Normann Hawkins blinked rapidly, trying to clear out a sudden dizzy spell that had settled over him. He drew his hand back from the translucent blue menu screen in front of him. An orb of blue and dark violet floated behind it, drifting back and forth in a strange spiral pattern as if it were impatiently waiting for him to make a decision. Normann had. It was the easiest choice for a person like him to make.
He wanted nothing to do with the orb, the SYSTEM it forced onto people, and all of the horrors that came because of it. Constant media showered him every day with the reality, and no amount of fame or power would erase the suffering of those who became operators. He had no desire to be one, let alone fight. He was a teacher; so, sure he’d defend his students, but he wasn’t an actual fighter. He’d shown that many times in his life, and this wasn’t an attempt to fix that because there was nothing to fix. He wasn’t the type of person to charge head first into a fight, slaughtering monsters and possibly innocents for guilds and corporations in the name of profits.
Normann knew exactly who and what he was: a fat, depressed 27 year-old man who still lived with his parents because he was too passive to go out and find someone or somewhere else to live. Why would he, of all people, be selected to fight when there were hundreds, thousands, millions, literally any one else really, who would be a better candidate to save the world? Why would he want that power to kill and die in horrible manner, never to see his family again. It made no sense, but the words floated in front of him, the screen of the SYSTEM hung before him:
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YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN BY THE SYSTEM TO JOIN THE HONORED DEFENDERS, THE JUST WARRIORS, AND THE RIGHTEOUS BRACE TO BEAR THE CHALLENGE SENT TO YOUR REALM.
OPEN YOUR SOUL UP TO [THE EMBODIMENT OF OMENS] AND WIELD THE POWER OF MYTHS AND STORIES.
LET INTEGRATION COMMENCE AND MAKE WHAT IS YOURS INTO REALITY?
{ACCEPT}\{DECLINE}
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holes in reality nearly tore the world apart. These holes, labeled Rifts by System, unleashed monsters that destroyed everything, killing thousands. Death wasn’t the only thing the System brought, though. With Rifts and monsters, power came too. People were altered fundamentally into operators, allowing their soul access to the strange and horrible magic the Rifts carried. Power that took humans away from everything that made them who and what they were. Power that only grew as one fought and killed the monsters, faced terror in the Rifts in countless forms. All for what? More power? Wealth? Death?
A simple choice for him; he wouldn’t amount to anything more than being a teacher, why bother. This was enough, his life was enough; certainly not worth trying to kill himself over the absurd belief of power and wealth. Those weren’t for a person like him. He wasn’t a fight, no matter how hard he tried with his friends in their games and play-combat. He wasn’t aggressive enough. He was, though, slow, lazy, and incompetent in so many ways and things. Normann surprised himself that he had job that required him to care and help others. That he somehow still had it. Maybe they couldn’t find anyone else and were just stuck with him. Every day, that reason made more sense than anything else.
The only saving grace in his was his halfway decent intelligence. Not that it mattered, not that he did something with it, but it’d enough to breeze through college and everything else that life threw at him. Figured out what was needed and was able to survive anything that came his way. Normann made it this far, and no one had learned the extent of his failings. He certainly wasn’t going to tell them.
Being selected the System hadn’t changed anything. In the end, the choice was easy to make. No matter the stories and delusions of grandeur he dreamed of each night as he fell asleep, he was an ordinary human of no worth. A nobody. His choice was easy.
The last words on the transparent menu stared at him, one of bold and depressed while the other was grayed out. He pulled his hand back from the “DECLINE” button; he remembered reaching out and pressing it. He choose that button specifically. It was important that he pressed it. Except it wasn’t the button in front of his fingers.
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{ACCEPT}\{DECLINE}
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The “ACCEPT” button had been highlighted and depressed while “DECLINE” had been grayed out. The entire screen glitched, like an old tube television struggling to find a channel, and a red haze hummed behind the screen instead of its previous blue and dark violet. The letters pixelated briefly, turning black and a different font only to transform just as quickly back into its clean white text. Normann had selected “DECLINE” and the System had otherwise insisted.
