Elysium's Multiverse

Chapter 2

[Worldwide Quest: Escape the First Wave - Complete. Welcome to Elysium’s cortex. Welcome to the multiverse. I am the Elysium Administrator, caretaker of this new universe. Riven, Allie, and Jose - You and hundreds of millions of others from Earth are being uploaded into Elysium at this very moment. Laws of physics have been altered. Spells have been introduced. Miracles have been introduced. Martial Arts have been introduced. Multiverse initiated. Cultivation and the Dao has been introduced. Earth is now being incorporated. Common Language for Elysium’s Multiverse has been instilled in all participants for equal communication opportunities.]

[Please Review your status page by thinking or saying the words ‘status page’ with intent.]

[ERROR - REROUTING PARTICIPANT. UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY ACQUIRED. SYSTEM NOW CONSIDERING ALTERNATE PATHWAY.]

Riven blinked as he found himself in a large void of white light. Hadn’t he just touched that pillar of light? Was he inside the pillar now? He was no longer wearing his previous outfit, and as he looked around into the vast nothingness - he found that even his body was missing. His brown hair, slim athletic body and green eyes were entirely gone. The 26 year old man was completely missing his physical self.

Where had his best friend and sister gone?

[System analysis complete: Riven Thane is registered as a match for Chalgathi’s Lineage starter quest. Criteria Met: Extremely high magical affinity detected for the Unholy Pillar and all related sub-pillars. Unnaturally high affinity detected for the Blood Sub-pillar related to unique bloodline.]

[Initializing loading sequence. Starting location acquired. If you successfully complete the starter quest and tutorials afterward, you will be reunited with Allie and Jose as long as they too succeed in their own independent trials.]

[Upload finishing in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…]

[Welcome to Elysium’s Multiverse.]

Riven came to his senses with a gasp and shot up from his position on the cold stone ground. Water pelted his skin as a torrent of rain launched into him from the stormy heavens amidst heavy claps of thunder and flashes of lightning.

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He gagged, his muscles spasming as he hurled and dry heaved – twisting around onto his front and trying to clear his head of the nausea as black ichor trickled from his mouth onto the ground.

Wait… black ichor?

[***Chalgathi’s Lineage Start Quest: Special, One-Time Event***

Your first step into Elysium has not been an easy one, and you have been given a test to complete prior to your tutorial. Your past haunts you and your future is uncertain. You have fallen from the grace of your peers and have been forgotten, a lone man in a sea of those who care little about you or your circumstances… Yet, you find that you don’t need them. You can do this on your own. All on your own… let the world be damned in your wake, as you tread the path few dare to take.

***Notice: All 1672 participants on Earth having Unholy-related bloodlines have been rerouted into Chalgathi’s Lineage Starter Quest.

***Notice: You have been afflicted with the Curse of Anthus, and your body begins to painfully rot from the inside out. Be within the first 200 participants to reach the top of the pyramid, or die.]

Another crack of lightning lit up the sky, and despite the immense amount of nausea and pain his body was riddled with – Riven couldn’t help but gape at his surroundings now that his vision was beginning to clear.

In front of him was a massive, looming pyramid of almost Aztec design. It had at least two hundred large steps before the top, and simply put - was huge. Stone statues of gargoyles, hooded skeletons bearing scythes, gigantic skulls and black knights were placed at intervals around the pyramid all the way up to the halfway point along the side. At the top of the pyramid a pillar of green fire rose skywards into the dark heavens amidst the downpour of rain.

Even despite the pillar of eerie green flames reaching skywards at the top of the pyramid, the structure seemed to soak up light around it and the flaming pillar did little to illuminate the pyramid given its size.

The pyramid sat as a monolith amidst a barren wasteland of dead trees in a sprawling forest that spread out into the horizon. Cold winds blew through their dead branches and rattled their old, withered bark with a sound that could only be described akin to that of sandpaper rubbing against sandpaper, though even this was somewhat dampened by the continued booming of thunder and torrent of water falling from the heavens.

Lastly, and to Riven’s growing confusion, he saw hundreds of other people just like him crawling to their feet and orienting themselves to their surroundings. Men and women of many ages glanced over at one another in shock, surprised to be here by all accounts, a few of them tried yelling to one another over the blasting sound of the storm.

Why had Allie been taken from him!? This damnable alien god-figure could go straight to hell!

Riven felt a lurching sensation in his gut again, and he doubled over with an intense coughing fit that left his insides reeling with pain. Looking down in astonishment as more black ichor shot out of his mouth and splattered along the stone ground at the pyramid’s base, he went wide eyed. Panic set in when he noticed that down along his stomach: there were growing clumps of blackened, necrosing veins slowly spreading across his abdomen and chest.

