Chapter 1: Waking Up to the Apocalypse
Night clings heavy and oppressive, but Sofia Ramirez remains wide awake, the blue glow of her ancient desktop monitor her only company. On NexusLit, her latest novel sits like a ghost town—thousands of words, yet only three lonely comments. “3 comments,” she thinks, “that’s peak engagement for a ghost. If only I wrote horror.” Another rejection from the editor on her contract application stares back at her. The site, in a baffling display of digital empathy, pops up a notification:
“Your favorite author, Hugo Wolfe, has a new series, ‘Void Scapegoat,’ just launched! Happy reading!”
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Sofia clicks. 3000 words, 10000 likes. really impressive.
Dad has been gone two years now, leaving behind not just his laughter but also the last vestiges of their financial stability. The medical bills stand as a monument to their love—insurmountable and relentless. From the next room, Mom Martha coughs up blood again. A sharp, guttural sound. Sofia sighs, careful not to wake her little sister Lillian, grabs a glass, and rushes in with water.
“Drink this, Mom.”
After Martha drifts back to sleep, Sofia sinks into her chair to write again. Then—a sudden, blinding flash. Her head spins. The world tilts.
She wakes to... dirt. Hard, cracked, desiccated earth that tastes of ash and smells worse. Rusty-colored buildings and chaotic forests stretch to a horizon that seems to swallow all hope. The air hangs thick, metallic, carrying the faint, unsettling scent of something organic yet fundamentally wrong—like burnt hair and ozone, with a hint of something that used to be a good idea, now long dead.
“Ok, this is definitely not my home,”she mumbles, pushing herself up on shaky arms. Her first thought comes as a whimper，her voice cracks.
“Did I finally snap and run off into a bad CGI movie? Because I specifically asked for a rom-com escape, not ‘Fallout: The Unlicensed Adaptation.’”
A translucent blue interface flickers into existence, hovering inches from her face like a stubborn pop-up ad for a subscription service she never signed up for.
[System Activated]
Her stats appear below:
Sofia Ramirez, Human (Fatigue: 80%, Thirst: Critical, Hunger: Critical)
A faint green glow emanates from a clump of stunted, withered berries nearby. They look exactly like the kind of fruit you’d find in a survival game right before the tutorial warns they’re poisonous.
“Well, if this is a game, the graphics are way too realistic,” she thinks, poking one with a trembling finger. Hunger gnaws at her stomach—she could probably eat the screen itself.
“Alright, System, you win.”
She plucks a handful, eyeing them suspiciously before popping one into her mouth.
[Stamina +1. Survival Points +5. Status: Hunger (Critical) alleviated. Status: Thirst (Critical) alleviated.]
“It is a game. And I just completed the ‘Eat Random Stuff’ quest. Next up, my life officially has a user interface.”
Her mind, despite the shock, automatically categorizes: UI elements, stat bonuses, quest prompts. She tries to swipe the blue screen away like an annoying mobile ad. Nothing. She pokes it. It stays. She attempts a mental command:
“Menu.”
No response.
“Options?”
Silence.
“Help?”
The System merely blinks at her.
“Right, no customer service in the apocalypse. Got it. Guess I’m stuck with this clunky interface and zero guidance. Just like my writing career.”
A low, guttural growl rumbles nearby. A grotesque, mutated creature slinks into view—all sinew and teeth, its sickly gray skin stretched over multi-jointed limbs that click against the cracked earth. It resembles a biology experiment gone horribly, violently wrong. Sofia, who normally reacts to spiders with full-body flinches, lets out a tiny squeak.
“Oh, fantastic, a boss fight!”
She whispers, her gamer instincts warring with her body’s desire to curl into a ball.
“Or maybe just a mini-boss. Either way, retreat! My character isn’t specced for melee combat. My only weapon is a sharply worded critique!”
She bolts through the wasteland, primal fear overriding all other thoughts. Her legs scream in protest before finally giving out near a towering, pulsating pillar of energy. It glows with eerie orange-red light, radiating warmth that pushes back against the wasteland’s chill.
[Radiant Spire: Provides warmth and repels mutated creatures within a 100-yard radius.]
Then she sees him. A charcoal-gray figure, lumpy like a toddler’s clay experiment. No discernible features—just a blurry humanoid shape with crude approximations of facial details. His tattered clothes hang like rags from his frame, marking him as someone who’s lost too many battles with the desert. An unfamiliar pang of pity stirs in her chest.
