Side Chapter

The gremlin was a basic, standard monster, and it was aware of that. It knew this because when it had come into existence several weeks ago, like a suddenly cast shadow, it had been born with a comprehensive knowledge of what it was and how it came into being.

The knowledge made the gremlin extremely angry. They knew the anger was by design, because it was explicitly spelled out to them by The System, which only made them even more angry.

What was a monster? Imagine that underlying all of reality, at the very, very bottom, was a vast sea of pure probability. Infinite potential. Something that a highly sophisticated and advanced being like, say, The System, could fish into to produce one yottagram of some rare and unlikely material that only formed inside of a super-massive black hole, at the request of asshole Space Elves. It's like fishing for Tuna, but completely different.

Except, exactly like fishing, it wasn't an exact science. Sometimes, actually very often, The System pulled up some sort of terrifying, reality ending thing, and had to deal with it; because now it existed, whereas before it was mere probability. Even if The System successfully pulled up the yottagram of ‘whatever-the-fuckieum’, it was still covered in weird probability slime.

Basically, it was a messy process that produced industrial waste on a cosmic scale.

What to do? Obviously it was way too easy to just. . . reach into the infinite sea of probability to get anything and everything anyone could conceivably want ever, so stopping wasn't an option.

Thus, The World. It rendered the terrifying, reality ending thing into chunks, sifting through it via extremely complicated and esoteric math. It converted as much of the thing as possible into something positive and useful: loot, treasure, wonderful animals and plants and buildings. Strange and mysterious, wonderful and exciting, all as a result of that cosmic waste.

Eventually the math ran out, and the only thing left was a big chunk of bad. The glowing chunk of green stuff from a nuclear power plant that scientists still can’t figure out how to neutralize, kind of bad. So, The System carved that up too, rendering one big chunk of bad into as many small chunks as was possible. Dungeon Cores, cursed objects, and yes monsters, were a few of the many options available for disposing of a giant chunk of bad. The System had been doing this for a very long time and had perfected an endless number of templates to perfectly encapsulate the bad.

When the equation was balanced as much as it could be, The System pulled the trigger. At that point, everything came into existence all at once; the yottagram of whatever for the Space Elves; a bunch of valuable, random treasure for The World; and a horde of monsters that needed to be neutralized.

If The System had been able to pull it off, it would have simply had the monsters kill each-other. Wouldn't that have been convenient! The System dreamed of the day he'd be able to pull that bit of trickery off.

Unfortunately, The System couldn't just do whatever he wanted. He had to get the thing to agree to be processed, and he had never been able to get them to agree to a game in which they were guaranteed to lose. There had to be a chance, however small, of victory.

The monsters grew more powerful by advancing through various ranks and evolutions, while players grew more powerful by leveling up and obtaining powerful classes. The two groups generally chased each-other around with sharp objects, and the monsters generally got destroyed, eventually.

As far as The System was concerned, there was nothing wrong with this plan, and he'd come up with the perfect method for scamming free wishes out of reality. After all, whenever the Space Elves asked him to do something, he always took a cut.

All he needed was a disposable workforce that had no choice but to exist in a world filled with monsters and constant violence. In that, and only that, The System was grateful for the Space Elves using it as their first strike weapon against all their problems.

The gremlin knew all of this, and would rebel against its fate save for a simple reason; it was subject to the same biological drives as all other living creatures. It got tired; it got hungry; it got bored. Things were, typically, evil, so The System had made hurting non-monster creatures feel good. They considered that a kindness, one they never intended to repay.

So the gremlin trudged along the beach, looking forward to an evening in which he and his tribe would get their primitive and cruel kicks at the expense of the big-headed gray female, then eat her, and grow more powerful in their pursuit of the destruction of everything, everywhere, across all time.

The worst part was, this particular monster knew that he had once been a part of a Lovecraftian, planet sized mass of pure hatred, and he had been expertly reduced to several gremlins scattered across The World. Worse, was that The System had managed to convert most of him into treasure! He had been turned into the very tools that would be used to perpetuate this whole scam!

The gremlin spat, making sure to aim at the prisoner/dinner guest. At least the next generation of monsters wouldn't be burdened with this knowledge; they were currently growing in gross, easy to hate, vibrantly colored slime balls, and would be born in a more normal way. The System would still use their bodies as toxic waste barrels, but they wouldn't know. They would just be monsters.

The gremlin spat something in the language it had been born knowing, and the other freshly generated monsters nodded in agreement.

Reality was stupid, and they were going to break it.

–

It's worth mentioning that monsters didn't come exclusively from The System. Many of them formed naturally as a result of mana saturation, or were just plain old natural creatures who were total jerks.

There were also monsters that had been thrown into The System by the Space Elves, which generally fell under two types.

The first of which were the monsters they found in their exploration/conquest of the universe. The Empire would constantly stumble upon planets that had destroyed themselves through some disaster of advanced technology mixing with warfare. The Empire would send whatever genetic, robotic, or trans-dimensional horror the native species had failed to tame straight into The System.

Then, there were the monsters the Space Elves created for fun in a lab, strapped a trans-dimensional antenna and broadcaster to, and threw into The System for entertainment value. There were a few competing shows in The Empire, but watching The World was a galactic pastime for the Space Elves; it was a classic reality show, and was never going to be canceled.

The World was full of monsters, but only the most naive of fools would ever try and reason with them.