Blood was everywhere, and Matt felt as if he had made an irreversible mistake—one that would haunt him forever—as pain surged through his body. With that pain came the memory of the day when everything changed, the day when the world lost its collective mind and every certainty was thrown out the window. In that moment, Matt believed it was the last time his mind would ever know peace; he wasn’t even sure he would survive this error. So, he decided to let his thoughts drift into fantasy, pretending he was still whole and present.
Matt was seated on a log beside his cabin, gazing out at the dense forest that enveloped him as he relaxed after another day of living freely in the wild. At least, that was his idea of freedom—a full day’s hike from the nearest person, with no road, trail, or any convenient means of reaching civilization. Many declared him crazy for spending every last penny on a 20-acre gold mining claim that lacked proper access and the permit to build a log cabin, but to Matt, it had been the best decision of his life. After all, he had managed to pack all the essential tools and even figured out how to construct the cabin so that it could shelter him through winter.
That first year had shown Matt that no matter what challenge he faced, he could overcome it. It didn’t matter that he only mined around 12 ounces of gold per year or that his only luxuries were a few electrical lights and a battery-powered radio kept charged by his waterwheel. To him, that was enough to live quite comfortably—it allowed him to pay his taxes and leave him with a modest surplus for seasonings and essential items like toilet paper, an item he couldn’t imagine doing without. In fact, he always asked the few intrepid souls who visited him to bring some when they made the arduous hike to his remote haven. In the end, only five people knew exactly where to find him: his older brother, his sister-in-law, their son—who was set to begin college after the coming summer—and two local friends who stopped by now and then, since his father hadn’t survived the last winter and his mother wasn’t up to the challenge of such a journey.
Speaking of summer, that was exactly the season, and if Matt hadn’t miscounted his days, school would be letting out very soon. Even if his brother wasn’t planning a visit this year, his nephew Tyler was eager to spend an entire month experiencing life completely off the grid. This meant that Matt needed to hike into town to meet him, requiring him to disable all his traps. Much of his morning was spent checking them, and to his delight he found that he had captured a few trout. This discovery meant he had time to preserve the fish before calling it a day—a task that even prompted Bob to come by in search of his usual treat of fish guts.
Bob was a bobcat that had wandered into Matt’s cabin on a freezing night when he was just a kitten. That stubborn little bastard ignored all of Matt’s attempts to shoo him away, instead choosing to curl up on a fur rug and drift off to sleep. Over the next few weeks, it became clear that Bob’s mother wasn’t coming for him, leaving the young feline to wonder what had happened to the life he once knew. But that had been eight long years ago, and now Matt couldn’t imagine handling his day-to-day existence without the troublemaking creature around. After all, although Bob consumed as much meat as Matt did, over half of his diet consisted of rodents—those same pests that had once made storing food such a constant battle. Nowadays, Matt rarely found any signs that the rodents even knew his cabin existed, and his biggest annoyance was Bob’s habitual disregard for his commands. Matt would shrug it off, figuring that defiant behavior was common among all cats; aside from the distant thought of owning a pet wolf, Bob was already well-sized for his liking.
At least Bob left alone the harvest from the fruit trees Matt had planted. Even so, Matt still relied on trapping and hunting local wildlife for most of his food, as he’d never been much of a gardener. Speaking of hunting, he anticipated a busy season with Tyler’s visit—once again it was that time of year to stock up the cellar for winter. In fact, Matt looked forward to having Tyler help fill it up; between fishing, hunting, trapping, and harvesting from the fruit trees, they’d be much busier than usual. More than anything, however, Matt was relieved at the prospect of Tyler’s visit simply being over, as he rarely enjoyed small talk or figuring out what to say when with other people.
That sentiment was exactly why Matt cherished his solitary life; he never mixed well with others. While he could tolerate his family—who took the time to appreciate his oddities unlike the rest of the world—he couldn’t stand other people’s endless BS and sheer idiocy. Nothing drove that point home more than his failed attempt to join the army, which he had assumed would be the ideal place to hone the skills needed for his self-reliant lifestyle. Although he had been a standout recruit in physical ability and became the best shot in his company during basic training, that was about the extent of his success. He quickly grew frustrated with the incompetence of those around him, and the drill sergeants proved no better.
