Resistance: Welcome to the Multiverse, page 1
Resistance
Welcome to the Multiverse
License Notes: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this e-book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Resistance: Welcome to the Multiverse 4
Copyright © 2024
Sean Oswald
Contents
The Story So Far…
Chapter 1 - Getting My Bearings
Chapter 2 - Exploration
Chapter 3- What Did I Do?
Chapter 4- And Then There Were Three
Chapter 5- Killing with a Grin
Chapter 6- Growing Together
Chapter 7- Urgency
Chapter 8- Vex the Thumper of Veil
Chapter 9- Risk v Reward
Chapter 10- Just One Outpost
Chapter 11- I Feel Strange
Chapter 12 - Dust Up? Dust Off?
Chapter 13- Engaged
Stat Sheet 4.0
Interlude 1- Back on the Homestead
Chapter 14- Tinkering
Chapter 15- Special Hunt
Chapter 16 - Every Forerunner for Themselves
Interlude 2- Far From Home
Chapter 17- The Enemy of My Enemy…
Chapter 18- Life and Spirit
Chapter 19- Flame Den
Chapter 20- Fire and Spirit
Chapter 21- Marking Time
Chapter 22- Cue Motivational 80’s Music
Stat Sheet 4.1
Interlude 3- Responsibility
Chapter 23- Finish This Dungeon
Chapter 24- Fire and Metal
Chapter 25- Bathing in Lava
Chapter 26- Riddles
Chapter 27- A Peak Behind the Veil
Chapter 28- On the Run
Chapter 29- Fire and Blood
Chapter 30- To Evolve or Not
Interlude 4- Growth
Chapter 31- Dealing with Allies
Chapter 32- Buzz Worse Than Their Sting
Chapter 33- Three Way Fight
Chapter 34- The Real Fight
Chapter 35- Life and Oblivion
Chapter 36- What Lies Between
Chapter 37- It’s Getting Crowded In Here
Stat Sheet 4.2
Interlude 5- Troubling Times
Chapter 38- Hunting and Hunted
Chapter 39- Fighting the Primal
Chapter 40- Fortuitous Location
Chapter 41- Loose Threads
Chapter 42- Life on Veil
Chapter 43- A Deeper Understanding
Chapter 44- The Root of the Matter
Chapter 45- Encountering the Huntsman
Chapter 46- Pursuit
Chapter 47- So Close
Chapter 48- Unintended Consequences
Chapter 49- Respect Between Predators
Interlude 6- Debts and Challenges
Chapter 50- Back to Earth
Interlude 7- Normandy Beach
Chapter 51- Maybe I Really Am OP
Epilogue- On the Cusp
Stat Sheet at the End of Book 4
Other Books by the Author
The Story So Far…
Book One – Induction
We are introduced to Silas, a 22-year-old who put his college aspirations on pause after two years, to help his mom and sister following the death of his father. Lightning struck for them as they learned about an inheritance his mother received from her deceased brother.
It turned out to be much more. They believed Uncle Dan was insane, but he’d been a Forerunner—a representative for Earth in a competition between five worlds. Silas’ father, Mark, was supposed to inherit the position, but the cancer had other plans, pushing Silas into taking over as a Forerunner.
His first exposure to the competition came in the form of an enormous mana-infected squirrel, which went crazy trying to kill him. Silas prevailed, gaining access to the system. He also snagged some pretty cool abilities, including two specific to the squirrel he’d defeated. The first, an aura called Adorably Harmless, caused other people, and even the occasional monster, to view him as cute and a non-threat.
The second, Save For Winter, was a modification of the Forerunner’s standard spatial storage ability. As its name suggests, Save For Winter upgraded items placed in his storage—so long as they were left in there undisturbed. A day in storage would turn a basic item into a common item. Ten days took an item from common to uncommon, a hundred from uncommon to rare and a thousand days to epic. Consumables cut that time in half.
Using a class shard obtained as loot from the squirrel along with some left by his uncle, Silas formed a class combining elements of rogues, mages, and healers. He also gained a pair of titles. As the first non-inducted human to kill a mana-infused creature, he gained One Small Step/One Giant Leap, doubling his stat gains from leveling up. When he finished the fight covered head to toe in the beast’s blood, the system granted his second title, Blood Bather, enabling him to gain additional evolutions based upon the creatures whose blood he bathed in.
Not that it was all dark… or gory. His first mission sent him to the dungeon world of Galen, where he fought for survival, completed a dungeon, and made some friends—Dori the rogue, Nevin the mage, and the warrior Crag. The Galenians looked very much like humans except for their rounded, half-circle ears and the blue tint to their skin. While it was still early days, the four of them became friends at a speed only shared danger could create.
Silas agreed to make the district of Anwich on Galen into a home away from home. He gained a boon of bonus XP for him and his team while there, at the expense of exposure to the political machinations of the interplanetary corporation Transhek, the Adventurer’s Guild, and the locals.
For his second mission, Silas was thrust into a war between two native races, centered around the city of Proximus. The Ceorgi were physically small but gifted with innate magical abilities. The Delmin were the exact opposite.
