The new, detached setting is teeming with 'land mines'-highly unusual ones. Plenty of other, deadlier things would be happy to reach out and touch someone anywhere, be it the roof of a skyscraper or a subway tunnel deep underground. Tons of somnambulant extras could swing either way: cut your throat or help you, purely on a whim. Weapons are as deadly as they are improbable. Deliberately imposed multiple handicaps make any attempts at camouflage meaningless.
It looks like there are way too many top Challenge participants around. Culling time is upon us.
The desert has been left behind, but Sinner's troubles have not. He finds himself in an elaborate trap-him, and everyone else who failed to go north early. Now he has two options: accept his fate and die along with countless other losers or escape from the trap and pull his friends out.
Except to do that, he will have to fight the most terrifying animal ever.
Man.
Welcome to the challenge. You're an absolute nobody here-nothing; a zero; a useless lump of meat filled with bones. You're but a delicious morsel for your antagonists and those who got lucky at the start. The only goal you can have in your miserable existence is to kick the bucket as soon as possible.
The Challenge continues, and there is no end in sight to the bloodletting. It doesn't matter whether you are a 'Brahmin' or a disenfranchised piece of meat, a popular top dog or the lowliest loser. You still don't know squat, and if anything, the questions just keep piling up.
Yet, the new tier is also different, at least for some. You can go hard, or go easy, but the harder the going, the higher the loot. If you are lucky, you may even get a respite from feeding on your own kind. Instead, you'll be eating right.
But don't rejoice finding yourself all alone on a deserted shore. Nature is the worst killer ever, and the puppet masters know your most secret nightmares. Eating right may well kill you just as dead.
They plucked him out of his own familiar world to kill him with extreme prejudice. This is what always happens to those who are just food in the bowl for someone with a better luck.
But consider yourself warned: he is a very special food-the kind that eats you right back. Think again whether you really want to come and get him.
And if you still do, just stay put. He'll come for you himself.
Welcome to the challenge. You're an absolute nobody here-nothing; a zero; a useless lump of meat filled with bones. You're but a delicious morsel for your antagonists and those who got lucky at the start. The only goal you can have in your miserable existence is to kick the bucket as soon as possible.
You are no one. Level zero. Empty of mind and memory. Even your past has been stripped from your brain by the inscrutable System.
A long, difficult road lies between you and remembering any part of who you are. A road punctuated with one death after another. You are too puny to survive by might alone. Information is the single resource that might keep you alive, but the brainless “digis” have none of it. Only those with experience can give you what you need, but most care nothing about you or your plight. In fact, some make it their mission to kill you.
So die you will, again and again, your life counter clicking lower and lower. Even the creators do not know what happens when your counter reaches zero, but many are sure that your last life here is just that. No more respawns.
You are not the first player in the world of S.T.Y.X., and you will not be the last. You can only hope luck will be on your side. The luckiest players are those who find a vulnerability in the System. Those they call cheaters.
Perhaps cheating is the only way to win.
Enjoy your game.
It started with a girl. One he had seen many months past, and only for a few evenings.
Her father, as it turned out, was a barbaric maniac, straight out of the foulest dungeons of the Middle Ages. Decades into the twenty-first century, the madman seemed terribly out of place.
Yet he was also a powerful mogul-and determined to turn the life of every man who had ever been romantically involved with his daughter into a particular variant of hell only made possible by the latest VR technology. All seventeen of his girl's former lovers would suffer in virtual reality until they snapped.
The torturers had considered every possibility and taken every measure to assure their success. Not even death would offer their victims an escape. No harm would come to their bodies, of course. Only their minds.
For the first sixteen, the project succeeded. But the seventeenth was different. The seventeenth was Dark.
