“What the fuck?” Morgan groaned as an unseen lock on the door clicked, and it silently swung open. There was evidently more light outside the room than in because Morgan could see a flickering amber glow outlining the gap between the door and the wall. He wanted to look through the opening and see what was beyond, but he also wanted to know just what the hell was going on with himself. Something was up with his mind. Morgan’s entire world had been turned upside down here; he was in a stone room in some boxer shorts and was seeing and hearing shit that should only exist in a VR game. Yet, he was taking things in stride. He hadn’t always had a cushy life; he’d seen his share of problems on Earth during the collapse, but he sure as hell shouldn’t be feeling so fine about things. Had the System screwed with his mind? Like more than just putting in a UI and changing his language? Did it pump him with dopamine or something? What else had the System changed about him?

Morgan examined his thoughts for a few minutes. He thought about his childhood, his schooling, the competition to join the Arkship colony. Everything seemed to be there, but would he know if something wasn’t? He thought back to his sister and how she had died during the Great Lakes conflict. Yeah, he still felt shitty about that. He still could imagine crawling into a ball and giving up. Okay, so his emotions weren’t all smoothed over, but for some reason, he just wasn’t freaking out about his current situation. “Huh, so survive the Crucible, eh?” He stepped over to the doorway.

Tiptoeing, barefoot on the cool tile floor, he felt like he was nearly silent. Gingerly, he pulled the door just a bit wider and peered into the space beyond. He saw a hallway with walls and a floor much like the room in which he stood. It stretched to his left and right, and about forty feet to the right, he could make out a corner because there was what appeared to be a lantern mounted there. It was glowing with an actual flame dancing behind a glass panel. Morgan stepped out of the room and began to creep toward the lantern. He’d made it about halfway to the corner when he heard the sound of feet slapping rapidly on the stone floor and the sound of wheezing, grunting inhalations behind him. Morgan spun around in time to see a short, gray, totally nude, and hairless man charging at him with a sharpened stick pointed right at his stomach. By the time Morgan recovered from his shock, the makeshift spear was almost upon him. He twisted to his left, and instead of running him through, the jagged wooden tip just left a painful scratch along his stomach. The momentum of the little man carried him in front of Morgan, and Morgan reflexively shoved him as he went by.

The gray man stumbled and fell to the hard floor, tangling with the haft of his spear. He turned and looked at Morgan from the ground, and that was when Morgan realized the man’s eyes were bright yellow. It spread its lips and hissed at him, and Morgan saw that the man had teeth more fitting a wildcat than a person, and his tongue was long and forked.

“Yo, settle down, man!” Morgan yelled, holding out his hands and crouching into a defensive pose. He’d been trained in self-defense techniques like all prospective colonists, and before that, he’d served in one of the Resistance militias, though he spent that time mostly pulling a trigger and not fighting hand to hand. The man, or creature, as Morgan was now starting to think of it, hissed again and struggled to its feet, leveling the spear once more at Morgan and advancing. “I’m serious, guy. Back off!”

“Hsssssssssss!” The creature burst into a run, once more trying to skewer Morgan. This time Morgan was ready, and he sidestepped, grabbing the haft of the spear and wrenching it in a half-circle while thrusting his weight into the creature’s forward momentum. It lost its grip on the spear and once more sprawled onto the hard floor. Morgan could see dark blood smearing the creature’s knees and the tiles. This time it was Morgan’s turn to level the spear at the little beast.

“Back off,” he said, once again. The creature struggled to its feet, and Morgan could see that it was weak; its stomach was hollow, and its ribs protruded. It looked at Morgan, hissed, gnashing its many sharp teeth, and then charged him, hands with black claws outstretched. Morgan lowered his center of gravity and thrust the spear directly into the creature’s stomach. He felt a moment of resistance, and then the spear burst through, dark blood splattering onto the floor. The creature wailed piteously, gripping at the haft of the spear weakly. Morgan pushed it backward and held it pinned to the ground. Soon, its wails turned to gurgles, and foamy blood dripped from its mouth as its chest stopped heaving, and its arms fell limply to the ground.

Morgan didn’t have time to think about what he’d just done before he saw something strange start to happen to the corpse. A shimmering layer of gold-colored dust started to sparkle around it, and then it surged into a stream that flowed straight at Morgan. He was startled and tried to dodge to the side, but it was impossible to avoid. The stream of tiny golden motes hit him square in the chest, and it felt just like when he’d touched the glowing marble earlier - warmth spread from his chest and into his limbs and head and then faded to a general feeling of warm satisfaction. “Goddamn! What the hell was that?” Morgan ran his hands along his body and couldn’t find anything amiss. Surprisingly, he felt pretty good. The scratch along his abdomen wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it was, just a raised welt with a thin line of blood in the middle.

