Murderous Savages. Chapter One, Initialization.

The end of the world arrived on a Tuesday afternoon. It was hot and muggy, and for those poor souls unfortunate enough to be outside of an air-conditioned room, the smell of stale piss and fetid sewage wafted through the air, courtesy of a broken sewer main that had resulted from a catastrophic failure at the water treatment plant.

Steven was walking home from work. Under normal circumstances, he'd have taken the subway, but the line that ran near his apartment had been closed down due to the sewer main, so he was slogging through the miserable summer heat and humidity. He was contemplating dinner, which was either going to be chili dogs or a cheap frozen pizza when a brilliant flash of light filled his vision.

Black lettering began to scroll across his vision.

'System Rev. 4.0271 Initializing.'

'Scanning Stellar System TS187NB639SC57SS18'

'Sapient Life Forms Identified. Scanning.'

'Symmetrical Bipedal Tool Using Omnivores. Pre-interstellar technological state. Species demonstrates extreme aggression. Scan reports repeated instances of Genocide or attempted Genocide.'

'TS187NB639SC57SS18P3 designated quarantine area for native species.'

Steven blinked and then winced as an incredibly loud voice filled his ears while more text appeared, this time in a sort of semi-transparent hologram in front of him.

"Attention, Humans of Earth. The Planet has been integrated into The System, a multidimensional administrative process designed to ensure stability and prosperity. The latent energy of this universe has been triggered and is now active. The System will help you harness that energy.

Interdimensional rifts will appear where ever humans have gathered. Enter these rifts, and kill the creatures you find within. Given your historical propensity for violent murder, this is unlikely to cause your species the distress normally associated with this activity. Failure to clear these rifts in a timely fashion will result in the rifts unleashing the creatures contained within into your world. There are both benefits and detriments to allowing this to happen.

The System has quarantined your world due to your aggressively violent natures. This quarantine will be revised in one hundred of your solar cycles. Until such time, no travel from Earth will be permitted. Travel to Earth will be restricted to beings and species able to meet your own ferocity."

The screens disappeared, and Steven found himself crouched on the sidewalk, clutching his head and squinting.

He'd finally lost it. His sister was a psychotherapist, and she'd warned him that he worked too many hours, didn't get enough sleep, and ate poorly. She'd always told him it was going to come back and bite him in the ass, and now it had. He'd clearly had some sort of psychotic break.

His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he pulled it out, thumbing the screen up.

Beth - Did you just see and hear that???

Beth - I'm going to check on Mom and Dad, you should come home too.

"So, not a psychotic break," he muttered. "That's something, at least."

Steven started walking again. There was a slowly flashing light in the corner of his vision. He paused and focused on it.

Another translucent window appeared in front of his eyes.

'Welcome to the System. Given the prevalence of the medium, the System will display your attributes in a fashion consistent with your entertainment devices. All interactions with the System will take place through your Status.   To review your Status, simply speak or mentally project the word ' Status.''

"Status," Steven said carefully.

Steven Hornell

Race : Human

Class : None

Level : 0

Experience to Next Level : 0/100

Titles : None

Achievements : None

Attributes:

Strength : 4

Coordination : 5

Endurance : 4

Intelligence : 5

Wisdom : 6

Charisma : 5

Energies:

Health : 40  (4 Health recovered per hour resting)

Stamina : 4 (4 Stamina recovered per minute resting)

Mana : 5 (6 Mana recovered per minute resting)

Skills : None.

Steven had played his fair share of video games. A former girlfriend had once indicated, in the strongest possible terms, that he'd played more than his fair share. The practical upshot was that the screen in front of him looked very familiar.

"Assuming five is average, I'm actually below average," he muttered to himself. His only outstanding attribute was wisdom, which did make sense. He'd always had a healthy dose of common sense.

He shook his head, then thought about closing the window, pleased to see it disappear. He called his Status back and closed it again a few more times, getting used to the process.

Nodding to himself, he started heading to his apartment again, this time at a more hurried pace. Another facet of his personality that had been pointed out to him was that he tended to be a pessimist. He preferred to think of himself as a realist, but he was willing to concede the point. Either way, being level zero had never been a good thing in any video game he'd ever played.

He was wondering just what he might find in his apartment to use as a weapon when a brilliant bar of light, six feet tall and a foot in diameter, suddenly appeared in his path. Unable to halt his rapid progress, he ran straight into it.

'You have entered the Rift ENAGAATLPT872. This Rift contains two hundred and sixty-eight creatures between levels one and three. You may exit the Rift at any time. Kill ten creatures to receive a reward. Kill one hundred creatures to receive a reward. Kill all creatures to receive a reward.'

