Chapter 1: Guide The Apocalypse
{Heroes, prepare yourselves. The Trials begin in 24 hours.}
The words appeared on every wall of the room, impossible to miss, the golden script glowing faintly in any light.
Kalli blinked slowly, her head pounding.
Memories flashed through her mind.
Alarms had sounded all through the office tower, alerting workers to the arrival of an interplanetary enforcement team in orbit above their position.
Not that it did any good.
Five seconds after the alarms had sounded, the orbital bombardment had begun, targeting the building where she was working, and everything within a ten-kilometre radius of it.
The worst part of it all was that she shouldn’t have been there at all. It was her day off.
And, her house was outside the blast radius.
She had been called into work for a midnight server breach attempt. She had locked down the servers and stopped the breach, only to lose her life.
It wasn’t even a good job, it just paid well.
For ten years after she was recruited out of university, she had held a data security role for what was undoubtedly a front company for an organized crime syndicate.
There had been too many requests to erase digital footprints across the planetary net, too many suspicious financial transaction records scrubbed from the data breaches she stopped, and entirely too many police snooping around the company for it to be anything legitimate.
However, she had learned on day one that it was best to keep your mouth shut, do what you were told, and make sure that there was absolutely nothing in the server logs that could possible lead back to you.
She had even altered her security credentials to trace back to an IT administrator who had disappeared just before she was hired.
If anything had gone wrong and the company was raided by a tactical team, her plan was to simply claim she was an intern and walk away without any evidence that she had ever worked a single day at the company.
She had even deleted her employee file, and took her pay in cash.
Now she was absolutely certain that she should be dead.
Only, she found herself sitting in a strange university classroom, surrounded by strangers in a uniform that she didn’t recognize, and in a body that looked vaguely like hers, but was not old enough to be her own.
There were no scars on her hands, none of the callouses from years of physical training, and while her hair was still the same shade of brown, it was longer than she had ever worn it, hanging down over her shoulders and onto her desk.
"Hey, new kid, what do you think that means?"
Kalli looked to her right, into the confused face of a dark-haired boy who was entirely too close.
"I honestly have no idea. I barely know where I am right now."
In his mirrored sunglasses, she caught a glimpse of her face. Perhaps this was her body, if she was a decade younger and had lived a life of privilege. Still her, but softer and slightly nerdy looking.
She was going to have to fix that.
The boy laughed. "I like you, new girl. Not enough applicants manage to get into Marimgar Academy with their sense of humour intact. But that sign is just too strange. Look, the teacher is trying to erase it, but her brush just goes right through it."
He was right. The message wasn’t actually on the wall, it was a few centimetres in front of it.
"What trials? Is this some sort of frosh week prank?" Someone in the front row shouted, clearly frustrated.
"Everyone, just stay seated. I will be right back."
The teacher stammered out her instructions, then rushed out of the room, leaving dozens of confused students with nothing to do, and a mysterious message on the wall mocking them.
"It has to be a prank by the seniors, right?"
"Of course. I bet the teacher is just mad that she couldn’t figure out how they did it. But what kind of trials do you think they’re planning? I thought that hazing had been prohibited when they banned the fraternal orders?" The boy in the front row replied.
The light from the letters began to glow more intensely, increasing at a steady rate that had students first covering their eyes, then turning away entirely as a blinding golden light seemed to come from everywhere.
Then, the light faded, and Kalli found herself floating in the void, surrounded by a ring of boxes, each wrapped like a birthday present with a large question mark on each side.
{Please Choose Your Class}
"What Class? Hello?"
Nothing.
Kalli reached out and touched one of the prize boxes, which turned easily in her hands, but seemed unaffected by gravity or inertia.
"How do I even choose a Class? What is a Class?
Is this some sort of purgatory?
Did I actually do something so horrible that the galactic fleet digitized my mind after death, and now I’m stuck in some weird Limbo having an insane dream before sentencing?" She pondered out loud.
{Time Expired} Assigning Your Class
"Wait, what? Give me time to choose!"
{Capability Optimized Class Assignment is already in progress.}
Kalli could almost feel the smug amusement in the messages as they appeared in the air around her. Whatever this place was, it was definitely mocking her.
The presents exploded in a shower of rainbow-coloured confetti, and a simple text notification message appeared in Kalli’s mind.
{Welcome to the end of your world, hero of the Marimgar Academy. In one day, the boundaries of the world will collapse, allowing your world to merge with another realm. In order to give the people of your world a fighting chance, every nation has been granted one Academy of Heroes.
Go forth, bolster your strength, build bonds, obtain epic gear, and forge lifelong friendships as you save humanity.
If at any time, you wish to see your progress, simply think the word ’Status’ and the Class Menu will appear.
Now, go! After the introductory Quests, you will have one day to prepare for the end of the world.
Use it well.
This message has been automatically generated. Please rate your experience. }
"You’ve got to be kidding me." Kalli muttered as she read through the message for a second time.
However, she was now back in her seat, surrounded by the same strange class of students. Or, half of them, anyhow.
The other half of the seats were empty, and slowly filling as students suddenly appeared in them, returned from wherever they had been taken.
"What Class did you pick? This is so cool, it’s like a VR game beta release!"
"Personal space!"
"That’s a weird class... oh, sorry," he replied, backing away a few centimetres. "But really, what class did you pick? I went for Warrior. There is nothing better to test a new game release than the classic human warrior."
"Status." Kalli whispered, praying that the strange message had actually given her a useful class of some sort.
[Name] Kallista De Marimgar
[Class] Coordinator
[System Points] 0
{Notice, please perform System tasks to gain points.}
[Class Skills] System Points Store, Storage Realm
"Store?" Kalli whispered hopefully, ignoring the look that her classmate was giving her, and the fact that the System had renamed her.
Her family name was most definitely not ’De Marimgar’.
She didn’t even know where that was.
She began with examining the System Points Store option, which brought up a holographic image in her vision. One that apparently only she could see, as the boy wasn’t reacting to it at all.
{5 options available} 0 Points accrued
Kalli stared at the greyed out images of a tent, a large knife, a motorcycle, a table covered in food, and a box with a question mark on the top.
The boy poked her to get her attention, too excited to care that she was clearly busy and ignoring him.
There had to be a way to get points.
She had seen something about System Tasks in the instructions.
{System Tasks} 1 available
{Mandatory Bonus System Quest} fortify the classroom to survive the introductory event attack on the Academy. 15 minutes remaining.
Oh, that was not good.
