I sat up slowly, carefully, and immediately noticed a few things the moment my eyes cracked open.
First was the view. I'd woken atop a hill, and it provided me a view that seemed to stretch on endlessly. Around me was a scene out of a fantasy movie, a perfect alien vista unlike anything I'd ever seen before, and I considered myself pretty well-travelled, always searching the world for new thrills to chase.
Hundreds of mountains loomed across the horizon in every direction, capped with peaks of white. They had to be hundreds of miles away, but they seemed to rise up endlessly. I couldn't even imagine how tall they were.
The sky was like a daytime aurora of green, blue, yellow, pink, purple, and red, unmarred by any clouds, with three suns gazing down on the landscape, one yellow, one green, one purple. Impossibly tall trees swept over the landscape, creating an undulating ocean boasting every shade of green, blue, and yellow. Beauty surrounded me on every side. It seemed endless.
The next thing I noticed rather overrode my awe for my surroundings: the state of my body. I wasn't one to put too much effort into my appearance beyond staying physically fit, and would never claim I was anything close to a bodybuilder. Honestly, I found bulging muscles kind of grotesque, so stayed away from heavy weights and all that junk. The point was: my active lifestyle had kept me in shape, and I didn't think I was anything too terrible to look at.
The body I found when I looked down could only be described as human perfection, aesthetically speaking. None of the dozens of scars I'd accumulated in the last few years were present any longer, skin now smooth as a baby's. My muscles were lean, wiry, and corded in a way that didn't register to me as gross. I had a goddamn eight pack. Even my body hair looked meticulously groomed, with a silky sheen that would have required way more care than I'd ever been willing to give it.
Guess the System already got to work, huh?
It seemed a little much, but I could hardly complain. Nothing about the sight of my body registered to me as unpleasant. If anything, this was the ideal state I would have worked towards if I'd ever had the inclination to try and make myself attractive to my standards of such.
It made me wonder how my face looked right now. Would the broken nose I'd gotten from the time a bunch of guys in Thailand tried to rob me and I foolishly fought back be fixed? Would the scar above my eyebrow from falling off a dirt bike in Germany be healed over?
I reached up, pinching a lock of my hair, and, as expected, it felt silky and full, cared for in a way I hadn't bothered with in years. Would the blond dye have washed out, replaced with a deep black sheen, or would it have followed along with my preferences, making me a true blond?
Far beyond my physical appearance, though, was how I felt right now. To say I felt good was an understatement. The feeling that had washed over me towards the end of my time in the black void still lingered, to a degree. My body felt light as a feather, yet strong as a tank. I was brimming with energy. I could run all day.
And that wasn't all. There was a level of clarity to my sight I'd never experienced. When I focused, it was as if I could zoom in my vision without limit, letting me inspect the peak of the largest mountain that loomed over the range far in the distance.
My hearing was a jumble of cacophonic chaos, seemingly picking up everything for miles around. It was kind of annoying, but it immediately subsided when I had the slightest thought of filtering it out, which was convenient.
The same went for my sense of smell, picking up countless different scents that all jumbled together until I couldn't distinguish between them. It faded to nothing as soon as the idea passed my mind that it was a little overwhelming.
All things considered, the only trouble with this situation was the fact that I was naked in an alien landscape which was presumably hostile, if the blue screen's pre-glitch messages could be believed. Trials and tribulations, it had said.
That thought jolted me into action, and I cautiously rose to my feet, looking around. There could be anything out here. Wild animals were a given, but I was expecting more. It went without saying that this situation was thoroughly supernatural, so it stood to reason that the threats I'd face out here would be supernatural, too.
My grin returned. I welcomed the challenge. Any goblins, werewolves, dragons, come right at me!
The grin immediately faltered. "Right after I find some clothes," I muttered, looking around. Fighting monsters naked would look a little unhinged, even by my standards.
There was nothing even vaguely resembling civilisation in sight, and my vantage atop a hill that stuck out over the treeline gave me quite the panoramic view. I could see for miles from here. There were no buildings, no roads, no telephone poles. Just trees stretching on to the distant mountains.
As I was looking around, the same white text box that had appeared to deliver my earlier "Achievement" returned with a new one.
[Achievement Unlocked: First Step!]
[You have entered the Eternal Tower.]
[Reward: Local Map.]
[Item already owned.]
I blinked. "Already owned? What is this thing on about?"
Before I could interrogate the System any further, something soft struck the back of my head. It was like getting hit by a puff of smoke, except I felt it disintegrate into dust against my skull, and when I turned around to see what the hell it was, I caught sight of the tiny grey particles getting whisked away by the breeze.
The wind sighed across the top of the hill, rustling the grass around me. Down below, the trees harboured an ominous darkness, inky shadows concealing enemies and secrets.
