After I ripped off the lizard’s head, I took the kitchen knife that he had stabbed deep into my upper arm and skinned him. It wasn’t easy work, and the scales that covered his thick hide made the work even harder. Yet, in a few short minutes, I parted the lizardman from his hide and scraped it free of flesh and fat. A few cuts and incisions later I had made a serviceable, albeit rather uncomfortable, loincloth. This action earned me the [Apprentice Leatherworker] profession. Level 0 had earned me the [Basic Skinning], [Basic Tanning], and [Simple Leatherworking] skills. Using those skills I was able to further form, fit, and preserve the loincloth I had made into a much more serviceable item of clothing. This earned me level 1 in [Apprentice Leatherworker] which in turn gave me the skill [Flay].

[Flay] turned out to be an unsightly skill, as I soon had to learn. I had heard the shouts and screams coming from outside the diner ever since I awoke. It wasn’t too long before they invaded my sanctuary.

Three muscled green orcs burst through the glass double doors in the front of the diner and were on me before I had the chance to do more than grab the large kitchen knife. Each was as strong as a bear and buck ass naked. Two were males with short cropped thick hair and the third was an equally muscled brute of a female. One held a broken bottle, another held a tire iron, while the woman came at me with bare fists.

Their attacks hurt. Broken glass scraped my skin, tire iron and fists bruised my flesh. But for every hurt I got, I returned a hundredfold. When my knife met their skin, huge swaths parted from the flesh. Where I knew my attack should have left a long shallow cut along the backside of one of the orc’s arm and hand, it instead neatly parted the skin from the arm in an area many times as wide as the thin cut I left in the red meat of his arm.

The fight didn’t last long. When the orcs entered the diner they had wicked confident smiles and had grunted loud words filled with deadly intent. However, their confidence quickly turned into screams of pain whenever my blade met their skin. As the last orc, the female, laid on the ground trying to press the better part of the right side of her face back into place with a hand that was missing most of its skin too, she made pleading guttural words towards me. I didn’t understand the language, but I did understand the tone and the posture of one hand raised towards me pleadingly.

I looked into her eyes. A person stared back at me through striking green pools of intelligence. I finished it quickly. That kill gained me my second level in [Defender] as well as the skill [Toughness].

I then spent the next close to half-hour parting each large corpse of its skin. I did this for no other reason than to gain experience leveling up my profession. I scraped and laid out the skins on the diner’s tables. They looked nothing like the lizardman skin I had worked on earlier, full of small holes and simple mistakes made while skinning. These were all one piece, besides the damages they had received from the fight. My [Basic Skinning] skill had given me what felt like years of experience and confidence and the [Flay] skill made the job laughably simple. My [Basic Tanning] skill was telling me that if I didn’t further process the hides they would soon dry out and become brittle. But I had little intention to keep these grotesque hides or even the one currently tied around my waist.

Knowing that I was close to gaining the next level of my profession, I fashioned a pair of simple bracers, a questionable fanny pack, and what was the equivalent of an orc hide poncho for me to wear. Using no needle or thread, I had to make all the ties and joints out of strips of the hide as I was working with it. It took close to four hours to make the four pieces to my satisfaction. While they were hideous and probably morally wrong to create, they saved my life more than once that first day. They also earned me my second level in [Apprentice Leatherworker] profession as well as the [Quick Stitch], [Quick Scrape], and [Quick Tan] skills.

After that, I ventured into the kitchen and grabbed another long kitchen knife, avoiding the human and elf bodies that were bitten beyond recognition on the floor. I also grabbed a small glass bottle and filled it with pickle juice before returning to the diner. I then took two small amber spheres from the thing that used to be the woman I loved and put them in the preserving bottle in my pack.

I knew something was wrong with me then. Maybe it was shock, maybe something in me had snapped. But I knew it wasn’t right to make bags out of sentient creatures. I knew it wasn’t right to keep the eyes of the woman I had fallen in love with and had killed in a jar. But I did so almost mechanically before striding out onto the street I had walked down not so many hours ago with Hannah.

This day was bloody, long, and hard. There was so much death around that the streets in many places ran red. There were roaming packs of orcs, goblins, hyena-like beast-men that I soon learned to call gnolls, and the occasional giant that were all looking for blood. Almost every other species, or at least the ones that had survived the first moments, had run and hid themselves the best they could. Unfortunately for all, the smells of blood and death had begun to attract all the beasts for miles around.

That first day I saw a pack of lion-sized cats with manes of crackling electricity take down a giant who was munching on a pile of humanoid bones. I saw a roc, I think it must have been a roc, swoop down on a group of dwarves and orcs fighting each other and grab a talon full of each group before flying back above the clouds. It was a beautiful creature that looked like an eagle big enough to fly off with one of the giants. The thought of it kept me looking up in fear for the rest of the day. I also saw a group of elves chanting together as a grove of trees grew up around them and weaved into an onion-shaped fortress of living wood. Many more strange sights I saw as I wandered around the town full of chaos and burning.

