Jackson opened his eyes to see himself surrounded by two of the human creatures that he had read so much about. They were every bit as absurd, garbed in strange white cloths that concealed their communications matrices and coverings over the pathetic eyes set deeply in their cranial cavities. He himself was suffering from such an odd arrangement, and could not even begin to get a decent feel for his surroundings, although the stereoscopic nature of his new vision was a wonder, with almost incredible clarity at incredible ranges and the almost instant ability to gauge distance. It was a trade-off, and one which he had been originally quite skeptical of, but as he flicked his eyes and turned his head he had to admit it was not a bad one.

While it was uncomfortable not to have passive vision in all directions at once, the speed of his new body allowed him to focus in almost any direction nearly as fast as concentration had in his real body. The absurd appendages these creatures possessed were astonishing, nearly as bad as the ring of ridiculous legs the subterranean and aquatic soul-eaters had used, and he was surprised and dismayed at the amount of pain radiating from his lower left limb.

The creatures were not facing him, and the cold temperatures were already starting to eat into him. He knew he was going to a hell-world, but hadn’t expected it to be this cold.

The human creatures were all looking at a display, and one of them was poking at it. “I swear, it was supposed to be Terrence Washington here. I have no idea who this beefy cracker is, but brain death was less than sixteen minutes ago. They unhooked life support, brought him down here to donors, and there must have been some kind of mix-up in transit, because this guy is not him. His heart was in perfect shape, but this guy hasn’t even been specced, let alone cleared. Did the surgeons put the wrong heart in perfusion?”

The other, slightly taller human replied, “This guy’s still dead. If his kidneys hadn’t been shot they’d have cleaned out those, too. We should probably just stash him in the freezer and call the coroner. I just hope they figure out what they did with Washington before he starts to stink. Can you imagine all the surgeons walking past some bed in a hallway with a covered up patient and realizing something doesn’t smell right?”

Both of the creatures… breeder-males, he thought, not neuters, laughed a little as Jackson sat up and started to lower his walkers. He shivered a little as this creature’s ridiculous excuse for a pseudopod, stashed between it’s walkers rather than someplace useful, brushed against the table below his walkers, sending a fresh jolt of cold through his form, and clutched the cloth which had been draped over his form closer, trying to absorb what heat he could from it. Fortunately, it appeared he still had access to silence, and with this new body’s absolutely insane dexterity the humans never even heard him.

“We should definitely do a run-through because it’s totally going to be our fault if it got lost on it’s way to the morgue, even if the idiot specialists got them swapped around with some other stiff.

Jackson, his new name coming into his mind, peered over at the display. It was clearly specialized to suit these creature’s spectacular focus, although he couldn’t make out exactly what the various labels actually meant, even though he could read them clearly. The medical specialists seemed to be speaking the local language easily enough, but the words on the display appeared to be a specialized language he hadn’t been exposed to.

The noise of something on the base of his walker touching the floor clicked, and both of the humans instantly turned to face him, their eyes widening in shock and probably fear as they saw him sitting up on the table. One of the humans screeched, but the other one narrowed his eyes and said “Oh shit!” before striking the first one in the arm and hurrying towards him.

He raised the upper limbs. Arms, he thought, just in case the creatures were attacking, but the taller one started babbling, “Oh shit sir, Oh my god. I have no idea how you got in here. Are you injured? You must be freezing. What are you doing here?”

He shook his head, the gesture of negation natural, even though it seemed to set his vision bouncing.

The second male, raced out of the room, while the first one reached forward to start pulling the wheeled table out in the same direction, towards a large portal the first had run through. “I think you might have had an incident, sir.” the tall one stated, “Do you have a history of cataplexy or epilepsy?” he asked, and brought the table, along with Jackson, into a much warmer room. The first man reappeared, with an armful of cloths, and the taller man threw one of the cloths down on a chair and then offered to help Jackson move from the table to the chair. He sat down on the fabric and realized it had been warmed, and let out a sigh of relief as the smaller man started putting more warmed blankets over his unclothed body.

“No, I respawned.” he said, and at the taller man’s blank expression, he went through his memorized information on earth and added, “I was consuming sustenance that must have been… fermented. And then I lost consciousness.”

He nodded, and another human, a female this time, hurried in “I had heard of something like that happening in Russia.” he said, and the woman said “I’m Doctor Camden. I need to check your vitals.” she had a strange staff on wheels with her, and took his arm, which he permitted. His stats were a bit insane, but he wanted to check them personally once he had a moment of privacy, and felt he could have prevented it easily.

