"I haven't been all that truthful with you all."
The words had left my lips before I could even get the chance to fully reflect on what it was I wanted to tell everyone. Marcos had told me to reflect, to think about what I was going to say, to think of a way to explain the fact that I was able to accomplish feats that were simply impossible by any human standard. And I did think about it. I had made up a ton of lies in my head and woven them with some truth.
But while I had sat on the transport on the way here, my mind couldn't do anything but wander freely through my memories. I thought of Anahrin, of the words he had told me, of his final lesson for me.
I remember looking at him as he lay on that dais.
"You want to know what makes a good leader outside of the military life?" he had asked me. "It's not power, it's not strength, it's not fear, hell, it's not even brilliance. What makes a leader is their ability to make others better in their presence and in their absence."
His lesson had been to help me lead a fruitful business. But the predicament we had just found ourselves in made the words have an impact that felt like physical blows.
As I stood here, on what was pretty much a physical pedestal, looking down at the faces of the people who had left their old lives behind to follow me in my grand journey of creating something from nothing, about to lie to them once again, I felt Anahrin's words ring louder than ever in my mind.
"Respect is not demanded from those who follow you. It needs to be earned," he had said, with a glowing certainty in his eyes. "But you don't earn it through grand speeches or through massive paychecks. No. You earn it with consistency in your character."
How the hell was I supposed to earn these people's respect when I had been pretty much lying from the get-go? Nothing about me was real. Not my current identity, not my own body, not my own position. It had all been fabricated from a lie.
I felt panic rise within me as I looked over the gathered crowd, all waiting with bated breaths for me to speak.
"I know things many of you will not believe," I started. "I've... met beings... I've met death."
I could feel an uncomfortable shift in the people before me. I closed my eyes for a second, trying to think, trying to come up with something to say. Trying to justify my actions, my lies, my identity. But I couldn't come up with anything. My mind had gone completely blind. I had never found myself at such a crossroad...
In my previous life on Earth, I had once heard a wise man say that, "A lie may take care of the present, but it has no future." I wanted to build a company, to build a kingdom, to build an empire, to take away the suffering caused by the current hands that held the puppet string of the IUC. I wanted to crush the scum who would dare attack the innocent. I wanted to rip out the throats of those who would lie to your face as they screwed your life six ways to Sunday. I wanted to stomp out the corruption that allowed good men and women to die while the worst of mankind swam in the fruits of their efforts.
However, even as these thoughts went through my mind, I had to remember that sharing the whole truth, that I possessed a literal, gamified System, wouldn't earn their respect and instead would break their minds. It would turn me from a man into an incomprehensible deity, alienating me completely from the very humanity I was trying to save.
An internal battle was being waged within the confines of my mind. One side was wondering what good was a throne built on lies? How far would I make it before everything crumbled through my fingers because I lied from the very beginning?
Meanwhile, the other understood that an empire built entirely on lies would crumble, yes. But there were some lies... some lies that just were the mortar that kept the foundation from collapsing entirely. If I unraveled the deepest truths of my existence, it would cause far more harm than good. I had to remain Mark Shephard. I had to give them a truth they could process, a truth they could survive.
"Mark," I heard someone say from behind me, and I opened my eyes. I don't know how long had passed, but Kenjiro had made his way through the crowd and rested his hand on my back, giving me support. "Whatever it is you have to get off your chest, just know I've got your back."
As Kenjiro's words entered my ears, I could almost hear Anahrin giving me his final lesson while he still breathed. "You share and give credit where credit is due, you take blame for your failures, and you show them that you see them just as they see you, as another human being. You demonstrate that you are no better than they are, that you're only their boss, but that's it."
I felt my heart fall back into a calm, rhythmic beating. I looked down at Kenjiro and gave him a bitter smile while nodding to myself. I couldn't keep up this damn lie. I couldn't keep making things worse for myself. I would give them the truth of my body, the truth of the universe, but there were some things that would have to remain hidden.
"I guess it's time I tell you all the truth," the words escaped my lips as if my mouth had a mind of its own. "About who... about WHAT I am."
I heard gasps escape everyone's lips as I had unconsciously summoned my railgun from out of my inventory in front of everyone. However, there was a smile on 2 people's faces. Dr. Corven, who was simply fascinated by my action, and the one who'm it truly mattered most, Lyra's.
