A B Y S S C O R E
2071
VRMMORPGs, after the constant increase of suicides and cases of dementia, are now considered illegal on all countries signed to the World Peace Treaty.
The players of Nightmare Online, the most popular game of all time and known for its revolutionary AI and ambiance, can’t stay far from their digital world and replicate the game’s code through programs named “cores”.
Many player-created cores compete in the underworld to be the true successor of the original game. While the big ones fight, from the shadows comes a mysterious programmer and his Abyss Core, claiming to be the one true successor of Nightmare.
The installer has just been posted on an obscure forum, many interested people log in as the servers open their gates...
CORE-01/01 (THE REAPER AT NIGHT COMES)
The final percentile loads. Aylen feels his consciousness being shifted to a different place of a digital existence. An image is projected into his mind, showing a wide decorated circle with smaller rings around it, filled with statues posing in different outfits. From an undetermined place a voice announces:
“Class Circle. Choose your own.”
After the soft voice finishes its sentence, Aylen regains his sense of physical body and notices that he is currently floating and can freely move around. He gets closer to the Class Circle, thinking about the options presented before him. Just as he approaches a statue that called his attention, the voice starts again, now sounding a little bit more robotic.
“Abyss Core has the new Fate Roll functionality. Would you like to know more about it?”
He waited for a pop-up with Yes and No to appear in front of him. After a few seconds of nothing happening, Aylen noticed that he was supposed to vocalize his option.
“Yes, please.”
Finally, something popped up right on his face: a small loading circle. When the bar reached its completion, an information board with a good amount of text written on it expanded from the circle. Not wanting to read all that, Aylen sighed and decided on manually picking his class, being relieved when the voice restarted, reading the board.
“The Fate Roll system automatically assigns a class to a new player based on his personality and Fate Number. It’s not optional.”
Surprised by the last phrase, Aylen tried to move, but couldn’t. The circle then revealed a wheel nature and started spinning in a speed his eyes weren’t able to keep up with. His vision started to become blurrier and black shapes seemed to approximate him as his eyes were almost shut. He started to regret downloading the link his friend had sent to his inbox, containing the mysterious Abyss Core. The white lights that still remained on his vision accelerated and formed a spiral, spinning until they dissolved themselves at center. Once again, Aylen was feeling disconnected from himself and a distant voice whispered:
“The choice has been made.”
Dead trees populated an equally dead landscape. What seemed to once have been a beautiful garden was now a place of morbidness and the sweet smell of flowers were replaced by the distinct odor of death. Anyone placed inside that circle of the once flourishing pines could barely see anything outside. The only exit revealed a path covered by the same kind of dead trees and emitted an air of “there are things living there”.
Right at center, one would find an unconscious man dressed in very secretive cloaks. His charcoal hair was spread out on the worm-infested soil where his face also resided, half completely dirty and bitten by bizarre maggots equipped with monstrous little fangs. A very cold wind started blowing through the hard as stone dead boughs, carrying the sound of evils lurking around. A small unrecognizable creature feels the wind ripping its carapace and slickly tries to hide inside the unconscious man’s black leather boots. His profound nightmares were interrupted by a strange feeling on his left foot, a bit too alien for his senses. A ragged-dressed Aylen jumped on two feet after noticing something was wrong and promptly smashed the creature with the impact of his foot onto the boot’s interior. The disgusting sensation alerted him of the macabre atmosphere of the place he found himself.
Slowly, the realization that he was inside Abyss Core struck him. Relief came out of his chest as he removed the boot with the thing he had just smashed. The tall figure waking up and making noise alerted the sleeping shadows who spied through the dead pines, some of them running around and making sure every single soul on that strange place knew of the new guy. Aylen had put his boot back on and was now completely lucid, analyzing his surroundings.
“Damn, I wish I had the chance to pick a class with a better starting spot… This is too eerie.”
Coincidentally or not, a shrieking laughter exploded far in the horizon, chilling his spine.
“Err… I should check my status before moving forward.”
Now that he wished to interact with the player’s interface, Aylen noticed he had no idea of how to activate that kind of stuff. It was a bad habit of his to just start a game without playing the tutorial or reading any help document. He tried shouting a few commands like “Open Status” and “Check” but nothing seemed to work and as the lurking shadows started to become agitated, he stopped trying.
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“Fuck, now what? I don’t even know what class I am. I wonder if at least have some kind of item.”
Putting his hands on both pockets, Aylen thought he had started out with nothing as they were completely empty. It was only after a careful check of the floor around him that he found a small statue whose appearance closely resembled the Grim Reaper. A mysterious but recognizable aura clarified that the object belonged to him. He picked it up, turning it around to see if there was any information carved on its surface.
“Nope… There’s nothing on it. Looking at the bright side, at least I have something to start with. I wonder if it’s related to my class, though...”
After picking what seemingly was the only object around, there was nothing left to do on that scary glade. Aylen was impressed but not surprised as Nightmare Online was always praised for its atmosphere, among other stuff. He started walking towards the only path available, paying careful attention the presences observing him from all directions. His steps made crackling noses as he stepped on very old sticks, petrified by time. Within the limitations of his blank slate start, Aylen though of the best ways to react to the obvious ambush that would come sooner or later, not finding much success on measuring his strength and dexterity.