Morgan had killed plenty of people in the various conflicts that had ravaged the North American continent over the decade or so before he’d been selected to join the Pilgrim 9 mission. It had haunted him at first, but survival was survival, and he’d had to create a hard place in his mind to put those feelings, especially when his sister died. He definitely wasn’t the same guy he’d been before that. He didn’t like that he’d had to kill this creature, but if it wanted to stab him, he was plenty happy to turn the tables rather than the alternative. “Status.”

Status

Name:

Morgan Hall

Race:

Human - Base 1

Class:

—

Level:

1

Energy Affinity:

9.2

Energy:

24/0

Strength:

6

Vitality:

8

Dexterity:

8

Agility:

7

Intelligence:

12

Will:

10

Titles & Feats:

Human Champion

Skills:

System Language Integration - Not Upgradeable

The only difference he could see is that he now had twenty-four out of zero energy. What the hell? It was a mystery he’d have to unravel sooner rather than later if his gut feeling was correct.

Morgan looked up and down the hall and at the corpse at his feet. He wondered if this guy was alone. The fight certainly hadn’t been quiet with the thing screeching and Morgan yelling at it. So far, nothing else seemed to be coming. He reached down and grabbed the body by the ankle and dragged it back to his doorway and into the room he’d started in. There wasn’t much he could do about the blood smears, though. He took a good look at the spear he’d taken from the creature. It was made of tough wood, and the carved point was black like it had been hardened further in a fire. Morgan felt immeasurably less naked with the spear in his hand.

Once again, Morgan was stealthily creeping toward the lantern at the corner of the hallway. This time he managed to get there without being attacked, and his eyes had become so adjusted to the darkness that he found it difficult to look directly at the little flame in the brass-colored lantern. It was hung from an iron bracket by a long brass handle, and Morgan decided to take it with him, lifting it off the bracket without any trouble. It was heavy with oil or whatever it used for fuel, and he had to assume someone or something had filled it fairly recently. The hallway that stretched in front of him continued for about 50 feet and, there, highlighted by the glow of another lantern, was a second wooden door.

Morgan kept hold of the lantern in his left hand while holding the spear, like he was ready to stab it forward, as you might hold it if you were going to throw it, in his other hand. He advanced at a slow, careful pace toward the door. When he was about eight feet or so from the door, Morgan noticed a sound coming from within. It was sort of a mewling, crying sound. As he crept closer, more noises started to leak through the door - grunting and guttural laughter. This door wasn’t so perfectly fit into the frame, and the wooden slats didn’t mesh without a gap like the door to his room. Holding his breath, Morgan leaned forward, peering with one eye through a wide crack. If he hadn’t been holding his breath, he would have found himself frozen with shock and unable to breathe anyway by the sight that confronted him.

The door separated the hallway from a much more crudely wrought room. The walls weren’t uniform to the point of almost looking like natural cavern walls. The room had a stone floor covered in debris and bits of rock and dirt. Lying on the floor, with her hands and feet bound with a rough hemp rope, was a humanoid female. The woman had long, bright-yellow hair and pale blue skin. Her eyes and mouth were covered with strips of cloth, and Morgan could see she was the source of the keening, muffled cries. There were two of those gray creatures hunched over the lower part of her body, and as Morgan realized what they were doing, he started to hyperventilate: they were eating her. Alive.

Something snapped in Morgan, and his vision narrowed to a tunnel. He set the lantern down and yanked the door open. The door wasn’t held in place by any sort of a latch, and it scraped along the tiles as he pulled, but he was through it and jamming a spear, with two hands, into the back of the first creature before it could turn around. He kicked the creature off the spear and swung the haft around, smashing the face of the second creature before it could finish standing up. The butt of the spear crunched into its nose and left eye socket, and it dropped to the ground with a thud. The first creature was writhing on its stomach away from Morgan, leaving a broad, slippery streak of blood behind it. Morgan stepped forward and drove the spear into its lower back, and it stopped moving. He looked around in the dark room, but nothing else moved. The woman was still crying, and Morgan started to walk over to her when two streams of golden motes slammed into his chest.

***Congratulations! You’ve achieved level 2 base human. You have 5 attribute points to allocate.***

The brief euphoria from the Energy, at least that’s what Morgan was beginning to suspect it was, flooding into him broke through his murderous rage, and he took a deep breath, steadying himself before he knelt next to the woman. She was wearing a tan-colored cloth, close-fitting shift, her legs and feet bare. The beasts had horrifically mutilated her right leg, the thigh having been chewed to the bone. Although she’d bled a great deal, Morgan could see she was still taking shallow breaths and softly whimpering. He carefully pulled the blindfold away from her eyes and said, “Easy, easy. They’re dead.”