Chapter 7 - The Tutorial (Stage Two).

"Oh fuck."

Søren vaulted over the workbench, heedless of the glassware he knocked off the side. The shattering glass was like a starter pistol going off. A section of the wall to the south of the resurrection vault slid open, revealing a lengthy hallway beyond. Sections of the hall were partially collapsed, support beams thrust down from the ceiling and stuck into the walls Several dark doorways line the hall here and there and finally, live power cables hung down from holes in broken flickering panels in the ceiling.

He leapt onto the first pile of rubble blocking his way and skidded down the other side, through the doorway. The chamber behind him started to shift and shake, rubble dropping from the ceiling and an explosion of sparks and light lit up the length of the hallway in front of him for a hundred feet or so. His shadow cast a long misshapen form across the floor, up to the first scree of loose masonry and dirt that spilled out into the hall from an unstable looking crack.

A progress bar appeared at the top, center of his vision. It had started entirely green and then the green started disappearing from the right side, leaving behind a yellow bar. Søren noticed a sliver of red appear on the right side. When he started running, the yellow bar started to diminish as well, leaving behind a grey section between it and the red. Green is optimal, yellow is ok, and red is dead. Simple.

Søren wasn't a slouch when it came to athletics. He had enjoyed throwing himself into various parkour style obstacle courses when he was a teen and participated in American style football as well as baseball during high school while in the United States. His parents had taken him with them when they joined an excavation at the Lindenmeier site, a Folsom campsite in northeastern Colorado, to gather material for a paper on Paleo-Indian culture in prehistoric North America. Søren put his old talents to use, bounding forward and using the wall to push up and over the scree of dirt and stone. The yellow bar dropped and started to catch up to the edge of the green bar as Søren used his momentum to roll forward beneath a few dangling power cables just on the other side. The sparks of electricity fell around him in a blinding shower.

The sparks almost caused Søren to not notice that a section of the floor in front of him looked unstable, covered in cracks and a few jagged pieces that had tilted upwards out of the floor. He pressed onwards, squinting and blinking to clear his vision, and leapt over the section of the broken floor with an ungainly leap. His landing was rough and he tumbled to his knees on the other side. The yellow bar had almost caught up to the green bar, but as Søren kneeled there for a moment, it started to grow slightly. A constant reminder to keep moving.

"Dammit!" he shouted. Søren charged further down the hall and slowed down just a bit to peer into a doorway on his left. A flicker of light revealed a set of lockers, a row of benches, and a large dusty, cracked mirror on the wall above a few sinks, though they looked like they were carved from a single block of stone. He glanced up at the progress bar, took note of the slowly creeping red, and decided to risk a quick search of any open lockers. The first few lockers were empty, but a box on the far wall at the end of the lockers caught his eye. The front cover had a cyan heart inside a circle painted on the surface.

Søren ran for the box and slid to a stop in front of it. He tried to open the cover, but the latch was jammed. A quick yank on the corner opened it a little bit and gave him enough room to look inside, but the flickering low light in the room made it difficult to see anything. Søren raised the pistol and aimed at the latch and then thought better of it. Don't want to destroy whatever is inside. He reversed his grip on the dagger and slammed the hilt against the latch. Two more sharp strikes knocked the latch loose. Inside, Søren saw a white satchel the size of a typical backpack. It bore the same symbol that was on the cover of the cabinet.

He grabbed the satchel and flipped it open quickly. A jumble of plastic wrapped objects were piled up in the bottom. Søren tossed the dagger into the satchel, threw one strap over his right shoulder and turned to head back into the hallway. The red section of the progress bar was rapidly eating up the thin bar of grey between the red and constantly expanding yellow bar. Søren stormed back into the hallway and glanced behind him. The wrecked chamber was entirely sealed off now. A large section of ceiling panel had fallen and completely blocked the doorway. With only one way to go, Søren turned what he had mentally labeled as south.

The hallway soon ended perpendicular to another hallway, neither side giving any hint of which direction was the correct way to go. With nothing else to go on, Søren went left. Being left-handed, it was second nature for him to choose left. It was also a common method for traversing mazes. Always go left or right, but never waver once you choose. Finding your way back should then be as easy as taking the opposite direction after turning around. Spatial or magical shenanigans could mess with this method of exploration, but at that point, you were blindly taking turns one way or the other anyway.

