[death is imminent]

…

They take the elevator down with Mohammed chatting about all the superpowers he wants and Gblimsequa confirming or denying the possibility of getting them.

Jake listens on as he reviews the mail messages and the system itself.

He does the former hoping he'd use context clues to get what "regression" means, but fails completely.

He does the latter to get a further grasp of the situation he's in. He seriously inspects the functions of the system and nods as he does so.

The system contained many functions, and it was much more different from a computer than he thought it would be. When Gblimsequa was first explaining some functions of the system, Jake was expecting something similar to a computer, where you can download certain programs like apps or games. He seriously expected a see-through computer.

Though some of the functions were somewhat similar, it far exceeded his expectations.

When first getting the system, the message and mail that came after were the first things that popped up for Jake, but after he x'ed those screens out, another screen appeared which displayed:

[Name: Jake Histan

Lifespan: 100

Strength: 4

Constitution: 3

Dexterity: 5

Intelligence: 50

Gin: 1

Techniques: None

Next Requirement: 10,000

System Note: More exercise is needed. High cholesterol. High blood pressure. ]

Below this screen, there were multiple tabs which displayed:

[Home] [Shop] [Call] [Mail] [Connect] [Settings]

Then above the screen, there was a large strip of lightly glowing digital red. It was outlined by a black line and inside the strip was displayed:

[News: The Eyes on a huge sale. 30% off when connected with The World.]

Then the words started scrolling leading to another piece of news.

Jake very cleverly assumed that the news area was where his eyes would look at the very least. So he started tapping through the tabs at the bottom. He was very tempted to press [Connect] as it was a word he recognized the least. Though, he instead first tapped at [Shop].

Then there appeared a virtual glittering effect that moved around the [Shop] section and opened up new mini-screens to introduce certain aspects of the shop.

Jake was the type of person that always skipped through cutscenes and the info dumps in video games, so he was very bent on spamming X. Through immense perseverance, though, he didn't.

To summarize, the [Shop] was basically any other online shopping website, except the delivery service is near instantaneous and the payment was not in dollars, for obvious reasons. Instead one would have to pay with something called credits.

Jake wasn't very surprised to see the payment method as credits as any futuristic fiction he's seen always used credits as the corresponding payment method. What he was most suprised about was the fact that the futuristic pieces of fiction were actually pretty accurate besides the part of being in the future.

He looked onto the tabs within the [Shop] section and saw the following:

[Featured], [New], [Growth], [Exclusive], and [Exchange].

The exchange was where he would be able to exchange Gin for credits. He tried testing it out with the one Gin he had and he felt like he just studied for 20 minutes; he was somewhat mentally exhausted.

'Huh that's pretty interesting. Is it because I went to zero, or is it just because that's how it normally feels to lose one Gin?' Jake turns to Gblimsequa when he hears Mohammed stop talking for a moment to ask the corresponding question.

"Ah ye, that's what happens when ya get ta zero. Talking about Gin, when you go into the training grounds, you should get at least 2 Gin per enemy. That's if you have The System on you, too." Gblimsequa nods and scratches at his ribs, looking at Jake and Mohammed.

The 40 square foot elevator with glowing red linings and a carpeted floor comes to a sudden stop.

Ding Ding.

They all look towards the doors, being the entrance and exit.

The doors smoothly open as the waiting room comes into view. Each of the evenly spaced ceiling lights shine into the eyes of Mohammed with his infected wound.

"Yes! We're finally fucking here." Mohammed hurriedly adds, "Come on. Come on. Help me out. Let's get this done quickly."

Jake turns to Mohammed to smile. "Alright. Alright! Damn." He laughs.

'I didn't finish inspecting the system, but that's fine. It's not going anywhere.' Jake assists Mohammed to the reception desk.

As they stagger over there, Gblimsequa walks behind the reception's desk and its eye flames flicker from green to pitch black for a split moment before it shakes its jaw, sighing. The skeleton swipes up from the desk's top and reveals a transparent screen. It's unknown what's behind the screen, but from where Jake and Mohammed were looking, there was just solid and glitching blue.