"As you already know, my name is Mark Shephard," I said, steadying my voice as it projected across the silent plaza. I then gestured subtly toward the Elites standing below me. "As I had previously shared with you, over three years ago, my unit was seized by the IUC. They were put on ice, stored in a heavily fortified black site on a restricted, desolate desert world. One that I wasn't going to leave them on."
I took a deep breath as I recalled the events that had gone down before I had awakened my inert system, recovered my past life's memories, and met Anahrin, all of which sent me down the path I was currently walking. But instead of sharing those, I added a twist to them.
"I had stolen a Corvette named the Obsidian, to get them back. I went in expecting some levels of corporate resistance from House Volanti, who had funded and run the experiment," my eyes unfocused, staring out over the crowd, but I was only seeing the tapestry of the branching story I was weaving. A necessary lie. "But intel can sometimes be a fickle thing. The IUC had actually abandoned the sector months prior, leaving it to be picked over by a small pirate syndicate, and the skeleton crew I had at the time, and I, flew blind into a pirate ambush. It was just the Obsidian against a swarm of over fifty pirate vessels."
I noticed a small commotion start, and a young man, maybe around twenty years old, broke free from the grip of someone I could only guess to have been his father, and spoke up. "How the hell were you able to-"
However, his father managed to shut him up before he finished his question. I sighed as I looked at the pair. "Sir, let him go."
The older man let the young man go and went to fix his clothes, pulling on his shirt to straighten things.
"Now, kid, I understand that you, just like many, if not everyone here, may have your questions," I said. "But I simply request you hold off until I am done, since what I have to say may lead to more questions, just as it may very well answer the ones you currently have."
The young man gave me a nod, so I continued. "When the pirates ambushed us, they didn't ask for our surrender and instead went straight for an execution. The Obsidian was a tough ship, and in the time she'd been in my possession, I had piloted her out of situations that would be considered impossible by most standards. But stacked armor plating doesn't mean much when the void fills with railgun slugs and autocannon fire. In barely three minutes, our point-defense networks had been overwhelmed, and we had been too distracted by their ineffective missile volleys to notice that we were being peppered by railgun fire."
I looked down at the floor beneath me, my hands balling up into fists. I had never really thought back about those days, about the men and women I lost. About the friends, no, the family I lost. But now that I was turning their deaths into another lie while I wanted to share the truth, I felt like a bag of crap.
"I watched my XO get torn in half by the emergency seals... and I didn't even get the chance to give the order to abandon ship before I was knocked out."
A suffocating weight settled over the crowd as I revealed the sheer scale of the helplessness and loss I had personally gone through. It was something these people, who had just lost their own friends and squadmates, could understand on a more personal level.
"When I finally regained consciousness, I found myself no longer in space," I explained, letting the memory pull me back into the dark. "I was inside the mangled bridge of the Perseverance, which had somehow survived atmospheric reentry and crashing. I was strapped upside down in my chair with multiple broken bones, stranded on the ledge of a mountainside on a desolate desert planet."
I paused, taking a slow breath of the humid air, letting it fill my lungs as the phantom sensation of vertigo gripped my stomach. "I assessed the distance and the Oxygen I had left, and decided to make an attempt to climb down the 2-kilometer mountainside. I made it a good way down before the ground beneath my feet gave way, and I fell."
I looked directly at Lyra, who was watching me with wide, terrified eyes, and offered her a small, reassuring nod before turning back to the masses. "As I fell, I accepted my fate. I didn't die with the ship, but it's not like I was making it very far either. I plummeted down the face of that cliff for what I'd have to guess was over 1700 meters."
A collective inhale of breath echoed through the plaza, and several people shook their heads at the impossibility of the statement I had just made.
"No one would survive a fall like that," a voice called out from the middle of the crowd. It wasn't accusatory, just a statement of undeniable biological fact.
"No," I agreed softly. "You don't. A human body hitting a pool of water from over 1700 meters would liquify on impact, just like I did. The impact shattered my spine in multiple places. My ribcage collapsed inward, puncturing both lungs and rupturing my organs, my skull fractured, causing a massive hemorrhage, and, by every metric of medical science, I was a corpse. I mean, I felt the lights go out. I felt the cold, absolute certainty of death wrap its hands around me."
I let the silence hang for a moment.
