"You can go fuck yourself."
It was quite an unusual sentence to hear from one Ruby Rose, currently sat on the edge of her bed. The girl seldom swore, and even then she did so more among the lines of 'Son of a biscuit' or 'Fudge nuggets!'. It was quite a surprise to hear a proper swear from her, more so in the circumstances presented.
The Xiao-Long-Rose household was empty, excepting herself. Her father, her sister, and even the family dog were all out and about. She wasn't. Despite having claimed the dreaded summer homework as her dire enemy to her family, her reasons for staying in were of a stranger origin and belonged to an altogether different satanic root.
Huntsmen and Huntress both unlocked semblances in certain spaces of time, or at least that's what school had told her. One could unlock it in a dire situation, in the years before finishing combat training, which usually ranged from 17 to 21, or in their childhood, as soon as their aura was unlocked.
None of these applied to Ruby, however, who believed she had unlocked her semblance two months ago, right at the ripe age of fourteen and a half, with minimal combat training despite her uncle saying otherwise, and without a single dramatic situation happening in the last two months at the least.
A normal person would have seen her sitting on the edge of her bed, staring at a wall, while the sun illuminated the room through one of the open windows.
If they paid a closer look, they might have also seen the fact that the girl was covered in sweat, and sported large blots of darkness below her eyes, along with a suspiciously clenched jaw, as if in great irritation.
And if this had made such a person curious, they would have stared just a bit longer, long enough to notice that the girl was not looking at the wall. She was staring at something, in front of the wall...something that wasn't there.
To Ruby, however, this was just Tuesday.
The Gamer
Name: Ruby Rose
Titles: [None Available]
Level: 5
Health: 90/90
Aura: 340/340
[-STATS-]
Constitution: 9
Strength: 15
Agility: 26
Willpower: 17
Perception: 15
Charm: 7
[-TRAITS-]
[ARENA]
In some ways, she hated the Game, as her semblance had taken to calling itself.
Actually, scratch that. She just hated the Game, period.
It was a way to get stronger, to give her an edge in combat, but couldn't it be normal? Like super speed, or super strength, or some sort of laser beam. A normal semblance.
Nope, it couldn't, and now she was stuck with...this.
She had bought games from all across Patch, in a desperate plea to understand what constitution meant in the way the Game casually threw it out and discovered that her life was now an RPG. With stats. But no skills or abilities apparently, because you couldn't get a semblance that had semblances. Fair enough.
Haha, yeah no. Bullshit.
And so after a shopping spree of over 300 lien, the entirety of her savings, she knew exactly what each stat was supposed to represent. Probably.
Hopefully.
Constitution, if RPGs could be in agreement with each other and not rename the bloody thing every few years so everyone gets a shiny new stat, was the ability of a character to resist poison, disease, debuffs, and was used to calculate health. Which seemed to be the case in her situation. She wasn't sure, but it looked like her health was equal to her constitution times 10.
Strength was self-explanatory, as was Agility to some degree.
Perception seemed to be her ability to understand things, observe weak spots, and aim at stuff. Which was pretty important. She wasn't sure how mental traits were translated into numbers, but semblances tended to not make much sense anyway.
Willpower was a bit of a doozy. If she was right, then it was a counterpart to Constitution, only that instead of contributing to Health, it contributed to Aura, which was equal to her Willpower times 20. If she was right.
Some less renowned games also featured a mental save, against psionic attacks which Ruby wasn't sure applied in the real world. All in all, she couldn't make any safe bets on Willpower, until somehow increasing it, and seeing any active changes to her aura.
As for Charm, she deduced it probably meant persuasion, and found some games where it was also represented as attraction, making it likely to be the 'get-out-of-jail-free' stat.
It took her the better part of an afternoon to gather all of this information, right after she unlocked her semblance. And on the same day, she also figured out that she wouldn't level up unless she fought Grimm or completed quests.
Without Grimm to kill, and quests to finish, she was left with a semblance that was virtually useless for the time being. Hence when her sister found her rifling through new games to try out that night, she had declared a newfound 'passion' for video games.
Otherwise, the teasing wouldn't stop this century.
But then another part of her semblance showed up.
