He awoke with a start and was struck by a coughing fit due to the smoke and dust he had inhaled. He noticed the early morning light of the sun about to rise. His head hurt, and his chest burned. After feeling his forehead, he noticed the swelling from when he got bumped after the explosion. 'The explosion!' he thought, rising to his feet and turning his sight behind him to the charred remains of what was his home. All that was left of the best place he had ever called home just a few hours before was ash. That was like a gut punch, and he fell to his knees. His vision swam as tears filled his eyes.
All his effort from the previous night, the actions of a young man desperate to protect the only solace that existed in his relatively empty life, were reduced to nothing in his unconsciousness. The first sob came with a powerful shudder from his chest that spread across his whole body. He was now unstable both mentally, emotionally and physically and fell to his side into a foetal position and lay there sobbing harder than he had ever done in his life. The levels of despair were completely debilitating.
Leo was a bit of a walking contradiction. He possessed a natural wit and charm that could always endear him to people with his jokes and humour when he tried hard enough; however, he never tried to go the extra mile to actually establish an actual human connection with anyone his age outside of being recognised as the class clown most times. He turned humour into armour instead of a bridge which greatly left him in a pit of loneliness he could never understand.
The only solace and comfort he possessed was in the woman who raised him alone after she was kicked out by her parents after her unplanned pregnancy. It had always been the two of them against the world since day one. She never sought to correct him and his complexities and faults. She merely offered acceptance to it all and unconditional love. And what had he done? When she needed him most, he cowered, hiding as those monsters set the fires. The guilt blended with all his self-disgust and made him feel great pain.
All he loved was gone, and he was alone in a world he had already felt disconnected from even before the weirdness from the previous night happened. Monsters! The world was changing and was now beyond his comprehension, even in his more rational state of mind, let alone this grief-stricken state he was in now.
His tears ran out, yet he did not have the strength or the desire to get up once again. There was no point. 'I might as well die here, maybe there's an afterlife and I can see her once again,' he thought sadly as he lay there with tear stains on his face. Then he felt the thrum building up. He realised he had felt the thrum on the ground for a while now, but had not registered it. It had become more distinct then and he could hear it as well as feel it. A thudding sound in the distance.
A sudden roar finally roused his survival instinct. It seemed some small part of him deep inside still desired to live, and thus he rose to his feet and fully surveyed his neighbourhood in the light of the morning. His building was not the only one ruined in the neighbourhood, as he saw some other ones with broken windows or even large chunks completely ripped off by god knows what. He looked west towards the road to the shopping mall and saw them. A horde of the green creatures he had evaded the previous night.
They were marching as if on the way to war, and the sheer number of them was terrifying, and Leo was running in the opposite direction before he even realised it himself. He fled at the best speed he could manage in his condition, heading towards the woods that were left over for future development by the government. He didn't look back as he left the ashes of his home to be occupied as one of the first goblin settlements around the globe.
He tried to leave the more open places and find a place that was secretive enough for him to truly hide. He finally found a place with a nice vantage point for him, with a tree that was really green and had thick branches that could support him in the event that he needed to hide. He sat by the tree, catching his breath after running for a while in woodland terrain. He did not even know where the energy for all that running had come from, and he noticed how hungry he was at that moment.
In his hunger-filled, adrenaline-drained state, he was too out of sorts to think of things as analytically as he usually did, but he tried to calm himself to rationalise what to do. There had been too much weirdness for him so far, and most of these things happened while he was not awake first the previous day after school, and then when he got knocked out after the explosion, so he didn't possess adequate information.
He was not sure how mythical creatures started appearing all of a sudden. He was a fantasy fanatic as much as anyone and had entertained thoughts of mystical quests and isekai life for himself many times, but the reality was not as beautiful as his foolish imaginings. This was an invasion in every sense of the word. He deduced that the densely populated areas would be attacked first. He did not have his phone on him, which further aggravated him.
He planned to lie low until it got dark and stick to himself as he snuck into a place where he could access the internet or find other survivors in the cover of darkness. He lay back and tried to clear his thoughts and keep his mind from spiralling into remembering his loss. He finally fell asleep around noon.
[ "You know my son, the greatest achievement of my life was being your father," the middle-aged man said to him. The look of pride and love was quite evident in his eyes as he looked at him with his hands on his shoulder. His father had the strong build of a warrior with piercing black eyes that many claimed to swallow everything in his gaze. His brown skin radiated life with only a few crinkles around his eyes and slightly greying hair as the only indicator of his age range.
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He looked at his father with a respect that was in his very bones as he attentively listened to his words. This was the person he respected above all others in his existence, and it brought him great joy to know that the man was proud of him.