After a few moments, the odd fabric around his arm swelled and started cutting off his circulation, and he was alarmed, but she was intently watching a smaller display while she ran a strange tool over his forehead and then lowered the blankets slowly and started asking him to breath while she used a slightly chilly tool plugged into her hearing organs.

In his prior form, his species used their entire bodies to detect vibration and atmospheric changes. They could use vibrations to indicate alerts, but communication was via common-sense chromatophores, not the vagaries of short-ranged pressure waves. Human hearing, however, seemed to be considerably more developed, as they had enhanced hearing sensors on both sides of their mobile brain limb with directional cones built around them. Jackson noticed that he could hear sound direction as well, which was an interesting development. Could locational hearing help make up for lack of omnidirectional vision?

The female human must have been healthy by human terms, because his pseudopod immediately started reaching towards her through the blanket. It was kind of disgusting, but human pseudopods had absolutely no prehensile abilities at all. They simply poked out and stiffened when the circulatory system activated them, only males had them, and apparently they were for both injecting fertilizer and relieving liquid waste, which resembled human fertilizer in some ways, rather than a more sensible system of simple dusting like his species, his prior species, used.

It was a little odd to have a digestive system that had both an entry and an exit points rather than simply regurgitating unused masses after the nutritional value was digested, but he could certainly see the point. Humans were utterly alien, and their bodies were surprisingly complex. Most truly Sapient Species developed their brains rather than their bodies, and hit the top of the food chain using their intelligence and special talents rather than raw physical potential.

Sintars had defeated their greatest predators with their minds, not their pseudopods. It was why they were one of the strongest forces in our universe, and why the Overmind was the strongest faction. Unlike the soul-eaters, the overmind simply used the organic resources of their expired bodies to increase it’s computing power rather than capturing and imprisoning their spirits. He, himself, had happily contributed his body resources to the overmind on more than one occasion rather than simply passing on when his life period had expired.

The soul eater alliance, rather than setting spirits free to find new bodies when they expired, trapped the souls without allowing them to move on in the great cycle. It was similar to what the Game of War did, but unlike the game of war, where spirits could move on by choice and release their memories, returning to the cycle of life, they eternally imprisoned the souls into a great mass conglomerate and never allowed them to release their species memories.

The doctor ignored his pseudopod’s state, thankfully. Apparently it was entirely antonymous, which he could see becoming a problem whenever exposed to females. Humans apparently internally nourished their young, instead of sensibly budding them when compatible dust met a mating patch on a female.

“ninety-five over seventy. Good pressure, and you have an RHR of forty-one, which is quite good, although based on your fitness it’s not that unusual. What is your name?

Name: Jackson Winters

Profession: none

Class: Bio-Cultivator

Race: Human Hybrid

Age: 18

Faction: Earth

Rank: 1

Advancement: 0%

Strength: 19

Charisma: 14

Durability: 15

Speed: 11

Essence: 10

Empathy: 10

Intellect: 15

Balance: 12

Reaction: 11

Endurance: 15

Health: 19

Dexterity: 11

Sorcery: 2

Technology: 2

Physical: 2

Ranged: 1

Cultivation

Piloting

Tolerance

Mounted Weapons

Lifeweaving

Communications

Rapid Regeneration

Throwing

Flexible mind*

Bio-Enhancement

Extreme Fortitude

Melee

* Please note that certain abilities may be disabled or proprietary if they do not conform to the Game of War’s internal consistency and balance check.

“Jackson Winters” He replied, quickly glancing over the sheet in the back of his mind. Whatever strength, charisma, and durability were, he had a lot of it. He also had gone from 1 health, like most civilized creatures, to 19. His prior people had 2 endurance, which was considered unusually hardy, but it had grown to 15, even though he had gained that disgusting empathy attribute which the Alliance of Soul-Eaters used to manipulate and control the abominations they created.

“We don’t have any records of you checking in. How did you get here?”

He shook his head and shrugged, “I spawned here. It was cold, and my walk...my foot hurts.” he pointed out. He untucked his foot from the blanket, and could see that there was a piece of wire with a tag savagely wrapped around one of his toes, which seemed to be growing purple.

“Oh crap!” the tall man said, bending down and starting to work at it. Removing it hurt more than leaving it on, but it clearly was cutting off his circulation which might lead to his flesh dying and fermenting.” “This makes no sense. It says Terrence Washington, I can see why transport got him mixed up, but Washington’s been up in the ICU for weeks now. This guy’s the wrong color, height, weight, everything.”

He wanted to tell them that he’d respawned, and more about it, but that would defeat the entire point of his presence. Such lies and deceitfulness colored the soul of those who used them. But the overmind had begged for his assistance.

