"Why the hell did you bring me here, System?" Jack snapped at the translucent interface in front of him. The response, as always, was mechanical and unhelpful:
[Time Remaining: 5:00 minutes. Make your final purchases.]
"Right. Five minutes until you ditch me. Figures." Jack sighed, running a hand through his disheveled hair. He'd spent two years slaving away for this damned system, and now it was about to abandon him like a bad investment.
"How good would it be if I just stayed?" Jack pondered as he felt his mind going back to the past.
His fists clenched. He could almost hear his old life calling: a cramped apartment, the piles of bills, and the hours spent researching Ancient Civilizations for low pay. It wasn't glamorous, but it wasn't lethal.
"Damn it," Jack whispered. "I want to go back."
He snapped back to reality and focused on salvaging what little hope he had left.
"System, convert the money in my bank account all into points! Leave only one hundred and twenty thousand dollars!"
[Warning! Conversion rate is currently at 1:100. It is recommended that you focus on meeting the system requirements. Are you sure you want to proceed?]
"Just do it!" Jack snapped. The regret hit him instantly.
He had been saving up so much of his money for the past two years. All in the hopes that when he fully unlocked the system he would be able to purchase a mansion deep in the center of the city. And live rich without any worries about money or being forced to fight monsters.
If he had held on he would have got a new system evaluation the conversion rate would have been much lower and he could get much more value for his buck. Of course, this could have been the system plan all along to reduce the amount of benefits he could extract from it.
[$345,076 has been converted to 3450 points.]
"I should have seen this coming," Jack thought, bitterness twisting his gut. But it was too late now.
He should have known better when the system threw a hundred pages of legal text at him. But who questions a magical cheat? The stories, the shows, the games-they all sell the same lie: these systems are saviors, not traps. And like everyone else, he fell for it, blind to how the idea wormed into his decisions until it was too late.
Jack clenched his fists, his nails biting into his palms. The screen blurred as anger bubbled into his chest, hot and suffocating.
[Warning! Warning! Time Remaining: 3:00 minutes. Please satisfy the mission or make your final purchases.]
Jack's mind stumbled as he felt his throat go dry. Two minutes had already gone by. This was too fast!
There were all sorts of things he wanted to do. How could he carefully choose if he should upgrade his attributes or skills with such little time? How much should he upgrade them with his limited points? His life was at stake at choosing the correct answer!
The prospect of six months in military service made Jack's stomach churn. Zombies, mutants, viral outbreaks lurked beyond the city walls, and the casualty rate-ten percent-wasn't just a number; it was a death sentence waiting to be drawn. The thought of being torn apart by the infected or devoured by mutated insects was too vivid, too real. It didn't matter how slim the odds seemed-one wrong move, and he'd be another name on a casualty list.
But what should he choose!?
"Show I convert the last 120,000?" Jack wondered. Converting the last bit of his money would give him one thousand two hundred more points. That was enough to buy another skill and upgrade it once or twice.
"If I keep the money, I might buy time. If I spend it all I might survive longer. Either way, the system's going to screw me over."
[Warning! Warning! Time Remaining: 59 seconds. Please satisfy the mission or make your final purchases.]
"Are you doing this on purpose, system!?" Jack barked with panic. There was not enough time to decide.
Jack bit his lips and bit the bullet. He frantically began pouring his points into upgrading his attributes. Whatever was left over he would put in his survival skills.
Jack dumped most of his points into his intelligence and defense, next was his endurance and dexterity- survival was key, and finally strength got whatever was leftover. There wasn't time for perfection.
"If I can't stop myself from being sent to the front lines, I need to survive. everything thrown at me. Think fast, Jack! Defense, endurance-no, intelligence first. Figure out the danger before it hits."
After spending on his attributes, Jack turned to his skill list and hastily purchased skills he thought he would need. He would learn all of them during his military service but it would be best if he had some foundation in them so that he would be ahead of everyone in terms of capabilities. If he was lucky the military might think he is talented and too valuable to be sent outside the city walls.
[User has spent 1000 points to unlock the Better Sleep Skill.]
[User has spent 900 points to increase Better Sleep Skill. Raising it to E+ grade!]
