TEST FRACTURE Located!
Current Distance to TEST FRACTURE: 250 metres.
This was it.
As the message popped up in his vision, he mentally waved it away after he read it. It was actually pretty intuitive, the SYSTEM and its controls, and he could already feel himself getting used to it.
Whether that was because he’d read books on the subjects or because of a modification to his body by the SYSTEM itself, he didn’t know. And right now, it didn’t matter. He found himself jogging towards the spire of purple light, questions on his mind.
Why was the TEST FRACTURE here, specifically? What was it going to entail? What ‘class’ was he going to get? None of it seemed to matter to him as he entered the clearing that the beam of purple light was pointing to, spotting a crowd of other people.
But it wasn’t the people that stole his attention, it was the thing they were surrounding.
Shining in the same purple light of the beam that was shooting into the sky, it looked like someone had taken a knife to reality itself and carved open a hole, the bubbling surface of what he could only assume to be a portal swirling vertically.
He barely noticed his hands grabbing out his cricket bat on their own as he strode forward, towards both the TEST FRACTURE and the crowd of people surrounding it, all of whom seemed to be… waiting for something?
Most of the group looked kinda like him, dressed in thick clothing that seemed to be slapped together, and holding various kinds of weapons, basically just things you could find around the house that you could hit something with.
He spotted at least two frying pans, for example.
He was a couple of meters away from the group when one of them noticed him, shouting in surprise, his arms raising into some kind of combat stance, a knife in their hand. It was a large man, bigger than him for sure, dressed in what he was pretty sure was some police officer’s riot gear.
“Jesus! Where the fuck did you come from?!”
The first person’s surprise seemed to have a domino effect on the others of the group, and Max found himself the target of all kinds of makeshift weapons as the group almost seemed to panic just at the sight of him.
He then remembered that he was still fully ‘armoured’ and that they likely couldn’t actually see any part of him other than the fact that he had gear and was armed as well. With this in mind, he took a step back from them, slowly putting his cricket bat back between his bag and armour, and unclipped his cricket helmet, slipping it off his head.
“Shit, uh, I’m really sorry for spooking you guys. I don’t plan on attacking or anything like that. I just got distracted by the TEST FRACTURE. I promise I’m not a threat.”
The fact that they could see his eyes now seemed to calm them down a little, but they still watched him like a hawk. What had they gone through before arriving here to make them already so distrustful of other people?
He put his hands out to his sides as one of the group, the police officer took a step towards him, motioning the group of people behind him to stay back. “Why are you here, kid?”
Now that he’d spoken a bit more, he could tell that the guy in the armour was older, probably upper middle age, unless he just had a really deep voice. Taking another step away from the police officer, he motioned towards the TEST FRACTURE.
“I just wanna go in that thing. You saw the boxes, right? That’s a TEST FRACTURE, and we need to go into it if we’re gonna get our classes and start being able to get stronger.”
The group behind the police officer mumbled at that, shuffling around. After glancing at them for a second, the police officer focused back on him.
“So, you’re seeing the boxes as well, and I assume the environment looks all messed up for you as well... do you live nearby? The current theory is that this is all some kind of foreign attack. Dropping hallucinogenic gas on us, stuff like that. But you seem pretty confident you know what all of this stuff means.”
Max nodded, glancing at the TEST FRACTURE again. He knew that he had plenty of time, a quick glance at the SYSTEM proved that quickly, still having over 30 hours before the TEST FRACTUREs turned into regular FRACTUREs, but he was still a bit anxious to get in there as quickly as possible.
The earlier he could start levelling up, the quicker he would get stronger.
“The blue boxes that appeared in your eyes, they talked about the ‘SYSTEM’, right? It’s a common trope in a lot of the books I read. The best way to explain it is magic with video game rules applied to it.”
He felt a little silly saying it out loud, no matter what he’d already experienced. His words caused frantic whispering to explode from the group of people behind the police officer, who didn’t even bother trying to stop them this time.
“Magic? You expect me to believe that Magic is a better explanation for all this, son? This isn’t the time for jokes.”
He was about to try and reassure the police officer that he wasn’t joking when he was interrupted.
“He’s clearly crazy, and probably dangerous like those other people were! You gotta cuff him, Damian!”
Max flinched as a shrill voice escaped the crowd, an older woman peeking out from behind the others, and pointing at him as she yelled. ‘Damian’ seemed to flinch as well, turning his head to stare at the woman for a second.
“Quiet, Sarah! The others attacked us outright, and… this guy is at least trying to talk. I can’t arrest people just because you’re scared. I’m sure he’s scared too. This isn’t the most pleasant situation we’ve been thrown into.”
While Damian had been talking to ‘Sarah’, Max had backed off a little further and had shifted his helmet in his hands, ready to quickly chuck it back on. He didn’t intend on hurting anyone here, he would never, but he couldn’t afford to be cuffed and potentially miss out on the TEST FRACTURE either.