The alliance of souls refused to let the spirits of those who passed rejoin the universe to be redistributed into the bodies of new creatures. Most of the civilizations merely preserved their most enlightened, rather than allowing them to be reborn into a higher state of being elsewhere, in a desperate bid to consolidate the power of the most brilliant, moral, and ethical souls forever for their own species.

The Damned Spider-Witches of the F’lok’nyran had been the worst, though. They were xenophobic to the extreme, and never let any souls be reborn. They captured and imprisoned them into gigantic soul structures, never letting them lose their experiences and be sent elsewhere after death. Instead, they locked them eternally into the hellish mudball of a nest that they lived in, slowly crushing the rest of the universe. They gave birth to literally billions, and then, when things got too crowded, they simply commanded huge swaths of their least capable, eldest, or damaged to discorporate, instantly suiciding so that their souls joined the collective net.

The Game of War had made it quite clear that souls were a finite resource. There were only so many of them in the multiverse at any given time. With the F’lok’nyran trapping literally trillions of them from moving on, other species, especially on lightly-populated worlds that they expanded to, started giving birth to soulless monsters.

The worst was that the witches didn’t expand. Instead, they sent their high-tech fleet of reaper drones to harvest everything around them, and drag it all back to their little mud ball. They consumed a huge section of their arm near the core of the galaxy, as well as depleting any dimensions they came in contact with. Unlike other races, though, the alliance almost never created adventurers, those whose actions unlocked new galactic resources and replenished worlds that had been stripped bare.

The Game of War, as the Overmind stated, had three purposes for existence. The first one was to prevent the hyperspace entities and monsters between the stars and away from rational thought from consuming entire galaxies, the second reason was to help people advance on the wheel of existence, offering them opportunities to be reseeded and reborn at a higher state rather than spending eternity as nothing more than the soul of a sandworm, through active heroism, and the third reason was to stop the decay of all universes into stagnation by periodically flooding reality with energy and matter that were slowly used up by all sapient souls as they advanced to the heavens.

Jackson didn’t know if the heavens truly existed, since once a soul was sent onward from their short cycle of respawning while playing the game, no one knew what happened to their souls except for trackers, who could identify soul traces in new sentients and match them to the traces stored in the databases. Some spirits had been traced through dozens of incarnations in dozens of species before they passed into an area of non-player-characters like Earth. But with the souls trapped at the core of the galaxy by creatures like the alliance, even unknown and previously uncharted places like Earth would give birth to soulless abominations.

Humans were very complicated creatures without innate bio-adaptation, so it was most likely that soullessness would not be physically reflected on such a populous world. But it would be reflected in their minds. Humans without soul would be monsters without ethics or conscience that could kill indiscriminately, savage brutally, and never feel the slightest hesitation at destroying or using any means to suppress anyone or anything that stood in the way of their more animalistic instincts or ambitions. Without a soul, they wouldn’t even think that there was any reason not to do so, and they would be right… without souls, there would be no afterlife for them, no return to the wheel, no advancement or rebirth.

Based on some of the records recovered after their final victory at the putrid homeworld of the F’lok’nyran and declassified by The Game of War, it appeared that Earth was home to an enormous number of such abominations. And according to the trackers, the sole survivor of their victory at F’lok’nyran was respawned on this world. If it succeeded in recruiting the humans here, it could create a new soul prison.

The worst part was, apparently the sole survivor was the Butcher.

The Sintar were not passive participants in the game of war, they were very very active, which was why they had set out to liberate the souls that the witches had permanently imprisoned in their vast networks.

The overminds had been one of the earliest races to participate in the game once the original species that created it had gone extinct. They were capable of assimilating other species once their souls had left their bodies, and increasing their own functioning as well as being able to unlock and modify the proprietary advantages many species received. They were, in the end, sentient but almost didn’t even qualify as sapient, as the conglomeration of information rendered them almost incapable of independent reasoning.

They were brought into many civilizations as organic intelligences, able to overcome the shortfalls of both synthetic and artificial intelligence but with virtually no ambitions beyond simple survival. Their most important function for the Sintar was to unlock dangerous or overpowering talents in new races, to allow them to be shared by all participants in the game or to allow The Game of War to evaluate them for balance and either remove them or create new classes that utilized them.

Humans had a proprietary ability that was truly dangerous. When added to their unbelievable attributes, it made the idea that many of the soulless ones born of their race could join the game and become truly terrifying monsters inevitable.