At first, Silas believed the Delmin to be the aggressors, due to their relentless bombardment of the city filled with Ceorgi civilians. After agreeing to help the Ceorgi, his contact Maelis taught Silas how to better connect with magic. This resulted in his magic becoming 60% attuned to life mana.
Sadly, it turned out that the Ceorgi only wanted to use Silas as a way of cycling ambient mana into life mana, essentially a battery for their shield. They also sacrificed any captured Delmin to feed their city’s shield. Silas took a stand against the enslavement and murder, but in destroying the city’s defenses he was forced to kill several helpless Ceorgi. He had yet to process the trauma.
Amidst all this, during his time on Earth, Silas needed to do something normal. He enrolled at a university and after an inadvertent physical display he was invited to try out for the football team. Yet Silas’ adventures had changed him on a fundamental level. Over the course of a couple encounters with his human peers, he struggled not to take advantage of the power granted to him by the system. His boosted charisma made denying the attention of the cheerleaders a test of his character.
He had brief encounters with three of Earth’s Forerunners—Jiang, Nuri, and Anika. They sought to test him, stressing that Earth couldn’t afford to have an incompetent Forerunner. Earth was in third place, which would result in it becoming a dungeon world. If they fell to fourth, Earth would be destroyed for resources along with its entire population when the induction came to pass.
His last mission was a race on a cosmic track with Nuri, Anika, his Galen team and Urg, the eidolon he learned to summon thanks to an ability inherited from his uncle. There, he met three of the other races who were competing against Earth. The Crembori were the typical little gray men often seen in old Earth science fiction. They were advanced in technology, but last in the competition. The Furlooni were a race of plant-like people, aligned with the elf-like Nargossians.
The Earth team prevailed with the assistance of the Crembori. They destroyed the Furloon vessel, killing all three of their Forerunners, leaving the Nargossians without an ally. They ultimately had to flip their ship around and crash headlong into the Nargossian vessel to interrupt their lead in the race. The battle was intense. Daina, the leader, managed to escape, but the fight resulted in the death of the other two Nargossians.
After the race was over, Silas returned home. He found a note in decorative script indicating that he’d done passably on the mission, but that he needed to train. Whoever wrote it—he assumed either Nuri or Anika—indicated that they would be seeing each other soon. Now, he had to find a way to Paris for a meeting in twelve hours with the other Forerunners from Earth.
Book Two - Countdown
Silas found a mentor in Samvek of the Rayden Clan, who taught him a great deal. Most importantly, the system didn’t tell Forerunners all the vital details about leveling. Under a brutal training regime while clearing a graveyard dungeon, Silas started to make his skills part of him. Abilities were created and bestowed by the system, but his hard-earned combat skills belonged to him. He learned the significance of leveling up his abilities, as well as how to augment his class core when tieri
In a close battle with a banshee, Silas inherited her Spirit Singing ability, which opened a much wider understanding of the multiverse, helping his team finish the dungeon. It took a chunk of Life Mana from the crystal he gained on Proximus to defeat the lich necromancer, but the ultimate victory netted him a huge gain in world points. It also created a mission for his new clan, earning him favors from the clan leader and from a mysterious priest, a disciple of the Sect of Veiled Infinity.
Back on Earth, the Crembori lost their patience and tried to force Silas’ hand by revealing their ship over Washington, DC. Silas flew in to confront them and reached a deal to grant at asylum to the few Crembori on board. In return, they allowed him to study their technology, bolstering his newly obtained Junkman Artificer occupation with their organic metal alloy.
His next mission took him back to Proximus, where he met a new team member, Dejin. He gained knowledge of what would be necessary to terraform Earth, including information concerning the growing and harvesting of plants in desert environments.
On Earth once again, Silas received a new message from his uncle, now that he’d formed an uncommon core. In it, Uncle Dan talked about how he didn’t trust the other Forerunners, and hinted that some of them had nefarious plans. Unsure who to trust, he broke into the prison holding Emil, another Earth Forerunner. He refused to leave with Silas, but used him to release a massive burst of mana into a residential neighborhood in Oslo, Norway. The creatures he unleashed spread across the world, while the people affected by the mana either were left experiencing strange sensations in the best cases, or dead in the worst.
The system didn’t look kindly upon this. It accelerated the countdown to induction by over two hundred days and penalized Earth three million world points, dropping them back into fourth place. Now, with seven days remaining until the Wild Hunt, Silas must train harder than ever, while dealing with new problems cropping up across the globe.
Book Three - Collapse
The book began with Silas dealing with the aftermath of the mana wave on Earth. Oslo was essentially ground zero for the beginning of the apocalypse or rather the pre-mature beginning. Thousands died in the explosion and aftermath, but worse monsters began to mutate with exposure to mana.
That was to say nothing of the samples which Emil had created and prepared to multiply once the mana wave hit. Those monsters were peak Uncommon and some of them far more powerful than humans could deal with.
