Michael's Story, ch 1?

Hey everyone!  This was my first effort with dictation.

I'm not sure if I will continue this story or not.  If I do, it'll have to wait until I finish SOO3 and Delvers LLC 5, but I wanted to share this with you.

Perhaps I will keep writing it in my free time for fun.  Who knows?  I have lots of story ideas and this kind of just happened, but it was fun to write and I feel like it'd be a commercial success. :P

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A half hour ago, he’d been mopping floors at his dead end night job.  Now he was afraid for his life, trying not to pant because it made too much noise.

Michael crept around in the darkness, keeping a wary eye behind him. The sounds coming down the hallway were sinister, moist. He paused.  Were the sounds getting nearer? He couldn't tell.

He rounded a corner and noticed one door ajar. With a nervous glance back, he carefully moved up, keeping his every sense peeled. The room was empty. He breathed the quiet sigh of relief. Then he moved inside and very gently shut the door behind him trying to make as little noise as possible.

Ironically, his only hope of escape was to corner himself like this.  From experience, he knew that whatever was stalking him would not let him get near an exit.

Trapped in his room, he moved to the wall adjacent to the hallway, rested his back against it, and prayed. It seemed like an eternity later, but noises from the hallway meant he had company. The shuffling stopped outside the door.  Maybe something was looking inside. But Michael was out of sight.

Every other doorway in the facility had been locked, his own handiwork as a custodian.  So whatever it was out there had no reason to think this door could be otherwise. Hopefully. Michael was betting on it.

After what felt like an hour, the unwelcome visitor moved on, taking its awful noises with it. Michael gently leaned his head back against the wall and cursed his luck. He didn't think if the end of the world happened, that he'd be in the absolute middle of the very worst place he could possibly be.

With a thought, he opened up his character panel:

Michael Benjamin Collins

Human

Special statuses: *Grace Period*

Stats:

Strength  6

Agility   5

Endurance  7

Intelligence  5

Willpower  6

Luck   1

Skills: None

Free Stat Points:  5

Free Upgrade Points:  15

Figures that my luck is at 1, he thought.

This was the first time that Michael had had a chance to really look at his character sheet. Since everything had gone to hell.  He remembered the prompt that he'd gotten right after the sky had flashed and words just started appearing before his eyes.  The hallways had been dim, only glowing with exit signs.  He’d seen:

Attention all people of Earth Welcome to your new reality, you have no choice in this matter. From this point forward, you will have a character sheet as well as the ability to buy skills and allocate points.  Your entire existence has fundamentally changed. Good luck!

Right after that, Michael had gotten a notice.

Unfortunately, your location is at an epicenter of the Convergence.  Because of this, higher level monsters than average have spawned in your location.  Because your life expectancy is extremely low and the Universe requires Fair Play, you have been given 15 extra Upgrade Points and five extra Stat Points. If you succeed in escaping the area, the Oversystem will reward you appropriately. Good luck!

After that, Michael had also gotten two quests. One was simple: just an escape quest.  Michel would like nothing better.  The quest read:

Escape the Dungeon Break area and survive.  Reward:  Varies

The other was marked with some sort of strange symbol.  It was a subjugation quest that Mike had seen before in games and was also simple in its own way, if batshit crazy.

Succeed in killing the Dungeon Break area boss.  Rewards: ??????

Six question marks.  It all left Michael scratching his head. He couldn't hear anything at the moment in his dark little room other than his own pounding heart.  This was a good thing. It meant the monster that had been chasing him was still some distance away, had lost track of him. The reprieve had to be temporary, though.  He didn't have a lot of time.

His instincts were telling him that if he didn't adjust quickly, he was definitely going to die. After all, even if he could hide in his little room forever, there was no food.  No water.  Michael didn’t know exactly how to survive his insane situation yet, but he knew it wasn’t going to involve cowering in a room.  At least not indefinitely.

The key had to be his stat sheet and all the other strange new menus he could access in his head.  What he was seeing basically looked like a role playing game, or RPG.  He was familiar with those.  Part of him wanted to reject that comparison, the familiarity, but he was not at the liberty to reject reality.  If he didn’t start rolling with the punches soon, what he believed or didn’t believe would pretty much be moot.

Some of this, “Oversystem,” was pretty self-explanatory, at least to him.  He quickly invested his five extra stat points, putting two in agility, one in intelligence, one in endurance, and one in willpower. Strength had been tempting, but he’d decided not to  go that route based on how powerful the creature chasing him around the facility was. The prompt he’d seen had made it sound like he was pretty much screwed, too and his gamer experience intuited why.