"Father, I dedicate this victory in your honour as with every one of my successes."
"The universe might judge me too greedy if I were to accept any more of your dedications as my own, my son," his father said with a slight curve to his lips. This usually meant he was about to mess with someone to those who knew him well. "It is a father's pleasure to simply watch as his son becomes a man and exceeds his glory and finally sprouts his own legacy."
Knowing his father was about to bring up looking for a bride once again, he smiled wryly and said," Father, I am still young; besides, we have lifetimes to do all the legacy sprouting ahead of us. For now, I'm simply content to have you, all my friends and my many contests of mettle and wit to give my life meaning."
"When I was your age, I was already quite the romancer, yet here you are squandering the looks you got from your old man. What am I to do with you, boy?"
"Careful, old man, I might just bring in a town of ladies knocking on our door just to show you just how I'm squandering my talents," he said with a wink. They stared at each other and burst into laughter. "Let us go and feast and be merry over your victory, my son, the charmer, then."
They headed into the banquet hall, where there was merriment and laughter as the many friends and family of the father and son duo were there already feasting without them, since their flair for delayed attendance and entry for such events was quite common knowledge. They were the type of men who were late to events they were hosting themselves.
As they entered and took their places, and the son sat, the father raised his goblet upward, and the whole gathering quietened. "I would like to thank you all gathered friends for coming to celebrate with me. You do me great honour beyond words. I once again ask your forgiveness for my fashionable lateness (this caused an eruption of laughter) and my sons as well (another bout of laughter with the son loudest of all). I would like to give this toast to my son, the divine sword. To his rise and success, may he be glory above all (echoed all across the room)."
As the son smiled, looking about the room, he felt a rush at the joy, he was sharing with all his friends and family. He spied her sitting beside one of his father's friends as she smiled while she talked to another young man he didn't recognise. She was beautiful with distinctive golden hair kept in place by an emerald circlet, which paled in lustre to the smile on her face in his opinion. He found himself watching her far longer than proper, and as if she felt it, she finally turned her attention from the young man beside her and connected gazes with him, and he felt a surge of electricity in his body. He was never one to be shy, but he quickly turned away.
He grabbed his goblet and drank from it, and looked into it as if trying to seem engrossed in it. That is when he noticed his reflection in it, and some sort of feeling of unnaturalness hit him. It was Leo who looked back at him. ]
Leo woke up groggily in the dark with tears streaming down his cheeks and felt as if he had travelled a long way. Something at the edge of his consciousness warned him of the importance of what he had dreamt, but already he barely remembered anything. By the time he was fully awake, the dream was fully purged as if by magic, and he wondered why he had been crying. It was now dark, he estimated it was around 8 pm as he cautiously moved to get out of the woods.
After travelling a while, he reached the edge of the woods on the opposite side from where he entered. This was supposed to lead to another nice neighbourhood, Willowborough, which was home to generally richer people. He knew a guy from school who lived here and considered looking him up. As he observed the street, he noticed that there were no monsters about. Willowborough had a local police branch to protect them, and that is where he decided to go.
As he walked around on his guard, that was when the weird beeping sound began…. It was loud, really loud and hard to pinpoint where it was coming from. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. After beeping for five minutes, a mechanical voice suddenly sounded out…..
This freaked Leo out beyond any level he'd been freaked out before. He fell on his butt and tried not to faint. 'System? What is that?' he thought to himself, completely clueless. 'Okay, don't tell me it is finally becoming an actual fantasy story now,' He thought incredulously.
After a few seconds, a large explosion of pain went through his mind as a large amount of information was suddenly transmitted into his head. It was a lot of things that would be hard to believe, and after the information was transmitted, a wave of pain began rolling through his body. There is pain at a surface level, such as burns and whatnot, and then there is what he felt. It was a molecular evolution of his cells as he became more than he already was.
He screamed with all that he had, and his screams were echoed all around him by people who had been hiding in buildings and trash cans and all manner of places. All around the world, humanity was changing, and it was changing through pain. Hours later, Leo finally awoke after passing out at some point in the torture.
He woke to find a holographic sheet in front of him,
[Leo August]
Life form: Awakened mortal
Classification: Superhuman
Level: 1
Basic Skills: none
Universe bestowal points: 10
Welcome to the path to eternity or despair, the test as well as the gift. Thank the grace of the gods, mere mortal, and entertain us.
As Leo registered all this, as well as all the new information that got flooded into his brain. He felt a myriad of emotions, fear, confusion, worry, but above all these, something burned even more out of the discovery of why he had lost everything. His anger rolled from within his core and spread out, making him shake and gnash his teeth. They would pay.