The vote lines were gone by morning.

  Someone had kicked dirt over them, probably in the night. Maybe more than one person. There wasn’t much talk about it, but everyone noticed.

  By midday, whispers started circulating—David was going to make his choice. He'd collected a number of his belongings and was going to sacrifice them all.

  Alex saw him early that morning, crouched beside the Obelisk with a bundle of electronics and gear at his feet: a set of binoculars, a firestarter kit, a watch, and an old pair of hiking boots with a worn but still-functional compass embedded in the tongue.

  One by one, he pressed them to the stone.

  +2.1 Points — Military-Issue Binoculars

  +1.4 Points — Magnesium Firestarter

  +3.8 Points — Tactical Wristwatch (GPS Disabled)

  +2.3 Points — Navigation Footwear (High Utility)

  +7 Points - Phone (High Tier electronics)

  By the time the compass faded into the Obelisk’s surface, he’d crossed the threshold.

  --

  The camp had changed, too.

  The air smelled like smoke and boiled bark. Miriam had helped organize a rotation—groups of five to comb the edges of the forest for edible plants, small game, or anything useful. Someone had rigged a pot from scrap metal and was boiling water gathered from the stream. The taste was metallic, but it didn’t make anyone sick.

  Shelters were coming together in mismatched clusters: tarp-covered lean-tos, branches lashed with vines, some half-dug into the dirt to break the wind. A few people slept in pits lined with pine boughs. The nights were cold, and the hunger sharpened with every passing hour.

  Nobody was thriving. But they were surviving.

  --

  David made his move just before dusk.

  No speech. No warning. Just boots crunching over dry needles. A handful of people paused mid-task, watching. A few stood. Jared looked up from tending a burn. Miriam froze where she was stripping bark into thread.

  David stopped in front of the Obelisk.

  He didn’t look back.

  He placed both palms against the stone. The surface shimmered faintly—like heat above pavement—and then brightened.

  The list flared.

  David moved his hand without hesitation, pressing it over a single name.

  One Piece.

  The glow deepened. The other names vanished.

  PATH CONFIRMED.

  Then—nothing. To everyone else, the Obelisk returned to its blank, matte silence. But David didn’t move. His eyes tracked something only he could see.

  The list revealed to him—and only him:

  One Piece Path – Available Powers and Items

  Remaining Points: 1.5

  Haki (Armament) – 25 Points

  Haki (Observation) – 25 Points

  Conqueror’s Haki – 100 Points (Limited)

  Paramecia-Class Devil Fruit – 80 Points (Unique)

  Zoan-Class Devil Fruit – 90 Points (Unique)

  Logia-Class Devil Fruit – 150 Points (Unique)

  Den Den Mushi – 5 Points

  Standard Marine Saber – 3 Points

  Supreme Grade Meito – 300 Points (Limited: 12 Worldwide)

  .....

  Miriam stepped forward. "David? What’s it showing you?" Everyone listened in.

  He didn’t answer. Not at first. Then: "Its opened up a list of options, all from One Piece, like devil fruits and haki, even items. It all costs points too, some are very expensive.”

  “Would you be willing to write some of it down”

  His gaze shifted to her, then back to the stone. “Yeah sure. Just give me some time.”

  --

  That evening, Alex sat near Ellie and Raj on the edge of camp. They watched the trees. The air had weight. Like something had turned its head in their direction.

  "So David's first, didn't seem so bad, no chains bursting out the Obelisk dragging him within" Ellie said.

  “I know right, finally someone did something with it, but I mean, he sacrificed basically everything he had on him, some pretty useful stuff too, don't think others are too happy about it.” Alex said.

  She hugged her knees. "I'm thinking maybe Fairy Tail, or Bleach."

  He was quiet for a while. Then: "Fairy Tail would be useful, has a lot of promise, but it just depends how expensive things will be. You go Bleach you might be able to learn Bankai."

  "Nah, got to be One Piece, imagine getting a logia, you'd be invincible, well almost." Raj was clearly enthusiastic about One Piece.

  Alex took a bite out of a slice of bread. "At least your sure I guess"

  --

  That night, more people began whispering about points.