A few dozen feet down the east tunnel, Søren skidded to a stop. A low chattering echoed from the darkness followed by the familiar tap and scrape of talons on stone. Søren backpedaled the way he came from and ducked back into the first hallway, taking cover behind the corner. He lifted the plasma pistol up and looked for a safety mechanism but couldn't find any.

"Really hope this works," he whispered and risked a glance at the progress bar. He had made up some time after searching the locker room, but the red bar was inevitably eating up the grey bar and getting closer and closer to the yellow bar. A creature like the Hordeling Spawn appeared out of the shadows and Søren spun out from behind the corner of the hall. He initially aimed low, recalling the medium dog sized insects from before, but this Hordeling was no spawn. It was closer to the size of a pony or small horse. He rapidly redirected his aim upwards, giving the creature substantial time to charge forward.

The plasma pulse pistol felt cool in his hands as he aimed down the built-in sights. The Hordeling rapidly grew in size as it took up more of his vision the closer it got. His finger and thumb squeezed tightly on the grip and almost inaudibly, a flash of orange-white light erupted from the end of the barrel and blasted into the open mouth of the leaping Hordeling. A much larger than usual, deep crimson damage notification -255 (critical hit) floated upwards and the corpse of the creature slammed to the floor with a sickening crunch of broken legs. Its momentum carried it further down the hall, stopping a dozen feet away from Søren.

You have defeated a Tutorial Hordeling (Copper II). (1/1)

You have earned 25 TEK. (215/1000)

You have lost 25 reputation with Umber Horde.

You have lost 15 reputation with The Collective.

Søren stood there silently with his mouth agape in awe at the power of the pistol in his hand. The power gauge on the battery back ticked downwards, decreasing the green section of the gauge slightly. Shit! The timer! Søren looked briefly down the hallway the Hordeling had exited from and decided that was the right way to go. Something in his mind told him the western hall would be a dead end. He leapt over the corpse of the Hordeling and hurried up to the edge of the darkness. A distant light on the other side of the chamber marked the exit from this area.

"I'd kill for a flashlight or even a candle," Søren said as he looked apprehensively across the dark area between here and the exit. "Time's running out, best get going. I'm going to need a good laugh and a long sleep after this."

Søren picked up a handful of stones and loose rubble and cast it in front of him in a wide arc. He advanced forward and listened intently for any pieces falling into a crack or other opening in the floor. The stones clattered to a stop and silence filled the chamber. One second. Two seconds. Three, four, and five seconds. No sounds of any falling stones. Søren cautiously crossed the dark area between the entrance and exit. He stumbled, one of the stones he had cast turning under his foot but he was able to catch his balance. Closer to the exit, the dim light emanating from the doorway revealed a clear path through the rest of the chamber.

"Warning traveler! You have two minutes remaining."

The cheerful voice was a jarring event that sounded out of place with the tense situation Søren had found himself in. Søren glanced at the progress bar and estimated he was a little more than a minute away from the end of this stage, if he ran flat out, based on the size of the green and yellow bars added together. The building or complex he was in shook suddenly as a series of explosions ripped through the rooms and hallways behind him. A loud crack emanated from the darkness above and rubble started collapsing around him.

Søren threw caution to the wind and charged into the next area, blinking at the sudden brightness. The hallway opened up into a long, curved tunnel with metal panels lining one side and a segmented, curved glass wall from floor to ceiling on the other. The center of the hall was a depression, the two sides angled down towards a pair of what looked like bright silver metal rails inset into the floor. A series of boxes and short walls dotted the hall from end to end. Søren's attention was drawn to the scene outside the glass wall. The velvet black of space filled with the sight of a blue, green, and white planet below. The continental shapes were unfamiliar to him. Even more strange was the exceedingly massive planet just beyond the first. Swirls of orange, red, brown and many other similar shades and hues spun through the atmosphere of what was clearly a gas giant.

"Not a planet. A moon around a planet. What the fuck."

"Warning traveler! You have one minute remaining."

