Choice

"I belong," 'click' "to the mages group." His voice sounded out right in my ears despite the distance. When he clicked his fingers, the surroundings shifted and distorted, from a rubbish-strewn street floor with towering grey buildings to a blisteringly cold wasteland with all white around.

The ground was perfectly flat and white all the way around to the horizon, except for a huge pile of rocks, the size of a mountain, which lay several kilometers in front of us. Out of the crowd of delegates came walking the Judge Hedd, a shiny silver badge in hand as he shouted out.

"Mage! You are in violation of L-" He was cut off as the suit lifted up one of his hands casually in response to the officer's outburst. The officer was pulled off of his feet and sucked towards the suits outstretched palm, arms flailing all the while, before shrinking into a tiny ball of purple which the suit plucked out of the air before placing him inside his breast pocket.

"Power. It is our one and only creed." As he began his speech I could see the mountain behind him get up and dust itself off before stretching and beginning to run over to us. His speech was basically about how our Instructor was misguided and how the only true path to power lay through the mage group and any other choice was stupid. As his speech ended we felt the vibrations from the mountains feet hitting the ground.

It didn't speak a word, but when it reached what I thought was a kilometer away it took a massive leap and what I had originally assumed was a few hundred meters tall, turned out to be two Chrysler buildings in height and wasn't friendly. It brought its fist crashing down upon us, which was the size of a group several times our size. Casually without speaking a word, the suit flicked his hand over his shoulder, in the same way, that I would brush a spider off of my shoulder. The monsters fist which was hanging in the sky over us froze in the air and its shoulder, all the way to its waist, split off from the rest of its body slowly and in a very fine line and crashed into the snow to our left, stirring up a large amount of wind and snow which swept over the ground towards us, meanwhile the other half of its body, fell through the air towards us.

Just before half the mountain, as well as the snowstorm, hit us, the suit snapped his fingers and there we were, in the city again.

"If you want that kind of power then follow me now. I will only take those with a Wisdom and Intelligence stat of 40 and higher." With that speech finished he threw the purple ball out of his pocket revealing an officer standing there with clothes in disarray and flushed cheeks.

"Do we have a problem here officer?" The suit stood there with his back to him and his hands in his pockets. He seemed to be smirking for some reason.

"What problem? A delegate has decided to leave and has extended his Invitation and his Terms. No law has been broken that I saw." With a nod, the suit set off down the only road which led off from the Institute.

I walked off after the man in the suit and a crowd of a hundred and fifty other recruits walked with me. I walked past a black coated man who was protesting very loudly as the suit had only left maybe three hundred recruits for the other twenty-four delegates.

Once we were out of earshot of the group of delegates I assume, the suit turned to all of us and smiled.

"My name is Mr. Silence. Thank you all for making the right choice. If you will all stand still I will save us all a long and boring journey and directly move us to the Mages Group Headquarters."

He closed his eyes but I scanned my surroundings furiously, in my experience this game was an awful, evil being. I was ready for us to get hit by a dragon any second now, this opportunity seemed to be too good to be true. Our surroundings distorted briefly from a wide street with sheer grey walls on either side to a reflection of myself, black me looking quite shocked with his 14-year-old face. God, I forgot I was 14.

We were now in a wide corridor with a silver reflective surface all around us including the floors and ceiling and black, cold doors behind us. Ahead of us, I could see a room with a long golden bench at the end. The distance that we had yet to travel seemed to be distorted by the walls around us. The scale of our numbers also seemed to be larger as each one of us in the crowd had infinite reflections around us. We seemed to reach that room very quickly. The bench was actually a desk of waist height with several people wearing suits of different colors manning it and several people also wearing suits talking to them on my side of the bench.

Each of the suits had a sign above their head. Indicating their class I assume and their Lv but all I could see was black question marks, except above Mr. Silver's head which had the name, Mr. Silver. I could also see that above my fellow recruits heads was the number Lv 0, but I couldn't see their names. According to the Knowledge we received them along with our class. I assumed I'd just unlocked this feature.

