Broken System Ch 1-10 (Preview) (Patreon)

So, as promised, here are the first 10 chapters of the series I'm starting next month when Letter of the Law is finished. It's a dark isekai that will explore things like the nature of free will, magic-as-prgraming, and man vs. nature. The first volume will be 70-100ish chapters long and will be published over about a year I think.

Patreon  doesn't let me post little blue boxes, so if you would like to read it in its intended format you will have to wait for the release!

Blurb

Benjamin wasn’t reincarnated to another world as a reward for a life well lived. Instead, he and his friends were summoned by heartless strangers, and changed by powers beyond their understanding becoming nothing but tools. Now using a broken system, he must attempt to navigate a strange fantasy world while otherworldly magic slowly burns away everything he is as he attempts to restore his friends and find a way home.

Expect: A broken system, a high fantasy world, magic-as-coding, brutal combat, questions about identity and agency, emotional trauma, and negligible romance.

Daily updates through chapter 30, Then every Monday and Friday.

Ch. 1 - Far From Home

They’d just started investigating the aftermath of what happened when Ethan shouted, “Oh my God! What the hell happened to my truck!?”

For the last couple of minutes, Benjamin and his friends had endured the end of the world. At least it had felt like it at the time.

It was his own fault, though. He’d been laying in his sleeping bag wondering how a weekend that was already one part sunburn, two parts bug bites, and three parts regret could get any worse when the universe had given him an answer: pure, unadulterated insanity.

They’d all been woken up by a series of earthquakes to find the skies on fire with eerie green aurora that should have never come this far south in the summer. Regardless, it covered the sky in wavering sheets of translucent emerald light.

After that, the stars started glitching out, vanishing ten or twenty at a time, as whole constellations just disappeared. The new stars that replaced them, just looked wrong, though. Instead of the cold blue-white light he was used to, these new ones had a golden hue that looked almost malevolent against the green stained sky.

Benjamin had managed to record most of it, and the commotion had been enough to force him and his friends from their tents once the shaking stopped. Almost everyone else in the nearby campsites seemed to have the same idea, making Emma and Matt some of the only people who hadn’t emerged from their tent.

Now Benjamin, Raja, and Ethan stood between their tents in t-shirts and shorts as they shivered in the cool night air and looked for answers by flashlight. Well, Ethan and Raja were searching, at least.

Benjamin was preoccupied with looking through the video he’d recorded to help. He was trying to make sense of what had just happened. It was like a time-lapse video on an acid trip, and his mind rebelled at the very idea of what he was watching.

As a YouTube video, it would have been compelling, but right now? If it wasn’t a nightmare, then Benjamin was certain they should have all died as the ground beneath their feet exploded, and the Earth was consumed by a coronal mass ejection that burned the world to ash. That hadn’t happened, though. Instead, the cosmic fireworks show had just sort of stopped.

Benjamin abandoned his attempts to understand his video and spun to face their parked cars as soon as he heard Ethan’s cry. The sight was disturbing. Benjamin’s Prius and Matt’s Cherokee both sat there undisturbed. Ethan’s new Tacoma, though, had been cut cleanly down the middle from bumper to bumper. It had been parked just to the right of the other vehicles, and now the right half was missing entirely.

“I mean, nothing natural could cut something that clean,” Benjamin said dumbly as his mind raced as he looked for something more relevant to say. There was nothing, though. He was too stunned to give a better answer.

He knew from his internship it would take a laser or a water jet hours to do that. Still, somehow, he was certain that the whole process had only lasted for the few minutes it had taken the stars to go insane.

“Tell me something I don’t already know,” Ethan sighed.

“I mean, I think the bigger question is, where did the other half go exactly?” Raja asked as he pretended to search for the missing piece further back in the trees like it could have wandered off somewhere. Even this wasn’t enough to make his friend be completely serious, though he did look as worried as Benjamin had ever seen him.

“What do you mean?” Matt asked, coming out to join them. “The other half of what?”

Benjamin turned to answer him, but when he saw Emma a few steps behind him wearing her oversized hoodie, he suddenly remembered why he’d been so pissed off earlier and turned away as he sought to suppress the ugly surge of emotions that the happy couple inspired.

He wanted to tell them about the light show or show Matt the video he’d taken. Instead, all he could think about when he looked at either of them was the announcement earlier that afternoon, and that still pissed him off too much to think about right now.

Let someone else explain what’s going on to the lovebirds, he thought angrily as he looked around at the other campsites and busied himself trying to develop a few theories or at least rule them out. For the moment, all he could say for certain was that whatever had happened hadn’t been in his head because it had woken everybody up. That, unfortunately, ruled out the possibility he’d dreamed the whole thing, eliminating all the most likely options.

Raja answered Matt’s question with another joke, but Benjamin tuned it out as he turned his gaze further into the dark. While the rest of the group talked about whether or not the insurance was going to cover this, Benjamin studied the wider area around them in an attempt to answer Raja’s earlier question. Where could the other half of a truck go?

He didn’t like what he saw. First, he noticed the RV on the far side of the campground and the fact that it was resting at an odd angle. It was only after staring at it for a few seconds that Benjamin realized it wasn’t just leaning. Somehow, it had been cut in half somewhere toward the middle in the exact same way. The front half was still sitting where it had been, but the back half was missing, and that was what was making it sit at an awkward angle while its frame rested on the ground and its windshield pointed up to the sky at a 45-degree angle.

“Look at that shit,” Raja said, coming over to join him. “Someone is going to have a really bad day. Do you think maybe the same thing happened over there? Do we got a thief running around that only steals half a car at a time?”

Raja was the only one to laugh at his joke as Benjamin started to lay the facts down in his mind. It was almost like a big circular piece of their campground had been picked up and set down somewhere else. That was the only way any of this made any sense. Cars and tents were sliced precisely, half an RV was just gone, and trails and roads simply dead-ended where they met an imaginary circular line and were replaced by tall grasses.

“Guys,” Benjamin said nervously, trying to figure out how to relay all this to them without freaking anyone out, “I think some real crazy shit has happened. Like maybe we’ve been teleported—”

This time, it was a pillar of green light erupting not far from the campsite that interrupted him. It was impossible to get a real sense of scale in the dark, but it seemed to stretch to the sky and shut everyone up as they gawked. For a moment, he could only look at the emerald blaze, which was so intense it bordered on white and forced him to shield his eyes.

Soon, the fountain of fire parted, revealing a doorway, and almost as soon as that appeared, people started walking through it. With the glare, it was impossible to see any details, but Benjamin wasn’t looking at the people. He was looking at the fire and videoing it since he already had his phone out.

The flames vanished completely after the last person walked through the strange gate. However, by then, he was already searching through the video to see if his eyes had played tricks on him. Zooming and pausing showed that they weren’t.

The embers and sparks that the unnatural pyre spat out were more than that. They were letters, or symbols, or something. Benjamin couldn’t really tell because they weren’t from any alphabet he’d ever seen before, but he supposed it could be Cyrillic.

He was still looking down at his phone and obsessing over these details while he attempted to process them when Matt said, “Those guys have fucking swords. This is about to turn into a Renaissance Faire or a horror movie real quick, guys. What do you think we should do?”

Benjamin looked at Matt just in time to see Emma cling to him in a way that was so stereotypically girly it made him roll his eyes. He was about to say something snarky about it, but then he looked past the cute couple to the approaching troop of Lord of the Rings rejects and decided that maybe Matt had a point. It was impossible to make out many details about the two wearing the dark robes, but the other four had swords and armor and seemed to mean serious business.

“If we all just get in your car and floor it, there’s no way they can—” Benjamin started to say.

“Everyone stay calm and come this way,” a voice rang out from the black-robed man in the center of the group. He wasn’t shouting, and yet it was still impossibly loud. “You are in grave danger standing so near the woods, but we will protect you.”

There was a strange reverb in his words that made Benjamin’s head feel fuzzy and the hint of an accent that implied that English definitely wasn’t this guy’s first language. Benjamin wanted to argue that the dude obviously seemed like a villain and that they should get the hell out of there. He wanted to turn around and run for his life. He wanted to do a lot of things.

He couldn’t, though. He couldn’t imagine doing anything but what he was told. Even though he was certain that was a terrible idea, he started to follow his friends down toward the strange group without a care in the world. At the same time, his suspicious thoughts seemed to dissipate on their own.

Until now, he’d been dealing with his fading buzz and annoyance at Matt and Emma, but all that was gone instantly. Instead, it was replaced with a feeling not unlike being high. Part of him knew that was a bad sign. This wasn’t like him, but he couldn’t make the rest of his mind care. Still, he struggled and squirmed against the feeling of absolute trust, but the most resistance he could offer was to ask, “Are you guys sure we should be doing this?”

“It’s fine,” Emma said, “This is a dangerous situation, and we have to trust him, Ben. So, please try to relax and don’t do anything weird.”

That cut him off as he recoiled from her words, and all he could do was walk down the slope in dejected confusion as more and more of their fellow campers joined them.

The Bryson Meadows Campsite had been pretty big, so at least three dozen people were slowly walking down the slope when all was said and done. That group consisted of everyone from young couples to college students like them, all the way up to retirees living their nomadic RV lifestyles.

Almost all of them were in their shirts and shorts, but a few people were wearing only their underwear, which made their strange procession even stranger. That was a lot less awkward than it should have been, though. Normally, Benjamin was very sensitive about letting anyone see him undressed, and he usually went swimming in a t-shirt to hide his lackluster physique. For some reason, this was fine, and any attempts to understand that disconnect just kind of slipped from his mental grasp.

As they approached, the black-robed man’s assistant was doing something with his hands. Then suddenly, a large pavilion tent appeared in a shower of glyphs and sparks. These weren’t the deep greens of the last spell that the men had cast. They were cerulean and…

Wait. It was only after that thought that Benjamin realized it; these guys were casting magic like it was going out of style. The implications of that boggled his mind. Teleportation? Summoning? Did that mean they were in another world now? Was he okay with that?

That made it even more ominous when the black-robed mage pulled open the tent’s doorway and said, “Alright, everyone, right through here. That’s right - line up over there. The sooner you are reprogrammed with your systems, the sooner we can retreat back to the safety of the city and integrate you into our great plan.”

Ch. 2 - We Need Your Help

“Programming? Systems?” Benjamin managed to ask, as he walked through the door. “Does that mean—”

The mage sighed heavily. “Sorry, I have more important things to do then explain these things to every newly summoned group. Every night, and every batch, it’s always the same questions. Don’t you people get tired of asking such obvious things?”

He snatched the phone from Benjamin’s hand as he walked by, and started to fiddle with it. Benjamin would have loved to stay and watch as the lock screen started to fill with those strange green characters, but he couldn’t. As badly as he wanted to see what this asshole was going to do to his phone he felt the need to keep walking with everyone else, since that was the last order he’d been given.

They were slowly assembling in three rows of ten or fifteen people, and as far as resistance went, the most that his friends had managed was to stay together in the front row. That was it, though. None of them had any more luck at telling this man no than he did. All they could do was stand there in the richly appointed red canvas tent and admire its opulence while they waited for whatever was going to happen next.

Benjamin would have never believed that this had been summoned into existence moments before if he hadn’t actually seen it, but he had. That made all the little details that much weirder. From the thickly carpeted floors to the brass oil lamps and the incense censers it looked thoroughly lived in, rather than being some cheap special effect or procedural generated monstrosity.

“Alright,” the mage said, setting Benjamin’s phone down on a table in front of the assembled group, “You have a lot of questions, and some of you are probably afraid. Don’t be. We’re going to take good care of you since you share our humanity. Even if you come from a backwards world and are in need of enlightenment, people as flawed as you can still help with our great work.”

Benjamin felt his worries melt away, even if logically everything the man was telling him should have intensified them. Benjamin’s eyes flicked from the mage’s ageless face, to the younger man that was obviously his servant or apprentice, and then over to the mage’s guards and back again.

