Tap.

Tap.

Out of nowhere, she felt her boots impacting on soft grass, sending a jolt through her body that woke her up and always made her fall on her face. Almost. She managed to catch herself mid-fall and restore her balance.

With a hint of panic in her actions, she started to desperately look around. She was standing in the middle of some strange, yet tranquil fields. She could feel her breathing speed up as heat rushed to her face. She knew what was happening. She had read about it so often already. Honestly, she knew that this was only a matter of time.

Still, she couldn’t believe that something like this had actually happened. The strange flash of light. This secluded location that she didn’t recognize and wasn’t even close to the location that she was even near the city that she had been in not too long ago. Honestly, this better was some kind of bad joke, because she couldn’t accept that she had been-

Kidnapped.

What else could this be? Getting knocked out, seeing a light and then waking up somewhere else? She didn’t know what kind of man would be brazen enough to actually do something such as this in broad daylight. It was her own fault really. Perhaps it was the owner of the building that she always laughed at who had come to realize that she always laughed at his company and wanted to teach her a lesson.

At that rather silly idea, a nervous round of laughter left her lips.

Yeah right.

“Still-”, she started to speak out loud, wanting to at the very least hear something even if it might not be the best idea to signal that she was awake to her kidnapper. “This, this is quite something and in broad daylight-”

“Should I be flattered I was pretty enough to get kidnapped-”, she murmured, making an utterly improper joke as she kept biting on her lower lip, a nervous tik.

“Greeting, Avelina Louisa Croy-”, an unknown voice spoke up. “Welcome to The Culling. I’m Proxy, your assist-”

“Did you just use my middle name?”, Avelina blinked somehow, finding that the strangest about this situation. As the words left her lips, she realized how dumb she sounded. Here some strange captor was speaking to her and the first thing that she did was question it for using her middle name. Real smart. Not a proper question such as ‘who are you’ or ‘why did you take me’ or ‘I did not give consent to any of this'.

Her studies really were paying off.

“-Ant. I will now be starting the simple instructions. Please follow said instructions.”

Oh. It seemed like this was some kind of recording. Yeah. That made sense…..Wait no. It didn’t. She had no idea what was going on. Not the faintest clue at all. How and why did someone make a recording specified for her.

“-open think about opening your Status or say status”

Shit. She had missed a part of the explanation. Still, she wasn’t a student for no reason. her ability to guess what the teacher said based on half-sentences was unparalleled. Given that she had little that she could actually do, she simply tried to think about opening this ‘status’, not expecting anything to happen.

When something then didn’t happen, it didn’t really surprise her.

“Please, say status or think about opening your status.”

She raised an eyebrow at the skies, still trying to figure out where this voice was coming from. The way that it kept repeating itself made it feel more like some kind of AI than a recording, but something like that only made the situation feel even stranger. She really hoped that she had just gotten kidnapped. This all was starting to hurt her head.

“S-status?”, she finally croaked out.

And her mind shut itself off.

Name: Avelina Louisa Croy Race: Human Titles: N/A Class: Medic Level: 0 Parameters Strength: 3 Dexterity: 8 Perception: 6 Stamina: 4 Mental Capacity: 8 Magical Power: 0 Magical Control: 0 Skills: N/A

“What.”

*Even speaking those few words took her entire mental capacity as a blue box appeared in front of her. That was it. She wasn’t kidnapped. She knew for sure. She had been hit by a car. That had to have happened. Or maybe someone had messed with the food that she was eating. Yeah, that had to be it.

No way that she was staring at an honest to god status screen.

She might not be some kind of game freak or nerd who knew all about this kind of stuff, but she used the internet. A basic understanding of things like that just came with that if you strayed even a few sites from the most basic and generic of social media, which she clearly had done.

“Congratulations on opening your status. I will now explain each facet of your status.”, the Voice robotically and unhelpfully chimed in.

“Wait! Wait! Wait! No!”, She shouted desperately, “You can’t just drop something like this and go on like it is the most normal thing in the world!

Alas, her cries ended on deaf ears as the voice simply started to drone on. “By focusing on a part of your status you can ask for extra information.”

“N-name?”, she decided that she might as well ask about something that she knew to see what this was about.

“Your name is what you identify as. Your name may be changed if you have a change of heart and identity. Currently, there are 231 people who go by the same name in different Cullings.”

