The start of the Apocalypse is never as simple and straight forward as people seem to think it is. There’s no fireworks, no call over the phone letting you know the entire world was changing, and certainly no big explosions.
Though, those last two things did happen, to some degree.
I’d love to consider myself smart and open minded. And yet…
If anyone had told me that portals would open up across the world and that these portals were connected to magical dungeons filled with deadly monsters, I would call them crazy. If they said they also contained not only monsters, but also granted special powers, classes like in video games, magical items, and stats, I’d tell them to screw off.
But that’s how it happened.
Barely a day into the shitshow since the first portals appeared, I found myself fighting for my life. I watched my friends die all around me, even as people who claimed to be our protectors floundered. Those weaklings could barely save themselves, so I took them out at the first opportunity, confident in my ability to survive without the dead weight.
Despite my rather janky start, I clawed my way to the top and cemented my position as #1 on the global system leaderboards. Killing those useless fucks didn’t turn out so badly for me in the end.
So, I imagine you are curious about how I managed that on my own. Well, I’m going to tell you everything, and I’ll even tell you the truth of it.
Eh, maybe not the truth in the way you’d like to think of it, because I might not be able to resist embellishing for the sake of dramaticism, if just a little bit. That’s why you are reading this anyway, right? For the drama.
Therefore, yes, I won’t lie to you.
Let’s get something straight right out of the gate. I’m not the Hero. I killed Barry Schilling. I eradicated the entire Saints Guild. That day in Detroit, I killed that kid. And, by the end, I was responsible for the death of two million people.
Why I did those things is a bit of a tough question. And I’ll answer that eventually.
Yet, I can say that I had some very good reasons. You might not agree with them all, hell, you still might think I am a psychotic lunatic who deserves the electric chair (as if that would kill me at this point anyway) let alone be looked at with any fucking iota of understanding or sympathized with by anyone. But that’s what I ask that you do anyway.
Go ahead, damn me to hell, or wish for my slow and torturous death. Spit on my corpse, do whatever you need to do, I don’t care. But, with the power invested in me by every bit of cheese locked inside those Missouri caves, you’ll make it to the end of my story.
So let’s get into it, shall we?
April 12th, 2088, 8 hours after the start of the Apocalypse.
The goblin’s teeth tore through Michael’s Veltech labcoat and into his entrails with a squelch. Blood leaked from the corners of its mouth in rivulets of crimson, and my lab partner failed to stop himself from screaming.
Beside me, three of the green little bastards were on top of Gwen, one pinned her to the ground, while two others ripped off her hands with serrated teeth, evil smiles showing on their faces. Her screams mixed with everyone else’s.
Frank was already cooling on the ground to my left, having his neck pincushioned and perforated by one of the goblin’s daggers to the point he was almost headless. He was far more blood and hole than human by the time they were done. His white coat was so deeply dyed red it was hard to imagine it had ever been any other color.
“Fall back, this way!”
To my right, the soldiers had already started a retreat into the trees. Victoria huddled with them, so it looked like she managed to get away from the initial attack. But it wasn’t like the soldiers would provide much help; we had already learned the hard way that our guns didn’t work. Rifles, pistols, didn’t matter; all they did was click.
The small shortsword I had pulled from the wall-alcoves of the starting cave was still held fast in my hand. The blade glinted in the light, the gleaming metal a stark contrast to the greenish blood dripping from its surface.
I’d killed the goblin that had gotten Frank, but that bit of revenge was nothing that could sate the anger I felt for the pudgy, ugly assholes.
Another of the creatures came at me, its dagger flailing in front of it. I stepped back to avoid the weapon and thrust my sword forward right after. The blade caught it high in the chest, and the wound ejected a green spray. The goblin squealed and then quickly fell silent as my follow-up slash caught its throat.
It crumbled to the dirt in a gurgle. I gave an extra kick to its skull, just for the pleasure of it.
Fuck goblins
.
“Pierce, come on!” Again, one of the soldiers called out.
Two more goblins came at me, and I saw more already piling in behind. I needed to rethink my approach. Numbers might be the smart option after all. I turned tail and ran after the others into the treeline.
The goblins were quick for their size, and their violent bloodlust meant they’d continue to chase us. I could barely look back as we sprinted ahead.