There were only seven of them. The campers outnumbered them by at least five to one, yet somehow they’d obeyed meekly. Benjamin didn’t understand that, but that was only one of the many mysteries he struggled with while he stood there.

There was something wrong with all of them, but he had a hard time deciding which detail horrified him the most. The ugly, misshapen guards stood there with dead, black eyes who stood there like they were nothing more than robots, the apprentice’s face twisted with a perverse glee at whatever was about to happen next, and the mage was so calm that he looked bored despite everything that was going on. He was handsome, but despite his words he seemed completely disinterested about whether any of them lived or died.

“I don’t have the time to explain all of this,” he continued. “But I’ve summoned a familiar into one of the little talismans that the people of your world seem to love so much, and it can explain everything to you while we get started separating the wheat from the chaff.”

Each statement the man made was more ominous than the last, but Benjamin couldn’t make himself get worked up about any of them. Not even the fact the man had summoned a demon into his phone, or the fact that he considered some of them chaff was enough to spur him to action.

It was only when Kitsune Miko-chan suddenly popped out of his phone that his heart rate finally began to rise. It wasn’t in fear or shock though, but embarrassment. In his stable of waifu’s, the sultry little fox girl was currently his number one best girl, and now there she was standing only a few feet in front of him in a slightly translucent form that was so detailed it was practically real. She was right there in front of him and her tight Chinese dress that showed off her ample curves, as about the only thing that could distract him from the several tails that swayed together in a hypnotic rhythm behind her.

On any other day, in any other place, Benjamin would have thought that he’d died and gone to heaven. Today though, he could only wish that he could curl up and die of embarrassment at the idea that all of his friends knew who his favorite waifu was these days.

Fuck, he thought to himself. I hope no one notices how much she looks like Emma…

Even dying of embarrassment couldn’t stop him from listening to her as she smiled broadly and interrupted the downward spiral that was quickly becoming his internal dialog by saying, “Thank you all so much for coming to help us! As my master said, we couldn’t continue this war without the brave men and women like you that come to Aavernia every day to bolster our numbers!”

“War?” Raja asked, “I don’t want to fight in anyone’s war!”

“And I don't want to hear another word out of you, ever again,” the bored man in charge says offhandedly. That was enough to silence Raja even though Benjamin didn’t quite understand how.

“Now, now…” the fox girl said with real enthusiasm, “Don’t be that way! Let’s have a big round of applause for the bravery you’ve shown by coming to our aid against all the wicked spirits that are trying to snuff out every trace of humanity on this lovely world!”

There was only silence for a few seconds as she seemed to wait for a round of applause that never came, and then she looked over to the man in charge, and he said, “fine, fine - do what she says.”

The tent erupted into cheers and clapping as soon as he spoke, and even though Benjamin wasn’t quite sure why, he joined in immediately, and with more enthusiasm than he generally showed about anything. He tried to analyze these thoughts, but they were almost immediately swept away on a tide of gratitude for the men that had brought them here, so that he could help them.

Kitsune Miko-chan’s smile broadened to the point where it became more than a little predatory, and she curtsied slightly before she continued. “On your previous world you might have been planning to be a scholar, or pursue one of the crafting professions. You might even think that you don’t have the skills necessary to fight angry trees or eight foot tall lupus berserkers, but in a few minutes you will! I promise you that!”

As she spoke a ghostly stat sheet opened up beside her and started to list a number of attributes divided between mind, body and soul. Skills followed that, and though he didn’t recognize the precise system they were using, he was fairly sure it would have fit right in with half the RPG games in his library.

“The runic magics that underlie the system will make you stronger and faster than you’ve ever been,” she said, gesturing to the glowing window. “Each category of your stats has an offensive and defensive ability. Not only are resistances derived from this, but it will also determine what abilities you can purchase when you level up.”

“Well - what abilities can be purchased for you,” she corrected herself. “The Summoner Lords of Rhulvin know best, and they will help you. Based on the Mind and Soul stats I can see from here, some of you should become [war mages] or [healers] as best suits your talents. But almost all of you will become [soldiers], because that’s what the war effort needs the most of right now! Isn’t that great?”

She said that last bit with a smile so twisted and with such eagerness that for a moment it really was great. For a few seconds Benjamin couldn’t wait to become a soldier. Even as he felt the hum of magical energy slowly building inside of him, and saw his interface panel beginning to populate with nearly nonsense phrases like ‘Incorporating soul ID,’ ‘installing common tongue,’ and ‘calculating etheric optimization,’ he realized that the very last thing he wanted in the whole world was to become a soldier with a gun or a sword or whatever.

That was why he hadn’t joined the Army to get money for college. He’d held his nose and taken out loans, deciding it would be a lot easier to pay back that money after he got a job at one of the big tech companies than it would be to heal from a bullet wound or from post-traumatic stress disorder. He’d been right too.

Two of the guy’s he'd graduated from high school with were beyond messed up now, and they’d only been enlisted for a couple years. Benjamin couldn’t imagine what such a fate would do to him, and yet, for a moment, he’d actually been excited about the prospect.

For the first time he found himself really struggling against the magic or whatever it was that was making him feel this way, and quickly found out that it hurt to do that. A lot. Judging from the grunts and hisses of pain he heard from those around him, he was sure that he wasn’t the only one either.

Trying to wrestle with the part of his mind that was certain that becoming a soldier in someone else's war was like wrestling with a live wire, and he was losing. Even though it should have been obvious that this was contrary to every major life decision he’d made in the last several years, more and more he felt like this was an exciting change of pace, and he couldn’t wait to give it a shot.

His waifu kept droning on and on about the war to come and how with the help of him and the new arrivals they would finally be able to achieve victory, but as soon as Benjamin’s character sheet populated, he began to tune her out because he finally understood why it was he couldn’t seem to resist even the most terrible ideas she was telling him.

NAME: Benjamin Newsome

RACE: Human

CLASS: Crafter(Programmer)

LVL: 4

EXP: 9542/10,000

BPs: 20

Mind

INTELLECT

9(7)

WILL

7(6)

MANIPULATE

4(3)

Body

AGILITY

5(4)

STRENGTH

6(5)

APPEARANCE

4(3)

Soul

ANIMA

5(4)

SPIRIT

7(6)

CHARM

3

RESOLVE:  22/28

HEALTH: 24/24

MANA: 28/28

STATUS EFFECTS:

Summoned: Resistance halved vs. your summoner. 24hrs.

Charmed: -10 Resistance to resist orders/spell effects. 1hr.

Integrating: -20% to all stats while system is installing.

SKILLS

Athletics: 9

Craft (programming): 52

Profession (office): 37

Lore (video games): 88

Knowledge (Academia): 63

Knowledge (internet): 82

Driving: 34

Diplomacy: 34

Team Work: 10

Medicine (first aid): 16

Seduction: 8

Leadership: 12

Resist (Social): 21

ABILITIES

Obstinate: +20% resistance to social attacks and charm magics

Quick Study: +10% skill points for each build point spent

EQUIPMENT:

None equipped

INVENTORY:

Salvaged clothes, possessed smartphone (grade 3)

His character sheet was a bit of a mess certainly, but one thing was very clear: when it came to trying to resist whatever it was they were telling them, he was at a clear disadvantage right now. Benjamin wasn’t entirely sure what everything meant, but he was pretty sure that the loss of resolve had something to do with all of this. Some effect was taking place for sure, and even though he was struggling against it, he was losing.

Benjamin managed to turn his head enough to look to his left and his right. Matt was still trying to fight it obviously, but Ethan’s normally cool demeanor seemed to have been replaced with something darker. He was gazing at the beautiful Kitsune with an eagerness in his eyes.

It was the sound of a distant horn that pulled Benjamin back into the present moment as his mind raced.

“See,” Kitsune Miko-chan said, gesturing excitedly enough to make her breasts bounce as her clothes were suddenly replaced by a set of busty samurai armor. “The wildlings are coming now. That could be your very first chance to strike a blow for humanity everywhere!”

“I think not. Half of this lot aren't even fit to be soldiers. We’ll take them back with us just the same though. Some will make for fine laborers, and the dross can be used as sacrifices,” the mages said dryly, somewhere behind him. “ Waste not, want not, especially when it comes to blood magic.”

“There will be no fighting then?” Kitsune Miko-chan asked with a tone of exaggerated disappointment.

“No, violence is inevitable I think,” the mage countered, “but we’ve already killed all the Throne’s trolls and most of her treants, so unless she opts to join the hunt herself for once, I’m sure that the centurions I’ve brought can handle whatever dregs they’ve mustered while we get the rest of this group initialized.”

Ch. 3 - Pieces of You

After that, commands were barked, and the small group of soldiers that had accompanied the mage since the start went outside with a simple order: protect the tent and its occupants, and kill everything that wasn’t human. Once they’d left, the tent wasn’t much quieter than it had been before, though. It wasn’t even particularly tense, which made the whole thing feel anti-climactic somehow.

Benjamin’s friends and the other strangers that were forced to stand there in whatever they’d been sleeping in continued to struggle against the orders of the cute kitsune girl as she lectured them on how glorious it was to kill a wolven, a dryad, or any of the other spirits that made up the shock troops of the natural world. Those sounds of struggle got weaker with every passing minute, though.

Benjamin had opted to stop fighting when he’d gotten his resolve down to the halfway mark. This wasn’t because he was done fighting, though. It was because he was saving it for the right moment. He was sure there would be some key moment that he could break away and escape, but so far, one hadn’t materialized.

Instead, he just stood there, occasionally glancing at Ethan to his right or Matt to his left, and he tried not to let his favorite waifu distract him too much from trying to figure out what it was the mage and his apprentice were up to as they wandered from person to person. This was hard since Benjamin and his friends were in the front row closest to the bloodthirsty fox girl, and the mage had started with the back row somewhere behind him.

From the sound of the man’s footsteps, Benjamin could tell they only lingered in front of each person for perhaps half a minute before they moved on to the next person. Sometimes it would be much shorter than that when the mage declared the person to be “unfit for combat” or “completely disposable.”

When the dispassionate man called one of those out, he uttered a few words that were completely incomprehensible to Benjamin, and he could see a brief flare of green magic light to the walls of the tent before the pair continued on. He had no idea what that meant, but he continued to watch and try to assemble clues while he did his best to ignore the way that Kitsune Miku-chan jiggled in her armor.

After the first dozen humans had been ‘processed,’ or ‘initialized,’ as they referred to it, the younger man started to make more and more comments that helped Benjamin to understand what it was they were doing. “You know - this one isn’t a complete waste,” the younger man said after they lingered for almost two minutes in front of someone unseen before they moved on. That was followed by him insulting the next couple of guys in line.

He just laughed at the first one, but at the second one, he said, “You know, judging from the state of these doughy men, this might be the most out-of-shape world we’ve ever seen. Maybe we should conquer it instead of just borrowing their citizens.”

“If magic worked there, I’d consider it,” the mage said coolly, “but sadly, the reason why they are so fruitful is because the rules of their universe don’t allow the sort of monsters that we must contend with here on Aavernia.”

Benjamin was hoping to hear more about that, but that’s when the sound of battle grew disconcertingly close to their tent. The mage and his apprentice stopped what they were doing for a moment but then continued on as if nothing was happening. The noises were enough to make Benjamin shake in his sneakers, but he could do nothing but listen to the carnage as he tried to parse the different sounds to try to understand what was happening outside.

Though the clash of swords and the roar of battle cries, even with the foreign tongue he was still getting used to, were largely understandable, that was less true about other sounds. There were keening screams that sounded positively inhuman in the way they grated on Benjamin’s ears like glass. There were other, deeper sounds that were more animalistic too. Roars, grunts, and growls all sounded terrifyingly close, but even though it sounded like the few soldiers out there were facing an army and the smell of slaughter grew thick in the copper-tinged air, the red fabric of the pavilion never wavered.