The System chimes:
[New Redrock Savage Detected. Provide sustenance to gain Loyalty?]
“Redrock Savage & Loyalty? Like a digital pet? Am I supposed to buy him DLC costumes next?” Sofia thinks. “This simulation keeps getting better.”
She kneels, offering a handful of berries with hesitant fingers. He chews, and the berries vanish.
[Redrock Savage Mor-1 Loyalty +1]
“What do you know about this world?” she tries to communicate with him.
His response comes as: “Grunt! Ooga! Booga!”
She stares, hoping this universal language might somehow translate. The figure merely tilts his head blankly.
“Ok, so verbal communication is a no-go,” she sighs, mentally adding another challenge to her growing apocalypse checklist. “Guess I’m stuck with charades. This is going to be a long game. Hope there’s a ′charades′ skill in this System.”
Sofia turning back to berry-picking, she notices Mor-1 mimicking her movements. His clumsy fingers fumble but eventually pluck a berry.
[Redrock Savage Mor-1 get new skill: Gathering (Primitive), Skill Progress: 1%, intelligence +1]
The System’s progress bar flickers mockingly.
“One percent?” she groans internally. “I’m used to leveling up after five minutes of button mashing, not... this. This grind will be brutal.”
Mor-1 keep picking berries. Satisfied with his haul, Sofia moves to collect wood, staying close to the Spire’s protective radius. The heat near the energy pillar becomes oppressive, yet venturing too far feels dangerous.
She arranges the gathered wood by their makeshift fire, adding a few more pieces. Soon, another emaciated figure collapses near the Spire. Following the same procedure, Sofia offers two berries.
The new savage—Mor-2—rises and watches her wood-gathering with visible confusion. After a moment, text appears above his head:
[Redrock Savage Mor-2 get new skill: Logging (Primitive), Skill Progress: 1%, intelligence +1]
Despite their language barrier, the two savages prove surprisingly efficient workers. Berries and wood piles grow steadily near the Spire.
Mealtime brings new challenges. The savages show no initiative to eat. Worried, Sofia brings berries to them, stuffing the food into their uncomprehending mouths when they don’t respond.
A midday nap refreshes her. Upon waking, she finds their stockpiles significantly increased. Finally, a useful prompt appears:
[Savages lack physical strength, should we summon them to eat?]
Relief washes over her at this automation. Selecting ‘yes,’ she watches the system deduct four berries. When she reaches for a second berry herself, another message stops her:
[You have plenty of energy and no need to eat]
The absurdity strikes her. She imagines her next novel’s title:
*Chapter 1: I Accidentally Became a Post-Apocalyptic Cult Leader. Subtitle: It’s Harder Than It Looks. Rated M for Mature Themes and Extreme Levels of Frustration and Berry-Picking.*
Her gaze falls on Mor-1, still painstakingly harvesting berries.
“Well, welcome to the thunder dome, buddy,” she thinks. “Hope you like berries.”
The berries, while life-sustaining, are a precarious food source. They don’t last, and their supply is limited. She needs protein. Meat. The thought of hunting, of confronting the mutated creatures she runs from, makes her hands clammy. She, Sofia Ramirez, who once considers cooking a frozen pizza an extreme sport, is now contemplating hunting. This virtual reality is getting far too real, far too fast.
She scans the environment, and then, a faint green glow catches her eye—a twisted, gnarled oak branch, lying near a jagged piece of flint.
[New Material Discovered: Oak Branch (Dense Wood), Flint (Sharpenable Stone).]
Her mind, used to plotting convoluted novel plots, suddenly makes an intuitive leap. She remembers old survival documentaries she watches on Netflix, procrastinating on her writing.
Ding![Eureka Moment! Crafting Recipe Unlocked: Crude Wooden Spear.]
Sofia stares at the recipe, a complex set of primitive motions outlined by the System. Her fingers, accustomed to keyboards, feel clumsy and inadequate. She picks up the oak branch, surprisingly heavy, and the flint. It takes her hours of painful, repetitive work. She scrapes her fingers, bruises her palms, the oak branch slowly begins to take on a point. Finally, she holds up a roughly pointed stick.
[Crude Wooden Spear. Attack: Low. Durability: Low.]
“Well, it’s better than trying to bite them.”
