Barry's legs were singing with pain.

If his moaning limbs as a whole were the choir chanting this aching tune, then his quads would be the bass, providing a deep, constant rumble of burning nerves. His hamstrings would be the tenor, breaking through every now and then with a severe counter-melody of agony.

Then, there were his calves. To hurt him so after all they'd been through together, they could only be the soprano, singing a haunting song of betrayal and torment.

For all that his muscles and bones had somehow been upgraded by the empowerment system, his endurance was clearly not without limits. Even an advanced machine might overheat or shut down from overuse, he supposed.

"Why am I even doing this," he groaned as frosty winds tugged at the sleek, thermally insulated suit he'd gotten from the System Store.

There was no reason to actually summit this cursed mountain. He just had to get across. But he was so close to the top, it would be a waste not to make it there. Or so he had told himself, time and time again. The funny thing about going up a mountain is that you can never quite tell how much there is left to go just from looking up.

To be fair, there had not been any easy path down so far as he could see from the wall he was scaling. It would be best to take a look and plot his course from the vantage of the summit.

He grit his teeth as he looked up at the next icy ledge, wondering if his hopefulness was once again mistaken. But then he heard footsteps and grunting, a familiar sound by now, though it had been a while since he'd come across any gorillas.

After the first two encounters, his reservations about killing the beasts had been quickly abandoned. Coming face to face with a massive, raging gorilla while climbing a sheer wall did not exactly leave one with the luxury of restraint. Once the bloodthirsty things got a whiff of his scent, they would pursue relentlessly, and Barry was not the most patient man.

Working his way up to the final shelf of ice, Barry paused to let [Camouflage] settle in along with his soundproof bubble. He pulled himself up slowly, coming eye to eye with a massive gorilla, at least twice the size of the others. It was pacing back and forth on top of a plateau of ice and snow. He froze, wondering how it could see him, until it pivoted and continued to pace.

What was it doing here on top of the mountain? It felt like he was walking in on some special encounter, perhaps the conclusion of a line of quests that he'd never gotten. He was just passing through, but even so, he'd have to take care of it.

Pulling himself up slowly enough to keep [Camouflage] activated, he then summoned his blades and waited for the right moment to strike. But then the ape seemed to sense something, coming to a stop and holding a hand out in his direction.

Barry tensed, but the ape didn't move. He frowned, wondering what it was doing, until he noticed that the temperature seemed to be dropping around him.

The gorilla looked at its hand, then suddenly roared, spittle flying from massive teeth. Without further hesitation, it rushed at him, forcing Barry to pivot out of the way of its lunge.

The grabbing paw missed him, landing instead on the ice, which promptly exploded in a cloud of steam. Barry backed away, still keeping up his [Camouflage], but he was leaving behind footprints now and if that steam hit him…

The ape turned, eyes clearly tracking his footprints, then it roared and rushed forward again, swinging and grabbing at the air. Barry ducked underneath a wild grab and felt scorching hot air pass over his cheek. Where it touched the snow, clouds of steam billowed out violently.

A mist was starting to form on the plateau, messing with his [Camouflage]. Drawing this out would not be in his favour, so when it next lunged at him, Barry went on the offensive, twisting away from its lunge, then around into a quick cut that took its paw clean off.

The beast paused for a brief moment, then cried out as a cloud of heat blasted out from its body. Barry screamed and dove back, skin singed, stopping himself just in time to avoid going over the edge. The steam was thick enough now that he couldn't see the gorilla anymore.

Instead of roaming blindly through the mist, he decided to use one of his many tricks. He created a projection of himself standing near the edge of the plateau, then cast a growling sound from the projection's throat.

Predictably, the ape came barreling out of the mist, all blind rage as the air warped around it. He leapt over it, spinning his body around once as his blades cut down. The gorilla silently slid to a stop as its head went rolling over the edge, the residual heat of its corpse making it sink a few inches down into the snow and ice.

When Barry confirmed that he wanted to loot it, the corpse disappeared entirely, leaving only the imprint behind. There was no special reward or Quest triggered, but when he checked the items, one of them had a yellow color in the System Interface, instead of the usual white.

Paw of the Mountain King

Once activated, this item will draw in ambient heat before releasing it all at once.

"Huh," he murmured. That was new. Barry had browsed the System Store often enough to know that items with special Abilities were not for sale. Apparently, they could be looted from boss-type creatures? He had no idea, nor did he have an immediate use for this particular item, so he just shrugged and walked up to the other side of the plateau.

