2023-07-04 00:47:32‘Where am I?’
Jason slowly opened his eyes and he felt something brushing against his skin.
“Crack! Crack”
The steel straps shattered with the steel bed as he moved his body with no effort.
‘Huh?’
Jason looked at the shattered steel in a confused mind.
‘I was… Like how it ended in the previous simulation.’
He realised he couldn’t feel any ground beneath him.
‘I am floating….’
His body flooded with a familiar power, and his body had mutated into how he was at the end of the last simulation.
Half of his body had skin that resembles the void filled with stars, and the other half had the scaled skin covered in spikes.
‘What is this place?’
He realised he was inside a manmade structure.
‘A factory? How did I get here? And what is this?’
He looked at the broken metal beneath him. The light came down into the massive building through the broken roof. Everything looked rusted and old, but Jason noticed some metals showing signs of resistance to the weather.
‘What are these? Are they robots?’
It looked as if the abandoned facility was a factory designed to build robots. There were many similar types of machinery of different sizes scattered across the building that looked several kilometres in length.
However, everything looked long forgotten.
“Beep! Beep!”
“Huh?”
Jason’s eyes darted to the sound, and his first instinct was to attack.
“What is that?”
He looked at the metal box trying to hide behind other broken robots.
“Is that a working robot?”
His whispers were low growls and the robot seemed to be scared of him.
It was too slow and weak to pose a threat, and Jason decided to ignore it.
He floated forward, trying to figure out where he was.
‘Wait! Time….’
Jason stopped and tapped his armband. His memories rushed to Hanna’s face while she was in peaceful sleep, and Amelia’s concerned face. He saw the same blue screen from all previous simulations.
However, there was a notable difference in the screen.
- 00:49:54
It was showing time, and forty-nine minutes had already passed since his clock started, and the time was moving forward. It wasn’t a countdown as before. Instead, there was another message.
- Complete the objective to end the simulation
‘What the….’
Jason froze in midair in frustration.
‘What objective? Where is it?’
Other than the clock and the single line of instructions, there was nothing.
There was nothing like a keyboard to type anything on the Armband, and his question went unanswered.
‘Is there a clue here?’
He looked around the factory, trying to find anything that could hint at an objective he had to complete. Still, there was nothing but worn-out machines and steel.
“What am I supposed to do?”
Jason roared in anger as he pushed several gigantic machines out of the way.
He could barely muster out words with his mutated mouth, and only the left half of his mouth seemed to be able to create actual words. Rather, he could easily roar and growl from the right side of his mouth.
“Beep! Beep!”
“What do you want?”
Jason ignored the annoying robot following him around. It was a rather weird one for a robot as it actually hid from him when he tried to push his way through broken machines.
‘Does it have emotions like fear?’
He wondered for a second before focussing back on his objective. The other simulation had a set time when he could go back, but this one wasn’t giving him anything to look forward to.
“Bang!”
Jason floated to the nearest wall and kicked it out of his way. His distress was taking away his patient, and he didn’t want to look for an exit.
‘What the….’
Jason froze at the sight that greeted him outside the steel wall he just broke through.
There were scattered buildings that resembled the one he just came out of and all of them looked long abandoned. Piles and piles of garbage made of various scrapes were scattered across the area, and some buildings were submerged in these piles of garbage.
There were no movements, no sounds, not even a single sense of movement within a hundred kilometres. His senses failed to detect even an ant moving on the ground, much less a bird.
“Beep! Beep!”
Except for the one annoying robot. It was the only thing within Jason’s range of senses that showed any movement. It just followed him outside through the broken wall and was looking around with its head made of two cameras.
‘Sigh. It is really advanced for a robot though.’
Jason sighed in frustration before directly rising to the sky.
‘Where the hell is this? Did everything go into extinction here except for one robot?’
Jason rose high above the polluted sky covered in dust and fumes. Mountains made of garbage filled his sight as he rose further. There was not anything else within his sight, and everything seemed to be buried under endless piles of garbage.
He stared at the wasteland in disbelief.
…
“Beep! Beep!”
The robot stared at the floating form of life in confusion.
It had no idea what this creature was, and there was no description in its database. However, it was the first form of life on the planet. Actually, it was the only creature except him.
It saw the other robots slowly breaking down over time, and it had yet to finish its duty. However, no new instructions came, and no one came to repair them. This was the first form of life returned to the world, but it was different.
The form of life seemed to be doing something on its own, something it didn’t have in its database. Still, this was the first form of life.
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Jason’s gaze returned to the towering demon before him, but he didn’t feel it was worth his attention. His glowing eyes simply stared at the massive figure for a brief moment before he swung his right arm through the air with effortless precision. It was as if he was clawing at the distant figure. A second later, several glowing white lines expanded across the space, moving faster than the eye could track. They reached the demon in an instant, cutting through its form. Behind it, the underground mountain erupted into a cloud of dust, disintegrating as though it had been struck by an invisible force.For a heartbeat, the Greater Demon stood there, frozen in place as if nothing had happened. Then, with a sickening sound, its colossal body crumbled to the ground in pieces, diced cleanly by Jason’s strike.“Screech!” A high-pitched wail echoed across the cavern as panicked creatures scattered, their movements erratic and mindless in the wake of their apex predator’s death. Even the remai