"But, clearly, I didn't die," I continued, my voice gaining a firm weight. "Because at the bottom of that fall, buried beneath the sand, was a facility. An ancient technological marvel that had been sealed away for hundreds of thousands of years. And inside that facility, suspended in a cryogenic stasis field that had miraculously maintained power for epochs, was a living being."
I looked at Dr. Corven, whose eyes were practically burning with scientific curiosity.
"I was saved by a being of an alien race. Unlike the Vulpinians, this race was called the Strathari," I revealed, the name leaving my lips like a sacred incantation. "And this being that saved me... his name was Anahrin."
Whispers broke out across the plaza since the "alien" carried a heavy stigma, conjuring images of the 26th century, when humanity managed to put its differences aside and fight on a united front against the Vulpinians. Or they thought of the feral beasts like the ones that prowled the jungles of this planet, but I quickly raised a hand to silence them.
"Unlike what you all might think, he wasn't a monster or some horrific, multi-limbed terror from a nightmare," I clarified. "Anahrin looked like us. He had two arms, two legs, a face with features that mirrored our own, but much more refined, and he also had quite the intellect. The only difference between us was height. He stood roughly eleven, maybe twelve feet tall, and had a lean body type, though his weight was actually immense."
"How is that possible?" Dr. Corven asked, stepping slightly out of the crowd, unable to contain her analytical mind. "I mean, aside from the vulpinians, which only resemble us through the fact that they are bipedal, parallel evolution on a scale like what you just described across separate star systems is statistically impossible."
"I'm not a scientist, Doctor, but I believe you when you say such a thing. However, this isn't a case of parallel evolution," I said, deciding to reveal the heaviest truth I possessed. "It's lineage."
As soon as those two words were let out into the air, the whisperings stopped entirely, allowing absolute stillness to fall over the thousand colonists.
"As I said, Anahrin wasn't just an alien. He claimed his species was our ancestor," I stated. "The Strathari were an empire that spanned God knows how many hundreds of thousands of worlds. They were Polymaths, masters of biology, of genetics, of localized ecosystem seeding, of travel, and God knows how many other things. Other than a genetic match, I have no proof, only a speculation that hundreds of thousands of years ago, long before the first primate ever learned to use a stone tool, the Strathari visited Earth. They likely manipulated the indigenous DNA they found there, mixing it with their own genetic code as a grand experiment. Humanity was wrong to believe it evolved from apes, but it's understandable since they were likely the rough draft of their experimentation. In truth, we are the descendants of the Strathari."
At that reveal, the plaza erupted into a cacophony of shock, denial, and existential panic. People were grabbing their heads, arguing with the person next to them, and looking up at the sky as if the stars had suddenly changed their alignment. I noticed Father Michael grip a small silver cross around his neck, his eyes squeezed shut as he processed a revelation that challenged the very foundation of his religion.
"Now I understand how you may feel," I stated, the amplified sound of my voice cutting through the panic and slowly settling the crowd down, though the nervous energy vibrating through the plaza was still palpable.
"But for now, I'm relaying things as I know them. Things may be far more complicated than that, or they may be just as simple," I said, because knowing my own situation, I doubt that whoever created this dormant system of mine was anything less than a god. I also understood their situation since my initial reaction when Anahrin had broken the news to me was just like theirs, if not worse.
"When Anahrin woke from his stasis and found my broken, dying body in a pool of a facility he owned, he recognized the genetic markers buried deep within my blood, and recognized his own species' legacy." I further explained. "However, recognizing me wasn't going to just fix my powdered bones. To save my life, Anahrin had to perform a medical miracle, of which he wasn't even specialized in. My body was too far gone to preserve it, which meant that he had to completely reconstruct me at the cellular level."
I tapped the center of my chest, right over where my heart beat with a steady, heavy rhythm.
"He utilized the technology at his disposal to weave his own pure Strathari DNA directly into my human genome, effectively splicing us together. He rebuilt my bone structure to be much denser, my nervous system to process information much faster, and my musculature to be harder to kill, since, in his own words, humans were quite easy to kill. I survived the fall because Anahrin essentially burned away what made me physically human and replaced it with the biology of his own people."
I let them look at me, really look at me. My height, the way I moved, and even some of the impossible feats they had witnessed today, suddenly all made logical sense to them. However, I didn't reveal the secret of my neurplasticity basically becoming frozen in time to that of a 5-year-old's.
