“Huh?”

Matthew got up from his chair with difficulty, bumping into the table he was sitting at and tipping over the now close to empty liquor bottle. The smell of the spilled liquor was barely stronger than that of his own breath.

“Is dat… a portal?” he managed to mumble.

He was now standing drunk in his workshop. He has been living here for almost 3 years now. This was his lair. He quit his engineering school after the Great Invasion, and lived as a hermit in the back of an old store since the accident on the 1 year anniversary of the Great Invasion. 

The workshop was located in an almost deserted old industrial neighborhood. It was not expensive to buy, and the one upside to Matthew’s long coma was that society had had enough time to reconstruct enough for him to receive money from the insurance after the death of his family.

With that, for the past 3 years, he could focus and has been preparing. He studied the phenomena that have happened since the Great Invasion. He watched interviews of famous players from all over the world. 

Players. That was the term the people that developed extraordinary powers following the events 4 years ago used. No matter where they were from or what language they spoke, they used a single term from their native language and never a synonym for it.

He prepared to be chosen as a player. He bought gym equipment to get fit and learned battle tactics. He planned a way to grow as efficiently as possible, he worked on developing adequate reflexes for years. He was ready, body and mind.

However, it never happened. It had been months now, since the last time someone became a player. Matthew never did. That was why he was in this state right now. His one and only goal in life was to find why these portals started appearing and stopping them altogether, getting revenge for all his loved ones. And for that, he needed power to investigate them directly.

The portal gates could only be crossed by players. Doing so before a certain time had passed allowed them to slay the monsters inside directly, avoiding a Portal Release. That is what it was called, when the delay was reached and monsters would come out of the portal gates. Non players could not enter portals or do anything against monsters.

There have been experiments to try and force normal people to become players by surrounding a low energy portal with players and waiting until the portal release. When it happened, the gathered players would slaughter all but one monster, weaken it as much as possible but keeping it alive, and have a normal person try to finish it off.

It never succeeded. They tried with all types of people and all sorts of methods. Military men with the sharpest knives or swords, strongmen with the heaviest blunt weapons, priests with so called holy items and ceremonies, or netizens with thoughts and prayers. But never has a player gained his powers by choice.

And here was Matthew, a non player, drunk, face to face with a newly formed portal in his home.

“Riiiight… It lookz just like a portal gate… Meh! No way it’s real, time to go to sleep…” Matthew said to himself before walking with great difficulty and collapsing onto his bed.

—

The next morning, Matthew woke up with a splitting headache.

“Did I hallucinate right before going to bed? I swear I remember seeing a gate in the workshop.” he grumbled, holding his head.

He got up, dragged his feet to the sink to get a glass of water and an aspirin. The layout of the workshop was very basic. There was a wide worktable along one of the four walls plastered with tools, a kitchen area and a table in one of the corners across, and a bathroom in the other corner. The entrance was between the kitchen area and the bathroom wall. There was also the bed along the table and kitchen area, and a tiny portal gate next to the kitchen table.

“Pffffttt huuuuuuuuh???” he spat out the water in his mouth in surprise.

The portal was still here. It was small, barely one meter in diameter.

‘Well, the detection team will send someone, they’ll measure the energy and then players will come and get rid of it… How are they gonna fit in though? That’s pretty tight.’ he thought.

The day passed and nothing happened. He spent the day either staring at the portal or going through his research to look for instances of gates as small as this one. There were extensive databases available with all types of information about portals in general, as every country figured it was best to cooperate against these phenomena. 

That night, Matthew barely slept, always on alert because of the gate, mere meters from his bed. The average time for a portal release was 15 days. Although it was not a statistic all that accurate since only portals outside of populated areas were kept until release on purpose, and it was not done often either since it required a lot of players on guard 24/7 around it, ready to react when it did happen. 

On the second day, nothing happened again. He did not find a single instance of a portal gate that small and nobody from the detection team showed up. The detection team was in charge of finding the portals when they appeared. A method has been developed to detect the energy signature of portals and pinpoint their location when they appeared.

The next morning, Matthew decided to just drink. Since the Great Invasion, he had only drunk twice. Last year on the third anniversary, and three days ago. But today, he felt like he needed it.

“Dose fuckers didn’t come and it’s almost been three whole dayzz” he grumbled between two glasses.

He only stared at the gate and drank until noon.

‘Fine! If they’re not gonna do anything about it, I’ll do it myself. I’m not much of a gambler, but since the chances of me becoming a player seem inexistant, it’s not like I have anything to lose anyway. Low risk, high reward. Worst case scenario, I lose a purposeless life, best case, ???... Well anyway, that’s that’ he thought.

He could not think of a reason, but somehow convinced himself that this was the right thing to do and that it made perfect sense. 

He grabbed a bunch of sheets of papers and started making plans to handle the portal release and did not forget to take a sip of liquor between each step he came up with.

“Ugh”

The next day, Matthew woke up sitting at the table, a piece of paper sticking to his face with drool. He held his head with one hand, got the paper and wiped his mouth with the other. The paper read “Workshop portal release masterfully sophisticated and absolute obliteration plan”.