System initializing…

Relocating target to [coordinates]…

Designating plane: Non-Contender 17

Rebuilding laws…

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Beginning Race Assessment: Human

Please State Your Name Clearly

Mason felt an instinctive blink, as if he were trying to process the light he was seeing, but he could not feel his eyelids move. As he tried to turn, he found that the black letters remained suspended before him, while the normal sensation of movement was missing. There was no air, he couldn’t see his hands and body beneath him.

The voice repeated its demand.

He felt his initial um filtered from speech, and all that was left from his statement to linger in the air was, “Mason Nevels.”

These words appeared in red underneath the black letters, then flashed green as he confirmed them mentally, before both sets of words disappeared.

Assessing Age: Category Five

Assessing Race: Human

Physique: Normal

Assessing skills, strengths, and intelligence, ranked according to racial profile.

Suddenly, the weight of his body returned to him, and the white light of his room was replaced with utter chaos. He dropped to the ground, terrified as he felt the burst of heat from a fireball flashing through the space where he once stood.

Mason rolled, jumped to his feet, and sprinted as far and as fast as he possibly could. Rocks began to fall from the blank sky, and he dodged them as best as he could. He stumbled and rolled as some of the smaller pieces collided against him and his ankles rolled over the debris on the ground.

Agility: Excellent

Endurance: Excellent

His body disappeared again, and all he could perceive was the white light.

Then questions began to roll through his mind:

What runs but has no feet? What has a mouth, but no tongue?

He would have laughed if his speech was enabled; he had seen this riddle in an old cartoon once.

“A river.”

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen…

And the questions rolled at him as quickly as the obstacles in the physical challenge.

When he had answered all of them correctly, his body was returned. Suddenly, he was in water - no, rapids - and could see uprooted trees rushing down the river toward him and a cluster of jagged rocks ahead of him. He could see in the distance a path through the rocks, so he paddled as hard as he could to direct himself where his body wouldn’t be crushed.

Intelligence: Excellent

Willpower: Excellent

Challenge after challenge came, interspersed with the strangest questions, riddles, and more.

Choose a door between one and three.

“One.”

Door three is revealed to be the incorrect door. Will you remain with door one, or switch to door two?

“Switch to door two.”

Correct.

His mind struggled to question what was happening. He had the vague notion that whatever was happening was forcing his mind into submission, trying to prevent him from doing anything but answer the questions honestly or perform in the challenges.

What bothered him the most - his mind choked out through a series of sputtering half-thoughts - was how often he had seen the word excellent. He was of middling fitness and he liked to believe slightly above average intelligence. But every question seemed to be something he already knew, and every physical challenge seemed to place him exactly where he needed to be to react safely.

He could barely struggle to conceive of time, but hundreds of questions had flown at him, more dangerous threats than he could count had presented themselves to him, and yet he got through it relatively unharmed.

Analysis Complete

Subject: Mason Nevels

Status: Healthy

Racial Aptitude: Excellent

Initializing Stats…

Human Base:

Strength: 2

Agility: 2

Intelligence: 2

Willpower: 1

Vitality: 1

Endurance: 2

Creativity: 3

Aptitude Bonus for Mason Nevels: +1 focus to all characteristics…

Completed Hidden Challenge: Best in Race! Achieve top marks in your assessment for your race: +1 focus to all characteristics

Completed Hidden Challenge: Primordial! First of your race to complete assessment: +1 focus to all characteristics

Completed Hidden Challenge: Undying Assessment! Attain no fatal injuries during your assessment: +1 focus to vitality

Completed Hidden Challenge: Ambassador! First of your race to meet a host: +1 focus to creativity

No skills selected by assessment: prerequisites exceeded. Skills will be unlocked over time.

Mason had no time to comprehend any of these messages. Instead, he was completely overcome by the feeling of pressure on all sides of him. It was excruciating at first, but the pain rose to the point of becoming mind-numbing. Moments passed but the sheer stimuli from the pain prevented Mason from tracking it.

Then, like air in a balloon, he felt a popping around him and his body released, his limbs flailing out at high velocity as he collapsed to the ground.

It took him a moment to stagger to his feet and look around, but when his eyes began to register what he was seeing, he felt the blood rush from his body, his hearing to go out, and his vision to pale. He was standing on a pile of viscera, blood smattering the stone floor and altar around him.

It looked like the ruins of an old temple, with a yellow-brown stone altar beneath him, and high, torch-lit walls all around. There were corpses everywhere, and blood dripped from the ferns and moss which made their homes between the cracks of the old bricks.

Completed Hidden Challenge: Hunter of Legends! Slay the first legendary boss for your race: +2 FP to either strength, dexterity, or intelligence.

He shook the message from his mind, and peered closer at the ground. There were coins spilling from a pouch, and as he picked it up, the blood dried and faded from its surface. Beside the pouch, there was a long, dark stretch of twisted wood. Mason picked it up only to receive another notification.

