The Allbright System - A Sci-Fi Progression LitRPG Story

Mrek: “It meant the thing on the holo-screens when I was seven, watching Sons of the Void with my dad: Vareth holding a dropship in the air with one hand.

Cool movie stuff.

You close the screen, you go eat dinner, y’know?

Then you enlist and they give you the briefings—classifications, Paths, Inheritances, probability statistics.

Professor at the front of the room, very official tone, whole datascreen presentation and all.

And you're sitting there half paying attention because you're tired and your bunk smells like someone else's feet, and the whole time your brain is just filing it under the same drawer as Vareth and the dropship.

You hear the words, y’know?

You even think, “sure, I'll keep that in mind.”

But none of it's real yet. Nothing makes it real.

Vonn: “When did it become real, then?”

Mrek: “PFC 931.

Six weeks into a push on a moon that I will never willingly revisit, heading for a settlement called Tauven Crossing.

We were third in the column.

Ahead of us were two squads—Thirteenth and Sixth, good people, nothing to worry about.

[Long pause.]

I was complaining to Sergeant Oresh about the mud—genuine Emperor-damned moon-mud, up to the knee, heating element in my left boot had been dead for two days—and she was ignoring me completely, as usual, y’know? And—

And then Thirteenth Squad just stopped.

And I mean, like, not like the column slowed or they hit a wall or took fire or anything.

They just stopped… being. Mid-stride.

There was no sound, no flash, nothing I could point to afterward and say I saw that and then this happened.

One moment they were there—seven people I knew by name, knew their card-playing habits, their favourite foods, moving through the grey light of early morning—and then suddenly the column had a gap in it, and the gap was filled with things that used to be people.

I don't want to be too specific about what it looked like, y’know?

I'll just say—there was no inward. Everything went out—all at once.

My… My legs stopped working, then.

I'm not gonna sugar-coat it, and I’m not trying to be poetic about it either—they literally stopped working. My knees went and I went down in the mud with them.

I just sat there, and I remember thinking, very clearly, the exact same thought I'd had a hundred times watching Vareth on the holo-screen when I was seven—

“Oh. Cool movie stuff.”

Like my brain refused to even categorize it any other way, y’know?

Refused to let it be real, even though I was sitting in the mud watching the evidence of it not even fifteen meters ahead of me.

Like the only way it could survive the next thirty seconds was to pretend it was still fiction, and whatever input it had just received was nothing but, y’know?

Sergeant Oresh hauled me into cover before I'd even registered she was moving.

The whole engagement was maybe… four minutes.

The Psyker was gone by the time we pushed in. Just straight—gone.

It was just suddenly quiet again at some point: Same grey light. Same mud. Same cold in my boot.

Just without Thirteenth and parts of Sixth…”

Vonn: “What changed after that?”

Mrek: “What changed?”

[Quiet laugh, no humor in it]

“Well, I suddenly became very interested in Resolve, y’know?

Added all the points for the next several Levels into it afterwards.

Which every veteran who's been through something like that will tell you too—and which is both completely rational and also, in practice, almost entirely a waste of time.

Because then you don't see another one.

Not for two years, not for four.

You run into precogs on your side here and there, maybe hear about a Telekinetic a few sectors over, and the whole time it's just normal-ass war.

People shooting at other people with things that make physical sense, y’know?

But even the friendly ones—even the precogs saving your squad from an ambush—there's something wrong about standing next to them.

Not bad wrong, y'know, not dangerous. Just wrong.

Like… You grow up with the bones of the universe underneath you—cause and effect, objects don't move unless something moves them, the floor stays where it is, y’know?

You don't think about any of that consciously. You just stand on it.

A Psyker doesn't need it the same way you do.

They're just politely using it because it's more convenient than not. And your brain knows it, somehow, even when they're just eating rations and complaining about the same mud you're complaining about.

So the Resolve then just sits there, and the years go by, and slowly it stops feeling urgent, y’know?

And you've almost forgotten all about it.

Almost.

My old man—ninety-three now, grows things outside Rein-Casset, most settled person I know—I mentioned Psyker activity near my sector once, offhand, and he went very still—not frightened or anything.

Just still, the way a person gets still when something old moves in them, y’know?

"You don't forget, kiddo," he said, then. "You think you do. You don't."

I believe him.

I haven't forgotten yet either…”

[Shortened Excerpt from "The Long March Back: Conversations with Veterans of the Galactic War", Vol. 4 — Serath Vonn, Veshan Academic Press, PFC 941]