He blinked into the gloom as cool underground air filtered uncomfortably between his thighs. A musty scent of mold and wet suffused his nostrils, giving him the impression of being inside some dank basement. There was a uniqueness to it, however. The air was too cold to be someone's basement, and there was a sense of age to the air. As if nothing had breathed here for years. Many many years.
Oh, and it was pitch black.
"Hello?" Dusty hesitantly raised his hands but found nothing. No wall greeted him, nor a helpful piece of furniture to give him some indication of where he was. It was as if he was floating in a void. Ever present darkness pressing in on all sides with enough weight that it felt physical.
The only saving grace was the stone floor beneath his bare feet. It was rough and textured. Stone, with little bits of dust and sand that dug into the balls of his feet. He shuffled his toes, feeling at the ridges and indentations in the ground in a vain effort to situate himself. It felt like tiles. Or at least how tiles might feel after decades of neglect. Deep cracks separated perfectly smooth sections covered in a thin layer of grainy dust.
A flash of light blinded Dusty followed immediately by a distinctive pop.
Dusty yelped, flinching back. He nearly tripping over his ankles as he blinked the spots from his vision. His hands flailed in front of his face in a panic as his brain slowly processed the information being sent by his eyes.
A penguin stood before him.
A glowing, slightly ethereal, penguin with dark, malevolent-looking eyes stood before him. It stood about three feet tall with a writhing beard of embers and ash flickered underneath the creature's beak. The light it emitted somehow failed to illuminate the pitch void surrounding them. The creature held a wooden cane in one of it's flippers as it stared dispassionately at Dusty. It stood out against the darkness in a way that made it look like it didn't quite belong. As if it were standing on two feet simply because it were customary rather due to the adherence to the laws of physics.
Glowing green letters floated above it's head:
"Hello?" Dusty asked after a moment where his heart stopped hammering. His hands slowly dropped to his sides.
"Greetings," the penguin intoned.
"Hi, do you... Could you turn the lights on?"
The penguin with the burning beard glanced around, its eyes as eerily emotionless as ever, before turning its gaze back on Dusty.
"Trouble," it said.
"Trouble?" Dusty repeated dumbly. "What trouble?"
The penguin shrugged, gesturing vaguely around it with its wooden cane. Dusty followed the gesture, but still couldn't see anything in the darkness. A sense of claustrophobia began building in his gut.
"I bring help," the penguin said. Then, before Dusty could respond, a faint pop sounded and the penguin was gone.
Once again, perfect darkness pressed in on all sides. It had been there all along, but with the penguin there to focus his eyes it hadn't felt so bad. Now it seemed to loom with hidden dangers.
Ever so slowly, Dusty settled down onto the ground. He considered crawling until he came up against a wall but it seemed prudent to wait a moment for the strange glowy penguin to come back with its promised 'help'.
Dusty didn't remember how he got here. In fact, the last thing he remembered was going to bed underneath his thick comfortable blanket. There had been a thunderstorm and his cat Mels had acted as an impromptu space heater as the thunder pealed outside the window.
"Hoo, boy..." Dusty breathed out. He licked his lips, then on a whim whispered, "Status."
Nothing happened, and the sinking feeling in Dusty's gut intensified.
Another flash of light and two distinctive pops sounded and suddenly two additional penguins appeared before him. They were of similar size and shape to the first penguin, but unlike the first penguin, they each carried a wooden toy sword in one flipper. And they were upside down.
Dusty blinked as both penguins dropped head first into the ground. They hit with a dull thump, staying there for a cartoonishly long time, before tipping over like a felled tree. It took a second, but the two penguins righted and dusted themselves off. They lined up in front of him, jostling for space and elbowing each other with their flippers before finally settling into some semblance of order.
Dusty's lips twitched with amusement.
The first penguin waved. It was hard to tell with a bird, but the set of its beak made it look like it was smiling.
"Hello, are you... the help?" Dusty couldn't help but do little air quotes with his fingers.
The Google nodded enthusiastically, then opened its mouth only to close it with a dejected slump. Chaos glanced at its friend, then shrugged and placed its flipper to its beak in a shushing motion.
"You can't speak?"
Both penguins nodded.
"Why not?"
Chaos shrugged while Google took its sword and folded it. Dusty blinked as the wood melted together like modeling clay. Google mushed it together, forcing it down until the penguin held in its hands a small wooden heart. Then, grinning, Google presented Dusty with the heart.
