Slumrat Rising

“Alright, so everything is terrible. I’m basically naked here-”

“No “basically” about it.” Muttered the System.

“Alright, I am buck naked in the middle of the desert in the middle of the Ressilaud Free State. A country where I would not voluntarily come on a bet but apparently will come on business.”

“Heh. “Voluntarily.”

“God, you are such a joy to be around.” Truth muttered. “Before I can figure out… what to do with my new life, I need food. Water I can get from the well, but I have nothing to carry it in. Camping supplies? Or some means of transportation to the nearest city?”

“What you need… is a Mission!”

“You just said you can’t give me any material rewards, and your immaterial rewards require me to feed you knowledge.”

“Yeah, but I can also line things up so you know what to do for best success. Resulting in “rewards.” The System looked at him like someone trying to explain to the dog why they were safe from the vacuum. “I learned all the things you didn’t notice or remember. Remember?”

“Fine. Why not? Stun me with your non-mission mission.”

“What’s the personal development sheet?”

“A one-stop summary of your physical and magical development. Really useful to help you figure out your development path. You saw a garbage version when you learned about body cultivation.”

“So why...”

“Because Starbrite decided how it wanted you to develop, and making the numbers go up gives humans a happy little tingle.”

“Right.” Truth sighed. “So, why not start the looting and resupply here?”

“You were a little dead for the last few years. This place is stripped to nothing. Take a closer look at the house. It’s been looted so hard even the door hinges are gone.”

Truth looked over. The house was barely standing. Anything of even the most minute value had been stripped and carried away.

“Guess I run.”

“Yep. But hey, have this.” A light blue arrow popped up in Truth’s vision, pointing left. It kept pointing left until he turned far enough, then it pointed to a spot on the horizon.

“Follow the arrow to the village?”

“Right. At least that’s where it was when we last looked at a map.”

“Better than nothing.”

“Alright, talking to you this long has been exhausting. I’m going back into your apertures. Also, because I know how your “brain” works, spare us both the penetration and holes jokes. I am as sexless as a breeze.” And on that note, the System vanished.

Truth looked out over the scrubby little bushes dotting the red earth. The sky was an empty, aching blue. The sun seemed brighter than he remembered, almost white. There was the well, the ruined house, the flat bit of desert. His graveyard home, for the last however many years. He absolutely would not miss it, but he was reluctant to leave. He chuckled. Hard to leave the womb. It’s a cold world out there. Truth lined up on the blue arrow in the sky and started running.

And quickly stopped again.

“What the actual…” Somehow, profanity didn’t seem the right choice. He started running again.

Truth felt his legs coil below him and launch him step after step. The easy jogging cadence had him moving at dead-sprint speed. Just to see what would happen, he tried to do a forward somersault in the air as he ran. He flipped, landed, and never broke stride. It had been effortless.

Truth grinned. New body. Upgraded body. Let’s see what the Mediations gave me.

It turns out that you can do cartwheels at 64 kph through desert gorse. Once. You can do one cartwheel at 64 kph. Bad things happen starting with the second. Don’t try it unless your face is supernaturally tough. One cannot, however, backflip at 64 kph. There is necessarily a loss of speed. However, while Truth was only guesstimating his exact pace, he was pretty sure he could now backflip a hundred meters faster than he could run it previously.

So. That was good. He stopped, crouched down, and jumped straight up. Nothing to measure against, but the hang time felt… long. When he landed, he looked at the footprints from his jump. About two centimeters deep in the hard-packed dirt. So. A lot of force in those legs. Which were not feeling the least bit fatigued so far.

In a giggling fit of madness, he did a handstand. Truth was not a handstand-doer. He was fit enough, of course. He just never really bothered. He lowered and raised his perfectly vertical body in a fairly extreme push-up. No problem keeping rigid and upright. No problem with arm fatigue or fatigue in his back and core.

Truth’s giggling progressed to cackling as he balanced on one hand and slowly raised the other. First, sticking straight out to the side, then brought in line with his legs. No problem, no real additional strain.

He raised off his flat palms onto his fingers. Then one finger. Then, giggling long since abandoned and now laughing like a loon, he started “strolling” on his index and middle fingers. Regrettably, this pioneering method of transportation was slower than he would like, but he still figured he could keep up with a Level 0 walking normally. Truth gave his arm a gentle flex and flipped onto his feet.

He laughed so hard he couldn’t keep standing, collapsing ass-first onto the desert floor. His naked rear landed on one of the spiky bushes. Truth stopped laughing instantly, expecting agony. Which didn’t come. He could feel it poking him, and it wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t painful either. In fact- Truth examined a foot. Unmarked and pain-free. Despite running at vehicle speeds through the rocky, hot sand, spiky bush-filled desert.

