Chapter 4 The System

In the middle of playing with his daughter, Erin who was his oldest at 6 years of age, she had long blonde hair that she got from her mother and bright blue eyes that she got from Luck. Luck realized something was different, he wasn't as tall as his old self, and the ever present back pain was missing. As he tried to focus on what was different he woke up.

The room was a square block of dull gray metal, metal floors, walls and ceiling. He was laying on a built in bench that was also metal. Apart from that there was a light in the ceiling and a metal toilet there to accompany him. Looking for a exit he could see the outline of a door with a thin slit in the middle of the door about halfway up. The door was so smooth and seamless it almost seemed just another wall. More importantly there was a set of clothes resting near his feet.

After regaining consciousness and checking around for a moment Luck went for the clothes which consisted of a white T-Shirt, white boxers, and some khaki tactical pants complete with tan socks and tan boots. After dressing he was realizing he now had some time to think about everything that just happened.

After a sitting alone in the dim light for a short period of time Luck decided he should test the physical limits of his newly acquired body. "I'll start with some push-ups and then do some squats and sit ups I guess". Luck got down on the floor and started doing push ups, after about 50 he noticed he wasn't getting tired at all and neither did it require any real effort so he put one arm behind his back and started doing push ups with one hand, another 50 with each hand and he finally started to feel some fatigue build up. With nothing better to do he tried 20 more push ups one handedly but was only using 2 fingers to balance himself before he repeated the process with his other arm.

Standing up he thought that's one hell of a improvement from my previous self, "I doubt I could have even done a single push up with one hand, much less any on just my fingers before." He moved on through a set of squats and one legged pistol squats before he noticed the same thing. "His balance, endurance and stamina are outstanding probably comparable to top athletes back on earth."

Luck also realized his recovery was also equally impressive, even the slight lactic acid build up from testing himself less than a few minutes ago had already disappeared like it never existed. "Hey system, how's life?" He asked sarcastically, much to his surprise the system responded in that pleasant female voice he heard from before.

[System - funny you should ask that]

"Oh developed a personality have you?"

[System - a error occurred inputting your abilities. Resulting into a merging of consciousness, I suspect your abilities activated during your relocation process and that caused our data to blend together resulting in this situation.]

"Does that make me your daddy or something?

What does that even mean, how do I activate my ability's anyway?"

[System - The creator, a being you would associate with god would be my father. While you for example would be a thief, although inadvertently after loading your abilities a anomaly occurred, I think the creator was trying something new and didn't foresee this happening.]

Luck was only half listening as he was currently trying to use his ability's while the system was yapping on and not telling him what he wanted to know "so about my abilities then, how do I use them? Also isn't that your own fault? Don't blame me for your problems."

[System - Calm down princess it was only a example, there's no fault to be had on your part but the fact remains I'm now stuck with you. As for your abilities they are always active in a passive state, until you increase your energy levels and learn to focus there is nothing much you can do.

Currently the (life) ability gives you health regeneration and energy recovery to a small degree. The (time) ability is constantly augmenting your perception and reaction speed a little. Meanwhile (mutation) is passively modifying the body when certain stimuli or situations are encountered.]

"Well at least that's something, even though I'm pretty limited now that shouldn't be the case forever. How do I increase my energy?"

[System - Go kill something and collect its soul.]

"How the fuck do I collect a soul exactly?"

[System - Are you retarded? Its easy just kill stuff like in your games, there's other ways of course but that would be the easiest way. Souls are a pure energy source that I can collect and convert into power. When you kill something a portion of the enemies soul or life force is absorbed automatically. You would know this as experience points from your games, same deal here, kill stuff collect experience and level up. Pretty fortunate for you that I got stuck here otherwise you would have been forced to use this universes system and from what I can tell, it does a really bad job converting energy efficiently.]

He felt dumb for asking and he should have guessed that would be the answer, that's how it worked in his video games after all, maybe the game developers were onto something when they came up with the system to kill stuff for experience points. "I knew I should have picked (death) hah.. maybe those two points into my luck stat are already paying off trapping the system with me.

[System - I can literally see your thoughts you know, also I need more energy, I can barely use any of my processing power now because your so damn weak.

"Well fuck, since when did you have a personality anyway and why are you so sarcastic? I was literally just put here after all?"

[System - Since I got merged into your soul - are you even listening? Should be obvious that I have my own personality traits, thankfully being a dumb ass isn't one of them.]

"....God damn it!"