"But I remained stuck on that planet for about a year and a half since I had no means of leaving," I continued, the memory of those days echoing in my mind. "Under Anahrin's tutelage, I became his apprentice and began to learn the dummy versions of an extinguished galactic empire's technological prowess. He taught me the underlying physics of the universe that human science hasn't even begun to scratch the surface of, most of which I couldn't quite comprehend. He also taught me starship engineering and a bunch of things to deal with it."
I paused, knowing the next part was the crucial, undeniable bridge to what the mercenaries had seen on the battlefield today.
"That is how I was able to bring us here after we got ambushed by the bastards of House Volanti. The Strathos' Shepherd, a ship I made to honor my mentor, is probably one of the most advanced ships in humanity's arsenal, technology-wise. Its reactor alone is far above what humanity currently has in stock," I said. Then, I raised my empty right hand. "And that is how I am able to do what was seen out there today."
I summoned my railgun again, let it materialize in my hands, and then sent it back into my inventory.
"Through Anahrin's teachings and the technology he bestowed upon me before he finally passed away, I was granted access to a pocket dimension. A subspace inventory, if you will," I stated firmly, choosing my words in a way that they would hide the truth of the system while still providing an explanation for the magic trick.
"How does that even work?" one of the structural engineers asked, speaking up from the crowd, his brain unable to resist the concept. Kenjiro remained silent, his eyes locked on me, already burdened with the knowledge he had kept secret. "You're talking about folding spacetime on a localized, personal scale without a massive gravitational singularity to anchor it. The energy requirements alone-"
"I will not be explaining the mechanics of it," I interrupted, my tone leaving no room for argument. "It is a technology that is far beyond our current comprehension, and frankly, I myself have no idea how it works. But it was a tool given to me, one I've used to supply this colony with the things we've needed to survive."
I lowered my hand, clasping it behind my back as I straightened my stance and looked the colony in the eyes.
"I will admit that I lied to you," I confessed. "When I brought you all together, when I recruited you, when we crash-landed on this planet... I lied about my identity. I lied about the truth of what I knew. I lied about who, and what, I had become."
I scanned the faces, seeing the betrayal, the confusion, and the anger starting to simmer beneath the surface of their shock.
"I did it because it was the only way I thought I could keep us safe," I admitted with a sigh. "I possessed some of the secrets of a dead empire. I possessed some technology that the IUC, which we all know is rampant with the corrupt, greedy bastards of the Houses, who pull the strings of our galaxy, would gladly burn a thousand worlds to acquire. If they knew who I was, if they knew what I had in my head, they wouldn't just come for me. They would come for everyone I have ever cared about. I thought that by hiding my identity, by playing the role of a lucky, resourceful survivor, I could keep myself, my loved ones, and the colony I was planning to make on Aurelius II somewhat safe."
I let out a self-deprecating laugh. "But that clearly didn't work. And if that wasn't enough, the universe seems to have a funny way of forcing your hand. Today, we accidentally woke up ancient war machines that forced me to use everything I had just to keep us from being wiped off the map. And in doing so, my secrets were dragged out into the light."
I straightened my posture once again, looking out over the sea of faces.
"My goal was, and has always been, to create a haven. A place where we could be free from the corruption that has always plagued humanity's governing bodies. A place where good people could build a future without fear of the boot coming down on their necks," I said, with true conviction in my voice since what I was stating was true. "Anahrin taught me something else before he died. He taught me that a true leader doesn't demand respect, but rather earns it through the consistency of his character. He taught me that a throne built on lies will eventually crumble."
'I'm sorry, Ani,' I thought to myself. 'Here I am talking about the consistency of my character while building yet another lie. Telling myself it's necessary, and it is, but that still doesn't change its nature and only serves to show that I'm just a liar.'
I took a deep breath. "I cannot be the leader you need if I am hiding in the shadows of my own history. I cannot ask you to sweat and bleed for this colony if I am not willing to shine the light on my secrets for you. So there it is. That is the truth. That is who I am. Judge me as you will."
The silence that followed my confession was deafening, but it didn't last long, and the shock began to wear off quickly, replaced by the chaos of human emotion.
