Brutality!

They reached it at the same time, but seven year old Zach had different things in mind as he drop kicked the other child into the sea.

Almost as if everything had played out in slow motion, he heard a "noooooooooooooo!" and then a splash.

'first timer, huh' Zach thought to himself.

Not worrying about the other kid, Zach looked down, towards the ring. It was red, with a red crystal sticking out on the top. Zach thought it looked valuable and thought it was enough to hand in.

But curiosity got the best of him. He shook the ring, put it close to his eye, tasted it(not good at all) and then he slid it down his middle finger. Then when he tried to drag it back out, he couldn't. It was completely stuck, he almost dislocated his finger from how hard he was pulling.

Then it dissolved, and in front of him, text showed. Text that was in no language, for if words had a meaning behind them, then this text conveyed not the words but the meaning directly.

"You have gained the demon system"

But Zach didn't care about this. All he cared about was finding something he could bring back to the teenagers to avoid the brown hole. Everything to avoid the brown hole. Nobody wanted to go there, or rather, be thrown forcefully there.

He found something, a shoe which was dirty and stretched out. He brought the shoe back to the teenagers who liked to sit on top of a large pile of trash. He climbed over brown abandoned couches and hassled past broken lights.

There was a street lamp which stuck out of the layers of trash every now and then, they still worked and lit up the area, enough so that you could see. Eventually, he reached the top and he found the teenagers resting on their favourite couch. A brown one, in it three rats lived, which the teenagers thought was a massage chair.

He gave them the single shoe which they accepted. Jake the largest one needed a new shoe and snatched it from Zach. Jake had a nose too big, eyes too dumb, a mouth to greasy, a tongue too black and hair too… old?

5 years later.

Zach was on top of a trash pile using a rotten apple as a ball, he was throwing it up and down catching it. He had two friends around him, Jim the person whom he had dropped kicked into the yellow lake, he turned out to be a pretty chill guy.

Then there was Marvin. They called Marvin an angel because he arrived from the sky. It was a day when Zach and Jim were hunting, and they heard a shriek. Then they see a boy fall down from the sky and plunge into the yellow sea.

He had been disowned and thrown into the lake, this was the first time Zach had seen this. Anyhow, the three of them had started their own gang. They called themselves the band of idiots, which was pronounced "bund-uf-idiuts".

Suddenly, Zach had been struck by a forgotten memory. It was off the time when he had picked up a ring on the hunt. Or was he hallucinating then? He didn't know, hallucinations happened quite often in the hot area. Like the one time Zach swore he could have seen a hot, naked, mermaid in the yellow lake, he almost jumped in himself.

He remembered another strange occurrence, almost a year after that the same voice sounded in his head. "Host, please say status". Which he had ignored because he was too focused on catching his prey, which was a necklace with a rotten banana on it.

As a joke to himself, he muttered, "status." And a large square appeared in front of him, with smallest squares inside of it which lead. "Skills," "Quests" "Stats".

He shook his head in disbelief but the square didn't go through. Then he hit himself hard enough for the mermaid to come back.

Jim and Marvin who were arm wrestling jerked their heads towards Zach. Zach didn't care about them though, his eyes peered down at the text in front of him. He tried focusing on the text stats.

---

Zach

Race: Human

Level: 0

Xp to next level 0/100

Power level: 10

Strength: 6

Agility : 4

Intelligence: 2

Endurance: 10

Mind: 12

Free points. 0

--

He was completely baffled, he tried touching the screen but his hands flew through it.

"You okay mate?" Jim said worried.

Zach ignored him and continued to act like a monkey who had seen a mirror for the first time. He shook his head multiple times, pointed at the screen, looked around, pinched himself, hit his head, and then finally broke into a defeated smile.

His mind curiously wondered what was on the pages past this, and the second he thought so the screen went back to before.

"Skills," "Quest," "Stats"

He looked at skills, and he found a completely blank page. He didn't quite know what it was though, so he didn't know how to feel. He decided to go back.

"Skills," "Quests," "Stats"

This time he looked at quests. And there was two quests in there.

"Reach platform 1"

and

"Do 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 jumps"

He focused on one of them

"Reach platform 1 - 100 xp"

and

"Do 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 jumps - 2 stat points, hidden reward"

He had never heard what a pushup was but strangely he had a vivid image of one in his mind. The same thing could be said for everything else. He then got down on four and began doing pushups.

Jim and Marvin became slightly worried as they had been staring at him all this time. After twenty pushups, he fell flat on his face. "This is hard, you two should join me its fun." And they did because they didn't have much more to do.

The band of idiots eventually completed each task and then Zach heard a strange noise.

"Quest completed - reward given"

With this, came a soothing feeling. Then when he looked back at quest page. He saw that the quest had disappeared and that there was only one quest left.

"Reach platform 1"

Now he really wanted to do it, and he knew only one person who could do it. That was Sketchy Mike.