"Because... you have a wooden heart?"
Google's grin vanished into a disappointed scowl. Chaos sighed, then molded its sword into the digit zero, and held it next to the wooden heart. The both gave Dusty hopeful looks.
"You don't..." Dusty's eyes widened as he realized. "You don't have any likes? No, that can't be. Can it?"
But both penguins were nodding furiously. Their wooden artifacts reverted back to swords with a snap as they did a little merry jig.
"What is this, a reality tv show?" Dusty chuckled. Both penguins paused and glanced at each other, then with a shrug, they nodded. Dusty blinked. "You're not serious."
Then penguins nodded.
"Okay then..." Dusty ran his hand through his hair, then he perked up. "But you can answer yes no questions right? With nods or shakes of your head."
Google nodded, while Chaos smiled.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
"Nice, okay, so. Where am I. Wait, shit. Can you take me home?"
The penguins shook their heads.
"Can I go home?"
Google nodded enthusiastically while Chaos shook its head. They glared at each other, then Chaos sighed and nodded while making a so-so gesture with its flipper.
"Sort of. Or at least it will take a lot of work. Okay then. What about... Have I been isekaid?"
They nodded.
"Is there a big bad villain I have to take care of? Or I guess I mean to say am I the 'Hero'?" Dusty made air quotes around the word.
The penguins shrugged and shook their heads.
"Just a guy, huh," Dusty's eyebrows rose at that. "So is there a system in this world? Or magic in general?"
The penguins glanced at each other, then Chaos took its sword and stabbed Google in the heart. Dusty opened his mouth in shock, but Google didn't seem phased by it. The penguin simply lifted a flipper dramatically and let its tongue loll out as if it had died. Chaos then raised its flippers and turned its toy sword into a party rattler that it shook twice.
"Ah huh..." Dusty scratched his ear as he tried to parse the pantomime. "I have to kill things for levels, and once I get levels I'll get access to the system?"
The penguins shrugged, then Chaos morphed its sword into a hammer, then a pair of scissors and a few other tools in rapid succession.
"Oh, any job. Okay, cool. Cool. This is fine. Everything is totally fine," Dusty nodded to himself as he processed his situation. He'd read enough of these kinds of stories to know what was going to happen next. He wasn't the hero as the penguins said, which meant that there was a pretty high chance of immediate death. Or at least, very lethal combat.
Pain wasn't Dusty's strong suit, but he couldn't help but acknowledge the allure of an entirely new world to explore. If he could explore it that is. No guarantees that he didn't die to the first monster that showed up considering he couldn't even see anything.
Dusty sniffed, looking around at the darkness. Little gray spots of eigengrau filled his vision.
"So, you did mention that you were here to help?" Dusty turned to the pair hopefully.
Google nodded and pulled out a blue marble from seemingly nowhere and presented it to Dusty. He reached out, but instead of touching it, his fingers passed right through both the marble and the penguins flipper. Then, the marble flickered and a pressured appeared behind his eyes. He squinted, and suddenly the uniform darkness retreated just enough to give him a black and white view of the chamber.
He was in a carved underground room. There were no lights hanging from the ceiling, or anything to suggest that whoever had lived her before had access to electricity. Sconces lined the walls which were made of stone and covered in tight carvings that showed what appeared to be bipedal dragons conducting some sort of ritual. The floor was likewise stylized, this time with flower like designs on the cracked and broken tiles. On the far side of the room, a dark archway yawned wide.
The entire place looked like not a soul except the bugs had lived here for a hundred years. Dust covered everything, and much of the relief carvings were faded with the thinner pieces like wing tips and claws broken off.
"Dragons," Dusty whispered, a sense of awe tickling the back of his brain. All thoughts of the danger he might face vanished as his eyes roved hungrily over the relief carving. The dragons must have been religious to some degree. A robed elder, marked by their stooped back and gnarly looking wings stood before a gathering of dragons. They all held hands, their jaws gaping in what Dusty presumed was song as they all stared at a twisting vine sitting atop an ornate pedestal.
They were conducting magic.
Dusty grinned as he turned back to the penguins. Theoretically, it was possible that the dragons were just singing to a plant vine thing, but until he was proven otherwise he was believing that this place had magic. There were weird talking penguins for crying out loud.
"That helps immensely, thanks. Oh, do you... have something else for me?"
