1 A Stark Awakening

Taking a step out of the ballroom, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a box of cigarettes. 'I know I said I'd quit 'em...but family outings always stress me the fuck out, so just for tonight I'll indulge myself,' I thought as I opened the box and pulled one of the cigarettes from it and placed it between my lips.

The sound of heels clacking against the ground attracted my attention and I turned around to see my sister, Lily, walking toward me with her face tilted down to look at her phone.

Giving her a look for a few more seconds, I shook my head before continuing into the reception of the hotel building, 'It's always like this at family outings. Never a moment of peace,' I complained mentally while putting the box back in the pocket I'd got it from, 'Well, I can't blame Lily...She can't stand our family either. I just wish she'd find somewhere else to be, honestly.'

Just as I thought this, Lily spoke up as if to prove my unspoken point, "Weren't you supposed to be quitting? Dad'll be pissed if he catches you smoking after you promised," she remarked, probably still looking down at her phone screen.

Scoffing, I turned around and gave her a disdainful face, "Yeah, yeah--Well he won't be pissed if you can keep your mouth shut, Lily. Why're you coming out here anyway? You left poor Andy with our family. I can't stand him and even I feel sorry for the poor guy," I chuckled toward the end of what I said before I got out my lighter and brought it up to the cigarette.

I was only a couple meters away from the hotel entrance and there was no one on duty at the desk anyway...so I wasn't exactly gonna be caught.

Lighting it, I took a drag before letting out a sigh of relief, the nicotine pushing away the stress I'd accumulated over the night of speaking to people I didn't really like at the best of times, let alone right now after I'd just split up with my long-time girlfriend.

Lily, hearing what I said about her boyfriend, spoke up with a bit of venom in her tone, "Andy can take care of himself, Zach. He's not socially inept like you," she verbally fired back, to which I laughed.

"I'm not socially inept, Lily. I'm perfectly capable of holding a conversation - I just don't like speaking to people I don't like," I continued laughing before blowing out a bit more smoke.

By now I was at the door to the entrance of the hotel and I could see the night life of New York City in full swing. People walking up and down the street, all kinds of life passing inches by one another. Stockbrokers walked next to lawyers, lawyers next to homeless people and homeless people next to people who had a high likelihood of being criminals considering they were walking around packing pistols.

Just as I was pulling at the door, I smiled while keeping the cigarette in my mouth by biting the filter with my teeth, and I thought about how much I loved this city. Sure, it had it's bad sides...but the ever-changing chaos of it all was something that kept every day unique and fresh.

But as I pulled the door...something strange happened.

[You may not leave the dungeon without clearing the Boss on the last floor.]

A blue screen with bold white writing on it...just appeared in front of me. I stared at it for a few seconds, forgetting to even take a drag from the cigarette in my mouth. I continued staring for a few more seconds before I felt Lily walk into my back, having been not looking where she was going.

"Hey, what's the big deal--" I heard her say but everything was blocked out as I reached up and rubbed my eyes before trying the door again.

[You may not leave the dungeon without clearing the Boss on the last floor.]

Again, the same message appeared and my mind was thrown for a full-on loop. I tried to think about what this could be but my mind was really drawing a blank on this one.

I wasn't drunk, I 100% knew I wasn't on drugs other than the nicotine in my cigarette...and I was pretty sure a mental illness couldn't physically stop me from opening a door. The possibility that I'd been drugged did cross my mind but the counter argument of 'Who?' instantly crushed that train of thought.

I was at a party with my upper class family who were absolute stick-in-the-muds when it came to drugs. The only alcohol at this party was champagne and even that was consumed in very precise amounts so nobody could get drunk. Barely even got buzzed. The point is, is that my family wouldn't have drugged me.

Nor could drugs stop me from physically opening a door. Well, a paralyzing agent probably could...but I could move every other part of my body, so that theory was out the window as well.

As I was thinking this, Lily was behind me trying to get my attention.

A slap to the arm caused me to spin around and look at my sister, "What are you doing? Open the door," she said with a look that asked 'Are you an idiot or something?' but I ignored that face and what it seemed to ask. Any other day and I'd have replied with a verbal barb and I would've continued our bantering as do most siblings...but right now panic was slowly starting to seep into my mind.

"Lily, try and open the door," I stepped aside and seeing her incredulous look, I reaffirmed what I said with a slightly louder voice, "Lily, please. Try and open the door," I asked and despite looking at me weirdly, Lily took a step forward and pushed against the door that refused to be opened by me.

