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  In between gasping breaths and gagging I hear Rachel shout, “Over there.” She points her hand to the left. I point my hand in the direction that Rachel pointed. The alien reappears and he is ready to blast with his pistol. Well, so am I. The goat-alien and I both unleash our attacks at each other. The green bolts of plasma are flying toward me as I see the alien get hit by my blue energy beam. A grotesque bleating scream peals across the savannah. His green bolts hit my shield and I can see the shield warp.

  Folding Shield: Durability 8/100 Hardness 10-6. A shield that folds in on itself enabling the bearer to hide the shield as a simple armband. The shield is damaged and suffers a penalty. The shield can no longer fold in on itself.

  You have slain another competitor in honorable combat, you are awarded 100x2 experience, 50x2 honor points and 13x2 green sigils.

  You have been awarded with 40 Iron I Tokens and 500 experience for your victory.

  Your opponent was ranked higher than you.

  Congratulations you have survived your second Gate War.

  You will be transported back to your world in thirty seconds.

  My chest itches and I see my wife, pouring sweat and heaving with breath. I thank her and tell her I am going to go loot. I run over to the fallen body extract my poisoned dagger and start the looting process.

  You have obtained 6 orange sigils.

  You have obtained 300 credits.

  You have obtained Boots of the Dragoon.

  Boots of the Dragoon Durability 36/40 Hardness 3 Your jumps gain 40% more energy, additionally 60% of the energy of your landing is siphoned into your personal aether.

  I start to walk back to Rachel when I feel the tugging sensation above my belly button.

  Chapter 3

  My vision clears and the tugging sensation ends. I am in my Whitespace. The smell of absolute nothingness fills my nostrils. It is a welcome smell after the roasting flesh of the savannah. I take the opportunity to change out of my torn clothing and replace it with items I have in my backpack. I will have to find a store, or something, fighting to the death can be murder on your clothing. I pull up my interface and I see icons in the top left of my vision. One is an arrow pointing up, and another the array symbol with a plus in the corner. I decide to click on the array symbol first.

  You have earned enough sigils to upgrade an array connection. Connections can be upgraded even without abilities slotted. Unslotting abilities does not impact the strength of the array connection. Select a connection to upgrade it.

  My array appears, the double nodes I slotted my abilities into with a glowing connection. Since I only have one connection that uses abilities right now, I click on it to upgrade it. An orange light flashes on the connection pulsing down to my abilities. They flash orange and I can feel a tingling sensation in my body.

  Congratulations. You have upgraded your first array connection. You have earned the achievement Stronger Together. You are granted 100 honor points as a reward.

  Hardy (Passive): Your skin, ligaments, tendons and muscles temper and are more resilient. In addition, 0 units of force and 2 units of electromagnetic energy of every impact is redirected into your personal aether.

  Energy Beam (Active): Create a beam of electromagnetic energy from your hands. Energy beam contains 10 units of power for up to 2 seconds. Siphon 2 units from your personal aether to add 1 units of power to your energy beam. Cooldown 9 seconds.

  Some nice upgrades. Hardy upgrades from one unit to two units of electromagnetic redirection and Energy Beam allows me to siphon more energy. I mentally kick myself. I have not been overcharging my Energy Beam. I don’t even know how to access my personal aether. I have a few items that deal with the aether, I should learn something about it. I think back to my fights. Between the orcs and the elves, I really did not need to overcharge my energy beam. I had always managed to muddle through. It seems that my Energy Beam ability does a significant amount of damage. If things keep dying quickly, I probably won’t ever need to use my personal aether. Even though it isn’t pressing, I really need to pay attention to my abilities and use them to their fullest. Any edge they deliver could be the edge I need in battle. Mentally kicking myself for my lack of care when fighting, I reopen my interface and click on the up arrow.

  You have leveled up. You are now level 3. You have gained 1 ability point. You have unlocked Talents. Enter the gates, battle across the galaxy, fight, win, conquer.