Chaos pulled out another blue marble and gave it to Dusty. Like before, the marble flickered then vanished. Unlike before the pressure was centered between his temples. A throbbing ache intensified, and Dusty squinted as the mother of all headaches blossomed. Before he could complain, the pain vanished and he was left with the most peculiar feeling.
"Well that is strange," Dusty murmured in a language that most definitely wasn't English. The words came easily to him, as if he had been speaking it for his entire life and not five seconds. Strangely, he didn't actually know the name of the language. It was simply 'Common' in his head.
The penguins nodded sagely, their glowing bodies casting not-light around the dim room.
Suddenly, a soft pop sounded and a third penguin came screaming into the room. No sound escaped its beak, yet the sheer terror in its eyes seemed to infect Dusty with a similar fear.
"What, what?" Dusty asked, backing away carefully.
Rooks panted, pointing back with its own toy sword then to Dusty, the back to the archway from whence it came. Then Rooks raised its sword into a fighting stance and faced the door. Chaos and Google did likewise, their dark eyes glittering as they faced the door.
"I don't suppose you guys can get rid of whatever that is?" Dusty asked hopefully.
The penguins glanced at him, then at each other. Rooks and Chaos dropped their guard and giggled while Google swiped his sword halfheartedly through Dusty's leg. The blade swished right through his shin without sending a single sensation of touch up to his brain.
"Ghosts, right. I was getting that feeling." Dusty licked his lips and awkwardly put his fists up in what he hoped approximated a fighting stance. A skittering sound came through the archway. Dusty swallowed, then he dropped his guard, and frowned.
"I'm not some Neanderthal. Punching a monster, honestly..." Dusty muttered to himself as he shot his gaze across the room. His gaze settled onto a broken piece of tile sticking up from the floor, and he rushed to pick it up. It was surprisingly heavy, and the jagged broken edge looked nasty. Then he rushed over to the archway and stood off to the side.
"Tell me when it comes?" Dusty asked the penguins. They nodded and poked their heads through the archway.
Several tense moments passed, each feeling longer than the last, as Dusty waited with his impromptu weapon in hand. Every so often a skittering sound would reach his ears, before it would ominously fall quiet. He didn't know if that was the sound of the monster stopping its movement, or simply walking slowly enough that it didn't make any noise. Regardless, the seconds filled Dusty mind with a thousand different monsters that might pop around the corner and eat his face off.
The penguins hopped back and raised their swords. Dusty licked his lips, eyes locked on them.
As one, they lowered their blades.
Dusty lunged forward, slamming his piece of jagged tile onto the dark shape the skittered into the entranceway. He didn't even get the chance to recognize its eight scraggly legs, or the half dozen curled appendages poking out of its mouth. The only thing he saw was his weapon crashing down onto the creature's hairy back. The creature's body crunched unpleasantly beneath his fingers and folded without any resistance.
Surprised, Dusty overbalanced, toppling over the creature and awkwardly turning his dive into a forward roll. His knees and elbows bashed painfully into the hard stone ground as he frantically rolled to his feet.
He'd lost his weapon in the attack, though as he turned to face the monster he realized he wouldn't need it anymore. The monster was dead.
Suddenly, his vision lit up with a half dozen glowing lines of text.
Type: Active — Single Use — Physical
Description: Imbue your next weapon attack with a surge of predatory force, dealing bonus physical damage on hit. If the target is at full health, the attack deals additional bonus damage, exploiting their unguarded state.
"Strike first. Strike hardest. Let them bleed before they blink."
Type: Active — Duration — Chaos
Description: For the next 10 seconds, any creature making direct contact with your skin is afflicted with Poison, stacking once per second. Each stack deals chaos damage over time.
"A brush of your fingers, and rot takes root beneath their flesh."
Type: Aura — Buff — Defensive
Description: Channel ancient draconic might, granting yourself and nearby allies bonus armor. Grants additional bonus armor based on your wealth.
"Steel may bend. Scales endure."
Type: Active — Control — Cold
Description: Imbue your eyes with the petrifying might of the Gorgon. For the next 3 seconds, any enemy who meets your gaze is frozen in place, unable to act or move. While channeling, you become immobile.
"Gaze upon me, and let terror still your heart—until even the stones envy your silence."
Type: Active — Recovery — Fire
Description: Center yourself with a surge of inner strength. The next three breaths you take within 10 seconds restore a portion of your missing health.
"Inhale the world. Exhale the pain. Let breath forge resolve where blood has failed."
First Skill Choice