《The Last 100》 Ch.1 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.1 I had never before known what it really meant to be alone. I don¡¯t think anyone my age did, between the internet and the increased population of the world we were a people who had forgotten. Forgotten the irrefutably most terrifying sound known to man. Silence. I sat in my room, sinking into the soft mass of my mattress and listened. Listened to a world that had stopped turning, a world devoid of people, a world devoid of life and goodness. A world in which for the first time in my life I knew true fear. But how had this happened, what had taken the world to this point? Well, all this stems from a most recent series of events. I was sleeping in my home, recovering from a day of forced social interaction when I was awoken by a curious occurrence. A window had appeared in my vision, it was translucent, and if focused on I could see through it. Greetings Human. You and your species have been inducted into the system, after some research we have likened it to be somewhat similar to the ¡°RPG¡¯s¡± of your people. Due to the knowledge of your people of systems similar to this, the strength of your biology and your large population, in the spirit of keeping things fair and egalitarian we have decided to issue your species with a handicap. We have culled the population of your world to a point where only 100 of you are left alive. This was done fairly and unbiasedly and the people to be killed were decided due to the population demographics of your world. If you¡¯re reading this you¡¯re one of the 100 people selected to represent your world. We wish you all of the best in your struggle humans. Good Luck. Hostile Entities will spawn in 48 hours. Sincerely, The Administrators. I swiped at the window half-heartedly, dissipating it into the air and reached over for my phone. Hissing in pain at the brightness of the display. 2:19am, fucking dream woke me up. I placed my phone softly against my bedside table and went back to sleep. I had school tomorrow. An incessant buzz to the right of my head woke me and initiating a pounding in my skull. Ugh, I groaned as I rolled out of bed, the biting chill of the morning slicing across my half naked form. I checked my phone, 6:00am. Tossing on a shirt and pants I scuttled into the kitchen and grazed upon the variety of foodstuff that populated the inner depths of our fridge. While I was pouring myself a glass of water to complement the headache pills that would make up the bulk of my breakfast my vision wandered. In the corner of my eye, hovering above the top left of my vision was a small counter. It read 44:08:34 remaining. It reminded me of the dream. I rubbed my eyes; the numbers didn¡¯t leave. They stayed right there, a mocking stain upon my sanity. I shook my head at them. Wasn¡¯t the weirdest thing my sleep addled mind had conjured, and I didn¡¯t think it would be the last or worst. Ignore it and it¡¯ll go away. I stumbled into the bathroom after that and purged my mouth with a tag team of toothpaste and mouthwash. I looked myself over in the mirror, checking my jaw and cheeks. I was going to have to shave before leaving. At seven thirty I left my house, tip-toeing past the closed door of my mother, she worked nights, she would be asleep for a while. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. I walked into an Australian winter morning, it was around 12 degrees. Not that cold in the grand scheme of things but when your school uniform consisted of shorts and a polo shirt it was fucking Antarctic. My dog ran to me in a blur of black and brown fur, staring up at me with his wide, jovial smile. I smiled back at him, patting his back and sides, feeling the muscle ripple beneath them with his movements as I did so. I looked at the sky in a window to the heavens created in the space between to palm trees. Dark clouds were approaching our skyline. ¡°Gonna have to take in the washing when I get home aren¡¯t I boy.¡± I said to the dog, patting his head as I did so. ¡°Alright, say hello to mum for me when she wakes up.¡± I locked eyes with him for several moments, mesmerised by the glossy darkness that they held within their confines. ¡°Good boy.¡± I left my home, wincing as the poorly oiled latch screeched with the song of metal on metal and began to walk to school. I ducked under a tree that grow its branches over the foot path in a natural roof, shielding me from a sun, trying piteously to shine its light through the thick cloud cover. I lived close to the school, walking through the paths of my estate home would find me there in about a 12-minute commute. I had lived in this small town for my entire life and the walk to school was littered with a side show of child hood nostalgia. To my left was the play ground where I had broken my first bone and to the right was the tree under which my heart was first broken. Good times. I came to the school through the back gate that opened up onto the oval. It was weird to find it devoid of people, my mind wandered back to the dream I had, had last night and my stomach dropped in a brief moment of panic. ¡°Shit like that doesn¡¯t happen in real life Jack, calm down. Probably just parade or something that you didn¡¯t get the message for.¡± Walking through the school for those couple of minutes was, weird. It was the feeling you get when alone in a public space, everything is deathly quiet and still. Its unnerving. To harken back to the opening statement of this account I had never really been alone. Not really and to be was a truly scary experience. So, it is without apt words that I describe to you the feeling I had as I walked through that school, checking every class, every hall and every office. Each one was a stab in the heart, each one had my spirits dropping to unknown depths and my stomach tying itself into knots. When I had explored the whole school, I stopped for a few moments and was just¡­ Empty. I stood under a small pavilion, sitting on a graffitied bench, I was still I didn¡¯t know what to do. I just sat, staring at the gates as they yawned outward into the direction of the main town. A town devoid of movement and people, it was like a water colour that had bled its colours out, the life slipping through its fingers and dripping onto the floor. Fuck, mum. I dropped my bag and ran home; the only sound was the pounding of my feet and the surge of blood in my ears. I had to know, had to know if my mother was alive. But deep down I knew she wasn¡¯t. If they, whoever they were had decided this based on population demographics than it was a miracle that there was even one Australian left, our population being as low as it was. I was alone, the only man in the world with an entire continent to himself. And for the first time in my life I knew true fear. Ch.2 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.2 I ran over perfectly manicured lawns, leaving lone footprints in the fields of uniformly cut grass. I ran through sprinklers, my shirt soaked with both water and sweat. I ran through the gate of my house, throwing it open and vaulting up the stairs to the patio and tugging franticly on the locked door of my house. Fuck. I ran back into the yard and ripped a pleasantly smiling garden gnome guard from his post and plundered his treasure, a small brass key. I collapsed against the door as I unlocked it, stumbling through the threshold and shouldering my way into the closed room of my mother, knocking the lock off the frame. The door swung open to reveal her bed, the sheets were still immaculately made, as if she had never returned home from her shift at the hospital, she was a nurse. It was as if she had just disappeared into thin air. I checked the garage and found that her car wasn¡¯t there. I was close to running all the way to the hospital in the next town over in which she worked to find her there when a I felt something rub against my leg. I looked down, it was my dog. He stared up at me with his massive, perpetual smile, his eyes held within them such depths of sympathy. I fell to my knees and pet his fur sedately. There were no tears in this moment, not because I wasn¡¯t sad nor was I particularly strong. It was just that there are some emotions that tears cannot properly express, such depths of sadness and despair that no physical action could ever hope to quantify. So, I sat and passively stroked the fur of my dog as he lay down next to me and went to sleep. She had been my entire world, nothing, no worldly desire of passing crush could make me forget my mother. My dad had left when I was young, I could barely remember him, it was only her, only the tow of us¡­ I choked up and hugged my dog tightly. We stayed there together for a long while, the sun was setting when I finally had an idea. I croaked out a word with off handed curiosity, they had said it was like RPG¡¯s after all. ¡°Status¡± My throat was hoarse with thirst as the words came out, rasping against my mouth like sand paper, but out they did come and with them another screen. Name: Jack Casser Age: 17 Gender: Male Level: 1 Specialisation: Points Available = 5 Stats: Strength ¨C How much physical strength you have - 8 Agility ¨C How fast, dextrous and mobile you are - 9 Perception ¨C How astute your senses are - 12 Intelligence ¨C How quick your mind is at processing, interpreting and retaining information - 13 Constitution ¨C How able you are to recover from illness and damage - 8 Charisma ¨C How adept you are in social interactions - 5 Endurance ¨C How tough you are and your ability to take damage - 11 Will ¨C How tough your mind is and its ability to endure strife - 10This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. No hp bar, no mana bar? What a bad game. I laughed to myself at the horrific absurdity of this whole thing. Why me, Jesus Christ. I¡¯m not the best person sure but did I deserve this, hell no. I closed the status window and looked at the top left of my screen, only to be greeted by not one number, but three. One was the casual countdown with which I had become accustomed over today it currently read 32:51:03. The other was directly to the right of it and read 98/100 beside that was an exclamation mark with a small number 2 next to it. I found myself looking at the second number for a long time. 100 what¡¯s?! What the fuck do you want from me. 100 people, I thought with a moment of morbid realisation, two people had died already. Well besides the other seven billion I thought grimly. I think this was what finally put it into perspective. Humanity was at the lowest point that it had ever been in conceivable history, there was only 98 people left alive on this earth. The species could well go extinct. It was a weird thought and it made a man think. I had always thought of mankind an unshakable bridle upon the planet, a burden it was forced to bear that it couldn¡¯t shake no matter how hard it tried. We stayed on this earth through fire and fury, through lightning and rain we endured. But we had only called this planet home for an objectively short amount of time, and the planet was here long before us and would be here long after. I closed my eyes as the thoughts kept coming. Until one cut through the void. Why not let them die? Sure, giving up would mean my own death but did I really care. My whole family and everyone I knew was already gone and chances are I was going to die anyway. I sat on my knees my hands idling in my lap and watched the number of seconds on the timer slowly tick down. And those are my odds without the introduction of these so called ¡®Hostile Entities¡¯ so why not give up? Wilhelm sauntered his way back into the room in which I sat. He had earned his name because of the fact he was a Rottweiler, a German breed. He approached me and rested his head upon my lap and I felt the grumbling of his hungry stomach. I supposed that not everything here for me on this world was dead. And in the moment, I thought about all the reasons to stay alive. For myself, for the 98 other people in the world who were probably feeling the same way as me right now, alone and scared. And for Wilhelm I looked into his eyes and saw how they lit up as he recognised me, how they burned with pure joy at the sight of his family. I couldn¡¯t leave him, nor would I have the courage to kill myself. And for now, those reasons were enough. I let out a sigh, my voice quavering as I did so. ¡°Alright boy, let¡¯s get us some food.