The...the...the fucking arena! There was no other way to think about it. Not after what she went through in it.
Her game, in all its wisdom, decided that she had to do something. So after two weeks, it unlocked the arena function, claiming the end of some sort of newbie phase as the cause.
Slowly, she raised her arm and tapped the blue screen, right on top of the arena button.
[-Arena-]
Arena Tokens: 45
Arena Level: I (Ice)
[-Enemies-]
[Ice Mephit]
[Winter Wolf]
[Frozen Treant]
[Chenoo]
[-Bosses-]
{Ice Queen}
Arena Battles do not affect the player after their end.
Defeat all Bosses to progress to the next level!
She despised the menu, truly she did.
After seeing the arena function, she immediately looked up every creature on the internet, because she lived in a game now, and found 3 out of 4 enemies. Judging by their portrayal in various games, she decided that she didn't want to mess around with the last two until she...leveled up a bit, which still felt weird to say.
So she did her fair research into the ice mephit and found out it was barely supposed to be a threat. Apparently easily beatable, but quite mobile, and also the proud owner of an ice breath attack. All she had to do was get in close, and whack it with something long.
So in one afternoon much like this one, inside of an empty household, she tapped the ice mephit button after finding a sturdy enough bat in the garage, and found herself inside the middle of an icy field, which she frankly didn't expect. At least aura protects against cold temperatures, so she didn't feel all that bad.
All of a sudden, however, a breath of frost was launched at her, and due to the blowing snow all over the place, she got hit completely.
Some sort of ping went inside her head, and she knew exactly how much aura she had left. 140.
Panic ensued, for all of three seconds, before she managed to spot another one coming and leaped away at the last second.
Rolling back onto her feet, she gripped the bat and started chasing after whatever had shot at her, and through the thick snow, she managed to spot a glimpse of something white and shimmering.
She swung, but the Mephit dodged, and from that point, the chase was on.
She'd dodge a bit, run, swing, dodge again, run, swing, it wasn't funny then, but now that she looked back the whole thing must have looked like a slapstick comedy routine.
Until the Mephit slowed down.
One swing and the thing was on the ground somewhere ahead of her. She rushed after it, but her fatigue was starting to do a number on her.
Charging after it, thick fog enveloped her, which combined with the blowing snow, reduced her visibility to centimeters.
She searched frantically, swinging with her bat as a blind man would with his cane, before stumbling onto a shard of ice.
For a moment, she didn't think anything of it. Until she realized that the entirety of the arena was a plain of ice. With no protruding structures.
She turned around, but it was frankly too late, and with two swings of long claws the thing pried her bat out of her hands and was right on top of her within seconds.
She was panicking, deadly afraid, and struggling to get it off, but the thing was quick-witted and even quicker in general. Out of desperation rather than rational thinking, she pushed against it, and to her surprise, completely tossed the ice mephit off of her.
The thing was light, but more than that, it was weak.
So when it tackled, she tackled right back, smashing into it with everything she had and quickly pinning it onto the ground, on its stomach, holding its arms behind its back.
The adrenaline had kicked in, and her hold had been a bit too tight, thus she'd learned what breaking a bone felt like, feeling the Mephit's arm shatter under her pull.
Ruby relaxed, waiting for the battle to end, and for her to be teleported out much like she was teleported in.
Except it didn't end.
And that's when she realized that she had to kill the thing. It made sense in hindsight, but that was the first time she realized what she had to do.
But by then, even with a broken arm, the bloody thing wriggled out once her hold got loose and turned the tables on her. Quickly, it latched onto her back, pulled its broken arm under her throat, and forced it into a chokehold by grabbing it with its jaws and rearing its head back, reinforcing the hold with its other arm.
She couldn't throw it off from that position regardless of the strength difference, and she couldn't swing it off her because the thing's legs pinned one of her arms to her stomach. So with one arm and a rapidly draining aura, she hoisted herself onto her legs and threw herself onto the ground with as much force as she could.
The hold persisted through what must have been a crushing impact for it, and at one point, it broke through her aura.
That was the moment where the Mephit shifted its attention, when it felt flesh and not a barrier, its teeth pulled back and sank into her shoulder.