There was no doubt in my mind that something within that forest had just attacked me. Some would say the smart thing to do at that point would be to take cover and assess the situation, but that wasn't my style. Where was the fun in running and hiding? There was no rush to be found in being careful. Whoever or whatever had just attacked me was going to find out what happened when they fucked around.
Leaning forward, I put my weight into kicking off like a sprinter, aiming myself forward to leap over a little rise in the grass before me, intending to essentially throw myself down the hillside and charge before my ambusher had the chance to react. Get the jump on them, so to speak.
Instead, the landscape changed. There was a blur of motion. The world became a watercolour painting that had been smudged, all the colours running and blending together. I was vaguely aware of air screaming against my skin, much like it had been in my freefall skydive.
This discombobulating sensation lasted for only a few seconds, before the world resolved itself into something more comprehensible.
Unfortunately, the discombobulation just changed to a completely new sensation, as I found myself sailing high through the air. I had to be hundreds of feet above the ground, soaring straight and true like I'd been fired from a cannon. The ground below was still rushing by, unbelievably fast.
A scream erupted from my chest, tearing through my throat, half delight, half baffled terror. My heart pounded in my chest, but felt… oddly subdued. Like, it should have been jackhammering. The adrenaline rush of finding myself in rapid flight without a parachute should have had me buzzing out of my skin. The swoop in my stomach should have been much more than what I was feeling now. I got more of a rush out of the downward momentum of a bloody swing set.
What the hell is happening? I thought, the question applying to multiple ongoing conundrums. I decided it was probably better to focus on the 'flying through the air without a parachute' thing rather than my body's disappointingly muted reaction to it.
Even if my body wasn't reacting much, my mind was. It had to. The speed and height I was flying at, I'd be turned into a bloody puddle when I hit the ground.
A frown pulled at the corners of my lips. Would I be turned into a bloody puddle? There was no denying I felt great, stronger than ever before in a way that was obviously supernatural, and the speed I was moving at… I was no physicist or biologist, but shouldn't air resistance have been messing me up? And, like, G-forces? I wasn't feeling a thing.
My frown deepened when I realised the white pane from earlier was still floating in my vision, anchored at the periphery. It had been sort of minimised, but when I focused on it, it returned to its full size, filling about 15% of my vision, curved in the way of VR/AR apps.
[Achievement Unlocked: First Step!]
So, is this separate from the tutorial thingie that got all messed up? It's a different colour, so maybe it is. Does that mean it'll work differently, or…?
Deciding to test it, considering it didn't seem like I'd be hitting the ground any time soon, I reached out for the panel and swiped at it. Just like with the tutorial boxes, the text shifted away. Instead of scrolling along to a blank screen, though, I was greeted with a new screen, full of its own text.
My mind went blank when I read what it held.
There was no difficult comprehending the text itself. The rune-glyph things were as legible to me as English, just like it had been before I'd glitched the blue screens out. It was the contents of the message that forced my brain to a halt, unable to process it.
[Name: Daniel Brown]
[Race: Homo sapiens]
[Level: 9999999999999999999999999]
[Class: Multi-class (MAX)]
[Skills: MAX]
[Spells: MAX]
[Traits: MAX]
[Stats:
VIT: 9999999999999999999999999
STR: 9999999999999999999999999
DEX: 9999999999999999999999999
MANA: 9999999999999999999999999]
That… can't be right? Can it? That doesn't seem right.
To my shame, I had been something of a gamer in the past. The last few years had been spent chasing a life worth bragging about when my toll came due, but much of my teens had been spent with my nose a few inches away from the screen.
I was never the most adventurous guy out there when it came to games. If you were to look through my long ago deleted accounts, you'd probably find most of my hours were whiled away in FPS games like Counter-Strike and Battlefield. I wasn't quite a normie, but I wasn't the type to go delving deep into more hardcore shit like RPGs and the like, either.
But I wasn't totally unfamiliar with their concepts. I'd played Skyrim. One of the Fallouts, though I probably wouldn't be able to name it even under torture. Did Pokemon count? If it did, I'd completed most of them up until whatever ones came on the DS.
The point was: I knew enough to know what a typical character's stats were supposed to look like. Even in the endgame. And I could extrapolate beyond, to what a reasonable level would look like once you'd literally beaten all the content. Hell, you didn't even need to be a gamer to look at those numbers and think, 'something fucky is afoot.'
Most importantly, I had an idea how much grinding it would take to reach the kinds of levels I was looking at on the white-and-gold character sheet. There were—I quickly counted—twenty-five nines there. What even were those numbers? What came after quadrillion? It was a couple over that, right?
That couldn't be possible. There was no way. There had to be some sort of…
It hit me, then. The cruel truth of what had happened.
It has to be some sort of glitch.
The revelation was so monumental that I somehow didn't see the approaching mountain until I'd already hit it.