So that was interesting. Could he still feel pain? He gave his thigh a ferocious slap, and the stinging pain convinced him that, yes, he certainly could feel pain. So it was just that his threshold for pain had adjusted with his damage resistance.

He tried to organize what he had learned so far. He was faster by a lot. Stronger, by a lot. Coordination, balance, and reflexes all hugely improved, and his reflexes were outstanding to begin with. Bodily awareness was improved. He couldn’t tell if vision or hearing were much better, but he was willing to bet they were. It was a massive all-around upgrade. And he still didn’t know what the limits of this body were.

Truth started to get into a sprinter’s stance when a particular, undeniable fact intruded. He was in a desert. He hadn’t had a drink of water in literally years. And he was planning on exhausting himself physically. This was, to use a military term, dumb.

The Starbrite Suits would probably put in a report- “Based on ongoing external factors and absent mitigating action items which might require unbudgeted expenditures, the proposed action plan for Associate resource allocation is currently contraindicated when taken in light of short and medium-term objectives.

Truth returned to a steady jog, letting the desert vanish under his feet. It quickly became meditative. Starbrite tried to kill him. Starbrite did kill him. Starbrite had been mind-controlling him, though it must have been laughably easy given his vocal, active loyalty. Starbrite… had his siblings.

Starbrite was mind-controlling his siblings. And the control would only get stronger the stronger his siblings got. And there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t “rescue” them without killing them. They wouldn’t want to be rescued or understand that they needed rescuing any more than he did… before he died.

Which he did. That was a thing he did. He wanted to argue with the System about it, but the evidence was pretty overwhelming that something had happened to him, and he was not currently dead or seriously wounded. Absent hallucination or a forcible transfer into a new body, he couldn’t imagine what else it could be. He had died. Starbrite had killed him. And something in his body caused him to keep his soul and the System inside. That same something rebuilt him.

Truth did a mental inventory of himself, running through “weirdness that affected my body.” It wasn’t that long a list, and the nine worms were quickly revealed as the prime suspects.

How the Hell they did that, he couldn’t say. Although speaking of Hell, he vividly remembered the giant sculpture the Ghul had made, their bound, heroically proportioned god ignoring the world he had made. Truth almost missed his stride. He realized that his current body was uncannily similar to the god in chains.

That was… not good? Though he couldn’t think of a reason for it being bad. This was a spectacularly comfortable body to move around in, and his previous body (“starter body?”) was pretty great already.

The sun sped over his worried head (no sunstroke, he noticed, nor did dehydration cripple him.) The horizon was utterly empty until just minutes before he stumbled on Reswqi. Truth contemplated how he was going to get what he needed.

It never occurred to Truth to hope for charity. The concept was utterly alien to him. He looked up at the sun. It was setting soon. Easy enough to just… lay down and wait. Truth felt nicely warmed up by the day’s exercise. Not sleepy, though. He lay on the dirt and waited.

Sunset, and he could smell woodsmoke. People cooking over wood stoves? Truth idly remembered his ambition to be a foodie. A couple of wagons were parked by rammed earth buildings, ancient wrecks, leering in the twilight and hinting that they might run, or not. Truth frowned at the sky, then shrugged. At this latitude, twilight lasted for less than an hour. Beautiful sunset, then periwinkle glow, and finally, it was darker than the inside of a boot.

The stars rose, and the sky exploded with wonder. Truth felt lifted up into them, lost in them, wandering in the wonder of the brilliant dots of light. Each light a sovereign power ruled by a vast spirit. Each light moving in perfect, immutable celestial order, guided by laws and principles even the wisest natural philosophers could only faintly grasp.

Someone came out of the village yelling. Truth rolled onto his belly. The fella was on the tall side, wrapped in incredibly colorful cloth. Truth couldn’t see his feet. The man had a spear, for some reason, which he was waving threateningly at the huts behind him. Some other equally tall men came out and shooed him away, unimpressed by the spear. Truth shrugged. Lousy drunk?

In the slums, lone drunks got rolled. Not that this guy had any pockets to run, from the look of things.

Truth skulked closer to the village. The loudmouth with the spear was staggering into the scrub. Loudmouth hiked up his… sarong? Dress? Whatever it was. Hiked it up and let fly. Truth had the decency to let him finish before he coldcocked the guy.

The sarong felt drafty, and Truth had no idea how you were supposed to wrap it. He tried to imitate how Loudmouth wrapped it, but he was sure it wasn't right. What’s worse, it didn’t have pockets. No pockets meant no keys and no way to know which of these houses was now empty.

Well. He could just go look. But that would take time. He looked at the knocked-out villager. He smelled sour, like fermented something and weeks of BO. Truth doubted he would be cooperative if he woke up. And Truth didn’t speak the local language. Whatever it was.

“Hey, System! Any chance you provide translation services?” The System didn’t respond. He would be doing this the hard way.

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