The Butcher had been one of the most terrifying and deadly adversaries that any of the Sintar, or any of the allied species that had joined them on their crusade, had ever faced. She was utterly ruthless, utterly brilliant, and used her race’s gifts to terrifying effect.

The drones that she controlled, despite being barely more advanced than galactic standard, were incredibly accurate, their predictive algorithms able to track and destroy all of the minor assault pods and fighters, and end their lives, often long before they were even aware of her presence.

She was always there, for the last seven battles she had simply grown in strength and deadliness, ending the lives of hundreds of pilots with contemptuous ease. Unlike most of her species, she flew above the planet on her atmospheric battleship, extending her range and facility along with a few other elite drone controllers.

The worst was if she closed her range. She would tear through formations, often overwhelming the security locks on pilot control systems and turning the fighters against their own units, forcing pilots to watch helplessly as their own ships tore through their friends, lovers, and allies. And if she got a few drones into range with their plasma cutters, she would tear through hundreds.

And if even one drone that she controlled survived, badly damaged but not completely destroyed, she would return with an entirely new fleet of freshly repaired drones to strike at the fleet from surprise as they either fled in disarray or advanced on the planet.

The Witch had even destroyed two capital ships. The first one, a rest and relaxation liner that was sent with the fleet to grant it’s members much-needed stress relief, had been ripped through by an army of drones wielding plasma cutters. The second was a last-ditch attempt to send a juvenile overmind to the world, along with an overwhelming fleet, hoping to get it into the soupy surface and hopefully have it unlock their soulbinding ability, so that The Game of War would have a chance to balance such a horrifying ability.

That one had been taken out by a single drone managing to get through the fighter screen, and the Witch had cut through the Dreadnought’s computer security, overwhelming the young overmind’s personal defenses and forcing all twenty reactors into simultaneous overload. This had nearly crippled the Sintar’s ability to wage war in a single battle, and it was with heavy hearts that the entire assembly had chosen to send a fleet of planet-killer comets at the world. The tens of thousands of pilots and crew that lost their lives had just been one more saddening statistic. The Sintar and many of their client species seldom produced adventurers, and so most of the crew were volunteers that hadn’t exceeded rank 1.

That ship had been captained by a young but well-seasoned and capable hothead named Jaeks Süng Coldseason, and he had been a rank 3 before his death.

After the overminds had purchased the information from the databases of the defeated necromancers, they had noted with near 99% probability that the one the trackers found, the most dangerous of all the witches as well as the only one the Game had protected, had most likely fled to an incredibly rich and dangerous world, there to try and build a new soul prison by recruiting the inhabitants and forming a cult of The Game of War players, with pretty lies and shallow promises of eternal life after death. The locals had no ability to perceive souls despite their odd tech development, and like all sapient species were terrified of the endless abyss of nonexistence, and so her arguments were likely to fall on receptive sensory clusters.

These humans were nearly insane from constant internal conflict and competition, and thus it stood to reason that many of the species would be more than capable of becoming adventurers, which was a highly sought-after commodity for fighting back the forces of chaos that constantly sought to corrupt and devour the multiverse.

The downside, of course, was that their souls, even after their last death, would be eternally bound. They would be intrinsically hostile to nearly every species that wasn’t a member of the alliance of souleaters. They would tear through the galaxy, conquering and devouring every civilization that stood in their way, and with their abilities, it might not even challenge them for long.

A fleet with another young overmind was on it’s way to the planet to try and defuse the imbalance, and perhaps unlock a new proprietary talent in flexible mind that could forever change their ability to battle the chaos that would consume reality. The Sintar, with their ability to custom-adapt new species, could be at the forefront of that battle, sending modified human adventurers into environments and fights that no race had ever dreamed of trying to disperse before, possibly even creating new classes that could help the more civilized races adapt to the real purpose of The Game of War.

The game had offered to send one individual to Earth to balance the new faction that had been formed. Technically they would both be members of the same faction, unless and until any players on Earth diversified, which was uncommon but not unheard of, especially with savage races like humans.

The Sintar and their allies had agreed to send the brave young captain that had sacrificed his life in a last-ditch effort to try and save the nightmarish world rather than see it destroyed for the good of the multiverse. The place was a high-gravity and poisonous hell world, but one of the compensating factors was that the humans had a lifespan around twice as long as the Sintar, without adding in bonuses from attributes.

Jackson had been sent with three goals. End the threat by preventing the Game from being disseminated before the fleet arrived in around 15 local solar revolutions without allowing the species to destroy itself, learn as much as possible about humans to assist their peaceful transition to a game-ready species of potential adventurers, and finally, to end the cult before it started, by stopping or killing The Butcher.