And just as she sharpens the simple spear, the other savages surround her and whisper, not knowing what they are saying. After a moment, there is suddenly another prompt—*
[Get a new skill: weapon making. Intelligence+1.]*
Sofia comes to her senses and sees these two black men taking a piece of wood and grinding and sharpening it on a huge rock. Soon, they make two identical spears.
A flicker in the dry brush. A rabbit. Not a cute, fluffy bunny, but a gaunt, scarred thing with too-long ears and unsettlingly red eyes. Not like something out of a children’s book. Her entire body screams run. But she forces herself to stand, her spear held clumsily. She remembers some vague concept of “stalking prey” and moves slowly. When she is close enough, she lunges. It is more of a panicked stumble, really. The spear glances off the rabbit’s side. The creature shrieks, a horrifying sound, and darts away. This is supposed to be a virtual system—why is it so damn hard?
She tries again and again. She sees a pheasant, its feathers dull, pecking at the ground, but her throws are wild. A tiny jerboa, a desert rodent with powerful legs, outruns her every clumsy lunge. This is not like the games where you just press ‘X’ to attack. This is real, exhausting.
Finally, she manages a lucky strike. The crude spear, thrown, connects with a rabbit.
[Rabbit Carcass Acquired.][Harvesting Options: Meat Chunk x3, Small Pelt x2, Crude Bone Shard x3.]
“Ok, so meat. Great,” she mutters, trying not to look at the gory mess. “Now what? I can’t just carry this around. It’ll spoil. Or attract something worse.”
Ding![Eureka Moment! Crafting Recipe Unlocked: Jerky.]
The System shows her how to thinly slice the meat and dry it over a low fire. It is painstaking, requiring constant attention to prevent burning or spoilage, but the result is a tough, dark strip of preserved meat.[Jerky x1.]
As for the bones, she grinds them into very sharp spearheads and embeds them in long spears. The savages follow suit, and soon two long spears are embedded with bone tips. Then, they go out hunting.
A prompt appears shortly:*[Mor-1 kills a small herbivorous animal (Pheasant), gaining 5 * meat, 1 * fur, and 1 * coarse bone.]*
In no time, another prompt appears:*[Mor-2 kills a small omnivorous animal (Jerboa), gaining 5 * meat, 1 * fur, and 1 * coarse bone.]*
After a while, the two savages come back with meat, fur, and bones. Sofia makes all the meat into jerky.
It is getting dark. While Mor-1 tries to fashion a makeshift spear from a rusted pipe and a sharpened stone shard—a task that seems to involve more grunting than actual progress—he suddenly stops. His eyes, usually dull, widen, and he makes a series of excited, guttural noises, pointing at a pile of broken concrete slabs. It sounds like a startled chimpanzee who’s just found a banana.
*[Redrock Savage Mor-1 has initiated ‘Construction (Primitive)’ project!]*
Sofia watches, dumbfounded, as Mor-1, joined by Mor-2, begins to systematically stack the debris. They aren’t just randomly piling. There is a method, an almost instinctual understanding of weight distribution and support, as if some long-dormant survival instinct has suddenly flickered back to life. It is slow, laborious, but the System’s construction bar begins to fill.
[Construction Progress: 10%... 25%...]
It is actually happening. They are building.
“They’re actually building something!” Sofia gasps, a genuine thrill running through her, mixed with profound relief. It isn’t just individual skill anymore. They are collaborating. Like a really, really inefficient construction crew. The resulting structure is less a house and more a glorified lean-to made of jagged concrete and bent rebar—[Crude A-frame Shelter.]
The two savages are thrilled, and Sofia is happy too—turns out they can randomly learn skills on their own! Finally, she doesn’t have to teach them everything step by step. They dance around the campfire, laughing and stomping in crude celebration.
After a while, the two savages crawl into the Crude Shelter together. Moments later, a System prompt pops up:
[Redrock Savage Mor-1 has initiated ‘Procreation’ with Mor-2. Congratulations! New Redrock Savage Mor-01 pending!]
Sofia’s jaw drops. They are making babies？ With no privacy whatsoever. “Wait, they are both men，can ... do that? hey, devs, what kind of biology class did you take? Just because now there are 97 genders in America?”
Is this the ‘survival of the fittest’ part or the ‘no Netflix’ part?
Her internal monologue is a chaotic whirlwind of shock and awkwardness. “Right, apocalypse. No internet, no Netflix, no basic social etiquette. What else are they gonna do? At least they’re contributing to the population count.”
