Sergeant Remington woke up to find himself in an arid landscape. He looked around wildly with a dry mouth. He immediately recognized the symptoms of dehydration and the onset of heatstroke. The need to cool off and rehydrate immediately rose to an absolute priority in his mind. It didn’t matter if he’d been dropped on some random planet or if the Valkyrie had taken a hit, he could figure out what the hell had happened afterward. He just knew he must have been unconscious for a few days already considering his condition.

***ERROR***

***DUAL ENTITY DETECTED***

***SURVEYING… SURVEY CORRUPTED… ATTEMPTING CONSOLIDATION….***

“What the fuck?” William croaked out through his chapped lips as a voice? appeared in his mind. He slowly started to stand up. He had to have been hallucinating. A thought that reminded him he needed water. He looked around and spotted a few greener shrubs lining a depression 15 meters to the side. He started shambling forward but stopped again halfway there. He felt another pain in his head as he suddenly knew a language that he had never known before. There was also the vague thought of someone saying ‘oops, that was my bad. Bitch got me for ya...’

He also had the vague impression that he was going the wrong way and turned to the right. He wasn’t sure why but it felt like he knew there was water there. He started walking through the sparse brush and quickly found a slight hill with a large pool of muddy water at the bottom of the other side. He carefully lowered himself down in his weakened state. Soon he was laying in the water when the voice came back.

*** INTERVENTION DETECTED…REEVALUATING BASE STATS... RESETTING CLASSES… CONSOLIDATION COMPLETE.***

***WELCOME TO CRADUS***

Name: William Tempest

Race: Human-Variant

Age:19

Class: N/A

Secondary: N/A

Profession: N/A

Level: 0

Health: 3/90

Mana: 150/150

Stamina: 68/120

Vitality: 9

Active Effects:

Severe Dehydration- Natural Health replenishment reduced by 50%.

Malnourished- Natural Mana and Health replenishment reduced by 50%.

Endurance: 12

Strength: 10

Dexterity: 9

Intelligence: 15

Attributes:

Variant Human: +1 Vitality, +2 Strength

Focus: 8

Luck: 3

Utility skills: N/A

A blue screen flashed in front of his eyes. He was so preoccupied that he didn’t even realize the filthy shirt he was using as an impromptu water filter wasn’t his standard-issue undershirt but a collarless button-down one made of coarse fabric. He looked around and the blue screen kept with his eyesight.

“That’s all I fucking need… That’s beyond just dehydration. Did someone infect me with intelligent nanites? Some spook shit?” he said to himself and thought of how to get the nanites out of his eyes. To his surprise it only took the thought for the screen to disappear, it should have taken a voice command or uplink from a control tablet. Which only made things seem far worse to him, “Aggh! They’re in my fucking head.”

William tried to ignore the blue screen and thought of nanites bouncing around his brain and focused on his body's current needs. He took it slow as to not make himself sick and although he was worried about water contamination, he wasn’t worried about alien bacteria or other microorganisms. The odds of a lifeform like that being compatible enough to affect his own body despite evolving on two different worlds was next to zero. He was more worried about hard metals and other toxins but he didn’t have a choice in the matter. He’d just have to hope a rescue party was already looking for him or that he could find a nearby settlement that had a doc or auto-med facility capable of detoxing a human.

It was a long shot of finding a settlement on an unknown world but it was habitable as far as he could tell. The air was breathable, the blue sky reminiscent of Earth. He was sunburnt but not to the extent that he felt he’d been exposed to direct solar radiation, so it likely had a magnetosphere or a magneto-shielding station at the L1 point. And the presence of his muddy bath and the clouds meant that it held water in a liquid and vaporous form. With the heat, he doubted he’d find ice in the immediate area.

He reached for his arm to activate his comms but stared blankly when he only saw his bare skin. He freaked out and rose out of the murky water and started checking for the rest of his gear. He hadn’t been kitted for a full engagement but he was still a part of the quick response team. He should have had his comm bracelet, medkit, and sidearm but he realized that not only were all those missing. So too were his personal effects, identification, and uniform!

“Okay! This is not funny!” William yelled out to no one as he pulled one of the only things on his person, an ancient-looking revolver that was now slimy with mud. He recognized it immediately but it was a relic to him, they still had them on Earth but it was a novelty item. Something his dad had an interest in but not him.