So, minutes later, despite the raging battle outside, the mages finally made it to the first row of people in the tent, where he and his friends had been hiding from whatever terrible deprivations the mages had been inflicting on everyone else. It was a terrible moment, and as the pair worked their way down the front of the line, Benjamin could barely hear the sound of the cheering fox girl over the sound of his pounding heart.

Any second they were going to reach Emma and do god knows what with her. After that would come Matt and then Benjamin himself. It was a terrifying thought, but not quite as brutal as the idea that by the time they worked their way to Ethan and Raja just past him, he probably would no longer even care what they did to his friends.

He couldn’t decide if he wanted whatever was out there to rip him to pieces or not as they got closer and closer. It would probably have been kinder than what these men were going to do with him. That was true until they reached Emma, at least. Once they got to her, the younger man said, “You know, making a woman with a body like this a soldier would be a real waste Master. Perhaps you could let me—”

Benjamin had mostly made peace with the fact that he was never going to get Emma, even before her sudden engagement to Matt. He’d put that shit behind him, but the idea that some smarmy little fuck was going to get his claws into her with his mind control magic was beyond sick, and he surged against his invisible bonds as he drained most of his resolution in a last-ditch effort to break that asshole’s neck.

His efforts were only successful enough that Kitsune Miku-chan fixed him briefly with a dazzling smile and said, “Please calm down before you hurt yourself. I know this part is unpleasant, but you’ll be able to join the fight soon enough, I promise, okay?”

Whether Benjamin wanted to or not, he felt himself calming down immediately. The mages never even noticed his rage, though. Even as he found himself drifting back to a blissfully neutral state, they continued their conversation about Emma without even noticing him.

“We have no need of more pleasure slaves, Kathalles, and if we did, they would be for the prince or his court, not for a lowly apprentice like you. She’s much too willful to make a good transplant for a noblewoman too.” the older man chided, “No, letting you optimize this one would be too much of a temptation I’m afraid, but since you’ve been observing so patiently, I will let you try your hand at the last few, so observe me on this one closely while I turn her into a [blade dancer].”

“Ah, I see,” Kathalles said, failing to hide his disappointment as he watched his master work. “Yes - I can see exactly why you lined up those stats like that. Very clever, sir.”

As they spoke, they finally stepped in front of Matt, and a cold chill went down Benjamin’s spine as he realized that he was next, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. It was a terrifying feeling, but even that didn’t have as much impact as it should. Just like his rage over the way the apprentice had referred to Emma, it was muted by a soft veil of words that everything was going to be fine as his resolve ticked down a few more points.

“As you know, the most important thing when it comes to reformatting a character’s system is to work with the grain and do as little damage as possible,” the older mage said, raising a small rod and pointing it at Matt suddenly bringing his character sheet into existence so that everyone, even Benjamin could see it. “Now tell me what the first thing that needs to go is.”

“Academic knowledge, just like so many of these others. His medicine is awful high if he isn’t going to be a healer… oh, I know - his love status effect. He’s definitely not going to need that anymore,” the apprentice said with a smug expression on his face.

In Love with Emma: +5 to all actions involving his betrothed.

“While that status effect is indeed something we can reclaim a few points by removing, it’s something we will have to evaluate after all the other changes, because it is most likely to be destabilizing for the subject,” the mage said with a shrug. “There is however one trait on this man’s character sheet that would render him completely unusable if it wasn’t removed first.”

Pacifist: Unable to take violent actions except in defense.

“How useless!” the apprentice said with a laugh. “Why would anyone choose that trait!”

“Well if you or I were to select it, it would contribute seven build points. That's practically a level and a half that a focused healer or craftsmen could use to increase their abilities,” the older mage waxed absentmindedly. “There are similar traits you could adopt as a mage. Synergistic disadvantages to enable you to outcompete a less devoted competitor at court should you desire, nephew, but in this case, we will have to remove it.”

“A core trait though - that’s as tied into his soul as his love for the girl you just optimized,” the apprentice said, “won’t this damage his soul quite a bit, Lord Jarris?”

“It will,” the older mage agreed. “For lesser issues I would leave in this place, but in this case, since it must be removed, I’m inclined to replace it with an opposing disadvantage. You would think that adding in something like [ill-tempered] or [belligerent] would exacerbate the problem, but research I’ve seen indicates that an opposing trait can mitigate the soul damage by up to a third.”

“So, all we need to do is remove the problem,” the mage said as [Pacifist] disappeared from his friend’s character sheet, “add a solution…” As he spoke, [Berserk] appeared in that place as he continued to speak, “and once we verify that the stability levels are still high enough we can make the other changes we need, and now we have a specialized class that will do even better than the average soldier.”

As Benjamin watched, Matt’s character sheet morphed until it was unrecognizable. The class of Healer (apprentice) vanished, along with a number of other skills, and they were almost instantly replaced by Berserker and a number of skills that seemed antithetical to everything that his friend stood for. leadership became lore (military) and lore (creature), athletics (soccer) became melee combat, and meditation became rage.

At the same time, as all this was happening, Benjamin watched his friend’s appearance start to shift visibly as they adjusted his stats, and his body literally changed to conform with the magic. They dropped his Matt’s intelligence and appearance down quite a bit and dumped all those points into strength and agility. That was a terrible fate, even theoretically, but to watch it play out in real time was abominable.

Benjamin could only watch from the edge of his field of vision as Matt’s formerly good looks faded into something misshapen and angry, and his kind, inquisitive eyes lost their luster. In less than a minute his friend - a man that he’d known since high school - went from a familiar face to someone that Benjamin would have trouble picking out of a line up.

When it was all over, Matt got a status debuff that said Bound to Serve, but the character sheet winked out of existence before Benjamin could see what it did. That it was going to do nothing positive was obvious enough, but when the sclera and the iris of Matt’s eyes disappeared and his eye’s turned jet black, it became doubly obvious that whatever they’d done to him was even more inhuman than all the other indignities he’d suffered already tonight as he became just like all those other soldiers.

It was terrifying, but not as terrifying as when the mage handed the metal rod to his apprentice and said, “alright, let’s see what you can do with the next one.”

“Really?” the younger man asked. “I didn’t think you’d let me try this for months yet.”

“Why not?” Lord Jarris said with a shrug. “This… Benjamin Newsome… was likely just going to be another sacrifice for the blood mages. Let’s see if you can turn him into something worth keeping around a while longer, Kathalles, and if you botch it, well - nothing of value was lost.”

Even though Benjamin had a handful of resistance left, he couldn’t even bring himself to struggle because he was too overwhelmed by fear. He’d just seen what they’d done to his friend - to a man that he secretly considered to be better than him in almost every way, and now they were about to violate his soul, but it was going to be the apprentice wielding the scalpel instead of the master?

Benjamin still heard the sounds of battle outside, but now he wished more than anything that one of the monsters would just come in and kill them all where they stood.

Ch. 4 - Everything he Was

“It’s like whoever made this character chose all the worst things of purpose,” Warren said with a laugh as he looked through Benjamin’s character sheet, making him flush in shame. “How do you even end up with most of your stats below average, anyway?”

“We don’t think anyone chooses their stats on this Earth of theirs,” the older mage said from over, the younger man’s shoulder. “It seems to be entirely random, which isn’t nearly as fair as your system, but still, we will do what we can to help him optimize and be of use to his betters.”

“Well, I’m not sure there’s much hope for this guy,” the apprentice said, shaking his head as he poured through the lines with a smirk. “Maybe if I flipped his gender and poured all his extra points into appearance, we could grow some titties and put all this flab to good use.”

They couldn’t really do that, could they? Benjamin found himself wondering. It was bad enough that they could sculpt his soul like clay and do what they’d already done so easily to his friend, but to change him so much that he literally couldn’t recognize himself in the mirror anymore? To practically erase him mentally and physically from the world? That shit was terrifying, or at least it would have been if Kitsune Miko-chan’s admonition hadn’t been enough to keep him from completely losing his shit as the magic of her words somehow managed to keep him calm.

“That would count as a failure for the purposes of this exercise,” Lord Jarris answered, showing a hint of annoyance for the first time this evening. “Though some might welcome such a transition, it is readily apparent in the nature of his soul that he would find that extremely traumatizing. Even mentioning such torments is already making your task more difficult, Kathalles. Please focus on the task at hand.”

“Fine…” the apprentice said with a sigh as he seemed to start taking the exercise more seriously. “Well then, the correct path would be to lower his intelligence to 6, strip out all the unnecessary lore and knowledge skills, and then apply the 60 build points plus the 20 he currently has to give him at least average physical stats and the Soldier ‘B’ package with the legionnaire specialization.”

“Why would you choose that over cannon fodder or any other possible option?” the mage asked. “He seems unlikely to survive in a formation, and putting a weak link there could endanger other members of the unit.”

“Well, he has just enough points in teamwork and leadership if I’m doing my math right,” the apprentice said, starting to sound somewhat unsure of himself, “So it seemed like the most optimized move. I thought about maybe converting him into a war mage because his programming skill is so similar to runic magic, but you said you wanted warriors, and in theory, since this loser spent so much time building up specializations in so many things that don’t matter at all, he should be capable of learning to be a good soldier after he gains a level or two fighting the wildlings.”

For a long moment, the mage stood there silently, making both his apprentice and Benjamin wonder what was going to happen next before he finally said, “I agree with your assessment, and especially your decision not to optimize him for runic magic. It’s much too dangerous for someone who is not born of the empire. Where will you start?”

Benjamin could only stand there in mute horror while the two of them discussed which parts of his life were least important and could be cut away first while he listened to the battle rage around them. He’d never felt so humiliated or afraid in his whole life.

Not when Matt had told him that he and Emma were going to go on a date the month after she dumped Benjamin. Not the night he’d gotten lost in the bad part of town and had to make it home without a cell phone to call an Uber. Not even when he’d been accused of cheating on that midterm and been called to a board of academic review to see if they were going to kick him out of school.

It was almost an out-of-body experience, and he couldn’t stop shaking as they discussed his mind like he was going to be the next patient on one of those horrible surgery shows. Eventually, they decided to start with his skills and then proceed to his stats, monitoring his soul’s integrity the whole time.

It was a terrible, disorienting thing for Benjamin. One second, he had a video game lore of 88 and an academic knowledge that was almost as high, and the next second, they were just gone. He could feel them drifting away as one at a time, some of his most cherished memories just vanished.

He’d been sure it wouldn’t affect him too much, and that he’d be able to resist it somehow, but he was dead wrong. It was like a bookshelf full of journals and photo albums where his whole life had been written down ere suddenly put to the torch, and as they burned, the complex network of memories associated with them vanished. One moment he was trying to pull his burning Super Nintendo from the wreckage of his mind, and the next he could no longer remember that cherished Christmas where he’d gotten it any more than he could remember all the afternoons he’d played it with Matt and his other friends. It just crumbled to ashes in his hands.

Suddenly, Benjamin could barely remember what a video game was, and though he was sure they’d been important to him once, he couldn’t bring himself to name a single title. Part of his mind had been anesthetized. Likewise, he had no idea what Academic knowledge was, but now that it was gone, he couldn’t remember precisely what it was he’d done with his whole life up until now, and math and science were just big blank spots in his mind.

One minute, he knew exactly where he’d been for the last few years and what he was going to do with his life. He knew what it was he did for fun and what his hobbies were, and in an instant, all of that was just gone. Whole years of life just faded into the mist, and he wasn’t sure what it was he was supposed to do. After that, all he had left was programming, and he held onto that like it was the only thing that mattered because it was all that he had.

C++, Java, Python, databases, troubleshooting, debugging, and object-oriented programming. He repeated these terms in his mind like a mantra. Like it was the only thing that could keep them from taking away everything he was because it was pretty much the only part of them they hadn’t ripped out of his soul yet, but he knew that they were going to.

