Chapter 2 - Advent of the System

  "My grandpappy once found a piece of old-world tech while rafting, of all things. Said the rusted metal of the beast would'ave taken his leg off if it weren't for the healers he did! Anyway, he couldn't carry it all the way to the Lore Office, massive as the thing was. They came out, rewarded him -- all the bells and whistles -- but more interesting than that, they called it a Sat-a-lite. Apparently, and don't tell no one I told you this, it saw the advent from beyond in one of those old world recordin' crystals. Only reason they didn't go mad was because they had mice watch the recordins first... poor mice."

  - Gossip spread by a young prisoner en route to The Cursed Lands to carry out their sentence.

  [System Activation Started. Please survive. We are so very tired of being alone.]

  [For those in areas of certain death, a teleport has been prepared and will activate shortly. Teleports are designated for overall survivability predictions of the human race.]

  The land shook with violent rage. It was as if the dirt had turned to molten plastic as it stretched apart. A deep rumble accompanied the change, and a sudden force sent Solis sprawling to the dirt.

  From his back, Solis saw thousands of stars, despite it being midday, and before he could cover his eyes to escape the corruption from beyond, every single one of them blinked out of existence simultaneously.

  Breathing, much less thinking, wasn't coming easily to him, but Solis did manage to roll onto his stomach and cover his head. That strategy didn’t last long.

  The dirt underneath his body seemed to crush and loosen itself - flowing around him in a tide - threatening to drag him under.

  He ticked up the one point of [Body] the system had deigned to grant everyone by default. Supernatural strength flooded his muscles, and he rolled, just managing to deny the growing sinkhole its meal. Unmistakably, however, the sinkhole was growing, and fast.

  Crawling to his knees and then his feet, Solis took off sprinting. He ran as he would on sand, kicking up his knees to clear his feet with each step.

  ‘I must look ridiculous. Curses.’ he thought, and wanted to laugh at the thought, but his lungs were too busy screaming to indulge his mind.

  Spotting a tree, he leapt for it, jumping three feet vertically and snagging a branch.

  Solis amended one of his past comments. He was now very thankful that the System had gifted him with one [Body] by default. He would never have been able to do that before. Not with a pack of supplies, especially.

  ‘Thank God for active stats.’ he looked up to the sky and frowned. The clouds were rather close and getting closer by the second.

  Glancing down, his face contorted into a snarl. In the moment he had glanced away, the ground had become covered in a thick fog, blocking his sight. All he could really see was the shadow of still flowing dirt as it slithered away to reveal more white stone.

  After a second to compose himself, Solis pulled himself the rest of the way up the branch. Relief only filled Solis once he had his arms firmly planted around the trunk of the tree. Only then did he release [Body] and eat the forty or so mana it had cost.

  That’s how he stayed for more than an hour. Clinging onto the rough bark for dear life.

  He had to move only once when the stone below shifted, rose, and rotated, angling the tree in such a way that Solis would have been hanging like a sloth from the trunk.

  The shift from vertical to horizontal had two benefits. The first was that it had raised him high above the fog and given him a vantage point to look out at the half dozen or so mountain peaks around him. Heights didn’t scare him, so he didn’t mind the sheer hundred or so foot drop down.

  The second is that he could rest his back against the rock of the cliff face by sitting near the tree's root. What did bother him to no end was that the roots were also wriggling and growing further into the rock. It wasn’t just the roots. The shape of the tree slowly altered to something alien, with sparkling teal leaves, which was quite beautiful. Seeing it grow in real time, though, just… really creeped him out.

  With some time to kill, Solis finally checked over the supplies Greenly had left him. He hadn’t checked before, too afraid that if the man had given him garbage, he would’ve marched back in a fit of anger and gotten shot for his trouble.

  Closing his eyes, holding his breath, he opened the military sack and finally looked through a single squinted eye.

  ‘Hahaha! I didn’t get screwed over.’

  Solis wanted to cheer. So he did. He let out a loud whooping cheer that echoed through the mountains and valleys below. With a new, exalted smile on his face, he categorized everything there was.

  The two most valuable items at first glance were the 9mm pistol with a box of ammo and a disassembled, bolt-action hunting rifle. Greenly probably thought he was being funny with that second one, but the joke was on Greenly because Solis knew how to assemble rifles. For the most part. He could manage a simple bolt action.

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  The rest of the bag was filled with field-stripped MREs, a notebook, pencils, a space blanket, two canteens, iodine tablets, a hydration bladder, a flashlight with extra batteries, two grenades, a first aid kit, and his personal favorite new socks.

  It took all of his self-control not to rip off his shoes and throw his old socks full of holes and so stained in sweat, blood, and muck that they were stiff off the cliff. The only thing that held him back was the fear of losing his shoes.

  The world stopped shaking after four hours, and a good thing too, because it was getting cold and the sun was about to set. In the silence of the mountains, Solis was finally forced to confront a simple fact.

  He was more than a hundred feet up from the next safe tree or ledge, and beyond that, he didn’t even know how much further he’d have to climb. At a certain point, the fog had begun to creep upward, and Solis had no way of seeing through it.