He was a super noob dropped in a high level area.

The thing in the facility that’d blocked the exit was bad enough.  He could only imagine that other creatures out there, if he was still even on earth, were more powerful still.  If he was going to survive, much less actually kill a monster, it would be based on wits right now… not brawn.  Maybe he could work on his physical stats if he survived until tomorrow.

Like usual, everything was unfair.

Somebody out there, somewhere, was probably dealing with tiny little goblins or giant rats. Those people were lucky.  Michael didn’t know what good luck was like.  He was convinced he’d been cursed from birth.

Positive thinking, positive thinking, positive thinking, he thought.  A quick massage to the temples helped him recenter himself.  Then he sighed, opened his skill market,  and ran through all of his skill options, or at least tried to.  He scratched his head again. …It didn't make sense. All the skills were wildly different point costs. And on top of that, their names didn't necessarily seem to reflect what they actually did.

For instance, one skill’s name was, Water Bottle Go Home. But when he mentally clicked deeper into it,  the skill was actually about purifying the air around him using mana.

The titles weren’t related to the skills.  There was no way to search for them, either.  All he could do was go to different pages and scroll.  Some had little symbols, and all that he saw were noted as, “Common,” “Rare,” “Epic,” and “Unique.”

When he clicked on the Help button at the top of his screen–extremely strange to have but also made incredible amounts of sense–he found an explanation for “Unique” skills. Apparently, Unique skills were abilities that vanished from the skill menu once somebody bought them.

After being bought they vanished.  The entry said they might come back over time, but there was no guarantee of that.

He checked the next Unique entry.  It was called, Tears of a Mangy Table.

When he clicked into it, the description read, “Turn upholstery foam into cheese.  Type of cheese is random and will change based on individual foam pieces.  Mana consumption is 10 points of mana per pound of foam.

What the hell? He thought.  With narrowed eyes, he looked up the next Unique skill.

Thit was was called, Training Mission from Next Level Accounting.

After clicking into this one,  he found that the skill would allow him to lock a door so that only he could open it twice a day.

The ability caught his eye, but it would be useless.  If he locked his classroom door with magic or cosmic energy, whatever, he had no doubt the creature hunting him would just come straight through the door itself.

He had to find something he could use.

Michael spent a few more minutes trying to find some way, any way, of searching for anything to help him escape.  Unfortunately, he finally just accepted that the skill menu was absolutely terrible.

He could not even filter the results based on “Unique” skills or any other metrics. And based on what he could see, there were millions, if not billions of skills, all of them with nonsensical names. Somebody could spend years, maybe even a lifetime reading all the skills.

With that in mind, Michael did what Michael always did in situations like this: he was going to trust luck. Despite his luck being terrible, it seemed whenever he truly just threw himself on Lady Luck’s mercy, things could sort of work out.

He went with the best idea that came to mind–he randomly chose a place in a skill menu, scrolled with his eyes closed, and opened them. Maybe his luck had been so bad he’d finally get a windfall. This is my starting place, he thought.  Then he slowly, painstakingly started going through all the skills.

Between scrolling he checked his points again.  Fifteen points was barely enough to buy one of the lower priced unique skills. As a gamer, he could intuit that Unique skills would likely be more powerful than regular skills. Of course, they might not be powerful on their own.  It was likely the best ones would require synergy in order to become game-changing.

Of course, all of this was assumption and he did not exactly have the time to dive into the menus. If he waited too long before acting, the creature outside was eventually going to find him.  He knew that for sure. So one by one, he went down the skill menu, looking through Unique skills, and other random skills because he didn't entirely trust his own judgment.

When he thought about it briefly, he smirked.  Even in a situation like this, he didn’t fully trust himself.

He frantically searched for at least 10 minutes before opening up a skill called Three by Three Axes.  His eyebrows raised when he saw the skill description.  It didn't use any manner of resources like mana, blood, or stamina to cast.  On top of that, the skill description was completely unlike any he'd ever seen so far.

Three by Three Axes allowed the user to point and kill any monster three times. This ability will act like a Death Orb spell at roughly 1000 times power, and can be thrown by the caster.

After that were technical specifications that were at the bottom of every other skill description, most of which Michael didn’t understand.