  You have one ability point to spend. Based on your personality, genetic disposition, and quantum entanglement with your planet, you have the following choices of abilities.

  Ballistic Projectile (Active): Accelerate an object to damaging speeds.

  Small Sound (Active): Create an illusionary sound in the distance.

  Plasma Bolts (Active): Fire plasma bolts from your hands.

  Zeal (Active): Increase your speed and reaction time.

  Mammal Communication (Passive): Understand the communication of all mammals.

  Stealth (Active): Go unnoticed by those around you.

  I think back to my first combat, there was a skater who could shoot projectiles as fast as bullets, could he have had Ballistic Projectile? If so, I also remember that his projectiles could barely penetrate my skin. I go up against someone armored or with Hardy, then the ability is next to useless. It can really tear into people that aren’t prepared for it, but not the toughest opponents.

  I look over my choices again, shaking my head in frustration. I wanted another defensive talent, something like that golden barrier the orc had. I need to think about the next battles, and my current weaknesses. I can take a hit; my skin can almost stop bullets, but it is susceptible to burning as my last fight showed. My Energy Beam is almost guaranteed to be a one hit kill, but it has such a long cooldown. In a fight I am not doing much in between shots. It is almost like I only do something every nine seconds, otherwise I am hiding behind my shield. I don’t like how I feel in battle, I feel too much like a one trick pony. If I ever run up against someone who is immune to my Energy Beam, I will be in a lot of trouble.

  Stealth is out, I am the tank in my group, and tanks need to be seen. So, is Small Sound. While undoubtfully useful, I can draw more attention by being flashy than noisy. I decide to go with Plasma Bolts, they should provide me something to do in-between energy beams and they should be flashy enough to make me a target. Before I officially select Plasma Bolts, I imagine taking Mammal Communication. Being able to talk to dogs and squirrels would be a pretty nifty ability. I just can’t see how it will help me in combat in the Gate Wars.

  You have selected Plasma Bolts.

  Plasma Bolts (Active): Create 1 bolt of Plasma out of your hands. The bolt contains 1 unit of power. Bolts gain their energy from your stamina, firing more than 15 bolts in 20 seconds will cause exhaustion. Bolts can be mentally guided after fired. Cooldown 1 second.

  To activate Plasma Bolt focus on firing a bolt of plasma from your hand. Let’s try it now.

  A target appears about twenty feet in front of me. Knowing the drill and knowing that the interface will keep bugging me until I do it, I hold out my hand to focus on firing a plasma bolt. Then it strikes me that I have no idea what shooting a plasma bolt feels like. I strain to shoot my Plasma Bolts, and I feel something happen. My energy beam starts to charge. I let it go quickly, missing the target on purpose. I need to figure out Plasma bolt, not Energy Beam. I focus on my breathing, in and out. There seems to be a feeling of tingling energy across my fingertips. I imagine the energy condensing in my palm and exploding out. A red-hot bolt of plasma fires out of my hand directly into the ground.

  Congratulations you have fired your first plasma bolt. However, you failed to break your target. Let’s try again.

  A smile cracks my face, I could still feel the tingling on my fingertips, but it was nowhere as painful as Energy Beam had been when I learned how to do that. I hold my hand up and fire another bolt. The red-hot bolt seems to guide itself by following my vision. It hits sm
ack in the center of the target, shattering it into hundreds of pieces.

  Congratulations, you have broken your first target. Would you like to compete in the challenge course?

  I focus on no. I want to practice more with my Energy Beam and Plasma Bolt. I need to focus on charging my Energy Beam while still firing my Plasma Bolts. It takes me about ten minutes of continuous practice, but Plasma Bolts and Energy Beam seem to originate from different places on my body. Energy Beam comes from inside of me and Plasma Bolts come from the surface of my hand. It Isn't too long before I can fire bolts on the run while still charging my Energy Beam. Happy with my progress I select to start the challenge course.

  A spinning timer appears floating in the distance. Three... Two... One.