During that time, I was also in many fights. Several times a stray singular orc or goblin would try to attack me as I wandered through the chaos. But most of the time they would come in groups of two or three. Once I even got jumped by a group of four goblins. One managed to sink a pocket knife into my lower back before I kicked it hard enough to make it fold like a lawn chair.

Battered and bruised, I spent a long time wandering the streets of this town I didn’t know. Several times I saw groups of elves or dwarves that fled when they saw me, but the ones that hurt the most were the humans. After the fight with the large group of goblins, I walked down a side road near the center of town. As I was walking I looked up to make sure the skies were clear of any creatures. When I did, I saw a human head looking down from a third-story apartment window, mouth and eyes wide open in shock.

I had yelled but that caused the young woman to jerk her head back and shut the window. I had even gone into the building and found the room where I thought the head had come out of. After a moment of knocking at the door, I tried the handle. Quickly, a male voice warned me to leave and that he had a gun. I tried to reason with him and tell him I was a human too but I could hear several female voices inside telling him to keep the door closed. One loud voice had even called me a monster.

Looking at my giant frame covered in blood and the raw skins of my enemies I didn’t argue but rather left in silence. It was disheartening but fair. I was about as intimidating of a person as I could imagine. And in that moment, as I felt the small glass jar at my waist, I couldn’t help but agree with that woman’s words. After another short period of wandering and defending myself, I found what I was looking for. A sporting goods store.

The first thing I did when I got there was go into the restroom and scrub most of the dried blood and grime off of myself before discarding the macabre clothing I had made. Soon, I found a large pair of jeans, a belt, and a t-shirt that almost fit me. A pair of nice thick socks and leather work boots were a welcome addition to my blistered feet. A pair of hockey shin and knee guards managed to fit over my legs and I even found a large pair of hockey pads that covered me from knee to shoulders.

I found a backpack and filled it with food, a first aid kit, and a notebook and pen I had found. While grabbing the first aid kit, I had opened another and used much of the thread in it to sew up the cuts and scrapes that needed it. I did this using my [Quick Stitch] skill. Due to my [Thick Skin] skill, none of the cuts had been very bad and I only needed a few stitches and some gauze. The backpack was a large pack, but due to my large build and the pads, it could only go over one shoulder. Uncomfortable as it was, it was filled with trail mix and Gatorades enough for a couple days of food. The last thing I grabbed was a pair of large Bowie knives that could almost be considered short swords and their sheaths with them. They fit well enough on either side of the belt I had found. Decked as best as I could be, I left the store as the sun was sinking towards the horizon.

As I walked the quickly darkening streets, I noticed that after the first day of chaos and blood things were growing much quieter. I assumed it was due to the creatures that had been hunting, having eaten their fill, the people who were fighting having won or died, and the long day taxing heavily on everyone’s endurance. But as for me? I was tough. So I kept walking. I walked through the town as the sun set. I walked past an apartment complex on fire that screams still came faintly from. I walked past a group of injured looking goblins huddling around a fire pit made of the crumbled masonry of a building that had fallen in the shaking. I found the highway and walked north.

I don’t know why I walked north. I just did. Seemed right. I walked as the street lights went out and the road was plunged into the low light of a cloudless night. I walked by as a group of overgrown wolves ate from a car wreck along the highway. I walked as far as finding a giant turtle with a crushed shell that glowed red in the darkness of the night and gave off the heat and light of a large low fire. I’m camped next to that turtle now.

It’s been a long hard day and writing this all out has helped. The first thing I wrote in this journal was the story of how I met Hannah and as much as I could remember about what we talked about. Something is happening to my memories of my old life. I've been losing much of what I knew and who I was. I also spent some time writing stories about friends and family I had in the old world. I couldn’t even remember my parents’ names but I could remember their faces. I wrote as much as I could remember before writing through the experiences of the day. I still feel a little insane but this has helped me process. I think I’m going to go bury Hannah down by the grove of ash trees I saw a while back. I think that will help bring some closure. I should have got more supplies before leaving town. I have no idea what to expect tomorrow.

-Liam, Defender of the Weak

Congratulations! You have met the requirements to take the [Scribe] profession. Accept? [Y/N]

[Scribe] +130 EXP (20/1,000)

Congratulations! You have reached level 0 [Scribe].

You have received new skills [Basic Calligraphy]

[Ink Production] and [Paper Production]

Congratulations! You have reached level 1 [Scribe].

You have received new skill [True Copy]

Congratulations! You have reached level 2 [Scribe].