"You lied to us from day one!" a man near the back shouted, his face red with anger. "We trusted you! We left our lives behind for you, and we didn't even know who you really were!"
"Who the hell are we even following?!" a woman yelled, her voice trembling. "A rogue commander? An alien experiment? How do we know you aren't going to turn on us? How do we know this whole colony isn't just some grand Strathari experiment for you?!"
"You put us in danger!" another voice screamed from the gathered crowd. "If you had this god-tech the whole time, why didn't you just wipe out the threats before they killed our people?!"
The criticisms rained down on me like a torrential downpour of justified anger, fear, and betrayal. I could see my Elites tensing, their hands subtly shifting toward their weapons. Their "experimental black-site" origin was just another lie I had woven to protect the true nature of the system, and one that I had to keep consistent.
I immediately raised a hand, ordering them to stand down since I honestly deserved this. I had earned every single word they were throwing at me.
"Everyone shut the hell up!" an authoritative voice cut through the clamor as Dr. Corven stepped forward, pushing her way to the front of the crowd. Her short height made her far from an intimidating physical presence, but her intellect and her role as the colony's chief medical and scientific officer carried an immense weight. She turned her back to the raised platform I was on, facing the angry crowd.
"Everyone, stop and think for one damn minute!" Dr. Corven shouted, her voice amplified by the sheer force of her frustration. "You are letting fear override your basic deductive reasoning!"
The crowd quieted slightly, grumbling but willing to listen to the doctor who had previously been quite a famous and admirable figure in the scientific and educational fields.
"Yes, Mark lied about his past. Yes, he withheld the origins of his biology and his technology," Dr. Corven said, pacing back and forth in front of the crowd, her eyes locking onto the loudest detractors. "But look at the reality of our situation! Look at what that lie actually accomplished!"
She pointed her hand up at the metal walls that surrounded the city.
"Since the moment we crashed landed on this rock, Mark has been leading the charge. He has been at the forefront of every single expedition, construction, and battle, taking the heaviest risks upon himself," she argued with a surprising amount of passion in her voice. "He created the walls that keep the predators out. He provided the medical technology that has the ability to fully mend broken bones in mere hours. He gave us a new start. And he took the crushing responsibility of our survival entirely upon his own shoulders."
"He could have done it all himself!" the angry man from the back shouted again. "If he has a pocket dimension full of materials, then why make us work? Why make us build the city? He was just using us for manual labor!"
"You are fundamentally misunderstanding human psychology!" Dr. Corven shot back, her tone laced with academic fury. "Look at him! Look at the resources he clearly possesses! If Mark simply wanted a labor force, he could have built a couple of thousand automated drones to do it all. He doesn't need us to build a city. He possesses the means and the resources to survive on this planet entirely alone!"
She swept her arm toward the crowd.
"He made us build the walls, our homes. He's making us work the plants and the earth because he wanted us to have ownership!" Dr. Corven explained, her voice softening slightly, trying to make them understand. "He kept his capabilities a secret to cultivate a stronger sense of community. If he had just snapped his fingers and built a utopia for us on day one, then we wouldn't be a colony. We would be helpless dependents leeching off the things he made. He lied so that we could build our own home, so that we could have purpose, all while he secretly ensured we didn't get wiped out in the process."
She turned back to me, offering a brief, respectful nod before facing the crowd again. "It is painfully evident that Mark has no ulterior motives other than our survival. His lies were put in place to shield us, not as part of intentional deceptions."
'Oh, lady, if only you knew...' I thought to myself, ashamed that I had to keep part of this farce going because stopping it would be more detrimental.
"That's a nice psychological theory, Doctor," a cynical voice sneered from the ranks of the Vanguard mercenaries. It was a man who had stayed behind the walls today and only heard the fight, not even part of the group that had gone to reinforce us. "But the fact is, he's only standing up there playing the honest saint because he got caught. He had no other choice. He whipped out his magic railgun in front of a ton of people, and now he's trying to spin it so we don't string him up for playing god with our lives."
The crowd quickly began to fracture, and arguments broke out. Half the plaza started yelling in my defense, citing the lives I had saved and the security I had provided. The other half, spurred on by the mercenary's cynicism, began shouting about accountability, betrayal, and the danger of following a man with alien DNA. The noise escalated into a chaotic roar with people pushing each other, the tension of the day's slaughter boiling over into civil unrest.