These monsters were going to take away everything they didn’t need because all that mattered to them was that he could swing a sword and fight and die for their war. It was so unbelievably unfair, and Benjamin silently prayed to any god that would listen.

The answer came in the form of a single arrow. It soared in from somewhere behind him, missing his own skull by inches as it glided over his left shoulder before it embedded in the neck of the young monster that was doing this to him. For a second, nobody moved as they were shocked into silence.

Kathalles gasped and tried to speak, but he couldn’t, and it was obvious why that was the case for Benjamin: there was magic in the arrow, and something was growing inside him. The shaft of the arrow wasn’t a smooth piece of wood. Instead, it looked like the stem of a flower or a branch plucked straight from a sapling. It was curved and contained both buds and thorns. That wasn’t the strange part, though.

The strange part was that while the apprentice choked and gasped, roots were growing under his skin, spreading out from the arrow, and even after the young man began to seize, and his master brought him down gently to the ground at Benjamin’s feet and pulled out the arrow, the growth only accelerated.

It looked like a terrible way to die, but Benjamin found himself wishing it had happened a few seconds sooner. Then, that little bastard wouldn’t have had the chance to fry half of Benjamin’s brain with the strange magic that they used.

Even as Lord Jarris tried to use magic to heal the strange growths that were crawling under the boy’s skin, the febrile seizures grew worse and worse. Eventually, even Benjamin regretted wishing ill on the man who was really just a little younger than him. Sure, the mage’s apprentice had been a monster, but no one deserved this.

Finally, Kathalles opened his mouth to scream, but he never got the chance. Instead, a fist-sized bouquet of blood-red flowers forced its way out of the orifice even as the body seized hard one more time and then was still forever more.

“So the witch has finally joined the battle, then,” the mage muttered to himself darkly as he rose back to his feet. “We shall have to teach her what a mistake that was. Alright, everyone, listen to me. We’re going to—”

Even as Lord Jarris gave his order and Benjamin felt himself eager to jump at whatever the command was, something large and loud finally burst through the wall of the tent. He didn’t have a chance to see it, but he did get completely bowled over by it as whatever it was charged straight for the mage.

What followed next was bloody and terrifying. Benjamin heard the yowling of some kind of giant cat and the baying of a giant hound, but balanced against that, he saw emerald beams of light and green fire being casually tossed around by what he presumed was the mage. All he knew for sure was that for perhaps half a minute, the pavilion was a bloodbath, literally and figuratively, and that he knew he wasn’t going to survive.

Once that hellish moment was over, though, the mage strode toward the rent in the far wall and said, “Come with me. All of you. We shall end this thing once and for all. Revealing her position like this was a tragic mistake worth all of your lives and more.”

It was only after everyone started following the mage out and Benjamin continued to lay there in the blood of his enemies that he realized that not only had he not died in the attack, but strangely, he didn’t feel the need to follow the other man’s orders for the first time all night. He had trouble understanding it, and as he slowly rose to hands and knees, he quickly realized what had happened.

The silver rod that the apprentice had been wielding to access his system had been lying beneath him, and something about that item, or the fact that his system was still being actively worked on, or both made him temporarily immune to the compulsion that had been so irresistible up until now.

As Benjamin stood up and looked around, all thoughts of pulling up his character sheet to dig deeper into the mystery were momentarily dispelled by the carnage. The six or eight humans from Earth that had been between him and the rent fabric of the pavilion wall behind him lay in pieces, along with their bestial attackers. If there was a silver lining, it was that he didn’t see any of his friends among the piles of dead, though even that was no guarantee that they lived now or would still be living in a few minutes.

The place was a charnel house. Some of the people had been pulled apart or cut to pieces by the monsters, but the rest of them bore magical wounds of one sort or another. Many of those that had died from magic had holes straight through their chest from some sort of beam attack, and others still smoldered with green embers that seemed to disintegrate the flesh it left behind rather than slowly reduce it to ash.

It was enough to make Benjamin vomit. He could feel his gorge rising while he clutched the rod in his right hand. In the end, the only thing that stopped it was Kitsune-Miko’s words.

“So you think you’re going to be able to escape?” she asked, practically purring. “Take me with you.”

“Y-you’re a demon,” Benjamin spat back, whirling around. He wasn’t sure what that really meant in this context, but he’d seen the word on his character sheet, and he was going with it. “Why should I listen to anything you have to say?”

“Because, unlike you, I know what the hell is going on, and I might be willing to help you if I think you could help me to escape from Lord Jarris’s grasp,” she said with a sigh. “That man is a monster.”

It was only after Benjamin was finished considering her words that he realized the fox girl was trying to be as seductive as possible in both her tone and her body language. She was trying to seduce me, he told himself belatedly.

“Fine,” he said, blushing slightly as he picked up the phone and pocketed it. “But if you try anything, I’m smashing this thing to bits, and you with it.”

“That works for me,” she cooed. “If we head straight south for the river, we should be able to—”

“We can’t,” Benjamin said, “Not yet. First, we need to save my friends.”

Ch. 5 - A Crowded Battlefield

“Your friends are already lost, and if Lord Jariss figures out that you’re running around with his control rod, you will be, too,” the fox demon countered.

When Benjamin had put his phone in the pocket of his shorts, the translucent fox girl had vanished, but her voice still lingered in his ear. He doubted that she was being entirely self-serving either. Judging from the limited carnage he’d already seen, trying to tangle with the man was a dangerous proposition, but that still didn’t change anything.

Matt and Emma might have treated him like shit, and Ethan and Raja were assholes for not telling him the truth about the trip, but none of those were reasons to let his friends die. He had no idea how he was supposed to save them, of course, but he knew that he had to try. ‘The creepy mage that summoned us here might try to kill me if I do’ simply wasn’t a good enough reason to bounce.

“You’re not wrong, but that doesn’t change anything, Miku-chan,” he whispered as he walked toward the hole in the tent to see what was happening. “So if you want to get away, you better tell me what it is that I need to do to give me the best odds, or we’re dying here along with everyone else tonight.”

“You think that death is the worst that the Rhulvinar can do to you?” she asked skeptically before she sighed. “I thought that too once, and look at me now. Do you really want to spend the rest of eternity as a soul bound to their service?”

What she said opened up so many questions that it made Benjamin’s head spin. He filed all of that away as questions to ask on another day as he looked around at the battlefield. It was a bloodbath.

Dozens of animal men and plant men lay dead or dying, and more than a few human corpses were scattered among them. Three of the five brass armored warriors that he’d seen at the beginning of the night were still standing, but all of them looked wounded.

The three of them and the mage seemed to be focusing on a giant oaken warrior that was as much tree as man and at least as large as a two-story house. It seemed wounded in a hundred places, and yet it continued to fight implacably. Benjamin watched for just long enough to wonder why the mage didn’t seem to be doing anything when he saw a green field of energy flare to life and halt another one of those strange crooked arrows in midair mere feet from one of his soldiers before it burst into flame.

He followed that up moments later with a wave of green napalm that detonated in the forest where it looked like the arrow had come from, briefly illuminating the dark night with his hellfire. It was immediately clear to Benjamin that this wasn’t the first time these enemies had fought each other. What wasn’t clear was how he was supposed to survive long enough to even figure out if any of his friends were still alive.

“Well, if you insist on being insane, you should probably spend your build points on some martial skills before you go out there,” Miku-chan said, “because even the smallest, most injured beast man on the field could rip your head off right now.”

The insult didn’t really sting because he could see that it was true. He pulled up his character sheet and saw that it was listed as being in assimilation mode. His first thought was to wonder if he should close that, and his second thought was how he should close that, but as soon as he saw how badly they’d messed up his sheet and how high they stacked up his build points, he set that aside.

Thankfully that apprentice hadn’t yet gotten around to reducing his intelligence, or he probably wouldn’t have gotten this far. Despite that, he still had 73 build points. His very first action was to bump his strength and agility up.

Benjamin had been planning to move them up as high as he could, but as soon as he moved his strength to 12, he saw a debuff appear and quickly lowered his strength back to 11 to see if it would disappear. Fortunately, it did.

Minor Soul Bleed: -1 to all actions, -25% to recovery effects.

“What the hell is a soul bleed?” he asked the disembodied voice of his waifu.

“It means they broke your soul in the optimization process,” the fox girl said impatiently. “It heals in time, but it’s made worse when you move points around that aren’t in line with your natural alignment and is definitely the least of your problems. So, stop sweating the small stuff, grab life by the balls, and focus on learning how to use a weapon before something decides you’re going to make a good snack.”

“Weapons? Didn’t that apprentice say I’d make a good mage? I was thinking—” Benjamin started to say.

“Hey - asshole, wake up!” the voice chided him. “Even if you increase your skill enough to cast a spell, mages are really vulnerable without a team, and as soon as you burn serious mana, the throne will shoot one of those arrows at you instead of our dear friend, so pick up a sword or a club, or whatever, and dump everything you have into melee combat and defensive skills and whatever else might keep you breathing, and maybe you’ll be able to find one or two of your friends before you’re found by a wolven or noticed by Lord Jariss.”

As pep talks went, it kind of sucked, and Benjamin immediately felt the need to argue with her about it. He would have too, but she had raised one incredibly good point. His friends didn’t have a lot of time. So, he did just what she said he should do and started dumping points. After all, if he could move his strength back down to 11, he could probably move his other skills around, too, right? Nothing seemed to be final until he turned off whatever the strange mode was that the mages had booted his system up in.

As Benjamin dumped all of his excess points into martial skills, he did so with the vague feeling that this wasn’t how he would have handled this in any other circumstance. He wondered how he would have handled this in a game, but he didn’t remember, and that bothered him.

Based upon the number of points he’d had in that category a few minutes ago, he was confident he would have had all the answers on how to handle this. Instead, he felt like he was fumbling in the dark and making the most straightforward, boring choices he could imagine. He couldn’t let himself get aggravated by it, though. Right now, what he needed was to live. So, he’d pump every last point he had into being a combat monster.

It was working too. He felt his muscles swell as his body shifted, and as his melee combat slowly increased, the battlefield in front of him began to make more sense. It wasn’t just a number of meaningless clashes now. He could see pack tactics and defensive formations. He could see the critical moments when all that stood between life and death was a simple feint or parry.

For Benjamin, it was like watching a football game for the first time and finally understanding what was playing out on screen. Of course, in football, when someone failed to complete a pass, no one had their entrails spilled out on the battlefield.

NAME: Benjamin Newsome

RACE: Human

CLASS: Crafter(Programmer)

LVL: 4

EXP: 9325/10,000

BPs: 4

Mind

INTELLECT

11

WILL

7

MANIPULATE

4

Body

AGILITY

11

STRENGTH

11

APPEARANCE

4

Soul

ANIMA

5

SPIRIT

7

CHARM

3

RESOLVE:  23/44

HEALTH: 44/44

MANA: 28/28

STATUS EFFECTS:

Summoned: Resistance halved vs. your summoner. 24hrs.

Soul Bleed (Major): -5 to all actions, -50% recovery, -10exp/hr

SKILLS

Athletics: 53

Craft (programming): 52

Profession (office): 37

Melee Combat: 77

Dodge: 55

Knowledge (internet): 82

Parry:34

Diplomacy: 34

Team Work: 10

Medicine (first aid): 16

Seduction: 8

Leadership: 12

Resist (Social): 21

Awareness: 49

ABILITIES

Obstinate: +20% resistance to social attacks and charm magics

Quick Study: +10% skill points for each build point spent

EQUIPMENT:

Off-Hand: Rod of Obedience

+35 on all mind control effects

INVENTORY:

Salvaged clothes, possessed smartphone (grade 3),

Less than a minute later, he finally had the confidence to step out onto the blood-soaked field. He picked up a spear from the body of an impaled beastman and held the blood-slick weapon in his right hand as he began to jog toward the nearest group of humans in search of his friends. Jogging was not something that he ever did if he had a choice, but right now, it felt right, and time was of the essence.