As the fog was blown away by the icy winds, the landscape became clear to see, all the way from the foot of the mountain to the far horizon. Barry felt a twinge of grief as he looked out at a surface that was nothing like Earth's. It didn't look like any planet, in fact, but more like an enlarged puzzle, or a quilt where different patches had been haphazardly sown together without a care for consistency.

He would have been too high to make out any detail, but with his Senses at 30 he saw the red and beige textures of a desert zone, cutting away into a swamp, which in turn bordered a coniferous forest that gave way to a jungle. The tapestry went on as far as he could see, all differently colored zones divided by straight lines.

Opening his map, he looked again at the route ahead of him. There were close to forty zones still between him and his goal. The next dozen would luckily be a mix of yellows and greens. Quickly counting out the ones he could see, he realized his goal would be beyond the horizon.

His eyes eventually traveled down again, looking for a path down the mountain. With a weary sigh, he concluded that it would be a lot of climbing before he would finally reach flat ground again. Then, he would finally be able to test what his body was capable of.

***

A giant frog with a long, snake-like tail that ended in a sharp bone tip sat in a swamp, well hidden by dark waters and high grass as it waited for prey. It would remain still for days on end, nothing changing in its environment except a slight breeze that rustled the grass. An exciting day might occur once every few weeks, where it managed to snatch an unlucky dragonfly out of the air.

It stirred, its keen eyes picking up movement on the edge of its vision. Its eyes twisted to take it in, body tensing imperceptibly to ready itself for a paralyzing strike with its tail or tongue. But there was only a blur, and before it could decide whether or not that counted as prey, it had passed, much faster than even its tongue could strike. That mysterious blur moved ever onwards, leaving a trail of upturned mud, trampled grass and confused predators in its wake.

The blur raced through grasslands, where loping wolves gave chase only for a moment before giving up, left only to sniff impotently at its trail. It rushed through forests where vicious, mutated bats flew out of their dark hiding places only to find nothing to hunt. It blasted through a desert, leaving a cloud of sand and a shallow trench where it passed, the wyrms that hid beneath the ground moving far too slowly to track it down.

On and on that blur went, until it finally came to a stop in a small clearing in a verdant forest, studded with beautiful flowers. Barry collapsed in the grass, taking a moment to catch his breath before guzzling down half a gallon of water and eating entire batches of food with all the grace of a starving caveman.

He changed his sweat-drenched shirt for a new one and did some stretches, checking his map for his progress. Nearly five-hundred miles in around five hours. Not bad at all, he thought with a grin. Going in a straight line on firm, even soil, he thought his maximum speed was well over a hundred and twenty miles per hour. He might well reach his goal in under a week.

The only stop he'd had to make was after about twenty minutes, when he'd already begun to suffer from the strain on his lungs. He'd fixed that particular problem by investing some additional points in Strength and Durability, fiddling with the System until he found the right settings for a focused Stat allocation. Although those five points in Strength and three in Durability added to his total, they were in fact spent only on strengthening his lungs and heart.

Tier 7 (Next: 8000)

Stats

Strength: 30

Durability: 39

Speed: 57

Senses: 35

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Intelligence: 20

PE Capacity: 1500 KJ

Abilities

[Halt Wave - Sphere]

[Cast Wave]

Direct Manipulation - Waves

[Blur Image]

[Camouflage]

Direct Manipulation - Light

[Reflect Momentum]

[Project Image]

[Charge Muscles]

[Infuse Momentum]

Unallocated Value: 1140

Value allocated to Stats: 3550

Value allocated to Abilities: 1980

Value spent on items: 6160

Together with some supportive use of [Charge Muscles] where needed, it had been enough to keep him going.

"Eat that, Pokka, you useless robot. My plans are working out perfectly," he exclaimed with a self-satisfied grin.

Since this was the first light green zone he'd come across, he then went looking for beasts. Over the last weeks, his imagination had run wild as to what his family might have had to face, but in the previous zone there had been nothing worse than a few evil capybara with sharp teeth and dangerous looking claws. It was another red mark on the long list of atrocities committed by these aliens, to have twisted such a kind and gentle creature into something as vicious as that.

After a bit of looking around, he came across a few rats. They were large rats, with oversized teeth and sharp claws, but still rats.

"That's all?"

He let out a long breath he hadn't noticed he'd been holding. These creatures were much less dangerous than what he'd been expecting. His family would have started with nothing, but he believed they were resourceful enough to at least deal with this level of threat.