Ruby had screamed, but adrenaline was one hell of a drug, and with one last throw, she smashed the mephit onto the ice. The jaws held tightly, but the hold with one broken arm didn't, and with one pull, she set herself free from the chokehold, breaking a second arm in the process.
And from that point, she couldn't remember much. It was all a haze of violence, as she hammered away with her free arm at the head of the mephit until it gave way, and then hammered some more.
She truly came back to her senses half an hour later, tucked into her bed.
And since then, whenever someone left two windows open, she'd close one of them. Any draft got her shivering. Not from the cold.
Ruby didn't even remember what it looked like, not that she could have discerned much because of the weather. It had been small and shiny, and by the time she had finished, it had been very much red.
She felt the need to tell her family, she wanted so badly to tell them everything about her semblance. But she couldn't.
They would trust her word when she said blue screens were flying around her head, and that her whole world was a game, but there was no way in hell they would be alright with her going through this just to get a bit stronger.
And she did get a bit stronger, at the very least. Just a bit.
When she had come back to her senses, she'd opened the arena tab once more.
One more tab opened along with it, displaying a basic victory message, and telling her to pick one of three rewards. They were all stat increases, one being a +3 to Agility, one being a +3 to Willpower, and the last being a +5 to perception. She didn't think of the stat she needed more at that point, nor did she contemplate as to why there were two +3s and one +5, she simply picked the highest point amount.
She thought about it later however and came up flat for an answer.
After a few days had passed, and she'd started feeling better mentally, she contemplated the situation and decided to do something...irresponsible at best.
Since death inside the arena didn't do anything to her, per the statement the game delivered, and one arena token was given to her daily, she figured she could scout out the rest of the enemies. The two that scared her, and the boss.
So that's what she did. After the boss, she decided to keep a tally. A notebook page with three lines was placed on her drawer.
Three deaths in the arena so far.
She still woke up in a silent scream every other night, covered in sweat. But since death didn't stick, after a while, all she felt was irritation. And anger.
A lot of anger.
The frozen treant had struck her once, twice, thrice, and that was the fight. She'd at least dodged a bit before it hit her.
The Chenoo lead to her discovering something new about the human body. She dodged the lumbering giant covered in gaping holes once, but the follow-up swing hit her. The next thing she knew, she was staring at her body, still upright, from somewhere around the ground.
Guess she knew the answer to the age-old debate. A head has a few seconds of consciousness after decapitation. Who would've known.
She'd laugh quietly to herself because she was the only person on earth who'd got to cosplay a Dullahan properly and live to tell the tale.
And the Ice Queen, the incredibly glamorous ice Queen, oh no. Two pokes from the spear, and off went Ruby for the number three special!
Despite the irritation she felt, she giggled a bit.
Her mental health was going down the drain.
But now, things were different.
Her commission for a basic training weapon had gone through, and her dad had brought it last night. Signal students got to receive a basic weapon to train with before making a specialization. She had wanted a scythe deep inside, just like her uncle, but it wouldn't be right, not when her strength was low and her agility that high, and she couldn't get one as a basic weapon either.
So now, she ran her fingers over the blade of her twin daggers. They were long, as long as her forearm, slightly curved, with a serrated edge on the inside and a smooth one on the outside, and a sharp point designed for stabbing.
Perfect for her, who relied so much on dodging things, as to not get blown to bits in three swings. Or one. Or two...
Shaking her head to clear memories of death from the forefront of her mind, she smiled whilst looking at the blades.
She hated her semblance, hated the arena, hated dying...but you know what? She'd go with it. She'd gladly suffer if it meant saving people later down the line. She'd die one hundred times in this game of hers because there were people out there who didn't get the luxury of dying more than once.
Just like her mother.
Ruby held her trembling hand forward, stopping for a second to steel herself. She had been scared for all of those fights. Truly and utterly terrified. But with time, her fear boiled into helplessness, before finally lighting itself into anger, direct both inwards, and outwards. And with gritting teeth she armed herself with fresh anger and rage, turning her arm into unshakeable iron, before tapping the Winter Wolf button.
She'd do it all to be a hero.