NOVEL NEXT 2.54: Chester
His screams were scraping his throat raw, but he couldn't stop. Every breath was a gasp of fire, every footfall a jarring impact that shot up his aching legs, but to stop, to even slow down, was to die. So he ran, and he screamed.
+124 Attention
+126 Attention
+131 Attention
Chester wished with every atom of his being that he could somehow switch the notifications off. The second-by-second reminder of the thousands of multifaceted insect eyes boring into his back was not helping anything. The incessant flicker was maddening, like a fly caught in the corner of his eyelid. Each tick of the counter was another jolt of anxiety, another confirmation of his worst nightmare made manifest: he was the centre of attention. The sole focus of a world that wanted to tear him limb from limb. The irony was so cruel, so perfectly tailored to his own personal hell, that it would have been funny if he'd had the capacity for anything other than pure terror.
Behind him, something popped with the wet sound of a water balloon filled with sludge subjected to a sharp needle. He risked a glance over his shoulder. One of the larger beetle abominations with a carapace the colour of dried blood had stumbled. Its legs buckled, and its body seemed to melt, its chitinous plates turning a corrupted purple before dissolving into a bubbling sludge that was quickly trampled by the rest of the pursuing horde.
Don't Look At Me.
The ability was both his saviour and a source of bone-deep horror. It was a passive field of corruption, creating a slow-acting poison that seeped into anything that kept its gaze fixed on him for too long. A few monsters at the front of the pack were beginning to show the signs with the purple veins crawling across their bodies, making their movements increasingly sluggish, their bodies twitching with unnatural spasms. It was thinning the herd, but not nearly fast enough.
With a choked sob, he mentally flipped the switch. The passive drain of the corruption faded, and in its place, a different power surged through him.
All Eyes On Me.
The strength that flooded his limbs was intoxicating and nauseating at the same time. It was a physical manifestation of the attention he so despised, a roaring fire in his muscles fuelled by the very thing that was trying to kill him. His speed increased, his tired legs finding a new, desperate energy. In moments, he was practically flying, legs pumping like pistons, his feet barely seeming to touch the strange, tiled floor of the warped corridor.
Navigating this place was a nightmare in itself. The office twisted in on itself in ways that broke his mind, corridors spiralling into ceilings, doors opening onto upside-down replicas of the rooms he'd just left. The only reason he had any sense of direction at all was the unwavering, single-minded pursuit of the monsters behind him. They were his compass, a terrifying, murderous arrow pointing him ever forward, no matter what was truly ahead of him.
How had it come to this? He squeezed his eyes shut for a second, the memory a painful, fragmented flash. The supermarket. The stickbug boss. He'd wanted to help, to prove he wasn't useless, that he wasn't just the rich kid who'd been carried through the end of the world, a burden. He remembered stepping forward, trying to draw its attention, to activate his abilities and then… nothing. Just a searing, all-consuming pain, a feeling of being utterly disintegrated.
He'd come to in this bizarre, sterile hellscape, his body so damaged it wasn't even painful anymore; he'd lost all feeling. In a blind panic, with the chittering of the first monsters already closing in, he had dumped every single point he'd earned into his levels in desperation to feel again.
And then he had started running and he hadn't been able to stop since. Minutes or hours or days could have passed. He had no fucking idea.
He had thought he would last seconds. A minute, at most. He was fit, sure; his father had insisted on personal trainers and a strict regimen. "A weak body betrays a weak mind, Chester. And the Harrington name is not associated with weakness." But he wasn't a fighter. He wasn't a hero like John or a pillar of strength like Doug. He was just… Chester. The disappointment. The one who hid in his room during family gatherings, praying no one would try to talk to him. The one his older siblings always had to protect from their parents' suffocating expectations.
Yet, somehow, he was still alive. The System's magic was ridiculous, when he stopped to think about it, pushing his body far beyond any limit he'd thought possible. But it wasn't infinite. The burning in his lungs was real, the screaming ache in his muscles a prelude to a collapse he knew was inevitable. He hoped, with a desperation that bordered on prayer, that the others were okay. That they would find him. He couldn't keep this up forever.
A fresh wave of self-loathing washed over him, almost making him stumble. He'd contributed nothing. Absolutely nothing. Since the world ended, he'd been a passenger, a piece of luggage the team had to drag along. Lily was sharp and deadly, Jade was a silent force of nature, Doug was their unshakeable shield, and John… John was something else entirely. Someone who took the apocalypse and stared it right in the eye.