Feeling like a weight had come off his shoulders, he got ready to start running again, but then he noticed something that made him hesitate. There was a thin line of smoke coming from between a copse of trees not too far off.

"People?" he murmured to himself, frowning.

He hadn't been expecting to come across any people this early, but come to think of it, this was a light green zone. Would they just have stayed here then, tried to settle down instead of moving to more dangerous zones? The more he thought of it, the more questions were raised, so he made his way in the direction of the smoke.

It didn't take long to find the campfire, surrounded by crude wooden huts in a large clearing in the forest. A pile of logs seemed to be drying next to the fire, and as he watched, a middle-aged woman appeared, carrying a crude wooden bucket which he thought was filled with water.

"John! Can you bring out the meat?" She called out.

A young man's voice called back and then he walked out from one of the huts, carrying a wooden stake with four fat rats skewered along its length.

Barry grimaced. Did these people have nothing else to eat? They did have a rugged look to them, clothes filthy and torn in places.

He felt suddenly dirty then, like a voyeur, peeking as he was from behind a tree with his Abilities turned on. Why had his first instinct been to hide, when finally encountering people after all this time? They were people, just like him. At the very least he should be giving them the benefit of doubt.

He swallowed, taking a deep breath, then turned off his Abilities and called out, trying to cast his voice to sound non-threatening.

"Hello?"

The woman startled, looking at him with wide eyes, while the younger man grabbed a spear off the ground and moved to stand protectively in front of her.

Barry showed his empty palms, staying where he was.

"I… uh… I'm just passing through. I guess. I was just… I wanted to ask you some questions, if that's alright?"

His mouth was dry and his palms were sweaty. He hadn't been anywhere near this nervous while fighting that gorilla king. Clearly, his increased Stats had not magically improved his social skills.

The two looked at each other for a moment. He heard the woman whisper to 'go get Dave', but the man hesitated, looking back at Barry.

"Go on," she encouraged, and then he was running off into the forest.

"We don't mean to be rude," she called back to him, "it's just that we've had a bad experience with strangers in the past. We're a bit more careful now."

"Oh," he said lamely, then scrambled to add on, "That's awful. I mean, I'm sorry to hear that." He hesitated, feeling awkward just standing there, then decided to sit down on the ground with his back against a tree trunk. The woman seemed to relax a bit upon seeing that.

"My name's Barry. You're actually the first people I've come across since…" He waved his hands in the air to indicate everything around them.

"Since the Reset? Really? Did you start far from here then?."

"Yeah. Very far, actually."

Barry explained his situation in broad strokes, leaving out a lot of details around the beasts he'd killed in the hope that she'd feel less threatened. The woman, who was called Sarah, explained that they'd been part of a larger group but had decided to stay in this forest instead of moving on. Dave had been a carpenter and was teleported along with his belt of equipment and a saw he happened to have been using at the time, which helped them make some basic tools and shelter.

It confirmed one of his suspicions, namely that most people would decide to find safety in numbers, converging around the stationary MAFTs.

There was an awkward silence after that, Sarah looking relieved when John and Dave returned. She repeated what Barry had told her, the two men reacting with shock when they learned Barry had started in a non-green zone.

"Wait, they put you in a yellow by mistake? How the hell did you manage to survive that?"

"Luck, mostly," Barry scratched his head, feeling a bit uncomfortable with the lie but deciding it was better this way. "I managed to lure a dumb beast off a cliff and, well, that gave me enough Value to get by. I got some Abilities that helped to keep me hidden and then I snuck past most of the other creatures."

"Abilities, huh," Dave said as he looked at the other two, something passing between them which Barry couldn't quite parse.

"What's that on your back?" John asked.

"Oh that's just my MAFT, where I keep the rest of my stuff. Very handy. You don't have one?"

Again, they exchanged a look that he couldn't put his finger on. Perhaps something like disbelief.

"Look, would you mind if we had a short talk, between ourselves?"

Barry agreed, and they went off for a few minutes before coming back.

"Alright, so you seem like a fine enough guy. Why don't you stay over for dinner? We could share stories, perhaps even trade some goods."

He thought on it for a moment, not wanting to waste too much time, but he couldn't find it in himself to reject an invitation from the first people he'd met since what they called 'the Reset'.

It finally felt like them letting their guard down, so he approached slowly, offering to help with some chores. When he noticed that John was setting up to start skinning the rats, he offered to provide dinner from his MAFT.