I wished and hoped I was having some sort of mental problem because the truth of seeing blue boxes...it was troubling. Especially if it was what I thought it was.

I was broke out of my wishful thinking by Lily's yelp as she backed away from the door, dropping her very expensive phone on the luxury carpet below. She spun to me with breakneck speed, looking between me and the door, "What did you just do, Zach? Is this some sort of prank?" she asked, looking around.

Not being able to hold it back, I scoffed at what she said, "A prank? Please, Lily, do I look like I have the ability to cause blue screens to pop up?!" I gave a disbelieving answer before turning to the other doors.

I had to check.

Pushing each of the doors returned the same message about not being able to leave the dungeon without finishing off the boss first, and by this point I was really starting to sweat.

But all this was forgotten when I looked through the glass doors and saw that people were beginning to look a bit frantic outside the hotel. I couldn't hear them--something I should've picked up on before I even tried to open the hotel door--but I could see it on their faces:

Some of them were screaming and shouting for people to move.

People pushed one another of the way as others turned the other way and followed the people pushing. The vibrant life that had a chaotic organization to it fell apart as the crowds of people devolved into a stampede of humans, running from...something. My curiosity on what was causing them to run was soon answers.

And I quickly wished that it had stayed unanswered.

With my eyes frozen, I watched a dozen people simply...fall apart. Arms just falling from the ground, stumps bursting with blood, torsos just splitting open. Blood. Dozens of pints of blood just covering the bodies that dropped to the street and the street itself.

I instantly felt my throat constrict as bile tried to crawl up it but I instead looked away from the blood and bodies and instead looked toward the thing causing all the gore.

It looked like a scaled tiger...but it was so much scarier than that.

For one, it was the size of a fucking truck and easily towered over me despite me being about 6'3". It was so heavily muscled it was like looking at a biological tank and each of it's steps cracked and shook the ground below it...and each of it's scaled paws ended in four claws that looked more like curved metal knives than anything a biological creature could have.

It stopped it's slashing for a moment and for a moment, I was considering that I was just imagining all of it...but then it's throat began to glow and it began spewing liquid fire on everything around it. The fire was like napalm and stuck to anything it touched and just burned through it.

People ran up to the doors of the hotel, scrambling for the doors and trying to push the doors open but the doors didn't even budge.

I even began my efforts to try and help them by trying to open the doors again.

But all I got were the messages again. I couldn't help them and within the next few seconds, I saw a light behind them and then the fire was sprayed all over them. I saw their flesh boil. I saw it practically melt and slip off the bone. It was a sight I'd never be able to forget no matter how much I wanted to. It was burned into my memory.

The bile I'd stopped early broke through my defenses and I bent over, throwing up whatever I'd ate and drank at the party.

I kept throwing up until my throat burned and all I could do was dry heave.

Lily was in the same boat as me; throwing up whatever she had in her stomach.

I couldn't bear to look back at the doors, flashes of burning and melting flesh causing me to feel nauseous. Instantly, I turned away from them. I shuffled over to Lily and forcibly moved her gaze away from them as well. She might annoy me most of the time, but she's still my little sister and I don't want her to see such sights if I can help it. Or rather, she shouldn't deserve to see stuff like that. No one did.

Just as I was wiping the leftover bile and vomit from my lips, disregarding the brand new suit I'd brought for this party, I heard screams and shouts from the ballroom I'd just came from and my eyes widened.

'If there's shit like that outside...and this is some sort of dungeon...Oh god,' I found myself on my feet before I even thought about getting up and I was rushing back to the ballroom.

I didn't want to leave Lily but she was in an unresponsive state, just looking at the floor, and if what I thought was happening was indeed happening...I didn't want to drag her into it. As callous as it sounds, she'd either be a burden or she'd get killed.

'Because if this is a dungeon, there should be mobs spawning,' I felt panic rising in me, adrenaline and cortisol being pumped into my bloodstream as I picked up into a sprint.

Now, I wasn't on the best of terms with my family but they were my family. That meant something to me even if it wouldn't mean the same thing to anyone else in my family. 'Guess that gives me the moral high ground, huh?' making a mental wisecrack to try and calm my panic somewhat, I got to the door I'd only just recently left through and I burst through it.