Silas took it upon himself to return to Oslo and rescue those he could. Flying would have been faster, but Silas was trying to get a feel for how this was affecting the people there, so he ended up bumming a ride with three locals.
Two of those locals ended up becoming significant. Dutch was an engineer who was trying to make it to Oslo to find his daughter. He ended up being inducted after Silas figured out that killing a monster with a low-tech weapon was the best way to achieve that.
The other important local was Asta Larsen, daughter of Forerunner Emil Larsen. She was striking and brave, both of which caught Silas’ attention, since she was only a couple years older than him. She, too, was inducted and assumed a combination of aerial warrior and pet class as she fought through a Mouse Trap themed dungeon.
From there Silas went off world, and had to deal with the chaos on Galen. He negotiated trade agreements with all three of the corporations on Galen—Transhek, Bymorte, and Acme. He also got to participate in a raid on one of the Transhek mana ships in orbit around the world, and collected a massive amount of broken tech to use with his new occupation, Junkman Artificer.
In the end, he reached an agreement with the Adventurer’s Guild to help provide training on Earth, and learned a great deal more from his mentor, Samvek. He experienced racial evolution, from a Homo sapiens to a Homo inspiratus, a species driven by instinct.
He also oversaw the induction of his sister, Cece, who showed an immediate aptitude for Fire Mana. His mother was too freaked out by it all, and once she was exposed to mana, Silas had the Crembori put her in stasis in order to preserve her life.
Book Three ends with the timer running out and Silas being portaled to the Wild Hunt. Those adventures continue now.
Chapter 1 - Getting My Bearings
Earth Countdown: 123 days, 21 hours, 30 minutes
Wild Hunt Duration: 90 days… pending
Bar’jek
World Points: 31,632,870 - Forerunners: 1/5 - Rank: 1
Nargossa
World Points: 22,994,000 - Forerunners: 5/5 - Rank: 4, 9, 10, 13, 14
Furloon-
World Points: 19,003,400 - Forerunners: 5/5 - Rank: 7, 11, 12, 15, 16
Earth
World Points: 18,740,920 - Forerunners: 5/5 - Rank: 2, 3, 5, 6, 8
Crembor
exempt from hunt
Instead of being directly deposited into a new location, I was held in some type of limbo. I couldn’t hear or see anything. I couldn’t even feel anything. No temperature, no floor beneath me—it was as if all my standard senses were dormant.
The small pin I’d received from Priest Bahran was the singular source of any sensation, and that was more spiritual than physical. There was a warmth to the pin, but I couldn’t say it felt warm against my chest, because I couldn’t feel my chest.
I pushed on my Perception, trying to gain information about… anything. It didn’t help. The next logical leap, given the pin, was to activate Soul Singing.
Abilities are temporarily disabled.
Straight to the point.
I went down the list of my abilities one by one, desperate for control over some aspect of my predicament, but it grew shorter by the moment. When my options had been whittled down to one, I reluctantly decided to try it. Despite previous experience, it had to be better than this void.
I opened myself up to absorb mana. The evolution was supposedly a non-system ability, but maybe the system’s categorization of the skill was on the fringe of what was permissible. I was immediately flooded with notifications.
Error. you are destabilizing the loading platform.
Warning. Chaos mana detected.
System resources are being allocated to stabilize the platform.
Blessedly, I finally felt something—a warm influx of mana. It filled my body, a body that I could only feel as the mana coursed through it, bringing a feeling of power and solidity.
Potentiality - A system measurement of the likelihood for off-beat events occurring around a given individual.
That was odd, it gave me a definition, as vague as it was, out of the blue.
Your Potentiality has increased by a factor of 0.33%. Potentiality adds significance. Significance adds an esoteric gravitational pull, increasing the likelihood of unusual occurrences around you. The trajectories of people, places, and events will be altered ever so slightly toward you.
Beware—even miniscule changes can have significant impact over a long enough trajectory.
The mana continued to course through me, seductively, and made me see the universe differently. For a moment, my mind expanded, and everything made so much more sense, a crystal clarity like I’d never experienced.
Then came a sharp pain as… something… slammed into place around me, severing my connection to the mana. My mind, which once again was all that was left to me, conjured up the image of a cage. I could still sense the mana, but it was tantalizingly just out of reach. I once again had no sense of my physical body, and this new cage, this… shield, cut off all my options. Panic set in with the pain, but fortunately, lasted only an instant.
Greetings, Forerunners!
You are receiving this notification as participants in the current Induction. Each Induction cycle undergoes one of six different possible final events. Opportunities to better your world abound during your event, known as the Wild Hunt.
Wild Hunt - an event to determine who is prey and who is a predator.
Rating: Significant difficulty
The Wild Hunt brings a primordial being to a pre-constructed dimensional platform. The Huntsman is the manifestation of the urge to hunt. He and his hounds are capable of tracking prey across multiple realities. For this platform, the Huntsman will be Epic Tier, but if insufficient hunting occurs as events unfold, they may be increased to Legendary.
The Huntsman is not your only worry. You are also being hunted by your fellow Forerunners, and in turn, you are expected to hunt them.