¡± I said wearily as I stood up, my knees popping due to my recent inactivity. ¡°After that me and you will deal with these pop-ups and decide our next move.¡± I scratched the top of his head in an absent-minded manner as I spoke. We meandered toward the kitchen, On the bright side, at least tomorrow can¡¯t be any worse than today. I thought. Ch.3 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.3 I was woken up by my alarm. It forced me awake and with a groan I checked my phone. The brightness momentarily hurt my beleaguered eyes but after the pain subsided I was able to look at the small, battery shaped icon in the top right-hand corner. 9%, I had been forced to use the flashlight on my phone to make food last night and it had been a drain on the battery life. That slowly descending number made me irrationally upset and maybe it was a release of all the emotion from last night, but I descended into a fit of sobs and weeping. Whilst watching as the number slowly dropped lower and lower. It was a small problem when placed next to the others that faced me. But to me, to my traumatised eyes watching that little number tick down was like watching the life slowly drain out of an old friend. I closed my phone and set it down on the bedside table. My eyes were sore from crying and my nose and face were caked in snot from the fit of emotion. Slightly disgusted at myself I had a shower, easing myself into the icy waters and wondering with trepidation at when the moment would be the water would follow the power and cut out. I shivered, not entirely from the cold and stepped out and dressed. Walking into the kitchen, clad in a fresh hoodie and pair of track pants I was met with the smiling face of Wilhelm. I smiled weakly at him and raided the kitchen for some food, then, my mouth filled with a granola bar I moved his food bowl into the living room and sat down upon one of the sofas. ¡°Alright boy let¡¯s check out these urgent messages then shall we.¡± I said with enthusiasm I didn¡¯t feel looking up I focused my vision upon the small exclamation mark but was distracted when I saw that the 98 had descended to 97. I looked at the number and another tear wormed its way out of the corner of my eye. I shook my head, the physical action helped to banish the thoughts. I focused my attention on the small exclamation mark and a drop-down menu appeared below it, the options that it showed were; Unspent specialisation points and Pending Notification. I selected the pending notification. When I did so another pop-up flooded my field of vision, the foreign sensation of having it appear so suddenly cause me to flinch backwards, the granola bar flying from my hand and onto the floor. I¡¯m not sure what was worse, how annoying the suddenness they appeared with was, or the fact I was going to eventually get used to it. Companion Request Due to a strong bond between you and the creature ¡°Wilhelm¡± it has offered you with a request of companionship. It will allow the two of you to better communicate and you will be able to sense its location at all times and access its status via your own. Do you wish to accept this request? Y/NStolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. I looked down at Wilhelm with surprise, he didn¡¯t seem to notice and continued eating his food, munching away without a care in the world. I shook my head. ¡°For better or for worse eh boy?¡± I selected yes and nearly choked on my breakfast. I all of a sudden felt an indescribable oneness with Wilhelm, I understood him, his wants, his needs. I was aware of where he was, it was like I would know where he was no matter what. He was an extension of me, as much as an arm or leg. If I closed my eyes I could almost see a small translucent line running between the two of us. A visual representation of our bond now recognised by the system. When I opened my eyes again to Wilhelm, he had climbed onto me and was now staring directly into my eyes, His breath was warm on my face and the moisture began to condense on my skin, a queer sought of perspiration. I told him to get off me and he responded almost immediately, returning to his bowl and continuing to eat. It wasn¡¯t for several seconds until I realised that I hadn¡¯t spoken a word or given him a visual clue. I had thought, and he had answered. We were bonded now, for better or for worse. Still shook from my telepathic communication with my dog I opened up my status as a way to ground myself, only now it had changed. Name: Jack Casser Age: 17 Gender: Male Level: 1 Specialisation: Points Available = 5 Stats: Strength ¨C How much physical strength you have - 8 Agility ¨C How fast, dextrous and mobile you are - 9 Perception ¨C How astute your senses are - 12 Intelligence ¨C How quick your mind is at processing, interpreting and retaining information - 13 Constitution ¨C How able you are to recover from illness and damage - 8 Charisma ¨C How adept you are in social interactions - 5 Endurance ¨C How tough you are and your ability to take damage - 11 Will ¨C How tough your mind is and its ability to endure strife ¨C 10 Companion: Wilhelm, (select to view status) Out of curiosity I selected the companion window and my status was replace by a more simplistic version, instead now it wasn¡¯t mine. Name: Wilhelm Age: 4 Gender: Male Level: 1 Specialisation: Points Available = 0 Stats: Ferocity: How much willpower does your companion have - 34 Power: How physically capable is your companion - 23 Loyalty: How loyal is your companion to you - 100% I looked Wilhelm in the eye, he stared back at me, in this moment we were brothers. I rose, and he did the same. On my way out of my house I passed by the vacant room that once housed my mother. My throat went dry and my stomach fell. I forced myself to turn away from it. There were emotions there that would have to be dealt with. But right now, they weren¡¯t my top priority. That was gaining a preparedness for these so called ¡°Hostile Entities.¡± Because I was ok if I was all torn up inside, as long as I still had an inside to be torn up. Ch.4 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.4 Strolling down an empty Bunning¡¯s was a unique experience. I had with me a shopping cart, half filled with planks of wood, nails and tools. The purpose of these was to help reinforce wherever it was I chose to when the time came. I refused to hole up within my home. Too many memories. Too distracting. A strange thing that people rarely ever realise about a Bunning¡¯s is the drought of windows. Its walls are made of almost bare concrete. It had never really occurred to me in my sporadic visits over the years. But now, devoid of the glow of artificial light, my way illuminated only by a newly liberated torch and batteries from the front desk, I was becoming keenly aware of this lack of windows. I would complain if there was anyone to complain to. I was now in search of weapons. Australia had almost entirely eradicated the ownership of guns within itself, so they were out of the window. Also, my town was devoid of any hunting goods store or any close by farms or loges so bows and crossbows were also a non-starter. Besides I wouldn¡¯t know what to do with them even if I had found them. So, Bunning¡¯s was where my addled, emotional wreck of a mind had taken me. I had been drawn here with the irresistible allure of axes, one of the few things in this town I could think of with any combat use. The problem was, Bunning¡¯s was large, larger when you can only see a few metres ahead of you. And I had no fucking clue where axes were, only that they were here, information sourced from a childhood memory of begging my mother to buy me one. I shook my head again. So, this led me to my current situation, wandering aimlessly around a pitch-black Bunning¡¯s, hoping and praying that I stumble across the isle with the axes in it. It was an oppressive atmosphere, this. The darkness seemed to encroach upon me and Wilhelm every second that I looked away from it. My tiny pocket of brightness dwindling with each passing second. It was my just in my head however. Eventually our odyssey of a search was rewarded when we came upon a small hoard of axes, piled up upon one another at shoulder level on one of the shelves. My fingers danced over the metal edges and fingered at the rubber handles. I hoisted it above my head and felt the weight. It was rather hefty, the weight was comforting, it felt more dangerous that way. I dumped it into the cart and dashed toward the entrance, running toward the tantalising portal of light that was the doors. Running from the dark, childish? Yes, did I care? Not at all. I emerged into a parking lot, it was bathed in the midday sun and covered with a light smattering of cars, they ranged in colour and design, the most common of which being the Ute. Tradesmen must have come here to buy more materials. I thought. It was then that I realised I had forgotten something. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. The fucking specialisation points, I¡¯m an idiot. I chastised myself. The telepathic communication with Wilhelm must have shook me more than I thought and the whole allocation of the points had slipped my mind entirely. I sat on the hood of a random red car, revelling briefly in the feeling of the warm hood that had been sitting in the sun for days. I then opened my status and cast my eyes over to the specialisation points. Then things got a little weird, for instead of a window opening like I had expected it to my vision instead went dark, standing in the darkness was a glowing figure of a man, I couldn¡¯t make out his features because of the light that emanated from his form but casting out form his hand was a lead of white light, it lead to a dog, it was made of the same materialised light. From this I deduced that it was representing Wilhelm and I. Inside of me, the entity that was me not the model made of light, was a form of¡­ I don¡¯t know how to describe it, it was like when you breath in way to deeply and you¡¯re swollen with air. Sought of like that but in a much more ethereal and grandiose sense. I knew, somehow that these were the specialisation points. And so, I did what felt right, I exhaled them in the direction of my head, I saw a diaphanous stream of golden light pass from the invisible entity that was my mind and into the model that represents me, I watched as the head of the being flared brighter than the rest before eventually burning down to a steadier, but still more luminous than the rest. My vision returned to me in spots. It was like when you enter into the outside world after being in a dim room for a long time. When it came back to me I checked the countdown and saw that it had gone down a full half hour. Note to self, don¡¯t allocate points in battle. I could already feel the results, however subtle they were there my mind seemed to work just the slightest bit faster, it was one hell of a rush. I hopped down from the hood of the car, the sound of my feet landing echoing across the car park. I called to Wilhelm in my head and began to move. I knew where I wanted for us to hunker down and it was a bit of a trek. I gripped the handles of the shopping cart that held my materials and began to leave the carpark. This would be way fucking easier if I could drive. Wilhelm barked his affirmative and for the first time since this had started I laughed. Yeah boy, you¡¯re right. When we arrived at the town observatory the sun had just started to set. I had chosen this building because it was at the top of a hill and on the edge of a cliff. From here we could only be attacked from one side and also have a few of the entire battlefield. Yeah, this is where we stand. For better or for worse eh boy. He barked again, and I smiled tragically. ¡°For better or for worse. We¡¯ll get through this.¡± I muttered it aloud to try and convince myself. I failed. Ch.5 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.5 One more nail, one more strike. My hammer hit iron which in turn bit deep into the wood of the plank, spearing through it and pinning the board to the grey door frame of the observatory. I looked at the top left of my vision 02:21:09, I looked around franticly at the room I was in, three more doors to go. I can do this. The good thing about the observatory was that it was relatively defensible, being located on a cliff and all. It had five different doors that opened into it from the front and two more escape doors. How did I know this? Floor plans I had found at the front desk. Another reason the observatory was a good pick was the fact that when the people ¡°Left¡± it was during the hours of the night guards, as such the security cameras were still on, powered by a generator hidden deep within the bowls of the hill on which the observatory stood. The place was a fortress. Something which made me question the motives of the otherwise kindly director of the facility. My heart panged with sorrow when I thought of him, I remembered tugging on his coat as a small child as he toured me around this building, holding me up so I could look through the telescopes. He had been a father to me and friend to my mother when that was what we both needed most. I hit the next nail with more force than the last, rattling the door in its frame. One more nail, one more strike. I had adopted the mantra after having finished with the windows. I had very nearly despaired. The windows were done but the doors weren¡¯t even started upon, the thought of breaking the monotony into simple, achievable goals made the whole seem more achievable. One more nail, one more strike. It was times like these that I found myself thinking more existentially, a train of thought that often led to self-destructive and counterproductive outcomes, it was times like these that made me think of what would happen even if I survived. What came after, I would still be alone, there would still be no observatory, no home to go back to. One more nail, one more strike. I mean, how would I contact the other 94 people left in the world. More were dying everyday and the ominously named ¡°Hostile Entities¡± hadn¡¯t even spawned yet. What would become of both me and Wilhelm and this observatory that we had made our Alamo? One more nail, one more strike. I had just picked up my hammer and hoisted the remaining planks under my arm to go and reinforce the remaining two doors, (the security doors) when something pooped into my vision that forced me to drop them out of shock. It was a notification that read, chat. The little speech bubble shaped notification had a small number ¡®one¡¯ next to it. I tentatively focused my attention on the notification and it opened into a greater screen that read above it, world chat. That wasn¡¯t what caught my eye however, what did was the fact that a message from someone named, Jamila Deanglisa. The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Jamila Deanglisa: Hello? Under the message was an absolute storm of ellipses, it showed the two people with names of Asian origin and 87 others were typing. I was one of them, spamming away on a small keyboard that had appeared under the chat box. What followed was an eruption of text in an equally large amount of different languages. I saw characters from and east Asian language, I saw Arabic. Something that may have been either French, Spanish of Italian and a fuck ton of others. My message was a simple. ¡°Fuck Me! Help.¡± I believed it fully encapsulated the emotions I was and still am feeling. Next, I saw the chats at the top gradually multiply from the singular world chat to a chat group, the name of which written in Chinese, then one in Arabic, the other European language whose origin I couldn¡¯t place was next and then finally English. The chat group was called. English Speakers. By this point, as I focused on this chat group I had dropped to the floor, sitting cross legged and with Wilhelm dancing around me madly. He seemed to have picked up on my enthusiasm. There were fourteen of us in the group and everyone was talking over everyone else. There was Jamila, who, after little interrogation confessed that she had discovered the chat feature after trying it out, she had said chat. According to her, her thought process was that if status would work then so could chat. And so, it did. What really confused me was the amount of people, even from the western speaking countries who hadn¡¯t learnt about the status yet. People like Jamila and I were in the minority and there were only 3 others who had tried it out. What came next was a slew of messages of people asking if anyone else resided in their country. There were four American¡¯s and of the people that were speaking and not just observing like myself they were the only country to have more than one person. As I expected no one stated that they were Australian. I hadn¡¯t spoken yet, I was too choked up with raw emotion to see people speaking my language, to have a dialogue with people again, I never knew how much the act of talking to people. Something I had before detested so much would now bring me such joy. They were all so alive and passionate. They were so much of both that it made me ashamed for thinking of giving up, here were these people, clinging to each other with such desperation and zealous fanaticism that leaving them seemed a crime. They needed each other. They needed each other to be alive with them, because living and surviving are different and while a person can survive alone they can only live with people. A beeping caught my attention, it reminded me of my alarm I looked to the top left corner of my vision as I had so many times today. 00:00:00, I paled and a voice in the back of my head that had made itself known in my worst moments reappeared. They were all so alive, we shall see if they stay that way, because now hell opened its gates. So it did. I thought morosely. Ch.6 The Last 100 - Ch.6 I closed the chat and scrambled to the security desk, calling Wilhelm to me as I did so. I hunched over the monitors and stared at them. Nothing. The parking lot out the front of the observatory was deathly quiet. I looked at it with scrutiny, casting a watchful gaze over it as if every misplaced piece of gravel was a monster waiting in disguise for me. When they did eventually arrive it was without fanfare of great numbers. It happened with a flash of grey flesh dancing out and then back into the woods. A tentative step that emboldened the others that hid within the tree line. Finally, approximately an hour after the bell had been sounded the entire tree line at the edge of the car park was vibrating with a wave of grey flesh. They danced out of the trees, ran to the gutter that separated the paved car park form the grassy hill on which the trees grew. Once there they would either howl and run back to the tree line or skip the howling step. I rested my hand anxiously upon Wilhelm¡¯s back, I felt the tension in his muscles and the low vibrations that ran through him as he let out a low growl. From the bond between us I could feel his tension. His fear and how he bayed for the blood of these creatures. I reassured him as best I could with my sloppy attempts at telepathy. I saw the number of notifications in chat slowly pile up, the frequency at which they arrived reaching a fever pitch. I didn¡¯t check them however, my eyes were glued to the screen, held captive, unable to move my body from the small televisions as if I was a spectator in my own life. Is this what it means to be paralysed by fear? I thought. It was an eerie thing to watch, the mics didn¡¯t have sound so all I heard was the occasional muffled howl though the boarded doors, and yet watched as a horde of small, humanoid figures of grey ran at and were deterred by the car park. They seemed to be afraid of the asphalt. It was with a coordinated suddenness that they stopped this however, they all retreated back to the tree line and I heard an utterly monstrous sound. Emerging from the tree line was a beast, twice the size of the figures which it resembled, in its hand it clutched a tree branch, ripped off an unfortunate gum tree. I watched as the larger creature swatted several others around it that answered its roar with one of their own. A challenge I assumed, he was asserting his dominance. From there I watched with fearful reverence as the creature paced toward the carpark. Watched as he stood before the black mass that was the paved surface. Watched as he scrunched up his eyes and held tight to his courage and shockingly placed a foot down on the foreign surface. He opened his eyes and from the cameras I could see the look of utter surprise that was plastered across his features. For several seconds all was silent. Returning back to the silence that I had known for the past two days. Then the large beast roared. With him to did all of the other creatures in the tree line, I heard the cacophony that was their raised voices and watched with dead eyes as they charged across the grass and then across the pavement that had deterred them for the past hour. When they slammed into the doors they rattled dangerously, the planks I had placed bowing with the force and even cracking in some places. There were at least fifty of the creatures of there. They hammered against the glass, shattering it and then poked arms through the gaps in the planks, clawing at both the wood and the door frames. What did I do as this raged on around me you ask? Well I was frozen, stuck, rooted in my position tied down with the ropes of fear, my mind? A mess with self-defeating thoughts. What the fuck was I thinking, I hadn¡¯t made anything safe, all I had done was entomb myself here. The blocked doors and windows didn¡¯t keep them out, they kept me in. