System Change

Derek ripped the void apart, then stepped out. As soon as he did, before he was even able to look around, he was hit with a sharp pain in his head, and his vision flashed. However, that’s all that happened. It was so fast that he wasn’t even sure that he had felt anything. What he did notice most of all was that the pressure inside his head that had been building since the moment he stepped into the void and started traveling had quickly disappeared.

It wasn’t an instant release, it was more like a rapid deflation of a balloon. He was already pretty sure, but the pressure disappearing like it had made him almost certain that the pressure was caused by the amount of time he and Silvi had spent in that part of the void. I’m glad that there wasn’t any pressure like that when I was stuck in the void from the portal. If that was how it felt after just a… few hours? Derek questioned how long it had taken him and Silvi to reach Earth, but he wasn’t exactly sure.

Yeah… it couldn’t have been any more than just a few hours. He shrugged. But yeah… I would have been dead a long time ago if that had accompanied the other void. At least… I think. He wasn’t exactly sure what the pressure of the void would have done to him and Silvi had they remained the there longer. Who knows? It may have just reached a certain point and stopped. Or… Maybe I could have covered our bodies in a void shell and just circumvented it.

‘That it?’ Derek heard Silvi’s voice chime in her head, which caused him to break out of his thoughts. The relief of the pressure and the quick, sharp pain in his head had distracted him momentarily.

‘What?’ he asked Silvi.

‘That was your old home?’ Silvi asked.

Derek quickly looked up and scanned his surroundings. After examining everything, he sighed deeply. There wasn’t much of anything around him. His cabin was gone, and by the looks of it, it had been gone for quite some time. He couldn’t say that he wasn’t expecting such an outcome. Still, he’d had a small hope that somebody would have kept it around, but that was obviously way too much to hope for.

Instead, all he was met with was tall grass covering the pieces of the home that were still there—which wasn’t much. Derek took a step forward and bent down, reaching his hand down and grasping a wooden plank from what had once been his family’s old cabin. He brought it up and examined it. The wood was well worn and rotted already. Just by picking it up, it had begun to fall apart.

‘It used to be,’ Derek finally sent back to Silvi. ‘But a place like this was never going to last without anyone to take care of it.’

‘Oh…’ Silvi replied. ‘Sorry.’ ‘It’s fine,’ Derek sent back. A smile formed on his face, though. ‘But thank you,’ he said. Maybe she didn’t care about many people or things, but at least Silvi still cared for him.

Still, Derek hoped that he may be able to find something, at least. A keepsake or the like. He’d hated that he’d not kept much of anything from his old life in his storage bracelet before he got stuck, but he was pretty well known to be someone that shouldn’t be messed with. At least, he was around Charlotte, North Carolina, and to anyone not named Jace Whitaker. So, since he was never away from the cabin for too long, he hadn’t bothered to store many things. He had preferred things to be out in the open.

“Well… at least the pond is still there,” Derek chuckled out loud. That’s where he was when the first notification from the Universal System came. He’d been on the small boat, fishing for his dinner at the time.

He’d just reeled in a catfish and was lowering his blade into its skull to put it out of its misery before taking it back and cooking it when he was hit by the first message. The notification came. His knife was driven into the fish, then he was rewarded with the title First of Many—which had been given to him for being one of the very first to obtain a kill after the Universal System came.

It was something that he would never forget, as it was the day everything changed. I guess I was pretty lucky in that regard, huh? He thought. The odds of having such timing to get such a good title had to have been astronomical. Still, it’s what happened, and it was one of the bigger reasons that Derek had become an elite on Earth without actually pushing for it.

I bet I could have been even closer to the top if I had really tried back then, he thought. Then he shook his head. No, if that would have happened, I doubt all the things that have happened to me would have ever happened, and that’s not something I would ever want. His talking with Dave had also let him know how lucky he was to have gotten a rare class back then, too—even if it wasn’t the first class that he’d received. I’ve definitely been lucky ever since the Universal System came… all the way up until now.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Hell, Derek even looked back upon getting trapped in the void as being lucky. Sure, the decades or even centuries that he’d spent there had been nothing short of hell, and he’d gone crazy and broken while in there, but he’d come out and been able to take hold of a new life and gain a new family. Yeah… I was definitely lucky. In fact, he even thought about thanking Silvi Jaccobs for not keeping the Portal open even a split second longer.

Eh… maybe not. Derek laughed internally, then shrugged before walking over to the small pond and looking out over the water. Surprisingly, the small wooden boat that he’d used was still there, even though the entire cabin was nothing but rubble and overgrowth. Of course, the boat was nowhere near usable anymore—having also succumbed to the conditions. It still held a boat shape, but when he reached down and touched it, all it took was a little tug and a handful of the wood came off.

