System Change

“The worst day of your life?” Alanah asked—she was even becoming emotional. It was easy to tell that she already had an idea about what had happened with Derek and his family.

“It’s probably worse than you think,” Derek said. “I guess my sister put in a lot of work and got my mother, and even my father, to agree to come to my graduation. But I didn’t know any of this at the time and Stace never told me about it. I guess she wanted it to be a surprise.” Derek swallowed the lump forming in his throat.

“That day, I walked out with the rest of my class and got my little rolled-up piece of paper, shook hands with the president of the university, then went back down. Finally, after four years, I was a college graduate with a degree in some that I would never use, and I had plans on becoming a professional football player,” Derek said. “Then, when I got back to my dorm, I grabbed my phone—a communication device—and saw a bunch of missed calls.

“When I called the number back, it turned out that it was the hospital nearby, which confused me,” Derek said, and he took a deep breath. “But after a minute, they figured out who I was, and I was connected to somebody else—I don’t even remember who. It was all a blur after I heard the words that my family had been in an accident.

“I mean, how could they have been in an accident in Arizona? They lived in North Carolina, and my mother, for as amazing as she was in her professional career, hated flying.” Derek shook his head as a tear finally rolled down his cheek. “But no, they gave me my father’s, mother’s, and sister’s name. It was them.”

“Oh, no,” Alanah muttered again, this time with her palm over her mouth.

“Apparently, they had driven through the night to get there in time for my graduation ceremony, but some kids who had been partying the night before decided that they were in good enough condition to go for a ride,” Derek said and clinched his fist. “My family never made it to the university…” He took another deep breath in. “When I got to the hospital, my mom and dad were both gone already… and Stace was barely hanging on.” Derek gripped the arm of his chair and was barely able to keep himself from crushing it.

Alanah just sat in silence, staring at Derek. It seemed she didn’t really know what to say to him.

“I sat beside her bedside and hoped and prayed… I held her hand in mine…” Another tear ran down Derek’s face as he spoke. “She opened her eyes, and for a second, I thought she was going to be okay… I thought my prayers worked… do you know what the last thing she said to me was?” he asked rhetorically. “She gave me a weak smile and said, ‘Looks like we missed your graduation…’” Derek snorted and shook his head. “That’s just like her. She was so used to making light of everything to keep me and my parents from fighting…”

“Mhm…” Derek nodded. “And our world was relatively peaceful,” he continued. “We didn’t have monster attacks or anything like that. Sure, we had wars with other countries occasionally, and there were always some bad apples out there prone to violence, but, at least where I grew up, you never woke up one day thinking that everything could turn to shit in an instant. Honestly, I had never lost anybody that close to me, other than my grandma, but we had time to prepare with her. With my parents and my sister… I wasn’t prepared.”

“And how could you have been?”

“So, no, I didn’t go pro. I fell into a bout of depression…” Derek said. “I moved back to North Carolina, but I couldn’t stand to be in the house I grew up in, so I moved some of my stuff out to a family cabin we owned, and I just stayed there—isolated from the rest of the world. Occasionally, I made my way into the city to pick up some groceries or stop by a bar for a drink and a hotel afterward. Never once did I drive if I was even remotely not sober. That’s something that sticks with you…”

“That sounds… horrible,” Alanah said.

“I’m sure you had it worse,” Derek replied. “Wanting to speak to people, but never being able to, no matter how much you wanted. That sounds like its own kind of horrible. Me? I just wanted to be left alone, and I was. I had my mother’s lawyer friend take care of the estate and everything else, and I just left. I never talked to a single person from my old life again. Then, a few years later, I was hit with a terrible headache, saw weird lights shooting down from the sky, then my vision was filled up with notifications about being inducted into a system’s tutorial stage.”

“So, this Universal System just came in and took over your planet? And what kind of tutorial would a system use? It just all sounds so confusing,” Alanah replied.

“Oh, it was confusing. There was mass panic, and I don’t know how many people died within the first week or two of the system taking over,” Derek said. He was more than happy to turn the conversation away from his family and toward his experience with the system. It had been harder to talk about everything than he had expected. It was also the first time he’d spoken his sister’s name out loud since the funeral.

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“I bet,” Alanah replied. “I can’t even imagine not having a system for everything. Everything we do is centered around the so-called Great System. We wouldn’t even know which way was up if not for the system’s support.”

“Yeah,” Derek said. “I figure that Earth will be like that before long—if it’s not like that already. If I’m not mistaken, the tutorial should be long over by now, and the planet should be completely integrated into the system. Now, what would that look like? I have no clue. As far as I know or can guess, the Universal System spans wide throughout the universe and integrates planets and people into it as it goes. It seems to be quite a bit different from the system you have here.”

“I wonder what kind of system I will be ascending to,” Alanah said. “Will it be like this Universal System, or will it be one similar to the Great System? I’m scared, but at the same time, I haven’t been this excited in a long time. Do you mind telling me what the big differences between this system and the one you used to have is? Or… you do have the so-called Great System, correct? Or do you have the Universal System still, even though you’re under this system?”