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. A screeching, different to the battle howls of before was what eventually tore me away from my monologue. I looked to the source of the noise to find Wilhelm mauling one of the outstretched arms of the beats. It howled in pain and pulled its mangled arm back out of the doorway. Wilhelm then moved onto the next arm, he was systematic in his destruction, biting just enough to get them to retreat and yet not take up too much time. The sadness and despair that had consumed me up until a few moments ago was gone, in its stead was a pure, black rage. One which I don¡¯t think I had ever felt before I gripped the axe that rested beside me on the counter so hard that the skin on my knuckles seemed to be about to split open. I vaulted the security desk, yelling incoherently and charged toward the closest of the four front doors, driving my axe down with all the force of my body into an overhead strike into the arms of one of the creatures. I felt the metal bite into bone as the shock of the hit reverberated up the length of my arm. The beast howled, and I laughed at its pain. I didn¡¯t know I had a side like this, one of darkness and rage. I hefted the axe above my head and brought it down on the grey, scaly elbow of another creature. One more hit, one more nail. Me and Wilhelm worked like that for a time he took the right most two doors and I covered the ones on the left, we attacked the arms as they grasped threw and clawed at the wooden barricade, as they pushed it to the point of near buckling with their combined weight. I was at the farthest door to the left side, severing the grey hand of a beast from its arms when the planks exploded outward in a hail of splinters and grey flesh. The large one had returned. He came through the breach shoulder first, his residual momentum carrying him into me and sending both of us sprawling onto the ground. He reacted faster than I and stood, hefting the branch of gum tree above his head in wind up to club my torso. Wilhelm catapulted into him in a storm of fur, claw and fury. Tearing at the larger animal with such a ferocity that it stumbled back. As he went in for the kill, his jaws about to enclose on the beasts neck a scaly grey foot collided with the side of his head, sending him back into the room, sliding across the tiles. I scrambled forward my grip on the axe had turned into a choke hold, my hand holding it right below the head and I punched the blade into the smaller creature¡¯s face, smiling with viscous delight at the feeling of his nose bridge collapsing and the shards of bone being force up into its brain. I turned to the other creatures. A wicked smile on my face, to find the larger beast rising form his previously stunned form. He looked at me with pure fury and roared again. His men surged through the breach. My smile dropped I turned to the barking of Wilhelm to find him at the beginning of the side corridor that led to the outside of the observatory. To the only doors I hadn¡¯t blocked. I smiled at the dog and chased after him as he ran down the hall, slamming into the glass doors shoulder first, exploding into the cold, night air in a storm of glass and minor lacerations. I heard the frenzied foot falls of the beats behind us, I ran to the edge of the cliff that rounded of the back half of the hill on which the observatory stood. Down below was the surging river that the town had been built around. I had seen enough movies to know what was next. ¡°Fuck me.¡± I turned back to see the horde of grey lizard like men surging out of the broken open door, they would be on us in seconds. I grabbed Wilhelm and clutched him tightly to my body. For better or for worse. We jumped. Ch.7 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.7 ¡°Chat!¡± She said the words, her swollen and puffy eyes shut tightly. Please god work, I¡¯ll go mad if I stay alone any longer. When she tentatively prized apart her eye lids she was met with a window that read, World Chat, Jamila didn¡¯t think, she didn¡¯t even register what had just happened before a message had been typed and sent. Hello? What followed next was a swarm of ellipses coming into existence below her message. She was elated, she jumped up from the desk she had been sitting on and began to jump around the room. Her fists were silently punching the filtered air of her subterranean bunker. When the messages finally arrived they did so in every language known to man, she saw Cyrillic, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and even a light smattering of vulgar English. Her father had ensured she had a good understanding of language. He wanted them to be prepared for any eventuality. And so she waited, and she read. Reading the pleas of nearly one hundred petitioners. When the time came she eventually joined the English chat group along with fourteen others. Jamila had always found her confidence online, where in the real world she struggled painfully to interact she had found solace and companionship in the form of message boards. This was no different, except now she had been starved of human interaction for the past two days. She exploded into a flurry of messaging, asking about the state of other parts of the country. A man named Robert Carter, responded to her. He informed her that she wasn¡¯t alone in the USA, he was from Texas it would appear. Two more people spoke up after that, one from California and the other from Virginia. She responded, informing them she was from Montana, her father had forced them to move up here. Jamila kicked her leg¡¯s idly under her chair, she had sat down once more, and asked more questions, attacking them with a full broadside of inquiries that ranged between asking about the general state of their mental well-being to the foot-ball teams they supported. She had never been good at focusing. She was on her way to the refrigerator to grab another square of chocolate when she heard the alarm, the timer had hit zero. Jamila got her chocolate, sat down and continued to bombard the message boards. When she went to re-open them she found that people were far less talkative than before. In fact of the three Americans, barring her, only Robert Carter, was still active. Jamila Deanglisa: Hey Rob, can I call you Rob? What¡¯s going on? Robert Carter: We¡¯re being attacked, didn¡¯t you get the message?! Jamila Deanglisa: Yeah, didn¡¯t really think it was real though. She turned her head to the ceiling, staring at the concrete roof with its painted-on stars. She strained her ears, trying to hear something, anything. Silence. Jamila Deanglisa: Nope, nothing here. Rob didn¡¯t respond, she waited nearly ten minutes before asking the chat again. After that she waited another ten minutes before spamming his name until he responded, finally he did. Stolen story; please report. Robert Carter: They got in through the rafters. Fucking rats, jumping down from above, knocked my gun away. Don¡¯t know how I got out. Jamila Deanglisa: Are you okay? Her eyes were wide with curiosity as she asked, this was the longest she had ever spoken to someone who wasn¡¯t her father in her entire life. That she could remember at least. She was tentative to call him a friend but hoped with time he would get there. He didn¡¯t respond, she waited for thirty minutes and still Rob didn¡¯t answer her. She looked at the second number at the top of her vision. 71/100, it was dropping every time she looked away from it. She returned to the fridge, this time she took out the entire block and sat back down at her chair. 69/100. Jamila pouted her lips, blowing up her cheeks and then letting out the air in one long burst. She twiddled her thumbs in her lap, alternating between fiddling and eating. Ugh, she groaned loudly as she through her head back over her chair, dread locks swinging and slapping against the wooden back support. Jamila was bored, more so than before she had found the chat. Because now she had tasted freedom from the grip of monotony and was reluctant to go back to it. 62/100 Jamila stood from where she was sitting at the dinning table and walked to the television her father had set up in the living room. Turning it on at the wall outlet she booted up her PlayStation, a luxury afforded to her by the solar panels on the roof of both the bunker and the house. Sliding the chrome disc of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, she loaded up her account and began to play. She sat cross-legged before the TV, like a dedicated worshipper at the altar of their chosen god, she immersed herself in the swirling steel and silver that was Geralt. Jamila was a one hundred percenter and had already finished this specific game over five times. When she finally looked up from the screen, 3 hours had passed and from the reckoning of the clock on the wall it was morning. The sun would, about now be rising above the hill that scarred the horizon. She smiled, she loved that sunrise. She looked at the number of people who were still alive 23/100. She raised her eyebrows slightly in surprise and did her routine check of the bunker¡¯s systems. She checked that the power was still coming in at a reasonable amount, she checked on the air filter, making sure that it was still operational and that none of the vents were blocked. After crawling through the dusty boiler room and vents she stripped of her hoodie and jeans and jumped into a steaming hot shower, burning away the dirt and grime from her dark skin. When she excited the marble alcove that was her shower and into the cloud of steam that filled her bathroom she dragged a closed fist across the mirror. It opened up a brief space of reflection, she stared into her own eyes. I hope Rob¡¯s still alive, he seemed nice. Jamila stood in the steam, feeling its warmth for a long time. She was in no hurry, she had all the time in the world. Ch.8 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.8 I awoke, it had been so ingrained into me at this point that the sound of the alarm played over and over in my wounded mind. It wasn¡¯t what had woken me however, that honour went to Wilhelm. He was lying beside my chest, his fur soaked and covered in sand, his tongue licking its way up my face. I sat up lethargically and stared at the river I had escaped into, its brown mass lapping softly against the lower half of my leg, not yet fully removed from the watery embrace of the creek. I looked to the top of my vision, looking away again when I saw how far the number of people left alive had fallen. 