Global Awakening: I Build Mechs and Slaughter the Gods

Pain.

It felt like someone had cracked his skull open from the inside and poured in a lifetime of someone else's memories.

Arthur's eyes snapped open. He was gasping, his shirt soaked through with cold sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs. Streets he had never walked, faces he had never met, a childhood in a rusted tin shack: all of it kept flooding in, burying his own memories beneath it.

He had transmigrated. Somehow, his soul had been dragged into a parallel world and forced to merge with an orphan boy who shared his name.

Before he could finish processing the splitting agony, a voice barked in his ear.

"Arthur! You're up! What are you standing there for?"

Arthur jerked his head up. On a raised platform stood a stocky man in his fifties, Mr. Davis, his homeroom teacher, according to the new memories. Davis held a black stone the size of a human head, and he was watching Arthur with an expression that was hard to read.

Arthur turned slowly. A schoolyard. A packed schoolyard, thousands of students in gray uniforms, and every single one of them was staring at him. Some eyes burned with feverish anticipation. Some were already smirking.

His old life was already fraying at the edges. The orphan's life was crisp: dead parents, a rusted shack in the Ninth District, three years of scraping by on stale ration bread and fists to the face.

And the memories supplied the rest. Today was Awakening Day, the day every eighteen-year-old in the city received their System.

A hundred years ago, the red moon had risen over the world. Beasts had poured out of cracks in the earth, and humanity had been driven underground, into walled cities buried beneath the ruins. The Wall still stood, a hundred meters of black alloy ringing the last cities. Beyond it, the beasts still hunted at night. Since then, the System had been the only thing standing between mankind and extinction. Everyone got one. That was the iron law.

And there was a second iron law: Systems were hidden. Absolutely, completely hidden.

No one could see what anyone else had bound. A mouse might be hiding a tiger. A beggar might be carrying a god-slaying skill. Every person in this schoolyard was either bluffing or being bluffed, and the only way to survive was to never show your hand.

In the third row, a broad-shouldered boy with a shaved head, Victor, a voice whispered in Arthur's memory, was grinning at him like a butcher eyeing a pig.

It was a world full of monsters wearing human skin.

He had watched it happen to others, in the orphan's memories. A student would press a palm to the stone, and it would flare: red for combat, blue for elemental, gold for the rare ones that made the whole yard gasp. Even the weakest Systems, the life-class ones, left a faint white glow, like a candle behind paper. Every stone lit. Every single time.

That was the part that turned Arthur's stomach cold. If his stayed dark, everyone would know.

"Come up here, boy," Davis said, a little more gently. "Put your hand on the stone."

Arthur swallowed. His legs felt like wet rope as he climbed the steps, each one echoing in the silence. He stretched out a trembling right hand and pressed his palm against the cold black surface.

Hum.

Something moved. Cold, slick, and thick, like a leech sliding up the inside of his arm, a strange wave poured out of the stone and burrowed straight into his mind.

Arthur went rigid.

Wrong. This was wrong. This didn't feel like a gift from the heavens. It felt like a mouth, a living, hungry mouth, opening wide around his soul.

Every instinct he owned, from both lives, screamed the same word: run.

And in the dizzy haze, he heard it. Deep inside the stone, something was chewing. A wet, greedy, slobbering sound, like an animal at a carcass.

Ding.

A mechanical voice rang out in his head, but there was something horribly wrong with its tone. It sounded hungry. It sounded like it was salivating.

[Soul anomaly detected. Soul barrier too dense. Parasitism impossible. Seizure impossible.]

[Parasitism failed.]

[Unbinding system... Unbinding complete. System deregistered.]

The cold, slimy presence withdrew as if it had been burned.

Arthur's mind was left empty and ringing.

Parasitism? Seizure? What the hell kind of System was that? Everyone else awakened and got power. He awakened, and the thing tried to eat him, choked on his soul, and fled. Which meant the Systems of this world weren't gifts. They were something else.

Worse, he now had nothing. In a world where every single person carried a System, he was the only ordinary human being alive.

The stone under his palm stayed black. No glow. No light. Nothing.

He could feel the silence stretching. In that silence he counted his own heartbeats: ten, eleven, twelve. A bead of sweat slid off his chin and hit the stone with a tiny click. Whispers began to ripple through the crowd. A full minute passed.

He thought of the posters plastered across the district. Unregistered anomalies must be reported. Reward: ten thousand credits. He had walked past them a hundred times and never thought twice. Now he knew exactly what happened to people who couldn't be read.

Arthur forced his lips into something that was almost a smile. "I... I awakened. A life-type support System."

Davis's eyes dropped to the dead black stone. They stayed there two full seconds. Something flickered across the old man's face, not mockery, not pity, something sharper, gone before Arthur could name it. Then he said nothing at all.

A collective sigh rolled across the yard.

"Tch. A life-class System. Trash among trash."

"An orphan trying to turn his life around? In his dreams."

"Look at his face. He's about to cry."

The mockery rolled over him in waves, cruel and delighted. Arthur heard none of it.

From the back rows, a faint white glow would have been impossible to see anyway. The crowd had already decided what he was. He walked down the steps like a sleepwalker, past a thousand faces that already hated him, and for the first time in two lives he understood what it felt like to be prey.

One thought looped through his mind.

That chewing sound.

He needed to find out what those Systems really were. And he needed to survive long enough to do it.