  Trades started to form beneath the surface, some trading their own food rations for broken electronics, with the obvious aim to sacrifice it to the obelisk.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  The Obelisk’s glow had faded, but something else had been lit in its place.

  By the fourth day, the forest stopped pretending to be quiet.

  Roars echoed in the distance—low, guttural things that vibrated through the ground more than the air. One came at dawn, sending birds into a screaming spiral above the trees. Another shook the water pot just after midday, rippling its surface as people froze mid-chew. No one spoke when it happened. A new sense of danger presented itself, the danger wasn’t abstract anymore.

  --

  Alex spent the morning bent over a stone, scraping bark from a thick branch with a sharp rock. The tool was crude, but it worked. By now, his hands were calloused from stripping vines, hauling wood, splitting roots. He didn’t talk much—never really had.

  He wanted points. A dream for most, to have the powers from anime, the confirmation that David's actions brought, cemented a drive in most people.

  He stood in the shade beside the Obelisk, holding a dead squirrel by its tail. He'd found it, and was quite lucky in doing so, but it had rotted a fair bit, so it wasn't an option for food.

  He pressed it against the Obelisk.

  +0.4 Points — Small Mammal (Dead)

  Not much. But it was something. He didn't want to sacrifice his own items as of yet, they held meaning to him, his phone had a number of downloaded songs and whilst it had gone dead, they have the solar chargers and who knows if the powers from the Obelisk such as electrical ones can be used to charge it as well.

  He stepped back, glancing at the stone. No glow beyond the brief flare of text. No whispers. No visions. Just silence and weight.

  “So you making some progress now, huh?” Ellie asked, stepping up beside him.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re hunting now?”

  He nodded. “No just found it. It was too rotten for food.”

  She folded her arms. “You still don't know what you’ll pick?”

  He hesitated. “Not yet. I’ll figure it out when I get there.”

  Ellie nodded. She didn’t press, heading off to see Miriam about something.

  --

  Tensions were building.

  Jared had broken up an argument near the food cache—someone accusing someone else of hiding a ration bar. Miriam had cut the fight short by handing over a bundle of dried mushrooms, but the stares hadn’t stopped. Hunger was sharpening tempers, and the risk of stealing was growing as well as other conflicts. Miriam and Jared worked out a guard rotation for the rations, of which there wasn't much now at all.

  In the southwest corner of the clearing, a few of the stronger survivors were digging trenches for waste and talking quietly about fencing. They wanted a perimeter. Wanted something to guard against the forest, but this wasn't a priority currently

  --

  That night, Alex sat by the fire with his knees tucked close, arms wrapped loosely around them. Sparks danced upward into the black. Miriam sat across from him, flipping through pages of a waterlogged notebook she’d salvaged from someone’s backpack.

  “I'm trying to keep track of everything, from rations to now damn points and powers.” she said.

  “Your doing too much, see if there others to help out.”

  “You're not?”

  “Well, I mean I'm trying”

  She smiled faintly. “I kid, your doing enough already. The real risk is we have a few kids and elderly, they cant do too much, so I'm just trying to find roles for them. I'm concerned with the direction this camp is going that they'd be forgotten, or deemed useless.”

  "We talking about the few problems around the camp" Jared sits down raising his eyebrow, clearly insinuating more.

  "Haaaa, I get the growing tension having negative impacts on people, but there's a few were it is becoming the norm to be assholes."

  They sat in silence for a while. Nearby, someone coughed in their sleep. A child whimpered. The wind creaked through the trees like the world itself was shifting its weight.

  The next Morning.

  Alex was crouched by the edge of the clearing, fingernails black with dirt. Beetles. Seven of them. He lined their tiny shells along a flat rock and cracked each one into the Obelisk, careful to make full contact.

  +0.03 Points — Insect

  +0.03 Points — Insect

  +0.03 Points — Insect

  ...and so on.

  Not much, but it was easy work. Ellie stood nearby, arms wrapped tight against the breeze. She watched the beetle guts smear with a grimace.

  “I’ll never unsee that.”

  Alex didn’t look up. “They count.”

  “Barely. You’d get more eating them.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  Their conversation was broken by the arrival of another.

