Tutorial (Final Stage): Settling Down

At long last, you, the first of your kind, heir to a potential future empire, and sire of a new breed of beings, have established the beginnings of something truly great. Or not. With there being at least five others of your kind, you now have the potential to start building an actual civilization.

A good start is to build some kind of shelter. Either do this yourself or have your subordinates do so. From there, everything else will be up to you and your fledgling nation. Have a Happy Apocalypse!

Objective: Build a shelter of some kind.

Reward: End of the Tutorial and the manifestation of a Divine Aspect.

Due to establishing a contingent of non-members of your species as subordinates, a bonus will be added once this section of the Tutorial is complete.

Due to already adding more of the lesser kin of yours to your number ahead of time, that phase of the Tutorial has been skipped and a Bonus will be added upon the completion of the phase of the Tutorial.

The words ‘manifestation of a Divine Aspect’ was something that gave Lyrhea some pause, but aside from that, she saw nothing wrong with any of this. The promise of new, secret rewards for doing some stuff ahead of time (whether she wanted to or not) was a welcome addition, and she hoped that these additional rewards would at least be somewhat useful.

She shot a glance back to a place not too far from herself and shook her head dejectedly. This damn game-like system was really going to make either she herself or one of her ‘daughters’ do this bullshit personally, wasn’t it?

She watched as a fifteenth building, if one could call such a ramshackle construction such, was put together and watched as the Tutorial did not update. She watched as, once again, eyes fell on her, heads were scratched, and more people tried to fulfill the conditions, only to fail yet again.

She closed her eyes, sighed deeply, rose from her seat, and muttered in clear annoyance a few short, angry words.

“Fine. I’ll do it myself.”

…

She was practically about to tear her own hair out at this point.

“How. The God. Damned. FUCK. Isn’t this applicable?”

Lyrhea was now thoroughly pissed. The Tutorial clearly said that ANY form of shelter would do, but she had built no fewer than five different improvised survival shelters (with the advice and verbal help of actual survivalists, of course), and yet none of them fulfilled the conditions. What, was the Tutorial going to have her build a fucking skyscraper with a built-in park, art museum, themed attractions, stock-trading center, and twenty Olympic-sized swimming pools?!

“God damned picky bastard.” She growled as she kicked one of the shelters down. And it was then, and only then, that the Tutorial was completed.

She stared at the glowing blue screen that hovered only in her sight, her mood and face going darker and darker and ever more filled with fire, fury, and overwhelming hate.

[“Hey, how goes it?”] The Primordial Serpent interjected.

“Fuck off.” was all that Lyrhea could muster, not even bothering to voice it only inside her head.

[“Hey, are you there? Answer me, Chosen.”]

This only got Lyrhea more pissed. “I just said-.”

Before she could finish, a deluge of dialogue from her Patron hit her all at once, with multiple sentences and even paragraphs overlapping to form a mess of unintelligible chatter akin to hearing around twenty to thirty attempts at communication at the same time.

This was pain enough to drop her to her knees, and Lyrhea grit her teeth as her head was hit with the mother of all migraines. Suddenly, though, the pain stopped, as did the endless deluge of stacked words.

[“Fucking finally.”] the big god-snake said. [“Are you hearing this?”]

“Yes…” Lyrhea replied, fully expecting another-

[“Fucking Lag.”]

“What?” Lyrhea was confused. This new reality could get lag?

[“Yeah, the system sometimes gets mucked with by a few of the Gods at too short a timescale and that can happen. Only ever happens early in a New Universe’s history, as more Gods are competing for the same real estate. Speaking of which, be glad you are where you are. Some fucker just tried to summon their God into existence and that caused a Lag Spike as the system likely decided to just nuke them and their entire faith all at once to ‘make a point’. That’s that Pantheon dead and buried.”]

Lyrhea sighed. As if the bullshit system she was stuck in wasn’t bad enough, it could lag and provide all manner of headaches that way.

[“Anyway, maybe check the rewards. Lag Spikes can be good things too, you know. Just take your new rewards as an example. Now, please cash those in, because I’m getting rather tired of waiting for that.”]

At the urging of the Primordial Serpent, Lyrhea almost shook her head and rolled her eyes, but she didn’t want that bipolar mess of a God to slam her face into the ground in a random act of divine yet petulant and childish wrath. After all, she was standing right now on some rather hard and rather rough stone, so a face-plant at several meters a second into that would at the very least bust a lip or break a nose.

Catching herself from grumbling, she allowed the endless, incessant chime of that damned system to end as she brought up the screen, and she had to do several double-takes at what she saw.

…

MEANWHILE! BACK IN THE CITY!

“Damn bastard.” The Ranger spat as she pulled a short sword from between the place where the right shoulder bones of a Grokel, not a Grekel, and the top of its rib cage formed a gap. “Get out of my way.”

“Hurr….” the Grokel Chief drooled a bit as it smiled stupidly at her. It let out a pig-like snort from its porcine nose and grinned widely, its thick, yellow teeth shown for the world to see and its thick and meaty tongue sticking out from inside its mouth and running across its lips. “You look nice.”

The Ranger rode the dead Grokel down to the ground, its body falling limp as the blade withdrew fully from the heart it had pierced. She cracked her neck a few times and shook her short sword free of the blood before taking a quick look around. She had, once again, lost the trail.

“At the very least, your kind aren’t fully like Japanese Orcs.” She had to give them some credit. At least they had and used their own females rather than those of other races. As she dashed forward and slashed out the throat of another Grokel, she figured that while they were better in that respect, they were still going to try and eat her if they caught her, which, of course, was not something she wanted.

“I’ll kill them first.” she thought to herself. “Then I’ll interrogate this fat ugly pig of a chief and get back on the trail. Hopefully.”