Many of the others around him were in similar states of shock and denial over the next couple of seconds. Some looked to one another as if to ask whether or not this was real, others keeled over in pain, and even more of them stood staring up at the pyramid like deer caught in headlights. But when one of the other young men nearby began to get up and sprinted headlong towards the pyramid’s steps, then started ascending despite his own body showing signs of the same rot that afflicted Riven – that’s when the horror truly hit home.

If that prompt that’d appeared had been true he needed to get moving, and he wasn’t about to bet his life on all this being some kind of nightmare. He could find the answers to the plethora of other questions he had later.

Adrenaline flooded his body and Riven’s muscles nearly spasmed as he shot forward across the short gap between himself and the steps leading up the dark pyramid. He could only curse and bound up the large carved steps – each at least three feet high – as a swarm of other people quickly began to follow, a mixture of horror and frantic need setting in across the scattered crowd.

The sky rumbled and the wind and rain continued to crash down upon him. His bare feet pushed against the cold stone, slipping more than once as he drove himself – step by step – up the dark pyramid’s face. A looming statue of a knight came into his field of view while Riven tried in vain to wipe away rain water from his face amidst the downpour. Riven paused, briefly looking up and into the dull set eyes when he heard a sharp crack of noise, and the figure quickly started to crumble along its joints.

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“Ah… Fuck you.”

Heart picking up its pace as the knight began to move with chips of stone breaking off its body as it whirled on him, he shouted out in a panic and lurched to the left to narrowly dodge a slow-coming sword strike that shattered part of the step he’d been on not even a moment before.

He felt like his chest was going to explode. The rolling pauldrons of the creature shifted, the statue that was easily twice his size looked his way… and it silently turned to meet him once more. All around the pyramid, as people began encountering their own monstrosities made from the bedrock of the pyramid’s body that they’d thought to have just been statues, screams began to erupt amidst the clash of thundering clouds. The oncoming torrent of water falling from the skies did little to drown out the sounds of horrified wails.

The statue let out a creaking, guttural groan and lifted its weapon again - but Riven didn’t wait around to let the slow-moving attack bash him. He dodged left – slipping and skinning his arm in the process as a stinging pain shot up the length of his left limb when another blow crashed into the stone steps nearby. Grunting in exasperation and disbelief at his current situation while he made a mad dash to regain the lost ground, he set his sights higher. He only gave the statue that’d swung at him a very brief look over the shoulder, then powered ahead with renewed determination.

He shoved ahead, barely passing two others on his left before the next attack from a new opponent missed him by inches. A fire-breathing skull of stone turned and washed away a woman frantically climbing next to him, and he could feel the burning heat of flames that he’d barely scraped by. She screamed and writhed, falling from her perch to bounce down the now dozens of stone steps like a burning beacon in the night. An old man to his right and a little further above him made the unfortunate mistake of getting a little too close to a stone gargoyle, which pounced on him and devoured him to the horrid sounds of begging, screaming and snapping bones.

The pained or horrified looks the people around him gave as black ichor mixed with their own blood that dribbled along the pyramid steps, before being slowly washed away by the storm, only did more to make him nauseous. On top of that – his body wasn’t responding the way he was used to. He wasn’t out of shape by any means, or at least he hadn’t been… but now he found himself getting winded by doing half of what he could have done prior to arriving here. He had no idea why, but he felt significantly weaker and slower. Perhaps it was just the ‘curse’ he’d been afflicted with?

He had no real answers for what he was doing here other than those god damned text-box holograms that would have seemed utterly ridiculous to him if he wasn’t here at the moment. Had some angry god come down from the heavens to smite his world? Had aliens abducted him? Had he been slammed into some kind of ridiculous fantasy world without even having fulfilled his sexy Latin maid fantasies?

He really… Really didn’t want to fail, or die. He was too young for that shit.

His muscles started to give out on him as he got up to the halfway mark, and he found himself panting – all the while continuing to wretch up that disgusting black gunk that seemed to coat his insides like coal in a chimney. The screams had dwindled down now as most of the statues had been passed by this point – with only the stragglers at the very back still keeping up with the monsters. The glistening stone gargoyles, reapers, skulls and knights all seemed hesitant to follow them up, so the only problem now would be the other people.

Of which there were still hundreds.

About half of the men and women who’d started here were dead, having met their untimely ends one way or another by now.