About that time, he heard the wet, snuffling sounds of whatever was chasing him again. They were faint but growing closer. Shit shit shit, he thought.  What he was really looking for was something that would let him teleport, or fly, or become invisible.  He wanted to escape!  The only weapon he had on him was

At the edge of panic, he chose the skill using all of his points.

First, he saw his character sheet change.  The update was immediate.

Michael Benjamin Collins

Human

Special statuses: *Grace Period*

Stats:

Strength  6

Agility   7

Endurance  8

Intelligence  6

Willpower  7

Luck   1

Skills: None

Free Stat Points: 0

Free Upgrade Points:  0

Suddenly, a white glow began to envelop him, glittering like a slowly spreading snowglobe.  No, no, no, he thought to himself. This was bad.  The room began to light up.

However good his hiding place had been before, it was about to be completely useless. Michael definitely didn't want to be trapped in a room with a monster when it inevitably found him now, so he made a break for it.  He ran to the opposite wall, opening the window, kicked out the screen and barely managed to shimmy outside.

The first few moments after everything had gone crazy were still a little fuzzy, but he remembered trying to leave the facility back then.  He hadn’t known he hadn’t been alone anymore.  After seeing him, the creature had been amazingly fast.

It was actually a miracle he’d survived.  His head had been fuzzy.

But now he was thinking clearly…he hoped…and he figured it was now or never. He'd done what he could, invested his skill points. Now it was time to find out if his skill even worked.

Michael ran for all he was worth and only turned when he heard a loud crash. Windows exploded behind him, and the wall slowly crumpled outwards as his stalker revealed itself again.  Slimy tentacles were busy tearing apart the rest of the brick and rebar barrier that separated the thing from its tasty human snack.  Michael’s fear rose, but he pushed it down.

Fuck, this really is the worst job I've ever had, he thought to himself.  “I quit,” he said out loud.  Nobody could hear him, but it made him quirk a smile.  At least his gallows humor wasn’t failing him.

The Monster was like a nightmarish cross between a squid and a giant mole. The squishy sounds it had been making was because of long tentacles that it dragged behind it through the hallways.  The thing had barely actually fit down them.  Its legs barely supported the creature, but it used its tentacles to move forward as well. The effect was something like a giant, furry, tentacled spider with huge vermin teeth.

Michael almost pissed himself seeing the thing out in the open. He felt an overwhelming urge to run but controlled it.  From experience, he knew that this thing was faster than he was even in a building that been cramped for the thing.  The only way he'd escaped before was a little bit of luck and by outsmarting it, moving around corners and through narrow doorways.  Its tentacles had blocked the exits, though.

Hence why he was here in the open, facing down a nightmare the size of a Buick.

This time he knew it was do or die. He’d already looked around, verifying that things had definitely changed.

The institute that he worked at before more or less still looked the same, was still big and blocky and boring.  Just a scientific testing facility.  However, literally everything else was completely different.

Now there were scraggly outcroppings of rock seemingly everywhere, sometimes with buildings or parts of buildings jutting sideways out of them. His workplace used to be in the middle of an office park. The surrounding landscape was completely broken now and was made even more hellish by the bits and pieces that he could recognize.

If Michael ran away, even if his stalker monster didn’t get him,  it really seemed like he had a high chance of dying horribly.  The messages he’d seen hadn’t been lying.  He had enough background in gaming and fantasy to kind of understand what was going on.  And the creature attacking him wasn’t the only alien on his world.  In the far distance he could see what he thought were more waving tentacles–these ones even bigger.

Oh great. I'm dealing with a baby monster that's still going to eat me in one bite, he thought.  When he focused on the creature he saw information scroll over his vision. Michael saw the monster’s information as alien, but understandable text that flashed across the top of his eyesight.  Now he knew it was something called a Mutant Shoggoth Hybrid.  Because of his gaming background he’d half expected the thing to have a level displayed, but there was none. Instead, five red skulls leered ominously in a line.

In the back of his brain, he knew exactly how to use his new skill he’d purchased.  All he had to do to prepare it for an attack was think about it and hold his hand in a cup of motion in front of him. He did exactly that and triggered the ability. Three By Three Axes. His hand suddenly filled with a sickly green, slightly glowing ball with a pitch dark center. The creature, apparently a mutant shoggoth, charged at Michael with the speed of a very angry grizzly bear.

Michael kept his cool.  If he’d been younger, before the military he’d probably be pissing himself by now.  He held it together but the thing moved so fast, it was almost on him in a blink.

