Chapter 3: It Feels So Good!

I stood in shock as confetti and sparkles cascaded all about. A wave of pleasure swept me from head to toe and I watched the scratches on my forearms knit closed. Feeling in my dead arm returned in a wash of pins-and-needles and I clenched my fist a few times experimentally. Good as new. I felt euphoric, powerful, alive as never before and grinned when no rush of drugs was released to dampen the sensation.

The frenetic drumming began anew, but this time it was almost drowned out by the roar of voices cheering.

“Congratulations on reaching Level 2! Wow! That didn’t take long. You must be some kind of bloodthirsty monster to find and kill a living, sentient being less than a minute from the end of the tutorial speech! Good job! Seriously, there are almost 8 billion of you on here and a little less than 1500 deaths have occurred. And of those, more than half were from falling somewhere unfortunate! Oops!”

The afterglow of pleasure still tingled in my fingers and toes and I fought to wipe the wide grin from my face. I knew I should feel bad about killing, but damn, it just felt so good. I wondered if it would be this way every time, and realised I was looking for my next enemy.

“For this exceptional achievement, and showing some true go-getter behaviour you receive the following rewards.”

They appeared in my HUD as she spoke.

1. Access to the Inventory function.

2. Basic Identify Overlays.

3. 3x Red Balls & 3x Blue Balls & 3x Green Balls.

4. The ‘Hatchling Predator’ Perk.

I had no bloody idea what any of that meant, though after a moments thought a memory rose to the surface. I’d been 9 years old when the UE had banned video games, a necessary step to improve productivity and unity. Either way I’d been a freshly implanted youth and hadn’t been capable of caring. I used to play this game, though I couldn’t for the life of me remember its name. In it I’d run around, collecting materials which I would store in an inventory, return to a home base and build. At night creatures would come to destroy what I had erected.

I picked up the dead Gosporian by one of its limp forelimbs and with a thought it blinked away, a haptic buzz in my brain and a whoosh of displaced air accompanying its departure. A little suitcase icon blinked beneath the human body in my HUD and I mentally clicked it. A table of perhaps 24 boxes expanded, but only the first four were populated. The first three each showed a different coloured ball and as I thought of them they gained a description.

Stolen story; please report.

Red Ball: Restores 10% HP

Blue Ball: Restores 10% MP (Locked)

Green Ball: Restores 10% Fatigue

The last slot showed the mangled corpse of the Gosporian Drone along with the modifier: ‘Edible’ which I thought was pretty fucked up.

The announcer’s voice seemed content to wait for me, and I realised I could still hear it faintly, humming that damn jingle. I’d thought this was either all prerecorded, or general announcements to large groups, but now I wondered about that.

I still needed to figure out what the Hatchling Predator perk meant, but though I searched, I couldn’t make anything else appear, so I closed my menu.

For the first time since I’d been whisked away from my planet, nothing happened to me. No pain, no vanishing in a crack of lightning, nothing attacked. I took a deep breath of the hot, rotten hamburger scented air and waited. The drums still thundered and I could hear the humming of the announcer as well as a muted conversation.

Hairs rose on my arms. It was only a matter of time.

I bent down and pried the custard-yellow coated rock from the dirt, holding it ready in one hand. A tingle of excitement, a memory of that pleasure coursed through me. Let them come.

“Well?” Asked the announcer. “Are you going to use it? We’re waiting Allan.”

Her voice was low and breathy and I nearly jumped out of my damn skin.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

A small icon on a bar at the very bottom of my HUD enlarged, wriggled and flashed a few times. I knew what they wanted me to do, but was loath to give them satisfaction. What new horror could they have in store for me? It wriggled some more and the movement reminded me of the way Gaspatchio, my mother in law’s French bulldog’s arse would whenever it smelled cheese.

I sighed and clicked the button. The music changed, it was heavier, full of rip-roaring guitar. My cousin Fabien and I had found some illegal pre-unification music on a datachip when we were teenagers, the composer’s name had been Mick Gordon and the music he had made sounded a lot like this. It had given Fabien a headache, but I’d liked it.

Hatchling Predator Perk Activated

My vision changed, the colours inverted and bizarre as though I saw in infra-red. A tiny silhouette appeared, flying through the trees in the distance. Tiny green text floated above it.

Rahn-Mi: Swarm Host Drone. Level 1.

Civilisation: Gosporian.

“That’s right viewers, the human has figured it out. What a smarty pants! Amongst a few other things, the Hatchling Predator perk allows the user to detect level 1 participants at a range of 500 feet. What will he do with this?

Run and hide?

Hunt and harvest?

I know which I’d prefer to see!”

The soaring guitar and frenetic drums reached a fever pitch.

And I set off at a run.