《Morgan the Monster Slayer》 Chapter 1 - Why did Patrick Deemer kill himself? In a grocery store on western side of town, a young woman stands bored while watching the self-checkout lanes. Customers come and go, some of them friendly to her, some of them stealing product while she doesn''t look, but none of them remain longer than they need to. Everyone has a reason to leave the store, whether it be to return home to their family, to smuggle their stolen goods out the door, or to just enjoy some time alone. Almost a month ago, one man left the store permanently, shortly before going on a homicidal rampage and killing himself. ''Why''d he do it...'' Morgan Coughlin asks herself for the hundredth time. The man she''s thinking of is Patrick Deemer, a very friendly fellow associate. He came to work on time, spoke happily about every subject, and never once hinted that he''d kill three people before killing himself. It rained the previous day, making Morgan unable to do her usual run. Instead, she focused on kung-fu moves from various movies she''s seen. To do cardio on this day would mess up the entire rotation, so she''ll have to do weights when she gets home. After work, Morgan goes home. With her workout routine and college finals coming soon, she doesn''t have time to hang out with friends to go to parties. Boys are constantly inviting her to obscure get-togethers, but she instantly denies them all. She''s got her whole future planned out, and a silly frat party has no place in it. While doing warm-up squats, Morgan has a television on in front of her. Normally she''d be watching a drama series, but this last week''s news reports have been very strange. Animals are attacking people in foreign countries, and magicians have developed new techniques that look exactly like the real thing. Halfway through Morgan''s first set, the Emergency Alert System takes over the television''s display and audio. It plays several annoying beeps, then a person begins to speak. "This is an emergency alert for residents in Carroll County. There are currently many swarms of deadly wasps and hornets. Residents are advised to stay indoors. Keep all doors and windows shut. Keep insect and wasp killer nearby, but do not go outdoors to get it. Close all entrances to your homes. Do not go outside. The alert will be updated soon." ''Wasps?'' Morgan questions the alert. Wasps are annoying, but far from deadly, especially when you''re not irritating their nest. She''s been stung by wasps in the past, but they only caused her mild pain for a few hours. Even out of all her family members, only her cousin ever had to go to the hospital because of bee stings. "Morgan, are you watching TV?" Morgan''s mother yells from the first floor of the house. "Yeah, it just played some emergency message," Morgan yells back.Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. "Don''t open any windows or go outside," Morgan''s mother warns her. "I know, I listed to the alert!" Morgan yells back, this time irritated at her mother. Morgan continues her warm-ups until dinner when her mother calls her down to eat. Her mother has prepared a dinner of butter chicken with sides of broccoli and mashed potatoes. To drink, there is a pitcher of sweet tea. Minding her weight, Morgan opts for a glass of water instead. Sitting to the right of Morgan is Jason, her father. He is nearing sixty years old and works at a nearby military base doing something with computers. It''s all confidential and top secret, meaning he can''t share with the family. Across from Morgan is Alex, her brother. He''s three years older than her, a bodybuilder and eats more than anyone else at the table. He works for a digital forensics lab in DC which is, once again, top secret and cannot be shared. Sitting to the left of Morgan is her mother, Elizabeth. She''s eight years younger than Jason and manages the finances for a local business. Her relationship with Morgan isn''t the best, especially considering Morgan''s career path. Jason got his degree from MIT late and has been working his entire life to better himself. Alex partied a little too hard in college but was able to get a good job thanks to Jason''s connects. Since being hired, he''s gone well above anyone''s expectations and is now a highly valued employee at the forensics lab. Elizabeth was born into a bad family. She got her GED and left home at 15, traveled the states for several years, and eventually met Jason when her car had broken down. Since her life was so difficult, she wanted to provide the best for her daughter. Morgan never smoked marijuana or needed to be bailed out from jail, but she still disappointed her mother. Morgan was aiming for an art degree from the local community college. She wasn''t trying to raise her social class like Jason did, or live an easy and carefree life like Alex did, or escape a dangerous situation like Elizabeth did. No, she was just coasting. Drugs are bad, and she hasn''t used them. Sex is bad, and she hasn''t done it. At nineteen years old, Morgan''s life could be described by a single word: uneventful.
Congratulations, you have been selected as a candidate for the position of Monster Slayer. To accept, kill a monstrous entity within thirty hours.
Begin now. If you wish to decline, sustain from killing a monstrous entity for thirty hours.