Ultimately, the six weeks he managed to endure before being told he wasn’t Army material taught him one thing: he just couldn’t stand being under someone else’s thumb, especially when that authority consisted of power-tripping idiots hell-bent on tormenting new recruits. His breaking point came when, in front of the whole unit, he finally told a drill sergeant to fuck off and stared him down. By that point, Matt knew that none of the leaders would dare lay a finger on him unless he struck first—and he wasn’t about to act foolishly.
Even so, watching the man who was supposed to instill the fear of God in new recruits look like he was genuinely terrified became the highlight of Matt’s army experience. Everything reached a boiling point after he made it clear that he wasn’t someone to be trifled with—the fools around him had tried to teach him a lesson. Matt ended up with a few minor scrapes, while four of the others were knocked out cold and six more suffered some form of broken bone, all because they blamed him for the company being relegated to red phase the morning before simply because he refused to risk his body during training.
Another thing about Matt was that he knew his limits. When he felt his ankle twist during a group run, he wasn’t about to keep going. He quietly slipped out of formation and sat down on the side of the road to assess the injury. Not even a second after he had started to remove his shoe, a drill sergeant stormed over, red-faced and shouting insults at him. This kind of outburst was nothing new; Matt was well aware that he wasn’t popular among those recruits who mistakenly believed that swearing like a sailor made them tougher.
Matt paid no mind to the drill sergeant’s tirade. He calmly took off his shoe and discovered that the injury was bad enough to require a brace for a few days. Meanwhile, the drill sergeant continued to holler, his anger spilling over as he practically screamed at the empty sidewalk.
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It didn’t matter that Matt tried explaining his twisted ankle and his need to visit sick call for a brace; in the eyes of the military, a private disregarding a drill sergeant for even a fleeting 30 seconds warranted severe repercussions. Matt, however, was unmoved. He remained seated until the captain and first sergeant eventually intervened and had him picked up by the duty van. Four hours later, Matt showed up again—now sporting a brace and a light-duty profile for an entire week—as the drill sergeants were forced to stand before everyone while they faced the consequences of their misconduct.
What happened next saw Matt discharged from service for “failure to adapt” after he pressed charges against the imbeciles who attacked him—and later attempted to sue both him and the drill sergeants for their failure to intervene. This turn of events was particularly satisfying for him. Although the assault charges hadn’t held in civil court, the UCMJ picked up the case, and it ultimately cost every drill sergeant in his platoon their rank.
It was especially gratifying because everyone knew Matt had been deliberately singled out and that his injury was entirely real. This allowed him to secure a settlement of about $25,000 from the government, which was labeled as a disability pay out, in exchange for dropping further legal action—a deal his lawyers practically forced his hand into. Even though after legal fees he netted only around $5,000, it still felt incredibly sweet to rub the outcome in the faces of all those inept fools.
After all, when one man takes on a dozen and isn’t typically seen as the aggressor, the odds are clearly stacked against him. Fortunately, a few of his platoon members had the guts to speak the truth and face the fallout. While others were content to be labeled “profile rangers,” Matt was one of the few willing to call out the idiocy around him. Even though he hadn’t been physically beaten, anyone can only tolerate so much verbal abuse before resentment starts to build.
At this point, those relationships had become mere footnotes in his life—most of the relationships in his life didn’t truly matter in his mind. It was hard to be an integral part of someone’s life when you only spoke a handful of times each year. That thought preoccupied him now, as he braced himself to deal with two individuals he could not afford to anger: Cassie and Apricity—a mother-daughter pair running a modest lodge that catered to affluent skiers during the winter season, where he made his spring and early fall supply runs.