Once I had that thought a flood of information poured through my head, leaving my head reeling. Everyone around me had collapsed, some still kneeling, but hardly anyone still standing like me. We'd all done something or reached a certain amount of progression to unlock this Knowledge in our brain. I took a second to process all of my new Information. Apparently, I'd been getting flashes of information this whole time which I hadn't really processed yet.

I got clear on a couple of things, this was not a typical RPG. I didn't level up through experience and gain stat points that way, Instead, I gained slow increases to my Stat points over time while using them, and they increased faster in combat. When I reached a certain threshold, when all of my stats hit their maximum, I was able to level up. There were 5 level ups available to me, each one harder to reach than the last. I could gain stats and skills from each level up. Somebody who was a Lv higher than me was definitely much, much stronger than me. But that wasn't all.

For us, this was just a game, but for the NPCs, if they didn't Lv up fast enough they would die. Their, and my lifespans were designed (I don't know who or what designed them to be that way) excessively short, but through continuous Lv ups, they could increase their lifespan to one which was 200 years. However, if they failed to reach Lv5 their lifespan would be limited to 50 years. That's it. That's everything the Knowledge told me, when I tried to probe further it just told me I hadn't received the qualifications necessary.

Mr. Silence looked on sympathetically, he'd gone through the same thing before after all. He waited for us to all get up off of the ground before making us continue onwards. He called out over his shoulder while he was walking,

"In case you didn't get it from the knowledge, you'll only have 1 year after becoming Lv 1 to become Lv 2. Not to worry though, most people do it in a month." We continued walking, I wondered how this was affecting the others, I didn't care, I was just wondering.

One of the suits a woman who wore a light pink suit stood in front of a doorway and had a sign which said Recruits (the doorway not her head) over her head. She perked up at seeing Mr. Silence and the crowd which was following him. Indeed, as we entered the room, all conversation finished as the suits, sorry the Mages stared in shock at Mr. Silence and the (I assume) size of the crowd which was following him.

Mr. Silence went up to the woman wearing the pink suit to have a brief conversation with her. I learned two things from their exchange, one the woman's name was Ms. Lucy and 2, that she had a huge thing for Mr. Silence. Ms. Lucy then took eighty members of the group through the door first. She said that we wouldn't all fit at once. Apparently, they really weren't used to getting so many new recruits all at once. It made me wonder if increasing the number of recruits was really worth it. Did he get a reward? It must be pretty good as he'd managed to piss off the local authorities just to get us to join.

After milling around for a while and sneaking looks at the Mages with their fine suits on as opposed to our white onesies, some brave idiot spoke out first.

"Mr. Silence, what department of magic do you belong to?" He smiled instead of slicing us all in half which was something, an improvement on his treatment of the rock monster at least.

"First of all, we practice mana manipulation here or MM for short, not parlor tricks. You learn about the difference in there," He gestured vaguely to the doors Ms. Lucy just entered, "But as to what I practice, it's called Spatial MM. Of the eight disciplines, it's the only one which can cause damage large enough to kill to a Lvl 3 at Lvl 1." My fellow recruits eyes lit up at the sound of that, but I thought it sounded fishy. Even if it was true there had to be some kind of heavy restriction placed upon it.

"It's also the Class which gives you the largest Mana well to draw on as you Level up. You can travel anywhere instantly with enough mana, you can even travel to other dimensions if you want." Seeing the eyes of the recruits glaze over as he went into the details of his class, he gave stories out freely of him slaying colossal beings, like the one we saw him kill earlier today, hundreds at a time. I had this nagging feeling that he'd skipped over something so I felt it was worth the risk of being sliced in half because of offense being taken (which I felt was unlikely to happen based on what I'd seen so far).

"What are the negatives about being a spatial Mage?" His head whipped up and he searched the crowd for the owner of the offensive voice.

