Injured
Reid woke up with pain on his lower-torso.
There was a metal rod that pierced his abdomen completely, coming out the other side.
His bones were fine.
He also felt headache and pain at other parts of his body, but the pain on his abdomen was way more intense.
What the fuck happened?
Reid tried to remain calm. Even though it hurt a lot, he knew he needed to remain calm.
He checked his bleeding.
He wasn't bleeding.
He started looking around his surrounding.
He was in a half-collapsed building.
There was a triangle shaped water puddle at the flood of the building, howewer it wasn't raining, at least not anymore. The only sound outside was the sound of wind.
There was a used anti-bleed stim laying next to him with a slight bit of dust on it, that explained why he wasn't bleeding. He had recognized the stim from the research he had done for Steeldust, it was what the military used to use.
It was clear that someone helped him while he was unconscious, they probably weren't nearby as they wouldn't just leave him here after deciding to help if they weren't in a hurry and not come back for long enough for dust to build up on the stim. Reid guessed it has been about 30-40 hours since the stim was there based on the dust on the stim.
The water did not reach that corner of the room, that is if you could still call it a room with the ceiling and half of the walls missing.
But it was not the time to observe and think who helped him or about the stim.
Better get myself off this thing instead of thinking about what could've happened.
Reid carefully removed himself from the metal rod he was stuck to. It was a slow and extremely painful process, and he fell down like a patato to the ground afterwards due to the metal rod not holding him up anymore.
He climbed out of the half-collapsed building and looked around for people. Even though he was confused on what happened, dizzy and in pain, he needed to survive.
The rest of the city was also mostly debrief.
There was nobody else alive on sight.
Earthquake?
After looking around a little longer, Reid realized some of the corpses hasn't died of the debrief, but killed by other things. Some had gunshot wounds while some were probably killed by bears or wolves.
After crawling to a less dangerous looking place, a place where there wasn't anything that could suddenly collapse on him, he searched for something to call help with.
He was crawling because he couldn't walk in his state.
He found a few corpses and decided to search them. Most of the corpses were completely smashed to bits while some were partially crushed under the debris. There were some corpses that weren't crushed but they were very little compared to how many crushed ones there were.
Gore didn't affect Reid as he was used to it from Steeldust. Reid had his gore censor off, which was too disgusting for most people to handle. Not to mention his body was also in bad shape, he tried not to look much into it as he did not like the idea of knowing how bad it was. He was scared of losing hope.
There wasn't anything usefull on the corpses.
Reid didn't bother looking into more corpses.
He could wait for help, but help might just never come. He had no knowledge on what had happened, after all it could've been the end of the planet or some kind of war.
He didn't follow what was going on IRL, Reid played Steeldust 24/7 and had been for the past 30 years.
Reid finally decied to check his body for wounds even though he didn't want to. He had to check in order to act based on his condition so he just braced himself mentally.
He checked his legs.
His left leg had a cut on it about an inch deep.
It didn't look that bad, but Reid's legs were numb so he couldn't use them.
His legs looked way thicker than it was supposed to be.
Im dizzy as hell.
He checked his torso.
Besides the hole, there were no other notable wounds on his torso.
He checked his arms.
There were a few cuts and bruises, but they weren't anything too bad, compared to his other wounds, of course.
His arms were also looking a little... Unfamiliar.
He checked his head and neck with his hands.
This was not Reid's body.
" Brown hair?... My hair is blonde..?"
His new body was tall, white, a little muscular and slightly feminine, but it was male. Reid knew so because of his voice, and suprising it didn't hurt when he talked.
However Reid didn't see any of these details from the pain he was in. He couldn't even focus properly. His head was too dizzy to see any details and he was barely remaining councious.
While he was looking for any other wounds, he had realized that this was not his body.
Reid was extremely confused and couldn't think of any possible solid reason that would cause this, even less possible reasons came to his head about his hair color changing.