21/100. I spent longer than I care to admit sitting on that river bank, idling, my progress stagnated. I just couldn¡¯t stop thinking of just how close I had come to meeting the same fate. I looked to the sky, the clouds from the first day had not yet broken into rain, instead darkening ever more and blanketing the entire sky in an oppressive sheet of inky blackness. I sighed, no solace would be found in the natural world. Next to the depressing number of living humans was the exclamation mark, an illustration that showed I had urgent messages awaiting me. Next to it was a little number 6. I turned my head and half heartedly scanned the bush line that encapsulated me, it wasn¡¯t a part of the river I recognised. Another problem to deal with. I decided to first cater to the notifications, it was simpler, hopefully. I focused my vision onto the notifications and a drop-down menu fell from them, it told me that both Wilhelm and I had advanced in level and that we both had unspent specialisation points. The next two messages said that I had both unread chat messages and an unread message from the system. I couldn¡¯t talk to anyone right now, not yet at least, so I opened my and Wilhelm¡¯s statuses, it revealed to me both that we had each increased in level to level 3, but that we also had 10 unspent specialisation points each. I opened up the window and felt as my consciousness left my body and I was once more taken to the field of blackness, in which a glowing model of myself stood proud. The feeling of held breath was greater than before, I felt as if my lungs were about to burst and without thinking I expelled the points into the head of my model, It flared up far brighter than before, nearly blinding my consciousness even with its lack of eyes, when the light had finally burned down to a more manageable form the head of the model burned considerably brighter than the rest, even at resting point. I left the menu and stared at the river as I waited for my vision to return to its previous ability. I stared at the currents and eddies of the water and in them I saw a brief undercurrent of numbers, vectors and variables. It was if a layer of reality was hiding just under my own and I was on the cusp of unlocking it. The layer of numbers was like a dream, retreating from you twice as fast as you chase after it, the harder you grasp the further away it becomes. I shook my head, thoughts too heavy for my mental state. I distracted myself by allocating the specialisation points to Wilhelm, breathing the breath of creation into the muscle fibres of his body, watching as they burned bright under the luminous skin of the model. When I exited that menu I stroked his fur, the muscles of his back more defined and taught than before. After the allocation of our specialisation points our statuses had changed, now looking like this.This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. Name: Jack Casser Age: 17 Gender: Male Level: 3 Specialisation: Points Available = 0 Stats: Strength ¨C How much physical strength you have - 8 Agility ¨C How fast, dextrous and mobile you are - 9 Perception ¨C How astute your senses are - 12 Intelligence ¨C How quick your mind is at processing, interpreting and retaining information - 28 Constitution ¨C How able you are to recover from illness and damage - 8 Charisma ¨C How adept you are in social interactions - 5 Endurance ¨C How tough you are and your ability to take damage - 11 Will ¨C How tough your mind is and its ability to endure strife ¨C 10 Companion: Wilhelm, (select to view status) Name: Wilhelm Age: 4 Gender: Male Level: 1 Specialisation: Points Available = 0 Stats: Ferocity: How much willpower does your companion have - 34 Power: How physically capable is your companion - 33 Loyalty: How loyal is your companion to you - 100% The next on my to do list was to deal with the urgent message delivered to me by the system. I focused on it and it expanded into my vision. Congratulations! We salute you on your admirable performance in the survival of the first night of hostile entities spawning. As a reward for this performance you have been allowed to ask one question of the system, please enter your query below. ¡­ I stared at the message, it was so cheery. A key board was hovering before my face, my hands hovering over it awkwardly. I stared at the ellipses on which I was meant to write and without thinking typed and sent the message. Why? Could I have used my question for a better purpose? Sure. Did I care? not really. Luckily or un-luckily for me however it seemed the system wasn¡¯t expecting my message and autocorrected it to something that I imagine was a popular question. Because instead of answering the question, why? It instead answered the question. Why do I not have any skills or spells yet? Its answer was comprehensive and understandable, somehow this annoyed me. It annoyed me that the system was so nonchalant about what it was doing to me, so self-absorbed in its own little charade as a real-life RPG, what annoyed me most of all however was the fact that the answer was actually helpful. In a watered-down sense the system had informed me that the only way to gain skills and magic was to kill a unique beast and gain the core that dropped form it. This core would alter the status of the player and give them the choice between several abilities. Abilities which could then be upgraded with specialisation points that I just now realised I should have been saving for when I gained a skill. I scowled at the message. Would have been nice to know that earlier. I flopped back down on the sand, feeling as it gave way under the bulk of my form and I sank partially into it. It was a comforting feeling. I knew soon I would have too get up and find my way back to town. But first I would check theses messages, and see if anyone else was still alive. Ch.9 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.9 I opened up the translucent blue screen whilst idly scratching Wilhelm¡¯s head, revelling in the feeling as he pushed it further into my touch. I scrolled through all of the unread messages in the English-speaking chat. Jamila Deanglisa, it seems she had spammed the chat last night, I scrolled through the rapid fire of question she had fired into the group while we were fighting for our lives. They ranged so far and wide it gave me a slight headache to follow her train wreck of thought, shaking my head as I realised she had just spewed her thought process onto the chat group for several hours. Wait, she was the one to discover the chat. Hmm, maybe not a complete idiot. Finally reaching the bottom of the chat I arrived into the middle of an ongoing conversation. One of actual substance and importance. I thought with vindictive annoyance at having just spent the last ten minutes scrolling through fucking bullshit. The conversation had four players, the before mentioned Jamila, a man named Robert Carter, who, if I remember correctly was from Texas. Another man named Connor Van Daalbek, from the name I thought he was either Dutch, German or Afrikaner, most likely the later going off of the fact he was in this group. Finally was a girl named Sophia Hebber, she could be from fucking anywhere. They were trading the answers to their question of the system, reading the questions that were asked I felt somewhat inadequate with self-pitying question of ¡®why?¡¯ Robert had asked what was the system, a question that now, in hindsight would have been incredibly useful and probably have satisfied the same curiosity that ¡®why¡¯ would have. Can¡¯t change the past Jack. I sighed, no use fretting over it. The answer he had received was ¡®The system is a set of guide lines and rules that make the universe at larger a fairer place. This answer gave more questions than it answered but it did serve to give me a realisation I should have had a while ago. There are fucking aliens! Connor had asked the question, ¡®How do I get stronger?¡¯ something that served as an illustrator for his personality and the answer of which showed how much of a dick the system could be. ¡®Allocate specialisation points to the strength stat.¡¯ Yeah, thanks. Jamila had asked another good question, at least I thought it was good. ¡®Why did the system come to earth now?¡¯ It wasn¡¯t practical knowledge, but I had a feeling that this kind of lore would be important, if for nothing else to keep me sane. The answer was a concise, ¡®Humanity had reached the stage in its development which, as stated in the guidelines, is the age at which the system is to be administered to foster further growth.¡¯ This answer infuriated me, it made me want to grab the system by the shoulders and shake violently, to try and ring out more answers from it. What fucking guidelines? Finally Sophia had asked a depressing, ¡®How do I get my husband back?¡¯ her plea struck a cord with me, it reminded me of my mother and was a fresh pang of pain in my heart, I realised then I would do anything to go back to my old life, to my shitty little town filled with people I didn¡¯t like and a school I hated. I didn¡¯t realise how much I missed them until they were gone. Even my peers. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. The system had answered with, ¡®That is currently impossible.¡¯ My lips turned upward slightly at that, currently. I thought. I watched as they continued to talk away at one another, Jamila trying her best to give first aid advice to Robert over the chat and Sophia and Connor chiming in with the occasional encouraging word. I wasn¡¯t sure how to approach, I had always been bad at people, never really getting how to talk to them, it had gotten to the point when I had stopped trying at all. Jack Casser: Hi¡­ I typed in tentatively, waiting for a break in the conversation before I hit send, not wanting to intrude on the dynamic to heavily. Jamila Deanglisa: Oh my god, we got another one!!!!!!! Robert Carter: Jamila my leg, stop getting distracted. Jamila Deanglisa: Oops sorry, you need to align the bones before applying the splint, make sure they¡¯re straight before you put it on and when you do make it tight. Don¡¯t want it falling off. Now that¡¯s done new guy where are you from? Connor Daalbek: Yeah, and what question did you ask the system? Robert Carter: My fucking leg, we aren¡¯t done. Jamila stop getting distracted. Jamila Deanglisa: Its good enough, anyway new guy don¡¯t ignore us. Watching the slew of text that followed my first message made me somewhat intimidated. Also I didn¡¯t want to seem like too much of a mope. Not sure why I cared so much about first impressions, but I still lied about what my first question was anyway. Jack Casser: I¡¯m from Australia, and my question was ¡®How do we get spells and magic?