Brute Force: Chapter 1 (Revised)

Tell me what you think!

Chapter One

I woke up in Hell with a mouthful of sand.

"Pff! Pfffpt!" I flailed upright. Spat and coughed. My body felt three times too large, like a sausage stuffed into an over-tight skin. The sun beat down on my back. Sweat stung my eyes. 

I was on a beach.

To my left, the ocean hissed and burbled. Humid coastal wind slithered over a rough outcrop of mossy rock bluffs to my right, vanishing into the dense jungle further back. As beaches went, it was a nice one. Crystal clear water. White sand. The edge of the jungle led up a hill, where the trees thickened. There were sticks, shells, dogfish egg husks, kelp and jellyfish on the sand. But I wasn’t supposed to be here. The last time I'd blinked, I'd been driving down a highway nowhere near a beach. And before that… 

Before that? I couldn’t remember a damn thing.

I licked salt and grit off parched lips. Spat. Then I looked down at my hands and arms.

Well, fuck.

Not only was I in the wrong place with no memory of how I got here, I wasn’t me. 

My body was huge. Not huge in a good way. I was eight, maybe even nine feet tall. Veins popped between my skin and the grotesque swell of muscle beneath. My hands were the size of hams, clumsy and rough. Dirty nails. Dirty everything. Under the dirt, lots of tattoos. Crisp, clear, newly etched in navy-blue ink. Grinning devils and naked women. A snake writhing on a dagger. A naked sphynx cat in a monk's robe, making some kind of religious sign. Two stars, one on each shoulder. Like compass roses. Russian mobsters had tattoos like that. I shouldn’t have any tattoos at all.

"Shit." I reached up to scruff my head. Could barely reach because of how thick my arm was. What I’d thought was stubble was actually just sand. I was bald. No hair at all.

One I was sure I could move my arms, I rolled onto my belly and struggled up to hands and knees. Eventually. It was like trying to flip a whale carcass. My limbs just didn't work right. When I tried to push myself up and forward, I tripped over a foot the size of a submarine, fell onto my face and ate dirt a second time.

"Kh-ACK!" The sand sure tasted real.

In the corner of my eye, a bar appeared. The bright green bar had 199/200 points. Other holographic meters hung below it. A Stamina bar, slowly filling up from zero. A teardrop-shaped Hydration Meter. A chicken-shaped Nourishment Meter, slightly below half full. There was a temperature gauge beneath that. It was 88 degrees in sunny Wherever-the-Fuck this place was.

Stupidly, I rocked back onto my enormous ass. I was at a loss. This had to be a virtual reality of some kind. There hadn't been a beach this clean in the real world since the early 2000s. That meant there should be an interface: A menu, an access portal, something. So I tried it. "Uh… show menu."

There was no menu at first. Instead, blazing lines of holographic text appeared in the air in front of me, read out by a cool, genderless voice.

[Welcome to the Crucible, Vance.]

[Now you have awoken, you have one choice to make.]

[Fight and survive, or die.]

The text cleared. Two buttons appeared. They were red, crawling with hot embers. One read 'Fight'. The other read 'Refuse'.

Vance. However I’d ended up here, I’d used my real name to log in. That wasn’t normal. I stared at the buttons for a few long moments. Sucked my teeth. "Show terms and conditions."

There was no response. The Fight and Refuse buttons hovered patiently.

"Server Information. Where am I?" My voice didn't sound anything like me. Deep, brutish.

[If you do not accept the Terms and Conditions of this EdenFRAME, you will be erased in 4.9 seconds.]

My oversized heartbeat stuttered. An EdenFRAME? If I was in an EdenFRAME, that meant I was dead.

I scowled. Scowling felt more impactful now that I looked like a waxed gorilla. "Fine. Accept."

The Fight button crackled with flames, then flared with white light and vanished. The Refuse button crumbled away into pixelated dust. A three-panel holographic screen came up in their place. The User Interface looked as cheap and tacky as the fire effects. Old fashioned, like a headset videogame from fifty years ago, rather than a modern Brain-to-Interface Deep V.R.

The right panel was a picture of 'me' with some empty tables. Whoever’d designed my avatar was clearly a white supremacist with something to compensate for. Using a normal-sized door would be a problem. Ditto with utensils, showers, or toilets. My cock was big enough to put someone's eye out if I wasn't careful. Any woman in her right mind would take one look at me and call an exorcist.

The center panel was a mix of information. There were slots for Armor and Weapons, currently empty. Quickslots for Items and Tools. There was a Stats Table and other numeric data. The stats were pretty basic, and each was color-coded:

Vance: Level 1 Gladiator Stats

· Vitality (Red): 400/400 HP (5 Points)

· Instinct (Orange): Average (2 Points)

· Carry Weight (Yellow): 151kg/332lb (4 Points)

· Stamina (Green): 240/240 STA (6 Points)

· Ingenuity (Blue): High (6 Points)

· Damage (Indigo): 130dps (9 Points)

· Willpower (Violet): Average (3 Points)

35 points at Level 1. I didn’t remember going through any kind of character creation.

Under the stats were the other table rows. Fatigue. Hydration and Nourishment, this time in bar form. Beneath those was ‘Lives’: a row of nine pips that glowed with a shifting light. Underneath the pips was a label – Legions - and two slots. ‘Greater’ and ‘Lesser’. There was no textual information for this table at all.

I tried to close the menu, but it wouldn’t pop out. Instead, the narrator began to speak again.