I passed Victoria and one of the soldiers, Perez, gaining speed with my long strides. The vest I had been given still rubbed and chaffed as I ran, and my helmet was gone in the initial scuffle, but I didn’t mind that.
My eyes scanned the trees as we went, heart pounding, looking for the goblins I knew were hunting us. The system had said we had to survive the entire assault, and I doubted it would be only that first group of goblins.
But I kept my theories to myself. No one was interested in talking strategy and game tactics when running for their life.
I suddenly heard a scream, Victoria’s voice. The goblins must have caught up to her. I didn’t bother imagining what they were doing to her. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to know the assholes wouldn’t take prisoners, and she would be gone.
Sure enough, her screams were cut off abruptly.
My legs pumped even faster, bringing me stride-for-stride with the soldiers. Poor Victoria, had only just joined the crew a month ago. She was the newest member of the lab, and yet now… she was the slowest runner of the group, so the things catching her might have been inevitable.
We ran for quite some time. Thirty minutes, maybe more, without stopping. We had perhaps reached two miles in and stumbled our way toward a new cave that was set into the impossibly high cliff face.
The cliff ran along the right-hand side for as far as I could see into the wooded expanse. Its face even peaked over the tops of the large trees, and I assumed it would eventually curve in a gigantic circle until looping back to the starting point.
Which made sense, a Tutorial Dungeon set in a large circular map was rather common. Something the world as a whole would come to learn much later. But I had been working on that assumption even then.
Reitlin, Johnson, and the other soldiers all ducked into the cave, with me following.
“Holy fuck, what was that? What are those things?” Johnson shook as he spoke; his hands trembled when they squeezed the stock of his rifle.
“Goblins,” I said. “You read the notification, yes?”
“Goblins? This is insane. That wasn’t some game out there, those four were—”
“Killed, yes. It said we had to survive. I don’t think it was lying to us.” I cut him off in a dry, matter-of-fact tone. I hate having to talk panicky idiots through Dungeon fights, and that was true even then, at the very beginning.
“Okay, calm down. We assess the situation and make a plan.” Corporal Mathews stepped forward then. “Whatever the hell is happening here, the rules are clear. We survive until the timer runs out, at sunrise, and we win.”
“The timer? That’s hours from now. Those things will find us, and we’ll be slaughtered. Our weapons don’t even work!” Johnson said.
“We are in this together, I say we will make it through, and we will,” Reitlin assured him.
But I knew the words were hollow. They didn’t have a plan, and they didn’t have a clue what they were doing. These “soldiers” knew how to fight humans with guns and Humvees. They didn’t know how to fight monsters. Hell, neither did I then, but I wasn’t stupid enough to have left an entire cave full of weapons inside a Tutorial without taking one.
“We can barricade the cave and settle in.” Mathews gestured at the trees a few yards away. “Plenty of wood out there.”
“We don’t have an axe or rope,” Perez pointed out. “And if they find us, we will be trapped with nowhere to go. We need to—”
I tuned out their stupid ass conversation. Needless arguing would not be the path to surviving that place. It was just costing time, and I wasn’t one to like fucking around to waste time.
Instead, my mind went to what I knew. We were inside a portal, a rift of some kind, that took us to a Tutorial level, like in a twisted video game. And we were given a quest to survive, then attacked by those creepy-as-shit little green goblin things.
So the question was, how do we survive?
If there was anything I knew about video games (and childhood experience had taught me a lot) it was that hiding away like a scared ass kid fresh out of diapers didn’t lead to survival. Fighting and levelling up, killing monsters, finding loot, that was how one made it through a game.
So, I started thinking like a video game, as certifiably insane as that might sound.
I used simple commands, trying to access whatever this place used to communicate the quest and the worldwide initiation message earlier that day. It wasn’t until the words “status screen” came to mind that something happened.
[ Name: Adam Pierce
Titles: N/A
Class: N/A
Level: 2
Unspent Stat Points: 3
Stats:
Strength: 6
Dexterity: 5
Vitality: 5
Intelligence: 6
Willpower: 6
Skills: N/A
Abilities: N/A
Spells: N/A ]
At that moment, I realized the sheer scope of what was going on. As a gamer in my youth, I didn’t need any of this explained to me. I knew what each of these stats and categories did.
Exactly how they related to each other, what the best “build” for stats was, and how to earn titles and a class… those were all details that would come later.
But the overall implication of the status screen was clear. It was game time.