“Well,” he said softly as the screen disappeared, leaving a misshaped orb of white and red light, gold flecks within it, hovering drunkenly in front of him, “fuck.
The orb shot forward, crashing into his chest and knocking him down into his chair. He slammed down hard enough to slide his chair back and cracked his head against the wall. He whipped back and buckled over, his eyes focusing on the orb burrowing into his chest, pulsing with a dark radiance that threatened to burn away even light as it consumed him. It ate through his shirt, burning away the sparse hair, the flabby skin, the weak muscle, the dense bone, until it was inside him.
It flared within him, a nightmare of heat and fangs all to consume. Energy lit him from the bones outward, a stark heat spreading out from his sternum, lungs, and heart, to the rest of his body, inch by agonizing inch. The unreal heat from the orb pulsed along his veins and arteries, coursing through all of him to his fingers and toes. From bones and sinew to muscles and ligaments to skin, the light of the SYSTEM crunched down and bit away at him, gorging itself as it devoured him to leave something horrible in its place.
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He couldn’t stop staring at the horrid light within the orb as it transformed him. He wanted to scream, but everything squeezed as hard as it could, taut against the onslaught consuming him. His jaw clenched, his teeth cracked. Red and light flared in dark brilliance to some enigmatic beat he didn’t understanding as blood rushed out in pace with his pounding heart only to be met by the inalienable and immaterial maw of the SYSTEM.
It was wrong. All of it was wrong.
Somewhere in the remains of his mind, hidden beneath the consuming light and the enveloping pain of his dissolving body, he knew what was happening, the way it was happening, was wrong. Twenty three years worth of data, from the first Rift to now, spoke of the process. Every survivor recorded what their so-called ascension was like, the glory and power they felt.
His scream of agony and desire died as the light consumed his throat. It ate, cell by cell, and excreted something horrific in its place as it crawled through everything that made him. The light gorged an all that was him, crawling over and through and in him as he turned to ash and sand and dust and all else that was left in the face of an inscrutable entity that wanted him gone.
The incongruity of the situation, his own pain masked any thought every the basest of them but somewhere in the mind that was once his as it was overwritten by the light and horror and pain, a thought had passed through him without lingering: whatever was truly happening, this sideshow of suffering and horror as the core consumed him entirely, was wrong. The crunching and burning away of the body turned metaphoric and the light flared as its gnashed its teeth upon his soul, as the SYSTEM tore out all that-
Normann Hawkins shot up and pushed the desk away. It scrapped across the linoleum floor, tearing gashes as the feet dug into the ground, and screeched over the blaring fire alarm. Cords tore and the computer crashed to the ground, the monitor shattering to pieces around him. His head ached and body burned. Empty Sky, did everything hurt? His arms and legs shuttered as he struggled to think through the ripples of pain leaving his body His anima stormed violently within him, nipping at the edges of his self in a threat to escape. It cracked with errant bolts of intent, attempting to tear itself free of him.
The world spun and he reached out instinctively with left arm, though his hand hadn’t been around for decades. Except fingers caught his weight and a palm slapped against mortar blocks to hold him up. Normann looked over to see his hand, five fingers attached to a palm attached to a wrist. “That’s…” he said and stopped as the word hit his ear. He glanced slowly around the room, eyes widening as the anima within settled beneath the shock of where he was and the voice he heard.
knew this room well. Normann had been a teacher before his conscription, and up until that moment he was stolen away, he taught in this room. He stood in a dream he had many times, of a simpler life without the pain of death gnawing at him as he fought. He returned his often in his sleep, escaping to when he wasn’t something grand and power, but a human again.