[Welcome to Survival of the Fittest, Vance. You have awoken in the Crucible, the arena in which the game of life and death is played. I will inform you of the Rules.]

[You are a Gladiator. The Crucible is your testing ground. It is the vessel in which Champions are forged.]

[To Ascend from the Crucible, you must find and slay the Four Servants of Demiurgos: the Daeva.]

[An ancient law requires that all Gladiators must battle the Daeva in single combat, without the assistance of other people. However, you share this world with the Legions, powerful monsters who are permitted fight by your side. Enslave the Legions and train them to fight alongside you. This is a harsh land - you will perish alone.]

[You may have two Legion companions at any given time: One Greater Legion and one Lesser Legion. Do not assume that Greater Legions are any more cunning and dangerous than their smaller kin.]

[The Legions will not obey cowards. If you wish to command a Legion, you must subdue it and attach the Command Collar unaided. All players are issued two Soul-Bonded Command Collars. You will find them in your Inventory.]

[The only time that rules apply to combat are in the Colosseum. Legion-only battles have formal rules which must be obeyed. The Colosseum Master will advise you of these rules.]

[There are no other combat restrictions. Other Gladiators will try and stop your rightful ascent. Kill or be killed.]

[Every gladiator has nine lives. There are no exceptions. When your last life is lost, you will be extinguished.]

[You are also being watched. Survival of the Fittest is a live-stream EdenFRAME server. Grow your audience, gain sponsors, and earn their favor. Their gifts may mean the difference between life and death. Learn more about Sponsors in your Channel tab.] 

[If you achieve the impossible and defeat the Gods, you and your Daeva will Ascend. Your reward is eternal paradise on the Platinum EdenFRAME of your choice, in perpetuity.]

My eyes narrowed. A Platinum FRAME? That was too good to be true. You had to have a HUSC of 8000 or higher to land a spot on a Platinum server, assuming you could even afford it. Whoever ran this dinky little piece-of-shit bootleg VR, there was no way they could port ‘players’ onto a Platinum FRAME.

“And what if I don’t want to play your stupid game?” I rumbled.

[The Crucible does not reward weakness. If you do not fight, you will age at nine times the normal human rate and die permanently.]

[Your first task is to survive. Good luck.]

And with that, the bitch – or bastard – cut me off.

I couldn’t remember what I did for a living, but I knew I was calm. There was a process for dealing with this shit. Evaluate, Assess, Act.

The first thing I had to come to terms with was that I was probably dead. EdenFRAMEs are post-mortem virtual realities. Living people aren't allowed to duplicate their data and post it to a FRAME while they're still sucking air. 

The second was that this was some kind of black-market PvP server. Real FRAMEs were heavily regulated and government or corp-owned. Gladiatorial combat was not a feature. That meant I was on an illegal, unofficial FRAME run by a hacker or – worse – an organized crime outfit. That was possible. Esports was big money, and the higher the stakes, the bigger the payout.

"Channel tab." I queried aloud. 

The requested tab appeared above the other three screens. It was a video streaming management interface with an active livestream in focus. The video gave the viewers a great view of my huge sandy ass. I couldn't turn the stream off. I looked back over my shoulder. No camera.

There were other features. A clicker. Three people were watching me, and one of them had even left a comment: <haahhaaaa FIRST!!> 

Same old internet.

Beneath the chat window, there was a betting panel with a list of odds. First one was my odds on keeping all nine lives. The next was my chance of making it through the night. The chance I'd tame a 'Brute' in my first week. All of the odds were shit. One person had made a bet anyway - they thought I'd live through my first twenty-four hours.

So, a gladiatorial esports server, with gambling.

Even as I watched, another bet description appeared. "Killed by a Hyperboar in the next ten minutes." The odds on that one were good. Four, then five, then six people joined. The clicker kept turning, and people began to lay their bets on whatever a ‘Hyperboar’ was.

It was as good of a warning sign as I was going to get.

I stumbled forward into a run up the beach. Made it about fifty feet before a piercing squeal pierced the air behind me. Still running, I switched the camera so I could see behind me. A huge royal blue razorback the size of an SUV exploded out of the jungle, ropes of drool swaying beneath its jowls.

Fannntastic.

The monster fixed beady white eyes on me, and as it did, a bright red highlight appeared over its head: <Hyperboar – Lvl 5>. The giant pig bucked and squealed. Electricity rippled up along its legs, frying the sand and blowing the burned-plastic stench of ozone into the air. Snapping and crackling, it charged after me.

I blundered down the sandbar like a rhino, heading for the trees as the squealing and snapping grew closer. Ferns and rotten logs crushed under my feet as I tore up a giant-sized trail through the brush. Somehow, I knew how to run, vault and climb, but my real body was small and wiry and it felt like doing parkour in a sumo suit. 

Within a minute, I was heaving for breath, stamina bar sinking from bright green to pale greenish-yellow. I charged through vines that would have strangled the real me, tearing them from the trees. Birds whirled up in a screeching chorus from the branches. Birds with teeth and clawed wings, and long, lizard-like tails.

Highlights appeared over their heads. They were Archaeopteryx.

Dinosaurs.

Bare feed skidded on wet leaves as I blundered up a hill, crashing top-heavy through the foliage. I skidded to a stop as the hill gave way to a steep ridge. There was a dry gully full of rocks below. No water.

“SQUEEE! SCREEEEE! WREEEEH!” The Hyperboar was closing in, followed by the stench of burning hair.

There were trees to one side, about eight feet out from the lip of the ridge. I put my shoulders down, charged, and took the leap of faith.