¡¯ Jamila Deanglisa: Ooooooh, good one. What was the answer? Sophia Hebber: Australia? Jack Carter: Yeah are you from here? I asked, my breath beginning to become more frantic with anticipation as she typed, maybe I¡¯m not as alone as I once thought. My more agitated state seemed to carry over to Wilhelm as he got up and began to run around our small creek bank. Sophia Hebber: No, I just had some family there. Sorry. Jack Carter: Don¡¯t worry about it. The system said you had to kill a unique beast or monster. Jamila Deanglisa: Ooh, like a boss fight?! So cool. How old are you? Cool! I was taken aback by her message, nothing about this is fucking cool. I sat there and stared at the chat for a few minutes, it seemed to have frozen after her message, the silence was broken by Robert. Robert Carter: Sorry about her, we think her dad was a doomsday prepper, she hasn¡¯t talked to people much. Have you seen any unique monsters yet? My mind flashed with images of running grey flesh, splintered wood and ear-splitting roars, they consumed me as I typed my next message in a trance. Jack Carter: Yeah, I think I have. Ch.10 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.10 The clouds, swollen, bursting at the seams finally erupted in a cascading torrent of grey, cold rain. It fell in sheets, lashing the ground with a vengeance, pockmarking the small sandy bank on which I lay. Scampering into the grass I dismissed the chat with a wave of my head and took shelter in a small knot of shrubbery. Cowering under it for the meagre protection it provided. Now was about this point that I realised I hadn¡¯t changed clothes in the three days since I had gotten the first notification. I was still clad in the off-white polo and black shorts. The rain was cold, like daggers of ice thrown from the atmosphere, I shook like a leaf, curling into a ball on the ground which, as the rain fell in progressively harder waves, was turning into a hellish slush of cold mud, running toward the river. I was about to die I thought grimly. After all I had already been through and it was the fucking cold and rain that got me. Tears began to stream down my face as emotion finally caught up with me. My body convulsed with wave after wave of sobs, shaking me more than the cold ever could my eyes letting out a stream which could rival the tropical storm. I laughed like a demon, howling to a sun obscured by the clouds, howling at it with raw throat, sound only pushed out of my parched lips through sheer force of passion and intensity of emotion. It had taken everything from me, I would never get to go to college, the time in my life which people always said I would enjoy most, I would never get to go to a high school party. I dug my hands into the churned-up earth, clawing at the earth itself as if trying to physically pull out a meagre amount of solace from anywhere, somewhere. None could be found. I was never going to have sex. This one hit me harder than it should have. The desire for love and sex seemed a petty one to have in the face of all of this great sorrow and yet when faced with it, it left me with a truly great sense of longing, greater than I had felt for any of the other realisations before it. That was because it went deeper than just sex, I realised I would never feel love. I would never feel a partner lying next to me, never feel calm with someone, never feel like one part of a pair. It ached in a primal, pure sense of humanity, the need to be wanted and loved. I was alone. In the moment of existential clarity that followed that outburst I was hit by another realisation, one far stronger than the rest. I never got to tell my mother I loved her. I vocalised the words, inaudible under the rain but the act of saying them seemed to make them real to me and I collapsed to the floor, the fight running out of me as fast as it had come. After surviving the first night I was filled with a tentative, excited sense of hope. An optimism which was washed away like the small river bank I had been taken to by the tide. What was the point. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. I collapsed back into my house of leaves, crawling into the foetal position and cradling my knees against my chest, the feeling of them offered no comfort, I felt the rain as it hit my skin, stinging it slightly with residual force, I didn¡¯t move, I didn¡¯t even want to breathe. I wanted to die then, more than ever before, it was a dark, all-consuming desire. I was so, so alone. A scream escaped me, it was shrill and keening, it oozed hatred and loathing and I exploded out of the bush with the sound, running back to the bank tearing the sand apart looking for the axe I had brought with me. When I did find it I pulled it from the sand with reverence, looking over the wicked edge with an expression of fanaticism and fear. I fell to my knees, holding the blade of the axe just above my wrists. I sat like that for a while, blade hovering over my veins, looming over them with a sense of finality. My arms shook with effort as I willed my body to make the cut, to go the final inch and take me from this hell, they stayed still. I screamed, a sound like none other which had ever come out of me, it was hoarse, it was ugly. An animal sound it was, in a world were there were only beasts to here it. In a rage I threw the axe into the now swollen river. I watched with a slight pang of regret and the axe slunk beneath the roiling black pool of waves, given strength by the rain. I collapsed to the ground again, laying lifeless as the rain lashed me over and over again. Damn my self-preservation. In my minds eye I could feel Wilhelm, it was the first time I had focused on the telepathic link between us and also the first time I realised that he had run off. He was agitated I could feel, standing and barking at, something. He wanted me to come to him I soon realised. Another wave of shivers took me, alright let¡¯s check it out I thought with morbid detachment. When I would think back on that series of events I would realise that I was in very little danger of dying from exposure. Sure the rain was cold, and it was winter, but it was winter in the loose Australian idea of the season, and while the rain was viscous it was far from the pelting¡¯s of ice water other nations got. None of this however made it into any faucet of my decision making, having no prior experience with the outdoors I had convinced myself of my death, and further cemented that with my self-doubt and loathing. A pallor on my mind which was yet to be removed. Ch.11 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.11 I walked through the bush on auto-pilot, my mind still awash wish new problems, existential and otherwise. I was focused on my connection with Wilhelm, following the thin trail with a blind trust, put into a trance by the oddly hypnotic sound of both my feet and the rain against the verdant carpet of leaf litter. I was so lost at that moment that I walked straight into a clearing, my eyes still locked on issues millions of miles away only to brought back to reality by the viscous, low growl coming out of Wilhelm¡¯s throat. My eyes came back into focus, scanning the scene curiously at first and then more frantically as panic wormed its way into my mind. We stood in a clearing, Wilhelm on far side, the side of the trees, he had dropped low to the ground, his ears flattened against his head. From our connection I could feel how he bristled, how his muscles contracted like a spring, ready to rocket him in a storm of fury toward his enemies. On the opposite side of the clearing were two of the grey creatures, they stood at about the height of a tall child, with the physical proportions to match. Long elfin ears speared off of their heads, and large, expressive yellow eyes were sunken deep into their skulls. They carried with them make shift spears, tips blackened by fire and scraped into a wicked point, both levelled at Wilhelm. And me, I stood in between the two parties, just realising now that I had walked right into a Mexican style stand off between two sides better armed and more prepared than I. My hand groped unconsciously for my axe. I turned to the grey creatures, not wanting to show any sign of weakness that might provoke a charge, raising shacking hands placatingly I began to slowly retreat to Wilhelm, feeling how his muscles softened almost imperceptibly as I approached, he seemed reassured by my presence. Me too buddy, me too. One of the grey creatures barked a guttural sound at me and I froze in my tracks, he began to gesture wildly around with his spear, dropping low and then jumping up high, thrusting his crotch wildly into the air whilst letting out a keening scream. Some kind of war dance? My mind racked itself for answers, the closest parallel I could draw being to the haka. The other one, the smaller of the two gripped his spear more tightly as this went on, I watched grimly as his breath became more and more laboured, they both dropped low at the end, banging spears against their chests. Definitely a war dance. Throughout all of this the rain kept pelting down, a dreary back drop to the confrontation. What happened next seemed to go in slow motion, the rain falling to a crawl as all of the parties, bar me, exploded into action. With one final, violent thrust of his hips the larger grey¡­ Thing, dropped his spear point low and charged toward Wilhelm, screaming bloody murder at the top of his lungs. Wilhelm charged to meet him, a blur of barking, violence and teeth. The smaller one came toward me, running at full tilt, I only managed to pull my attention away from the far more impressive fight to my left in time to dodge just slightly out of the path of the inky black point. The spear sailed past my right cheek, hitting my face with a rush of wind which puckered my arse. The moderately sized creature crashed into me, a slave to the momentum of his thrust he hit my chest with his shoulder sending us to the ground in a hellish tangle of limbs. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. Normally I would have been able to hold my ground, not through skill but by the sheer weight and size difference alone. But due to my unpreparedness I was sent tumbling and off balance, the creature managing to land on top of the pile. The beast pulled a small flint knife from a twine belt at its waist and began trying to force the small, sharp blade into my eye socked. An eye out of the corner of which I could see Wilhelm ripping the throat out of his opponent in a spray of viscera and hate. I remembered being able to command him telepathically in my panic, as my arms fought against bad positioning as they tried to force the blade back upward to no avail, they were squished awkwardly against my chest and I wasn¡¯t able to get any leverage. I screamed at myself for choosing intelligence. ¡®Wilhelm, Kill, kill, kill it!