Luckily, he’d already acted, cocking his arm and letting fly, throwing his attack like a baseball.  Then he dove to the side rolling as fast as he could. Even though Three By Three Axes was pretty much his last hope unless he could somehow kill the thing with a million tiny cuts using his multi tool or pocket knife.  As he rolled, he realized he hadn’t seen whether his attack had even hit.

Luckily, it had.  When it landed, the effect was instantaneous. The thing seemed to go limp in mid air, collapsed in on itself, and slid forward in a heap.  If Michael hadn't gotten out of the way himself, he would have definitely been crushed by the thing. When it came to a stop, Michael's eyebrows flew up into his hairline. Crossing the top of his vision where it wouldn't obstruct his view again, he saw level up notifications fly past faster that he could count.

At the same time, in the distance there was a gurgling roar.  The overhead sky that looks shot through with Black Lightning seemed to grow restless, turbulent, and the tentacles that he'd seen waving around in the distance did so faster as if they were agitated.

Oh, great. It seems they know I'm here now, he thought. Michael briefly thought about staying in the research facility, but decided not to. Maybe if he was MacGyver or a Youtube scientist he could make a bomb with stuff in the facility, but he knew his limitations.  Michael was okay with explosives as long as they were already in weapon form, but he didn’t have any.

He ran to a nearby crevice, hopped down inside and began slowly creeping forward as carefully as he could. Earlier, he’d seen some vestiges of civilization left in the distance.  Maybe. After about five minutes, when he deemed he was far enough away that the squid thing’s friends wouldn't find him, he sat down and made himself as small as possible.  Then he looked over his notifications. It seemed that Michael had leveled up almost 20 times. 19 levels.  He soundlessly whistled.

After counting, he realized that he got one stat point every level.  He’d also gotten a skill point every level.

Now that he hopefully had a little bit of time and wasn't being directly hunted, Michael took some time to review his help menu.  He skimmed it.  There were main sections that were labeled, “Getting started.”

Your World

Levelups

Quests

Quests and parties.

Auction House

The first one was about the changes in the world, Earth.  This part was actually still the hardest for him to accept.

It only been an hour ago that Michael was working the night shift at his shitty custodian job, a position he’d had to take the pay the bills when he hadn’t been able to find anything else. Who knew that after getting out of the Army, the only jobs he'd be able to find were either working in fast food or cleaning up puke? It was all super unfair.

Less than half a year ago, he'd been in a combat zone responsible for multiple other men and carrying a half million dollars of equipment. Then he’d ETSed and real life hadn’t been as great as he thought it would be in the Army.  Right when he'd been getting over his frustration and disappointment about how his life had turned out was when the world had literally gone to hell. Figures.

As he continued to read, he learned that the Earth was part of some sort of galactic collective run by gods and aliens and all sorts of things.  Some of this part didn't make any sense. The only thing he was really sure about now was that his existence and the world was part of some sort of a game. It always had been, but the planet had been left alone before.  Thing had changed.  There were invested interests and Earth had been annexed.

Parts of Earth had been instantly moved around, or maybe even slapped onto other planets.  Some of it was unclear.  The world had been moved, though–that part was easy to understand.  It  was now part of a solar system with multiple planets that could sustain life. This was one such solar system in the universe, and apparently, the…game was massive.

Michael took a short break from reading and looked up at the bizarre sky.  Well, that explains why we never met any aliens, he thought to himself. They were watching us and planning to put us in there in this fucked up game. Maybe that's what all the UFO sightings were in the past.

The next section of the Help menu that he skimmed had to deal with leveling up, which was of immediate interest to him as well. He hadn't known any of this information a few minutes ago before his face oof with Mr. Hairy Squid, but it likely wouldn't have changed anything.

Average, healthy, adult human males stats’ would average around 5 in each category: Strength, Agility, Endurance, Intelligence, and Willpower.  Human females were one to two points lower on average in Strength and Endurance.  Luck varied wildly from person to person, but human females generally had an extra point or two in Luck, and in Wisdom.

From Levels 0-10, a human player received a single stat point every level.  Then they received one skill point every two levels up to level 100.  Past level 100, they would receive 1 stat point every five levels.

The only Stat that could not be directly raised was Luck.  New skills could unlock new stats, too.  So unlike games Michael had played where Intelligence created a mana pool, mages in his new world might have a “Mana,” stat they would need to feed with stat points.