Completed Hidden Challenge: Wielder of Legends! Retrieve the first Legendary Weapon for your race: +5 to Equip skill, Legendary Weapon [Staff of Mardun] usable immediately

He felt power surge from the staff and into his skin, but it quickly subsided.

Mason glanced around the room again, then dropped the staff, fell to his knees, and lost his mind. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, what the ever living fuck is happening…”

Spawn invulnerability will be cancelled in five minutes. A one-time portal has been summoned to teleport you to the nearest friendly safe-town for your race.

A bright flash of light later, Mason saw the portal open up- a powerful aurora of swirling magentas- and on a whim he ran straight for it.

“These… humans. They’re not even magical. The last dozen non-magical races we dropped into the system were extinct or enslaved within a few cycles. And look at how plain they are. I don’t see any reason they should get preferential treatment when the great Magi-Kings of Secundar were unceremoniously dropped in without so much as a greeting,” whined the first of several voices.

“Yes, my magnificence, you are right. They have no magic, but look at what they’ve made of their world without it. It’s unprecedented in our search to see a race so adaptable, so ingenious, and so devoid of mana. They may not be powerful now, but what will happen to them if the mana can change them?

“You all have heard my position on the matter. Allow me to interfere with just a single human. I will set the system in his favor, granting him an increased allotment of our resources, a relatively safe area, and we can observe how he does. If he fails, his race is no less doomed than the rest of the universe at the moment.”

Mason fell to his knees in the middle of a dirt field. He was covered in blood, holding tightly to a gnarled black staff with an iridescent green gem the size of his fist in the top, and there was nothing but sparse trees and brown grass for nearly a hundred yards in any direction from him.

The safe-town he had been promised was conspicuously absent.

There was a message in the dirt, half-carved and half-burned into the ground was the message, “Three months before your people come here. Find strength. Guide them.” Each letter was nearly a foot in height, so it took Mason some time to walk the length of the message and read it. Before he even finished, the wind picked up to blow the charred dirt away, hiding the message forever.

“What the fuck, universe? Did you just go and break on me? What the fuck do you expect from me now?” He cast about, and even as far as he could see, there was nothing to give him any hint of where he was. Beyond the hundred yards or so of sparse vegetation, there were simply thicker patches of trees that became woods and a forest, and the faint impression that the land rose up into hills and mountains further away.

He took a deep breath and plopped down in the dirt, not minding that his already-ragged and bloody jeans and cotton t-shirt would end up worse for it. They wouldn’t do much good as they were, anyways. Deep breaths tried to slow his heart-rate, calm his mind, but any thought he had about his current predicament sent both racing. He recalled the assessment, but already it was just a blur - a dream of sorts. But then his memory got to the results, and those became crystal clear in his mind. As he focused on them, he could almost imagine a screen forming in front of him.

And then he could see a screen actually form in front of him. His eyes open now, he cast around to see a wealth of information. First was the console, the most recent message being that his invulnerability had ended. There were options on one of his achievements: Hunter of Legends allowed him to spend skill points and, quickly considering the staff in his hand, he clicked intelligence.

With that sorted out, he cast his glance to the side and thought about his status. The screen switched again.

Mason Nevels:

Classless Human

Strength: 2 (+3)

Agility: 2 (+3)

Intelligence: 2 (+5)

Willpower: 1 (+3)

Vitality: 1 (+4)

Endurance: 2 (+3)

Creativity: 3 (+4)

Skills: Equip (5)

You’ve received the starter challenge: Skillful.

Skillful: Unlock six skills to determine your starting class. (1/6)

Remembering the human default stats, he breathed a sigh of relief. All of his skills had bonuses that at least doubled that of the default, which meant that hopefully he wouldn’t be in immediate peril, even though there was no town here.

He blinked twice then, shaking himself to realize he was being insane. It had only taken minutes for him to start thinking in terms of video games, which, he presumed was appropriate given the stat sheets and challenges. But it was almost irresponsible to just accept that. Almost.

No, he’d read stories about getting stuck in a video game: the first rule was to suffer from complete disbelief and shock, and act as if he didn’t know the bare fundamentals of a video game.

Then he remembered the message on the ground. If he was truly alone for three months, he had better hope those stats were correct. There was no way his normal body would be able to survive in the wild for three months with his total lack of experience, but if he had stat boosts and magic…

He held his staff out in front of him and decided to try something simple. He waved it gently, focused on a point in the distance, and thought, fireball.

When nothing happened, he tried shouting it.

Then he tried picturing it, red-hot and flaming, energy condensing on a point, growing from the tip of his staff and soaring through the air in front of him… But again, nothing happened.

He swore again, and began marching toward the tree-line to get out of the sun.