Yaz never believed in fate. Life was a sequence of calculated choices, risk assessments, and expected outcomes. That was as clear to him as any other fact. There was solace in predictability. While many sought the thrill of spontaneous decision-making, chasing careers filled with uncertainty or indulging in all that life had to offer, Yaz had no interest in such things. His world was structured, monotonous. Wake, work, relax, repeat. He preferred it that way. From an early age, he realized he was different. Not in a bad way—just different. The allure of parties, drinking, and casual flings never held the same appeal for him as they did for others. That didn’t mean he lacked meaningful relationships, but maintaining a social presence always felt like an obligation rather than a desire. Something he endured, rather than enjoyed. After high school, he pursued a degree in accounting. It made sense. Numbers followed rules, patterns—there was no chaos, only logic. If the shoe fits, wear it. During college, he developed a passion for collecting trading cards. There was something therapeutic about it—opening packs, sorting through the bulk, meticulously arranging them in binders, tracking the collection. It was a controlled hobby, one that offered both structure and satisfaction. He was materialistic in that way, despite his religious inclinations. But college came and went. He graduated, landed a position at the firm he had interned at, and settled into a rhythm that most would consider suffocating. Work, gym, games, collecting—week after week, month after month. To outsiders, it was a purposeless existence, devoid of excitement or ambition. To Yaz, it was perfection. No risk. No stress. He invested in retirement, paid his bills on time, saved diligently. His projected retirement age was 57, and that was without factoring in promotions or increased earnings. No needless spending, no unnecessary relationships. Life was simple. Life was good.
He glanced over at the clock on his nightstand. 11:37 PM. He exhaled slowly, stretching his arms. His body ached from hours of poor posture, but the numbers were right. His reports balanced. Another day, another fraction of existence chipped away in the grand game of life. Yet, something gnawed at the back of his mind…
Was this it?
He was secure, free from stress, filled with routine and stability. No attachments, no obligations beyond his work. By every metric he considered, he had won the lottery – a life free of uncertainty, just as he had always wanted. So why did he feel like something was missing? The hum of his phone vibrating on the desk pulled him from his thoughts. He paid it no mind as he stood up and began packing his things. He closed his laptop, unplugged it and put both it and his mouse in his backpack. He grabbed his water bottle, and lunchbox, still full of food he had overpacked in the event that he decided to stay overnight at the office. He put on his coat and grabbed his gym duffle, then began to make his way out of the office. Laden with bags and accessories, he made his way to the elevator. Stepping out onto the bottom floor of his building, he walked toward the door and into the empty city streets, bathed in the cold glow of flickering streetlights. The clod night air bit at his skin as he walked toward the parking garage where he parked his truck. A distant siren wailed, then silence. Nothing unusual, especially considering where his office was located. Out of nowhere, Yaz was overcome with a sense of oddity. Something felt…off. Yaz quit walking, thinking that maybe someone was following him, he checked over his shoulder. The streets were empty, he was definitely there alone. Then, the sky shifted.
It was subtle at first – a flicker, a distortion at the edge of his vision. But as he stared upwards, the stars vanished, replaced by a vast, unknowable emptiness. He took one step back, all senses of urgency firing in his head at once. He was frozen with indecision. His phone was vibrating in his coat pocket, aggressively. He didn’t know what possessed him to look at it given the situation, but this time, he looked.
| System Initialization: Complete. Integration Commencing.
Everything around him turned a blinding white, as if something ha detonated right in front of him. A loud piercing sound reverberated in his ears, he went to scream but nothing left his mouth. His fear was mounting, his senses were overwhelmed. Then nothingness took him.
Yaz awoke to pain.
Not the dull ache of exertion or the sting of fresh wounds – this was much deeper, a fundamental pain was the only way that he could describe it. He felt as though his entire body had been unraveled and stitched back together again with a wiry thread and a rusted needle. He groaned, rolling on his side and opened his eyes, blinking furiously. Only then did he notice the notifications appearing in his vision.
[System Integration Complete.] [Assigning Parameters…]
His breath caught in his throat as he went to curse. It hadn’t been a dream, it couldn’t have been. Pain and visions were never this clear there. Unless he was ill. Was he hallucinating? Had he finally lost it? He looked up and despite the crystalline blackness that was there merely moments ago, it now split open, an unnatural red. A surge of strength flooded his veins – it all felt too real to be a dream.
