Okay so I’m gonna give a bit of a ‘disclaimer’ first.  Not that anything is offensive or whatever, cause who cares about that at this point, right?  Anyway, I just haven’t decided whether or not this will ‘definitely’ be the prologue to book 1 or not.  Also, I wanted a bit of input regarding various things… Do you like the way I wrote the Prologue?

I do want to make HCOP into actual books eventually.  However, I’m having a hard time deciding certain things.  For example: Should I have each arc be considered a ‘chapter’ and each chapter be considered a ‘part’?  Also, should I write ‘prologues’ like this one for each arc/super-chapter?  In that case, there would be another prologue before what is currently chapter 13.  If I do decide to do prologues for each arc/super-chapter, then should I write them from different character’s perspectives?  Sarah appears for the first time around chapter 13ish, so I might do the next prologue from her perspective…

Also, what’s your opinion on the edited chapter 1?  How much more editing does it need?  Well, whatever… Oh, btw, the prologue is in the MC’s perspective rofl.  This is not an autobiography lulz 😛

Prologue: Michael

There’s a lot of power in prayer, whether people wanna believe it or not. I mean, think about all the crazy shit that happens on a daily basis… There’s always some ridiculous nonsense that totally defies all common sense and logic, yet it’s still out there!

I had a cat one time that could scream “Help me~!” Well, it was probably like, possessed or something, but it was definitely strange.

When I was a little kid, I used to always have these weird dreams. No, this isn’t going to be some awkward and tragic story about how I was molested or whatever. Seriously, I wasn’t, so stop trying to create unnecessary drama. There’s already enough fucked up shit without inventing more problems just for the hell of it.

Anyway, in those ‘visions’ I would always see this asshole… Okay, stop, this isn’t about my anus-fetish, I’m talking about a person. His name was Michael, the same as mine, and so logically, I always assumed it was just me imagining some awesome stories where I was the main character. It ain’t that strange, loads of authors do that; it’s way easier than trying to totally create a character from scratch.

Every night, I would start thinking about how fucking stupid the people were in just about every television show I watched. This was the olden days, nineties and early two-thousands, before toddlers had goddamn tablets and internet-porn. Basically, I would just dream about “What would Michael do if he was in that situation?”

It started as just a simple fanfiction type of thing; I would replace the main character with one of my own design and creation. In the beginning, he was young and naive, like I was. Yes, once upon a motherfucking time, even ‘I’ was a little kid!

Eventually, he started to become more experienced, powerful, cynical… However, it had gotten to the point where he was beyond the scope of those silly shows. Whether it was a zombie apocalypse or a voyage through space, he didn’t really ‘fit’ as one of those morons anymore.

By the time I was twelve and had the interwebs, I didn’t really need him to fulfill my fantasies. I had video games, porn, and although it was in its infancy, social media did exist. Thus, Michael disappeared for a while and I indulged in ‘reality’.

Of course, that blissful ignorance only lasted for about a single year, before I stumbled upon a little problem. It turned out that I was a massive pussy. Well, they pretty much indoctrinated us in school and I was still technically a little bitch, I mean, ‘kid’.

I was thirteen when I started getting bullied. The reason was merely that I was a virgin, had good grades and was mentally weak. Sure, I wasn’t physically strong, but I still could have beaten the shit outta those other brats if I had even the tiniest bit of experience.

Back then, I used to believe that everything would be fine as long as I just wasn’t an asshole and didn’t pick fights with other people. Obviously I was wrong, because not only did the bitches and cunts verbally abuse me on a daily basis, it eventually went farther than that.

It was so long ago that I honestly can’t remember the exact reason, but eventually, this guy named Gabriel started fucking with me. Even though he was fourteen, he got held back because he had a learning disability. I’m pretty sure that was total bullshit, cause he just used that ‘status’ to get away with bullying kids.

There was an ‘assault’, where he ran up behind me and punched me in the back of the head. Then he pushed me into the corner of a door and after I fell to the ground, he continued to kick the shit outta me for a while. To be completely honest, it wasn’t really that big of a deal; I’ve done far worse things to my ‘friends’ while sparing or just playing around. Still, it was my first experience with violence and I was tricked into believing that if I didn’t fight back, then everything would work out.

Yeah, the school treated me as if I provoked a mentally handicapped ‘child’ and got what was coming to me. The bastard’s parents even threatened to press charges against me and a bunch of the girls that normally bullied me, obviously tried to get me suspended by claiming that I verbally abused them.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that you should never trust any sort of authority figures, because they will mentally and physically rape you the moment they get the chance. So, you may be asking yourself “Nyah~, but Mikey~, what does that have to do with praying?”

