Error messages spilled forth.

//A MOCKERY OF THE SYSTEM ITSELF

//HOW AMUSING

The error messages piled up in the text box, and I only managed to see two real messages mixed in among them. Whatever was talking to me seemed to approve of my tactics, so I took that as encouragement that I’d at least made an interesting choice. I watched as all of my armor slots were filled with simple gear, then moved my finger over to the blinking blue square in the top right corner of my interface.

//A GIFT FOR THE ONE WHO BRINGS INTEREST TO AN EMPTY VOID

//NULL WILL TRANSFORM THE TRINKET

//IF YOU CHOOSE TO BEAR IT

“That’s new.” I laughed, shooting a glance over at Jimmy to see if he was done with his interface yet. Seeing his blank yet focused stare was still in place, I pressed on the trinket to read its description. “Let’s see what the lottery gave me.”

(Crafted,Rare) Sigil of Amplification. Required Core Mastery to equip: 1

Increases Battery by [2]/4/6/8

All functions that drain Battery have all their effects increased and battery drain reduced by [2]/4/6/8%

Upgrades at Item Mastery [1]/5/10/15

Item Mastery? I’d never heard of that before. And what was this about the item upgrading? Everything else I’d ever equipped had a Core Mastery equip requirement, a stat bonus, and maybe a passive or active function. But they’d never upgraded themselves. This had to be another aspect of the system that had been purposefully excluded last time.

I pressed the button underneath the text description and found myself holding a metal ring that fit perfectly in my palm. Inside the ring were two glass tubes shaped like a plus sign that held filaments inside, like the ones found in incandescent light bulbs, but they weren’t glowing at the moment. These things had to be activated by armor, then they’d run on the ambient power of the core that was in my chest.

Nine presses and three tutorial confirmations later, I was staring at a stat screen with far fewer error messages.

//Sebastian Cormier: 21 year old Human Male

//Core: //NULL

//Equipment

//(Shoddy,Common) Helmet of Resilience

//(Shoddy,Common) Chestpiece of Battery

//(Shoddy,Common) Gauntlet of Power x2

//(Shoddy,Common) Arm of Speed x2

//(Shoddy,Common) Legs of Recovery

//(Shoddy,Common) Boot of Speed x2

//(Crafted,Rare) Sigil of Amplification

//Core Stats

//Mastery: 3 //Hazard: 1 //Health: 51

//Armor Stats

//Battery: 4 //Speed: 5 //Power: 3 //Resilience: 2 //Recovery: 2

//Core Functions

//NULL

//Armor Functions

//Minor Passive Amplification

//Inventory

//NULL

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Glad that loophole’s still open. Not that this thing’s gonna give me that much of an advantage.”

With one more thought I equipped my armor, feeling the cold embrace of empty space wrapping itself around my body as it was created. I looked down at my hands to see extremely dark blue metal wrapped over a faintly glowing inner layer of milky white, shifting under my armor like a constant river of energy.

Until my battery ran out, I was completely immune to any permanent harm inside this armor. I could get cut in half, and as long as I got treatment before my battery ran out, I’d live like nothing ever happened. Life support was only one of the functions of the armor, but when I had to push myself to the brink, it was by far the most used.

The rest of my armor was simplistic like my gauntlets; deep blue interlocking plates that showed some of the milky white energy underneath. I snapped the sigil onto my chestplate, right over where my heart used to be, and felt the slightest rush of adrenaline. I might have underestimated what the sigil would do for me, since when I checked my stats again, it showed that literally everything was being boosted by 2%.

“Not bad for something so low-level.” I mused, waving away my interface and looking over at Jimmy. Who was, in turn, staring at me through his helmet. “Like what you see?” I said with a grin, flexing my muscles that wouldn’t show through the armor at all.

“Why’s yours blue and white and mine’s red and orange?” He asked, gesturing at me and then back at himself. “Except for my sweet chestpiece, we look exactly the same but painted different colors. And whatever doohickey you’ve got stapled to your chest, I guess.”

That was something I’d wondered myself the first go-around, but it had become obvious once I met two people that had been assigned the same core. “It’s your core. It makes your armor the color it is, and sometimes actually changes the shape of it. But we’d have to be a helluva lot stronger before that happens.”

“Oh, yeah, that makes sense.” Jimmy nodded. “Mine’s called a ‘Furnace Core’, so that’d explain all the orange, red, and fire. What’s yours?”

I paused. When I’d checked my stats, the space where my core was supposed to be had been blank. I felt like that shouldn’t have been possible, since I was standing here in brand new armor, but the interface didn’t lie. “I don’t know if it’s right, but my core's called, uh, ‘slash slash NULL’. But the slashes are the ones you’d type on a keyboard, and the NULL’s in all caps for some reason.”

“Cool.” Jimmy said, already not paying attention to me. “How do you get anything in your inventory? It just says ‘empty’ under mine.”

“Maybe try picking shit up?” I sighed, hefting my pack over my shoulder. The sky was cracking more by the second, and I wasn’t going to be caught unaware this time. I wasn’t going to risk putting my pack into my inventory with a power stat of only three, since everything stored within the armor weighed three-times as much as if I carried it myself. “Look up, Jimmy. It’s starting.”