  In the blink of an eye hundreds of targets of different colors appear around me. There is a timer floating in the distance. It flies toward me and fixates itself in the bottom right of my vision. It is counting down from sixty. I catch on immediately and begin to fire my Plasma Bolt every second. The challenge is to see how many targets I can break in sixty seconds. I direct the bolt with my eyes and hit the target as the targets spiral around me. I keep firing as quickly as I can. I destroy target after target. I only attack the yellow targets since that is the most basic level. I need to break targets with every bolt. No matter how many targets I break more targets keep coming appearing to replace them. Sometimes they are yellow targets sometimes red or blue. But the timer keeps counting down.

  The timer reaches 43 and I stumble forward. Suddenly, my eyes started to get heavy and my limbs seem to be made of jelly. It is hard to catch my breath and I begin to wheeze. I keep pushing through, firing bolts at targets. My arm is shaking as I hold it up and fire more plasma bolts. It is getting harder and harder to coalesce the crackling plasma. The energy is getting torn out from me with every bolt that I fire. I fall down to one knee and I can’t seem to catch my breath. I try to focus on my breathing, but even my deepest gasps don’t seem to fill my lungs. The timer reaches 28 and another wave of exhaustion hits me. I try to keep myself up. I stumble to one knee and tip over. I collapse and slip into unconsciousness.

  I wake up to a message.

  Congratulations, you have finished Plasma Bolt Challenge. You have scored 29 targets; this places you in the 15th percentile of all participants. You may retake this challenge again at any Mana Point Stadium.

  Shit. 15th percentile that is the worst I have ever done at a challenge. The more I thought about it the more it made sense. Theoretically people with this ability would have upgraded the ability and could fire more bolts before falling unconscious. This would mean that the challenges get more competitive as I increase the ability. Just another added dimension to my new world.

  I don’t understand why I was able to score so high on the first challenge. The only thing I can come up with is that the energy beam is more of a sniper weapon, so it is about aim rather than speed. During the Energy Beam challenge my aim was on point, so that could be the reason why. I do not get a reward chest for completing the challenge, so I move on and look at my interface.

  My interface has changed slightly, instead of the arrow telling me that I have leveled up, I see the array symbol and a hand with a cross inside of it. I click on the new symbol quickly, barely able to contain my excitement. New abilities are extremely useful on the power curve, and I need all the edge I can get if I am going to survive to buy Rachel the antidote.

  Welcome to Talents. Talents are a way to further customize your ability growth within the Gate Wars competition. Talents provide bonuses based on your role in a party. You can select active or passive abilities to improve your aptitude. Your talents may be reset at any time by meditating in a mana crystal garden. Your races behaviors have been scanned and the roles generated reflect the most common configurations your race would use in a team.

  Seven circles appear before me. I reach out at random and touch one. It expands to fill my vision and I can see what I thought was a circle is actually seven circles around a central orb. The orb has one circle with four orbs on it, like beads on a string. In the central orb is a single word, Tank. I exit out of the tank talents and flick through all of the other tiered ring structures. The other roles are: Support, Ranged DPS, Melee DPS, Healer, Buffer, Debuffer. The Ulterians took these roles right out of the video games I used to play in college. I am very familiar with what it means to be each of these roles. My abilities and my strengths will put me in either the tank role or the ranged dps role. Tanks being the damage takers of a group and ranged dps being primary damage dealers. I bring up each of the talent systems for the two roles.

  Tank:

  [+] Shake it Off (Passive): Improve your resistance to status effects and manipulation.

  [+] Harden Item (Passive): Empower a single item with your soul’s essence. Increase the hardness of that item.

  [+] Repair (Active): Once per day, repair an item to full durability.

  [+] Hurry Up (Passive): Increase movement speed.

  Ranged DPS:

  [+] Endurance (Passive): Increase your resistance to exhaustion.

  [+] A Little Extra (Passive): Increase the power of your applicable abilities.