He was well aware that trading his gold at this lodge meant receiving slightly less value than he could possibly get elsewhere, but it was a fair price to pay to avoid the complications of venturing into town. His only worry was that Apricity had developed a romantic interest in Matt, and her mother Cassie was of no help in persuading her daughter to back off. Matt had no desire for entanglements; in his view, women were nothing more than frustrating distractions. Every brief relationship he'd tried ended in the same manner—usually after no longer than a month, when he would walk away, frustrated by some minor annoyance or another. More often than not, simply being in the presence of someone was a challenge; aside from Bob, Matt had never found anyone whose company he could tolerate for more than a few hours. Fortunately, most teachers had learned to leave him quietly working in a corner during the initial hectic weeks of each school year.
Yet despite all this, Apricity possessed one quality that set her apart from every other woman who had shown him any interest—a genuine love for the isolation of nowhere. While most women would prefer an evening out for dinner and a show, Apricity was always eager for him to show her around his claim and introduce her to Bob. She stubbornly refused to make the journey on her own until he extended an invitation—a fact for which he was secretly grateful, as he had no intention of inviting her anytime soon. Matt suspected that this was the only reason Cassie had refrained from running him off during the recent years, even as Apricity’s interest grew more insistent. According to Cassie, the best way to ensure her daughter didn’t pursue something she didn’t like, was by never forbidding her from doing it in the first place.
Matt could relate to that; his parents had always insisted that he couldn’t live completely off the grid in the middle of nowhere, and that very insistence had fueled his determination to prove them wrong. It was also the reason he had flatly told Apricity that he wasn’t interested in a woman who had been in elementary school when he finished high school. To him, nine years was nine years—it didn’t matter that she had since turned 25 and was well into adulthood. Still, he could only hope that she had found another target for her affections since he last saw her in the spring, though that seemed unlikely. After all, what made Matt even pause to consider this was the fact that she appeared to need just as much personal space as he did at times. Even so, spring always meant she was eager to unload about the latest series of wealthy assholes who believed it was a brilliant idea to try their luck with their host’s daughter.
Matt still remembered the time she cornered him to recount how men—old enough to be her grandfather—had made passes at her. Although he didn’t press the issue, it was obvious throughout the week he was there at the lodge that opportunities like that were all too common, and Apricity had to endure constant unsolicited comments. While her fiercely protective mother, Cassie, dismissed such remarks from the elderly, she had no qualms about complaining when it came to similar comments from men closer to Apricity’s age. In fact, she would often grip her hands and complain about how her mom ensured that none of those men ever got Apricity alone, even if they were clearly attracted to her.
This pattern defined the couple of days Matt spent at the lodge, as Cassie refused to help him unless he first dealt with Apricity’s relentless venting. Apparently, because Cassie thought she knew him well enough to believe he would never entertain any sort of relationship. Thus, he had become an effortless target for her to let Apricity vent her frustrations too. Part of him had been tempted to retort sharply more than once, but the prospect of enduring several hours of Apricity’s incessant complaints was a fair trade-off for Cassie’s willingness to handle his gold and finances in town. Yes, that was the very cornerstone of his reason for dealing with Apricity—if he ever burned that bridge, he’d have to find someone else to manage all the tedious government paperwork that plagued him.
It was while he was reflecting on all of this, just before calling it a day, that everything changed. The familiar sunset, usually a calming display of reds and oranges, suddenly erupted into a dazzling array of colors. A vibrant rainbow quickly swallowed the sky, as if the northern lights had ramped up their intensity and, in a surreal twist, had become the eastern, western, and southern lights all at once. Matt barely had time to register the spectacle before Bob growled and the world around him plunged into darkness, mysterious text appearing before his eyes.
World connected to system...
Dominate species found…
Spiritual energy insufficient…
Environment unsuited for progression…
Calculated needed adjustments…
Filtering world inhabitants by species…
Filtering world inhabitants by mentality…
Transferring all to specialized tutorials designed for maximum growth…
Initiating terraforming, estimated time needed 31,557,600 seconds as counted by world.
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