Brute Force - Draft 1, Chapter One

Some of you (those on Discord) have probably seen me post snippets of this project. It's basically a fun diversion from Archemi Online - I felt like writing a more pulpy sort of LitRPG.

The goal is to write about 1000 words of this a day while I work on Warsinger and Blaze of Glory (working title), the next books in ArchOn. I won't be serializing/publishing Brute Force until all three books in the trilogy are written.

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I woke up in heaven with a mouthful of sand.

"Pffpppfft!" I flailed upright. Spat and coughed. My body felt three times too large, like a sausage stuffed into a too-tight skin. The sun beat down on my back, made seeing difficult. I was on a beach. 

My EdenFRAME was not supposed to have a beach.

To my left, the ocean hissed and burbled. The wind skipped across a series of mossy-green rock bluffs to my right, whispered through the dense jungle further back. As beaches went, it was a nice one. Brilliant blue water. Black sand. There were sticks, shells and dogfish egg husks, kelp and jellyfish, but no man-made trash. Silvery fish darted around in the shallows.

There was no beach this clean in the real world. I licked my parched lips, took a deep breath, and looked down at my hands and arms.

Well, fuck.

I wasn't me.

I was huge. Not huge in a good way. Veins popped between my skin and the grotesque swell of muscle beneath. My hands were like hams, clumsy and rough. Dirty nails. Dirty everything. Under the dirt, lots of tattoos. Crisp, clear, newly etched in navy blue ink. Grinning devils and naked women, mandalas, a snake writhing on a dagger, a sphynx cat in a monk's robe, making the sign of the pope. I pushed my chin down to look at my shoulders and chest. Two stars, like compass roses. Russian criminal tattoos.

"Fuck." I reached up to scruff this stranger's head. I was bald. No stubble at all. Just sand. Once I was sure I could move my arms, I rolled over onto my belly and struggled up to hands and knees. Eventually. It was like trying to flip a whale carcass. My limbs just didn't work right. I was like a newborn foal, trying to stagger upright on legs that were too long and too strange. Brain and body didn't match. When I tried to crawl forward, I tripped over myself and ate shit.

"Pffft!" The sand sure tasted real. My skin crawled with sweat. It felt real, but it wasn't real, because there was a tear-drop shaped Hydration meter hanging to my upper-right. It was pulsing orange. The meter was almost exactly half full, as was the ham-shaped icon below that. A Nourishment meter. HP and Temperature were beneath that. It was 98 degrees in Sunny Wherever-the-Fuck-I-Was.

Stupidly, I rocked back onto my enormous ass. A red holographic display appeared in the air in front of me. Blazing lines of text appeared, read out to me by a cool, genderless voice.

[Welcome to the Crucible, VANCE BRUKOV.]

[You are here because someone believes you have what it takes to become Legendary]

[You have a choice to make: Survive or Die.]

[Which will it be?]

The text cleared. Two buttons appeared. They were red, crawling with white embers. One read 'Accept', the other 'Refuse'.

I stared at them. The Accept and Refuse buttons hovered patiently.

"There's only one logical option. That's not a choice." My voice sounded like my body. Deep, brutish. Nothing like me. "EdenFRAME Information. Where am I?"

[If you do not choose, you will be erased in 4.9 seconds.]

"Okay. Accept." I scowled. Scowling felt a lot more impactful now that I looked like a waxed gorilla.

The Accept button crackled, then flared with white light. Both buttons vanished. A three-panel holographic screen came up in their place. The right panel was a picture of 'me' with some empty tables. It was about what I expected. Hard face straight out of some Nazi asshole's private Aryan spank-bank. Cock big enough to put someone's eye out if I wasn't careful. Any woman in her right mind would take one look at it and get out the crucifix and salt. Whoever designed my avatar had something to prove. Or compensate for.

The center panel was a mix. Equipped Armor and Weapons, currently empty. Quickslots for tools and items. There was a Stats table and other numeric information. Weight limit. Hydration and Nourishment. Beneath that was a row of nine pips that glowed with a shifting light. Underneath the pips was a strange grid, shaped like a five-pointed star. There was no textural information - just six slots in the star, one at each point and one in the middle.

[Welcome to the Arena, Vance Brukov. I will inform you of the rules.]

The red text appeared over the menu, this time.

[The Cruicible is a testing ground. It is the vessel in which Champions are forged.]

[To ascend from the Crucible, you alone must find and slay the Gods who keep you here. To lure the Gods, bring them offerings.]

[You cannot have people help you in this task. However, you share the world with the children of the Gods: the Daevas. Enslave them and bend them to your purposes using the Control Collar in your inventory. You may have an active team of six.]

[Daeva will not obey cowards. If you want one, you must subdue it yourself.]

[The only time rules apply to combat is in the Colosseum. Daeva battles there have formal rules which must be obeyed.]

[There are no other combat restrictions. Other Gladiators will try and stop you. Kill or be killed.]

[Every Gladiator has nine lives. There are no exceptions. When your last life is lost, you will be extinguished.]

[If you defeat the Gods, you will ascend. Your reward is eternal paradise.]

[If you are entertaining, sponsors may send you helpful gifts. Learn more about Sponsors in your Channel tab.]

[Your first task is to survive. Good luck.]

"Channel tab?" When I asked the question, it appeared above the other three screens. The new menu was a videostreaming management interface. There was an active livestream in progress. I looked back. No camera. The video gave me a great view of my sandy ass. I couldn't turn it off. 