Steven immediately turned around to look for the exit. He'd never been so much as hunting and had been in exactly four fights in his life, all of which had resulted in him getting his ass beaten.

He didn't have anything to use as a weapon, and he was not in any way, shape, or form prepared to fight.

The bar of light was only a few feet away, and he swiftly reached out to it. Just as he was about to grasp it, he felt a sharp pain in his left calf. As his hand touched the bar, a message appeared.

'Unable to exit Rift while in combat.'

Looking down through the translucent screen, he could make out some sort of animal biting into his lower leg.

Dismissing the screen, he frantically shook his leg, trying to dislodge the beast. That only served to cause him more pain as the teeth dug in and the weight of the animal tore at the wounds.

A pale red bar appeared in the upper right-hand corner of his vision. It was perhaps ninety percent full, and it was dropping.

Steven reached down and grabbed the beast by its neck, letting out a scream of pain as he forcibly ripped it loose. Tossing it away from him, he dropped to one knee and clutched at the torn flesh and skin that hung from his calf.

A snarling sound brought his head up, and he blinked away tears as he caught sight of the little monster barrelling out of the grass, this time leaping towards his now invitingly lowered throat.

He lunged forward to meet it, his hands grasping for its body. One hand caught it by its own throat, but the other was caught by its mouth. A mouth full of sharp, pointy teeth. It bit down hard, and Steven screamed again. This time, he pounded the beast down into the ground, screaming and crying as tears and snot rolled down his chin. Seconds went by before he felt the beast go limp.

He let go of it, dragging his mangled hand out of the monster's now slack jaw and fell back on his ass. He clutched his hand to his chest, ignoring the pain of his calf in favor of the fresher and much worse pain from his hand.

After a few moments, he regained enough sense to unbutton his shirt and shrug out of it, whimpering as it went over his hand. He wrapped his hand tightly in it, then took off his belt and did his best to wrap the wound on his leg.

He'd taken a first aid course years ago, back in high school, and he knew he wasn't accomplishing much.

Ignoring the flashing light in the corner of his vision, he reached out and pushed his hand into the bar of light.

-----------------------------

The emergency room must have been beyond full because Steven never even made it to the doors. There were tables set up outside the hospital for triage, and he was assessed almost immediately, given a green armband, and told to wait.

So he waited, in a cheap plastic folding chair, doing his best not to whimper.

After overhearing the conversations around him, he couldn't help but feel that as someone who had accidentally fallen into a rift, he ought to get preferential treatment over the idiots who willingly entered one.

He was pulled from his introspection by a gentle nudge from the person sitting next to him.

"That looks nasty. How many critters did you fight before giving up?"

Steven looked over. It was a man, probably his own age, dressed in leather motorcycle gear. His arm was in a sling, and he had a bandage wrapped around his shoulder. He also had a battered baseball bat resting between his knees.

"One," Steven replied.

"Just one?"  The biker shook his head, "Damn, I figured you'd taken on a horde with those wounds."

"I fell through the rift," Steven said stiffly, "I wasn't prepared, nor looking, for a fight."

The biker winced. "That sucks," he offered a hand, "I'm David, by the way. I got myself all geared up and headed in, thinking I was going to clear the Rift out, but I only killed twelve of them before I had to run out."

"Steven," he shook David's hand. "I suppose we can both chalk this up to a learning experience."

David snorted. "Yeah, I learned that after the first ten, they start coming in pairs."  He shook his head. "I won't be going in there alone again."

"I'm definitely going to need a weapon and maybe some kind of armor," Steven replied.

David nodded, "This is the new world. Everything has changed."  He dug into a pocket of his motorcycle jacket and pulled out a phone. Unlocking the screen, he tapped at it for a moment before pushing it in front of Steven. "Check this out," he instructed.

Steven looked at the phone. David had pulled up a Facebook post. The top read, in bold letters, "A new currency for a new world."  He kept reading. Apparently, killing creatures in the rifts paid out System generated currency. This currency could be used to make purchases directly from the System. The author carefully outlined his plan to purchase a generator that could be powered by power cells, all available from the System. After the initial costs, the author had calculated that he'd only need to kill fifty monsters a day to keep himself in electricity and food.

Steven noticed that he didn't mention anything about rent or internet service. He had a feeling that his landlord would be eager to adopt the new currency.

"That's interesting," he admitted, passing the phone back to David.

"New world," David grinned.

