One day while working in the University laboratory as a tools assistant, he overheard two of the professors discussing a new experiment in the university sanctioned by the kingdom in hushed tones.
Apparently a special drug trial was being tested for people with no martial or combat talent in the top universities in all planets of the kingdom. The matter was supposed to be a secret, but the professors were speculating that it could be a new technique to raise more combat ready civilians for war.
Hearing this, Red's interest was instantly piqued and he made inquiries about the program. Soon, he had enrolled into the program himself. Today was another day of these so called tests. Initially Red had been very excited about the possibilities of the test, however, he soon became gloomy. Every session involved him being injected with a powerful drug that made him sick to his stomach, but none of those drugs activated any special talent whatsoever, they simply made him extremely sick and often caused him to be truant at work, however, Red still continued to attend these experiments that many were continuing to drop out from.
The drug trials had become such a failure that they had become infamous all throughout the planet. Protests were being held by rights groups across the Dwight Kingdom but would be promptly quashed and silenced. Red had ended up becoming the only regular test subject on his planet. He was half of the opinion that today's test too would be one filled with pain. He just imagine it would be this bad.
Red was loaded onto the bed and then two tubes intravenously fed him a silvery blue metallic liquid into his body. For a few hours things seemed normal, the nurses kept recording his vitals and as per usual there seemed to be no responses from his body. However, his veins slowly started turning blue and he found it difficult to breathe. Before he knew it, Red had suddenly suffered a cardiac arrest and his brain was shutting down. In panic, the nurses moved him into the Intensive Care Unit built for the trial in the university hospital department. However, Red seemed to have gone into a complete stasis and his vitals were ending. His body suddenly started to melt. The doctors and nurses watched in chaos and panic as Red was dying, the chief researcher immediately informed higher ups to not administer the drug at other testing centers, having seen the effect on the subject at their facility.
At that moment. Space. A wormhole suddenly opened up in the vicinity of the Puratynt system. A pyramid shaped space ship hurtled out of the wormhole triggering all kinds of planetary alarms. The spaceship was made of a most bizarre set of materials, because it kept remolding constantly. One moment a pyramid, next a hadronic solid, at another moment a Klein bottle. It often took hyper-dimensional shapes, different parts of it attracting and repelling each other. This was a mysterious spaceship unlike any humanity had seen before.
The spaceship hurtled towards Puratynt B at an unimaginable speed and before the defenses could even raise an alarm collided into the planet, right at the location where the capital Almos was situated. However, the collision did not cause any explosion as expected, instead the shape shifting spaceship suddenly expanded to billions of feet and smothered the entire city in the mysterious material it was made of.
It smothered everything. Nothing could escape from it, no sewer, no tunnel. The entire city and all its people were smothered completely. Before anyone could react, all matter dissolved into the material, obliterating every human, pet, building, plastic on Almos instantly. No one even had any time to blink, they were obliterated instantly consumed by the mysterious shape shifting material.
The University hospital in Almos was the same. The material invaded the hospital as well, swallowing everything in its path including the precipitously dying Red. Red's body was shutting down, but through brief remittances of consciousness he noticed the mysterious silvery material dripping through the building like it was blood. As he passed out again, the material swallowed him too, Red sighed as he breathed his last...
...
Red opened his eyes. He could see the binary stars in the sky. There was nothing around him. He simply lay on the ground, naked, looking at the sky. The world around him was empty for miles upon miles as far as he could see from his sleeping position. He wondered if he had reached the afterlife, but he doubted in the existence of an afterlife. He got up, confused. His body felt physical and real. A wisp of thought occurred in his mind, perhaps he did not die.
He did not die, but he was in Almos. He remembered hazily the silvery mysterious blood like essence flooding his body and everyone around him. His mind was boggled. Could it be a terrorist attack of some kind? Unless he had mysteriously teleported to some other place, he was right in the center of Almos. Which meant Almos was completely flattened, and the eery silence that accompanied him told him that no one else survived.
How could this be possible? Red wondered. He was shocked and stunned by his primary deductions that he refused to believe it for a long time. He stood like a statue, bewilderness on his face for almost fifteen minutes. His mind slowly started working like clockwork. His primary goal for now was to survive. All he could see around him was a vast planar emptiness, as if he were alone on an uncolonized planet with no atmosphere of its own. He had to hope that the entire planet was not devoid of life and find shelter, food... and clothes.
Picking a random direction, Red, naked, began walking steadily. The land around him was extremely flat. He used the position of the red sun to ensure he did not walk in circles, it was unnerving how easy that was to do when everything around him looked identical flat emptiness and plain rock.