  [+] Reroll Sigils (Active): Once per hour reroll the sigils gained from defeating a competitor.

  [+] Ranged (Passive): Increase the effective lethal range of your abilities.

  This was tough, all of the abilities had their bonuses and would make me stronger. My choice was what type of competitor did I want to be. I loved the idea of doing more damage, and had to stay my hand at immediately selecting A Little Extra. It was a nagging in the back of my head. Ever since the beginning of this competition I have wanted to protect my life and now my wife. My second ability, Hardy, is focused solely on taking damage. Hell, I had been disappointed when I last leveled up that my new ability choices hadn’t included a defensive ability. Who cares how much damage I did, if I couldn’t stay alive. No, my role was already decided by the person I was becoming, I am going to be a tank.

  Both Repair and Harden Item seem a little too obvious. The number cruncher inside of me tried to look at it objectively. Those talents seemed to just trade talent points for credits. Repair scrolls were fairly cheap and abundant, and hardening an item would just mean that its durability lasts longer. From the huge prices on the auction house, I figured that credits would be coming soon. If credits eventually became bountiful then spending precious talent points just to reduce my credit usage didn’t seem prudent. I haven’t encountered any status effects yet, but I could imagine that a stun or a paralyze would cripple me. The Hurry Up talent was also appealing. I had to chase down Rachel twice already, that extra movement speed would be extremely helpful, it could make a difference between arriving and arriving too late. I decide to go with Shake it Off. Surprising an enemy by resisting his stun could tips the balance in a fight.

  Shake it Off (Passive): Automatically resist a mental or physical status effect 5% of the time.

  Nice boost. A 5% chance meant that is a one in twenty chance of automatically resisting a status effect. One talent point well worth it in my opinion. Seeing that the 5% was a purple trait tells me that talents are upgradable just like abilities. We will have to keep an eye out for purple sigils. I exit out of the talent screen.

  Having only one more prompt on my interface and I decide to take care of it right away. I open up arrays. I see a hand with multiple bolts shooting from it, floating below my arrays. That must be the icon for Plasma Bolts. I focus on the area with my already filled array slots. Both Energy Beam and Hardy have an open slot connected to them, but there isn’t a way for me to slot Plasma Bolt so it was connected to both Energy Beam and Hardy. I will have to choose. It turns out the choice isn’t that hard because I almost immediately put Plasma Bolt connected to Hardy.

  Modification Unlocked. Hardy and Plasma Bolt have successfully combined. Review the modifications now.

  Hardy (Passive): Your skin, ligaments, tend
ons and muscles temper and are more resilient. In addition, 0 units of force and 2 units of electromagnetic energy and 1 unit of plasma energy of every impact is redirected into your personal aether.

  Plasma Bolts (Active): Create 1 bolt of Plasma out of your hands. The bolt contains 1 unit of power. Bolts gain their energy from your stamina, firing more than 15 bolts in 20 seconds will cause exhaustion. Expend 20 units of energy from your personal aether to remove exhaustion. Bolts can be mentally guided after fired. Cooldown 1 second.

  Success! By slotting Hardy and Plasma Bolts together, I make myself redirect plasma energy. This helps me with my defense considerably. If I had this ability in the last fight the plasma weapons from the aliens wouldn’t have done nearly as much damage. Which means that Rachel would not have had to heal me as much and she wouldn’t have had to push through the exhaustion. Plasma was also the most common energy type I have encountered so far. Overall, an excellent upgrade. The Plasma Bolt upgrade was deceptively powerful. Not having to worry too much about the exhaustion from using my Plasma Bolts means that I can shoot them faster and more often. It also gives me another use for my personal aether. I have not had to use my personal aether yet, but with this upgrade and the upgrade to Energy Beam, I probably would have to soon.

  Without any more interface guidance in the left corner of my vision, I walk up to the wall and quickly navigate to the auction house. My shield had really taken a beating in that last fight and I needed to repair it. So, I purchased a repair scroll, for 285 credits this time, and got to work repairing my shield.