  They heard her before they saw her—branches snapping, footfalls unsteady. Camila emerged from the treeline like a ghost dragged back to life. Her shirt was torn across the ribs. One leg limped. She carried something, humanoid.

  No one moved.

  Her face was unreadable. She didn’t speak. Just walked past the firepit, past the wary glances, straight to the Obelisk.

  She dropped it at its base. A heavy, wet thud.

  Gasps scattered through the clearing as realisation dawned on them on what it is.

  The creature was small, maybe four feet tall. Its skin was the color of bruised leaves. Elbows sharp. Knees knotted. Its jaw was wide and crooked, filled with jagged, yellow teeth.

  A goblin.

  People didn’t whisper. They stared. Stared like children watching something slip from dream into waking world.

  “What in the fuck is that?” Wren said, her voice cracked. A woman, 32 years of age, was a housewife.

  “A fucking Goblin” someone else whispered. “It has to be.”

  "Well if the Two moons didn't confirm it was a different world, this has to."

  The goblin twitched, a faint snarl escaping its throat. It was still alive.

  Camila crouched. One hand pressed to the creature’s chest, the other to the Obelisk, However nothing happened.

  She stood again. Looked around. Found a rock—smooth, round, the size of a fist. Then she brought it down.

  Once. Twice. A crack like splitting bone.

  The goblin shuddered, then lay still.

  She repeated the gesture. Both hands against the stone.

  +2.0 Points — Goblin (Dead)

  The letters faded as quickly as they appeared.

  No one moved.

  “What the hell is going on?” Vin muttered. “That was a goblin. That was a goddamn goblin.”

  “Are we... hallucinating?” Marcy whispered.

  Camila looked at them all, then she walked off.

  A solid introduction to most, Camila. From what has been gleaned, she was a a trophy wife, turning up to this world, extremely well dressed, adorned with jewelry. Although all that jewelry is now gone, which belies the question to others, had she sacrificed it all, and if so, how many point does she have. She's young, maybe 27 years of age, but she has clearly took to their situation with gusto, unlike the many others.

  --

  The camp simmered into evening. Firelight flickered across silent faces. The stew, made from mushrooms and river weeds, was left mostly untouched.

  Miriam sat cross-legged by the fire, her fingers absently tracing the spines of her charcoal-marked notebook. “We need to organize watches. Real ones assigning a few each night, for the one hour shifts isn't going to cut it. No more just nodding off near the flames.”

  Yusuf nodded. “10 per shift. Rotate every few hours.”

  "Yeah, sit them around the camp as well, as a sort of perimeter." Miriam follows up.

  Raj said nothing. He was sharpening sticks again, eyes on the trees.

  Ellie sat close to Alex. Her voice was low. “I keep thinking... if there’s goblins, what else is out there?”

  Josh, hunched nearby, looked pale. “What if they come in packs?”

  “They do,” Camila said. She was squatting by the edge of the clearing, cleaning her blade with slow, deliberate strokes.

  Everyone turned.

  “I saw three more. Maybe four. They don’t make noise until they’re close. They were carrying sticks, even what looked like clubs”

  “You led them here?” someone snapped.

  Camila didn’t blink. “No that I know of”

  "You didn't think to bring up this information before?" Yusuf challenged, but Camila just shrugged.

  Miriam exhaled, tired.

  That night, as the sky deepened into blue-black and the stars refused to come out, Yusuf and Raj took first watch with 8 others. They sat near the half-finished barricade that had been constructed, spears at their sides, well sharpened sticks, with their backs straight.

  Li and Marcy shared a blanket closer to the fire. Li was shaking. Marcy gently placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered.

  “No it’s not.”

  “Then it’s what we’ve got.”

  Wren and Vin sat farther out, arguing over whether goblins could talk. Vin was convinced they could. Wren thought he was trying to make himself feel important. They went back and forth until both of them gave up and sat in silence.

  Camila didn’t sleep. She just stared into the dark, her fingers never far from her knife.

  Alex lay in his shelter, eyes open. The sound of insects and wind returned, almost normal. But there was still something just past the firelight.