Running a hand through his hair, Brock overlooked the vast expanse of red sand with wide eyes. The sun was shining brightly in the sky, beating down on him and his surroundings with its searing fingers.

Here, the air smelled disgustingly of dust and dirt, and it made breathing a sorrowful affair. A hot breeze flew through and made his ruined clothes stick to his sweaty lower half. Dust quickly joined them. It was Brock’s literal worst nightmare. He had utterly despised the outback all his life despite having grown up there, and slowly, over the course of the month, he had come to hate being alone.

And now, he was both. Stuck alone in the outback.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Brock sighed.

He was truly stranded here with nothing. He hadn’t realised it until now, but the backpack he had been using was now nothing more than a loose bundle of fabrics at his point, leaving only the remains of a broken water bottle and a leaking can of beans, which Brock quickly found himself eating due to stress. The only silver lining was that his enhanced body seemed to nullify the effects of the sun’s heat somewhat, though it was still annoyingly uncomfortable.

Aside from his obvious lack of items that practically ensured his survival, Brock was also covered in the tatters of a suit. The once pristine jacket hung loosely around his waist, like it was the barbaric furs of some animal. His shoes were akin to wraps of shredded leather and his pants had long been slashed into overly revealing shorts.

All in all, he looked like the homeless marketing agent he was. You’re funny mate. I can’t hear me laughing.

I think I’m going crazy.

But blessedly, he wasn’t left to wander the Aussie desert in the nuddy, and that was enough to satisfy him, for now at least. Massaging the growing tension from his neck, Brock tried to survey his surroundings and was left dumbfounded. That was the first thing he hated about the outback. No matter where you looked, it was all the same shit. If you got lost, you would only get lost-er.

It was the validation of that very reason that Brock was left with no clue which direction to go and what to do. If one direction led to some sort of highway, great! He could follow it to a gas station and loot it for some food and drinks. But if one led to only more desert, well, it wouldn’t end in any way that was kid-friendly.

Most likely with ants crawling inside his skull.

Brock didn’t really have anywhere to go, although he had an idea where he wanted to be. His hometown. James and their mother had lived there before all… this, so hopefully, when everyone came back, he’d find them there and would be able to confirm their safety. Jane should be fine on her own until he sought her out.

Well. I better get moving then, huh? He groaned as he looked to the expanse. And I still have no idea which direction to go.

Sighing with a heavy heart, Brock did the most sensible thing he could think of. He closed his eyes and spun around with his arm out. Whichever direction he ended up on was where he was going. Two dizzying twirls later - the second one because he didn’t like the direction he picked out first - Brock found himself traversing hard to what he thought was north, though the chances were, he’d never know.

You couldn’t trust anything these days. Not even the sun. He narrowed his eyes in its vague direction.

True to his initial impressions, as he trekked onward over the next ten minutes, all Brock saw was more red dust and maybe a tentacled cactus or a shrub or two. As his environment threatened to drive him insane, the marketer suddenly realised something, feeling his Ascendancy throb gently within him as it worked to slowly repair his damaged pathways. It was making good progress.

I guess all the stress just… made me forget? Status.

Brock Carter.

Race: Human [F] LVL 11

Ascendancy: Fetters of the Bound [F]

Level: 1

[Stats]

Strength: 62.4 [+20%][Base: 52]

Agility: 58.8 [+20%][Base: 49]

Dexterity: 52.8 [+20%][Base: 44]

Constitution: 62.4 [+20%][Base: 52]

Vitality: 63.6 [+20%][Base: 53]

Intelligence: 72 [+20%][Base: 60]

Wisdom: 66 [+20%][Base: 55]

[Augments] - Augment of Sparks (23.19%).

[Titles] - At The Precipice, Agent of Chaos, Blessed, Destined for Greatness, Underdog, Hidden Fangs, Leader of the Pack, Login Bonus, Opportunist, Enlightened, Mass Murderer, Needless Slaughter, Masochist, Trophy Hunter (Unique).