Morgan''s brow furrows as she reads the boxes of text floating in the air over her plate of food. "Something up, sis?" Alex asks, noticing Morgan''s changed expression. "No... it''s nothing," Morgan replies and continues to eat her meal, ignoring the boxes of text. As soon as she does, the boxes disappear, as if knowing her intention. The diner continues uninterrupted. No more boxes appear, but Morgan can''t help but space out as she contemplates the meaning of the words. In addition to the words, their method of delivery was extremely profound. The box of text looked like something from a video game. "Thank you for the meal," Morgan stands and says after finishing her food, then takes her plate to the sink to clean it. After placing the plate and utensils in the dishwasher, Morgan goes back to her room upstairs. "She wasn''t listening to anything we said," Jason says, watching his daughter climb the stairs. "Maybe it''s just too hard for her to believe," Elizabeth says. "I''m a little shocked too that an entire school bus of kids was killed by hornet stings." Chapter 2 - Are nunchucks a deadly weapon? After returning to her room, Morgan sits at her computer desk and attempts to write down the words from the box of text that floated in front of her during dinner. From a drawer on the left side, she retrieves a sheet of college-ruled paper. From the drawer above the one with the paper in it, she pulls out a black pen. As she first tries to recall the exact words, the first box reappears.
Congratulations, you have been selected as a candidate for the position of Monster Slayer. To accept, kill a monstrous entity within thirty hours.
The box is strangely transparent. Morgan can still see the desk and the various items that cover the top, but the words in the box of text are easy to read. Then, a second box appears.
Time Remaining: 29 Hours and 42 Minutes
Since Morgan can bring the boxes of text back whenever she needs them, she decides to not write down their contents on paper. If anyone saw them, they''d probably think she''s crazy. Instead, she makes the boxes of text disappear and puts away her sheet of paper and pen. After that, she pulls forward her laptop and opens it. ''The whole world''s going crazy,'' Morgan thinks as the laptop boots up. Once it''s on, Morgan logs in and opens and internet browser. The first website she opens is a popular video hosting site. The day''s popular videos are all having something to do with the monster sightings in Japan. Morgan clicks a video of a man fighting a monster, titled ''Man fights goblin''. It''s shaky camera footage of a man hacking another man apart with a sword. The only strange thing is how the man being hacked apart has green skin and arms that reach his calves. Morgan thought it was a hoax, a CGI made to be passed off as the real thing, but now she thought differently. The man with the sword makes several loud yells at the goblin. Once he has the goblin''s attention, he begins to slowly walk toward it. The goblin notices this, and charges at the man. The goblin doesn''t have any weapon, but its hands look fierce. They are covered in dirt and have long fingernails, dirty and unkempt like the rest of the goblin. The goblin jumps at the man, but the man dives and rolls around the goblin, slashing at the goblin''s right leg as he passes. The goblin stumbles on its injured right leg, and the man uses the opportunity to decapitate the goblin. The first wide chop to the goblin''s neck doesn''t kill it, but the second chop from the same direction makes the head separate from the body. A few seconds later, the video ends. The goblin monster in Japan could be faked, but videos like this one are becoming too common on video hosting websites. Even television news channels are playing some of the less-graphic videos. The videos are also coming from all across the island of Japan, not from just one city. If the goblin monsters are real, and the boxes of text that appeared before Morgan''s face are not just a hallucination, something about the world has drastically changed. For now, she''ll call it The System, a name fitting for the videogame-like changes that defy the laws of reality. The System is telling her to kill a monster and she''ll receive a class as a reward. ''Maybe there''s a tutorial,'' Morgan things, but is stopped by a box of text; from now on, she''ll call them System Messages.
There is no tutorial. If you accept your position of Monster Slayer, you will be given a brief explanation of your abilities, but nothing else.
