Aaron sunk into the couch, immersing himself in what the news lady on screen was saying. According to the broadcast, the police had already begun to contain the situation in the city. They had set up an emergency shelter that people who lost their homes or people who simply didn’t feel safe could stay at. Using their guns, the police had been able to easily defeat most of the monsters they had run into. Apparently, the highest level police officer, lieutenant Walters had already hit level 10.

With all that firepower, staying in the emergency shelter was tempting. Unfortunately, Aaron’s house was 30 minutes outside of the city, making it much too far to travel. Besides, the emergency shelter may be safe from monsters, but it was vulnerable to humans. Eventually, food would run low, and tempers would flare, turning the supposed safe haven into a powder keg, ready to blow at the slightest provocation. Or at least that’s what Aaron thought, he wasn’t an expert on human nature, so he wasn’t too confident in his prediction. For all he knew, people could come together and act like saints, he hadn’t lived through an apocalypse before, so he had nothing to go off of.

“Lieutenant Walters is a good man,” Aaron’s mom said as she walked into the room carrying two plates filled with food. She placed his plate in front of him, as well as a knife and fork. “Might as well eat it before it goes bad, it definitely won’t last too much longer.”

Aaron looked down at his plate and stabbed the two day old lasagna. “It’s good.” The newswomen droned on in the background as he silently ate his food.

“Wanna watch a movie?” his mom asked. Aaron stared at her like she grew a third head. “What? it's the last chance we’ll ever get, besides, we’ll be able to pick up any information we missed in the morning on that.” She pointed at a small handheld radio.

"Fine, but we’re not watching a romance movie.” She laughed and began scrolling through movies on Netflix. Eventually, they decided on a bizarre looking cowboy movie called, What’s West of the West?

Aaron was left scratching his head at how weird the movie was. The movie followed two cowboys as they moved to the next great frontier, space. To protect their new home they had to first fight off dinosaurs, and then later aliens. Later in the movie, it was revealed that a secret society had taken over the Earth. Just as the movie reached its dramatic climax, a tense space battle between the two cowboys, one trying to drop a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles, the other trying to stop him, the power cut out.

The room was submerged into darkness, leaving only faint moonlight to illuminate the room. With a click, light returned to the room. His Mom stood in the corner of the room holding a flashlight. She reached into her back pocket, pulled out another flashlight, and handed it to Aaron.

“I wish we could have seen the end of the movie,” Aaron said.

“Me too. The movie definitely left an impression,” she said as she fiddled with the brightness of the flashlight. “Go check on your sister. I’ll clean up here.”

Aaron turned on his flashed light and shined it in front of him. He slowly walked up the stairs, all the while, worrying that a monster would jump out of the dark and eat him. Glancing down the hallway, the feeling refused to go away. In fact, his back began to tingle as he became more worried. He saw that the light in his sister's room was off and the door was open. He carefully walked down the hallway and looked into his sister's room. Aaron had to squint to see, his night vision wasn’t the best, not to mention his normal vision was below average as well.

His sister lay asleep, hidden beneath a blanket. She shifted restlessly in her sleep and began to breath faster. Aaron clenched his fist so hard his knuckles turned white, the tingling sensation in his back disappearing. A 13 year old girl shouldn’t have to live through this. Her life had been hard enough, growing up without a father, she didn’t deserve to have her childhood stolen by the apocalypse as well. “

He took a seat in the corner of the room and leaned his back against the wall. “Don’t worry, Vanessa, no matter what, I’ll protect you,” Aaron swore to himself. He closed his eyes and attempted to fall asleep.

Sleep eluded him for what felt like hours, every small sound would have his heart racing. He yawned. “I guess I’m not gonna sleep much tonight,” he whispered to himself. To distract his busy mind, he opened up the system’s help screen

Welcome to the help screen. For a price, all your questions can be answered here.

Help Screens Unlocked: Phase 1 System Integration Timer

Please type what you wish to know more about here, if you have enough system credits you will be granted access to its corresponding help page.

Aaron spent the next few hours entering phrases into the help screen, but it turned out his piddling 14 system credits wasn’t enough to unlock anything. Who thought it would be a good idea to make the help system pay to win? That was one of the most useless help menus he had ever seen.

He learned a little bit about the help screen even if he was unable to unlock anything. First, the unlock price drastically varied. He had seen some as low as 100 system credits and others as expensive as 1,000,000 system credits. Second, the help screen was able to provide information about things that weren’t directly related to the system itself. For instance, Aaron was able to find a help page on the Fire Mice, the type of monster that burnt down his school. Of course, he didn’t have enough credits to unlock the page, so he didn’t know how useful the page was, but it was interesting nonetheless to know that the system made that type of information available.