Well, before then, I had never truly hated anyone or anything. I really didn’t have any aspirations or motivation at all to be completely honest. However, being super pissed off is a great way to get shit done.

My father told me “You need to stop being such a pussy! Why didn’t you fight back?! Here’s some sixty year old weight-training equipment that’s practically falling apart and extremely dangerous! Use this to get into shape and stop being such a little bitch!” Okay, maybe he didn’t say it exactly that way, but that’s how I remember it.

Working out isn’t nearly as difficult as people make it out to be. I’ve seen guys and girls with actual physical disabilities who were still in amazing shape. It wasn’t because they were ‘talented’ or lucky, they just stopped being lazy and did some damn exercise!

Now, I was a thirteen and hadn’t totally gone through puberty yet, so I might have pushed it a bit too far. I just thought “If I keep going, I’ll definitely look like a body-builder!” As it turns out, even if you work up to it, doing a thousand sit-ups a day can be really dangerous. I pulled my diaphragm and could barely breath for a month or so, cause I was trying to get abs.

My advice is to never force yourself too hard or fast, in anything. Anyway, I did get really beefy by the time I was fourteen and thus, everyone started making fun of me because they thought I was on steroids. Seriously, with my beard and muscles, if it weren’t for the fact that I was five-four, I could have passed for a thirty-year old man.

Oh yeah, that whole prayer thing, it really did work. I asked ‘God’ to help me get stronger and I definitely did. Of course, I also had to do lots and lots of physical exercise over a long period of time. It wasn’t like I just power-leveled in a day and became a superhero or some such bullshit.

Speaking of which, even though I was way ‘bigger’ than that Gabriel douchebag, he still kept trying to pick a fight with me. Thus, the dreams of ‘Michael’ had returned. However, instead of placing him into random television shows or in ‘romantic’ situations with girls at school, I imagined him killing that fucking piece of shit…

I had anger issues, pretty much everybody does. My irritation and borderline homicidal rage resulted in me taking it out on my friends. It’s not like I was the only person who likes fighting, so it wasn’t that hard to find sparring partners.

Somewhere along the line I also started getting interested in music and became obsessed with playing guitar. Every so often, someone would ‘try’ to bully me, but it usually ended with them getting too scared to actually do anything.

Well, my high school days had a lot of ups and downs, but I’m sure that you really don’t give a damn about any of that nonsense. Let’s just skip to the important part: When I first started writing. Honestly, there were too many stories, far more adventures than I could possibly record or remember.

In the beginning, I really had no idea what I was doing. It was just a mess of obnoxiously gorey battles, incestuous and weird sex scenes, time travel paradoxes and dream-sequences that would make you think I was on an acid trip. No, I’ve never actually taken any narcotics at all in my entire life, but my nightmares would make most people want to kill themselves or make a Japanese horror movie.

After my first girlfriend ever finally broke up with me, I started slipping back into my old habits. Playing MMORPGs, I bought a pocket-pussy, I got a yeast infection, I masturbated so much that I ripped the skin off of my penis, okay most of my problems had to do with my absurdly overpowering sex-drive.

However, since my ex was the one who introduced me to writing, I kind of lost interest once we broke up. Of course, just because I was too lazy to type it all out, didn’t mean that my brainbox would let me stop thinking about that fucking cuntbag Michael. Although, I did also have some dreams about other characters that I had written about and created in my imaginary world.

I used to play this game called “The Gates of Sidhe”. It was about faeries, elves, demons, and just about every other generic fantasy-styled creature that anyone ever invented. They put their own little spin on it, but it’s not like they really came up with any ‘new’ ideas.

In there you could make your different characters have relationships and you could even write their backstories. I was a Doom Knight named Plagued One… Of course, they didn’t let you have more than a single word, so it looked more like ‘Plaguedone’ and everyone always called me Plague Done.

The point is that I obviously used that as an excuse to invent this awesome backstory about how before he was a Doom Knight, Plaguedone was a Paladin named Michael the Archangel. I had like ten other max-leveled characters and each of them was related to that first one by various means.

When I was twenty, after a whole year of being single, I did something that would totally change… everything. It wasn’t like I robbed a bank or joined the army, I was still poor as fuck and unemployed. No, that ‘horrible’ thing I did was just ask ‘God’ for a bit of help.

Now, most people pray for good health, a loving family, and to win the lottery. What I wanted was a bit more ‘exotic’. All I said was “Can you send me to a game-like fantasy-style world? It can’t be too unrealistic, but also, it would be nice if I was immortal to some degree. Oh yea, no rape or slavery either, cause then I’ll have to spend the whole time trying to build a perfect society, and I’d rather not have to deal with all that nonsense. No other players, cause that always creates a ton of annoying drama; I just want to have a fun, relaxing, and enjoyable time.”