''Thanks, System,'' Morgan thinks and continues to look at videos on her laptop. Knowledge is power, and Morgan needs to accumulate both of these in a relatively short amount of time. Being a Monster Slayer sounds better than being someone who gets slain by monsters. As some would say, kill or be killed. The videos are helpful with finding what kinds of monsters are in the world. Most videos are coming from Japan, but a few are also from South America. In South America, the monsters are vampire types. Bats fly close to people, explode into a cloud of black smoke, then a person is revealed while eating flesh from another person''s neck.You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. After watching dozens of videos, Morgan has watched everything relevant and useful for acquiring information about the monsters. The goblins will most often travel alone, but sometimes will be in packs. They don''t use weapons other than what they can find laying around when a fight begins, and they don''t hesitate to use their teeth as a weapon. The vampires are much more mysterious. They always travel and attack alone, but they can move very fast by shifting into their bat form. Usually, someone who gets surrounded by the black smoke is certain to be killed, but a few people have survived by rolling on the ground like you''re supposed to do if caught on fire. Once the supply of reliable videos on the streaming website is exhausted, Morgan goes looking for weapons in her room. All she has in her possession are a couple of toy knives and a few pairs of nunchucks. The toy knives are sharp like a regular knife, but probably wouldn''t work well against a monster that could overpower her. Morgan only has two pairs of wooden nunchucks. The rest are made of plastic. The first set of wooden nunchucks is very heavy and has a thick steel chain connecting the two handles. The second set is lighter and has a very short string cord connecting the handles. Because the first set is heavier, it can hit targets harder, but the second set can be swung faster and is easier to control. Morgan decides to use the second set of nunchucks as her main weapon. The goblins are based in Japan, a country really far from her home in America. The vampires are located in South America, which is at least connected by land to America. The second set of nunchucks are the only ones that Morgan will have a chance at hitting the vampire''s bat form with. She doesn''t know anyone that would let her borrow a gun since nobody in her family owns one and neither do any of her friends. If she could get a head-shot on a goblin''s head, it''ll surely be killed. If she can hit a bat with a shotgun while it''s in the air, it''ll be blown away like a clay pidgin. For the rest of the night, Morgan uses her laptop to replay looped videos of monster sightings while she practices her nunchuck techniques. She starts first with the second set, but switches after a few minutes to the first set. Going from heavy-weight to light-weight makes her strikes feel much faster, and helps Morgan think of combinations of attacks to use against vampires or goblins. For a vampire, it would be best to strike it with the fast set of nunchucks, then hit it with the heavy set of nunchucks while it''s down. Against a goblin, the heavy set of nunchucks could be used from the very beginning. In fact, any fast moving monster should be attacked first with the light set, then finished off with the heavy set. Morgan practices her moves for over an hour. Every few minutes she changes the video playing on her laptop and continues. While practicing, the heavy metal chain and classic D-swivel of the first set of nunchucks makes a large racket, and Morgan is forced to stop when her mother knocks on her door. "We''re trying to get some sleep over here," Morgan''s mother says from the other side of the door. "You don''t need to be doing that this late at night." "Ugh, fine," Exhausted, Morgan stops her training and pauses the video playing on her laptop. She is tired and waits in the center of her room for a few seconds while her mother walks away. Until now, Morgan only practiced martial arts and nunchaku to imitate her child idol, Bruce Lee. Now that she felt she''d have to use those skills to kill something, practicing became much harder. Nothing felt like it had the power to kill something. Sure, the nunchucks swung faster than the eye could see, and Morgan didn''t want to be hit by a stray handle, but she didn''t think they''d kill.
Time Remaining: 27 Hours and 22 Minutes
Morgan checks the remaining time and looks at the clock in the corner of her laptop screen. It''s currently 9:44 PM, which means the time remaining will reach zero at approximately midnight the next day. Aware that she has a long day ahead of her tomorrow, Morgan undresses down to her bra and panties and takes a towel from her closet to the bathroom. After showering, Morgan brushes her teeth and dries her hair with the towel. Two minutes later, she finishes brushing and wraps the towel around herself and walks back to her room, locking the door behind her after entering. Before laying in bed, Morgan lays the towel over the back of her desk chair and puts on a new pair of underwear. Morgan knows she needs to sleep, but the anxiety is too much to let her sleep peacefully. She can''t help but watch the remaining time as it dwindles. It''s still over 24 hours, leaving her at least one day to complete her task, but her task is something she''s never done before. Kill something? The system had to be joking! If it wasn''t for the videos she saw of other people fight monsters that should only exist in fantasy realms, she''d call the System Message a hallucination and check into a hospital! This isn''t a videogame on her laptop, it''s real life! Maybe, in the morning, she''ll be thinking with a better head. Instead of texting some people with her phone, Morgan forces herself to go to sleep. She''ll need her energy is she''s going to kill something, especially so if she''s going to chicken out and run away at the last second.