Aaron yawned, then opened the one help screen he had available to him.

Phase 1 of System Integration Started:

-User Interface Initialized 100% | Think 'Status' to continue to the Status screen

-Initial Geographic Restructuring 16% | Time Remaining: 54:17:46

-Increasing Environmental Mana Levels 81% | Time Remaining: 2:56:16

-Introducing Low-Level Random Mobs 18% | Time Remaining: 50:26:54

-Converting Certain Natural Landmarks to Mob Nests 14% | Time Remaining: 59:22:28

Aaron blinked. It may be the tiredness getting to him, but he could have sworn he saw a number on the status screen tick upward. A disturbing scraping sound interrupted his train of thought. He liked to think that he had gotten good at ignoring the small sounds that naturally occurred every night, but him still being too scared to fall asleep was probably enough evidence to disprove his theory. Aaron strained his ears. The sound repeated itself. If he had to describe the sound he would say it sounded like a hyperactive cat was scrapping its claws across a window.

The sound repeated itself. He crouched as he walked down the stairs and into the kitchen, careful to make as little sound as possible. Moving agonizingly slowly he opened a drawer and pulled out a kitchen knife. Holding the knife in an icepick grip, Aaron searched the room for what was making the sound.

The sound once again repeated itself and he was able to catch a glimpse of what was making it. His hearing had proven correct, it was actually scrapping its claws on the window that faced the backyard. From what he could make out in the dark, it was a small monkey that had red fur. The blue box above it indicated that it was called a Blood Monkey.

He had to do something about the situation, sooner or later it would break the window and get in the house. From what he had seen from monsters so far, they all were relatively bloodthirsty. If he didn’t act quickly his family would be in danger. Luckily, if one could be considered lucky in a situation such as this, the monkey hadn’t noticed him yet.

Aaron tightly gripped his flashlight and ignored his racing heart. He would feel like a total idiot if he went back on his promise to protect his sister the same day he made it. His plan was simple, he would go out the front door, sneak up on the monkey, then stab it in the back.

Aaron’s plan almost went off without a hitch. He was able to sneak out the front door without the monkey noticing. He was also able to climb over the fence and enter his backyard without it noticing. Things went wrong when he was only 10 feet away from the monkey.

Due to his poor night vision, he didn’t realize he was going to step on a twig until it was too late. The twig broke with a large snapping sound, he’d be surprised if the whole neighborhood hadn’t heard it.

The monkey twisted its neck and locked eyes with Aaron. Not wanting to waste his one chance of surprising the monster, he shined his flashlight on full power into its eyes and sprinted towards it. Before the monkey could regain its vision, a blade found its way into its chest.

With surprising strength, the monkey gripped Aaron’s wrist, preventing him from pulling out the blade. A blinding pain exploded in his right bicep as a second monkey hopped out of a bush and sank its fangs into him. He once again tried to pull his knife out of the first monkey’s chest, but it was too strong.

Red screens flashed in his peripheral notifying him that he was rapidly losing Hp and that he was now affected by a debuff. Realizing that there was no way he was getting the knife out he changed strategies. He repeatedly smashed the butt of his flashlight into the head of the first monkey as hard as he could, while twisting the handle of the knife to deal as much internal damage as possible. The light in the first monkey's eyes dimmed as it went slack.

Releasing that its brethren had been slain, the surviving monkey released its death bite on Aaron’s bicep. It flailed its arms wildly, distracting him, and then it sunk its sharp fangs into his shoulder. Aaron let out a scream of pain as he felt the monkey's jaw tear through his flesh.

“Fuck you,” Aaron said as he ripped the knife out of the dead monkey, mentally preparing himself for doing something stupid. He rammed his shoulder with the monkey on it into the wall of his house, forcing its fangs even deeper. The move had been a double-edged sword, he had taken a lot of damage, but now the monkey was stuck, pinned to the wall. The monster scratched his arm desperate to escape. He ignored the monkeys flailing and stabbed the monkey till it stopped moving.

Aaron took a step back from the house and allowed the monkey to slide off his arm. He checked the system pop-ups that he had been ignoring the entire fight. The Hp notification showed him how much damage he had taken from each hit. He winced, he had ended the fight with only 127 health left. Another one of the pop up said he had been afflicted with the debuff, Minor Blood Poisoning.

He grabbed his shoulder and collapsed to the ground. The adrenaline had numbed the pain for Aaron during the fight, but now that it was over, all he could do was roll on the ground in pain and try not to scream. Finally, the pain resided and Aaron was able to lay still on the ground. “Well that could have gone better,” Aaron thought as the sun crossed the horizon, marking the end of his first day in the system.