04 – The man above

“Improve random.”

Barely a moment after waking up, Martin was greeted by the blinding words of a new level. He couldn’t say that he had slept well, despite not really remembering anything beyond when he collapsed against the tree. His head was hurting still, and his body felt stiff and unresponsive. His first thought was to get rid of the added annoyance of the level up popup, and he became all the more impatient once he remembered that leveling up also healed him to almost perfect condition, mental state included.

With this in mind, it took him all of his willpower to consider the options he had for even just a moment. One the one hand there was the promise of a new, exciting skill. On the other hand he really was curious about what would happen when he upgraded one of his cool skills. He decided to choose the latter option, just to see. There wasn’t any real need to do either thing anyway.

>Improving random skill…
>Skill: Master System 2 improved to Master System 3 (hp, mp, stamina bars)!

He didn’t have time to be disappointed that, once again, the system had chosen itself as the target of the upgrade. The change was immediate. At the edge of his vision, off to the side as to be as unintrusive as possible but somehow always perfectly in focus, three horizontal bars appeared: one red, one blue and one green.

He immediately knew what they were. And as of right now, they were all completely full.

He got up, noticing with a faint upward curve of his lips that even this tiny action consumed a sliver of stamina, depleting the green bar by just a tiny fraction before it went back to full again. Right now, the red bar was the shortest, followed by an almost identical blue one and by a larger green bar. Even the latter however, despite being the biggest, was so small as to appear insignificant.

There was an idea that popped into his mind. Martin remembered what he felt the previous day, and decided to test something. He leaned against the largest tree he could find around him, and activated Energy Sap. He kept a close look at the three bars and, just as he though, immediately upon activation both the green one and the blue one went down significantly. Then, they began to replenish at an accelerated rate as the skill sucked the energy from the tree. Meanwhile, the red bar that was already full was growing in length ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly.

By the time the skill had drained the whole tree, he was left with three quarters stamina, a bit more than that in mana, and some extra maximum health. The other two bars had grown as well, but not as much. Which, considering how little the red one had grown, meant they didn’t really move at all.

Another quick test on a slime confirmed his idea that different creatures gave him different replenish and growth rates, probably depending on what the target’s stats were.

With this said and done, he found himself suddenly aware of where he was, and what had happened last night. There was a forest around him now, a thing that had been there all along but seemed to have magically disappeared from his perception while he focused on trying out his new theory. Looking back at the ruins of the village, he saw that all the fires had died down during the night, and tall dark pillars of smoke were rising from what was left of the huts and of a few trees that had caught fire in the mayhem.

Martin walked among the ruins, moving slowly to carefully avoid any dead bodies on the ground. He observed them, eyes darting from one green unmoving creature to the next, and felt absolutely nothing. There was a little body thrown to the side, and from this angle he could see its face. It looked like a young girl he saw a while back.

He was at a Starbucks, he remembered. The smell of coffee was faint, fainter than it usually was and there was a distinctive pungent smell of floor cleaner. There was a queue at the bar. By the time he sat down with his laptop, he was tired and uncomfortable. A little notification told him that the battery was low. What made an already irritating set of events even worse was that he couldn’t find a plug to charge his laptop. The only plug he could see was already in use, there was a young girl sitting there working on her MacBook, with headphones on her head, looking all happy with her cutesy pink drink.

She was quite pretty.

All he could think about was how much he wished her laptop exploded on her. Oh how he would have reveled in pleasure if he saw her pretty face disfigured and mangled by the acid, the hot metal and shards of glass from the explosion. Would she cry? Scream? The scenario had played in his head several times, with different variations, all with the same outcome. Catharsis. He also had become suddenly aware that he was standing still, in the middle of the room, with his drink in one hand and the laptop in the other.

And yet, he had done nothing. He sat back again, meekly to the side, sipping his now cold drink, wishing it was still hot for when he planned to sip it while he worked. What was she even doing there, wasting time scrolling some random social media, when he just wanted someplace to sit down and get some work done? She never got up from there, and he went away defeated.

He shook his head, letting the unpleasant memory dissolve like those rising clouds of smoke around him. He could hear some noise, like the clanging of a chain in the distance. It was a chorus of noise, he realized, with rhythm to it that he didn’t think could ever be natural. Soon, the random noise resolved itself in his head, and the image of armored soldiers marching towards him was first in his mind, then in the distance clear as day to his eyes.

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Someone was coming.

However, before that…

Everything went still, time itself stopping its pervasive flow.

The world receded, like an image on an all-immersive viewscreen that was slowly shutting down, glitching, powering down.

The Observer got up, and did a little stretch. The chair he was sitting on disappeared in a little show of deep blue cubes, receding into the ground like a hologram. The Observer walked calmly around the room of illusions, where the forest was nothing more than intangible dreamy matter, and towards where the armored men were coming from. They looked so little, their proportions weird and their details missing because the view was still centered on Martin’s point of view.

A door materialized, and when it opened it was like the world itself was being cut precisely in the shape of a rectangle, and only darkness was outside. The Observer went through, and the door closed behind him.

“Hmm,” he muttered, looking around and out the huge windows.

The golden beams that came from infinitely far above surrounded the Citadel at the end of Time, splitting up from a single source into a myriad of threads in the color of gold, ochre and bright yellow, each different than the other. Only a few were visible right now, or the view of the night sky would be too cluttered to be properly appreciated from inside the golden cage. A single one of those threads was highlighted, glowing red. He panned and zoomed, and witnessed in real time as the thread split into two, going downwards in parallel now, before returning to its golden hue.

Time was still flowing there, as it still was in all the universes except one, all threads flowing down to once again be joined together in a single end. The end of time itself which, funnily enough, was here.

There was a little hiccup he had to attend to, nothing major he was sure, before he could return to his favorite pastime. He reached a console and typed in some characters, and time blurred and went, bizarre as it always was in this place, and then the Observer was done. A single thread of time changed its hue, barely noticeable, as the little adjustment done upon it rippled and cascaded through the endless chain of cause and effect.

With a newfound skip in his steps, he reentered the chamber. With a flick of his wrist he made time—“Hmm, why don’t we make this more interesting?”

He pondered, scratching his chin. Then he remembered what happened last time, and his eyes went for a moment to a tiny spot in the golden fabric of threads that was the sky. His eyes didn’t need windows to see them, and he immediately found what he looking for. A little, tiny invisible void of a universe that wasn’t there anymore. An irreplaceable loss that felt like a whole world of possibilities snuffed out forever, and also like it was worthless compared to the infinity of the multiverse.

Such a dichotomy… it made him melancholic.

“Nah. I won’t interfere. Not worth it.”

Martin decided that the best course of action would be to avoid the soldiers. He really didn’t want to deal with a large group of armored people who would surely end up questioning him, and having to come up with a reason why he was here.

Better to run past them, and back to the path.

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