"Who said that?" Everyone around me immediately moved away, leaving me stranded in the open. Once locking eyes with me Mr. Silence just nodded once, then continued telling his story about fighting a living jungle on his own. The crowd stayed away from me though leaving a ring of open space around me, wanting to stay in Mr. Silence's good books. Once he finished his story which ended the same way all of the others did, 'I killed everything', he looked at me and answered my question with hesitation and in some places gritted teeth.

"In terms of statistic distribution, our class is designed with the largest mana well, however, this does mean that our other stats are rather neglected, with only the bare minimum going into each one. However from what you saw would you not say that the trade-off is worth it?"

"Give the boy what he asked for Gerald! Tell him the real downsides of being a Spatial Mage." When I wasn't looking, seven people with different colored suits on had come out of the elevator and lined up in front of it and were all grinning at … Mr. Silence. (I refused to call someone who could slice a mountain in half with a flick of his wrist Gerald) Mr. Silence continued talking like he hadn't noticed them come in.

"It has the highest destructive power, unrivaled across the other MM departments." The same one who interrupted Mr. Silence earlier, who wore a pinstripe silver suit with stripes of blue called out again, startling and visibly upsetting Mr. Silence.

-

"Wrong."

"Fine, possibly unrivaled."

"What's the statistical chance of reaching Lv 5?" The silver-suited man really gave off a smarmy air with his slicked-back black hair and white teeth, he really didn't care about Mr. Silence's opinion.

"I'm giving an introduction here, which is part of my role as Recruiter if you want to talk to them, see if they join the Electromagnetics department. Until then would you mind politely-" Taking a step around Mr. Silence the man in the silver suit cut him off with a wave.

"The chance of reaching Lv 5 in the Spatial Department based on a recent Census is, conservatively speaking, slightly over 1 in a million." The silver-suited man spoke with arrogance, and he really rolled his r's, he reminded me of one my cousin. He seemed to relish in the response he'd gotten, I could see that the crowd's expressions towards Mr. Silence were changing from those of reverence, to those of unease. That chance meant that 999,999 people had died before a Lv 5 Spatial mage was created, either because the class was so hard to level up or because it was unwieldy to use in actual combat.

"And what's the chance of reaching Lv 5 for the two easiest Departments?" The silver-suited man spoke aloud, letting his question sit in the air before bothering to answer it.

"Thermodynamics at 1 in 500 and Electromagnetics at 1 in 1000." The silver-suited man turned to a red-suited woman next to him and said,

"Why I believe that's our departments, Galley!"

"..." The red-suited woman flicked her black hair over her shoulder and turned away from him with a 'hmph'.

Ms. Lucy chose that moment to stick her head around the door.

"All done!" She took in the visibly upset Mr. Silence, the smarmy silver suited man, and me in the center of the crowd with a three-meter radius of no people around me with one gaze. She seemed to ignore me thankfully and instead pouted as she saw the upset Mr. Silence.

"50 new recruits for the Spatial department." I've never seen a man go through such a range of emotion in such a short span of time. His smile radiated so strongly I suspected briefly that he was somehow also a priest, my Knowledge gave no sort of response to this sort of thought, so I assumed that it wasn't possible to have multiple classes. 10 recruits followed the Electromagnetics representative, 5 went to the Thermodynamics department, 3 to the Elemental department and two to the Illusion department. With a last quick plead to consider the spatial department, Silence walked steadily to his new recruits and then it was just me, the crowd and Ms. Lucy.

She took us through to a cinema like a room with enough seats for everyone. We sat down and it played clips of the eight different types classes we could pick and a short clip of them destroying their enemies from Lv 1 to 5. It also gave a brief description of how mana manipulation worked. Apparently, we'd been created (Still no more information about that disturbing fact and everyone around me just nodded along) as blank slates, allowing us to choose our own paths in life. We were designed (Are we clones then?) to have no affinity for any type of energy from birth. When we gained our Mage class, our souls would be branded, allowing us to use a certain type of energy, in the form of mana, freely. Even I was slightly confused by that statement.