The cracks in the sky pulled apart to reveal a massive stain of emptiness beyond them, and from the emptiness came ruin. The wind began blowing harder than any tornado, ripping away any living matter but leaving behind anything inorganic, like the building we were standing on. Or us, now that we were in our armor. Jimmy screamed something in Italian about God, falling flat on his ass and scooting away from the railing as the earth was scoured clean of all life within mere seconds.

“What the… what the FUCK?!” Jimmy cried, stumbling to his feet and leaning over the railing. “All those people… are they dead? Are they gone? What the hell is going on?”

“The razing.” I said plainly, pushing down the lump in my throat as I watched the few armored figures on the street below wandering about aimlessly among the freshly scoured thousands. “It was strangely peaceful at first. Nobody suffered, just spontaneous non-existence. It’s everyone that’s left that has to deal with the aftermath.”

Jimmy slammed his hand against my shoulder. “What the hell are you talking about? People just died! That’s not fucking peaceful!”

Half of me said that Jimmy was right. But the other half knew exactly what was coming. I stared up at the cracks, watching as what looked like glass shards flaked off the edges and were sucked into the gaping holes.

Lightning slammed into the building next to us, exploding in a spray of glass shards as if it had broken a thousand windows on impact. The glass bolts were the second onslaught of the razing, and sent to make everyone accept the popup that appeared in the corner of my vision.

“Your world has ended.” Jimmy read in a shaky voice, backing away from me and looking around in panic. “Salvation is not coming. But there is a chance, should you choose to accept it.”

The sound of Jimmy disappearing let me know he’d taken that chance, just as I had last time. This time, however, I wanted to see the true end of my world. I’d heard stories of monsters eating oceans and the land turned to towering spires of black sand, miles-long serpents of bone and magma circling them like birds around skyscrapers.

Another glass bolt shattered behind me, sending a weak shock through my armor that did nothing but force me to turn around. A massive scorch mark and crater filled most of the roof, parts of it falling through to the apartments underneath, and filling said crater was an abundance of glass beads. Small like ball-bearings and glowing with a spark of violet electricity.

After a thorough look as more bolts crashed down in the distance, I noticed something gleaming in the exact center of the crater. “Huh. Maybe the bolts do something for me after all.” I said, walking forward as beads shattered and cracked with electricity under my feet. I felt the electricity lapping at my ankles the more beads I shattered, and by the time I stood over the thing in the crater, it felt like I was standing in a raging river of static electricity.

I reached down to pick up the spiky glass bauble, wrenching thin spikes free from the ground with a grunt of effort. “Well you aren’t fragile at all, are you?” I said to the thing that looked like a blown-glass sea urchin, a core of violet electricity sending periodic sparks out to the end of each spine. “Let’s see if you are what I think you are.”

//INITIATE ANALYSIS

//WORKING…..

I flinched back at the sudden message that wrapped around the glass urchin, a band of text that orbited it like one of Saturn's rings. Then another popped up. And another. And another. They kept popping up until I could barely see the urchin through the //WORKING notifications, then as quickly as they’d shown up, they froze. And changed into something else.

//ANALYSIS COMPLETE

//DISPLAYING FOUND INFORMATION:

The found information was delivered to me as a glass slate that hovered above the glass urchin.

“Crystallized Finality: Tri-Power compound. When destroyed by a core that matches one of the compound’s types, it grants one core node. Will not function if the core already has [???] or greater nodes.” I read, then frowned. There was no mention of any core types to be found. Was I supposed to break it and hope it worked for me? And how many nodes were there in ???

The constant shattering became a cacophony, and I turned my head skywards to see that the entire sky was now filled with falling glass bolts. They were falling in slow-motion, so much so that I could see the color of electricity captured inside each and every one of them. As I ran for cover I tried to track where a blue or white bolt looked like it would be landing, but there were far too many of them.

When the next warning came, I learned that all the stories I’d heard had been lies. This one wasn’t in the form of the slash-slash errors that seemed to be talking specifically to me, but in a system-wide notification that came with a countdown that put a hard limit on my remaining time on Earth.

“Hazard level of EARTH has been raised to 1. In [11H 59M 48S] EARTH’s Hazard level will be increased by 1. See the provided information on Hazard levels for further information.”

I didn’t need to open the attachment to know how hazard levels worked. If my Hazard level was lower than wherever I was, I’d be forcibly removed and sent to the closest ‘safe zone’. There were some numbers behind the scene that I didn’t quite understand that let people go into hazards if their own hazard level wasn’t high enough, but I’d never risked it. On-level hazards were dangerous enough.

As I ran down the stairs, I heard the constant popping of glass beads coming from above me. Either they were designed to burst after a short time, or there was something following me. I opened the window that gave me the option to leave Earth at the press of a button for insurance purposes and burst into the lobby, where shattered windows and glass beads had congregated to leave a perfect floor for something that floated instead of walking.

Which was exactly what the thing that slowly turned towards me was doing.