¡¯ I thought frantically yelling the commands at him through our telepathic link. The dog gave his assent before bounding off into the cave, barking madly. What?! stupid mut! I thought angrily as he ran into the alcove. I stared into the cold eyes of my opponent and realised no help was coming. It was me against death, the two of us facing off, I had wanted this so badly just moments before, it would be so easy to just lay down and accept my fate. But again I choose life. I wanted to live with a burning desire I didn¡¯t know I had. My stare could bore a hole into stone in that moment. The knife began to descend closer to my chest with every second, my arms being pushed into progressively worse positions for directing force upward. I needed a distraction. I chomped down onto my lip, gnawing at the soft flesh with stinging brutality, smiling slightly as the thick blood streamed into my mouth. I spat it into the creature¡¯s eyes. A scream escaped its lips, but I paid it no mind, I used my brief moment of respite to lift my hips upward and the creature with them, finally managing to gain the upper hand I flipped our tangle, slamming the grey creature into the ground and sending the small weapon flying. The game had changed, and I now had the upper hand. What I didn¡¯t have however was a monopoly on dirty tricks. The beasts bit down onto my ear, hard, I felt fangs pierce through the flesh in multiple places and the only thing that kept me from crying out was the rush of adrenaline. I wrenched my head to the side in morbid silence, grimacing as I felt the flesh tear away. Lifting up my head I saw the creature swallow the lump of ear it held in its teeth, I nearly vomited. Instead I turned my disgust into rage and slammed my head into the bridge of the beast¡¯s nose, smiling as I felt the fragile bone snap under my force. I hit him again and again after that, sometimes with my head, other times with my fists or my elbows or with whatever I could get my fucking hands on, I pummelled the poor thing¡¯s face long after it had stopped twitching, ceasing only when the rain had turned its skull and brains into a red stain in the mud. Standing up I wiped the blood off my clothes and face, pawing tentatively at the gaping wound on the side of my face. The pain had not yet caught up with me. I resolved to find Wilhelm before it did. With that I walked into the cave. Ch.12 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.12 I reached the threshold of the cave, pausing slightly before entering. My mouth drew taught and I scampered back hurriedly, grabbing one of the dropped spears. I hefted it, solid, weightier than it looked, levelling the point in front of myself I finally entered the cave, my shoulders noticeably less tense than on my last attempt. I leaned into the yawning maw of the cave, it tunnelled in for a way before turning abruptly, cowering behind a bend and shortening the length of it I could survey without entering. I could feel Wilhelm deeper into the rock. ¡°Wilhelm.¡± I called out to him tentatively, receiving only a bark in return. I hesitated for a moment, I wanted to call him back and have him by my side. Why? I chastised myself. I¡¯ll be walking him right back in anyway, and if he¡¯s fine then there shouldn¡¯t be anything to worry about, man the fuck up Jack. Yeah, I laughed, it cut through the din of falling rain. I then walked into the mouth of the cave, my white-knuckle grip on the spear having not released by even a fraction. Knock, knock, knock. My shoes resounded against the stone floor with booming echoes, the sound charging off, headstrong into the cave, leaving me to plod along sedately behind. I forced myself to take step after step, go around bend after bend and with each passing metre and with each kink in the path of the cave traversed a small glow grew ever brighter. It started as naught more than a pinprick of light at first, a scant source and poor substitute to the now abandoned light of the day. But as I approached, the warm, orange glow burned brighter. And with it the sounds also grew in intensity. Wet slapping noises echoed back at me through the tunnels, it was as if me and the maker of the sounds were competing, each sending barrages of echoes to assail the other combatant. His unnerved me far more than mine probably did him. I rounded the last corner with a burst of energy, speeding around it, a low war cry escaping my lips and my spear raised, it was juvenile, and attempt to drive away unseen monsters, and I knew deep down that no monsters hid in these shadows. I did it anyway. My cry startled Wilhelm, causing him to jump comically into the air, yelping in surprise. The chamber we were in was rather homey and comfortable, with a fire and several skins and furs laying on the ground, the purpose of whom I assumed was for sleeping in. There were various pots made of clay and gourd scattered around the room, laying disturbed on the ground, most likely Wilhelm¡¯s doing. Then the other details hit me. It started with a slow burning, a putrid smell assaulting my nostrils, it violated my nose and wormed its way into my brain until it made my eyes water. It was the smell of blood, blood and death. Strewn around the room were a smattering of small, lifeless, grey bodies, they were three in total and each of them seemed to by mauled beyond recognition, faces ripped apart and flesh torn from the bone in ribbons, lying strewn across the stone like the remnants of a party popper. I couldn¡¯t decipher any features of the creatures from the torn apart forms but what I could see loud and clear was just how small they were, even compared to the two males out the front of the cave. Then it dawned on me. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Oh god no. I felt nauseous, I couldn¡¯t be in that room any more, I dropped the spear, dead to the sound of it clattering to the ground and charged out of the cave. Dropping to the ground when I finally reached the outside I vomited into the mud, spewing out the contents of my famished gut all over the corpse of the eldest male. I stayed there for a bit, doubled over and dry retching as I remembered the smell, the lust of battle had worn off and all that remained were the messy realities, and the pain. What remained of my ear burned like the pits of hell, I had crawled over to a small puddle to inspect the mangled mound of flesh hanging to the side of my head just long enough to choke up. Wilhelm came to me, rubbing his face against mine, smearing a fresh coat of blood onto my already stained cheek. My first instinct was to yell at him. To rave at the poor creature and try to explain to him what he had done was wrong, to try and hold him accountable to what he had done to those¡­ To those children! To those babies! Then I remembered my commands to him, kill, kill, kill. I had ordered him to kill three times, and that was what he had done, butchering the brood which the two grey creatures tried so desperately to protect. It was my fault, not his, he was just carrying out his orders, his only crime was his loyalty to me. I sighed painfully and patted his head softly, more to comfort myself than for his benefit. We sat like that for a long time, long enough for the sun to begin dipping below the far of hills, clawing at the wild landscape with its last breaths of life. I spent that time thinking, thinking about what I wanted. And as I stared into the glossy depths of Wilhelm¡¯s deep, joyous eyes I found it. I wanted to live. I remembered the passion which I had felt during my fight with the grey creatures, felt how strongly I had wanted to live and tamed that fire, lashing it to my soul and taking it into my very being. I wanted to live, but for that to happen I needed to accept new realities, harsh realities, necessary realities. The first was that death was a part of life and it would have to be a part of mine if I were to survive. The first step in achieving this was to take responsibility for the killing which had just been done. But no amount of talking, no amount of soul searching to the dying sunlight or cliched self-pep talks stopped the tears from falling as I dragged the mangled, fragile bodies of the grey children from the cave, or stopped the small wails as I gave them all to the earth. And no amount of acting tough stopped me from crying out as I cauterised the mangled mess on the side of my head, sealing shut one of my ears for good. It seemed it would take more than words and affirmative action to change, it would take deeds. I resolved myself to go out hunting in the morning. I would have to be a new person then, a harder person, a killer. But tonight I could keep being Jack, if only for a little while, and so I let the tears fall freely under the stars that night, with no one but Wilhelm and the earth to hear me cry. Ch.13 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.13 Moshkur raised his shoulders slightly in affirmation, the scout leader had ordered for the column to advance with a guttural snort. They hadn¡¯t heard from Shib¡¯ Zur and his family in several moons. Even more, several scouts they had sent to search for the wayward son of the leader had gone missing. Moshkur liked the leader, he was the greatest of the newborns to be sure. He had been the first to brave the black stone and the man who had forced the flight of the tall thing and his furry commander. Moshkur had been there that day, the day they were birthed. He remembered how furiously the furry demon had fought, how he had brought low many of Moshkur''s brood brothers with his gnashing fangs of ivory white. He remembered how deftly he commanded his tall, pale subordinate, it took a great chief to fight so well in unison with such a cowardly creature. The great leader of his people would drink from the skull of the furry one and give him a hero¡¯s death. It was deserved. Small, grey feet crunched on the green sea which blanketed the earth, holding it in a gentle embrace of fragile vegetation. There were three of them, the other scouts had been lost to the great green and the leader, furious had sent his full contingent of scouts to investigate, they were part of the largest and most fearsome force the clan had mustered since the storming of the high hill, the new home of the clan. The great leader had tried to amass other war parties since that fateful battle against the furry one, to take spear and blood to the tribes of the scaly folk across the way and the winged ones who harried the hunting and gathering of the clan folk. But the clan was hard to muster, and harder yet to order around, it took a strong leader and a time of true strife to sway the will of the people in one direction or another. Luckily for the clan of the high hill, they currently had both. Moshkur remembered the speech the great leader had made from his throne, how he had called the people to action with a war dance to shake the earth and a roar to sunder the skies. It still sent shivers down his spine. A kookaburra laughed at the grey folk from his perch on a gnarled gum branch. This was the first prong of a full-scale invasion into the green, no longer would it swallow the folk of the high hill. They were the hero¡¯s who had braved the black stone, they were the ones who had broken down the horizontal trees that barred their entry to the leader¡¯s castle! They were the ones who had made low the furry one and his tall soldier! And they would not be cowed by this great expanse! His hands gripped the shaft of his spear tighter with each thought, rising to an intensity that threatened to snap the fire hardened wood. Determination burned in Moshkur¡¯s eyes, it was the passion of a man who assumed himself to be an instrument of righteousness. Distracted from his orders by daydreaming he hadn¡¯t noticed the small, slight crunching of leaves from of to his right, nor had he seen the frantic signing of the scout leader for the column to halt. For the scout leader had heard the signs. But his men had not, and they reacted sluggishly and so it was upon unsuspecting prey that Jack and Wilhelm struck. ----- We rocketed out of the woods silently, a grim pall hanging over our actions, Wilhelm struck the head of the column and I the back, we had been following this group for a small while, not used to pursuing groups numbering more than one or two and I had been busy devising a plan of action to take them out. All the while praying furiously that they wouldn¡¯t hear the cacophonous thumping of my heart, because it was fucking deafening to me. