by Arthur Stone
As Cheater paced in a slow spiral, he ran a flurry of mana calculations in his head. Periodically, he stopped to activate Flash of Omniscience and interpret its findings. While hardly an expert, he was growing more confident at parsing these etchings of light, no longer gawking at them with a deranged look on his face. He could now pick out interesting leads with relative ease, knowing that time and practice would make this ability second nature. The images informed him that the sand beneath his feet covered an underlying bedrock layer and, in places, unruly heaps of boulders. These boulders poked through the surface here and there to create rocky, squat outcrops in the wilderness. Besides these, the area was wide open.
After fifteen minutes of scanning, Cheater found his first evidence of a recent human visit. Without Omniscience, he’d easily have missed it. Approaching the bright spot, he crouched to filter his fingers through the pebbles…and pulled out an odd, flattened cylinder. He dusted off his finding and squinted at it. A plastic bottle cap. Garbage. Inhabited clusters were full of stuff like this, but there shouldn’t be any in gray clusters. People had clearly brought it here, its roughed-up state implying they’d left it long ago. If these were the same people that left the backpack, Cheater’s chances of avoiding confrontation had officially improved.
Inspecting the surrounding area, Cheater found several more traces of human activity—thanks not to Omniscience, now, but to his Darkvision. One of the caved-in sections of stone gave him pause: the shadows it cast didn’t match the objects above them, an eerie dissonance obvious in the twilight gloom. So this is why cats are always so curious…especially in the night. Perhaps they could see things their owners never noticed. His well-hidden discovery looked like a funnel from a large-caliber shell. He couldn’t even spot it from the highest point of the fortress, at the highest point of noon. These pits in the earth were serious.
Such long-range artillery shells could be fired in two different ways: they could be rigged to explode immediately upon contact, or shortly afterward. This second mode allowed them to dig deep into pliable soil and blow up there, scattering whole cubic meters of earth and stone in all directions. He looked over one round pit, ringed by its ejected former contents. Angular rocks positioned around the edges broke up the funnel-shaped outlines, preventing Cheater from suspecting a thing from his vantage point. Despite the fact that hundreds of spent shells littered the pit, this was not a proper emplacement—unexpected circumstances had forced someone to hurriedly construct a defensive position.
Cheater plucked a shell from the ground and looked it over: Automatic, 7.62mm. NATO issue. This was a common ammo type popular among players, nothing special; a moderately-developed infected wouldn’t flinch at a gunman using it. The other type of shell present proved far more interesting to Cheater. It was Russian-made and of the same caliber, but for a rifle. If shot from the right gun, it would utterly wreck its target. Judging by the sheer volume of expelled cartridges, Cheater assumed several rifles had been active here. Looking closer, he revised his guess: they must have used a machine gun, swiveling it to take enemies charging them from several directions at once. They’d clearly burned through their ammo with abandon, yet even that hadn’t saved them.
Scraps of clothing and an utterly shredded field vest further illustrated the grisly scene in Cheater’s head. Unless the owners had stripped and stood aside while their things were ransacked…they obviously hadn’t survived. Cheater shuddered deeply. Finding no bones or flesh, he could tell the dead weren’t digis, nor bots, nor atomites. Players had lost this battle, their bodies swallowed by the black sand. It was unlikely he’d find any remains below—after all, the shells remained on the surface, exposed to the elements—but it was still worth one more use of Omniscience to verify, if only for practice.
Selecting “bones” as his search item, Cheater felt his breath catch. There were bones…many, many bones. They weren’t just scattered, either: he was looking at easily forty full skeletons, positioned upright and plunged a dozen feet down. They appeared to have sunk below for a while, Cheater deduced, so they couldn’t be related to this battle above. Perhaps he was examining a cemetery. The skeletons populating the cemetery were anthropomorphic at first blush, but clear differences marked them as distinctly non-human. Their collarbones and shoulders were hypertrophied and their hind limbs bent backwards, but Cheater had seen enough infecteds to know they didn’t match. Could these skeletons perhaps belong to some kind of intelligent gray? Cheater wasn’t acquainted with those beasts’ anatomies beyond their color, so he couldn’t confirm this. Either way, it made sense that the pit was a cemetery, the players likely excavating the graves for valuables.