Free Stats: 0

Shards: 0

Stars of Ascension: 0

Fetters of the Bound, huh? Sounds like… something from one of those edgy anime’s James used to watch…

Excited nonetheless, Brock surveyed his status, happy to have been presented any distraction to the endless red hell he had been thrust into. The first change which he noticed, perhaps the biggest of them all, was of course his newly unsealed Ascendancy. It seemed to him to be oddly accurate to the history of his newly gained power.

Chained. Bound. Fettered. A bit on the nose, I guess?

While sounding a rather dark and ominous, Brock couldn’t wait to see what it was capable of. Aside from that, both his stats and Augment had seen a change, with the latter having reached the 20s in percentage, off from 7.22%.

Augment of Sparks (23.19%): +7 Strength, +7 Intelligence

Looking back, Brock thought he knew the exact moment when he had upgraded his Augments stats, if that’s truly what had happened; the final part of the fight between him and Ur’Kahn. He had fallen into some kind of trance of enlightenment as he torched through the werewolf warrior’s knee, and if not for that, he doubted he would have allowed himself to be punted like a football halfway across their razed down arena.

He had somewhat noticed an ease to which he had cut through the roots that had attacked him in the Centre, though honestly, he had just assumed it was a simple matter of fire beats wood, an age-old truth, not something far cooler. Either way, he was elated to discover what new uses it held and the degree of increased power that came with the upgrade.

Putting all that to the side, the three lines that had sat at the bottom of his status menu since the beginning had swapped from having the value N/A, to a disappointing 0. Free Stats was pretty straightforward, and he assumed Shards to be some kind of currency, or maybe even the Shards of Awakening he had found sparsely so far, though he doubted it.

The Stars of Ascension were a whole new ball game, however, and the mere fact that it was sealed along with his Fetters of the Bound pointed to it being related to his Ascendancy. Perhaps it was some sort of sub-currency that he could use to gain skills or whatnot, if he remembered his games correctly.

Smiling to himself at the concrete gains he’d made and the clear avenue of progress he had finally opened up for himself, Brock was once again plagued with the cursed atmosphere of the desert as he dismissed his status screen. Silently, he looked out to the great land of hollow sands beyond him with a frown, his arm moving idly to sever the head of a small, fanged lizard as it leapt at his face.

It was small, but small these days was the size of a medium dog at minimum.

Glancing at the scaled creature that attacked him, Brock noticed that it was a cruel mutant of what was once a national treasure; the frilled neck lizard. Weakly humming the tune of the Australian anthem which he didn’t really know the lyrics of, he bid the creature a sincere farewell and lamented on the fact he had been to school for over twelve years and still had no idea what everyone had been singing.

He had only ever followed what everyone else had done. Lip syncing was the way to go.

Grasping his dagger tightly in his hand, Brock flicked the somewhat luminous blood from its silver length and carefully watched as he infused his upgraded Augment into the blade. A swirling blade of energy extended from the blade, sporting a far more vibrant orange than that of before. The ambient heat it emitted had ramped up significantly, and even the maximum length of the extension had increased by about an inch or two.

Overall, just from an initial look, it was a pretty qualitative change.

How did I not notice this? What the hell is wrong with me?

Brock was a smart man with a simple mind.

Just kidding. He’s an imbecile.

In addition to all that, he found that his newfound upgrade granted him access to that which he had dreamed of. The next half an hour was spent with Brock literally scorching every rock, plant, and dangerous-looking creature with a flaring ball of fire. It could only travel about a dozen or so meters before its heat began to rapidly diminish and it fizzled out, but as long as he kept to the range, the fun never ended.

Then it did, and Brock felt ashamed. He was turning twenty-three this year after all. While fireballs were his little wet dream, he couldn’t help but wonder if there was more he could do with fire. Maybe I should find a physicist for its energy aspect or something?

That aside, his raw explosion attacks had ramped up drastically in their ferociousness and heat, so much so that when he tried to merely blow up a rock, it and its surroundings had turned to shattered pieces of glass and molten slag, leaving a heated crater behind. Immediately after, he had looked to his hands and recited a famous quote from spiderman.

