When Jude woke up, it was in his bed. He suddenly snapped out of his daze, but he still looked as though he had not gotten used to the feeling of leaving the dream, and he was trying to determine if this was real or an illusion. His senses and memories gradually adjusted, and he slowly confirmed that he had really woken up this time.
He still remembered the last thing he had seen before everything began.
[Do you wish to participate in the Apocalypse Experiment?]
[Yes / No]
After that window, it had been many months, too many months. He had been sleeping for too long. How long had it really been?
Then numerous streams of data flowed like a waterfall in front of his eyes, accompanied by the cold, mechanical voice of the System.
[Tester Jude. The Beta Apocalypse has ended.]
[Everything you lived through was the Beta Apocalypse. It was not a game. It was a simulation of the end that is coming.]
[What happened in the beta will happen here.]
Slowly, Jude read the rest of the message. His eyes widened. By the time he finally finished reading it, his face alternated between white and red. The room was quiet. His hands were trembling.
Jude called out the status window, as he had done countless times before.
"Status window."
Something appeared in his sight.
[Level: None]
[Point(s): None]
[Vitality: 15 / Strength: 17 / Agility: 13 / Dexterity: 15 / Perception: 14]
[Unique Ability: Random Teleportation]
[Skill: None]
[Active Buff: None]
"...What is this...?" he muttered to himself as he read the strange window that had appeared in front of his eyes.
Jude let out a slow breath. After scrutinizing the details, he promptly regained his composure. Although the numbers were different from the ones he remembered, he was sure it was the same status window.
Jude closed his eyes and reopened them several times, and he even washed his face with cold water, but the window was still floating there. When he called out the window again in his mind, it disappeared. Considering that the numbers were those of an ordinary man, the condition of his body was quite decent.
The unique ability meant that he could teleport, and since it was a unique ability, the only one who could use it was him. No description told him where it would take him. One of the biggest features back then had been the labyrinths, and perhaps it would send him into one of them.
He was curious, but he did not think he should use it without making any preparations. From what he remembered, the labyrinths had been extremely unfavorable places for intruders. He was only someone who earned his living by running a grocery shop, and he could not throw his life away just like that.
So he took out his hiking backpack first and put all the things he would need inside.
"Random Teleportation," he whispered, and after waiting for a few seconds, there was no response.
"Random Teleportation."
He tried once more with a louder voice, and the sound of a howling wind broke the calm of the room.
[Random Teleportation: Teleports the one who has this ability to a random location. Every location he reaches can be registered, and he can return to it.]
Jude took a deep breath. His heart was pounding. The space around him twisted fiercely, and even before he realized it, his location had already changed.
Jude's figure suddenly appeared on wooded hills, in a dense forest.
[A new location has been registered.]
The sound of flowing water resounded in his ears, he could hear the cry of an unknown bird, and a faint smell of the sea tickled his nose. It was so cold that he quickly put on a jacket. It was summer in Yorbia, but on these hills, it seemed that winter would come soon. Judging from the atmosphere, and from the fact that his phone showed no signal, he was no longer in Yorbia.
There were five continents in the world, separated from one another by massive oceans. Yorbia was where Jude lived. The other continents were Azian, Cameria and Cafrica, and Ostrich, which most people only ever saw on a map. But these hills did not seem to belong to any of them.
"Let's leave a mark for now."
With the white marker he had brought, he left a mark on a nearby tree. On hills like these, once someone lost his way, it would be extremely difficult to find it again.
Jude walked through the trees carefully. After only a few meters, the bushes in front of him suddenly shook violently, and a huge animal with black fur came out through them. It was a cat, bigger than any cat he had ever seen in Yorbia, and above its neck, a window appeared.
[Marauding Cat]
Did he have a window above his own head too? Jude looked down at his body, but no window appeared. Just like the status window, it seemed that this cat was an animal that did not exist in his world.
The cat raised its nose to the air and sniffed several times. In the next second, it turned away and ran off at an outrageous speed, and Jude let out a breath he had been holding. It must have noticed him by his scent.
Jude still remembered the beasts he had met inside those labyrinths, though for a veteran, they had been nothing but a source of food. But if a cat on these hills was that big, he could not imagine how big the other beasts would be. It would be nearly impossible to hunt them, since this was reality and not a simulation.
He had spent more than seven months there. There, the testers had no choice but to learn through their mistakes. Now that he, someone who had already watched the instruction manual, was here, the same thing did not have to happen again.