Jake and Mohammed wait in front of the desk, where they see Gblimsequa leaning forward with both of its long bony arms reaching to make its palms flat on the desk. It towers over the screen, clearly not paying attention to the screen, but rather pondering over something.

As the reception room was in the most peak condition for health standards, Jake and Mohammed didn't get very uncomfortable waiting for Gblimsequa and instead were fairly comfortable. They didn't hurry up Gblimsequa either as they were sure it was part of a process of sorts.

They stood there in the comfortable temperature, glancing at the surroundings once more.

One minute pass. Jake and Mohammed chat about what either of them would do if they went back to Earth.

Ten minutes pass. Mohammed gets irritated from the really long wait and almost yells at Gblimsequa to hurry, but Jake stops him, trying to remind him of the possibility of something going wrong in the procedure as a result. Jake lacked the confidence in such reasoning, as he himself was both irritated and highly confused.

Jake smiles awkwardly. "Ah, r-real nice place here."

'Besides for the lack of furniture or basic human needs.' Jake adds inwardly, looking for a reaction from Gblimsequa.

Gblimsequa stood there in the same position.

Mohammed gets angry at the lack of reaction from Gblimsequa and so he looks up at the giant skeleton. "Hey! What's taking so fucking long?"

It then seems that that brought about a response as Gblimsequa's eye flames turn black, while the skeleton slowly looks up to Mohammed. The skeleton reaches under the desk for something.

Mohammed clearly senses something is wrong and he rolls to the side towards Jake with his injured leg.

Right where he originally stood, a sword produces an afterimage and appears, held by Gblimsequa's side.

The sword was long with a red blade and gray handle. Slathered on the sword was some liquid that seemed as if it was permanently there as a solid. The liquid made it look like a permanent fire on a sword made for punishment from hell.

"What the fuck yo?" Mohammed grips his injured left leg while fear grips at his heart. He came here hoping for a healed leg, but rather, was walking along the edge of the abyss.

Jake, overcome by anger from the fact that he's went through all this for Mohammed only to bring him into further danger, heavily wishes to attack Gblimsequa. Though, in that split moment of hesitation, he's pulled along to the side by a fearful Mohammed who wishes to run away immediately. The pull snaps Jake out of his daze and they both start running in a direction away from the skeleton.

Gblimsequa stands there with his head down, his eye sockets burning pitch black, and teeth gnashing. He faintly whispers, "sorry guys."

As if those words were a cue, Jake yells. "What the fuck, Gblim? Don't do this!" He runs away along with Mohammed, fearful of dying.

The two kids with a high heart rate and adrenaline flowing through their bodies both get a simultaneous notification from the system.

[Notification: death is imminent]

Both of their faces turn pale and their thoughts become full of the immediate danger. They subcounciously run towards the direction of the elevator they previously were on.

The walls were completely red, translucent, and ridded with unknown characters. On the other side of the translucent wall was another wall, colored marble white.

As Jake and Mohammed run weakly, Jake glances behind them and his gaze becomes overlapped with the skeleton's. The skeleton's burning black eye sockets stare at him, seemingly watching his soul's every signal of existence. Jake's actions and thoughts become sluggish as he feels as if they are plain and obvious under the skeleton's gaze.

'H-holy shit. H-h-oh my god.' The skeleton shows signs of movement under Jake's terrified gaze.

Mohammed, while running, turns his pale face to look for the sluggish and slow Jake. He feels a slight sense of deja vu seeing the situation. He grits his teeth and tries to ignore it. "Jake! Move!" He runs towards Jake.

At that moment, Jake becomes paralyzed as if he's being watched by some terrifying existence. He instantly shuts his eyes and instinctually slowly and hesitantly kneels. Mohammed stops in his tracks and does the same thing with absolutely no resistance as if he personally decided to do it.

Gblimsequa then started to walk forward, eyeing down the two kneeling kids that seemed completely willing to be in such a position.

The intense gaze left the two mentally terrified, but their outer appearances didn't show it, as if they weren't connected at all.

Suddenly the surroundings, invisible to the three people in the waiting room, started to slowly warp. The molecules in the air seemed to be slowly changing. Even the strange skeleton didn't notice the changes as it intimidatingly stepped toward the two, creating an aura of terror and death approaching the two.