Before i woke up i was logging into Steeldust, But Steeldust does not allow this much pain, and this is not what my character looks like. It is closer to my real body, but it is not my real body either.
Reid decided to try opening one of the game menus.
"Full Status"
———————————————————
Info:
Reid
Sinner
Level 1
No faction
Stats:
Experience 0/100
Strength 10
Agility 10
Endurance 10
Intelligence ?
Health:
Consciousness 12/100
Death 30/100
Obliteration 2/100 (missing body mass)
Achievements:
Player knocked out 0
Player kills 0
Player obliterated 0
NPC knocked out 0
NPC kills 0
NPC obliterated 0
Monster knocked out 0
Monster kills 0
Monster obliterated 0
Use command "help" for list of commands
———————————————————
Reid did not bother to read it at all.
"Log out"
...
Nothing happened.
"Log out"
...
Reid opened the command list that opened on will instead of actions. It required some focus, so he opened the one for beginners which was meant to be easier to open.
The pain was also the reason why he was using voice command, it was too diffucult to focus.
—————
Full status
Skills
Faction
Friend list
—————
The main menu was missing.
Reid could not log out.
"Oh... So that whats going on. Im stuck. Maybe my PC or the game server got hacked? Well, doesn't matter since i can't really do much about it from here..."
"I'll just search for some food or something i guess."
Reid looked around, searching for buildings that had not gotten as much damaged as the other ones. Most buildings were completely debrief which he didn't have enough strength to dig. Even though he wasn't bleeding anymore, he still had lost a lot of blood and had a finger-sized hole that was caused by a metal rod that pierced his intestines. Reid has been trying to ignore the fact that he was covered in blood from waist down for a while.
He crawled for a while, a while that felt like hours. Maybe it was hours. Reid looked at the sun, but he still had no idea how much time had went, almost like the sun wasn't moving at all.
"Health status"
———————————————————
Health:
Consciousness 5/100
Death 31/100
Obliteration 2/100
———————————————————
Reid was slowly losing consciousness.
He was not dehydrated, he did drink water. Altough it was dirty water in the debris and dirt, it was better than death.
The problem was food.
He found a collapsed pharmacy. He searched for anything he could grab that didn't get buried too deep.
Reid found absolutely nothing, everything was crushed and buried.
He decided to search the corpses near the pharmacy. Unlike the other corpses, maybe he could find something that was bought from the pharmacy.
He approached a corpse.
The corpses head was decapitated.
He checked its pockets.
Reid found some painkillers. This would help him greatly, but not completely as the painkillers were not very strong. They wouldn't be able to cut fatal woulds and possibly infection pains.
Reid consumed one of the painkillers. He only took a single pill and left the remaining 7 for later.
Reid kept moving and searching corpses until he heard a gunshot not too far away from him.
After crawling under some debris to hide himself, Reid waited for a few minutes and listened to hear whether it was safe or not.
But that was the only sound that could be heard.
suicide? murder? why would anyone ever shoot a single shot and nothing else? anything in steeldust wont die from a single shot, even sinners without armor wont die from a single gunshot most of the time. was it a headshot? did the gun jam? sounds like small caliber handgun fire. doesn't sound like anything i've heard before. maybe a gun outside player blueprints? is it scavengers? IRL mechanic? what is this, a musket? why isn't there any following shots?
Bang!
Another gunshot was heard. The distance seemed about the same, so they were probably not going to move to somewhere else since they didn't move until now.
Reid decided to crawl another direction, the direction away from the sound of gunshot.
After a few hundred meters, Reid could barely stay conscious anymore.
"Health status"
———————————————————
Health:
Consciousness 1/100
Death 31/100
Obliteration 2/100
———————————————————
Reid simply rolled under some debris to hide then let himself fall asleep, he would rather get crushed to death than being eaten alive while unconscious.
If he's lucky, he might even wake up before he dies!