Skill points could be traded for stat points. But the higher level you were, the harder it was to get stat points. From level zero to 50, it costs three skill points for one stat. It costs five skill points from level 50 to 100.  And then from level 100 on, it cost 10 skill points for every stat point.

There was something in the help menu about balance, too.  Putting too many point in any specific stat could actually kill you, like having too high of an agility that your bones couldn’t keep up.  They might snap.

Michael thought it was a crazy system, but he had just learned about it as well. skills were all another stream subject. He found out that some skills were readily available on every stage of the game or existence, he still was getting the to mixed up. But sometimes individual planets, or even individual players might have access to skills that others did not. Some skills were only available after meeting certain requirements unlike regular skills that he'd already seen by scrolling through the menu, these types of skills would appear at the very top of the menu. After accessing it the first time that that particular skill was unlocked. This made sense to him.

The next two entries in the Help menu were not of immediate concern.  Quests seemed pretty straightforward, and Michael wasn’t expecting to group up or party with anyone.  He’d come back to that section if he actually saw or heard any people.  The last entry was about the Auction House.

He was curious and wanted to read, but felt time ticking away.  Michael decided that the Auction House was probably not highest on his priority list to learn about since he needed to survive his current situation first. Instead, he focused on learning what he could do that would be practical to his current situation. The fact that he was curled up in a ball amid some rubble, and it seemed like he might be the only human four miles around was weighing heavily on his thoughts. Ultimately, he needed to escape.

His skill market menu was confusing as hell.  That was a problem.  But he decided to return to the first entry in the Help menu first, try doing more than just skimming it.  His eyebrows raised when he saw something about portals and safe zones, but he regretfully moved on.  It still wasn’t what he needed.

Then when he saw something about dungeon breaks, he remembered the original prompt that he got. Settling on that section, he discovered was that the area he was in,  a “dungeon break,” was actually just as it sounded.  It was an area there had been a dungeon, which was like a horrible hanging in the air to another world.  If the dungeons were left alone too long, allowed to reach the end of its lifespan without the boss inside being killed, it allowed all the features, like the geography and monsters inside to come out.  They would basically take over part of the real world.

He leaned his head back.  Understanding his situation wasn’t helping much yet.  Apparently the area he was in now, a “Dungeon Break Area,” was a place where the laws of physics could change.  Some changes were the same for every Dungeon Break Area, too.  Regular earth weapons wouldn't work. The help menu clearly stated that nothing without some sort of inherent mana, or some sort of other supernatural power invested in it was completely useless inside a dungeon, and by extension…a dungeon break area.

Michael had been hoping to find his car and get his pistol from his glove box, it wouldn’t have done much against a squid-mole thing, but would be better than nothing. However, now he realized that it might literally be do nothing, at least if he could trust the information in the help menu.

He still wanted to find his car if he could, though. Even though he hadn’t been a doomsday prepper like one of his old battle buddies, he had liked being prepared.  In his car, he helpt things like a backpack, tools, extra clothes, and snacks.

Things were looking grim. It really seemed like the Skill Market and his level ups were going to be the only way he would survive this.

Michael wasn’t quite done with the help menu yet but he decided to be quick.  He wanted to move soon.

The last thing he tried to find information on  was about the monster he just somehow killed. Apparently, while his new reality was a lot like a game in many ways, some things were different to what he was used to.  When he examining a monster, or a person or a player, he wouldn’t see levels, just symbols that suggested relative danger.

It was a system using a complicated series of colors and symbols that the Help menu assured would be simple once understood.  Michael frowned.  He’d prefer to see levels or at least more concrete info.  Maybe there was a skill that would help him do so…if he could find the damn thing in the men.

He didn’t know more more now that he had before.  There was a chart he could memorize later, but it’d already been obvious that the monster he’d killed was definitely more powerful than he was and likely much higher level.

Michael decided to shelve that information for now. He wasn't sure how powerful his new ability was, Three by Three Axes. But based on what he just seen it do, it was powerful indeed.  He’d basically one shotted something strong enough to make him go up 19 levels.

There were still more notifications he hadn't looked at, and he moved on from the Help menu to check them out.  Two read:

Congratulations, you are the first warrior of your world to have solo-killed a creature that was more than twenty levels higher than you! Legendary feat.  You have received an inscription, First Among Many.

Congratulations, you have achieved a Heroic Feat by killing a monster that should have been impossible for you to kill before reaching level 10.