There were other features. A clicker. Three people were watching the stream, and one of them had commented in the text channel. 'First'. There was a betting panel with various odds. My odds of keeping all nine lives. The chance I'd make it through the first night. The chance I'd tame a 'brute' in the first day. All of the odds were shit. One person had made a bet anyway. Even as I watched, another gambling option appeared. "Eaten by Hell Pigs on the first day." The odds on that one were good. They got better as people began to join the stream and lay their bets. A warning sign.

I was already running by the time shrill screams pierced the air. Men, all of them. Giggling and screaming like hyenas.

They were coming from jungle, and I was too slow. My body still didn't work right. I was used to everything being a fine-tuned machine. A professional fighter's body. Hard, lean, medium-sized frame, stringy and fast. I blundered through the trees like a rhino, shoving past things I should have skipped over. Within a minute, I was heaving for breath, but I began to get the hang of it. Trample instead of jump. I could charge with my shoulders through vines that would have strangled me IRL, tearing them from the trees. Birds whirled up in a screaming chorus. Birds with teeth and clawed wings.

Dinosaurs.

"We're coming for you boy! The Pigs are comin' for youuuu!" A man's high-pitched shriek broke through the screams of the others. I was bulldozing the road they needed to chase me.

Guttural roars added to the chorus. Animals? They were big. If they had animals, there was no way I could outrun them. Not unless there was somewhere to leap off into water.

I headed up - always up. Bare feet skidding on leaves, top-heavy and blundering, I drove myself up toward a ridge as the Hell Pigs kept pace. I heard a tree smash and topple behind me. Turned to look back. That was a mistake. My legs nearly tangled up when I saw what was behind me.

The raiders wore armor. Bones, chitin, some metal. The rest of their outfits were pure post-apoc fetishwear. Old ripped leather. Black tribal paintwork on their faces. Nostril piercings that looked like tusks. One guy had a coif made out of bullets. They had spears and crossbows, a few old-fashioned rifles. The six in the lead were riding monsters.

The one in the lead was a sabertooth on roids. It was bigger than a polar bear, with red fur the shocking color of fresh blood. The ones following up were just as bad. A black glossy beast with six legs and spined tentacles, like a giant panther from hell. Giant feathered Velociraptors. A muscle-bound hammerhead with skin that pulsed blue, yellow and orange, shifting with every step. Probably weighed four or five tons.

I was naked. Unarmed. Uncoordinated thanks to the body swap. 

There was no water on the other side of the small cliff I'd run to - just a gully full of ferns and sharp stumps. 

Fuck these guys.

Adrenaline was enough to put my brain back in my body. I squared up, as if I was in the ring. The animals churned up bracken and mud beneath their feet.

My eyes narrowed, and I lunged forward, running between the first two riders. They thundered past, screeching to a stop at the edge of the ridge.

"Get him!" Bullethat screamed. He was riding the raptor. Spit flew from his mouth as I sprinted past.

The guys on foot pointed bows and guns at me. The guns had long barrels - enough I could grab the end of one and push it up as the Pig fired. It was a one-shot rifle with a kick like a mule. The man's shoulder jerked back. My training kicked in.

In the ring, that punch would have cleaned his clock. But I was bigger. Stronger. Inhumanly strong. The man's head snapped across. His skinny chicken neck cracked and he fell to the ground limp. Not unconscious. Dead.

I'd never killed a man before. It stopped me cold.

A literal fatal mistake.

The first arrow took me just beside my spine. The second and third hit my left shoulder. I barely felt them. Thump thump thump. My heart drowned out the sound of the gunshots, or maybe the gunshots deafened me. I barely remember grabbing someone by the head, punching through his skull like thin rice paper, being horrified and throwing him back. I stumbled back into someone else, bowling him over. When I looked back, he had a knife. We wrestled for it. I won.

"What are you idiots doing!? He's a fucking noob! There are people watching this!" Bullethead screeched.

The guy under me spat and tried to bite. I saw sharpened rotting teeth and punched him on reflex. His jaw folded like warm clay. He squealed - a real, garbled sound of pain. Things were thumping into my back.

"Guys, it's not a person! It's a fucking BRUTE!" Someone was shouting. "Switch to tranqs!"

"I am using tranqs!"

They sounded more scared than I felt. I bounced up with the knife, but more arrows hit me before I could get my bearings. One took me in the lower back. Hot, white, searing acid pain tore from kidney to throat.

There was screaming and whooping. Blind, I roared wordlessly and began stabbing as men jumped on me. The blade bounced off armor, then found flesh. I didn't care about killing anyone now. No matter how many went down, more piled on. Might have been the same guys who'd died before.

[You're Level 3!]

[You're Level 4!]

[You're Level 5!]

Every time I gained a level, my total HP went up. But it was still draining faster than it was refilling. I took a blow to the head from a club. The smell of ozone filled my nose as I slammed the knife into someone's skull.

[You're Level 6!]

[You're Level 7!]

[You have new Subscribers!]

New subscribers. Just what I always wanted. The blows rained down as someone got their arm around my neck. I couldn't seem to pull the knife free as the grey fuzz at the edge of my vision closed in.

I didn't know where I was. I knew I wasn't supposed to be here, stabbed and shot and choking to unconsciousness. But I knew one thing.

The motherfuckers who had sent me here were gonna pay. With interest.