And what had he done? He'd hidden behind them. He'd flinched and stuttered and made himself small, just as he always had. He was a Harrington. His family built empires. They didn't cower. The thought of his father's disdainful gaze if he saw Chester now was almost as terrifying as the monsters at his heels. The only comfort he'd ever known was the easy, unjudging presence of Grant and Jessica, the only two people who saw him and not the disappointment to the family name. Now, they were probably dead, and he was failing their memory by being this pathetic.
He grit his teeth, the self-recrimination fuelling a fresh burst of determination. He wouldn't die like this. Not as a coward. Not as a burden. He would survive. He would find his team. And he would find a way to be useful, even if it killed him.
Fuelled by this grim resolve, he pushed his body harder, the power of All Eyes On Me a bonfire in his veins. He rounded a corner into a long hallway lined with motivational posters. The first one read "TEAMWORK" under a picture of several severed hands clasped together, gore dripping from the stumps of their wrists. As he ran past, the image writhed and changed, the hands becoming skeletal, clawed things, and the text shifting to read "THEY LEFT YOU." He flinched, his stride faltering for a split second. The next poster, "PERSEVERANCE," showed a lone figure climbing a mountain. It warped into an image of him, his face contorted in a scream, falling into a chasm filled with insectoid legs, the word changing to "POINTLESS."
He tore his eyes away, his heart jackhammering. The office was actively mocking him.
He burst through a set of double doors into what looked like a large conference room. A long, polished table dominated the space, surrounded by chairs occupied by desiccated figures in rotting suits, looking only vaguely like humans. They sat perfectly still, their leathery hands folded on the table, their empty eye sockets all directed towards a large screen at the far end of the room. The screen was pure static, but a muffled, monotonous voice droned on from a hidden speaker, an endless corporate presentation for an audience long dead. The stench of decay stung his nose.
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He didn't slow down, vaulting over the table and scattering ancient, brittle papers. The horde poured in behind him, their chittering echoing unnervingly in the tomb-like silence of the room. He kicked open a door at the far end and found himself in the IT department.
It was a nest. Thick, black cables, pulsating like veins, covered every surface, forming a dense, tangled web. In the centre of the room, several spider-like creatures skittered and twitched, their multiple red eyes swivelling to track his movements even as they launched themselves after him, overcome by the spell-induced primal urge to pursue.
His flight led him past a vending machine, its glass front displaying neatly packaged, still-beating organs. A human heart, a pair of lungs, a coiled length of intestine, each pulsed weakly in its sterile plastic wrapping. He felt a surge of bile rise in his throat and swallowed it down, forcing himself to keep moving.
The path twisted again, leading him to a wide, carpeted staircase spiralling downwards. He took the steps three at a time, his enhanced legs absorbing the impact. The roar of the horde behind him was a constant, deafening presence. He reached a landing and continued down the next flight, then risked another glance back.
His blood ran cold. The staircase above him was gone. Where the landing should have been, there was now just a solid, featureless wall of stained beige drywall. He looked down. The stairs beneath his feet continued into the gloom, but the flight he had just descended had vanished from existence. The monsters, their single-minded momentum carrying them forward, had presumably continued down a phantom staircase that was no longer connected to his reality. The chittering roar was fading, replaced by a sudden silence that was almost as unnerving.
He stopped, his chest heaving, slumping against the railing with his hands on his knees. Sweat dripped from his brow, stinging his eyes. He was alone. Truly alone, for the first time since he woke up in this hell. The silence pressed in on him like a steel net. He could hear his own ragged breathing sawing in and out of his lungs, the frantic drumming of his own heart, even the creaks of his tortured bones.
For a moment, relief washed over him. It was over. The chase was over. He could rest. He could hide. He sank to the floor, his back against the wall, his entire body trembling with exhaustion and adrenaline. The constant, maddening flicker of the Attention notifications faded. The world was quiet.
But the quiet didn't feel safe. It felt empty. Wrong.
He pulled up his status with a thought, a nervous habit. His eyes scanned the familiar text, looking for... he wasn't sure what. Reassurance, maybe. But what he saw sent a fresh spike of ice through his veins, even though it was exactly what he should have expected.