Søren shook himself out of the shock filled reverie he had fallen into and took a second look at the hall in front of him. It looked like an obstacle course or an airsoft field. As he took a step forward towards the nearest cover, emplacements in the walls and floors opened up and began shooting blasts of pulsed plasma at him. He dived forward and took shelter behind the nearest wall. The floor beneath him continued to shake. Cracks spiderwebbed up from the base of the glass panes. He could hear air hissing through the cracks. The gun emplacements stopped firing for a moment and gave Søren a chance to push further into the hall. He leapt on top of a cube and used the height to bound upwards towards a short wall on the left slop near the glass windows.

Rather than drop down on the other side, he hurled himself forward and landed hard. He bent his legs to absorb most of the shock of landing and rolled to dissipate the rest. He used the momentum to get into position behind another low wall near the midpoint of the long hall. The red bar inevitably ate up the sliver of dark grey left. Søren was on the cusp of matching the shrinking green bar with his yellow bar. Bolts of pulsed plasma slammed into the floor next to him and crashed into the wall he knelt behind.

"Warning traveler! You have thirty seconds remaining."

The cheerful voice of the Guide made Søren grind his teeth. The gun emplacements on the wall slacked off again. Probably on a timer or maybe they overheat and need a moment to cool down, he mused. The last echoes of the bolts explosive hits faded away. Søren leapt to his feet and charged around the wall, heading directly for the exit. No tricks. No waiting. He didn't have time. A hundred feet away from the door, the gun emplacements opened back up and fired. Søren dodged left and right erratically and varied his pace with a random stutter step to throw off the gun's tracking. It appeared to be working. Pulsed plasma bolts impacted the floor near Søren, leaving black scorch marks everywhere.

"Warning traveler! You have ten seconds remaining."

Søren pushed himself harder, reducing the amount of erratic movement in favor of pure speed. A final pair of gun emplacements on either side of the door slid out from behind hidden panels. The barrels were already glowing red hot from charging up blasts of plasma. He watched as the center of the glowing barrels went from dark to blindingly bright when the shots were released. Søren heaved himself forward with a final lunge into the room as the door slammed shut behind him. He rolled off his stomach and onto his back, gasping heavily for breath. The thunderous shaking and swaying of the floor settled down.

"Congratulations traveler! You have completed stage two. You may now rest for one hour before starting stage three. Good luck!"

Calculating rewards.

Tutorial Stage 2 completed with one kill and zero deaths.

You have earned the Perfect Run (Tutorial - Stage 2) achievement. [Complete stage two of the Tutorial without taking any damage and eliminating every foe.]

You have earned 500 TEK. (715 / 1000)

You have earned 2 attribute points.

You have earned 10 skill points.

You have earned 2 perks.

Søren swiped away the notifications about the Tutorial rewards and sat up to take in the room. It was another sterile white chamber, but this time it had a view and a table with a chair near the window. The west wall had a large window inset into the panels and much like the passage filled with a rain of plasma and death and dismay, the window in here revealed the same blue-green-white moon with strange shaped continents in front of the astronomically larger gas giant. A dozen or more whorls of red surrounded by thick bands of brown and orange spun through the top of the gas giants towering clouds, scattered here and there across the surface.

Lightning storms sparkled in the depths, lighting up the clouds from below. A hiss of air and a soft sliding thunk sounded behind him. Søren turned to the noise and discovered a panel had opened in the wall. Behind it was a white ceramic plate with a baked fish of some sort on top. A small bowl filled with berries and cheese set next to the fish. Finally, a pitcher of water and an empty glass sat next to the plate. The sight and smell of the food caused Søren's mouth to water.

Søren set the pistol and satchel on the table and then moved over to the open panel. He took the pitcher and poured the liquid inside into the glass. It looked like water. He hoped it was water. Once done, he took the glass and plate and sat down at the table. "A whole hour to think to myself," he said quietly, his gaze drawn to the view beside him again. His heart was still racing from his life on the line race from one end of the complex to the other as the walls collapsed around him and alien bugs tried to eat him.

"I think I'd like to just not think for a few minutes." Søren sighed and leaned back into the chair. He sipped at the glass of water, his mind quiet for a moment at last, suppressed by the view outside the windows.