There were more “Congratulations,” prompts:

Congratulations, you are among the first 1000 beings of your newly integrated world

to have leveled up. You have achieved a rare feat.

Congratulations, you are the second person on your world to have reached level 10!  You have achieved  a rare feat.

And the very last one said:

Congratulations, you are the first player on your world to buy and use a rare or higher tier skill to deadly effect.. This is a heroic feat!

For every single one of the inscriptions that he'd gotten, he’d also received some sort of benefit.  He didn’t know what most of them were, though.  All of them but one had a little gift box looking icon. When he clicked on it, they said,

“Available after choosing a starting class.”

He popped back into the Help menu to find out how to get a class.  Michael sighed in frustration.  He’d be able to choose a class either a month after system integration, or upon reaching level 20.  Which ever came first.

“Doesn’t help me much right now,” he whispered.

Shaking his head, he examined the reward he’d earned for being one of the first 1000 people on Earth to level up.  When he mentally clicked it, he read:

Inscription: First out the gate!  +1 to Strength, Agility, and Endurance.

Nice, he thought.  Then he took another look at his character sheet.

Michael Benjamin Collins

Human

Level 19

Special statuses: *Grace Period*

Stats:

Strength  6 (+1)

Agility   7 (+1)

Endurance  8 (+1)

Intelligence  6

Willpower  7

Luck   1

Skills: Three by Three Axes (⅔)

Free Stat Points: 14

Free Upgrade Points:  0

As he studied his character sheet, he realized he’d been crouching for a while and his knee…wasn’t hurting.  That was new.  He’d had a messed up knee since his first year in the Army.  All I had to do was lose everything and the world be destroyed for my knee to heal.  Cool, he thought sarcastically.

He looked down at his arms and thought, if 5 is average human level, that means I’m half again stronger than an average man.  Is that even possible?  His arms didn’t look really jacked.  Maybe it would take time.

It was also possible he was crazy and in a coma or something, but he couldn’t let himself go down that path.  He just couldn’t.

Michael was tempted to invest more skill points before buying anything. He might be in some sort of weird hell and had almost no chance of escaping his situation alive. But he also as a gamer knew that he'd been handed quite an opportunity.

He frowned.  If only his damn skill menu could be more easily searched, he could come up with several ways to escape this Dungeon Break Area.  Gaining invisibility, stealth, flight, or other things of that nature would help a lot. But he was stuck scrolling through all the options in the awful skill menu.

The roars and strange sounds around him again made it obvious he had limited time. He was very aware of the fact that he was probably only still alive due to luck, which was ironic.  Both his Luck stat and luck in life were not good.

So most of him wanted to hurry up and invest all of his points into stats and try running the hell out, but he restrained himself.  He didn't want to be too hasty. His gamer instincts were telling him that making decisions now with limited information would probably be a mistake.

So with a grimace, he only put one point in Constitution, which made him start feeling a little bit more refreshed over the course of about 10 seconds, and he crept forward again.

He really wanted to get to the parking lot that he thought he'd seen before, maybe reach his car.  It  was going to require a short climb, though.

Michael made his way to the end of the wide crack he had been following and then found an area of torn up asphalt with rebar sticking through.  He climbed as quietly as he could, but still cringed whenever he made noises. When he was to the top, he blinked. This was the parking lot to the facility he'd been working for. There were still several cars there, including his car, an old Toyota Corolla, complete with a few telltale brown spots of rust on the bottom near the rear rear tires.

His car had moved–it wasn't in its original parking space.  Michael ran up to it and hit the unlock button on his key fob. He winced when the car beeped as the doors unlocked. That probably hadn't been the smartest thing he'd done during the day, but he just vowed to move even faster.

With a speed born of extreme stress, he found his backpack in the trunk and gathered up everything useful that he could think of including the nine millimeter pistol from his glove box. Then, he sprinted to the other end of the parking lot where there had been another crack, similar to the one he just come out of. He jumped into it.

He took off at brisk walk, keeping his center of gravity low so that he would make less noise.

Michael followed the natural path, a tear in the earth and asphalt, until he was behind a new rocky ridge. It seemed he'd gotten away from the parking lot just in time because he could hear a car alarm and crashing sounds from that direction. Either something had been attracted to the noise the car had made when he’d opened it, or something was stalking him, maybe both. Either way, he resigned himself to move even faster and tried to find himself a hidey hole. The writing was on the wall, he needed to upgrade himself, but he also needed time to figure out how.