-10 Attention
-20 Attention
-30 Attention
The numbers were going down. Of course. It was so obvious, so hideously, cruelly logical. His power was fuelled by attention. When no one was looking at him, the well ran dry. He was losing points. The very resource he needed to level up, to buy skills, to simply survive, was draining away second by second in this blessed, damnable silence.
A choked sound escaped his lips, half laugh, half sob, all pathetic. He couldn't hide. He couldn't rest. The System had designed his torture for one purpose: to be a spectacle. A target. A lure. Hiding was a slower, more insidious form of suicide. If he stayed here, he would bleed out, his potential dwindling to nothing until the next monster that stumbled upon him would find him too weak to even run.
All the self-loathing, the fear, the resentment coalesced into a hard point of bitter sorrow that stuck in his throat like a metal barb. He was truly, utterly on his own. His team was gone, maybe dead. His family, who he could barely stand to think about, were a world away. There was no one to save him. No one to hide behind. If he wanted to live, if he wanted to see another day and maybe even find his comrades again, he had to do it himself. And doing it himself meant embracing the nightmare.
He got to his feet, his legs shaky. The determination he'd felt earlier was back, no longer a fleeting spark but a hard ember in his heart that he was sure could become a roaring flame if he fanned it just right. He was done being pathetic. He was done being a burden.
Chester looked around with new purpose. The staircase continued down into darkness, but there was a door on the landing. A simple, plain office door with a brass handle. It was probably a trap. It probably led to a room full of monsters.
Good, he told himself. His lips trembled. Good, he thought again, practically shouting the word in the confines of his mind. It didn't help.
"Good," he tried saying it aloud, and that made the sentiment feel more solid, somehow. It was a good thing that there'd be monsters in there. He'd be able to kill them, and gain more points, and then he'd be a burden no longer. In fact, he'd become so strong that the others would have no choice but to make him the leader of their team, but he'd only order them to stand back and leave it to him, because by that point they'd just get in his way as he slaughtered through thousands of monsters single-handedly just by existing.
"Yeah," he murmured. "That's how it's going to go."
He walked to the door, took a deep, steadying breath, and threw it open.
The room beyond could hardly be called a room. He was standing on a precipice, the doorway opening into nothing but a vast, mind-bending emptiness.
Below, above, and all around him, walkways and staircases twisted through the cavernous space at angles that defied logic. And on every surface, there were monsters. Thousands upon thousands of them, scuttling, marching, waiting. In the very centre of it all, suspended like a malevolent god, was the portal core. The great green sphere, its surface marred by the black, hourglass iris, pulsed with a nauseating light.
For a moment, nothing happened. He was just another detail in the impossible architecture. Then, the great eye of the portal core swivelled. The black iris constricted, focusing, and locked directly onto him. A wave of pure, psychic pressure washed over him, a feeling of being seen, known, and utterly despised.
The effect was instantaneous. Like a switch being thrown, every monster in the chamber, from the smallest cockroach to the largest beetle, stopped. Every head, every multifaceted eye, turned in perfect, horrifying unison to stare at him. The ambient chittering of the room ceased, replaced by a silence so absolute it felt like the world was holding its breath.
+5732 Attention
+5914 Attention
+6211 Attention
The notifications exploded in his vision, a scrolling waterfall of text. The sheer weight of that collective gaze was like an entire planet had just been placed on his shoulders, and he was no Atlas. He felt his soul shrivel inside him, a feeling of such overwhelming terror that his consciousness seemed to detach, floating somewhere above his own head, looking down at the pathetic, trembling boy about to be torn to pieces.
But the scream that ripped from his throat this time was different to the ones that came before. It wasn't just fear, though there was plenty of that in there. It was defiance. It was rage. It was the sound of a cornered animal deciding to bite back rather than cower, for once.
He reactivated Don't Look At Me, the corrupting aura shimmering around him. The monsters on the nearest walkway began to surge forward, a living avalanche of chitin and hate.
And Chester ran. Not back through the door. Not away from the danger.
He launched himself forward, off the ledge and onto the nearest upside-down walkway, his feet finding purchase on the ceiling as if it were the floor. He ran straight towards the giant, hateful eye, his own personal scream a war cry against a universe that had made him its unwilling punching bag. He was going to contribute. He was going to make his mark. He was going to show this world, and himself, what it really meant to be the centre of attention.