The path, being much narrower than the clearance, was covered by the late afternoon shadow projected by the trees. Now that he noticed it, the sun was almost setting and he was sure things would get much worse with the darkness, raising his walking speed to almost running. Bestial sounds could be heard from everywhere, not ceasing to follow the new player and tracking every movement of his. Once in a while, the whispers came accompanied with a laughter similar to the one he had heard before.
“Oh, God… Who had the idea to make a game where you start in a place a like this?”
Seconds after his grim statement, he finally reached a wider place, only slightly smaller than the starting glade. At its end, the path bifurcated into two, doubling his troubles of pathing to the forest’s exit.
While thinking on the correct side to choose, Aylen observed an almost unnoticeable bonfire made of already burnt kindling. He wondered if that was the work of a player like him, awakened at such an oppressive place. Fiddling with the sticks, it was clear that he would need new wood to lit another fire and he had no idea how to do it.
“Huh, so I don’t have any Survival skills, apparently. I guess that the best idea is continuing forward, then.”
And so he did, walking until he was very close to the split path. He once again tried player commands, still unable to do things like opening a map. Maybe the game had no interface, he thought, making it very realistic – not his kind of game as he now realized. Taking a quick look at each path’s end seemed a good option too, until he saw that they shifted to different directions, making a wall of black wood the only visible thing from where he was.
The creatures’ rumbling started becoming more intense as he stood immobile, weighing his options that seemed equally bad. A sudden crack sound made him turn his head instantly, enabling him to see a little beastling with pitch black fur, ready to attack his back. The early revelation, instead of making him retreat, made him go completely mad and directly attack Aylen’s face, reactionless until the last moment.
Apparently, his reflexes were on point as he punched the beast in its gut right as he approached his nose with a ready-to-devour mouth. The creature was quite lightweight, flying to where he came from just with the punch’s impact. A fainting sound confirmed his death and the whispers became more aggressive. Once again, a sudden explosion of sound came from the young man’s back, with the cause being a much bigger creature this time.
“Oh, shit.”
Some kind of bizarre jaguar, with a quadruple mandible and a snake-like tongue advanced onto him in full speed. Aylen was sure he couldn’t avoid that attack by simply facing it with a punch, he had to dodge. Tightening every single muscle in his body, Aylen chose the direction opposite from the closest trees, wishing to fall in a soft spot. He felt the creature’s fur passing with mere millimeters of distance from him, but the black shadow quickly regained its composure and was ready for another bout. Fallen on the ground, Aylen felt desperation starting to consume his body and prepared to dodge again, this time by rolling his entire body to the side. This time, the movement was much slower and the beast’s claw ripped a large cut of skin on his left leg.
His vision became red for a moment and pain surged as a quick twinge on the lower side of his body, turning into a lighter sensation right after.
“Damn, I didn’t expect to feel pain in this game… This makes things a bit too annoying.”
The jaguar didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. After landing near the old bonfire, it started another rush to bite Aylen’s head. However, he was adamant on not taking the next hit. Picking the only solid object he had access to, a Grim Reaper miniature, he waited for the jump onto his face, raising his hand in a hard blow as soon as a shadow casted itself onto him. The animal let out a sharp screech, calling the attention of every single last creature around them. As it was only lightly injured, it got back on its paws again and with a berserker’s rage assaulted Aylen one last time.
“You’re too easy to read, creature.”
Noticing that the jaguar’s attack was too brute to change its trajectory mid-run, the man sidestepped to his left and when the black beast stepped near him, his right leg performed a heavy maneuver, similar to a kick and launched the beast upwards, making it extremely vulnerable. The finishing move was another blow with the little statue right on its head, completely taking down the jaguar. Relieved, Aylen stood on his knees, ignoring all the sounds from the trees just for a moment.
“I wonder if killing these monsters gives me experience or something alike. Doing these without a reward seems really futile...”
He remembered that in a lot of games you could check a creature’s body for loot to sell on towns. Until that moment, usual game logic didn’t really apply to his situation but trying wouldn’t hurt. He approached the dead jaguar with a careful look, not completely sure if it had died. A closer inspection confirmed the death and allowed him to check the corpse for stuff. As no window popped, he probably had to manually remove stuff like skin and claws from the jaguar and again, he clearly had no skill on doing it.
After a few seconds of close examination, Aylen gave up and sat down near his deceased enemy, looking to the fading dark orange sky. Sounds of steps and mumbling getting closer reawakened his attention to the forest, only then noticing that he was completely surrounded by creatures who looked like a reinterpretation of the standard goblins, having black skin, vicious eyes, rotten teeth and an intensely foul odor. They smirked towards the lone player, who had no hoped of winning that battle, although he still believed in a chance to escape.
When the apparent leader of the rottenlings abruptly moved his hands, Aylen set off running, only to be intercepted by dozens of similar creatures jumping on him and immobilizing his limbs with putrid smelling vines. When the ropes were too tight to allow him to make a single move, the monsters started laughing in a similar fashion to the laughter he had heard before and their leader went to Aylen’s face, laughing with the others and saying on an almost unintelligible manner:
“Hahaha, I dun’t kno whu krips deliving us thees whilings, but his radder gentler to doeet!”
After the leader finished, the laughter became even more louder and they started dragging Aylen to the shadows of the dead forest. With his face being dragged through the dirt, he started saying every command possible to open his available skills, failing with every single word. The image of large huts made of black wood and a very big fire on the middle of a glade made him sure that his first character had already become rottenling food.