He tried to walk out to the student desks and chairs, to the white boards lining both sides of the long room, to the books on the far wall. Normann took a step, but neither leg moved as it should; he tried to grab the chair near him, but its wheels spun it away and he collapsed to the ground and finally looked at himself
The legs that stared up at him were not his. His period of starvation as a conscript had eaten away at most of his muscle and body, leaving a thin frame barely able to stand. He regained some weight in the sixty years since, but his body wasn’t what it had been and had always felt so strange to see the skeleton in skin when he rarely went without his frame.
These weren’t skin and bone legs; but trunks of solid muscle. Normann pressed against them, using his hand to feel the steel wires that were muscles. He felt with both hands for a moment, before pausing to stare at the left hand which shouldn’t have been there.
During the Chernobyl Labyrinth Raid, thirty seven years ago, he’d been forced to step up and protect a backline Augmenter who wasn’t paying attention; despite his own failings with combat, he stood on the front line and used a flimsy sword best he could to hold off a horde of mutant ants. If he hadn’t, the entire heavy squad would have perished. Instead, he sacrificed his hand into the maw of an ant the size of a mini-van, saving a healer from being torn in hand.
Jezebel tore him a new one as she tried to stitch him up; he didn’t remember much of her yelling then other than telling him she cursed him out against when he was healed up.
The hand was fresh, unscarred. So was the arm attached to him. In fact - Normann checked his throat – he doubted he had any scars. The skin felt new, without a single hair on it. When he was fifty seven, just after his conscription was ended and he was formally added at to a heavy squad, Normann’s throat had been torn out by group of Folly demons in a Heavy delve. Jezebel cursed at him again for that. Left him with a deep gravel that barely came out in a whisper.
Normann dragged his left hand down his throat to his bare chest to the exposed pearlescent crystal embedded in his sternum. It had fused perfectly with his skin, the transition zone smooth and nearly indistinguishable. As it should be. As a normal operator had.
It wasn’t his core though, not the one he had since he had been conscripted. For nearly a hundred years, he possessed open sore that leaked anima. Charred and rough, his core exposed him to the world, staring out through a faulty integration process, but that’s what happens when humans attempt the work of an eldritch nature. Instead of an open wound bleeding both anima and blood, he had a normal core.
Maybe. He couldn’t remember a core that looked like this.
A large patch of chest, as wide as a hand-span and stretching the length of his sternum, glistened in poor fluorescent light. Hard as steel and slightly translucent, an iridescent sheen revealed a dark and deep ocean with something far beneath the surface pulsed in time with his heart. A second heart of anima that burned with a power from another level of existence granted to him by the SYSTEM. It raged as a storm within his body, steady and almost serene, but it was his and, unlike before, was in tune with his body rather than burning him out and working against him.
This wasn’t his core; not the malfunctioning one that he had lived with for ninety three years. It was the same color and texture as the artifact grade core he activated only seconds ago when he was standing outside the [Lasting Sunrise] Mythic Raid.
“It worked?” his voice sounded so strange to his ears. Youthful and painfree. Normann touched his core with his right hand and stared at the healed left hand. He stood straight; no pain in his ribs from the shitty Hammers of the Honored healers, the ones who just made sure he could stand and sent to the front lines to die like the rest of the conscripted. He could breath easily, though the air was dirtier than he remembered, giving it a toxic tang that the world didn’t have any more. Probably less industry spewing out its poison. Not a strong taste, but noticeable now.
“It fucking worked?” Normann barked out, barely containing the hysterical laugh boiling in him. He tapped his chest twice, two fingers on where his sternum should be, and summoned his HUD.
His menu appeared in front of him. Just as it had ninety-three years ago. Or would it be eight years from now? It didn’t matter, except it really did. Because it fucking worked. Figures and numbers flashed briefly before turning translucent and fading into the periphery of his vision, waiting for him to turn his attention to it. Once the HUD filled in a set of three bars at the bottom of his vision, a menu popped up, revealing his character sheet. A second one covered it immediately, dimming the first menu. This one had only a simple message typed on it, black text on a red field:
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