[Welcome to the Genesis]
Lines of text unfolded in front of his eyes, crisp and clear, carrying a weight that made no sense as they appeared to be apparitions. Yaz sat up, blinking away his dizziness as a series of windows popped into view.
[Name: Yaz] [Race: Human] [Level: 1] [Class: Unassigned]
[Attributes:] Strength: 10 Mind: 8 Dexterity: 7 Endurance: 7 Intelligence: 9 Arcane: 0 Vitality: 10
[Skills:]
- Echo of the Forsaken
[Status Effects:]
- System Assimilation (Temporary Fatigue)
He froze as his mind raced. This made no sense and defied every conventional belief he’d ever held. He rapidly brainstormed what could have possibly happened, there was simply no plausible explanation for everything that had happened up until this point. He was a religious man, sure, but even that could not explain away his experiences. Heaven didn’t have a bright red sky. The scent of grass filled his nose. Grass? There was no grass outside his office. His fingers curled into the dirt beneath him, the sensation grounding him in reality. His eyes flicked back to the floating text. Stats. Attributes. Skills. It was a framework ripped straight from a game, something he had spent countless hours engaging with for fun – but this wasn’t fun. It was real. He had Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, even skills. His mind struggled against it, trying to rationalize or disprove, but the evidence was right in front of him. And it was irrefutable. An Arcane attribute? As in, magic? There were so, so many questions. Yet, regardless of circumstance or reasoning, there was a single truth at the heart of the matter, that being a radical change had just occurred and he needed to adapt. He did not know the scale, or if he was the only one affected, but what he did know is that he needed to figure out what the fuck was going on, and quickly. He sat up, ignoring the pain, and began to think. He was in an open plain, the grass around him reaching high enough to go maybe halfway up his thigh. There was a circle of hard, dirt ground that he appeared to have landed on after “assimilating”, which is what he mentally called the event as he began determining what to do. He read his stat window again, making a mental note of the skill that he had.
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[Skills:]
- Echo of the Abyss
“Echo of the Abyss..?” he muttered under his breath, almost laughing at how ominous it sounded. Abyss? What? Abyss sounded so… sinister. He had been a law abiding citizen his entire life and had no idea why the skill was titled that way, but he didn’t meander on the details. He needed to figure out what it did. He reached his hand up and made to touch the screen, but his hand just phased through, and no explanation prompted. He sat, thinking.
“Echo of the Abyss!” he shouted.
Still, nothing. The screen didn’t budge. His face held a light red tinge from embarrassment, but it was quickly wiped away as clearly no one was around to hear him. Thinking a skill explanation would not drop down, he just sat there and began try to deduce the skill’s effects based on its title, when suddenly, a window dropped down.
[Echo of the Abyss (Mythic-Perfected)]
The echoes of those defeated come to you. This skill tethers you to those who have lost, assimilating their remnants into your own being.
Effects:
Grants Echo Consumption. Grants resistance to mind-affecting skills and illusions. Enhances all skills with an absorption effect that belong to the user or are granted by weapons or armaments.
Echo Consumption – Enemies that you have killed will leave behind a Fragment, that when consumed grant stat boosts that allot pro rata according to the stat distribution of the enemy felled. Fractional points accumulate but do not provide a boost until they reach a full stat point.