Was it some sort of fucked up test, dropping a grunt on an unknown world with only an antique to defend himself? If it really was a spook test, they wouldn’t stop their experiment just because he caught on. That would just be more data. He was still going to demand a full investigation with the admiralty when he got home though.

A glare of reflective light caught his attention as he stood in the knee-deep water. He stared at it for a second and looked around. He didn’t see anything else in the vicinity but rather than check on it, he lowered himself back into the water. He still had to care for himself.

He lay there for a few hours as his body slowly recovered while trying to take in his situation. He noticed a few things. For one he must have been out for quite a bit longer than he originally thought, although it could have only been the past day or so that he was on the surface. The biggest indicator was the rough growth of hair on his face, he was far outside military regulations. A minor thing, he’d shave once he had the chance, he could even use a decent knife if he had to.

Besides that he noted that he seemed alone, he hadn’t seen a single animal but he immediately put that off as the effect of being in an arid environment. Any wildlife was probably taking shelter from the hot sun and would come out at night. It did mean he would want to get away from what could be the sole watering hole for potentially dangerous or venomous alien creatures before nightfall.

The final pieces of information he noted were about his environment. The system had two stars and despite the time that passed he could tell the rotational period was on the longer side. He used his fingers to track their process across the sky and figured it was around a 30 hour day. Long but not enough to mess with his sleep schedule much.

As the suns started lowering in the sky, William decided to get up and take in his surroundings. After he was confident that he was alone he started making his way towards the reflective thing he’d seen earlier.

“Now if I could just get a scan to check my status-”

Name: William Tempest

Race: Human-Variant

Age:19

Class: N/A

Secondary: N/A

Profession: N/A

Level: 0

Health: 11/90

Mana: 150/150

Stamina: 68/120

Vitality: 9

Active Effects:

Dehydration- Natural Health replenishment reduced by 25%.

Malnourished- Natural Mana and Health replenishment reduced by 50%.

Endurance: 12

Strength: 10

Dexterity: 9

Intelligence: 15

Attributes:

Variant Human: +1 Vitality, +2 Strength

Focus: 8

Luck: 3

Utility skills: N/A

He stared again at the blue screen in front of his eyes. This time though he didn’t freak out and studied the information provided. If the damned spooks wanted to mess with him at least it looked like they gave him a built-in bioscanner. Although most of it was complete nonsense.

“Health, eleven out of ninety? How the hell would you calculate that? Classes? Mana? Luck? Well at least that one seems fucking right, it’s lower than the rest and I’m here,” William said to himself. He ignored the pointless data and focused on the part that looked like dumbed-down results of a medical scan. It informed him that he was suffering from dehydration and a lack of nourishment, both things he already knew.

He looked at the various numbers and tried to think about what they had been when it first came up. He remembered it was reduced by fifty percent twice, meaning a 100% drop in health replenishment that was now only a 75% drop. Which would explain why his health was going up so slowly compared to the other values…. William blinked.

“What the fuck am I doing?” he questioned his sanity and willed the screen to go away. He shook his head at his own stupidity, “Hope you bastards get something out of that!”

He kept walking and after moving back and forth managed to spot the reflective material. He walked up to it to find a backpack, an empty metal canteen being the source of the reflected light. He looked around for its owner but realized it was only feet away from where he woke up.

He crouched down and did a quick inventory of what he assumed was his supplies for the experiment. It didn’t take long and in the end, it was only frustrating. He had a single change of clothes, a dusty hat that looked like ancient cowboy movies his dad liked, an empty canteen, some sort of metal stick, a bottle of what smelled like whiskey, some dried meat, a thin blanket, and a small pouch with coins and a single bill. The final piece was worrisome. It meant wherever he was, they used a physical currency. That hinted that the locals were not a part of the coalition.

There were also twelve rounds of ammo for the revolver, a large knife, and a very rough map that made up the only three useful items. Well, the map was useless too once he realized he had no idea his current location or what the hexagon pattern was about. He’d have to figure out the first while the second he assumed was some sort of grid for measuring distance, at least there were settlements and a river marked on the map. It also looked like it had once been larger with an entire side of it singed, the paper darkened by burn marks, though there was no way of knowing how much had been lost.

