I set down the Beginner's Manual on the coffee stand. I had just realized that I was still in the living room of my apartment. I decided to excuse myself from not looking around, since I had just been whammied with a crap-ton of information. I took a seat on my coach before letting out a deep breath.

  First things first, I needed to check some things out. Looking at my nanite counter, I quickly found out just how many nanites I truly had. 500 chunks, that's it. Well, I can work with that. It's the equivalent of 250 status points.

  It sounded like a lot of money, but I knew there had to be a catch somewhere.

  "Open status." I was cringing the whole time I said it. My embarassment quickly disappeared though, as a blue box appeared in front of me.

  All of my stats, at this point, were at 1. That meant I was in danger of becoming unstabilized if I died. I needed to change that. I couldn't do it right now though, since I still needed to check out the shop. Speaking of which, "Open shop."

  I wasn't quite sure how to do anything, but I decided to go off instinct. Reaching out my hand, I tapped weapons. When I did so, the list of tabs remained in my vision. An additional blue screen appeared below the tabs though, all of them containing the different weapons I could buy.

  I currently had 500 chunks, or 500,000 shards.

  Now it made sense about all the money I'd been given. The ballistic weapons, which I believed were actually just normal pistols and such, used nanites to fire. Made sense, the bullets had to come from somewhere. That meant I would literally be shooting money around.

  Lasers cost ten times as much, but used energy instead. I would have to buy charging and storage status points just so that I could use the weapons. Plus, I still wanted to upgrade my other status points as well.

  I went to the other tabs available and started going through them. Food had some things like hamburgers and pizza for sale. None of the food was too expensive though, all of it costing a couple shards at most. Property, Tools, and Liesure objects was currently unavailable for some reason. Status points just let me buy additional stats by spending 2 chunks. The search just let me type in whatever I wanted to look up. Let me tell you, trying to use a floating blue keyboard is as weird as it sounds.

  The only other addition tabs I was really interested in was the Ability and Armor tabs.

  Again, this was information overload. The abilites were really interesting, the flight one especially. Still, they were all so expensive. I was currently looking at.... 17 minutes and 22 seconds before a horde of monsters would come to kill us all. That meant, I would need to look at the short game over the long game. Definitely not how I normally like to play, but this is life, not some video game.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  I immediately bought the personal armor, a laser pistol, and 3 frag grenades. 11 chunks and 150 shards. That left me with 488 chunks and 850 shards. I went ahead and bought the ballistic sniper rifle, a sword, extreme jump, flight, and electric emissions. It cost a total of 75 chunks and 403 shards, leaving me with 413 chunks and 447 shards.

  Now, it was time for me start buying status points. I could currently buy 206 ability points, but I wouldn't be buying that many. At most, I would buy 140. That would leave me with 132 chunks to save up and spend. I wasn't quite sure about in the future, but I would probably need to buy food, a house, and maybe some other equipment I hadn't seen yet.

  First priority was to buy Capicity, Charging, and Shield. I needed shield for extra protection. That meant increasing charging so that I didn't drain my energy. I also needed to upgrade capacity so that I could actually use my new abilities and the laser pistol.

  Besides that, I also needed to increase my agility and dexterity. Strength would have to wait. Intelligence was also a must, since I would be able to slow down my perception of time. Ugh! This was going to take a while. I glanced at the clock again. 15 minutes and 41 seconds. That was time I didn't have.

  I went ahead and bought 40 status points each for Capacity, Charging, and Shield. Whenever I did that, I felt a rush unlike anything else I had ever felt. It was a tingling sensation all over my body, an electric jolt that was extremely pleasant. The closest I ever came to this was when I did skydivng before on a dare. Obviously, I had changed. Let's see how much. "Open Status."

  Great. Now I had 20 points to increase everything else. I put 10 points in Intelligence and then 5 points in Agility and Dexterity.

  Okay. That was done. Now, to see my purchases. "Open Inventory."

  I decided to try what I'd done with the Store menu. Reaching out my hand, I tapped Personal Armor. Another blue menu popped up.

  I tapped equip. I felt the cold touch of the floor as it swarmed up my body. In the time it took for me to blink, I had already been completely covered in the gray nanites. They even covered my face. Again, I couldn't move and I had to struggle not to scream as I felt them cover my mouth. I felt the nanites lift off my face, my vision clearing as the nanites covering my face turned see through. I looked down at my body, seeing myself covered head to toe in black armor.

  Black plates of metal armor covered my arms, legs, and chest. The parts that weren't covered in armor were covered in what looked, and felt, like black spandex. I took a tentative step forward. It didn't constrict my movements at all. The wonders of nanites. My head was also covered in black metal, making my face seem like an egg. The metal didn't appear to stop me from looking through it though, something that I couldn't explain.

  I decided to check out the other things in my inventory. Maybe I could shorten the time though? "Equip sword." Nothing happened. Maybe I needed to do something else? "Open inventory equip sword." This time, my hand turned into a sword as nanites flowed up from the floor to recreate my hand. I was actually starting to get used to the whole 'body turning into objects' thing. I wasn't sure whether I should be happy or very concerned for my mental health.

  Let's see if it worked the opposite way too. "Store sword in inventory." As I wached, the sword dissolved into grey goo and fell to the ground. It disappeared, seemingly passing through the floor.

  A beep sounded out, causing me to look at the monster wave timer. 4 minutes, 59 seconds. Yeah, I needed to hurry it up.

  The last thing I needed to do was check my abilities. How did I go about that again? I opened up the Beginner's Manual and turned to Basics of Abilities. Yep, all I had to do was say 'open ability list.' Easy enough. "Open ability list."

  At least the abilites seemed simple. Say the name and you perform the ability. I might as well try it out now. "Flight." I wasn't thinking of the height I wanted to be at, so I immediately went to the max height of ten feet. Or eight feet since my ceiling was in the way.

  "OW!" I yelled as I hit my head off the ceiling. Hard. I saw my shield value plummet from 410 to 408. In less than a second, it went right back to 410. Great, at least it worked. Apparently, I also felt pain too. I concentrated and thought of 2 feet. I descended from the ceiling that my body had been pasted to and was now floating about two feet from the ground.

  I thought about moving forward and I did! This was amazing! I was so caught up in the joy of flying, that I forgot about the timer until I heard the beeping noise. 0:00.

  I could immediately hear growls coming from outside. "Open inventory, equip laser pistol, deactivate flight." I fell to the floor as grey goo flowed up my body. The laser pistol formed in my hand in less time than it took to blink. My 82 EP regeneration rate, technically 41 since the other 41 was taken by my shields, meant that Flight didn't waste my EP.

  I took a deep, shuddering breath as I gripped the laser pistol. It was time to face whatever horde of monsters that Gad had created.