“Pierce, give us the sword,” Mathews, the corporal, called out to me.
I turned to him, my eyes refocusing from looking at my screen. It appeared they couldn’t see my status screen as I could; that was good information to have, and a fact that later became a headache for the world as a whole.
“What?”
“Give us the sword. It’s the only weapon we have,” Mathews repeated slowly, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.
Which was damn stupid. I knew what he said, and I wasn’t confused about why he was asking. The rest only had the useless guns on them, which were just hunks of metal that didn’t work. And I, not being a total dipshit, had snagged a sword from the starting cave before the place closed itself up and kicked us out at the beginning of the goblin assault.
But I was the only one to do so. And so, I had the only weapon.
I narrowed my eyes as I looked at Mathews, Reitlin, and the others, then at the shortsword still held in my hand.
A decision had to be made right there. One with implications that would ripple out even if or when we made it out of the tutorial. It wouldn’t be as simple as “doing the right thing” or "following orders.”
We were huddled together like scared mice in a tiny ass cave, tucked inside a large forest of some videogame-like Tutorial level. Four of my friends were already butchered like farm animals right in front of me. These were people I spent hours each day working with, talking with, sharing lunch breaks. Some more than others, but all were big parts of my daily life.
A life that was essentially now over.
I forced my thoughts back to the task at hand. We had a quest to survive an entire night against dirty fucking goblin monsters. I had already been conscripted by my government to help them figure out what was happening with these spatial rifts, which was how I ended up there in the first place.
This all came on the back of learning that my brother, Alex, was dead after some kind of explosion while he was out doing his job in the military. The same aforementioned military.
Now, the stupid ass soldiers who claimed they would protect us had already allowed four deaths, had no weapons, and wanted my sword.
None of that sounded good. It was utterly terrible to be honest. It was a deal one might make with an extra moronic demon, a deal that gave me no upside and all downsides. Leaving me defenseless and at the mercy of the idiots who got me there in the first place.
If I gave in and handed over the weapon. Well, I’d all but certainly be dying in that dungeon. I had zero illusions that those guys could fight off the goblins. We’d all die.
But if I refused and ran away… I would absolutely survive on my own, given everything I knew at the time. But there was a problem there, too. Once the tutorial was over, any of those guys who also managed to survive would report what I did. I’d be hauled in for desertion, thrown in prison, maybe even killed.
The chances of any of them living through this were small. But it was more than feasible given what I had planned at that point. The goblins wouldn’t really be a problem for them if I killed all the green-blooded fucks before that. Which was what I wanted to do.
So I couldn’t refuse, or I’d be put in prison or killed by the government on the outside.
But I couldn’t comply either, because I’d be killed by the goblins there on the inside. It was quite the sticky, slick pickle that I was in.
“Come on, hand it over already.” Perez stepped forward and reached for the blade.
I pulled back, not ready to give up the only weapon we had to these idiots. "No, I'm not gonna be defenseless out here."
"You won't be defenseless, you'll have us," Perez continued to try reach for the sword, now grabbing my other arm to keep me from backing away.
"Lot of good that did for Michael, and Victoria, the others..." I shoved against Perez, trying to get him to back off, but he kept pushing back. "Get the fuck off me."
"Hey, guys, stop—" Mathews began, but he was interrupted as the scuffle between Perez and myself escalated.
Perez tried to lock my free arm behind my back to gain some control, but I turned away and sent a knee up into his stomach, causing him to cough up spittle.
The soldier responded by throwing a punch at my face, and I ducked before slapping away his fist on his follow-up. The impact reverberated through my arm, he wasn't holding back anymore. He was seriously trying to knock me out. I could imagine what would happen if he managed it. The sword being taken away, my only means of defense against the goblins gone just like that. I'd probably be left alone, too, even if I survived the portal, like I said, I'd be pulled in for some bullshit military court. Thrown in prison to rot.
But there was a third option. One they probably hadn't considered. Yet, I did. As I said before... I'm not the hero...
I brought the sword up and slammed the tip under Perez’s jaw, the weapon piercing through the flesh and into his skull. I killed him almost immediately, and his corpse fell to the dirt at my feet as I yanked the sword free from his body.
“What the fuck!” Reitlin yelled.
“Well… looks like none of you are making it to sunrise after all,” I said.
1.01 I'm Not The Hero