William went and filled up the canteen, filtering the water through his spare shirt, taking a few more drinks himself straight from the pool, and left the watering hole. He was still tired and hot but he really didn’t want to be next to the water come dark. He looked around the area and noticed a large rock outcropping. It looked like a small butte and only rose four meters above the surrounding ground. Seeing it as a decent place to camp for the night, he went to it.

The climb was short but took a lot more out of him than he thought. He did make it to the top in quick order though. Once there he inspected his new campsite. It was a rough oval of four meters by five meters. Not the most spacious and he wouldn’t want to be sitting there in the sun the following morning but it was what he had.

He sat down his gear and pulled out a piece of tasteless jerky, he knew it was old meat but he still didn’t worry about infection. He pulled the meat from his mouth and looked at it.

“Hopefully this isn’t fucking frog,” he voiced his concern but decided even with the rumors about coalition intelligence, aka spooks, he doubted they would go as far as feed him the flesh of a sentient. Maroon a marine planetside? Sure. But surely they weren’t that fucked up.

He spent the last hour of daylight trying to orient himself to the map. It was difficult with the rough depictions that he doubted followed any kind of scale. Some parts may have but it looked like landmarks and towns were drawn much larger than they should have been. The towns at least had a dot marking their actual location next to the symbol and name.

After that, he sat down and started cleaning the ancient weapon he’d been given. It looked larger than he remembered from the movies his dad watched but the old films could have been deceptive, he’d never actually held a revolver to know for sure. It had an octagon barrel with thick walls, a wide drum, a handle lined with ivory, and no stamps indicating make or serial number. When he figured out how to open it, he realized it only held four rounds. That was severely disappointing having been used to his issued weapons, his sidearm alone held twenty and that was half of his rifle's capacity. He sighed and kept cleaning, his next surprising discovery was a bit better and concerned the size of the rounds.

“That a twelve seven?” William pondered as he pulled a round out and looked at the large bullet. It might not have been but it looked like a 12.7 mm round, known to most as a fifty cal even after the coalition adopted metric as its official standard. He even thought it looked larger but 12.7 was the largest he’d ever handled and it wasn’t a pistol round. He shrugged his shoulders and considered himself blessed that even though his weapon could barely hold any ammunition at least it wasn’t a 5.6 pistol round.

Utility skill learned: [Identify] level 1

William jumped as another blue window popped into his eyes. He calmed down quickly, having been in plenty of nerve-wracking situations. His reaction was more akin to a simple jump scare than actual fear. He looked at the message and tried to poke it but nothing happened.

“What’s identify?” he asked and the window was quickly replaced by another.

Identify- lvl 1

Provides the ability to gain knowledge by utilizing skill with objects or living entities. Certain magics can interfere and one must be higher level than the target to obtain information on system-recognized entities. Higher-level increases quality of information and range.

Current range: 10 feet

He looked at the description and blinked. It was fairly straightforward except for two things.

“Magic?” he said aloud as he reread the words again, “and who still uses feet? I’m fucking American and we don’t even use that anymore!”

He willed it away, more caught up on someone using the largely obsolete form of measurement. It didn’t even occur to him to question why it would show up like that other than thinking spook bullshit. He looked at the bullet in his hand and thought about identifying it.

0.5 ammunition

Details: A 0.5 round for a firearm.

Composition: Unknown

Durability: Unknown

Damage output: Unknown

Estimated value: Unknown

“Are you fucking kidding me?!” William threw the round onto the ground in his frustration as he closed the window. A bullet… that’s basically all it told him, it was a bullet. It didn’t give him the manufacturer, the grain of the gunpowder, or the type of projectile. The fucking thing could be a copper over ceramic round, lead, steel, isotope tracer, or any other kind, he had no idea other than seeing the copper projectile and brass cartridge.

He stared at the round and picked it up with a huff. He wiped it off and laid it on top of his backpack before removing the other rounds and started cleaning the weapon to the best of his ability. He had to use a little water from his canteen but he’d refill it in the morning. When he got done with the outside he looked around for how to clean the barrel. He grabbed the knife and cut a chunk of fabric off the corner of his blanket before he picked up the metal rod.

