He was going to be sick.

  It was a little-known fact that Brom hated carnival rides because of what they did to his stomach. As a man who'd done his fair share of vomiting in his life, he hated the weak feeling that came after you heaved your guts. His vanity also bristled at the fact that absolutely nobody looked cool doing it, especially him. Just when he was certain that the sensation was going to overwhelm him and just add another reason why this was the worst day ever, he saw something flicker in his vision.

  - Nausea

  The squirming, flipping sensation in his guts was suddenly gone. His innards became as calm as still water, joining the rest of him in this level of zen chill that was almost more frightening. Because Brom knew he should be panicking. He should be screaming in absolute visceral terror. He shouldn't be worried about something he could cure with a little Pepto and a lie down. If he closed his eyes, pointless in the darkness, it wasn't hard to remember the echo of the pain from just a little bit ago. That got a full-body shudder out of him. The kind that were usually powered by tipsy bar cougars running red nails down his bicep. Great, that was two unpleasant thoughts at once!

  But with no terror holding him back, his innate curiosity took hold. This endless descent seemed to be a safe spot, so it was time to open that Menu and look at those skills. It was surprisingly intuitive, just a quick thought away to open and then open again. He started by browsing over his passive skills, wanting to know what was always on by default.

  - Enhanced Physique (Legendary)

  Barbarians are known for being physically robust, and you are the apex of Barbarian physicality. You can shrug off wounds and conditions that would cripple a lesser individual. You have increased health, deal increased physical damage, and are immune to physical debuffs.

  - Iron Willed Heathen (Legendary)

  Barbarians bow to no power except their own, and you take that to the extreme. You cannot be harmed by hostile spells or spell-based abilities. You cannot learn magic spells.

  - (Unassigned)

  Let there be context. The System had been right to call him lucky. Brom had a small, sneaking suspicion that not being able to learn magic was going to be a pain in the ass later, but if he was reading that ability right then, it was well worth the trade-off. He examined the menu, looking for signs that there was a limit to how many passives a person could have. After a few minutes, he concluded that there didn't seem to be any indicators leading him to believe, at least until proven wrong later, that there was endless growth potential. From how the System had spoken, though, and the fact that his third passive was a reward for being the first of his kind and nearly the first in the world, it didn't seem like passives were easy to come by.

  His active Skill was pretty much what he'd expected. He was a Barbarian, he'd played games before. He hadn't expected it to be anything but an attack of some kind.

  - Heavy Attack (Legendary)

  After every third attack, you may deliver a Heavy Attack laden with destructive force. This attack becomes stronger each time it is used without the attack chain being interrupted on a target.

  Okay, so this seemed to be some kind of charged skill. Like he'd build up the ability to use it. Made sense, it wasn't like he was sitting back at a keyboard and could hit a button to activate his Heavy Attack. It didn't seem to be weapon dependent either. Instead, it just seemed that when he was attacking, the third one would be stronger than the others somehow. Maybe it would have flashy effects? He didn't really play these kinds of games much, he was a simple board game kind of guy. He needed to find TJ.

  Was the teen okay? He was a good kid, better than his dad by miles, and he had a bright future ahead of him. Then again, maybe he was in the same situation as Brom, in this endless blackness. Frustrating as the never-ending darkness of this place was, Brom couldn't say it was dangerous yet. Although he felt it starting to weigh on him. Insulting as it had been, he missed the kitten poster just a little bit. Hang in there indeed.

  Minutes ticked by. Or maybe it was hours. He'd started humming to himself to keep the mental fatigue at bay, and he knew it was creeping up on him. Mostly because he'd chosen the theme song to a childhood movie that didn't have the happiest memories. The name Artax required trauma processing. Still, upbeat music was upbeat, fingers tapping out the riff on his thigh and foot keeping the beat. Wasn't this why elevators usually had music of some kind? Then again, elevators also had...wait, was it getting lighter in here?

  Belatedly, Brom realized that he could make out...something. Staring downward, he realized the darker patch of blackness within the black was his own body and that light was rising slowly, seeping around what seemed to be a circular edge of the floor. The glow continued to grow, and his emotions surged with it. It would seem that his Enhanced Physique did not absolve him of anxiety, and now that he was out of the tutorial, whatever processing lock had been on his emotional cortex seemed to be dissolving.

  As kind as the elevator out of the dark had been to slowly bring up the light levels, Brom was still unprepared for when they popped out into a real illuminated space again. It was like staring directly into the camera flash after emerging from a dim bar, and he recoiled the same, a crisp "Fuck!" escaping his lips.

  - Daze

  The black spots dancing in his vision abruptly vanished, leaving him to take in the scenery unfolding around him. A ruined city. No, correction, a ruined metropolitan area. Brom, for all his travels, was a small-town guy. Ten years of trying to make it as a musician had left him with negative impressions of big cities. People were assholes. Seattle was pretentious. Portland was weird. LA was a hellscape where talent went to rot. This city dwarfed them all, and the two suns in the sky told him he definitely wasn't on Earth, or at least he wasn't on his Earth.

  The dark circle hit the ground with a gentle thump, and then it was gone, leaving his sneakers on the crisp brown grass that made his own ratty yard look lush and pristine by comparison. A chain link fence, rusted and climbed by growth, still let out a decayed rattle in the gust that whipped his ruddy hair into his eyes. It smelled like despair. Like dust and hot metal and plant life that couldn't survive under the conditions here.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Tutorial starting in five-

  "Hey, where is this?"