Luckily, Damian seemed to be keeping calm, or at least pretending to for the group’s morale. After a moment, he turned back to Max, one hand raised, as if trying to calm him. “I promise, I’m not gonna cuff you unless you actually attack someone.”
Max nodded, swallowing. This first meeting with other people had been a lot more stressful than he had been imagining. “I’m not going to. I just need to get past you guys to enter the TEST FRACTURE, get my class, and then I’ll go.”
Damian glanced at the group, before looking back at him. “Look, we’re only here because we saw the beam of light in the sky pretty much first thing as we woke up today, and cause the screens said to find this ‘TEST FRACTURE’ you keep mentioning. We won’t stop you from entering… just…”
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Max could feel the nervous energy from Damian, and it was flowing off the other people in waves as they stared at him. Damian sighed. “We saw someone walk into the purple thing earlier, and they just… disappeared, as if they were vanishing into water. Are you willing to risk vanishing?”
Max paused for a moment, glanced at the TEST FRACTURE, the glowing purple rupture in space that seemed like a portal to him and nodded. Even if he hadn’t been confident that it was a portal, he needed to go into it.
“Yea. If I’m right, then it’s a portal that’ll take me somewhere else where I can earn my ‘class’ and finally start levelling up. I would suggest you all go through it as well, but I can’t force you to believe me.”
Damian stared at him for a moment, before nodding slowly. “If you’re sure. Everyone! Hop out of the way so the kid can move on. And Sarah, don’t even think of swinging at him. I saw you break some teeth earlier, so don’t lie and say you wouldn’t!”
As the group shuffled out of the way, having been standing right in front of the TEST FRACTURE itself, Max nodded up to Damian, clipping his own helmet back on, and pulling out his cricket bat.
“Thanks, Damian. I’ll get out of your hair now, but please at least think about going through the TEST FRACTURE yourself.”
Damian nodded, but Max could tell from how quick and sharp it was that he wasn’t giving it much thought, for now at least. Sighing to himself, Max walked forward, reaching the edge of the TEST FRACUTRE.
“Oh, and by the way… my name’s Max. It was nice to meet you all. Well, at least most of you at least, ha.” Forcing a smile onto his face at his own joke, Max pushed himself forward, through the purple, watery field of the TEST FRACTURE in front of him, and for a moment…
Everything went black.
----------------------------------------
And then, with a rush of sound, colour returned.
Max stumbled forward as the TEST FRACTURE’s portal seemed to throw him out the other side, and because he was stumbling he tripped, landing on his knees. Luckily, the padding of his motorbike pants stopped it from hurting him.
You have entered a TEST FRACTURE.
Progress to the end of the TEST FRACTURE to earn your class.
Combat will be enabled in the current TEST FRACTURE.
Time Remaining to complete: 33 Hours, 57 Minutes, 23 Seconds
After reading through it, and then quickly swiping the SYSTEM box out of his vision, Max pushed himself to his feet. Shaking out his shoulders, he leaned down and grabbed his cricket bat, which he had dropped when he tripped and looked around the room.
As he looked at the seemingly ancient and rotting stone brick construction of the walls and the dirty cobblestone floor, he sort of felt like someone had thrown him into some old-timey dungeon under a castle.
The room he was in was pretty bare, if you ignored the signs of disrepair, and only had one door out, a wooden one directly in front of him, about twice as wide as he was, but only about half a head taller.
With nothing for him in what was obviously just some sort of arrival room, Max walked towards to door in front of him, pushing it open slowly, trying to avoid it from creaking or grinding against the stone floor, but it swung open smoothly and without noise, an odd thingy for such an old looking place.
As he entered the second room of the TEST FRACTURE, he was blown away for the second, or was it third, time in this one day alone. In front of him was what he could only describe as an ‘arena’. The roof was gone, replaced with a beautiful night sky, with so little light pollution it felt like he could see the individual stars in the sky.
“What the hell is going on here?”
It was beautiful, but also confusing, seeing as it had been late in the morning when he had entered the TEST FRACTURE. Was he somewhere else on Earth, that had some other timezone? Was he still on Earth at all?
Whatever the answers to his questions were, he didn’t have time to think about it for too long, as his SYSTEM popped up again, the sound of rattling entering his ears from somewhere in the ‘arena’
Combat Test: Initialised
Enemy Type: Skeleton (Basic Humanoid)
Objective: Destroy all enemies
Mentally swiping the SYSTEM screen out of his sight, Max readied his cricket bat, swallowing as nervous energy entered his system, the rattling noises getting closer and closer before he finally saw the Skeletons the SYSTEM mentioned.
He found himself thanking… something that the skeletons were made of clean bone, with nothing left over of the flesh, but even still, it was incredibly scary to see in real life. There were six of the skeletons, all of them lurching towards him surprisingly quickly, their empty, bony hands reaching for him.
“Ok, Max. You got this. You’ve played plenty of RPGs. It’s just some skeletons, one of the most basic enemies. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. You got this.”