With great power comes great responsibility. Fortunately, in the vast emptiness of the outback, he had none. And he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

“Who knew the outback could be so fun?” Brock said aloud as he blew himself over from the shockwave of his Augment expulsion, leaving the particularly large rock he was targeting as a sloughing mass of magma.

It was also during this time that he had finally realised the signs of wear and tear on his blade. It was only slight, but the resilient bracer had begun to fray, and his ethereal chain of violet had dimmed ever so slightly. Even the blade itself was looking marginally dulled. The was edge still beyond razor-sharp, but it wasn’t as deadly as when he had first received it.

Eventually, as he walked, Brock decided to lose the shoes, finding his continued stops to empty the sand that had found its way within driving him slowly to the brink of mental instability. His Constitution was high enough that the scalding hot sand was reducing to a soothing warmth underfoot, letting him enjoy the sensation of sand between his toes while he walked.

Until he stepped on a dinner plate-sized scorpion hidden under the sand. That was when it had decidedly not become soothing. Quite the opposite in fact.

Almost an hour after he had been transported, Brock let out a heaving sigh of relief as he happened upon a rest stop, the tattered remains of a highway barely recognisable under the layers of orange sand obscuring it. Even the rest stop itself was buried by several inches of sand, proving to Brock that the System had dumped some more sand on top of the sand, meeting its terraforming quota.

Although the building did look beyond run down, so more sand might have been just the result of the System’s method of aging the environment. Erosion and all that.

Approaching it and pulling the door open, feeling the weight of the sand behind it, Brock entered within and spoke out on hopeful instinct, “Hello? Anyone here?”

No one replied, much to Brock’s disappointment, and he stepped in, making a beeline to the fridges which were now lacking the illumination from within he was so used to.

“I’m going to steal your shit~”

He called out teasingly, yet still, no one replied. It was worth a shot, even if the shot was a bad one.

A few minutes later, Brock stumbled out of the store with an armful of Big M’s, a few bottles of water and several protein bars. Quickly, he found the warm Big M’s to be more solid than the weathered stone that made up the servo, but the protein bars and water were fine if a bit melted and warm.

So food isn’t aged, but the world itself is? Brock opened his first protein bar and grinned. The Big M’s must have expired naturally.

He rubbed his stomach pleasantly thirty seconds later after having utterly devoured over thirteen cookies n’ cream flavoured protein bars and gulped down two full litres of water. He hadn’t realised what the desert had taken out of him until it was too late. He probably should have controlled himself and rationed, but one did not simply say ‘no’ to cookies n cream.

He was still rather hungry, but the servo had been looted dry by him.

Five minutes later, Brock hurried around to the back of the rest stop, clutching his mouth with one hand and his stomach with the other. Satisfied, he removed both and let it rip, a projectile stream of protein bar and bile splashing across the back wall of the building and all over the surrounding sands.

He probably should have remembered that the things have an expiration date. One that had passed within a month’s time. He had no idea what was in those proteins bars, but judging from how sketchy the wrappers looked, he feared for his life.

Then suddenly, as the final splatters hit the ground, a flash of the same blue and green lightning he had seen take Carrie appeared to his left, the figure of a person slowly flickering into existence within. Brock raised a brow and quickly wiped his mouth, scuffing some sand over the considerable puddle, although failing miserably to obscure its existence.

“No ma! I promise it was!” a scrawny teen with an accent Brock pinned as being from Boston flashed into existence with a final burst of lightning and he thudded down on the sandy earth beneath, his blonde, curtained hair flopping about with the movement. Noticing the strange silence, he hesitantly cranked his eyes open and looked around with a dumbfounded expression, “Huh?”

His eyes settled on the scarred and bloodied form of Brock, and they widened in shock for a brief moment before they trailed down to the mess he had left behind. His gaze settled there for a while before he looked up and met Brock’s own gaze, frowning. The boy seemed strangely… dull. Like he wasn’t fully there.

Shocked, Brock felt his lips straighten out as he looked to the teenage boy sitting before him, “One does not simply say ‘no’ to cookies n cream, ok?”