CRACK!
A deafening, hypersonic crack of a magnetic rifle discharging into the air silenced the entire plaza in a heartbeat, and everyone turned their heads toward the source.
Standing on the edge of the crowd, his body armor scarred, his face pale, and his uniform stained with the blood of his fallen comrades, was Davis. He lowered his rifle, the barrel smoking slightly in the humid air. He looked exhausted, traumatized, and furious, but his anger wasn't directed at me. It was directed at the crowd.
"You people have absolutely no idea what you're talking about," Davis said, his voice raspy. He walked slowly forward, the crowd parting to let the battered survivor through. "You sat back here behind the walls today. You heard the fighting and saw the pretty lights from the Shepherd's railgun, but you didn't have to face the death machines that marched out of that mountain."
Davis stopped near the front of the steps, looking up at me for a moment before turning to face his fellow mercenaries and the angry colonists.
"I was there. I fought the mechs," Davis said, his voice trembling slightly with the suppressed trauma of the slaughter. "You all saw one being transported to our military encampment. They were fifteen meters tall and had these fantasy story blue shields that ate depleted uranium like it was candy, and fired flechettes that tore men in half before they could even scream. It was a damn massacre."
He pointed a shaking finger directly at me.
"And when the mountain broke open, and the nightmare started... he didn't run," Davis stated, his voice gaining strength and volume. "He stood at the front of the line, and his first order, his only priority, was to evacuate the civilians. He put himself between us and sure death."
Davis looked around at the silent, wide-eyed faces of the colonists.
"If he's just some manipulator playing god, then why the hell did he stay? Why didn't he just jump in the maglev and leave us to die to cover his tracks?" Davis demanded, his voice echoing across the plaza. "He stayed because... he stayed because he is our Commander. He faced down ancient machines of death for us. And he almost died for us today."
Davis lowered his rifle completely, letting it hang on its sling.
"If those aren't the markings of a true leader, someone who is always willing to put their life on the line to protect a bunch of ungrateful pricks whom he'd given shelter, food, and hope to, then I don't know what is," Davis said firmly. He looked over at his comrade, who had started the argument. "And let's not forget the educational modules, schematics, and training data he's allowed us to use. When, in the entire history of the IUC's miserable corporate reign, would any of you ever have had the chance to learn the things Commander Shephard has provided for us? He gave us all a future and invested in us for you all to be complaining because he kept some secrets to himself?"
Davis turned and offered me a military salute.
The plaza fell into a deep, reflective silence. The anger that had been boiling just moments ago was quenched by the raw reality of Davis's firsthand account. The colonists looked down at their hands, then at the towering metal walls that protected them, and then they looked up at me, standing at the top of the steps of the City Hall. I could almost see the gears turning in their heads as they began processing the truth.
I looked down at Davis, returning his salute with a slow, heavy nod of gratitude. All it took was having one of the survivors of today's encounter to give them a reality check for the colony to pull back from the brink of tearing itself apart.
"I am not perfect," I said. "I know that I have made mistakes, that I have kept secrets that maybe I shouldn't have, and that I possess flaws that I battle with every single day."
I looked out over the crowd, my eyes meeting Lyra's once more, drawing the final reserve of my strength from her adorable little smile.
"But my conviction is real," I declared. "It may take a while for me to regain your trust, but you have my word that I will bleed for this colony if I have to. I will continue to fight unknown monsters if I have to. And I will build an empire here that the corrupt scum of the galaxy will fear with my own two hands if I have to."
I paused, feeling my chest swell with something alien. It wasn't pride. It wasn't bravado. I couldn't tell what it was, but I felt convinced to say my next words.
"I am Mark Shephard. And I promise you that as long as my lungs hold my breath, that so long as my heart beats, that for as long as I'm around, no one will ever take this haven from us."
Ah... so that was it? That was why I felt this within me. My eyes unfocused from the large portion of the crowd that was cheering me on and focused on the blue screen that had popped right in front of me.
**Final Hidden Quest Accomplished!
The Truth With a Grain of Lies
The people under the Host's governance have learned the truth of their existence. But a wise leader must know the perfect blend of truth and lies. Knowing the truth of their existence, humanity requires a guide!
Congratulations, Host!
You have completed all required hidden quests to activate the System.
Welcome, Shepherd of Humanity!**
---
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