---------------------------------

Steven went home after six hours of waiting. His wounds had hurt less and less, and eventually, after much trepidation, he decided to see if the full red bar in his vision was accurate. It turned it that it was. His hand had healed, as had his calf. He'd torn off the green band and left the hospital, which had only grown more and more crowded. Some of the people being wheeled in were missing limbs, and others looked nearly dead, with massive chunks missing from their chests.

He'd gone home in a bit of a daze. Standing in his shower, the hot water pouring down on his head, his mind started working again.

He needed to look at the facts. The world had changed. If you could purchase electricity and food directly from the System using the currency you gained from killing monsters, that currency was going to become a cornerstone of this new world. His ability to kill monsters was determined by his attributes, which weren't fantastic, but shouldn't impact his performance too badly. If five was the average value, then his strength of four meant he was hitting eighty percent as hard as the average person.

He was not eager to fight more monsters. But he could see where things would head. That was the one thing he'd always been good at. First and foremost, he needed to get the fuck out of Atlanta. There was no way that this whole thing wasn't going to result in at least a temporary breakdown of basic services. There was also the human element to consider. Power corrupts, and petty criminals accustomed to violence would likely find this new world very much to their liking.

So, get out of town. His parents were in Montana, but he didn't expect he'd be able to travel there. He'd check the airlines, but it seemed unlikely. His sister was in Idaho, less than a hundred miles away, and she'd said she would check on them, which meant that was a concern for later. His uncle owned a cabin on the northeastern side of the Smoky Mountain National Forrest, and he'd been there two years ago for a family reunion. While he hadn't enjoyed sleeping in a tent and dealing with the swarms of bugs, he did know how to get there, and there would be a lot fewer people there.

Toweling off, he pulled on a pair of shorts and sat down at his laptop. Before leaving, he needed to take advantage of the information available on the internet. Cellular service at his uncle's cabin had been spotty at best, and he was concerned that as robust as the internet was, it might not be robust enough to handle what was coming.

Google had thousands of listings for websites relating to the System, but one caught his eye. It was a site that hosted what used to be a popular streamer. She'd gotten out of streaming when the last MMO she played had shut down. Until that point, she'd been the foremost expert in several MMOs.

He clicked on AoE Annie's site and was greeted with a prerecorded video.

"No bullshit, it's the end of the fuckin' world," She said tiredly. "I've been fighting monsters for six hours and gathering intel for another six, and you can see what I've discovered below. Long story made short; you're going to have to get comfortable with blood and guts because no matter what you used to do, your new job is killing monsters."  She sighed and tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. "Once things settle down into whatever the normal shakes out to be, you might end up doing something else. People will still want to eat, and some of us can't cook, so restaurants will still be a thing. I expect that anyone who is, or becomes, good at making weapons and armor is going to find employment pretty easily. But as an IT girl, I know my old life is over."  She shook her head. "Sorry, I'm really tired. First thing, get some armor. Sporting gear works, at least for now. The monsters aren't that big, at least not the ones I've fought or the ones I've heard about, so leg protection is key. Second, get a weapon. I'm using a baseball bat, and it works pretty well. I watched a guy with a sword get torn apart because it got stuck in a critter, so maybe stay away from blades. Guns work," she sighed, "although the System has dropped some pretty big clues that they won't for long. Get geared up and get into a rift as soon as you can. Killing ten monsters gets you a skill shard. Getting ten skill shards lets you pick a skill. Skills can be anything from an enhanced melee strike to a fireball, and yes, I got fireball," she managed a grin. "Killing one hundred monsters gets you a weapon, which is a damn sight better than the ball bat you're going to start out with."

Steven scrolled down and followed each link. It appeared he'd been correct, and the average attribute score was five. Some people had reported scores as low as three, others as high as seven, but they were outliers. There were already hundreds of skills listed, but the common consensus was that activating a skill carried a cost of either one stamina or one mana.

There wasn't any information available about classes yet.

Steven downloaded the site for future reference and started packing. His barely used camping gear was still in the back of his ancient, and hopefully, still running Toyota. He walked to work and the grocery store, seldom needing the car, and hadn't started it in more than a month. He emptied his cupboard of all dried and canned goods, grimly accepting that he'd be eating a lot of spaghetti in his immediate future. He didn't have anything to use for weapons or armor, although the tire iron in the back of the car might find a new purpose in life. Tugging on his heaviest pair of jeans and heavy winter jacket, he staggered out of his apartment and down to his battered old car. Heaving the two duffel bags into the rear seat, he sank into the driver's seat and turned the key. The engine turned over once, then twice, then caught, roaring to life. Dropping the car into gear, Steven stepped on the gas pedal and started making his way out of Atlanta.