At that moment, a splash sounded out, and Derek looked up. A fish about five feet long and a couple feet wide jumped up from the center of the pond. The fish had razer-like teeth and sparks were pulsating from it. As soon as it reached the peak of its jump, a purple bolt of lightning hit it before it went back down into the water. Seconds later, the dead fish floated up to the top and Silvi hopped off Derek’s shoulder to go store it.

Derek waited a moment before he realized that there was no notification coming—not one from the Davenresh System, nor the Universal System. Oh, shit! Derek thought, then quickly looked over his status before letting out a sigh of relief.

He still had vivid memories of the system text being one of the few things keeping him sane during his time trapped in the void, then losing even it. And, since a couple of the things that he was concerned about was how the systems would react with one another again, and if the Davenresh System would truly stick with him once on Earth, he was relieved to see that nothing seemed to be wrong.

I still have all my skills, experience points, contracts… and everything, he thought. It looks like the only thing that I’m missing is the ability to gain experience points… or… I guess… essence. But that’s almost no different than when we killed Void Beasts. The system just isn’t going to help me and Silvi process the essence from killing things outside of it, which I guess makes sense.

Actually, does the Davenresh System even help us with that anymore? Or is it the Origin System? Derek shrugged. It wasn’t something he could know unless he spoke to Dave again, but he didn’t expect to be seeing the elf for a while. Oh, well… he thought, then dropped the crumbling wood that he had in his hand as Silvi came back and landed on his shoulder.

“Did the storage rings still work?” he asked Silvi. She still had all the storage items in her pot.

‘Yes,’ Silvi sent to him telepathically.

“That’s good, at least,” Derek said. “Do you mind if I get my stuff back?”

With that question, the lid that Silvi had just put back on her pot after storing the fish opened up and Derek reached in—equipping all of his items. Silvi would have to carry them back, but for local travel on Earth, Derek figured that it would be easier to just coat everything in a void shell again instead of storing them in the pot. Silvi did the same for her items, and soon enough, she was able to let the pot disappear.

“What are we doing now?” Silvi asked through her communication crystal now that she had it equipped.

“I don’t know,” Derek said. He’d expected to feel… more when he came back to Earth, but, other than the regret of not having kept the things from inside his cabin, he didn’t feel much. “I think… I just want to meet one person, then we can go back home.” That’s right, this was no longer his home. His home was wherever all his friends were—which was currently in Cydaria.

The location is definitely not what creates a home, Derek thought. It was cheesy, but it was truer for him now than ever before. He still had his memories, and he would always have them, but those were from the past, and he knew now more than ever before that his future wasn’t here.

“Who are we meeting?” Silvi asked.

“Silvi,” Derek replied.

“Yeah?” Silvi answered.

“No, that’s who we are going to go see,” Derek said with a chuckle.

“Me?” Silvi asked. “There’s a me here?”

“She’s your namesake,” Derek said.

“Oh, right! She must be very strong!” Silvi said.

“Well…” Derek rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. “About that…”

“She is weak?” Silvi asked. “I was named after a weak person?”

“To be fair,” Derek said. “At the time that I gave you your name, which I doubt you can remember since we weren’t contracted yet, and you didn’t really have any intelligence, you were probably even weaker than she was.”

“Oh…” Silvi said. “Then maybe she is stronger now.”

“It’s possible,” Derek said, but he wasn’t sure. Her aura wasn’t exactly weak, but he hadn’t really tried to sense exactly how strong it was when he was following it to Earth. However, he knew a bit about Silvi’s character, and he knew that she would have been distraught after losing most of her team, then, technically being the person who caused Derek to disappear. He wasn’t sure if it was something that the woman would have been able to come back from even stronger.

“Let’s go, then!” Silvi insisted. “Let’s go meet Silvi!”

“I guess there isn’t anything else to do here, is there?” Derek asked rhetorically. He turned around and looked at the space where his cabin used to stand—where he’d spent years in solitude after his family had died. He thought about taking a trip to his childhood home, but he didn’t have a lot of good memories there, and he knew that it was in even worse shape than his cabin was because he’d went back to it once before, before everything happened with Silvi.

Derek sighed and shook his head one last time. “I guess this is it,” he said to nobody. In his mind, he knew that it was probably the last time he would visit this place. Derek turned around, his back facing the rubble that was his old him. Then, he slapped his face with both of his hands and said, “Okay, Silvi… let’s go meet Silvi.”