Lucas’s mother’s face went pale as she seemed to process the information. She shifted, unsteady, and braced herself against the doorframe. Lucas pushed the bag of supplies toward her. Her fingers wrapped around it, though her eyes were unfocused, thoughts elsewhere.
“This is what I got, Mom,” he said, trying not to acknowledge the shock rippling through her. She hadn’t been friends with Richard, but he’d been someone she knew. That was enough.
His gaze moved to Isabelle, who sat watching the entire exchange and looked as if she wanted to disappear into the chair.
“Come on,” Lucas said, stepping past his mom and moving toward the garden.
Isabelle followed with Apollo a moment later. She glanced back at his mom, who still stood frozen in the doorway.
Lucas pulled on the garden door, the plastic padding peeling off the frame, and stepped out into the garden, finding the beanbag chair and huffing down. “Right. This time, you’ll need to watch carefully. I don’t think I’ll just be going stiff this time.”
He had to reach step one hundred. With the XP they’d gathered from the wolves, he’d have at least six minutes to guarantee he made it there.
Something was bound to happen.
Sitting in the metal garden chair, Isabelle squirmed. Did she have something to say? Her eyes shifted from the kitchen door to Lucas, as if questioning his actions from a minute ago. Lucas frowned. His actions had indeed been a tad bit harsh, but they were necessary.
His mum only partly accepted the situation, partly accepting the fact that the world had gone to ruin. She still couldn’t acknowledge the system—the reason the world had fallen the way it had.
“Don’t worry about her,” Lucas said. Even as he spoke, the words rang hollow. He was worried, but being concerned about his mother was one thing. Not having the strength to protect her and Roland was another.
“I’ll deal with it later,” he said, giving Isabelle a weak smile.
The girl raised a brow, as if not fully agreeing with his logic. After a moment, she simply sighed and rested a hand on the glass of the garden table. “It’s up to you… But you hurt her with that.”
And there would be a lot more pain to come. The world had already taken so much from them. Lucas hadn’t even asked his mum if she’d heard from their auntie. They had cousins, too, out there in a world that was becoming rife with destruction.
They couldn’t worry about them, not yet. His mum certainly didn’t seem to put that at the front of her mind, but maybe that was it. Maybe she was trying to keep herself so busy that she didn’t have time to think about it.
The wind chime at the back of the garden jingled. Lucas let out a breath. They were wasting time.
“I’m gonna go now,” he said, shifting in his beanbag, the stuff inside rolling against his back.
“Alright, I’ll keep watch over you,” Isabelle said.
At her words, Lucas closed his eyes. The world darkened. Sounds became more muted, and the abyss swallowed him.
The next thing he knew, he was there again in the white expanse. He shifted in his seated position, with the same system screen appearing at his side, converting the amount of XP he’d received into time.
This was it. He didn’t want to leave this place without reaching the top of those steps. They had become hard to climb, but they weren’t impossible. He just had to grit his teeth and endure.
══════════◆◇◆══════════
SYSTEM MESSAGE
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| Time Left: 00:00:00
| Time Experience: 65 —? 00:06:00
| Time Experience Remaining: 5
| Time Left: 00:06:00
══════════◆◇◆══════════
He looked at the time he’d received and nodded; it was a sizeable amount.
He stepped over to the stairs, placing a foot on the first black brick, and then he appeared at the top of them like he had previously. Glancing around, he felt his heart throbbing in his chest, excitement bubbling. Now or never. It was time to see how high he could climb.
????ˊ? ·?? ? ? ? ??· ??ˋ???
As the minutes fell away, Lucas climbed one step after another. His body ached, screaming for him to stop, but he pushed. He climbed the ninetieth step, then the ninety-fifth, and finally the hundredth.
His body trembled on the verge of collapse, heart hammering like it never had before; it was as if he’d run four kilometres.
Lucas bent forward, hands braced against his knees. Sweat should have poured down his face, his lungs should have burned—but here, in the white expanse, none of that existed.
Instead, his body simply trembled, a phantom exhaustion his mind insisted was real. None of that mattered, though. He’d made it to step one hundred.
Taking a breath, he straightened, and the black stone beneath his feet pulsed, a wave rippling through it. A single step began spreading, cascading outward like dominoes falling in reverse.
The expansion rippled through the white void with thundering clicks, and within seconds, a platform stretched before him at least twenty to thirty feet across. Meanwhile, the space around him hummed as pressure built, mounting before the inevitable release.
Then the puppet appeared.
It materialised across the platform: feet first, then legs, torso, and arms. Finally, a head. Metal gleamed silver-white under the sourceless light, the thing standing at least a foot taller than Lucas, its frame broader and thicker than his own. The same blue wiring that ran through his spike puppet threaded through this one, and its faceplate remained blank and featureless.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Though if he’d seen a face on it, that would have been something.
Lucas’s breath caught, a bubble of excitement growing in his chest. Was this it? His reward for making it to one hundred steps? He’d expected a level up, but maybe this was something similar. A new puppet, stronger than his first.
He had earned it, hadn’t he? Climbed those steps with a determination he’d never mustered in his entire life. His own mother had once suggested running the London Marathon, and he’d handily talked her out of it because of the ridiculousness of the idea. He wasn’t about to kill himself in the name of an experience.
The mounting pressure snapped, and a text box materialised in his vision.