Immediately then, the surroundings around Jake changed into an illusory outer space with countless stars in the unreachable distance with the direct surroundings being absolute nothingness.

Jake feels his control over his body return as he faintly sees a figure watching over him on an unrealistically giant high back chair. He faintly sees it being more on the feminine side and sees it faintly smiling with its dark red eyes looking at him, but it's face seems covered by some floating translucent black liquid. The chair seems floating in the air, no in space, with the figure's gown hanging down to thousands of feet below Jake's feet.

With the distance between the two figures being around 50 feet, Jake becomes immensely at ease and overfilled with a sense of tranquility as a huge amount of the same black liquid gushes out from behind the giant chair.

As the liquid approaches, the lady visibly frowns and suddenly snaps her fingers and Jake's head throbs before his surrounding distort once more.

He once more appears in a new location where his sense of tranquility disappears. He attempts to stabilize his mind from being thrown around to rapid changes in states and being under immense stress as he observes his surroundings yet again.

This time his surroundings seem to be a desolate desert except instead of sand, there existed just snow. The similarity to the desert was the blazing sun above, somewhat burning at Jake's skin.

Then, yet another figure appears before Jake's gaze where it sat upon the most commonly known UFO. It, unfortunately for Jake, wasn't an alien as he most commonly knew, but instead was a very humanoid figure with blue skin and completely white eyes, including the pupils.

The blue figure sat on the UFO in what looked to be an uncomfortable manner. It had its body leaned against thin air with its hands resting on thin air as well. It looked more to the masculine side as it had such features on its face.

The blue figure's nostrils flared up as the surroundings suddenly turned ice cold.

It said in a rather cold manner while Jake's brain turned numb, "My domain. Delectable creature."

Jake then abruptly felt his body's feeling once more detached like before, except his mind felt like it lost all feeling, completely numb. His thoughts weren't sluggish like before. No, they were nonexistent.

Then the surface of his skin became covered with goosebumps as he slowly became covered in a layer of ice.

The white eyes of the blue figure glowed slightly before dimming again.

At the same time, something invaded Jake's mind as he instinctively bit on his thumb, ripping it off his hand with no qualms. His teeth become revealed with unnatural sharpness. He grins wide with his thumb and blood in his mouth.

Then the blue figure's UFO hurriedly releases a light blue frost floating mid air that approaches Jake at the speed of light. Before that happens, Jake becomes unconscious and so dies.

The figure clicks its tongue and the frost goes under Jake, slowly lifting him up into the air and towards the figure. Once Jake's corpse reaches the figure, it reaches out and takes a bite out of Jake's neck, ripping out his muscles.

"Mmm." The figure lets out a groan of delight as he expertly rips certain muscles and bones, showing a gory scene of his blood everywhere.

The blood floats midair around the blue figure as the figure lifts up a finger and uses some unknown means to make Jake's corpse rip into multiple pieces.

Soon Jake's corpse was fully eaten, but the figure stops for a moment and furrows its icy brows. It grunts and lifts its finger once more, bringing a horrific scene of countless human corpses flying to him before stopping 10 feet from him in a circle.

As the figure grabs a certain corpse, the rest fall to the ground and explode into hundreds of pieces before being absorbed into the snow in an unrealistically speedy manner.

"Extraordinary. Yes. Bunny?" The figure turns its head and a giant at least 100x the size of a human suddenly appears from nothingness and nods.

"Yes sir." The air around the giant vibrates intensely.

…

"Hey kid." A six and half foot person stands intimidatingly over a kid with a water bottle in his hand.

"What?" The kid responds, irritated.

"You just bumped into the young master. You're not going to apologize for this?" The person who looks to be in his 20s with broad shoulders looks down onto the kid and gestures towards the other kid behind him.

The two kids look at each other with clear hostility.

Suddenly the "young master" sees the other kid grip his head, struggling to stand.

The tall man looks at the other kid. "Hey dumbass, what are you doing?"

The kid behind the man also looks.

The other kid collapses to the floor, shuddering with widened eyes as if he was in a blizzard.