There was also a short list of facts about each class, like the statistics of reaching Lv5, and their stat allocation.

The Lv 5 version of every different class was powerful enough to single-handedly take down a dragon from Emperors Road by my reckoning. Apparently, the best player was currently Lv 3, but I reckon with a group of paid mercenaries, I could quickly catch up.

The level 5 version of the Electromagnetic Mage was actually the man in the silver suit I'd seen earlier. The level of pure destructive power he released destroyed a small moon as he seemed to distort space, drawing upon a huge amount of power before releasing it in a thin stream of lightning, when it hit the moon it distorted the area around it creating a huge hole in the moon and destroying the fragments remaining, in the clip shown.

The clip shown of the Illusion Lv 5 was her stamping her foot in front of a horde of wolf-man like monsters, each one maybe ten meters tall and it tearing itself apart, they tore apart each other and when they didn't have anyone to fight they tore apart themselves, the fight took less than 30 seconds.

The Necromancer clip just showed an endless horde of zombies attacking a mage and his mana eventually running out and him dying after several minutes. It was very uninspiring.

The Life clip showed a female Mage waving her hand at an army and a forest formed sprouting from a seedling to a grove and to a forest in seconds, which then combined into a huge tree which eventually transformed into gigantic Ents which tore into an army of monsters, multiplying as they went. There was a strange part where at the end of the clip when all the monsters were dead, all the ents turned around and charged at the mage but the clip cut out before they reached the mage.

The Elemental clip was just a man standing there until a horde of metallic, rusty murder machines appeared. At which point he put his hands together before spreading them apart, causing a huge rift in the ground to appear below himself for an instant before swallowing him and the monsters whole.

The Summoning clip was similar to the necromancers clip in that he had an army as well, but his was more varied. It had swarms of bees alongside colossal beings with a thousand eyes, next to a hippo the size of a house, the beings didn't look the designers had even pretended that they existed in nature unlike most of their other monsters. A snake which was a mile long with one tiny pair of white dove wings was being sat on by a huge glowing cat, around which tiny flames were burning fiercely in midair.

The screen faded to black after showing a Spatial clip (Basically somebody weaker than Mr. Silence cutting a lava monster a hundred meters tall in half) and a boring one for Thermodynamics. Were these clips randomized? It would explain the inconsistency because I could almost guarantee that if the previous group had seen the Electromagnetics clip that I'd just seen, more than 10 people would have chosen it. They also showed a brief description of each class. I'd already made my choice but it was nice to see my competition.

Ms. Lucy would call out a Class and everyone who had chosen that class would stand up and follow her out of the room. It was rudimentary, but it worked and I appreciated that the developers were giving us a little bit of a sneak peek before we chose a class, which apparently determined how we played the entire game. This was all Knowledge, and it would be a similar process if I'd decided to be a Warrior.

"Spatial." Only one person stood up, it was the first person who'd asked Silence what class he was. Probably another fan of his looks more than his class, she'd probably already given up hope of advancing very far, and had instead chosen to cozy up to Mr. Silence in attempt to make life easier for herself. I suppose Silence was quite good-looking for a man.

"Electromagnetics." 34 people stood up. I wanted to join them and destroy a moon too, but a childhood dream of mine was holding me back.

"Thermodynamics." One confused person stood up before sitting down again, the clip they'd played wasn't very inspiring, it was a woman freezing these rock monsters slowly to death, it took more than 5 minutes to end.

"Illusion." 3 people stood up and walked out, the clip shown was frightening but the others were worse.

"Anti-life MM"

"What?" I called out.

"Necromancy changed their name this morning, they said Necromancy was too old-fashioned and people had too many mistaken ideas about what it actually was." I was confused. But why? Necromancy has always been evil, why did they suddenly want to turn over a new leaf now that I wanted to join?

"Last call for Anti-life MM." Did I want to join such a department? Maybe this was all just a terrible idea. I stood up and locked eyes with a blonde girl who stood up with me. It was just a game. Why not?