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Eventually I had decided to blitzkrieg them, smashing the man at the front whom I assumed to be their leader and the man at the back whilst also setting us up for a pincer movement on the final grey creature in the centre. With those final moments of planning it was ready. It was time to kill, time to die. We charged out of the woods. Dimly I recognised Wilhelm in my peripheral vision, leaping through the air and crash tackling the head man, teeth sinking deep into the throat of the creature. My focus however was consumed with the creature ahead of me. Time seemed to slow down as I weighed up different possibilities and consequences, something I had realised was most probably a side affect of my investment in intelligence. I slammed into the creature spear tip first, the fire blackened wood piercing the hide of the beast just below the arm-pit with an audible puncture, I felt the resistance of flesh, grimacing slightly as the wood stormed through it. Vibrations shuddered up my arms as the spear struck home, my thrust was slightly off the mark though, slamming into the ribs of the creature instead of the clean shot to the heart which was planned. The head of the spear snapped off, skidding into a gap between two ribs and lodging deep within the heart of the beast, I guess it worked out in the end, I thought morbidly. It died almost instantly. I pulled the broken, blunted haft of the spear from the creature¡¯s side with a sickening sucking sound and turned to survey the next scene of the battle, not watching as the small grey man clattered to the ground in a pile of limbs and blood, like a puppet with the strings cut. The creature between Wilhelm and I looked back and forth in a panic, a small fire quickly retreating from its yellow gaze, being replaced by an all-consuming fear. It finally turned its sights onto Wilhelm, deciding him to be the more dangerous of the two of us, something I didn¡¯t wholly disagree with, it was, however, a fatal mistake. I ordered Wilhelm to go low, ducking under the spear point of the creature before it could even register movement and then spring up, latching onto the small creatures¡¯ knees with a sickening crunch. It fell to the ground in a heap much like its companions had. Except this one wasn¡¯t silent, it fell and, as it did so it howled, it screamed for its life, a haunting, melodious wail that nearly made me reconsider those decisions I had made in that cave several days ago. I fell to my knees before the beast, raising the heavy wooden haft above my head and slamming it down into its head, splitting its ear and denting its skull. ¡°Shut up!¡± I brought the wood down again, I wasn¡¯t even sure if it was still screaming or if it was just the sound was echoing in my mind, nevertheless I kept hitting. ¡°Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, please god be quiet.¡± I smashed its head over and over again before looking up, locking eyes with Wilhelm. My vision was blurry with tears, but I still managed to make out his measured, disapproving stare. No, it was probably just my own thoughts reflecting in his eyes. Whatever the case the meaning was clear. It said ¡®Man up, if you doubt now then you die. Cry on your own time Jack, there is work to be done.¡¯ I wiped my tears and stood up, he¡­ I was right. Ch.14 The Last 100 ¨C Ch.14 9/100 I sat by the fire and it burned nowhere near as hot as that number did. 9 people were all that were left of the human race. Of the English speakers only Jamila and I still used the world chat. We didn¡¯t yet want to accept the likely fact that the others were dead. In all truthfulness we had already defied the odds by both surviving. Jamila Deanglisa: So¡­ How are things on your end? I stared at the message, blinking several times before looking up from it and surveying my camp. It was a ramshackle affair. I chuckled slightly at the decrepit nature of my home. ¡®Oh how far we have fallen. From great cities and mastery of the world to 8 people and me, living in a cave, surrounded by sticks and small fires.¡¯ I had made the cave my base of operations, a place from which to conduct my, ¡®hunts,¡¯ building small fires had managed to fend of the cold and the smoke had warded off the few remaining insects of the wild. Not yet driven off by the relatively tame winter chill. Off to the corner Wilhelm trotted back into the camp, a bush turkey in his mouth its black feathers dripping with sporadic drops of blood. He placed it before me, retreating into the cave afterwards. I could feel the fatigue in his muscles. He had been hunting food for the both of us ever since we had retreated to the woods. He was the reason we hadn¡¯t starved. I picked up the turkey, grimacing slightly at the unnatural jutting of its spine, ¡®a clean break.¡¯ I began to pluck the feathers in earnest, doing it clumsily, my fingers unused to the slight, precise almost loving movements required to do it well. I was not yet adept at this life. Jack Casser: Can¡¯t complain. And I couldn¡¯t, things were, objectively, good. I wasn¡¯t going hungry, I wasn¡¯t cold, I wasn¡¯t as covered in filth as I once was, having washed myself in the stream. Still it didn¡¯t shake the deep, seated unhappiness which had settled in the pit of my stomach. I felt somewhat disconnected from the actions my body took. As if I were a spectator to my own struggle, a witness, a plaything of the gods being pulled one way or another for their sick, twisted amusement. ¡®Still, nothing to bother anyone with.¡¯ I thought, pulling the last of the feathers from the turkey, grabbing a flint knife and using it to crudely gut the animal. Jack Casser: What about you? I was a slave to social norms, refusing, terrified to break from decorum, even now at the end of the world. Old habits die hard. And I was required to turn her question back to her. It didn¡¯t matter that Jamila was even more socially inept then I was or that she probably didn¡¯t give a shit whether or not I cared about her state of affairs as long as I talked to her. I cared. And so I asked. Jamila Deanglisa: Really good! I¡¯ve managed to start luring in some smaller things through one of the air vents and I made a sort of killing ground. Also¡­ On and on she went. I was amazed at how positive she could be in the face of all of this. Trying to dampen her enthusiasm was like trying to put out a wildfire by pissing on it. I mean for fuck¡¯s sake if you scrolled up a small way you would find the last words of Robert Carter and she was still bubbly. I wasn¡¯t sure how to feel about her. I moved from the spot where I was gutting the turkey, Rising I skewered the now somewhat butchered animal and placed it upon a spit above my fire, my mouth moistening as small drops of fat melted off the flesh, sloughing off in the heat. I moved over to another pile of raw materials, fibre, stripped from the bark of several trees nearby. Next, I tried to do my best imitation of Primitive Technology and began to clumsily twist the fibres together. Making a long length of string. It was slow mediative work, I reopened the chat and dealt with the salvo of messages from Jamila. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings. Jack Casser: So what¡¯s your next move going to be? I was curious as to what the girl was planning. While I attributed most of my survival to luck and much could be said of hers being due to the same I felt¡­ Something else there. She had guns, she had knowledge, she was positive, and she had a fucking fortress. If mankind was banking its hopes on someone it wasn¡¯t me, it was her. Jamila Deanglisa: I think I need to start grinding some more stats, then IDK, maybe I¡¯ll leave and try to find one of those unique monsters. Who knows maybe I can trap it here. Wouldn¡¯t it be really cool to have magic, what else do you think it could mean by skills. The system said skills and spells when you asked it right?! I could just feel how quickly she was attacking the virtual keyboard, beating it like a disobedient child. Jack Casser: Yeah. What followed next was gushing, lots and lots of gushing. I rose once again with about a metre and a bit of fibre string. I began to lash it to the ends of a worn, carved stick. Broke the last string needed a new one. Wilhelm chose that moment to leave the mouth of the cave, walking up to the fire and sitting before it like a hungry child, pleading eyes and all. It forced a rare chuckle out of me and I smiled at him, it was a sad kind of smile, still, it had within it love. I got up and walked back to the fire, checking the bird, burnt, again. Fuck. Strife hadn¡¯t managed to make me a better cook, nor had any rise in stats. Hell maybe a skill might, I placed a bit of the charred, bitter meat into my mouth and frowned as I chewed into the tough flesh. Jesus at this rate I might actually take a cooking skill. I scratched Wilhelm¡¯s head as we ate, he was lying beside me, head resting in my lap. He was smiling, and I was feeding him food, both of us watching as the sun once more retreated behind the horizon, losing its battle for supremacy against the moon. Jamila Deanglisa: What¡¯s your next move, what are you planning? I looked at the message and smiled, what was I planning on doing. I looked over the camp as I tried to think of a way to phrase it, to find words to parse out not just the actions, but the emotion behind them. I needed to know more about the system. I needed to know if there was a way to go back and, barring that, forward. Even depressed I was curious, I wanted to know, I needed to know. I needed to talk to the system again. And there was only one way I could think of to do that. Only one way to progress further and force the system to take note. Jack Casser: Me? I¡¯m going to kill a king. I looked over the small bow I had made, its crudely carved but symmetrical arms, its clumsily woven but still strong string of fibrous cord, and its arrows, sticks hardened and sharpened in the fire and fletched with the black feathers of bush turkeys. ¡®That¡¯s right, your days are numbered, Jacks coming home.¡¯ I chuckled at the thought, the sound was devoid of any mirth, all it had was anger, anger and determination. I looked at Wilhelm, he stared back at me eyes blank, but hard. ¡®Don¡¯t cheer too loud boy.¡¯ This got me to crack a genuine smile and Wilhelm began to howl toward the slowly rising moon. Soon, soon we would go home. And we would find out just what the fuck was going on here after all. Update Yes another one, why? Because I don''t like doing really long author notes and because I want to, that''s why. Anyway the reason behind this one is that the results of the survey are in and the verdict was that he should become more lonely, (Jack cries at your cruelty.) Anyway that should be coming into effect in the chapters that follow.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. PS: I deleted the other update chapter as I did the one before it, so sorry if you got something saying your comment was deleted, at least now you know why. And to the guy who I didn''t get back to, he hasn''t tried getting a gun or something yet because he was driven into the woods by the monsters taking over the town. PaperScrap out.