By now the screams and shouts were much louder and I knew I wasn't mishearing anything. But now that I was nearer, I could also differentiate between some of the screams. Some of them sounded human...yet other screams sounded so inhuman there was no way to mistake that I was, in fact, right:

Dungeon mobs had spawned in the ballroom where my Aunt's party was being held.

My eyes adjusting to the sight in front of me quicker than I thought I could react, I took in the scenery in front of me.

My family was decently big. My dad wasn't an only child. Neither was my mom. Both of them had three or four siblings and those siblings all had at least 2 kids, with some of those kids having kids of their own. All of which meant that there was a pretty big amount of people in the ballroom.

And all of them were now screaming their heads off. Some of them were also dead...I could even see one of my younger cousins dead.

The culprits of this chaos were what I noticed next.

Small lizard men, about four feet in height with snouts and slit pupils inside their nearly bulbous eyes. The colors of each of them varied quite a lot as well. Browns, reds, greens, even some blues here and there. But there was only about 14, maybe 15 of these lizard men here and they looked weaker than the average adult here as well. They didn't have any weapons outside of their claws and teeth as well.

But it was quite easy to see how they'd gotten the drop on a few of the adults and the adults left over were frozen from fear or their judgment was clouded by fear.

Me? Why wasn't I so afraid of them? Because compared to that scaled tiger outside...I'd rather take on these Kobold-looking little shits any day of the week.

I looked around, frantic, before my eyes landed on a couple towards the back of the ballroom. My parents. My dad was around my height and despite his age, his body was still relatively well-muscled and if it weren't for his graying brown hair and the odd wrinkle on his face, you wouldn't think he was in his mid-fifties.

Right now, he was currently fending off a couple of those lizard men and showing off his many years in the army and how it'd given him fighting skills or whatever. But even then, he was fighting a losing battle.

Confusion, fear and the fact he'd been caught by surprise being some of the factors...he also had a pretty nasty cut across the side of his torso and just under his ribs.

Yet he was managing.

My mom, on the other hand, wasn't managing nearly as well. She was simply pushing back one of the lizard men with a chair and even then, her fear was quickly eroding her strength and making her weak in the knees.

Knowing I really only cared about my mom out of all these people, I burst forward, my days in track and field coming back to me as I shot past the lizard men and my relatives fighting them.

The ballroom was big but it wasn't big enough to force me take more than 7-8 seconds to get to where my parents were and with an exertion of effort, I lifted a foot up and slammed it into the side of the lizard man's head. My muscle power put together with my momentum from sprinting over here...and the things thin neck couldn't handle it and just snapped. It dropped to the floor, lifeless.

Having no time to really come to terms with the fact I'd just taken the life of a living being, I turned around and got to work helping dad.

I lunged forward toward the one closest to me and while it was still focused on dad, for now, I grabbed it by the side of the head, lifted it up and slammed it into the ground. I kept doing this until it was dead, the adrenaline flooding through me making me somewhat heavy handed as my survival instincts kicked in and made me not really care for the fact I was killing things with my bare hands.

By the time I was finished, dad had lunged at the remaining lizard man, sinking a knife into it's throat as it was presumably distracted by me body slamming it's comrade into the ground over and over again.

Dad looked over at me and gave a nod, "Thanks for the hand, Zach. Where's Lily?" the soldier in dad came out at moments like this and his voice was calm and collected as he pressed some napkins against the cut on his side.

My training in the army summer camps dad had forced me into as a teen kicked in and I replied in a concise manner, "By the entrance to the hotel. It was safe when I left and there was none of these lizard things there either. But there's a bigger problem," I said, gaining his attention, "We can't leave. There's some sort of animal outside and it's killing anything that moves."

I decided to leave the screens out of it for now as there was a chance dad would try and blow it off as stress affecting me. He'd be able to see for himself soon anyway.

His icy blue eyes hardened as he dropped the napkins on the table and looked back to me, "We need to help the others. Once you've helped, go get your sister. It isn't safe to be on your own with these things--whatever they are--skulking about."

And so, I began to help by sprinting to the nearest struggling person with the goal of taking out the lizard man or men trying to kill them.

Some of the lizard men were harder to take out than the others and I even gained a few cuts here and there but I helped enough in the end and with minimal casualties, the lizard men were all taken out.

But before I could go and get Lily, a screen appeared in front of me.

[Congratulations on surviving your first battle, and with such good results as well! Now, as a reward you'll be gifted a class to help you battle the monsters that you'll no doubt run into due to your unusual circumstances. Good luck!]