Cheater activated Omniscience one final time, studying the objects “standing out.” He found mineral veins snaking through rock formations and several shallow lizard tunnels, but nothing valuable enough to inspire risking one’s life in the scorching desert. Wait, what’s that? Something flickered in his peripheral vision… and then winked out. Inching closer, he used Omniscience again…and again…and twice more. These allowed him to understand the cemetery’s layout more clearly. The graves were clearly grouped into three sectors in a circle two hundred yards across, one sector prioritized by the diggers over the others. From above, the layout was shaped like the traditional radiation warning symbol. Cheater guessed the most interesting contents would be found in the center, further scanning confirming his suspicions.
A massive tomb was placed square in the middle of the formation—a crypt, rather, or even a mausoleum. As with the rest of the local architecture, it was constructed of huge, awkwardly-divided stones. Lined unevenly with smaller tombs, the main space was anchored by a rhomboid table, perhaps an…altar? Cheater had a hard time finding human analogues for what he found, alien features escaping proper description. Those grave robbers clearly picked the wrong target. Atop the table, a miniature object glinted in a frantic, fluttering rainbow dance, its panoply of colors impossible to miss.
The deceased excavation crew’s tools sat nearby, ready for the taking: two shovels, a pickax, and a crowbar. Nonetheless, Cheater balked at the thought of digging through a five-story building’s-worth of rock. Even on his healthiest days, he was no miner. Could Omniscience help? After all, the bodies’ resting places clearly hadn’t been positioned from above, and there were no signs that the rock between Cheater and the tomb had been excavated and filled in. Discovering the lowest level featured a horizontal passage, Cheater followed it, activating Omniscience every fifty paces. He lost an unfortunate amount of mana tracing it towards the fortress, of course, but made a valuable discovery in the process: the rising passage gradually opened into a room buried beneath his very own home base! He had been living just above the entrance to an underground cemetery. What was he to do about this new, deeply unsettling discovery?
Shaken and slightly unsteady, Cheater gathered his well water and returned to his lair to pick at a can of stew. As he thoroughly chewed each bite, his mind also masticated, gnawing through pros and cons. Cheater’s inventory was packed with treasures—why embark on a quest for more, its risks unknown? Did he need any more proof of his own idiocy? Did he want to keep testing his luck? On the contrary, he saw no tangible risks. He could strain his shoulder working the shovel, but that was it. Additionally, the deceased excavators were working out in the open, with naught but a simple camouflage net to protect them from their enemy. Cheater, however, would be staying safely within the fortress walls.
Omniscience helped him assess that he had three yards of digging to do. He would then somehow push his way through to the mausoleum itself. If he used the tools generously left by his advance team, he could likely complete this in a day; after all, consistent rest and his new food supply had strengthened him. The onl
y thing he risked losing was a little bit of time, if that. On the mend and waiting for March, Cheater had planned to stay in the fortress anyway—why not use his time productively? His pockets full of treasures hardly quenched his thirst for more. He smiled to himself in anticipation. Tomorrow, I dig!
Chapter 8
Life Nine. Grave Robber
Progress was tough at first. Cheater thankfully had the presence of mind to bandage his hands; his new skin was far too raw and tender for hard labor, and this labor was hard. His shovel was nearly useless at first, forcing him to resort to the crowbar and the pickaxe. As he progressed, the obstacle before him looked less like a collapsed structure and more like a man-made barrier designed to keep everyone out. The large stones were cunningly arranged, their bizarre notches and protrusions interlocking into a formidable barrier. With its unconventional geometry and intimidating complexity, it was beyond the forces of nature—likely the work of a mysterious alien architect. Its blocks fused together by gravity and time, the barrier was a mind-bending Tetris game.
