I barely recognized what stared back at me. Two white-blue bloodshot eyes with dark circles underneath that made me look almost like a raccoon followed my every move, reality slowly dawning on me while the implications bothered the hell out of me. I felt a gut that was almost big enough to rest a drive-thru cup on and remembered the reason why I’d grown this itchy and annoying beard in the first place.

“God damn it, not again.” I muttered, reaching for the electric clippers that I kept locked in my drawer since Jimmy’s ‘personal use’ incident. “It took me twenty years to get my health stat up to 100%, and now I’m a fatass again.”

Another message popped up where the error had been, telling me just how right I’d been.

//HEALTH STATISTIC: 51%

//AT THE CURRENT PACE, HEALTH WILL FALL TO 50% IN 6 DAY(S)

I froze. I distinctly remembered my health stat being 51% when the razing started, pulling everyone into a brand new hellscape as Earth was scoured clean and wiped away in cosmic winds. And I knew I wasn’t going to suddenly have a change of heart and start eating healthy, especially not with exams so close.

Exams that were cut short by the razing.

“Was any of that real?” I wondered, even as the message was fading. “Maybe I’m still dreaming. Those sleeping pills do fuck me up pretty badly.”

//YOU ARE NOT DREAMING

//IGNORANT FOOL

So I wasn’t dreaming. And the system messages were insulting me. Wonderful. “If I’m not dreaming, then how the hell did this happen? I’m fucking fifty, and I look as fat as I did before I got sent to the new world.”

No response from the error messages, but my vision flickered and shuddered as what looked like a bent pane of translucent blue glass knit itself into the world. I remembered this. But last time, the glass was pitch-black with purple cursive writing for all of my stats. This one was just… blank.

“Jesus Christ!” Jimmy, my roommate, screamed from the other room; a sound like metal crunching and gears whirring accompanying another slew of curses from my roommate. “I’m fucking Iron Man!”

Footsteps rapidly approached the wall behind me. “No, no, no!” I yelled, falling to the floor as Jimmy burst through the wall in a spray of porcelain shards and freezing cold water. Our shower didn’t survive first contact.

“Look, Sebastian! I’m fucking Iron Man!” Jimmy whooped with joy, slamming his hands against his chest like the gorilla he certainly wasn’t. Where I was chunky, he was beyond skinny. Even the armor around him looked like it hadn’t eaten in a week, dull red ribs vibrating over a swirling mass of deep orange flames caged in glass. “Flaming Iron Man! But, uh, not that kind of flaming. The real fire kind of flaming. Not the… gay… actually, I guess that works too.”

I looked him up and down, noting that all but the chestpiece of his armor was the generic freebie everyone was given if they didn’t assign their starting wealth. “Did you spend all your credits on one single chestpiece?”

Jimmy paused, and I could imagine the guilty look under his helmet. With the impulse control my roommate had, it was a blessing he’d never gone for anything harder than weed and vodka.

“How do you know about the credits?” Jimmy whined, most of the wind taken out of his sails with one well-placed sentence. “The system told me I was number seventy-one. Out of… everyone.”

//YOU ARE //NULLVALUE

//EXCUSE ME. YOU ARE NUMBER 0

“I’m number seventy.” I lied. “I bet it hit our room and did whatever the hell it did to us at the same time.” I pushed myself to my feet, careful to avoid cutting myself on shards of mirror and porcelain. “We need to get moving. The razing’s coming, and we don’t want to be inside when it hits.”

“The what?” Jimmy asked, his armor disappearing to reveal his bony face and perfect chin. He looked at me with the same confused expression that he always had when he came home drunk at eight in the morning and found me getting ready for class. “The razing? What’s that, Seb? …Seb? SEB!?”

I wasn’t in anything like a hurry, but my memories were starting to jumble together and form one confusing soup. Just yesterday, I’d been fighting the final hazard in a world that wasn’t this one. But yesterday was also the day I’d sat in front of my laptop all day, watching some pirated movie and eating frozen pizza to distract myself from the massive amounts of studying I’d have to do over the weekend.

And the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go back. Finish that hazard and see what the hell happened when we cleared it. But apparently that wasn’t going to happen, and all the awful shit I went through to get there was about to happen again.

“It’s all about to go to shit.” I said as Jimmy poked his head over my shoulder. “We don’t have much time, since it doesn’t look like everything’s going like the… system told me. It’s supposed to happen in a few days, but it looks like it's happening today.”

//RECOMMENDATION: ASSIGN YOUR OWN CREDITS

“Not now.” I muttered, going from drawer to closet as I looked for my backpack. I eventually found it strung up on the ceiling fan, sitting on top of one of the blades. I shot Jimmy a withering look, and he had the decency to wither away to start packing a bag of his own. “Clothes, water, and pre-packaged food only, Jimmy.”