  The ground could be right there, two feet below the mist, or it could be a thousand or more feet. He had no way of knowing without physically going down and checking.

  If he were better with [Mana Manipulation] maybe he could send a tendril down to the fog, but after a certain distance, it became hard to control and would blow away in the growing winds.

  ‘Curses,’ he mentally hissed again.

  He stared out over the distance, and in the setting sun, he swore he saw something strange. It was obfuscated between two jagged peaks, but if he stretched forward along the trunk of the tree and craned his neck just right, he thought he could see what could only be described as a colossal mound of stone.

  Its mass was choked with the viney, red overgrowth of a blooming Virginia creeper. The distance cheated the eye, an ocean of space reducing its colossal size into something almost delicate.

  What wasn’t covered in red revealed harshly textured stone, looking more like wrinkled skin or the ridges of one's fingertips, but perhaps he only thought in those terms due to its peak. It dipped and rose in a jagged rhythm, tumbling into a deep valley and clawing its way skyward before ending in a sheer drop.

  If he traced it just right in the setting sun, it looked like a face. Mouth agape. Screaming

  What completed the illusion were the six pillars of stone that reached up, the ground blanketing and seizing them like thick bog water that refused to give way, dragging the hand back just underneath the surface.

  Solis tore his eyes from the scene, leaning further back to break any line of sight. He wanted to watch. He wanted to study it and burn the sight into his mind. A part of him found it beautiful, but it was only a part, drowned out by a bone-deep fear.

  Wrapped in his space blanket, he had to admit the chill wasn’t why he was shivering. He imagined a massive figure, trapped beneath the earth. It’s last breath swallowed by dirt—

  He needed to think about anything else. Like how he was going to get down from the mountain. That was the important thing. Not some odd-shaped, oversized hill.

  If going down was a bust, then maybe going up would yield results. He studied the cliff face again. There was something peaking out. Maybe an outcropping, but hopefully a cave entrance. He squinted, not quite telling one way or another. With a sigh, he activated [Acuity], and his senses heightened. Which sucked because it felt even colder, but he could tell the bit of stone peaking out seemed to curve past his line of sight.

  So, likely a cave.

  Hopefully.

  Switching off [Acuity] and on [Mana Manipulation I], the intensity of his senses lowered, but he gained a new one entirely.

  The first time he had used [Mana Manipulation], it had felt like his brain had been thrown in a vat of burning fry oil. It was like his brain was trying to use nonexistent pathways, and once the skill realized that, it had created the ones it needed.

  A month of effort, training with it day in and day out, had changed much, though, and he was no longer invalid for hours after it.

  Solis felt the mana diffused throughout his body in a single pool, only kept inside by a thick, semi-porous membrane overlapping with his skin.

  He grabbed at portions of the pool, pushing some and pulling others to create whirlpools, then pushed those whirlpools to the fingertips on his right hand.

  From there, shunting the mana outside of his body came easy, and the volume pushed out by the whirlpools made his control solid rather than like it would blow away.

  Ten minutes later and a hundred mana down, Solis cursed the sunk cost fallacy. He had wanted to save mana by not using [Resonance] while he shaped, but he ended up losing more to wind than he ever would have through stat activation. At the end of the ten minutes, despite some frustration, his mana tendril reached the mouth of hopefully a cave.

  Solis couldn’t see through mana sense, but he could get a vague feeling for where solid objects were and of general mana levels.

  It wasn’t much, and it was way more complicated than that, but it was enough to confirm if it was actually a cave or not before he climbed up for potentially nothing.

  So, it was good news when he finally got a tendril, unbroken, up to the spot and began tapping the walls, moving farther than a normal outcropping would allow.

  ‘Score,’ he thought, collecting as much of his tendril as he could before bringing it back into his pool.

  Now all he had to do was climb up, and that part was easy since he could just [Mana Manipulate] his own handholds into existence. If he pushed enough mana into the handholds, he could anchor them to the wall as if they were part of it, which had come in handy more times than he could count. One time, he had even used that trick to climb up the side of a skyscraper like he was a gecko. Very handy.

  ‘I love magic.’ Solis preened as he began making his handholds, cresting into the cave after only five minutes of effort.

  Heaving himself over the ledge, he was met with feathers.

  ‘Hahaha, never mind, fuck my life.’

  In front of him lay a sleeping bird. That wasn’t actually accurate. It had feathery wings, four sets arrayed down a thin tubular body. One could argue the monster was a snake with wings, but it didn’t have scales, and its mouth more resembled a cookie-cutter shark than a snake's. Across its body, sectioned off bone plates rotated like a slow-moving lathe. Each section had ridged edges that looked like they could interlock with their neighbors.

  Again, Solis had to stop himself from looking. He found it beautiful, and it was a shame that all monsters existed expressly to kill people.

  Him specifically, if he made too much noise. He was tempted to take [Analyze] with the last Enhancement point that he had, but he needed that point for a different skill. He just hadn’t bothered because he'd been preoccupied with trying to get his sister into the safe zone. He was starting to regret not multitasking because he could use another skill right about now.

  It wasn’t hopeless

  Solis had options.

  Two grenades burning a hole in his bag after all for one.