Two hours of toil with his pickaxe and crowbar barely brought Cheater a half-yard deep, but he eventually reached ground pliant enough to swap in his shovel. This phase was less taxing but more tedious, as crushed sand and fine gravel kept pouring into the new spaces Cheater dug. On two occasions, Cheater was forced to battle Sisyphean cascades; still, he made steady progress. By noon, Cheater—beat, bloodied, cut, calloused—finally broke through to an open area. After spending a final hour widening and fortifying the passage, he adjusted his bandages…and steeled himself for Phase Two.
As expected, Cheater began by crawling. He wasn’t forced to wriggle like a worm, but the space was still pretty tight. He wasn’t fearful of a sudden cave-in, as the passage’s sturdy stonework would likely stand for centuries. Thank you, alien architects! The pitch black was unnerving, however, and Cheater’s Darkvision hardly helped. The last thing he needed was to trip and injure himself once more, so he whipped out his flashlight. He was in no danger of being seen, after all. The illuminated passage revealed nothing distinctly interesting, but Cheater couldn’t help nodding his respect to the builders. Their style appeared chaotic and confounding in its complexity, the tunnel an erratically-angled pipe improbably forced into bedrock. However, the method in their madness allowed the aging structure remained perfectly stable. Impressive. Marveling, Cheater moved for the burial chamber entrance, when…
…Danger! Minesweeper sense triggered! This sudden message startled Cheater to stop and drop by the doorway. Mere steps from the vertical graves, Cheater’s ability highlighted several stones on his path a violent red. Shaken, Cheater took a moment to examine these presumed traps from different angles. They were strange stones, perhaps ersatz ones…but Omniscience shed no light on the situation. He knew he shouldn’t step on them—he was no imbecile—but the consequences of doing so were unknown. Creeping carefully over the danger zones, Cheater once again marveled at the fact that his new ability had saved his neck twice in 24 hours. What were the odds? He’d yet to face a mine or trap on his journey, too. Was the System trying to prove the value of its gifts, in its own unnerving way? Then again, this might have just been coincidence, and no ancient tomb worth its salt would be free of traps. If anything, they boded well: built-in security meant treasure.
Cheater found it strange that the tomb was…anything but strange. It was perfectly ordinary by human standards, with vertical walls, an even arch and a sane adherence to symmetry. Against the backdrop of the local architecture, the space was abnormally normal. As everything he’d encountered thus far looked like a Rubik’s Cube’s fever dream, Cheater couldn’t help but find the dissonance unsettling. Curious. Odder still was the object resting on the table before him—the term “object” used loosely. This entity was an irregular blob of impenetrable smoke, an amoeba of mist suspended inches above the stone surface. It did not spread out, fall or rise; instead, it remained completely immobile. Cheater understood why his Omniscience scans pinpointed this shape most of all, as the object was literally otherworldly. The greater his examination, the lesser his elucidation, so Cheater squinted to activate inspect mode.
Essence of Mastery. An intangible artifact created by blind sages of the Shgrazqu from the final breath exhaled by the great blademaster Sqhmazazuo Tkree. Four times he won a great duel to the death, the event held under the skies of Teerqzi among the best fighters of all seven schools of the Shgrazqu. He was also the greatest spreader of seed among the fattest females of all neighbors of the Shgrazqu and a valiant warrior against the mountain robbers, from whom he plundered a great fortune in war. The legacy of Sqhmazazuo Tkree must not be interrupted. His mastery shall forever endure with the Shgrazqu.
Note: This is an artifact of an alien race whose lands have temporarily become a part of the Continent. Likely artifact properties: Consumable (disappears after use). Non-transferable (cannot be moved to another location, but can be used). Causes a significant change to your character. Note: Alien artifacts are unpredictable. Your character’s multipliers may suffer a reduction. If successful, this artifact is likely to give you a Swordsmanship ability. However, this will be an alien ability. Teerqzi anatomy, motor functions, and thinking patterns differ from human ones, which may lead to difficulties using and developing this ability.