One of the words that the voice that she had no pinpointed to be speaking directly into her mind given that she could quite literally not find the source in the slightest set of her mental alarms. Culling. The reduction of a population via systematic slaughter. Oh.

“Culling? Explain that!”, she cried out, stomping her foot on the ground.

“By focusing on a part of your status you can ask for extra information.”

“CULLING!” EXPLAIN!”

“By focusing on a part of your status you can ask for extra information.”

“C-U-L-L-I-N-G.”

“By focusing on a part of your status you can ask for extra information.”

“Eh.”, She paused, trying to ask it in a different way, “Where are we.”

“The waiting room.”

“Where does the waiting room lead to.”, she pushed further.

“By focusing on a part of your status you can ask for extra information.”

“What is the ehh, purpose of the waiting room?”, she tried again, grating her teeth.

“The purpose of the waiting room is to let the testees get familiar with the system before the Culling.”

After a few more back and forth she realized that she wouldn’t be getting any proper information out of whatever thing this was, but the reality of the situation was slowly setting in and so she got to work, asking any bit of information that she could in a rather exhausting session of testing the limits of the system over and over again, getting stonewalled because she didn’t use the proper wording as often as she got an actually useable answer.

Most of the information was as she expected. The only thing that caught her by surprise was the fact that Strength seemingly had more to do with the power and speed of explosive movement than with normal strength feats, which didn’t bode well for her after all her strength wasn’t the highest. For the rest it seemed like the words were rather standard, Endurance allowed her to not die as easily, dexterity decides the speed and control of fine movements, stamina was well stamina and mental control seemed to have something to do with skill usage? She didn’t fully get that one yet, but would most likely figure it out later.

She also learned that magical stats were rare to possess. When she learned that magic was real she did get excited for a moment, after all, magic was in so much fiction and always so perfect. The only thing that made her more emotional than learning of the existence of magic, was learning of the fact that she didn’t possess the aptitude for it.

She didn’t know if her values were low or high, but she felt that they were rather decent. After all, in the few times that they had to dissect a corpse for one of their courses she had rather deft hands and made clean cuts and her strength being lower also made quite a bit of sense given that she only went to the gym enough to stay somewhat in shape and not to actually build muscle.

That left her with only one unknown-

“Class.”, she called out, tired.

“A class decides the skills that unlock. Each level grants you 5 points that you can freely allocate.”

She eyed her own class, ‘Medic’. She understood where it came from her. She was a medical student and had quite a bit of experience, but most likely simply didn’t count as being a doctor due to her lacking experience or perhaps the class didn’t exist in the first place. Still, the explanations were more lacking then she had hoped, but perhaps that was part of the test. One of those, do the most with as little help as possible.

It sure did fit the theme of a ‘Culling’, a word whose meaning she was dreading to properly figure out.

As she glanced around she realized that she hadn’t informed herself about skills. It felt a bit pointless as she could make an educated guess what they were. Still, she wasn’t going to be lazy when it came to something as clearly supernatural as this and besides.

“Skills.”, she called out as she suddenly felt a pang of pain shoot through her body. At first, she thought this had something to do with this system, yet as the taste of iron filled her mouth and killed her taste buds, she realized what had happened.

“Skills are actions made easier via the system. Skills can be evolved. A skill is learned every two levels, unique to your own experience.”

She had bit her own lip over.

“Shit.”

She glanced around, looking for anything to stem the bleeding. As she reached for her purse to fetch a handkerchief she realized that she didn’t have it with her anymore. Somehow in her panic, she had missed something so obvious. Now with all her questions, there was only one thing that she could properly do-

-Laugh nervously.

It was an unsettling sound and she was happy that no one was here to listen to her. She was utterly pushed to a breaking point already and nothing had even happened. Her head was pounding from both a lack of sleep and from the stress created by this situation while her mouth was filled with both blood and the strange dryness that a night of heavy drinking and lacking hydration left.

“Fuck this. I’m done with this crap.”

Avelina wasn’t the type to enjoy swearing. She found it vulgar and prefered to use passive-aggressive statements and sarcasm to get her point across. The only times that she actually started to swear is when she was at her wit's end. Such as when she was thrown into some shitty horror movie plot or whatever this was supposed to be.

Still, those were the wrong words to say.

“Tester Ready. Initiating Culling.”

And for the second time in an hour, everything went white.