Max forced himself to take a couple of deep breaths, using the time before they reached him to prepare himself mentally. Fighting the dog monsters had been hard enough, but these were human skeletons. Human-shaped, at least.
But it didn’t matter. As the first skeleton reached him, he stepped into it, swinging his cricket bat down on its skull, and found with morbid relief that the skull shattered under his swing. That relief was torn from him a second later when he realised that the body was still moving, even without the head.
“Fuck!”
He stepped back rapidly as the skeleton lunged for his head, but even though he wasn’t quick enough, the grill in front of his face from his helmet snared the skeleton’s hand, stopping it in place.
It still struggled to attack him, and it was still gut-wrenchingly scary to have it so close, but with it trapped like that, Max was able to grab his cricket bat with two hands and slam the edge down on its elbow, severing whatever was holding the bones together, before kicking the torso of the skeleton to make space.
The hand and lower arm stayed attached to his helmet, but he quickly reached up and pulled it out, small shards of bone sticking to his jacket, meaning he was going to have to clean it once he got through the TEST FRACTURE.
With his sight unhindered, and the trick to the skeletons discovered, Max held his cricket bat in both hands like a longsword and let out the breath he had been unconsciously holding.
The skeleton he had kicked before hadn’t gotten up yet, the loss of its head and arm messing with its ability to stay upright, but that didn’t mean he was safe. The other five skeletons were approaching as well, but now he knew how to defeat them.
Stepping out of the way of the closest skeleton when it lunged at him, he kicked at its shin, tripping it over, before he wailed on it with his cricket bat, attacking the joints and breaking it into its separate parts.
He had misjudged how fast the others were, however, and he felt another skeleton slam into his backpack, throwing him forward. He stayed upright, but just barely, using his cricket bat to keep himself upright.
The bag had enough stuff in it to have padded the blow at least, in addition to his makeshift armour, meaning that he wasn’t too hurt by the attack. The skeletons were still charging him, and when the nearest one came into range, he swung for its spine, right below the ribs, his fight with the dog monsters running through his head for a moment.
He doubted that they worked like regular nervous systems, but if he could break them in half, he could take his time getting rid of them, and be safer about it.
His cricket bat cracked the skeleton’s spine in half fairly cleanly, and its torso toppled to the ground. Max didn’t let up, however, switching targets to the next skeleton and doing the same, shattering its spine and breaking the skeleton in half.
The skeletons on the ground were still moving, both halves were, in fact, but they didn’t have the speed they used to, or the ability to move while attacking, or vice versa.
With the knowledge that his strategy was working, Max pressed on, growing more and more confident in himself as he broke the skeletons in half one by one, until finally he was left with six half-skeleton torsos crawling at him while their legs flailed uselessly.
Slowly walking away from them, Max tried to control his breathing. He wasn’t actually physically exhausted, having spent years training almost every day to swing a bat like this a hundred times over and running more than he could even count, but he’d never experienced combat like this before.
It was exhausting in a way that he hadn’t anticipated, both physically and mentally.
He rolled his shoulders and shook out his arms as he turned to face the smaller, and much slower swarm of skeletons, before nodding to himself. “You’ve got them essentially neutered, now. So just… do what you did to the dog monsters again. C’mon mate, you got this.”
He didn’t even have to go to them as he did for the dog monsters, as they crawled their way over to him, almost lining up perfectly for him to stab at their joints with his cricket bat. He snapped each of their shoulders and necks with his cricket bat until eventually, they all stilled.
As he saw his SYSTEM pulse for a moment, he couldn’t help but feel a little… anticlimactic about the test? It hadn’t been… the hardest thing in the world? Hell, even the dog monsters he had fought before had been tougher.
“Am I being stupid? Why would I want it to be hard?”
Shaking his head at himself, he turned away from the pile of bones he had created and scanned the room, trying to find the door forward. Frowning when he couldn’t spot it, he walked forward, getting a closer look at the walls.
He’d gone around about a third of the wall in front of him when he realised that the door forward had been covered by some of the plant life that dotted the walls and pushed them out of the way, eager to move on.
Only to find out that the doorway was blocked by an old metal portcullis. He tapped at it with his cricket bat, and the ringing noise it made reverberated throughout the room, before eventually quieting down.
And then a tingle went down his spine.
He had barely started turning around when something collided with his chest, the baking dish he had placed there vibrating as he was thrown backwards, eventually hitting a wall and slamming to a stop.
“GAH! -cough- Fuck!”
His helmet had most likely saved his life there, as had his makeshift armour in general, but that didn’t stop him from hurting all over. He forced his eyes open again, having shut them instinctively during his tumble, and immediately knew what was going on.
Releasing combat tests limiters due to unexpected ease of completion.
As Max looked at the hulking skeleton in front of him he couldn’t stop his own mouth.
Enemy Type Updated:
Skeleton (Basic Humanoid)x6 -> (Basic Orc-type)x1
Objective Updated: Destroy the enemy.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”