Hell, there was this one time that I drew a bunch of magical symbols onto a piece of paper, then smeared blood and cum onto them. After that I read some weird chants that I found online and tried to summon a sexy dragon-girl out of loneliness. Let’s just say, I’ve done a lot of weird shit in my life, so asking God to send me to a fantasy-world wasn’t that big of a deal. In fact, if I hadn’t made so many similar ‘requests’, I probably wouldn’t have even been able to remember something like that in the first place.

It wasn’t until I was twenty-two that I finally decided to write a fanfiction. Then I began working on my first web-novel. Just like that, a whole year passed by and since I was a little burnt out, I decided to take a break from writing.

Of course, almost immediately after that, I began hardcore working on a new book. Within two months, I was actually starting to make some money for the first time in my pathetic life. I was really happy… Anyway, the moral of this story is to be careful what you wish for.

Chapter 1: The MC Is a ‘No-Lifer’

Drenched in steaming water, a man materialized in the middle of a grassy plain; he was completely naked, with a foamy white substance in his short black hair. He casually muttered “Okay then… that was weird. Hmmm~ probably aliens? Well, I could just be dreaming, or dead, but somehow, this place feels kinda… different? Maybe I was abducted, or fell through some sort of trans-dimensional portal, heh. Sigh, they could have at least waited until I was finished though.” As soap leaked into his eyes, he shouted “Ow-ow-ow, shit! Damn it! Gah, oi, whoever brought me here; couldn’t you have waited until ‘after’ I got out of the fucking shower!?”

Unbeknownst to the mysterious, twenty-three year old Human, a small yet ferocious predator stealthily approached. Before he even had a chance to react, the fluffy white rabbit, with blood-thirsty bright-red eyes, leapt into the air and headbutted his lower-spine.

Strangely enough, the relatively muscular man was launched a few meters forward by the attack. The large green ‘health-bar’ appearing above his head was nearly emptied. His ‘HP’ was only at 3/10, and the words ‘partial-paralysis’ suddenly appeared in neon-orange, next to the pitch-black name “Michael”.

On that man’s lower-back, was a huge, dark-red bruise, which seemed to be internally bleeding quite a bit. Since he was unable to remove the soap from his eyes, there was also a ‘blinded’ debuff as well.

As the blood pooled in his abdomen from his broken spine and ruptured internal organs, he lost another point of health. However, even under such excruciating pain and discomfort, he was surprisingly calm and only groaned a few times, before promptly dying.

The mostly intact pale-skinned corpse was immediately surrounded by five small white-rabbits: Each of them became dyed a deep crimson from the carnage. Once there were only shattered bones, clumps of hair hair, broken nails, and a few chunks of uneaten flesh, a small, inconspicuous pearl was remaining.

Thus, the bloodthirsty creatures continued to slaughter each-other, until only the strongest remained. Out of the five ravenous beasts, only the one who killed Michael was able to consume his ‘mana-core’ and evolve. When the severely wounded rabbit swallowed the mysterious pearl, its body swelled to at least twice its previous size and a large spiral horn erupted from its forehead. Even though it was on the verge of death before that moment, with only 1/5 health remaining, the HP swiftly jumped up to 5/10. Once it completely devoured its former comrades’ mana-cores, a bright white light descended upon it, and a loud ringing resounded in the surroundings.

Next to the generic name “Horned Rabbit” was the number two, signifying that it had ‘leveled-up’ and all of its health-points were instantly filled, while also increasing to fifteen. A disembodied spirit in the shape of a tiny pitched-black will-o’-the-wisp, was quietly observing the entire scene. It eventually started laughing hysterically, and after the creature scampered off into the distance, a completely naked level-one human man materialized, standing on the blood-soaked ground.

This time Michael didn’t have soap in his hair or water on his deathly-pale skin, but strangely enough, he had a wide grin on his face. After stretching his newly formed body, he started talking to himself. “I wonder if this is a virtual-reality game? Sigh~, those bunnies were so adorable… even if they are slightly dangerous. Well, I still think it’s probably aliens, or maybe my whole fucking life until now has just been inside of a VR. Hmmm, I mean, it’s not like I really had that many attachments. It figures though, I finally start making some money and I get abducted into a different reality, hahahaha~!”

While laughing maniacally, he had once again, drawn the ire of a small white rabbit. This time however, he could hear it crawling through the thick, knee-high green grass. Yet, when he turned around, his reflexes weren’t fast enough to alter his fate.