“Okay!” Jimmy called, a crash echoing out from the kitchen.

I shook my head and sighed. There was no way Jimmy wasn’t filling half of his pack with beer right now, but I didn’t feel like stopping him. If people were getting their system access almost a week before I remembered, the razing could happen any minute now.

Fifteen minutes later, Jimmy and I leaned against the railing on the roof of our building. He’d taken less beer than I’d thought, and he’d packed it in a solar-powered cooler I didn’t know he had. So I only grumbled at him for two minutes, instead of the ten I’d planned.

“The sky is broken.” Jimmy muttered for the fifth time, staring blankly up at the fractures that were spreading through the sky like the spider-webbed cracks from a rock hitting a windshield. “How is the sky broken? Why am I Iron Man? And why aren’t you freaking out?”

I shrugged. Half of me was freaking out, but the other half dismissed those feelings and put urgency in their place. These memories were going to take a whole lot of getting used to.

“The system explained everything to me.” I lied, feeling the wind on my face and at the back of my head at the same time. “But it didn’t tell me it was happening today. I thought we’d have a little more time, you know? Give us time to get used to our armor so we don’t die right away.”

Jimmy was uncharacteristically quiet while he stared up at the sky, and a quick check showed that his eyes were following something that I couldn’t see. I figured he was playing with his interface, assigning values to his nodes, and reading all the descriptions of whatever his core function was. I scratched my face and glanced down to where all the error messages came in from, and decided that now was probably the last safe time for me to initialize my interface.

I pictured that blue glass screen and blinked. Suddenly my interface was in front of me, the curved pane of blue glass displaying only a single message spread over two lines centered slightly above the middle of the screen.

//Welcome back, Sebastian Cormier. Press the square below to continue.

//ERROR: OBSIDIAN CONUNDRUM NOT FOUND

If I needed confirmation that the embodiment had stolen my core, that was it. And that had to be the reason I was seeing all these error messages. But then… why didn’t Jimmy remember everything? We’d cleared a couple of hazards together before going our separate ways, so he should have at least some memories of the other world.

I pressed on the error message and watched as a screen filled with text scrolled by, a mess of random letters, numbers, and symbols falling out of sync with each other like a digital waterfall. It went on for a handful of seconds before turning completely blank, then flashing blue as new text filled the screen.

//Sebastian Cormier: 21 year old Human Male

//Core: //NULL

//Equipment

//NULL

//Core Stats:

//Mastery: 3 Hazard: 1 Health: 51

//Armor Stats

//Battery: 1 Speed: 1 Power: 1 Resilience: 1 Recovery: 1

//Core Functions

//NULL

//Armor Functions

//NULL

//Inventory

//NULL

I swiped my stats away to get at the text box underneath it, one that glimmered along the edges specifically to catch my attention. I pressed on it to make the text larger, then began reading it to myself. I mostly remembered how to do this, but I wasn’t about to make any stupid mistakes. Not like last time when I’d spent all my credits on gear I replaced within the week.

//Welcome, user, to the chronal relocation program. Your universe has become unstable due to unforeseen circumstances regarding outworld entity activity, and as such your species will be placed on a giga-planet that is suitable to house the carbon-based species that you belong to.

That was brand new. The first time I’d done this, I’d been told that I was being pulled away from a meteor crashing into the planet. Even as I watched the sky crack, I’d believed that it was all thanks to that approaching doom. Since this time seemed to be real, I guess whoever was in charge of this system had no reason to lie.

I scrolled the window down with a worried frown and kept reading.

//You have been granted a one-time gift of twenty-five credits that will be removed the moment you close the shop. Tap here [---] to open the shop, where further instructions will be given.

The rest of the text was blurred and illegible, probably to force me to open the shop and continue the text chain. I didn’t have any reason not to, so I pressed on the glowing rectangle and watched as my interface shifted once more.

//For the purpose of this tutorial, you will not have access to the entirety of the shop’s wares. Make your selections wisely, as your currency is–

I dragged the text box out of the way of the shop, which on my new interface was completely text-based. My old core had shown me pictures as well as descriptions, which had tempted me into buying the more expensive stuff last time. Just like Jimmy had. But this time, I wanted to test something out.

Before, when I’d bought my starting equipment, I’d only had two credits left. Not enough to buy the cheapest chestpiece, which was three credits even. But when I’d closed the shop, all of my equipment slots had been filled. The chestpiece was the exact same three-credit piece I’d passed over, and there was a box in the corner of my vision telling me that the two remaining credits had been transformed into a random item with a 2% chance of being something valuable.

One percent per unspent credit. I swiped my hand through the shop to get the exit button to appear, and pressed it without a second thought.