══════════◆◇◆══════════
SYSTEM MESSAGE
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The level-up trial has been initiated. Please prepare yourself. Survive this trial to ascend and level up.
══════════◆◇◆══════════
Lucas’s heart dropped. Survive? The word echoed in his skull as his gaze darted from the puppet to his empty hands. How was he supposed to fight this thing, with nothing but—
The space beside him warped.
His capsule emerged from nothing, its glass surface catching the light, the low whir of machinery filling the silence. And there, mounted on the back, his spike puppet hung limp.
Relief crashed through him. At least he wouldn’t have to face this block of metal barehanded. But was it even a fair fight? His gaze moved from his spike puppet to what he now dubbed the trial puppet across the platform, and that relief curdled.
Bigger. Heavier.
Sure, the spike his puppet manifested could punch through flameback wolf hide and muscle, but could it scratch this thing’s frame? For a moment, he hoped its armour proved just as vulnerable as his spike puppet’s.
After all, the wolves had bitten through that easily enough, dealing sizeable damage. Not all was lost, though. With that size, the trial puppet had to be slower, at the very least.
But would speed be enough?
Lucas glanced over his shoulder, considering retreat. Perhaps he could go back and prepare? But the black steps were gone.
The same featureless white void stretched away to the horizon, the platform suspended in the air. No way back. No retreat.
His hands shook as he glanced back at the text box. If he didn’t survive, what would happen? Would he wake up in the garden? Or, he swallowed, would this be his end, killed inside his own mind?
He shoved the thought down, jaw clenching, sweat prickling at his palms despite the impossibility of it in this mental space.
This wasn’t a game. That realisation settled over him like a weight. He’d been treating it like a simple path to follow, like one in a video game: defeat monsters, gain XP, level up.
This should have been the same, should have made life easier, at least in that respect.
Richard’s face flashed through his mind—the man taken by the wolves, his friend killed right there beside him.
Those had been actual events, nothing like a game. No revives existed here. The system wasn’t here to make the world better; it was here to provide trials, to forge them stronger through hardship. And this was one such trial.
Lucas stepped toward the capsule, and the glass dome lifted with its familiar mechanical hiss, cool air rushing out. His hands trembled as he reached for the edge, pulling himself into the moulded seat and letting his back settle against the familiar contours.
For a moment, he allowed himself to feel almost safe. Across the platform, the trial puppet remained motionless, as if waiting for him. He appreciated that. If it had rushed him at the start, he’d have been dead.
The glass lowered over his capsule and sealed with a pressurised click.
Darkness swallowed him. Then sensation exploded, his awareness expanding outward, filling the puppet’s body, sharper than his human form. The puppet dropped from its hook with a metallic clink, landing balanced and ready on the black stone platform.
He raised his metal hands, turned them in the light. No pain. No fatigue. Even the exhaustion from climbing those last few steps had faded to something distant and muted.
As he stepped away from the capsule, his metal feet rang against the ground with each movement, and when he circled around to its face, he saw himself. His actual body lay slumped in the seat, eyes closed, chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm.
He’d never get over the wrongness. Seeing himself lying there while simultaneously inhabiting the puppet, an out-of-body experience in the truest, most visceral sense. Disturbing.
Across the platform, a low whir cut through the silence and his thoughts.
The trial puppet shifted, its frame rising as joints dropped and locked into a combat stance.
Lucas exhaled—though his puppet had no lungs—and clenched his fists. Time to fight. No turning back now. The fear remained, though being inside the puppet somehow made it more distant, easier to manage.
Still, the unwanted thought crept in: what would happen if his puppet had its head caved in? That lumbering mound of metal would then have free rein to smash through his capsule’s glass, ripping him out, pulling him from—
He couldn’t let that happen. Didn’t want to find out.
He launched forward. Legs pumping, metal ringing against stone, the platform blurred beneath him as he closed the distance. Within moments, they collided. The trial puppet met him in a thunderous clash of metal on metal.
The trial puppet swept wide. Lucas dropped low, felt its limb cut through the space where his head had been, air displacement rushing over his metal skin like a physical force. He pivoted mid-dodge, driving a fist into the trial puppet’s side.
Metal rang against metal, a hollow, resonant clang that reverberated through his entire frame, but the trial puppet didn’t even flinch. Its backhand came instantly, and though Lucas crossed his arms to block, the impact struck true, launching him backwards.
His feet scraped across the black stone in a spray of sparks, friction fighting his momentum until he finally slowed.
The trial puppet was already closing the distance.
A silver fist filled his vision, expanding like a tennis ball hurtling toward his face. Lucas ducked and then yelled. “Spike!”
The word triggered something deep in his puppet’s core. Energy flowed immediately, metal churning along his forearm, writhing and whirring as it reshaped itself. The spike erupted outward, gleaming into a tapered metal that caught the light, and he surged forward with it, thrusting toward the trial puppet’s exposed side.
His strike stopped dead.
Not slowed—stopped.
The spike’s tip pressed against empty air, unable to advance even a fraction of an inch. The space between them warped and distorted like heat haze on summer pavement, and Lucas watched in amazement as a barrier shimmered into existence.
The trial puppet had raised its arm, palm forward, and somehow generated a shield from nothing. But it hadn’t come from nothing, had it? The damn thing had access to a Word.