Michael was only five and a half feet tall, so the little critter was able to leap all the way up to his chest and perform a powerful headbutt. His sternum snapped and the concussive force had immediately stopped his heart. A huge, bright red number appeared above his head, as his entire health-pool was instantly drained to negative three: It was a deadly strike, causing triple the normal amount of damage.

The rabbit directly dug the mana-core out of the corpse’ skull and evolved before any of the others had a chance to attack it. The pitch-black wisp sighed dramatically, muttering “What’s up with this hardcore difficulty? Actually, why the fuck are these bunnies spawn-camping me? I haven’t seen anyone else suddenly appear in this field, so is it just me? Hmmm~, normally, wouldn’t the player start out in a town or village of some sort? Hell, if this was a damn hero-summoning story, ugh… Actually, I would rather get repeatedly murdered by these adorable rodents, then have to deal with that kinda drama.”

He appeared to be the type of person who talked to himself, a lot. When Michael’s human body was reformed for the third time, he had finally decided to be quiet and only softly grumbled “Ew~?” Then he looked down at his feet, which were standing inside of his former chest.

Unlike the previous pack of rabid rodents, the one who insta-killed him left without devouring his corpse. As he casually started walking in the opposite direction from where the two horned rabbits had gone, he mumbled “Well, if I ever get hungry and can’t find anything to eat, heh-heh…” There was nothing but grassy hills everywhere he looked, so there was no real difference to him.

He had guessed that the more powerful creatures would probably go to a place that fit their level and rank. It wasn’t hard for him to notice that next to the number by their name, there was also a letter. Before the rabbits had evolved, there was a ‘G’ and afterwards, it had changed to ‘F’. He assumed that eating the mana-core would either boost experience or increase the base stats, depending on the relative ranks and levels.

However, in order to test out that theory and lessen his chance continually getting insta-killed, he needed to find one of those tiny critters. Michael could hear them crawling around in the grass, but they kept their distance and didn’t let him get too close. He snickered, whispering “So they act like normal bunnies when you’re trying to kill them, but the moment you drop your guard…” Then he purposefully looked up at the cloudy sky, which tempted one of the less cautious ones to jump towards his stomach. Before it could reach his body, he move to the left and then grabbed both of its ears with his left hand; his vice-like grip crushed them so badly that the creature received two points of damage.

It released a horrible screeching noise and he suddenly received a ‘stunned’ debuff, which made his head feel like it was going to explode. Fortunately, the duration wasn’t very long, and the other rabbits that would have taken that opportunity to attack him, were also hit by the ‘AoE’ crowd-control ability.

Michael sighed at the squirming and helpless little bunny, then muttered “Sorry, but it’s your own damn fault for trying to kill me. Ugh, gross…” as he used his left hand to break its neck. The eyes bulged out and blood squirted from its tiny nostrils, as a huge bright-red seven appeared above its head. He couldn’t help but curse “For fuck’s sake, gory games are a lot more fun when you don’t have to touch, feel, and smell them! Whoever designed this shit, really shouldn’t have put so much detail into it… Why does a stun have to include actual mind-numbing agony anyway?”

He sighed dramatically, as he saw something pop-up in the corner of his vision; he had received 1/10 experience needed for him to level-up from simply killing it. While grimacing, he used both of his hands to crush and twist the rabbit’s head until it made a terrible popping noise: splattering blood and brain-matter all over his face and chest.

After dropping the carcass into the tall-grass, he looked at the meaty paste and bones in his right palm. He had to pick through it until he could find an unreasonably small, transparent bead. Michael gagged a few times, before quickly tossing it into his mouth. Then he immediately swallowed it, while trying to spit out the fur that had rubbed off the mana-core and attached to his tongue.

The naked man assumed that there was a fifty-percent chance that he would either die, or receive a minor experience-boost. If he wasn’t completely certain of his apparent immortality, he probably wouldn’t have so casually tested his theory.

After a few seconds of waiting, while being vigilant of his surroundings, a big holographic screen popped up in front of his face. It was a notification which read “Stats have increased after digesting a level-one, rank ‘G’ white-rabbit’s mana-core: +.1 Aura, +.5 Agility.”

 

[Player Information

Name: Michael
Titles: The Nudist, The Noob
Level: 1
Experience: 1/10
Age: Adult
Race: Human
Rank: F
Class: None
Specialization: None
Profession: Unemployed]

[Stats

Health: 10/10
Mana: 15/15
Stamina: 4/5
Mana Regen per minute: 20
Health Regen per hour: 10

Strength: 3
Vitality: 1
Endurance: 1
Dexterity: 3
Agility: 1.5
Intelligence: 3
Wisdom: 2
Perception: 1
Charisma: 1

Willpower: 7
Luck: 7
Aura: 1.1

Attack Rating: 15
Defense Rating: .5]