Once it was in his hand he felt a strange feeling. It was like being close to an electric outburst but not so close you would get shocked, more of a tingling sensation where his skin made contact with what he’d thought was a weapon cleaning rod. He also felt like something from within him was moving into the metal as well. He focused on identifying it.

Fire-Starter Wand

Details: A fire-starter wand.

Composition: Unknown

Durability: Unknown

Damage output: Unknown

Estimated value: Unknown

Utility skill leveled: [Identify] level 2

“Okay?” He said confusedly. William dismissed the windows after attempting to identify again and seeing it didn’t give anything new. He held the ‘wand’ in front of him and willed it to activate but nothing happened.

“Fire!” he said, slightly embarrassed and was glad the only people likely watching were black ops types that meant any recordings would be classified. As for them watching, they could go fuck themselves. He kept trying though, “Flame! Flame-start! Fucking fire! Inferno! Fuego…”

He continued for a little while, saying things in English, Spanish, Korean, and the new language he suddenly comprehended but nothing worked. He waved it around wildly, held it perfectly still, and even tried the old fashion swish and flick. Nothing worked.

“Alright, what am I missing?” he asked himself. He didn’t believe it was actually magic but it was still a tool he’d been given and he wanted to use it. After a moment of thought, he realized the tingling sensation must have been the nanites. He held it in front of his face, then moved it to arms reach after realizing it was dumb to have it inches from his face. He focused on the tingling. The nanites had responded to mental commands up to that point, so he willed for them to interact with the device.

He smirked as a small orange flame flickered from the end of the device. It wasn’t dangerous so he moved it closer and studied it.

“Looks no different than a butane lighter… where does it keep the fuel? Where does it come out?” He blew it out but had to stop pushing his nanites into it to get it to actually extinguish. A quick bit of searching and twisting it around to every angle ensued in the failing light. No matter how he looked at it though, he couldn’t figure out how the fuel got out to ignite.

“Well, the galaxies most expensive and confusing lighter… great. Least I don’t have to rub sticks together,” he sighed and put his new lighter down before he jumped up. He realized if it got cold he would be in a predicament and might need a fire, he’d been so preoccupied with the strange lighter that he had forgotten about survival!

He quickly put his weapon back together and holstered it. After a moment he dumped out his bag and threw it over his shoulders. Dry wood would be relatively easy from what he’d seen, the landscape was arid but it wasn’t a sandy dune-covered desert, more like the rocky high desert of Oregon. There was plenty of dry grasses, scrub brush, and a few trees he could gather from.

He dropped down carefully off his butte perch and made his way to a small grouping of hardy trees. He didn’t have anything to actually cut them down but he looked on the ground and started collecting dry sticks that had long since broken off the gnarled plants. He stuffed them into his bag and snapped off branches of a dead bush before throwing in some dried grass for tinder. It would be enough to get a fire going but he moved to another tree to ensure it didn’t go out if he managed it right.

He moved efficiently through the landscape and looked for anything that would burn for more than just a few minutes. He went back when his bag was full and dumped it before climbing back down for a second load. His bag wasn’t very big so he also grabbed his blanket and was soon going for a third load.

“Come on Will, just a few more sticks,” he walked with his eyes scanning the ground but couldn’t find anything to fill out his pack.

*click*

William froze at the sudden sound. He didn’t move a muscle but focused on his hearing while his eyes scanned everything in front of him. He slowly turned his head in both directions and didn’t see anything. When he turned around, there was nothing but gnarled trees, bushes, and rocks. A breath escaped his lips, one of relief...

*click*

He spun in the direction of the noise but didn’t see anything. He started backing away from it while his hand hovered over the grip of his revolver.

*click**click*

He turned to the right as he heard it again and just as quickly to the left as the second one made a sound.

“Fucking A! There’s more than one!” He said as his head was on a swivel. He made his way back to the butte while occasionally hearing the strange clicking sound come intermittently from random directions. None of them sounded close but he was still keeping his distance.

*click**click**CLACK!**click**click**click**click**click**click*

He froze again, whatever was messing with him just ran away, making their clicking sounds as they went. It was immediately after what sounded like two pieces of wood slamming into each other. He looked around in the failing light and his eyes ended up focusing on a strange black tree. He didn’t remember seeing it before. It didn’t have any branches and rose from bushes 15 meters away.

“What the fuck?!” William yelled as he pulled his weapon. The tree had moved!