He wasn’t sure exactly what he would need to do to set them free, but he was confident that as long as he held the mage’s rod, he’d be able to do something to break the spell. As long as someone was still alive, of course. The battlefield was looking a lot sparser than it had been even a couple minutes ago.

The treant was down, along with another one of the mage’s elite guard, and though there were fewer humans left standing than ever, Benjamin was sure that at least Matt and Emma still had to be alive. Please, God, let them still be alive, he thought to himself as he charged to the nearest group of warriors that were still standing.

Though Benjamin’s luck held, and he didn’t have to fight anyone to get there, once he did, he immediately noticed that he didn’t recognize any of the three people busy fighting off a goat man with a giant club. He realized that if he joined the fight and threw his spear from where he stood, he could likely send it straight through the thing’s rib cage from behind. That would deny him a weapon and slow him down from the fight that really mattered, though.

In that split second, he agonized over the decision, trying to justify a reason why it would be okay to let strangers die; another animal man with the head of a boar charged him from the shadows with a savage roar. Unlike the giant goat man, this creature was perhaps only four feet tall, but it was still stronger and faster than him.

He could see that from its very first motion. He could also tell that though the thing wielded femur like a club, the bigger danger was its tusks as he kept its head low to the ground as it bounded toward Benjamin running on its hands and feet.

Benjamin feigned indecision as he stood there until the last possible minute before bolting to let the thing chase him. It wasn’t indecision, though. He knew exactly what he needed to do. It just terrified him.

Benjamin hadn’t played a sport since high school, and though he’d always kind of wanted to join one of those groups that played with swords in the park, he’d never quite gotten around to it. That was why the current plan in his head seemed so insane.

Two minutes ago, he’d had no real combat instincts to speak of, but now his newfound skills were telling him ten different ways to kill this thing, and the one that was most likely to succeed was by far the craziest. Still, he wanted to live, so he went with what the newfound knowledge in his head was telling him, and he waited until the boar-man came in low, trying to knock Benjamin off his feet before he did the one thing that he never would have imagined he’d do.

He jumped.

Benjamin leaped straight up, letting the creature’s momentum carry it beneath him. If this was a movie, then he’d lash out with his spear and impale the creature through the back of the skull or the chest and kill it in a single blow.

He couldn’t, though. He’d left the spear behind, braced against one of the many bodies that lay scattered on the battlefield. Even as the beastman tried to pivot to track Benjamin, it was already charging into that weapon at full speed. By the time Benjamin landed, his opponent was already impaled and dying. He didn’t stay long enough to finish the suffering creature off. He just stooped down long enough to retrieve the fallen club before he took off at a run.

Ch. 6 - Blossoming Violence

Benjamin’s first instinct was to run to the next knot of warriors fighting fifty feet further on, but something about the desperate struggle of strangers made him unable to turn away. He didn’t know any of them, and if he’d passed by them in the street on any other day, he wouldn’t have thought about them at all.

Today, he couldn’t turn away, though. Today, they were bound together by their terrible circumstances, and leaving them to face something this inhuman would have been wrong. Especially when he could read the battlefield so clearly. He’d never been much for watching sports, but right now, he could practically see how everything was going to play out, and it was exhilarating.

So, instead of charging off into the night, he ran at the horned giant’s blindside, timing his arrival just after it started a mighty scything blow with its axe. Benjamin wouldn’t stay long enough to finish it off, but seeing how easily he could turn the battle against the behemoth made him stay as much as anything else.

Using his lifetime of unearned fighting instincts, Benjamin swung his club with all his might at the side of the thing’s exposed knee, crumpling it with a sickening crack that made his hands briefly go numb from the force. The thing bleated loudly in pain as it toppled down toward Benjamin like a felled tree, but he took advantage of his momentum in a terrifying new way and rolled beneath the thing’s legs before vaulting over its other flailing leg in a handspring that belonged in a parkour video or that game, Prince of…

Benjamin tried to seize the errant thought like the prize it was, but it crumbled into dust as soon as he touched it, and he continued to run on, leaving the felled monsters to be finished by the three humans that were still left standing. Suddenly, he had all the power of an action movie star, but the lifetime he’d spent absorbing pop culture to inspire him on how to use it was almost entirely gone, and that frustrated him to no end.

Benjamin was sure that he’d be able to use his newfound talent for murder so much more creatively if he could remember more the occasional snippet of his favorite movies and comic books. As he ran, he tried to remember what he’d forgotten, but really, all he managed to do was grope blindly at the edges of everything that was missing. Most of high school was just gone, and part of university, too. Sure, he could remember key moments like graduation, but he knew for a fact he spent his whole freshman year absorbed in some game called…

He roared in frustration as he closed in on the next group. He just didn’t know. How could he not know something he spent a whole year of his life doing? He couldn’t remember who he played with or even if he’d enjoyed it. All he could remember was the smug look in that apprentice’s eye when he’d deleted that skill and its associated memories like it was nothing but garbage.

Because he wasn’t paying attention to what he should have been doing, he didn’t notice that it was Raja and Ethan just ahead of him, fighting for their lives against a woods spirit until he was practically on them. Of course, he didn’t notice the dryad barreling down on him either until it was almost too late.

It, no, she appeared in front of him in an instant and attacked with scything talons where her fingers should be that were each almost a foot and a half long. There was no time to dodge, so instead, he brought up his club to parry the blow. The result was still enough to send him toppling backward ten feet as he struggled and failed to regain his footing.

Benjamin barely had time to rise again and noted that though his arm had some minor lacerations, the brunt of the unexpected attack had been taken by the club, and there were four clean cuts that went halfway through the thick and mottled femur. There was no way it would be able to take another blow like that.

His first reaction was to dump all 4 of his remaining points into dodge, bringing the skill to 66, but even that didn’t feel like enough in the face of this killing machine. The boar and the goat had each been scary in their own way, but the way that this dryad moved was terrifying. She had more in common with a cobra or a viper than a tree, and as she shifted sinuously, she practically flickered as he continuously gave ground.

In the end, he was sure he would have died if he’d not accidentally tripped over one of the dead centurion’s corpses and found the bronze sword and the wide metal banded shield. Though Benjamin would have loved the luxury of time to put on the rest of the dead man’s gear, that was impossible.

Instead, he rose with the weapon just in time to make a feint, driving her back. She parried the defensive blow with a single one of her wickedly edged-fingers, and it cut the tip off. For a moment, Benjamin had his plan: he would attack until she was nothing but kindling so that he could reach his friends, but within seconds, the wooden blade had regrown, showing the futility of it all.

“How am I even supposed to kill this thing?” he growled at himself as he waved his sword around while he got a better grip on his shield.

“Fire, mostly,” the fox spirit whispered in his ear, practically making him jump out of his skin. “There are other tricks too, but—”

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Benjamin shouted as he recoiled from a surprise attack that never existed. “Don’t do that!”

“Well, if you ask a question, what am I supposed to—” she protested.

Benjamin quickly cut her off, though, as he channeled his sudden rush of adrenaline into a flurry of blows that did a good imitation of a weed whacker, but before he even pulled away, she was already regrowing all the pieces he’d cut away. “If I’m talking to you, I’ll say, ‘Hey Kitsune Miku, can you help with this, or Miku-chan, do you know what I can do here?’ Got it?”

She didn’t respond, and part of him was sure it was malicious compliance on her part. He’d just given her a rule, and now she expected him to follow it, but he didn’t have time for that. Instead, Benjamin ignored her petulance and raised his shield to block the incoming strike that likely would have taken his head clean off.

“If you don’t help me out here, we’re both going to die,” he said, trying to spur her to action.

Kitsune Miku-chan wishes permission to interact with your system. Will you allow this? Yes/No

“Oh hell no,” Benjamin said immediately, lashing out with his sword at the same time he closed that window. There was no way that he was letting anyone else get into his head, especially not a demoness. That was an obviously terrible idea.

“If you don’t hurry, none of your friends are going to be alive for you to save,” she said coldly.

“Well, then you’d better explain it fast because if they don’t make it, you won’t either,” Benjamin grunted as he dueled the shrieking dryad, looking for any shred of advantage he could find.

He was as frustrated as anyone that two of his friends were right there, and there was nothing he could do to save them because he couldn’t kill this bitch hard enough. Not even that frustration was enough to justify giving a demoness access to his soul, though.

“Fine,” she sighed. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Over the next ninety seconds, she proceeded to lay out to Benjamin exactly what he had to do, starting with turning his Craft (programming) skill into magic (runic). He opted not to do that because he felt like that skill and his knowledge (internet) skills contained the most about who he was at this point. He had no idea how much his current skills losses had already changed him, but he didn’t want to chance it, so he shifted his profession (office) to the magic skill and watched his soul bleed tick up ever so slightly instead.

“You know that’s way less efficient, right?” she asked snidely.

“I know that if I’m not still me at the end of this, then there’s really no point to living,” he countered.

After that, Benjamin was briefly overwhelmed by the options as she walked him through the spell interface just long enough to create a flaming weapon spell. It was just the tip of the iceberg, though. In that interface, there were hundreds of options. In fire alone, there was beam, blast, ball, explosion, incineration, burning, and a dozen other choices for making whatever spells he wanted, and he could see that he was going to want to spend a lot of time in those menus when this was all done and the danger was passed.

“Couldn’t we make a bigger spell,” he grunted, cutting off the dryad’s head for the third time in as many minutes.

“Cast this spell, and use it to kill this dryad so you can keep moving,” Kitsune Miku-chan ordered. “It’s only 2 mana. Any attack spell is going to be a lot more than that. You get too crazy, and the forest queen will take you out with a single shot unless Lord Jarris has killed her already.”

It was a good reminder, and an involuntary shiver went through Benjamin as he remembered the roots growing under the skin of the mage’s apprentice.

Flaming Weapon: (2 mana/minute) increases weapon damage by 50%. Additional damage is type elemental (fire).

There were no hints on the tooltip, but eventually, Benjamin figured out that he could cast it merely by willing the magic into existence as he said the name of the spell.

“Flaming weapon!” he shouted, feeling slightly silly even though it worked.

There had to be a better way to do this, he told himself as he watched his bronze sword suddenly catch fire just before he brought it down onto the dryad’s blade-like fingers. The last dozen times this had happened, the monster had shrugged off the blow or even hissed in something that almost sounded like pleasure before regrowing her weapons and trying again.

That wasn’t what happened this time, though. This time, the bark-skinned woman shrieked in pain and leaped back, suddenly reevaluating her opponent and the battle they were having.

“If you run, I won’t chase you, you can—” Benjamin said as he tried fruitlessly to de-escalate the situation.

It was never going to happen, though. The forest spirit shrieked in rage and pain and charged at him. After that, it was all over in seconds. This fight hadn’t taken so long because she was an exceptionally difficult opponent. It had taken so long because she just wouldn’t die.

This time, as he plunged his blade into her chest, she went rigid as the smell of burning wood and the sounds of boiling told him just how easy she’d been to kill in the end. As he pushed her aside and looked down at her corpse, he felt sad in a way that he never would have about the beastmen. There was something ineffably human about the dryad and the surprised look in her eyes. Benjamin was certain that if he didn’t have to go and help his friends, he would have stood here much longer, to give this magical creature the moment of silence she really deserved.

Ch. 7 - Save Who You Can

When Benjamin finally reached his two friends, they were just putting down the last mangy, dog-headed monstrosity that had been in the pack of howling monstrosities they were fighting. Both Raja and Ethan were bloody, and the bodies of many strangers lay scattered around them.

“Great work, guys, but we need to…” Benjamin started to say, but he lost his train of thought when he saw Emma step out of the knot of strangers.