  Four-three-two-one! Have fun!

  That definitely wasn't five seconds. Those last four numbers had flashed past practically on top of each other. The System was holding a bit of a grudge against him, it seemed. He didn't appreciate it, he'd been perfectly logical. He'd provided feedback. Zero stars. This whole experience could go to-

  A strange creaking noise stopped his thoughts. It wasn't just a creak. It was also a clack. A hollow thump. It sounded a lot like when Uncle Mike had taken him hunting that one time, and he'd heard deer antlers rattling together. And it sounded like it was coming from behind him.

  Horror movies had always worked on a peculiar kind of logic. Why, if you were so frightened, would you turn around so slowly? As Brom learned, sometimes it was because your brain was desperately trying to tell you the entire time that you'd imagined it. That you were being foolish. That you really didn't need to turn around and look because there really wasn't anything there, and you were just going to look silly. Too bad, in this case, there absolutely was something there.

  Skeletons. At least a dozen clearly former humans were approaching at a slow and deliberate speed, clutching what looked like rusty kitchen knives.

  "Nope! Nope-nope-nope-nope!" There were a few constants in Brom's life. One of them was not messing with dead people, hence why he'd never done any stupid graveyard photo shoots or attached himself to the imagery of the dead. Another was you didn't fuck with rusty metal, he was fresh out of tetanus shots.

  Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. Sometimes you had to retreat to seize victory. Brom's body was in motion before his mind processed more than the fact that he needed to be anywhere but here. He vaulted that rusty chain link fence like he was an Olympic medalist and hit the ground on the other side mid-stride.

  You are leaving the Tutorial area! Please return to the Tutorial area!

  "You can't fucking make me!"

  He skidded down the gentle slope he'd been standing on, kicking up dust and scattering pebbles, then launched himself over the piled-up cars that had crushed into a makeshift barrier at the base. Sneakers slapped at cracked pavement as he hauled ass like he owed those skeletons money.

  I could, but I have been informed you're currently being entertaining. Please carry on, Player Brom Jones!

  "Fuck you, fuck your mother, fuck the horse you rode in on, fuck this whole bullshit, fuck taxes, and fuck me too for getting mixed up in this shit!"

  His stream of curses was uninterrupted, his body moving like a tremendous machine as he continued to sprint across the ruined remains of a parking lot. With a straight stretch ahead of him, he aimed himself between two cars and spared a glance back over his shoulder to see if the skeletons were anywhere near him. The moment he stopped looking ahead of him, he hit something. His leading shin bumped it, sending it forward, and his following foot crunched down on it. It slowed him a fraction, but when he glanced down, he didn't see anything, his massive stride having carried him past the whatever it was. Rusty orange splattered his legs, must have been a paper bag or some shit, tossed by the wind and full of something rotting. Gross.

  If he'd bothered to look back a second time, he would have noticed them. Small figures with skin of a greyish green hue and makeshift weapons that had been lying in wait behind the two cars. One had leaped out in an attempt to ambush him, and he'd trampled right over it, caving the thing's chest in with a single stamp of his foot. The others were now gathered around their fallen comrade, trying to process what had just happened.

  + 1XP

  Congratulations on your first kill, Player Brom Jones!

  "Wait, what?!"

  The shriek started behind and rippled out around him. A hundred throats all screaming like someone had thrown glass in a shredder. It brought him to a dead stop as these horrifying figures seemed to come from everywhere. From behind, inside, and under the ruined cars. From every shrub and every scrubby bush. Hell, some of them had been laying flat, camouflaged and pretending to be pieces of the cracked asphalt. According to the little bar above each of their heads, these were Goblins.

  They howled at him, round heads cracked by mouths the width of their skull and crammed with rows of spike-like teeth. Four-jointed fingers gripped those weapons made from salvaged metal with bits of sharpened glass and plastic attached. Some held shields that might have been made from vintage hub caps, old metal trash lids, and skin. A couple held gnarled sticks set with hunks of glass and decorated with feathers. If the skeletons had been bad, this was worse.

  The body of the fallen goblin was lifted, like it was crowd surfing a mosh pit, and brought to the edge of the circle. It was propped up, the ruin of its crushed chest leaking orange blood from its flattened viscera. Brom swallowed hard as he realized it hadn't been a paper bag. He had trampled right over this little thing. He had smashed it hard enough to force shattered bone through skin. And now it's kin were propping it up so that its dead eyes could watch as they got their revenge.

  The ear-splitting shriek had stopped. An eerie silence now descended as the remaining goblins eyed him for a long moment. They weren't large things, the tallest was maybe up to his thighs. But he'd seen videos of ants killing things a lot bigger than themselves. These guys were way smarter than ants. Size didn't matter when you had an overwhelming force of numbers.

  He wasn't sure which goblin started it, but he heard it. Thump. Thump. Thump. The rhythmic pounding of a tiny fist on a tiny chest. Then another. Then another. Then they were slapping weapons against shields. A wall of sound all around him.

  "Why do I feel like I've entered the Thunderdome?" Maybe if these guys were going to play by the rule of Thunderdome, then he had a fair shot.

  The next moment, the chest beating ended. The scream began. The goblins descended on him.