“Woah, woah, woah.” Derek laughed. “Slow down… one question at a time,” he said. But he knew how interesting learning about all these things was. If he were in her shoes, he probably would have thrown out even more questions than she did. In fact, he had thrown out a lot of questions when he first met Dave. “Let’s start at where I left off with my story,” he finally said.

“Great!” Alanah said excitedly. “I was wondering what happened next.”

“Well, like I said, the system came and started sending us notifications,” Derek continued. “I guess I was lucky, but I had been in the process of killing a fish just as the system came, so, I was hit with the system and its notifications just as I was plunging a knife into the fish’s skull, and when I did, I received a Title—which is what that system had instead of Achievements—about being one of the first people on my planet to obtain a kill. It was called ‘First of Many’ and it gave a huge boost in stats—a ten percent boost, in fact.”

“Percentage boost? In stats?” Alanah said, stunned. “Now that is a rare Achieve… Title. Rarely do you receive an Achievement that works on percentages. It’s mostly just static increases in certain stats.”

“Don’t I know it.” Derek said. “But yeah, I’m pretty sure that since we were in the ‘tutorial phase’ and newly introduced to the system, it was giving us special rewards to increase the rate at which we grew so by the time the tutorial phase was over, we would be ready to be introduced to the rest of those with the system.” Now that I think about it, I bet that’s why when I focused on finding Jace, he didn’t seem to be on Earth. The tutorial is over, and since he was strong and a fighter, he probably moved on to some place different. He would get bored easily if there wasn’t anyone on Earth to provide a challenge to him.

“That makes sense,” Alanah replied with a nod. “I can’t imagine what would happen if it just threw you all to the wolves. There would be no surviving that. People are not so kind as to help you if someone tried to take over your ‘Earth.’”

“Exactly,” Derek agreed. “I doubt we would have lasted more than a week or two. I mean, we had a population of around eight billion people when the system came, and with just the monsters that were made from the integration, I would bet that more than half of those people have already died. I would like to see the actual number one day, but I know it was basically something out of an apocalypse. Cities vanished overnight and bears, wolves, gerbils… basically every type of animal we had was turned into monsters and roamed freely.”

“That must have been horrible. Living a relatively peaceful life, then thrust into a world full of monsters and magic,” Alanah said.

“For most… it probably was,” Derek said with a real smile for the first time in a while. “For me, it was perfect. I thrived in a world full of monsters. I fought without regard for my life because of what I was going through before it came. But I was good at fighting, good at hitting and being hit, and no matter how much the system threw at me, I somehow came out alive. In fact, the tutorial phase of the system introduction had leaderboards, and before I left the planet, I was one of the top ten strongest people on the planet. People would seek me out for help, invaders would run from me when I approached.” Jace would seek me out and beat the ever-loving shit out of me… he thought but didn’t say. “I was basically alive again after all those years of living in that cabin.”

“So the system coming gave you a new life,” Alanah said.

“It did… sort of,” Derek replied. “I still avoided people. It was much easier to just seek out beasts and monsters and grind levels that way. I still only went into town for food and drink—or to exchange system credits at one of the hubs. Oh, that is something the Universal System has that this one doesn’t… system credits.”

“Oh?” Alanah raised her eyebrows in interest. “What do those do?”

“Well, each system curated base or city would have a sort of system hub. Among other things, you could use it as sort of a digital shop with your system credits—which was earned by gaining Titles, selling things on the hub, and even killing monsters. Though, it seemed like I was gaining less and less credits by slaying monsters as time went on. But, you could take those credits and buy a lot of stuff. Food, drink, land, buildings, armor, weapons, and there were even some skills. See, we didn’t have skill points used to purchase skills like this system. We got the skills based on class, and we could supplement those with other skills purchased from the system hub.

“Now, there was a lot of stuff that couldn’t be purchased, or was way too expensive to purchase. It was basically an auction that was constantly running,” he explained. “It made buying things much easier. And I never had to actually carry physical coins or money.”

“That sounds very convenient,” Alanah said.

“It was, though, only a few people ever had enough credits to make real use out of it,” Derek said, then pulled out his old glaive—the one with all his memories. “I special ordered this through some intermediate blacksmith on the hub. I paid a pretty penny for it back then.”

“Interesting,” Alanah said as she looked over the glaive. “Maybe this new system I am going to will have something like that. That would make things much simpler.”

“Hopefully,” Derek said. “And the best part about it was that you could sell things anonymously. You didn’t have to worry about being killed because you sold something you shouldn’t have.”

“That is always a pain to deal with,” Alanah said.

“I take it you’re speaking from experience,” Derek said.

“More than you know,” Alanah laughed before adding, “So, the system came, you thrived, yet you still avoided people. So… how is it that you ended up here?”