The feral look of her black eyes made her look like a stranger, even if she was definitely still the Emma he’d always known. Even knowing that, though, she was still barely recognizable. At the beginning of the night, she’d been wearing little more than an oversized hoodie and a pair of shorts. Her top was shredded now, showing off her black bra, and her arms and chest were covered in blood, though after a brief search, it didn’t appear to be hers.

Before he could even open his mouth to tell her how glad he was to see her, the whole group moved as one, pivoting toward the next conflict on their desperate little battlefield. It was an instant reminder to him that everyone else was still controlled by the madman that had summoned them here, and for a moment, he despaired, certain that if he wasn’t still holding that little metallic rod in his shield hand, he’d be in exactly the same boat.

“Guys, what are you doing? Why aren’t you snapping out of it? You’re acting like this is your fight.” he sighed exasperated. “Just fucking wait a minute and…”

Benjamin’s words trailed off as the impossible happened. He’d been prepared to watch them run off and find the next opponent as he vented his frustrations, but instead, they all came to an almost immediate halt only a dozen feet from him.

He tried to parse what was happening. He suddenly glanced down at the rod he was holding and realized that it had to be tied into the control magics that had been cast on them. As long as he was holding it, he wasn’t just immune to its compulsions, but he could order those that still were around.

That realization was enough to make his skin crawl. Given the way he’d seen the mage delegate his powers to the demon in his pocket with a few words, he shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was.

It can’t be that easy, can it? He thought to himself.

“Raja, stand on one leg,” he said, testing his newfound powers. His friend immediately did as he was told, not even bothering to turn around. It was shocking, but it was hard to argue with what he was seeing. “Alright, so this works, I guess. Next question - does anyone know where Matt is?”

When no one answered, he followed up again, “Ethan, Raja, and Emma - tell me where Matt is.”

“He was heading toward the woods several minutes ago; that’s the last I saw him,” Ethan said calmly.

Raja didn’t say anything, he just pointed, but even as Benjamin tried to follow where his friend was pointing, Emma’s words snapped him right out of that effort.

“Who’s Matt?” she asked like she’d never met the man.

“Who’s Matt?” he asked, flabbergasted. “He’s your fucking fiancée, that’s who Matt is. How could you say that? He’s the guy you dumped me for!”

Emma turned and looked at Benjamin in confusion for a moment until a look of recognition about who it was she was talking to crossed her face. “Oh. I see,” she said. “The Berserker. He ran into the forest in search of more creatures to kill rather than fight with us. He’s almost certainly dead by now.”

The way that she said that with an icy tone and without so much as a flicker of worry crossing her face shocked Benjamin. He could barely comprehend what it was she’d just said. Half an hour ago, she’d been a clingy, doting fiancée, and now she was a bloodthirsty Amazon that barely seemed to recognize the people in her life she’d known for so long.

His mind flashed back to the exchange that the mage had briefly had with the apprentice about the love status effect that Matt had. From the sickeningly cute expressions Emma had been giving his friend for over a year now, he was sure that she’d had something like that, too, and it was just as obvious that they’d torn it out.

After all, because they’d removed his academic knowledge, he could barely remember the last few years, so it was pretty likely that if the mages removed anything love-related from her character sheet, that could definitely explain this.

An explanation didn’t make any of this any less horrifying, though. He was shaken to his core by this train of thought while the people in his temporary thrall just stood there waiting for the next order. That was when he saw her fidget and twist the ring absentmindedly. It was a small thing, but it gave him the tiniest burst of hope, and that was enough to snap him out of the nihilistic downward spiral of negative thoughts he’d been about to go down. That was when he realized they’d been standing there too long.

He probably would have stayed there even longer if he hadn’t seen another jet of green fire arc out into the night. It wasn’t the fact that it melted another rampaging mob of beastmen that spurred him to action, though. It wasn’t even the larger, more monstrous silhouettes that were briefly illuminated in the darkness. It was the reminder that the mage was still out there, and with a few words, he could make them all into his puppets again.

“Alright, guys, we’re getting out of here,” Benjamin said, his mind made up.

Where though? He asked himself.

Into the forest seemed like a death sentence. The demon in his pocket had mentioned something about a river, but that didn’t really matter. The only direction that mattered was away, but it wasn’t until he looked at Ethan and remembered him freaking out about his truck that he decided how they were going to do that.

“Matt’s Cherokee,” Benjamin said to himself. If all that mattered was speed, they couldn’t do better than that. It had to have at least half a tank of gas and four-wheel drive if they came to it. The mage had portals and spells and whatever else, but they had a sort of magic, too: the internal combustion engine. If it still worked, of course.

“Alright, everyone, follow me,” he said as he turned and started running back across the dark hills toward the campsite while he explored that thought.

What would they do if they got all the way there and the thing didn’t start? He didn’t see any reason why that would be the case, after all - despite being summoned to another world, his smartphone still worked just fine. If a magical world was going to fry technology, then a cellphone was a hell of a lot more fragile than whatever it was that made a car engine work.

Besides, he reassured himself even if the car didn’t start, they were still moving further from the mage, and really, that was all that mattered.

It was only a few hundred yards away and easy enough to find with the brightly colored tents. He just kept glancing over his shoulder as he went. It wasn’t out of fear that more of those beastmen might attack him, though they could, of course, at any moment. It was to make sure that the mage and his minions were still deep in the rearview as they went.

It was only when he saw the car looming in front of him he said, “Ethan, you’re driving. Everyone else get in back while I find the keys.”

All five of them, including two strangers around their age, moved to comply without question, and Benjamin tossed down his shield and sword on the floor in front of the passenger seat before he ran past the vehicle to dig through Matt and Emma’s tent.

Benjamin flipped out his phone and turned on the flashlight as he grabbed the nearest set of pants and started digging through it for the keys. Even as he tried to focus on the task at hand, though, he couldn’t help but feel sad looking at the cozy scene as he dug through the pockets of Matt’s pants in search of the keys.

“You think that they were getting it on before all this happened?” Kitsune Miku-chan asked, suddenly appearing beside him. As he looked at the translucent woman, he couldn’t help but notice the lascivious look that she gave him.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he demanded with a rising sense of outrage.

“I’m just saying - clothes tossed around at random like this - you can practically see what they were up to before you were summoned to this world,” she said with a gesture, “and now she can’t even remember his name, and he probably doesn’t even remember how to speak. It’s just sad.”

“Weren’t you the one that was so concerned about getting out of here as fast as possible?” Benjamin asked as his anger started to boil over. “If you’re going to manifest, then help me. Otherwise, you can just—”

As he was about to tell her to fuck off, she pointed, and the ghostly outline of the keys appeared at the corner of the tent.

“Of course… my master,” she murmured in obvious amusement. “I’m happy to help, but I just wondered what you thought since you’re obviously attracted to the girl. I could help you with—”

“That’s none of your business,” he said as he groped for the keys and stood up, feeling dirtied by her words.

He’d been trying to ignore Emma’s clothes and the way they were scattered around. Even thinking about the whole thing enough to avoid them made him feel like a creep somehow, but the fox spirit’s words had helped immensely in that regard.

At least his visceral revulsion to them had. It was a clarifying emotion.

“That’s true,” she agreed, “I’m just wondering if you’re the sort of master that thinks about that sort of thing. After all, she’s single now, and with a word, you could—”

“Not another fucking word,” Benjamin said as he turned off the light and shoved the phone in his pocket. “My friend is dead, and instead of being in mourning, his fiancee can barely remember he existed. Using these messed up mind control powers to replace him would be beyond fucked up.”

“Not according to the mages of Rhulvinar,” she whispered as she vanished from sight.

Benjamin didn’t respond to that, but then, in his mind, he shouldn’t have to. Instead he rushed back to the car as his mind tried to find some logic in the rage that Miku-chan stirred up.

Anyone willing to kidnap strangers and bring them to another world was almost certainly a bottomless pit of depravity, and if Lord Jariss was the rule rather than the exception then he had no wish to explore it. He was nothing like them, and even having all the power in the world in his hands wouldn’t be enough to tempt him into becoming a monster like the mage that had brought them here.

As he opened the car door, though, and the dome light turned on to reveal the crammed backseat, he couldn’t help but notice Emma and how beautiful she was. For a moment, he could see the temptation. He could see how a lesser man might think to do something terrible to get closer to a beauty like her. He wasn’t that guy, though. No matter how much he might want another chance with her, that ship had sailed, and even if it hadn’t, this certainly wasn’t the way to get her back.

Instead, of fixating any longer, htore his eyes from Emma and handed Ethan the keys to the car. “Let’s get the hell out of here, Benjamin told him.”

“Where are we going,” Ethan asked as he fumbled with the ignition.

“Away. Away from the mage and the forest and anything else that’s trying to kill us before they succeed,” Benjamin answered coolly. “We just need to get the fuck out of here.”

Ch. 8 - A Frantic Escape

When the SUV’s engine roared to life, Benjamin breathed a secret sigh of relief. There hadn’t been any reason why the vehicle shouldn’t have worked, but until he saw the instruments light up and heard the engine, he still worried that he’d made a terrible mistake.

Ethan didn’t seem to share his concerns, though. Instead of worrying, he just put the Cherokee into gear and gunned it, weaving in between the tents as he made for the broad and rolling hills. With the lights on, this wasn’t exactly stealthy, but there was nothing Benjamin could do about that right now. Maybe when he had a second to breathe, he could learn an illusion spell or something, but for now, they would just have to hope that speed was enough.

The first ten seconds were nerve-wracking because of the bodies scattered everywhere. It forced Ethan to go a lot slower than Benjamin would have liked as he carefully wove between them, and though all he wanted to do was tell his friend to run them over, he knew that was a bad idea. That wasn’t because it would have been disrespectful to the dead, either. It was plain to see the bloody horns and the snapped spears littering the ground, and Benjamin could see just how easily it would be to pop a tire on any one of those.

So he gritted his teeth and looked in the rearview mirror at his other friends to make sure they were okay. Raja sat there, still strangely silent, with alert eyes that were constantly darting around to take everything in as always, which contrasted with the cold black eyes of Emma as she sat there on the crowded back seat waiting pensively for her next order like a tiger ready to pounce.

The difference made sense, of course. She and Matt had been completely changed by the mage’s magic, whereas Raja and Ethan hadn’t been changed at all. Benjamin firmly hoped that when the charm spell wore off in an hour or a day, or however long it took for these things to pass, that they’d be back to normal.

Only Benjamin was affected enough by the magic to be changed but aware enough to notice. It was a strange position, but now wasn’t the time to think about it. Not when they were just getting clear of the messy battlefield and starting to work their way up to speed.

When the sun had set, this whole area had been a high meadow in the Sierras, full of granite boulders and steep drop-offs. Off-roading in the daytime would have been incredibly dangerous, and doing this at night would have been impossible. Now, though, at least that had changed in their favor.

The cliffs had been replaced with grassy rolling hills that led away from the dark, primeval forests. Though the occasional tree or thick cluster of underbrush barred their way, there were no signs that this area had ever been touched by the hand of man. None of that made the path particularly gentle, though, and as they accelerated, he could feel the vehicle bouncing up and down harder than it was supposed to. He was sure of that much, at least.

“Kitsune Miku, is there any chance you have a map or…” Benjamin started to ask, but his words trailed off when the GPS screen on the center console suddenly lit up, and the fox girl appeared inside the display.

“To the east, we have the arboreal throne and her army of wild spawn, so I definitely wouldn’t recommend going there,” the fox demon said, standing there in front of the map like she was giving them the forecast on the weather channel. “Whereas to the west, you will eventually find the city of…”

“Miku-chan, please - this is cute, but we need something a little more tactical,” Benjamin said.

She sighed loudly as she faded out of sight, and the picture behind her turned from a stylized map of the region to something more like a bird’s eye view of the area that you might see on an actual GPS system. She even included a glowing red arrow that seemed to be their vehicle and a red, dotted line that seemed to be the path that they should take as it wove south towards the river and then north along it.