He unlocked Basic Survival, spent extra to raise it to Grade D, and added Novice Sniper at the last second.
[System has detected that a large quantity of points is being put into non-game developing skills without the user completing the mission. It is highly recommended to save some points to make better games.]
"Shut up! What's the point of saving points when I'm going to fail anyways!" Jack gritted his teeth as a wave of pain flooded his body he felt thousands of burning needles poke his body.
But he endured the pain because he knew that it would save his life in the future. It wasn't his fault that the Game Making System that came with him to help him out gave him an impossible mission.
He had to reach one million players in one of the games he developed. And he wasn't allowed to cheat and copy any game that existed in his old world either.
All his games had to be original and also follow the system's strict requirements of being recreational games. The system never gave him direct answers to his question on why he couldn't rip off any of his past lives games. Even if they weren't going to be as popular in this world due to the high level of development into the gaming and entertainment industry the games he wanted to create didn't exist here. No one would know except for him and the system.
Even restricting him to only creating recreational games was odd. In this world, games were divided into two categories: Recreational and Military Grade. Recreational games were self explanatory; they were all games that weren't Military Grade. 2D puzzle games and high level virtual reality games would all be under the same category of Recreational games.
Jack had spent hours debating the system's arbitrary rules: no military grade games. Why? Wasn't his survival a better mission than creating random recreational games?
Although recreational games were the most popular game in the market, creating a military grade game would guarantee that he could avoid being drafted to military service. With the skills he had gotten from the system it wouldn't be too hard for him to create a military grade game that met the government requirements and with the system's help he could directly avoid having to get a military game developer license.
Jack had long shelved the growing doubts that nagged at him, distracted by the ever-looming clock and his dwindling point pool.
In two years, his most successful project had been Ranked Survival, an RPG MMO that garnered a pretty good size of 60,000 players. But pretty good didn't cut it. Not when the system demanded he hit one million players—an unreachable target.
Despite hundreds of thousands of points accumulated from his games, most had been poured into his game development skills. Now, only a handful of points remained for his survival.
[Warning! Warning! 10 seconds remaining! Make your final purchases!]
The system's reminder came again, harsher than before. Jack gritted his teeth and shoved aside his frustration. He was down to less than three hundred points. The time for perfect decisions was over.
In desperation, he threw his remaining points into the system's Random Skill Slot—one of the few options available to him. It was the system's way of pushing him to spend points quickly, promising a chance at acquiring something useful for his journey.
But Jack knew how this worked. The more points he sunk into it, the higher the odds of landing a useful skill, or so the system claimed. In his early days, he'd tried it a few times, occasionally getting lucky with valuable skills, but more often than not, he'd ended up with skills that weren't helpful at the time. He'd once wasted a chunk of points on Locking Picking, Jogging, and Scooter Savant, skills that had zero relevance to his game development.
He could have chosen a skill for certain—one that he knew would be useful, but the system's rules were infuriating. To unlock a skill directly, he'd need a thousand points—an outrageous amount when he was starting out. Now, he was back to no longer being able to afford that luxury. All he had left was a gamble.
"Please, not another useless skill," Jack muttered, his palms sweating.
[User has spent 278 points to randomly select a skill….. Congratulations, the user has acquired the Fashion Sense Skill.]
Jack's head throbbed, his thoughts tangling in a knot of regret and fury. He couldn't help but laugh-bitter, humorless.
"Fashion Sense? Oh, fantastic. At least I'll die looking stylish," Jack muttered through his gritted teeth.
His legs buckled, slamming against the ground. The pain barely registered, drowned out by the hot sting of his body unraveling. Jack's head throbbed like a drum beaten out of rhythm, and every nerve in his body screamed as if electrified. His brain felt as if thousands of little spiders were eating their way out. His vision blurred into a kaleidoscope of colors, and the ground beneath him tilted dangerously.
[Mission failed! System evaluation, partial failure.]
The words hung in the air, their weight pressing on his chest. All those hours, all the sacrifices, and this was how it ended? His mind screamed for answers, but the kaleidoscope of colors warped into a suffocating darkness, and his screams echoed in the void before cutting off. But not before a final thought tore through his mind: "I should be getting the call soon."