Current Absorption Rate – 0.5%
“Holy word vomit,” Yaz said out loud. He didn’t even know what to make of the text that was in front of him. It wasn’t even that long, but he couldn’t even begin to wrap his head what it meant. It was all simply too new to him. It seemed like the skill only worked if he killed someone. That was insanity, to kill? Throughout his entire life he had not even committed a traffic violation, and yet the system gave him a skill that expected him to kill people? He didn’t even know what to think. It sounded insane. To kill? To take something from the aftermath? He was expected to - No. He wasn’t a murderer. I need to worry about something else, that skill is just ridiculous, Yaz thought to himself, and he noticed that when he quit thinking about the skill, the popup went away. Interesting. He noticed that since he’d arrived in this new location, all he’d thought about were the weird stat window that had popped up in front of him. He intentionally let his mind wander, thinking about the work that he was doing right before he’d been whisked away, and suddenly the stat window vanished too. Nifty. The window pop-ups were related to his focus on them, it seemed a little too intuitive for his tastes but it’s all that he had to go on for now so he would work with it. He looked around and began to take stock of his surroundings. All he saw was grass, it wasn’t very tall but because he had still yet to stand up he had no idea what was really around him. Maybe I should make sure something isn’t going terribly wrong around me before I get to caught up in this, he thought to himself. He took his backpack off, noticing his lunch box and gym duffle were off to the side. Perfect, I have food too. God bless an over prepared workaholic. He put his bag between his legs and reached inside, pulling out his concealed carry. A Canik Mete MC9, his favorite carry. He didn’t wear it on his person when he was in the office, but he was too paranoid to simply not carry protection at all times. He quickly checked and ensured the firearm was loaded, he had no reserve ammunition so he would need to be careful in situations that called him to use his firearm. He leaned forward into a crouch, pointing the muzzle of his firearm down as he slowly raised his head above the grass when he noticed that he was totally alone. The plains were wide, very wide. But not infinite. There was a tree line in the distance, to some forest. Although more concerning, and something that made a pit form in his stomach, were the wildlife surrounding him in the area. He had never seen anything like them before, and they definitely weren’t from Earth.
“Holy fucking shit," he said to himself.
A massive creature wandered the plains. A towering beast with obsidian-plated limbs and a ridged spine of molten amber trudged across his vision, each step carving deep furrows into the untouched ground. It had six glowing eyes that swept over the land as it moved its head from side to side. Intense fear immediately washed over Yaz. A gun would not stop this behemoth. Not the one that he had anyway. He wasn’t confident that he could kill an elephant pre-assimilation, much less the creature before him. He quickly ducked down as the fear took hold. He was careful not to make a sound. He quickly racked his head on what to do, the creature had to be around 7-8 feet tall, and he had no idea if it was hostile or not. And he had no intention of finding out. He needed shelter, he needed safety, and he needed it quickly. Yaz began rummaging through his two bags, condensing all of his necessities into his backpack and abandoning his gym duffle. He kept his laptop and phone, because although there was no reception, he still didn’t have a full grasp of his current situation and wouldn’t discard them until he was sure they were worthless. His immediate thought was a break into the forest. He didn’t know how fast the thing was, and so despite having no clue what awaited him in the forest, he did a quick risk analysis before determining a break for the tree line was his best option. If he was facing the tree line straight on, the behemoth was at his 3 o’clock. With his possessions in tow, he began creeping through the grass on his knees, hoping to stay just underneath their height as he made his way into the trees.
After several painstaking minutes, he had finally made it to the trees. Thankfully, he did not have to face off with a giant within mere moments of being thrown into this new world. He noted no immediate threats and tried to make a plan of action. What was he supposed to do? Where was he supposed to go? He had no survival skills besides some camping trips in his teenage years. There was simply never a need in modern society, how he regretted that now. If his father had been here, he would have a much better bearing on what to do next. As he mulled over potential ideas, a sharp cry echoed in the distance. From what he could tell, it was not a creature, but a human. He thought of the potential dangers, but realized he needed to find a group. It was possible that some people had brought with them more supplies than Yaz had, or that maybe there were some with more experience in unreliable situations. Yaz sprinted toward the sound, weaving through the debris in the forest. He had yet to hear the scream again but kept running toward the direction he had heard earlier. He thought that maybe he went the wrong direction, when finally, he heard another scream. It was a woman, and she wasn’t far. Palming his firearm, he began to hear rustling when he slowed down. He peered out from behind a tree, his stomach twisting. A wolfish creature was awkwardly surrounded by a group of men while some women were huddled off to the side, holding each other. The monster was issuing a low growl from its maw, blood dripping from its maw. After a quick assessment of the situation, he noticed someone leaning against a tree, blood dripping from his forearm and his face a pale white. Yaz clenched his fist. Turning away was an option, as far as he was aware no one knew that he was spectating this disaster. But he also recognized that he didn’t know what to do next in this new world. He could brainstorm, sure. But his only real lead were the people in front of him. He took his backpack off and laid it against the tree, then leaned his shoulder against the tree as he gripped his gun with both hands. If this gets me killed, I’m going to be seriously pissed, Yaz thought to himself.