Riven heard a curt scream from up above and he narrowly avoided another man about his age tumbling down the pyramid slope to bounce unceremoniously with audible cracks and crunches on every hit. The screaming stopped a couple steps down from where Riven gawked back at the man, the poor guy’s head oozing out blood as he remained wide-eyed on the steps. A large gash along his skull and his neck twisted in a sickening abnormal angle.

The storm continued to roar overhead, and he stared at the corpse while taking in deep inhales between coughing fits.

“Don’t stop!”

He turned. The call was from a middle-aged Asian woman to his right. She too was heaving, trying to catch her breath as her slick black hair was coated to her face and the signs of necrosis were evident along her bare stomach and breasts.

It was just like his own body, where the black signs of rot were beginning to creep into his pectoralis muscles and even his right thigh.

“Keep moving!” She puked, throwing a hand back down to the trailing people behind them and to the few men and women who were climbing ahead. “We are in the forefront! Don’t let yourself die because you get a weak stomach!”

“Yeah… Yeah you’re right…” Riven shakily gulped, nodding to her and trying to smile in appreciation at her words of encouragement. But he failed this attempt when another wave of nausea overcame him. Instead, he pushed himself up by his hands and knees; willing himself to move forward even despite the sickness and pain that afflicted his body.

Only halfway to go… Only halfway… to go…

The second half of the pyramid’s climb was far, far harder than the first half – even despite the lack of enemies. Instead of abrupt and violent ends to meet them, the participants found themselves huddled over and clutching at their stomachs or bleeding from their eyes as they desperately tried to finish the quest prompt for the promise of relief.

Riven, fortunately, appeared to have more willpower than the others. Even some of those who’d gotten head starts on him began to sag behind. He crawled, struggled, and breathed heavily while closing his eyes to shut out the pain – trying to concentrate on the steady stream of roaring water that berated him as if to deny him his goal. His muscles pumped and spasmed, moving even despite the heavy amount of damage his body had accrued, and his mind internally roiled with a torture unlike anything he’d ever experienced before… as it became his new, all-encompassing reality.

“Out of my way!” A desperate snarl from ahead caused Riven’s face to lift, and he saw someone he could barely distinguish through the storm shove the Asian woman Riven had briefly spoken with.

She was obviously dizzy and weak, far too weak to catch herself, and she began to stumble backwards past Riven’s own spot just behind her.

He blinked rapidly, and with a herculean effort managed to catch the woman with violent vertigo setting in upon the effort. He fell forward, collapsing with the stranger who’d encouraged him earlier onto the stone steps and saving her from a brutal backwards fall.

They locked eyes through the downpour, both panting on the steps with ichor leaking out of their eyes, noses and mouths.

“Keep moving…” Riven managed to say with a pained grunt. “Don’t let yourself die now!”

She stared at him, remaining where they’d fallen face-first onto the steps, and winced as new patches of rot began spreading across her right cheek. “I owe you one…”

He gave the woman an encouraging nod and glared up the pyramid towards the climbing man who'd nearly killed her. “Come on.”

Riven hoisted himself up through blinding pain and tears, his body screaming at him and trying to get him to stop. He looked over his shoulder when the woman faltered in her own attempts to move. He reached down to help her but was overtaken by a dizzy spell, nearly falling over as he stumbled onto the forward step. His body tried to deny his efforts to help, to keep going, but through sheer force of will and a defiant sneer on his face he reached down and hoisted the woman up.

Silently, they powered on.

They struggled, leaning on one another when the other was weak. They muttered encouragement to each other as they trudged ahead, and despite their failing organs and the immense amount of pain they felt - they persevered. Riven’s mind was set on only one thing - survival. It was a base instinct he could not ignore, a driving force that far outweighed any motivator that’d been present in his life prior to this moment. He just focused on putting one step in front of the other, one crawling hand in front of the other, until he finally found himself at the top of the pyramid.

The top was devoid of any structures, but it had a large circular pit in the center where rippling green flames of the skywards pillar still erupted at the center. His body immediately rid itself of the rot when they passed through a thin, shimmering veil of gray mist - and a system notification appeared in front of his face.

[You have completed part 1 of 3 in the Chalgathi’s Lineage starter quest.]

He gasped and spasmed, finding simultaneous delight in his sudden lack of pain and despair after having gone through such a strenuous ordeal. Tears leaked down his face to mix with the rainwater, and he lifted his shaking hands into the air with a primal scream of defiance towards the heavens.

Beside him the panting Asian woman who’d been encouraging him earlier gave him a sideways glance of relief before puking onto the pyramid’s stone rooftop. Dozens of others around them who’d also reached the top were in similar states: emotionally discharging with sobs, wails and hysterical laughing fits befitting that of madmen.

They’d survived.