It wasn’t much, but he would take it. “Head the way she says,” he told Ethan as he looked over at the man behind the steering wheel and felt a pang of envy. A few hours ago, Benjamin had known exactly how to drive, but now things were a little fuzzy. He knew that the wheel controlled the direction and the pedals controlled the speed somehow, but that was about the details.

At least it isn’t a skill I’m likely to need here, Benjamin assuaged himself.

They might have gas for what? A few hours? After that, cars wouldn’t be a thing he’d need to worry about until he got back to the real world. Which meant he needed to figure out what they were supposed to worry about next. If we get away clean, then we can…

Benjamin’s thoughts trailed off as Raja suddenly leaned forward in between the two front seats and pointed at the screen.

“Yeah, that’s the way we’re going,” Benjamin agreed. “Now, why don’t you tell me—”

Even as Benjamin spoke, his Indian friend crawled further forward and stabbed his finger directly on the screen, pointing out three glowing green dots that Benjamin hadn’t noticed before.

“Ummm… Kitsune Miku - what are those?” he asked with a sinking feeling as he was sure he already knew the answer.

“Those are your enemies,” she said simply. He took the news numbly as he watched one of them move toward their position a lot faster than the other two.

“And that one there, is it—” he asked.

“Lord Jarris,” she confirmed instantly.

Benjamin swallowed hard as he realized that even running away at 25 mph wasn’t going to be fast enough. The man definitely wasn’t running, though. Did that mean he was flying or maybe riding a dragon or something? He realized that he had no idea what was about to happen next, and that worried him as he searched frantically in the passenger side mirror for any clue about what was going to happen next.

“Ethan, go faster!” Benjamin spat in frustration.

“If that’s what you think we should do,” his friend said, pushing down harder on the accelerator even as he spoke, “But we aren’t on a road here - if we go much faster than we are now, we’re probably going to get in a nasty wreck.”

Benjamin tore his eyes away from the map and the mirror and looked at the path ahead of them, or at least the part that was illuminated by the headlights. The gently rolling hills they’d started with were becoming rougher, and paths they could go that weren’t dominated by trees or boulders were getting narrower and windier.

Benjamin thought about countermanding his order to go faster but decided against it. If that mage caught up to them, they were all almost certainly dead or worse anyway, so he’d balance the two dangers and hope for the best. Dying in a fiery car wreck was better than getting his brain wiped out anyway.

“What else can we do to protect ourselves?” Benjamin asked the fox spirit while he tried to keep an eye on everything at once. “Can I cast that portal spell or create some kind of shield?”

“The rift you’re referring to only works for places you’ve already been and know well,” she said, “and lesser portals within your mana budget wouldn’t be enough for more than one or two of you. Shields though…”

As the green dot that was the mage slowly got closer and closer to the red marker that was their car on the map, she walked him through learning another spell, and he was forced to sacrifice a few more points of knowledge (internet) to pick it up.

Reinforce Object: (5 mana) doubles the armor and hit points of an inanimate object for 1 hour.

It didn’t seem like much to him, but when he finally cast it on the car, he understood why she’d chosen it. The spell treated the car as a single object, which seemed to be cheating to him, but the way the magic rippled across every visible surface with a faint red shimmer when he cast it made it clear that was what happened.

It was only seconds later that the green thunderbolt ripped down from the dark sky and struck them. For a single second, the whole world around them was illuminated like it was suddenly daylight. The darkness that flooded in after that light was even more suffocating than it had been previously, but Benjamin was less concerned with that than he was with the condition of the car and the passengers inside it.

Strangely, no one seemed to be hurt. That didn’t make sense to him because he was sure that the metal frame of the vehicle would have made them more vulnerable to the lightning, but it was impossible to deny. The lights hadn’t even flickered. It was like the mage had missed, but Benjamin was sure that he hadn’t. He’d felt the waves of dangerous magic even as it dissipated. Maybe it was my spell that saved us, he wondered.

Then he saw a light in the side mirror. It was green, and after a moment of study, it resolved itself into a glowing horse being ridden by a dark figure that had to be the mage, as he tried to kill them before they could escape.

“A Mount of Azamerious,” the demon volunteered. “No wonder he’s gaining. You have two choices. You can try to shoot him down, or you can flee across the river. Even though it flies, it can’t follow you over water.”

“I think we should—” Ethan started to answer, but Benjamin cut him off.

“Both,” he blurted out as he looked back at Emma. This motherfucker had already killed Matt, and he wasn’t going to let the mage hurt her too. “Miku-chan - show Ethan the best place to cross this river and then help me build a spell that’s going to take this asshole down a peg or two.”

He still had 21 mana, and though he had no idea how fast he regained it, that should have been more than enough to do whatever she needed to do. For the next half minute, Benjamin frantically followed her commands, throwing away a few more pieces of himself to get the points to learn Swarm of Devils while Ethan tried to reach the ford that she thought they might be able to cross.

Swarm of Devils: (2 mana/per [Asmodean fly]) Summons 3 to 5 unintelligent [Asmodean flies] that fly to their target in an attempt to murder it or die in the attempt.

“I don’t know the first thing about Earth magic, though, so who knows if it will work,” she said with a note of caution. Benjamin had no idea either, honestly. Four-wheel drive cars were supposed to be able to go anywhere, weren’t they? Still, he let Ethan handle that part while he rolled down his window and leaned outside precariously as he sought to target his enemy.

“Spells like lightning don’t just automatically hit,” she whispered in his ear. “The better you understand where your enemy is and where he’s going, the closer you’re going to be, but I chose this spell because—”

“Swarm of Devils!” Benjamin yelled, pointing at the mage as a mix of fear and excitement swirled in his heart.

Not only did he want to kill the bastard, but he wanted to cast his spell and get back inside the vehicle before the target called down another lightning bolt and cooked him to a crisp. He felt a tingle and watched his mana drop by eight as four glowing red wasps the size of his hand suddenly appeared and streaked across the night like a drone swarm, leaving a fiery red trail behind them.

He slid back into the passenger seat and watched the red dots streak through the night from the mirror. He watched with anticipation as the ghostly green horse pulled up short, and for a moment, he thought that meant the mage was about to run for it. Instead, it just proved to be a precaution because all four of the creatures he’d summoned exploded harmlessly on an invisible shield.

Ch. 9 - A Frantic Escape (part 2)

The anticlimactic result was disappointing, but he took it in stride. How much effect could a single eight-mana spell have on a mage that was at least ten times more powerful than him? As scary as he thought those wasp things looked, he knew they couldn’t really amount to much, or summoning them would have been harder.

Still, it was what he had, and they seemed to curve toward their target like a guided missile, which he liked. He was about to lean out the window and try again when another barrage of lightning rained down on them. This time, it was a series of strikes that crackled and arced so much that he could see green electricity arcing from the antenna to the hood and back again, but other than making the headlights flicker briefly, there seemed to be no effect.

“When did Thor start chasing us?” Ethan quipped, swerving sideways as he struggled to stay on the path, “And why the hell hasn’t he heard of grounding?”

Benjamin ignored him to lean out the window and let off another blast of three shrieking little monsters with his Swarm of Devils, leaving his mana nearly exhausted. This time, the range was much closer, but they didn’t even make it to the mage’s shield before he unleashed a gout of green disintegrating fire that had been on display most of the night, annihilating them on the spot.

They weren’t his target, though, and even as the flames raced past the sparkling red demon, engulfing and consuming them, the flames stretched toward the car. The first blast wasn’t quite enough to reach it, thankfully, but a few seconds later, Lord Jarris fired off another blast of his flames that was enough to blow out the back window, showering them with little square shards of safety glass even as the roof of the car caught fire. The roof and the tailgate began to warp and disintegrate almost immediately under the onslaught, and Benjamin hoped everyone was going to be okay.

They were getting close to the water. Even in the dark, he could see the river ahead of them drawing ever nearer. It was larger and more imposing than it had looked on the map, but it was easy to see why Kitsune Miko-chan had chosen this spot for them to try to cross. Here, the river broadened to over a hundred feet wide before briefly splitting into two around a small, dark island that couldn’t have been more than thirty feet wide and fifty feet long.

Benjamin was hopeful that it would slow enough that they all wouldn’t just be swept downriver, but even that was preferable to the alternative. If he could just buy them another thirty or forty-five seconds, then they’d theoretically be free, but as the mage closed the gap on his iridescent emerald steed, Benjamin suddenly knew what he was going to do next. He wasn’t going to try to blast them all with lightning again. He was going to try to capture them alive.

And all he needed to do to make that happen was to shout. Benjamin’s blood went cold as he realized how much danger they were all in. He might be immune, or at least able to resist as long as he held onto the Rod of Obedience, but everyone else…

The roof was almost totally gone now. Even with the magical fortification that Benjamin had granted it, The flames still licked the rooftop, and the holes, surrounded by dark green embers, began to slowly widen as the metal dissolved into dust and rained down on the passengers.

“Listen—’ the mage shouted as he closed in that he was even with the back seat on the passenger side and only a little above the SUV. Now, all that separated them was a thin layer of glass, and Benjamin knew that would do nothing to stop the words that were coming next.

He’d already planned for that thought, and even as the mage spoke, he was reaching over to the stereo and cranking out whatever CD it was that Matt and Emma had been listening to on the way up to their campsite. The mage continued speaking, but no one heard him as strains of some 80s metal band suddenly overpowered everyone’s ears.

The music was pure garbage as far he was concerned, but it was still a thousand times better than the alternative. So, Benjamin turned it up as loudly as he could without blowing out the speakers, and as he did, he turned back to the mage, making a critical mistake.

‘Give me the rod,’ the mage said to him.

Benjamin couldn’t hear him over the sound of the music, but he could read the man’s lips, and apparently, that was enough for the magic to work. Even as Benjamin undid his seatbelt and began to stand, though, he felt the magic fizzle out. He no longer felt the compulsion to do as he was told.

It was a huge relief to feel his puppet strings give way so quickly, but even so, he kept moving. Benjamin was sure that if the mage figured that out, the next thing he would do was call down more fire or lightning on their unprotected heads. No, I need to use this to take him by surprise, he thought as he stood and turned, but how?

“You have enough mana for one more cast of swarm of devils if you’re able to get inside his shields,” the fox demon whispered into his ear.

Is that possible? He wondered as he looked at the face of the mage. The man was smiling so hard he was positively gloating. Benjamin struggled to remember how far out his first swarm of demon wasps had dissipated and decided it had to be at least a couple feet away. That means I’m well inside then already, right?

He wasn’t sure, but he was out of time. Even as he extended the mage’s metal rod back to him and Lord Jarris took hold of it, Benjamin began to whisper the words, feeling the last of his mana pour out of him as three of the red, glowing monsters appeared.

The shock on the mage’s face was palpable. He opened his mouth to cast something, but he had no time to react. Instead, he could only watch in horror as the bloodsuckers smashed into his robes. The first two did almost no damage, as the runes that lined the embroidered green-gray robes came to life, doing all they could to protect their owner as they glowed in chartreuse and gold.

Even as those circuits started to overload, though, and some of the runes started to smolder or wink out, the third demon wasp found its mark. It didn’t hit the outer fabric of the mage’s protective robes. Instead, it burst through a singed area where the first one had already struck, instantly turning the white shirt beneath it blood-red as the angry little creature bored into the other man’s body with all the subtlety of a shotgun wound.

The mage released the rod as his eyes widened, and his face went slack, but he had no time to do anything because, at that moment, the SUV crossed into the river, slowing only for a moment as Ethan did something with the gear shift. The mage’s arcane mount tried to rear up at the edge of the water but still started to vanish even as it threw its rider, and he was washed downstream by the current.

The river itself was wide but shallow, and Benjamin couldn’t waste time to see where exactly his friend was driving it as he watched the mage disappear into the darkness. In the moment, he was sure that the right thing to do was to go chase that body down and behead it to make sure that the man was really dead, but he lacked the energy. While he stood there, the water was boiling up through the seams in the body panel, and he was already up to his ankles in cold river water.

