it. He had survived, and he had amassed contribution points, and now it was time to make a difference.