Cheater heard legends of a player whose stupefying luck led them through ruins to something like this. It was rumored the player received a magical unarmed combat ability that allowed them to take down rafflers, tramplers, and even younger biters with their bare hands. They could dodge incoming attacks and packed mana-infused punches that blasted right through the infecteds. The creatures’ armor would look like tin cans of mincemeat when the player was through with them…or so the story went. Cheater doubted the tales, of course—the stables were rife with absurd yarns and general hyperbole—but he never quite shook them.
Players loved to twist tales like these to keep their secrets hidden, protecting their private knowledge through distortion. Knowledge was power—and all players feared losing power. Sure, they’d mete out tiny slices of wisdom in the form of beginner’s guides, basic pamphlets advertising the Continent’s bare necessities for survival. Moving past these novice guides required attentiveness, critical thinking and steel-trap retention. A successful player kept their ear to the ground, unraveling mysteries and asking the right questions. The System naturally tested these tendencies in every player upon every resurrection.
As Cheater gave the description a second pass, he knew his mind was already made up: he had to take this power. It came with an ominous warning, yes; still, Cheater couldn’t stop thinking about the legend of the fist-fighting power. That lucky player bravely took the power and never looked back. Why should Cheater’s own story differ? Puzzling over how to activate the power, Cheater reached out to experimentally graze the blob with his finger, when…
…BAM. He immediately regretted it. It felt as though he’d been standing on a stool that was suddenly, roughly kicked out from under him. His body collapsed without warning. Every muscle cramped up violently, right down to his tongue. His attempts to curse came out as heart-rending howls, their protracted echoes giving the tomb an asylum’s ambience. As the cramps grew worse, Cheater’s body twisted into ghastly knots, his joints—perhaps even his bones—bending in different directions. His fingers and knees and forehead slammed into the stones. His muscles un-cramped and cramped again in new and frightening orientations, again and again and again. Writhing like a corkscrew, Cheater struggled to regain control, struggled to think, struggled to breathe.
He wished that the fall had knocked him unconscious—anything was preferable to the hallucinations flashing before his eyes, as dark and tangled as the tomb. Steel streaked slashes as bright as the sun; blood of unnatural colors gushed out of inhuman, tentacled flesh. A flying head gnashed massive jaws and rolled its single wide eye. A monstrous, armored bear swiped its paw, a chunk of which was blown off. Whole cities swept
out before him, their layout incomprehensible. Gouts of red-hot lava cascaded off a precipice, beneath which dropped an army of thousands beneath a brutal hail of arrows. The fallen warriors’ bodies thickly carpeted the ground, layers upon layers collapsing. The living, the dead, the dying—all burst into flames, teeming towards the opposite bank. Steel blades crossed, clinked, sparked. Magnificent structures sprawled in non-Euclidean tangles. Swooning from the never-ending visions and cramps, Cheater felt scattered images sear into his memory. Finally, in an instant, they released him, sprawling on the cold stones dampened with his blood.
Note: You have learned the Swordsmanship of Great Master Sqhmazazuo Tkree, warrior of the race of Shgrazqu. Your stat modifiers have changed: +0.05x Strength, +0.1x Dexterity, +0.05x Speed, +0.05x Endurance, -0.2x Willpower, +0.05x Reaction. Your body has undergone a transformation, but not a mutation. You have significantly increased mobility in your joints, ligaments, and muscle fibers. Certain parts of your musculature have experienced intense development and the creation of optimized neural connections. Some changes to your physique were not possible within the confines of your anatomy, so be cautious when you use swordsmanship techniques tailored to the anatomy of the Shgrazqu. Remember that attempting the impossible may maim or even kill you. Please accept the System’s apology for this minor inconvenience.