Segmentation Fault
In which our protagonist dies again, and the world politely resets.
The system had been patient for three days, and Kenji had written nothing. That was about to change.
He had been dumped unceremoniously in a forest. Not a friendly forest with paths and berries, but a proper old-growth wood with trees the size of buildings and moss thick as carpet. He had no weapons, no food, no map, and absolutely no idea how the magic system worked.
The system overlay, which he had mentally nicknamed "the Compiler" because it felt less insane that way, was helpful in the way that a man page is helpful when you do not know what you are looking for. It gave him a basic HUD: a vague sense of direction, a small stamina bar, and a list of "Available Functions."
[Available Functions]
- light (mana cost: low)
- detect_mana (passive, always on)
- basic_endurance (passive)
Kenji had tried to cast light on his first night. It worked. A small orb of pale yellow appeared above his palm, hovered for about ten seconds, and flickered out. He had celebrated by crying a little, then by eating moss. The moss tasted terrible but did not kill him, which he counted as a win.
By day three, he was thinner, dirtier, and had a working theory of the world's physics. Mana was a resource. It regenerated slowly, like a stamina bar that took an hour to refill from a sip. Spells were functions: repeatable, expensive, and best understood as little more than inputs and outputs. The Compiler was not a system that gave him power. It was a system that let him understand power. Like translating between two languages he had never spoken.
It was, he thought bitterly, exactly the kind of unfair advantage a corporate middle manager would design. You do not get to be strong. You get to be literate.
On the morning of the fourth day, he heard voices.
Not human voices. Something deeper, guttural, with the cadence of a transaction. Kenji crept through the underbrush on hands and knees, following the sound, and came upon a clearing where three goblin-like creatures were arguing over a pile of furs and dried meat.
They were maybe a meter tall, green-skinned, with long ears and sharp teeth. They had knives. They were also distracted, shoving each other and chittering in a language Kenji did not understand. A fourth silhouette hovered at the edge of the clearing, half-hidden behind a tree, watching the others with the patient attention of someone waiting for a transaction to end.
The Compiler pulsed.
[detect_mana: 3 sources identified. Threat level: low. Stamina: 67%.]
Three. Not four. Kenji stared at the number. He had counted four goblin-shapes with his own eyes. The Compiler was either wrong, or it had decided that the fourth shape was something it would rather not name.
Either possibility was, in a small way, worse than the other.
He weighed his options. He could run. He could try to fight them with light and hope they were afraid of bright flashes. Or he could try something stupid.
He chose stupid.
He picked up a rock the size of his fist, focused on the feeling the Compiler gave him when he cast light, and tried to imagine the spell as a function he was calling with parameters. Instead of "cast a light," he thought: "if I throw this rock with a light on it, the light will be a tracer and the goblins will be confused."
He threw the rock.
It was a bad throw. The light orb appeared around the rock, bright enough to flare, then popped out of existence halfway through the arc. The rock itself tumbled into the underbrush with a sad little thump.
The goblins turned. One of them saw Kenji. They looked at each other. They looked at Kenji. They reached for their knives.
Kenji ran. He ran very fast, and very loudly, and he did not stop for an hour. The forest blurred past him. He tripped twice. He lost one of his shoes. He did not care. He was, for the first time since he had arrived in this world, afraid enough to forget the hunger.
When he finally collapsed against a tree, gasping, he thought: "Right. So magic is not a gun. Magic is a debugger. I can use it to think, not to shoot."
It was, he supposed, a start.
He sat there in the moss, chest heaving, and tried to take stock. The goblins had been small, but they had been armed and they had been organized. He had been almost killed by something the size of a kindergartener. In his old life, that would have been humiliating. In this life, it was just Tuesday.
But the goblins had not been alone.
The Compiler had not said anything about a fourth goblin. Three sources, it had said, plainly, in the same tone it used for everything. Three. Not four. Either the system was wrong, or the system knew about something it had decided not to show him. Either way, there was a thing in the deeper forest that the Compiler would not, or could not, name.
Kenji, who had spent ten years reading log files for hidden patterns, did not like the silence. He liked the silences that came after a successful query. He did not like the silences that came before something was about to start.
He stood up, brushed the moss off his torn clothes, and started walking east, where, sometime in the last hour, a thin grey line of smoke had begun to rise above the trees. People, probably. Or fire. Or both. Either way, the goblins were behind him, the fourth one was in the forest, and the forest was not going to tell him which of those two facts was the more important one.
Somewhere, very faintly, behind him, a horn sounded again. Same note. Same direction. The same brassy, mournful sound that had greeted him on his first night in this world.
The Compiler did not have an entry for horns.
It would, soon.