“Are we going to make it?” Benjamin asked his friend as the vehicle shuddered again and the water began to climb higher.

“We’re going to try,” Ethan said tightly, focusing intently on the path ahead of them.

In the end, he must have decided that they weren’t going to make it all the way across, though, because suddenly he turned and gunned it toward the small island halfway across the river and got the vehicle as close as he could before it became hopelessly bogged down in the mud a few feet from shore.

“Alright,” Benjamin yelled, “Last stop, everybody out! We’ll stay here at least until morning and then figure out where we can go next after we’ve gotten some rest.”

Everyone moved at once to obey him, which still felt strange to him. Normally, every decision from him or Matt would result in a minor debate or argument; only Emma could expect this kind of blind obedience, and he wasn’t sure he cared for it.

He reached down for his weapon and his shield and then took one last look at where he’d last seen the corpse of the mage that had been hunting them before he repressed the urge to go try to find it. That was when he noticed that there was still someone in the backseat.

Everyone else had hopped out of the SUV and was trudging toward shore, but one of the strangers was still sitting there with his eyes closed like he was lost in thought.

“I know what you’re going through, man, really,” Benjamin said, “But we’ve got to keep moving.”

As he reached back and shook the man’s shoulder, his head lolled forward. It was only then that Benjamin saw he was dead. The back half of his skull was missing, and a few green embers still burned deep inside where his brain should have been.

Benjamin pulled back away immediately as a shiver went through him. He’d been that close to losing Raja or Emma. The thought was terrifying. For a moment, he considered tossing the corpse in the river so that everyone else wouldn’t have to see it, but then he thought better of it and decided that, unlike all the bodies they’d had to leave on the battlefield, this one would get a proper burial.

Not tonight, though. With that thought fixed firmly in Benjamin’s mind, he hopped down into the knee-deep water and started to slog slowly toward the shore with everyone else as he tried to push the image of the corpse from his mind.

A couple minutes later, they were all pushing through the thicket of saplings and brambles and eventually took shelter on the highest ground of the ait, some six feet above the level of the river, and nestled amongst the trees of the copse that rose from the hilltop.

Benjamin sighed and collapsed on the dry ground, peeling off his wet shoes and socks almost immediately. He was exhausted. Looking at his nearly empty pools of mana and resolve, it wasn’t hard to see why, of course, but just because he could attach a number to his exhaustion didn’t make it any easier to bear.

“We need to…” Benjamin trailed off, suddenly aware that he needed to be careful about what he said because everyone was likely to leap to obey him even if it was exactly the wrong thing to do.

“What do you guys think we should do,” he asked instead, trying to stimulate a conversation from the quiet people clustered in this small clearing around him.

“Well, I think we should lie low until we understand what happened to us,” Ethan said hesitantly. “Maybe that fox girl you command could—”

“We need weapons, or we shall never be able to survive whatever attacks us next,” Emma said testily.

With her dark eyes, Benjamin found it almost impossible to meet her gaze and looked away even as Ethan continued, “We’re not going to be able to find much of anything until morning, and you’re bleeding. I think what we need is to just relax and recover, so we can…”

Benjamin tuned out of the argument and instead took stock of the group as a whole. His friends were obviously almost as exhausted as he was, and the strange girl that had joined them wasn’t in much better shape. He’d get everyone’s input, but it was clear to him that they couldn’t go on like this.

Ch. 10 - Safe, For Now

After a few minutes of debate, they settled their priorities. Fire and sleep now, food and weapons as soon as possible after that. Not everyone was happy about this, of course, but then, they didn’t have to be because at least until this spell wore off, or he managed to dispel it, he was in charge.

They quickly gathered a small amount of deadwood that was mostly dry, and though Benjamin was worried that he had no way to light it since he was down to just one mana and needed two to cast flaming weapon, Raja came to the rescue and produced a lighter quickly becoming the hero they needed. The orange glow spread, and warmth chased away the damp shivers they were all suffering through.

They made for a strange group, and the newfound light that everyone warmed themselves by only emphasized that. Two of the people he could see still had normal eyes, and the other two had cold black eyes that looked more than a little disturbing. Benjamin hadn’t pried into Emma’s character sheet too much, but he’d taken a look at the strange debuff that shackled her. Between that and the fact that the mage had lowered her intelligence to 6, meant that he’d practically lobotomized the girl that he’d spent the last year pining over. It was painful.

Bound to Serve: -100% chance to resist mental effects and commands from Lord Jarris or his agents.

She might look a little more like herself than Matt had when the mage was done with him, but as far as he was concerned, there would be only one reason that Lord Jarris would keep her appearance at 13 even while he lowered all her other noncombat stats to 5 or 6, and it sickened him to think about.

Benjamin supposed that he shouldn’t be surprised. Absolute power was supposed to corrupt absolutely, and there wasn’t a dictator or a billionaire back on earth with a tenth of the power as the mage he’d just murdered.

If he was actually dead of course. A shiver went through him as he considered the alternative: that the mage had lived and would be back to have his revenge.

That was how it was in these stories, wasn’t it? He’d seen the man bleeding while he drowned in the river, but this was a fantasy world right? They had healing potions and all kinds of other crazy magic, didn’t they? That meant this was far from over.

Of course Benjamin could just kill him again, somehow. The first time he’d gotten lucky, but if he could get his friend’s system’s turned on and unlocked then they could find some synergies and come up with a plan… he was sure he would have been the one in their group to do that once, but he’d lost that part of himself earlier tonight, and there was a big hole where that part of him used to be.

Benjamin stopped himself from thinking about either topic just now. Obsessing over what he couldn’t change wasn’t a good plan, but focus on murder… Well, that wasn’t a road he could go down. Not yet.

Depending on how you counted it, he’d murdered somewhere between one and four people today, which was more than he’d ever thought he would, and he wasn’t in a place to process that. He was also in no mood to imagine how many more hundred or thousand ‘Lord Jarris’s’ there were out there. He needed to focus on the here and now. Those terrible thoughts could wait… Well, they could wait as long as possible as far as he was concerned.

With effort, he turned his attention to Raja. Since freshman year, he’d been the clown of the group and always had some clever joke or prank to make at just the right time to cheer all of them up. Even if he hadn’t yet undergone the terrible psychic surgery that he and Emma had been subjected to, the man still seemed almost as depressed by his inability to say a word.

They could really use that now, but he apparently couldn’t speak. It only took one look at his character sheet to see why. The mage had forbidden it. It had been a passing moment and a handful of words that Benjamin barely remembered, but as he looked at his friend’s sheet, it was easy enough to see.

Proscribed (Speech): This character may no longer use speech until the vow is lifted by its owner.

While they all sat there, Benjamin tried several times to remove it but had been completely unsuccessful. He didn’t entirely understand the error messages that resulted, but he was quite sure it was some sort of permissions issue. In theory, that meant that he should be able to find a workaround or brute force it somehow. However, before he could do that, he would need time to understand this bizarre system, and if he was going to do that, then the girls obviously needed more help.

Neither of them moved a muscle. They just sat there by the fire, waiting for their next order like they were pod people. Emma was responding to Ethan’s questions as he attempted to tease out information from her and understand just how much of his friend might be left, which Benjamin was grateful for because he couldn’t bring himself to do that right now.

Instead, he turned his attention to the stranger. “So, uhmm, Nicole,” Benjamin asked. “The man that was with us before - you fled with us. Was he your…”

“He was my husband,” she answered flatly.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he answered. When she didn’t respond, he continued. “You do know that he died, right?”

“I do. It is unfortunate,” she agreed. That one word, unfortunate, was enough to give him hope until she continued “for the Rhulvin empire. He did not die in battle, so it was a needless waste.”

Part of him was certain that Nicole was mad at him for trying to help them escape, even though she didn’t say that in so many words. Still, the way her bottomless black eyes bored holes into him, he was pretty sure that she would have jumped across the fire and strangled him for pulling them away from the one-sided fight with the strange forest creatures that she’d been programmed to view as the enemy.

“Benji, what the fuck are we going to do, man,” Ethan sighed loudly after finding out that Emma couldn’t even remember most of her time in college. Benjamin understood that feeling, at least. “Tell me that you and your little magic wand can fix this. Please, man. Give me anything over here. I’m dyin’!”

“I wish I could,” Benjamin said with a shake of his head.

“What do you mean?” Ethan asked.

“I mean, that about the only person I seem to be able to affect is me. There seems to be some kind of password on both the people that the mage ‘optimized’ as well as those that the process was never started on, like you and Raja. It might be the same password, or it might be a different one. I really can’t make heads or tails of it right now.”

“Well, what about your fox girl? Can she help?” Ethan asked.

“Maybe,” Benjamin agreed. “But she’s literally a demon. I’m not sure that you want her poking around in your soul too much. Who knows what crazy fetishes she’ll give you.”

“Like I don’t already have those,” Ethan said with a laugh.

Even Raja smiled intently at that one, leaning forward as he followed the conversation with hope. Sadly, Benjamin had none to give him. It was like his friend was withering without the ability crack jokes like usual, but the rest of them were the ones suffering for it. They needed him how more than ever.

He let the conversation continue for a while, and he even let Ethan hold the Rod of Obedience, but other than making him immune to Benjamin’s orders, it didn’t give him any more control over his own system than Benjamin’s efforts had yielded.

“It keeps saying that I lack permissions to access this information,” Ethan complained as he tried to use his existing build points to boost his stats.

Benjamin nodded at that. He was pretty sure that once he tapped the complete button on his own interface, he’d be in the same boat. It would seem that in this world, the system wasn’t a tool for empowerment but a straight jacket for control. Though he might wish that wasn’t the case, it was.

They kept talking in circles for a while longer, but when the fire died down to a small bed of coals, and they were as dry as they were going to get, Benjamin said, “The sun is coming up in a few hours. Let’s all try to get some sleep, and tomorrow, we can figure out what’s next.”

Everyone lay down in a sort of ring around the fire after that, and a few minutes later, he heard the soft sounds of snoring while he stared sleeplessly up at a sky full of unfamiliar stars. He laid like that for a while, and just as he started to drift off, Kitsune Miku-chan whispered, “Going to sleep with your system still open is dangerous, Benjamin. Every minute you leave the interface open, your soul bleed gets worse.”

“What choice do I have?” he asked quietly.

“You could spend your points and move on,” she said, “before you do serious damage to yourself.”

Soul Bleed (Major): -5 to all actions, -50% recovery, -10exp/hr.

“I will as soon as I can,” he said, considering the warning window. “Which almost certainly means tomorrow, but you have to admit that my stats are all out of whack right now. If I’m going to lock them in for who knows how long then—”

“Benjamin, I’m sure that you’re very smart where you come from, but if you don’t let me help you, then—” she said more insistently. For emphasis, she appeared, sitting on the grass next to him.

“Help?” he asked with a low chuckle. “How am I supposed to trust a complete stranger for help? A demoness working for a madman? How do you think that looks to me? I don’t even know what you want!”

“We’re not so different, you and I,” she said sadly. “I want to be free. The same thing as you.” Benjamin couldn’t help but feel like he was being manipulated on some level by the fox woman all the time, but it was especially bad right now.

That was her nature, after all, wasn’t it? Kitsune, demon or servant of these strange mages, her job was the same: to manipulate and subjugate him. If that was true, though, then why was she showing concern for him now?

“Soon,” he said, with a note of finality. “Almost certainly tomorrow. There’s just too many things we don’t know yet, and my ability to control my system to give us the tools we need is about the only wild card we have.”

“As you wish, Master,” she said with a sour expression before fading away. “Just remember, you can’t save your friends if you are dead.”

It was a line that he was unable to shake. Even though he lay there in the dark, he kept turning over and over in his mind. He couldn’t help anyone if he was dead.