The beast was waiting for me as I re-entered the lobby. Its behavior was decidedly unnatural, considering how long I had spent searching the building, any normal predator would have gone looking elsewhere for prey. The system must have made it specifically to hunt me, giving it a singular will and focus, an obsession with taking my life. I flexed my fists inside of the harness and stepped towards the door, watching the eyes of the beast as its nostrils flared and saliva dripped from its jaw.

I flung the door open and dashed forward, aiming to grab the beast by the scruff of the neck to allow for an easier follow up. It lept backwards, easily escaping from my reach. Despite the harness feeling like an extension of my body, I still had overextended myself, sending me off-balance. Fortunately, I managed to stay upright, but this left me exposed as the beast charged in at my left side.

Its claws clattered against my harness and the extra weight did push me to the ground, pressing my side into the bare dirt, my cheek grinding down further as those snapping jaws moved closer and closer to my unprotected flesh. I tried to shove the beast to the side, but the harness failed to grant me any additional power, leaving me trapped with the drill beneath me. With a grunt, I managed to yank my left arm free from the weight of the beast and shoved my hand down onto its snout, trying to keep its jaws at bay.

The beast pulled back for just a moment, enough for me to pull out my right arm and, more importantly, the war drill attached to it. In my moment of focusing on that, though, the beast lunged back and dug its teeth into my hand, cracking the bone, tearing the skin, and sending jolts of pain through my head. As I tried to pull my hand free, the beast shook its head with such force that my arm popped from its socket audibly, causing me to let out an ear-splitting shriek.

In the depths of my pain, everything faded, becoming a washed out grey. Time slowed to a crawl, leaving me frozen between moments, with all sensation disappearing into that grey, leaving me with a moment to think, to breathe. It would be easy to give up, I knew that was an option lingering in the back of my mind, the option to give in like I had wanted to for so long. This was too much, this was too real, this was too hard, I wasn’t good enough, they had chosen the wrong person.

The drops of my blood fell in slow motion, forming tear drops as they distended under gravity’s cruel wake. I was a fuck-up, always had been, and here was yet another sign of it, another failure, and perhaps a fatal one. No. The voice rose up from deeper places in my heart, thrumming for a moment with steely resolve. No. My voice spoke louder. I would live. I would fight.

I would kill.

I rolled and with all of my strength brough right hand around in an overhead arc, slamming it down onto whatever part of the beast I could find, its neck. It whimpered suddenly and let loose my hand as time restored to its normal flow, but the adrenaline was already doing its work in numbing my pain and reducing my world to the task before me. I let out another cry, this one of wordless bloodlust, and activated the drill.

The whirring noise was joined by a brutal crunching as blood whipped out from the wound, splattering over my face and the harness. I stopped the drill and breathed out a breath I didn’t know that I had been holding. After a glance at the body of the beast, I immediately looked away, finding my stomach flipping at the sight of what I had done, what I will continue to do in order to survive in this world. Instead, I just focused on trying to stand back up, but my left hand remained worthless to help with that task, doubling the difficulty.

By rocking back and forth for a moment, I was eventually able to do a sit-up, lifting my knees and wrapping my arm around them to keep me steady. I inspected my mangled left hand and winced at the damage done to it, but the pain was now a distant thing, far from my thoughts as I took a more removed perspective. I tried to flex my bent fingers, but they didn’t so much as twitch. Where was I to receive the medical care that I needed in this new world? How would this wound ever heal properly or at all?

My thoughts were interrupted by a flash of blue light that washed up out of the beast’s corpse over my body. A brief surge of pain came with it, an almost imperceptible echo of the system integration. A system message flashed before my eyes.

Level up! +10 Path Points, Health and Erg restored!

War Drill->10

Battle Harness Proficiency 1->10

the higher you climb, the harder the fall the fall the fall

A warm sensation ran through my left arm, bringing with it the relief from the lack of feeling. The bones in my hand set themselves as I watched, and the flesh knit itself back together. I gave another experimental squeeze of my left hand, and this time it tightened easily into a fist. A brief scan of my status screen showed that I had indeed leveled up, my skills had increased, and that I was still 10 Path Points in debt. Still, without this harness and the weapon attached to it, there was no way I would have gotten that level in the first place, so I didn’t think too hard about it.

My gaze slowly wandered over the crater, looking for any sign of life, but the space was utterly vacant in a way that felt distinctly wrong. Perhaps it was the arrival of the factory, perhaps it was the system integration, perhaps it was the presence of the beast, but something had frightened away all the creatures from this area. To my surprise, though, I did spot grass sprouts already beginning to push out of the dirt, soft and small and still struggling towards the sky.

For a moment, my perception shifted and I became aware of the veins of blue energy connecting these sprouts to their deeper roots, intertwining with the air, with the dirt, even running through my body, creating an elaborate machinery of motion, pumping that energy, erg I suppose, throughout the world. This sense of cosmic oneness faded as my senses returned to normal, but I was still aware of the vague impression that it had left behind.

[Basic Skill Gained!

Erg Vision 0->5]

Interesting. The system noting it as Basic probably meant that it was independent of the path system, and judging from the nature of the skill, likely a category for skills that everyone could make use of. I instinctively gained an understanding of how to activate the skill, I just had to look at things from a slightly different frame of mind, shift my thinking a small degree away from normal. Doing it willfully for the first time was a bit harder than I was expecting, like examining a particular complex math equation, having to wrap my mind around the intricate details.

Then it all popped into place and I saw that blue glow around everything, the flow of erg around me, suffusing the land. The sense knowledge didn’t come with a deeper insight this time, though, but it did help to map out the contours of the space around me. I turned to face the factory and saw it infused but inert, ready to be brought to life from a state of stasis, but only barely interacting with the erg swirling around it. I looked to my hand and saw a much intricate weaving of erg between my flesh and the harness and with the war drill as well, not a complete unity but something far more resembling it than any other interaction of erg.

Once more I scanned the crater, and this time saw the ringing trees like a wall of erg, glowing much more brightly than anything within the crater itself, but sending small pockets of erg down into the crater like falling pollen. Then I spotted something underneath the surface of the crater, visible only because of the relative lack of erg in the dirt. There, buried beneath the ground was a vein of glowing material, not biological but still charged with energy, it had to be a vein of ergonic ore.

I hurried over as fast as I could, my feet bounding slightly off of the crater until I came to rest directly in front of the ore deposit. There, I spun my drill to life, remembering its description as not just a weapon, but a tool as well, and began to dig, sending dirt flying as I carved out a space, carefully shifting the terrain to allow me to get to the top of the deposit. The hole widened and deepened slowly, but the effort felt pure in a way that fighting had not. There was a joy to this physical activity, to losing myself into the precision of digging a hole very well.

Hours passed, but I eventually excavated the top of the deposit, while leaving a ramp to allow for exit back into the crater. I wondered for a moment about the lack of interference, but decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Instead, I knelt down, pressed the tip of the drill to the ore deposit and set it spinning once again.