"I'm sure you'd like some variety after always eating, uh, the same… meat. For this amount it won't even cost me anything. I promise it's remarkably good for food that just magically appears."

They accepted without offering much resistance, their faces lighting up at the thought of being able to order from a wide variety of choices.

"Oh my God. Should I get a burger and fries? Or Mac and Cheese?" John was unable to hide his excitement, looking like a kid that had just found out he was going to Disneyland.

Sarah and Dave seemed apprehensive, like they didn't actually believe that the food would be real, but all of them gaped slack-jawed when steaming dishes appeared on the thin, round platform of the MAFT.

"I think it's one of the first things I got, actually. I think it was around 250 Value. I don't remember exactly, but it's worth every bit."

Dave nodded as he swallowed a bite of steak.

"We'd love to get our hands on one. But one of those damned rats is only worth 2 Value. So that would mean killing one hundred and twenty five rats without spending any Value on anything else during that period. I wouldn't even know where to find that many of 'em. This steak is really good, by the way."

John and Sarah nodded emphatically at his last remark, making appreciative noises with their mouths full of food. Conversation then came to a halt as the three ate with undisguised hunger and enjoyment. Once everyone was full, Dave cleared his throat as he met Barry's eyes.

"Listen, Barry. I know we just met, but you seem like a good guy and… Well, there's something we could really use your help with," he said. From the way the other two were now leaning forward and looking at Barry intently, he thought that this was what they'd been discussing before.

"We have this challenge coming up, two days from now. We're doing our best to prepare, but it sounds dangerous, and we're all pretty worried about what might happen. You seem strong and well equipped, and, well, we could really use an extra hand."

As soon as he realized they were asking for help, a familiar discomfort crept into Barry's gut, making him squirm slightly on the log he was using as a seat. He'd never been any good at saying no to people.

"What kind of challenge?" He asked, tapping his foot as he tried to avoid eye contact with John and Sarah who were now looking at him with desperate expectation.

"It doesn't really say, just that our attempted settlement will be 'challenged by the denizens of this zone'. We had ten days on the clock when that message first appeared. Now there's only two days left."

"So that's how they do it," Barry murmured to himself as he thought it over. Pokka had admitted that their ultimate goal was to gather soldiers. So how would the aliens handle people who just stayed put and never fought anything more dangerous than a large rat? Why, they'd simply force them to fight, wouldn't they? By whatever means necessary.

"What was that?" Dave asked.

"Never mind," Barry said, shaking his head with a sigh before looking up to meet Dave's eyes. "There's almost no chance that this so-called challenge will not involve heavy fighting. I also don't think it will end with just a single challenge. You'll need to prepare for the worst."

The three of them exchanged anxious looks, then John looked back at Barry with wet eyes.

"Are you saying… You won't help us?" Barry's gut wrenched as he heard how the young man's voice cracked.

"It's not that I don't want to, I just have people I need to find. Family," Barry said. All three of them were looking at him, waiting, hoping for him to change his mind. The pressure quickly became overwhelming, so he got to his feet.

"Just… Let me think about it for a moment," he said, walking up to the edge of the forest where he started to pace.

He could just run off and never look back. That way he wouldn't even have to see the crushing resignation and fear on their faces when he refused. They were just strangers, anyway. He didn't owe them anything. His family might need him even more than they did. Besides, they might not even need his help. They had fences and weapons, enough to handle a bunch of rats.

But that awful feeling in his gut just wouldn't go away, like a bag of hot stones sitting there, weighing him down. It was just a random encounter, but still, it felt important. Pokka's unanswered question came back to him, then.

When you find them, what will you do?

He had a choice to make, and nobody could make it for him. It did not feel like a problem that could be solved by weighing the odds. A philosophy student might talk about some obscure variant of the Trolley Problem and ask him whether he thought his family's lives were worth more than the lives of these strangers.

For Barry, the problem was more immediate and visceral than theoretical. He knew in his bones that if he walked away right now, that feeling in his gut wouldn't just disappear. If he left, he would forever remember these people's faces and wonder what had happened to them. Would he be able to live with that?

After some more pacing and staring out at the forest as he argued with himself, he asked himself one final question. Could he live with himself if he was two days late to save his family? He thought of his parents then, of what they would have to say about this. They would be proud, he thought, realizing with a sad smile that he'd reached the clarity he needed.

His parents had always been kind and quick to help those in need. They'd never walk away from people like this, not when they could help them.

And neither would he.

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