You have received new skill [Bestiary]

Ability: [Basic Skinning] This skill will give advantage when dealing with and basic mastery over the foundational skills every skinner should know. The basics in understanding the behavior and differences of different types of leathers and hides, how to scrape fat, hide, and hair, as well as the ability to handle more exotic forms of leather such as scaled skin, are encompassed in this skill. This skill is non-specific and will instead give an overall boost to one’s abilities and understanding.

Ability: [Basic Tanning] This skill will give advantage when dealing with and basic mastery over the foundational skills every tanner should know. The basics in understanding the behavior and differences of different types of leathers, how to work with brines, racks, and braining solutions, as well as the ability to tan leathers using natural tannins or metallic solutions, are encompassed in this skill. This skill is non-specific and will instead give an overall boost to one’s abilities and understanding.

Ability: [Simple Leatherworking] This skill will give advantage when dealing with and basic mastery over the foundational skills every Leatherworker should know. The basics in understanding the behavior and differences of different types of treated leathers, how to work with awls, edgers, and leather knives, as well as the ability to form and fashion basic clothing, armors, and bags, are encompassed in this skill. This skill is non-specific and will instead give an overall boost to one’s abilities and understanding.

Ability: [Flay] An ugly skill earned by treating humanoids as a source of skins. This hidden skill is a more powerful version of the skill [Skinner] that is common among the [Leatherworking] professions. Whenever the user strikes an opponent with skin using a bladed weapon large portions of the victim’s skin separate from their flesh.

Ability: [Toughness] This is a passive skill that doubles the base endurance points of the user as well as reduces the user’s unconscious reactions to pain.

Ability: [Quick Stitch] This skill is common among professions that require the use of needle and thread. Simply put, the user is much more precise and rapid at stitching.

Ability: [Quick Scrape] This skill is common among classes such as [Leatherworkers] and [Lumberjack]. Simply put, whenever scraping one material off another the user is much more quick and effective.

Ability: [Quick Tan] This skill is specific to those who tan leather. The tanning step is the longest step in leather making. However, anyone with this skill who oversees this process will see a marked increase in its speed.

Ability: [Basic Calligraphy] This skill will give advantage when dealing with and basic mastery over the foundational skills every Calligrapher should know. The basics in understanding the behavior and differences of different types of writing media, how to make and use brushes, quills, and pens, as well as the ability to consistently and effectively write in legible stylized script, are encompassed in this skill. This skill is non-specific and will instead give an overall boost to one’s abilities and understanding.

Ability: [Ink Production] This skill gives the user the know-how and ability to produce various colored inks from diverse types of ashes, saps, oils, and pigments.

Ability: [Paper Production] This skill gives the user the know-how and ability to produce various types of papers from reeds, hemp, and wood pulp.

Ability: [True Copy] This skill gives the user the ability to copy writing from one source to another without unintentional deviance or error. This also gives the user the ability to copy and reproduce spell books and magical scrolls. The copies will be of inferior or unusable quality unless the paper and ink are made from appropriately magical ingredients.

Ability: [Bestiary] This skill allows the user to create a magical bestiary. A bestiary documents the names, natures, weaknesses, strengths, and abilities of various monsters, humanoids, and beasts. It is sufficient to have only seen the creature to make an entry, but for detailed information, it is best to have studied the creature in close proximity or even dissected it once dead. Once sufficiently filled, a bestiary can evolve.

[Quest Complete!] One time quest: [SURVIVE] has been completed.

Item: [Defender’s Pack] has been added.

EXP +100

Character Name: Liam

Character HP:21/21 | MP:24/24 | EN:64/64

Character Level: [2] EXP:(945/1,000)

Character Title: [Defender of the Weak]

Character Race: [Human]

Character Age: [17]

Character Stats: (1-20)

Strength: [20]

Dexterity: [9]

Constitution: [16]

Intellect: [12]

Wisdom: [11]

Charisma: [8]

Luck: ???

Character Class: [Defender]

Character Sub-Class: [Empty]

Character Professions:

[Apprentice Leatherworker] Lvl. 2 (12/1,000)

[Scribe] Lvl. 2

(20/1,000)

[Empty]

Character Skills:

[Thick Skin]

[Iron Will]

[Toughness]

[Shelter]

[Basic Skinning]

[Basic Tanning]

[Simple Leatherworking]

[Flay]

[Quick Stitch]

[Quick Scrape]

[Quick Tan]

[Basic Calligraphy]

[Ink Production]

[Paper Production]

[True Copy]

[Bestiary]

Character Equipment:

[Journal]

[Hockey Armor]

[Bowie Knife] X2

[Work Clothes]

[Backpack]

[First Aid Kit] [Gatorade] X5 (empty) X1 [Trail Mix] X9

[Defenders Pack]

[Water Skin] [Ration] X4 [Mess Kit] [Tinderbox] [Bed Roll] [Torch] X5 [Bronze Skullcap]